This Sunday, March 27, Uruguayan men and women have, once again, a day of resistance by voting in the Referendum for the repeal of 135 articles of the Law of Urgent Consideration (LUC), approved in July 2020.
From Rumbo Socialista we want to express the following issues:
The Law of Urgent Consideration is basically the management program and the implementation of the strategies that the right-wing government of Lacalle Pou intends to implement to give a legal framework to decisions that respond to the restoration of conservative values and to accentuate public policies of capitalist and neoliberal sign.
These types of laws, when presented with the denomination of urgent consideration, have a time limit to be dealt with in the parliament (45 days per chamber). Once these deadlines have passed, if deputies and senators do not take action, the law is automatically in force.
This law was known to the population in its entirety once this government took office at the beginning of the pandemic, which limited access to correct information about it and prevented sufficient time for it to be debated in the different social and political spheres. It is worth mentioning that the LUC has 476 articles referring to issues of all kinds, from the authorization of the sale of homemade sausages to deep and reactionary transformations in security and education.
Regarding allí these articles, the center-left parliamentary opposition, nucleated in the Frente Amplio, finally voted in favor of 51% of them. Among them, several of the most harmful articles, which are now proposed to be repealed.
Faced with this reality and the limited time for discussion, the social and trade union organizations understood that a broader discussion was necessary, as the need to question and reject this law globally was becoming increasingly clear.
After several instances of debate, two options or campaigns began to take shape, one defined by several social organizations, which began by first considering the collection of signatures to enable a referendum to repeal the entire law. And in view of the fact that the popular sectors were beginning to organize strongly and from below, other organizations, many of them referenced in the Frente Amplio, started another campaign consisting in gathering signatures to repeal not the whole LUC, but 135 articles, which are the ones currently in question.
Although those of us who belong to this organization believe that it is necessary to repeal the whole law, at the time, we held the position of collecting signatures for the 2 options, since it was not contradictory and allowed that if one option was not achieved, it could be achieved with the other, which was what finally happened. The first option collected a little more than 30 thousand signatures while the second option, which was the one that as the days went by it became clear that it had more possibilities of reaching the referendum, reached the necessary signatures to achieve the referendum for the 135 articles.
This 27th we call to vote for the YES pink ballot
We call to reflect on this instance, with respect to the fact that it can mark a before and an after, in rights won by the struggle of all. It is a matter of maintaining the conquests obtained with great efforts such as the recognition of fundamental rights and in the perspective of promoting the transformations so that there is a present State that increases access to education and guarantees the working men and women that education is not a privilege of just a few, a State that prevents the strengthening of a police model as a repressive apparatus against the people and with authorization for the abuse of functions, giving legitimacy to more repression. To stop the attacks on fundamental rights such as strike and occupation as an extension of the latter and the freedom of the organizational forms of the unions.
Left out of this referendum are several articles that will also imply a setback in our rights, such as the reform on social security that implies an extension of working life and the transformation of the solidarity and public savings system into a system of private and individual savings.
But beyond the result of the Referendum, the struggle does not end on the 27th, quite the contrary. Faced with an increasingly distressing situation in this post-pandemic world and in a context of war, with a growing increase in the cost of living, thousands of layoffs as in Casa de Galicia, exponential increase in violence against women, etc, we must continue to fight for our rights, implement the necessary changes in our unions and in the PIT-CNT to unify and strengthen the struggle. We workers must assume our historical role in the defense of our working and living conditions and assume the representation of the defense of the sectors historically violated by the hegemonic power such as women and dissidents and the economically and socially submerged sectors. Always carrying in our struggle the banner of the need to have a more just and egalitarian society where everyone can have a decent life and building a political tool of the workers and the people to achieve it.
