Democracy, order and legality

The emergence of a conservative and right-wing batllismo in the "Happy Uruguay" of the early fifties

Abstract

The article addresses the political trajectory and evolution of the ideas of a partisan political sector, the catorcista or pachequista batllismo, which constituted, in the period between the postwar period and the fifties, one of the expressions of the field of the rights in the Uruguayan political scene. His story is interesting for the purposes of dialogue with other regional processes for several reasons: firstly because its members come from an ideological tradition of strong republican and reformist imprint, whose origins refer to the cycle of changes that occurred in Uruguay during the first decades of the twentieth century; secondly, because the emergence of this aspect coexists with a new reformist cycle led by another current of Batllismo that sought to restore the progressive matrix of the beginning of the century; finally, because the turn in the positions of the sector takes place in a climate of time - marked by the irruption of the Cold War - that justified the conservative revision of ideas about democracy by various parties of liberal profile and even reformist in Latin America.