Tabaré Vázquez
Tabaré Vázquez was president of Uruguay twice, in 2005-10 and 2015-20, the oncologist who was the first president of the left in the country's history, elected in October 2004 in the first round with fifty-one per cent as the candidate of the Broad Front, the coalition of socialists, communists, Christian democrats and former Tupamaro guerrillas founded in 1971, which had won Montevideo under him in 1989 and lost the presidency twice before it won. He governed a country coming out of the crash of 2002, in which the banks had failed and a third of the people were poor, with the emergency plan of cash transfers. There was the health reform that created the national integrated system, the income tax that Uruguay had not had, the collective wage bargaining restored. There was the tobacco law that banned smoking in every enclosed public place and that Philip Morris took to arbitration and lost, the laptop for every schoolchild. There was the growth of six per cent a year on the soy and the pulp mill at Fray Bentos, over which Argentina blockaded the bridges for three years and went to The Hague. He vetoed the abortion law of 2008 as a doctor, which his own party had passed and which Mujica signed in 2012. He was born in Montevideo in 1940 in the working-class barrio of La Teja, the son of an oil-refinery worker, qualified in medicine in 1969 and in oncology and radiotherapy. He ran the radiotherapy department of the state cancer institute, practised through both presidencies. He was president of the Progreso football club, which won the championship under him in 1989, the year he won the capital. The second term, won in the run-off of November 2014 against Lacalle Pou by thirteen points, was the slowdown, the deficit, the teachers' strikes. There was the vice-president Sendic's resignation over a credit card and a degree he did not have, and the rise in crime that gave Lacalle Pou the presidency in 2019 by thirty thousand votes. He handed over in March 2020 with lung cancer, the disease he had treated. He died in Montevideo in December at eighty.
- Lived: 1940 CE – 2020 CE
- Nationality: Uruguayan
- Roles: president, physician, politician
