The Far-Right Tide Reaches Uruguay

Guido Manini Rios addresses Cabildo Abierto supporters at an event in Plaza Gomensoro, Montevideo, Uruguay, June 9, 2019. (RICARDO ANTÚNEZ / ADHOCFOTOS)

On November 24, 2019, in the second round of a very close presidential election, the self-described “multicolor coalition,” made up of all of Uruguay’s right-wing and center-right parties, came out as the winner. Among the coalition members was Cabildo Abierto, a recently formed party that in the October 27 general elections had managed to consolidate itself as the first right-wing party in the country’s history to achieve a significant portion of the vote. Since the 1920s, Uruguayan electoral law has hidden a system of multiple parties under a framework of apparent bipartisanship, stimulating the presence of diverse ideological groups under the banners of the National Party and Colorado Party.

Cabildo Abierto formed in the summer of 2019, absorbing the most radical right-wing elements of the National and Colorado Parties, the “military family,” and the various nuclei of reaction against the left-wing Frente Amplio, which had been in power for three consecutive terms. In the 2019 election cycle, then, the most significant novelty—in addition to a change in government after 15 years of progressive administrations—was without a doubt the fact that, for the first time, a completely new party obtained very successful results, consolidating itself as a key actor with access to participate in a parliamentary majority and the course of the new government.

The profile of the electorate and the motives behind the vote for Cabildo Abierto haven’t yet been studied in-depth. Nevertheless, among the 2019 voters for Cabildo Abierto, we can identify considerable swaths from popular sectors, including people who once voted for former president José Mujica. These voters saw in Guido Manini Ríos, the presidential candidate and leading figure of Cabildo Abierto, a charismatic leader who responded to their immediate concerns, above all regarding pressing security issues.

But this electorate also expressed that Uruguayan society—perhaps more gradually than is the case in other Latin American and European countries—is navigating a turn toward more critical views on the functioning of democracy, political parties, and politics. This process is happening simultaneously with the growth in prestige of the Armed Forces and a general slide of public opinion toward more right-leaning positions, as well as an erosion of the traditional suspicion towards militaristic and far-right views. This all emerges amid an incipient but effective climate of “culture wars,” in which progressive forces are the enemy target and the “dictatorship of political correctness” is repeatedly invoked. In Uruguay, with the often extreme positions of its party militants and leaders, Cabildo Abierto is the force that, as a real black swan, has come to partially express this new sensibility.

A Party with a History

The rise of Cabildo Abierto in February 2019 surprised many. However, it did not arise spontaneously. For one thing, its emergence was directly related to the malaise aroused among retired military men and civilians linked to the 1973–1985 dictatorship after the start of legal proceedings in 2005 against those responsible for state terrorism. The party’s creation was also a response to the creation of public policies for memory and redress in relation to the dictatorship and the years of authoritarianism leading up to the 1973 coup.

Precursors closely connected to the rise of Cabildo Abierto include the emergence at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011 of the retired military group Foro Libertad y Concordia; initiatives to fundraise for the defense of military personnel and civilians facing prosecution; the launch of various websites, digital media outlets, and groups linked to the promotion of these pro-military ideas, the most representative of which was the web platform Uruguay Militaria; and the deepening ties of these groups with international far-right organizations and networks like the Union of Democratic Organizations of America (UnoAmérica).

All of these initiatives were associated with the public actions of notable figures linked to the last civil-military dictatorship, who, from the outset, occupied positions of leadership and organization within the ranks of Cabildo Abierto. The cases of Enrique Mangini, Eduardo Radaelli, and Antonio Romanelli, among others, stand out. Mangini, one of Cabildo leader Manini Ríos’s most trusted figures, is a former member of the Juventud Uruguaya de Pie (JUP), a far-right youth movement, led by one of Manini Ríos’s older brothers, that was very active between 1970 and 1974. Mangini is accused of carrying out the 1972 murder of student Santiago Rodríguez Muela, and he served as bodyguard for the late dictatorship-era general Iván Paulós. A member of far-right organizations like UnoAmérica, Mangini hosted political meetings at his home with Manini Ríos and several military retirees in 2018 and 2019. Radaelli, for his part, another man closely trusted by Manini Ríos, is a former military official who was extradited to and tried in Chile for the kidnapping and murder of the chemist Eugenio Berríos, who had worked in dictator Augusto Pinochet’s secret police and whose remains were found buried on a Uruguayan beach in 1995. Radaelli has been fundamental in the work of managing and financing Cabildo Abierto. Finally, Romanelli served as a guard in one of the main prisons for political prisoners during the dictatorship, and he has been accused of torture, abuse, and antisemitism.

In December 2018, the Artiguista Social Movement, the direct forerunner of Cabildo Abierto, publicly announced its formation. The name General Guido Manini Ríos made the rounds, even before he was dismissed from the military. He ended up being the presidential candidate and leader of the new party.

The Rise of a Military Caudillo

The appointment of Manini Ríos first as a general in 2011 and later as commander of the Armed Forces in 2015 seems only to be explainable through the logic of the classic conception of the “meeting of the combatants” (encuentro de los combatientes). This strange link brought together—and perhaps still brings together—the MLN-Tupamaros, the main leftist guerrilla that emerged in the 1960s, and the military officials connected to the most nationalist and extreme tendencies of the 1973–1985 military dictatorship, who are the drivers of the new political party. The underlying idea of “combatants” alludes to the preeminence that both the military and the guerilla give to armed conflict as a form of confrontation.

President Luis Lacalle Pou speaks during his inauguration in Montevideo, March 1, 2020. (ALAN SANTOS / PR / CC BY 2.0 DEED)

From 2011 until his death in August 2016, Tupamaro member Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro served as minister of defense, under the governments of leftist presidents Tabaré Vázquez and José Mujica. The main legacy of his ministry’s military policy was precisely Manini Ríos’s political and military impact. In his nearly five years as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces from 2015 to 2019, Manini Ríos violated constitutional and institutional norms with his constant political pronouncements. He thus played a leading role in numerous incidents that had strong political effects. He constantly used social media to issue messages opposing the government’s human rights policy and the trials of military personnel for their roles in dictatorship-era state terrorism. He gave speeches rousing his troops with a clearly political tone, repeatedly transgressed the strict norms of secularism in the performance of his duties, and clashed harshly with organizations of relatives of the detained and disappeared, who repeatedly accused him of obstructing the search for their loved ones’ remains. He also publicly clashed with government ministers and legislators in defending the Army’s demands, particularly regarding changes to the military pension and retirement system, among other episodes that were only sanctioned at the end of his administration.

It was this unprecedented behavior as an officer of his rank that made Manini Ríos the first military caudillo since the end of the dictatorship. His excesses were repeatedly permitted until President Vázquez finally dismissed him in March 2019, after he had virulently criticized the judiciary and hindered the confessions of notorious dictatorship-era perpetrators from passing to the justice system. These confessions were procured in “courts of honor” that judge military conduct from an ethical point of view and prepare reports, then submitted to the commander-in-chief, that may recommend sanctions to be carried out by the executive branch. Manini Ríos’s dismissal as commander-in-chief ultimately came down to two reasons: a letter he sent to the president in which he discredited the judiciary as an impartial and independent power in trials against former military personnel accused of state terrorism, and his delay in relaying to the justice system an honor-court confession from known human rights abuser José Gavazzo, who at the time was under house arrest for dictatorship-era crimes. After these incidents, the prosecutor’s office launched criminal proceedings against Manini Ríos, which then passed to a civil case. Ultimately, since the triumph of the “multicolor coalition” in the 2019 elections, Manini Ríos, now an elected senator, has relied on his parliamentary privilege, despite having said he wouldn’t do so and that he would face justice. He has also accused prosecutors of acting against him “at the orders of political power.”

Thus, in March 2019, Manini Ríos left the Armed Forces at an opportune moment. He had solidified himself as the caudillo of an institution that for decades—with a brief interregnum during the first Vázquez government (2005-2010)—had not only not become democratized but also increasingly reaffirmed its conviction that it had been harmed, particularly but not exclusively under progressive governments. Manini Ríos responded to his dismissal with a harsh statement against the government, issued using the official channels of the high command, an unprecedented move for which he was not sanctioned. Just days later, in a public press conference, he agreed to become the presidential candidate for the newly formed Cabildo Abierto party.

In short, Manini Ríos, a military leader who quickly became a successful political leader, emerged as an expression of a military policy—associated with the actions of Defense Minister Fernández Huidobro and implemented during Mujica’s and Vázquez’s presidencies—that was at the very least dangerous. Under that policy began an accumulation of political power that was finally confirmed in the October 2019 elections.

The Formation of New Castes and Agendas

Once a candidate with the new party, Manini Ríos did not worry much initially about moderating his most controversial sides. On the campaign trail in 2019, he did not qualify his most extremist ideas. He subscribed to the classic move of refusing to accept an ideological position between right and left, nonetheless remarking that his position was certainly not “centrist.” Similarly, Guillermo Domenech, in one of his first public appearances as president of Cabildo Abierto, maintained that the new party was “neither left nor right,” adding: “Personally, I am ambidextrous.” On several occasions both have described themselves as nationalists, which corresponds to the formation of an imaginary and rhetoric that positions them as apolitical, de-ideologized defenders of the common good.

On its candidate lists, Cabildo Abierto did not hide the presence of figures denounced for their associations with dictatorship-era state terrorism. It also did not hide its at least complacent views on the dictatorship, nor the participation in its ranks of many former members of the far-right youth movement JUP, which was accused of establishing links with paramilitary groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Manini Ríos and his party have been a magnet for young Naziphile extremists.

In shaping its public image, Cabildo Abierto has made an effort not to be identified as a “military party.” However, after the elections, from the first months of Cabildo Abierto’s participation in the governing coalition, the influx of retired military personnel and their relatives in public positions was noticeable. Eduardo Lust—a lawyer, professor, and activist in the fight against pulp-processing plants who was elected to the Chamber of Deputies with Cabildo Abierto but resigned from the party in February 2023—denounced the existence of a military leadership that met on party premises and in private homes to set the course of the party in multiple areas. Shortly after, in a conversation recorded without his knowledge, Lust claimed that half of Cabildo Abierto was made up of people who had been torturers.

Uruguay’s parliament is elected through a “closed list” proportional representation system in which parties set the order of which candidates will be the first to win seats. When it comes to the profiles of candidates who headed Cabildo Abierto’s party lists in the October 2019 elections, it is worth noting the absence of military personnel. Instead, the top spaces were occupied by individuals whose common denominator was their claim to be recent arrivals to politics, although this was not strictly the case. Of the 99 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, Cabildo Abierto won 11, a bloc made up of eight men and three women. These lawmakers’ backgrounds are varied. They include a naval mechanic, a commercial pilot, a domestic worker, a retired fisherman, a veterinarian, and an owner of an electrical shop in a city bordering Brazil. Most of them had been active in the National and Colorado parties before joining Cabildo Abierto.

Many have correctly pointed out that the group of legislators who took up seats with Cabildo Abierto on March 1, 2020 is similar to the evangelical bloc in the previous legislature. Most of the Cabildo representatives presented themselves publicly with slogans calling for the restoration of traditional family values and rejecting “gender ideology” and sexual education in schools.

In the Senate, Cabildo Abierto won three of the 30 seats. One seat is held by Manini Ríos, who in the October 2019 election ran both in the first-round presidential race and as a candidate for Senate. The other two senators both previously held government positions. Domenech, a lawyer, notary, and Manini Ríos’s vice-presidential running mate, had a public role during the dictatorship, when he served as a summary lawyer and promoted the dismissals of several teachers, among other actions. Between 1990 and 2019 he headed the Government Notary Office. He was an adherent to Herrerismo, the ideology associated with the liberal-conservative sector of the National Party, until the founding of the Artiguista Social Movement, the movement of military and civilian figures that spearheaded the creation of Cabildo Abierto. As Manini Ríos’s running mate in the 2019 race, Domenech made notable statements against “gender ideology,” saying things like, “Soon they will impose a mandatory homosexuality law on us.” He also claimed God had brought Manini Ríos into party politics as a “reincarnated Artigas,” a reference to the 19th-century figure recognized as the hero of Uruguayan independence.

Cabildo Abierto’s other representative in the Senate is Irene Moreira, Manini Ríos’s wife. Daughter of a retired colonel and a Herrerista militant since her youth, Moreira was appointed to head the Ministry of Housing and Territorial Planning, which she led until May 2023. Her alternate in the Senate was the retired colonel Raúl Lozano, who served from 2011 to 2013 as director of the military’s Material and Armament Service, then as assistant to Defense Minister José Bayardi in the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) beginning in 2015, under the Frente Amplio. In addition to repeatedly expressing from his seat in the Senate the need to “rediscuss the legality of abortion,” decriminalized in the country since 2012, Lozano has maintained an attitude of vindicating the military’s participation in the dictatorship era and the years leading up to it. In May 2023, President Lacalle Pou asked Minister Moreira to resign after she directly granted a home to a Cabildo Abierto militant. She then resumed her seat in the Senate, and Lozano took over as minister of housing.

Guido Manini Ríos (right) speaks with Brazilian senators Luis Carlos Heinze and Eduardo Girão during a visit to Brasília ahead of Uruguay’s 2019 elections, September 19, 2019. (WALDEMIR BARRETO / AGÊNCIA SENADO / CC BY 2.0 DEED)

Both the leader of Cabildo Abierto and other members with public positions have openly expressed positions that coincide with the attitudes and main banners of the new right. Manini Ríos and the other two senators of his party have regularly discredited the justice system, especially in relation to the judiciary’s actions against dictatorship-era repressors, who they have defended in a monolithic way. These delegitimizing statements have sometimes turned into direct attacks.

Despite supporting the market economy in very general terms, Cabildo Abierto’s main figures are far from being classical liberals when it comes to the economy. They have frequently expressed dissent with respect to the dominant line of President Lacalle Pou’s clearly liberal economic team. The Cabildo figures identify as Catholics and have repeatedly made laudatory references to Hispanicism, the ideology advocating unity of the Spanish-speaking world that has now been renewed by a neo-Francoism that is expanding beyond Iberian borders. This combination of Cabildo’s characteristics shapes a conservative imaginary that supports proposals for social welfare policies while invoking “the humble” in a vision of social harmony that vindicates the hierarchies between social classes and genders.

Likewise, another of the party’s rallying cries has been the denunciation of “liberal globalization.” On this front, Cabildo Abierto invokes vague anti-imperialist expressions and even refers in negative terms to the “oligarchy” and financial speculation, placing itself on the side of the “people” and all that is “national.” When it comes to geopolitics, the first trip Manini Ríos made abroad during his campaign was to Brasília, where, among other activities, he met with retired general Hamilton Mourâo, Jair Bolsonaro’s running mate and vice president of Brazil from 2019 to 2022. While still serving as commander-in-chief, Manini Ríos had met Bolsonaro personally while attending the inauguration ceremony of the new commander of the Brazilian Armed Forces, General Edson Pujol, in January 2019. Manini Ríos publicly expressed his support for Bolsonaro, as well as for the 2019 coup in Bolivia against former president Evo Morales.

Unanimously, Cabildo Abierto is harshly opposed to new expressions of feminism and what the right wing calls “gender ideology.” The party also rejects the issues encapsulated within the so-called “new rights agenda.” The idea of a “destroyed Uruguay”—due to political corruption, economic stagnation, and decadence in terms of values—was central to Cabildo’s electoral rhetoric. Their leitmotif was “no more crime, no more waste by the political class, no more transgressions in the moral order.” In line with these priorities, they put forth the slogan “Recess is over” together with a set of proposals to restore respect for authority at various levels, ranging from a call for greater regard for police investiture to the restoration of traditional gender roles as the basis of society.

A Global and Regional Shift

In the four years since the last elections, Cabildo Abierto has promoted several bills that would profoundly modify the judiciary and the actions of prosecutors’ offices, particularly with respect to trials and dictatorship-era human rights abusers. The party achieved salary increases for the military and led a campaign to gather signatures to trigger a referendum on the legislation that regulates usury, placing itself on the side of the debtors. At times, it has been in agreement with the left-wing opposition, such as on issues of environmental defense or in criticizing the government’s retirement reform or a bill that aims to regulate media impartiality. Up until 2023, although Cabildo Abierto was undoubtedly the most fractious partner in the government coalition, its membership was not up for discussion. That question was put on the table beginning in May 2023 with the first of several crises that led Manini Ríos to criticize Lacalle Pou’s “presidential” and “personality-centered” model.

Current polls place Cabildo Abierto’s electoral prospects below their successful showing in the 2019 elections. At the same time, their daily presence throughout these four years in the media and in public political action has contributed to their “naturalization” as a political actor here to stay. However, this new right has shown itself to have clear far-right aspirations. At the very least, its political presence warns of possible medium-term developments in a changing regional scenario and a context of a new rising wave of alt-right groups in Latin America and the world.

Cabildo Abierto’s insertion within a framework of solid parties and democracy like Uruguay’s has, in practice, buffered several of the most controversial aspects of its program. But, despite its old “island vocation,” nourished from within and without, Uruguay is not in fact an island within the political and ideological context of the continent. In times of global anti-progressive reaction and the advance of the new right, it doesn’t hurt to remember that.

Translated from Spanish by NACLA.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Magdalena Broquetas

Magdalena Broquetas is a historian and associate professor at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay.

Gerardo Caetano

Gerardo Caetano is a historian and full professor at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay.

Broquetas and Caetano recently coordinated the publication of Historia de los conservadores y las derechas en Uruguay. Siglos XIX–XXI (three volumes) and are responsible for the Group for Historical Studies on Right Wings in Uruguay.