Autonomous Entities

Autonomous Entities (Entes autónomos) is the juridical term for the commercial or industrial state enterprises in Uruguay that are the legacy of the welfare-oriented and state-interventionist ideology of the Colorado Party leader José Batlle y Ordóñez. There are some twenty nationalized industrial and commercial activities run by a board of directors selected by the government. Batlle believed that national sovereignty and the general welfare could be protected only by an interventionist state. Thus, beginning in 1912 with electricity, a wide array of state-owned services were created. Over the decades these grew to include the ports, railroads, an official radio broadcasting service, the national airline (PLUNA), the telephone company (ANTEL), sanitation, water, and oceanographic and fishing activities. The most famous and largest of the entities, the National Association for Fuel, Alcohol, and Cement (ANCAP), was created during the depression and proved to be a huge source of jobs and patronage. ANCAP was given a legal monopoly to refine oil and produce alcoholic beverages and cement. Batlle had wanted these activities in state hands, but he died before his goal was realized. Economic crisis, however, prodded the political elite into action.

While the vision that inspired the autonomous entities may have been noble, in practice many of these state corporations became inefficient make-work operations that served as patronage machines for the Blanco and Colorado parties. Control of the entities and of such decentralized services as education, social security, and housing, through such organs as the State Mortgage Bank, Social Security Bank, State Insurance Bank, and the Bank of the Republic, became so important politically that the composition of their boards became the subject of constitutional debate, and formulas were written into several constitutions on how directors were to be assigned.

Louis Lacalle, elected president in 1989, hoped to privatize several of the entities or at least to allow private participation in them. He had a law passed that enabled him to sell the telephone company, but the law was overwhelmingly abrogated in a plebiscite held in 1992. Nevertheless, Lacalle managed to eliminate some of the monopolies currently held by ANCAP and by some of the public banks.

See alsoBatlle y Ordóñez, José .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Philip B. Taylor, Jr., Government and Politics of Uruguay (1960).

Additional Bibliography

Nahum, Benjamín. El Uruguay del siglo XX. Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2001.

                                     Martin Weinstein