Julio María Sanguinetti
Julio María Sanguinetti was the president who took Uruguay back from twelve years of military rule in March 1985, negotiated the terms of the transition with the generals at the Naval Club the summer before, and then, to keep the generals quiet, had the parliament pass in 1986 the law that expired the state's claim to punish the crimes of the dictatorship, a law the voters upheld in a referendum in 1989 and again in 2009 and the courts have been picking at since. He served a second term from 1995 to 2000, reforming the pensions and the constitution, and has been the Colorado party's elder and a newspaper columnist ever since. He was born in Montevideo in 1936, a lawyer and a journalist on the Colorado daily Accion, was elected to the chamber at twenty-six in 1962, and was minister of industry and then of education under Bordaberry in 1972 and 1973, resigning when the president closed the parliament in June 1973 and the generals took over. He was banned from politics until 1981. The dictatorship lost its own constitutional plebiscite in 1980 and began to look for a way out, and Sanguinetti, as the Colorados' secretary-general, was the civilian who found it in the Naval Club pact of August 1984 with the military. It fixed the election of November while the Blanco leader was in prison and the left's leader proscribed, which is why the Colorados won it. He took office on 1 March 1985, freed the political prisoners the same week, restored the dismissed public employees and the universities, and in December 1986, with the officers refusing to answer the courts' summonses, pushed through the Law of Expiry of the Punitive Claims of the State, arguing that a democracy that had been born of a pact could not try the other party to it. A quarter of the electorate signed to force the referendum of April 1989 and fifty-six per cent voted to keep the law. He came back in 1995 with a coalition of the two traditional parties, cut the public deficit, moved pensions to private accounts, and had the constitution amended in 1996 to give each party one candidate. He handed over in 2000, wrote history and columns, and at eighty-three came back as senator in 2020 to hold the Colorados together.
- Lived: 1936 CE – ?
- Nationality: Uruguayan
- Roles: president, politician, journalist
