Uruguay

A buffer state created to stop two larger neighbours fighting over it, which became the most secular and socially liberal country on the continent. The Banda Oriental was contested between Spain and Portugal for a century, then between Argentina and Brazil, and British mediation in 1828 produced an independent Uruguay largely so neither would have it. Jose Artigas, the independence figure, had argued for a federal league and land reform and died in exile. Civil conflict between Blancos and Colorados ran through the nineteenth century. Jose Batlle y Ordonez, president in the early twentieth, built something unusual: the eight-hour day, free secondary and university education, divorce at a woman's request from 1913, state monopolies in utilities and insurance, and the removal of religion from public life so thoroughly that Holy Week is officially Tourism Week and Christmas is Family Day. The country was called the Switzerland of South America until economic decline and the Tupamaros insurgency preceded a military dictatorship from 1973 to 1985 that imprisoned a larger share of its population than any other. Uruguay legalised cannabis nationally in 2013, the first country to do so. It won the first football World Cup in 1930. Montevideo is the capital. The country has about 3.4 million people, nearly half of them in the capital. It is the second smallest South American state after Suriname. There are roughly three cattle for every person. Colonia del Sacramento, founded by Portugal in 1680, is a World Heritage site. Uruguay generates almost all its electricity from renewable sources.

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