The history of Uruguay

Uruguay, the small country of rolling grassland between the Río de la Plata, the Atlantic and the Uruguay River, was for thousands of years the home of mobile hunting and fishing peoples, above all the Charrúa. Europeans settled it late, and the land they called the Banda Oriental, the "east bank", became a frontier contested by the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Independence came in 1828 as a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil, and the new republic began its life with the massacre of the Charrúa in 1831 and decades of civil war between its two great parties. In the twentieth century Uruguay built one of the earliest welfare states in the Americas, fell under military dictatorship from 1973 to 1985, and has since been one of the most stable democracies in the region.

People reached the lands that are now Uruguay at the end of the last Ice Age, roughly 13,000 years ago. The earliest stone tools, from the north of the country, belong to hunting and gathering traditions that archaeologists call the Catalanense and Cuareim cultures. Hunters used bolas, corded stones thrown at running prey, the oldest about 7,000 years old. Rock paintings survive at sites such as Chamangá in the centre of the country.

In the east, around the lagoons and wetlands near the Brazilian border, people raised thousands of earth mounds known today as cerritos de indios, some of them about 5,000 years old. Little is known of the builders, who left no written record, but excavations have found traces of early plant cultivation and the bones of dogs.

By the time Europeans arrived, the land was shared by several peoples who probably never numbered more than 10,000 to 20,000 in all. The largest group were the Charrúa, estimated at around 9,000 people, who lived as seasonal nomads. They moved to the coasts and rivers in summer to fish and gather shellfish, fruits and roots, and inland in winter to hunt deer, rheas and smaller game with bows and bolas. The Chaná, along the lower rivers, seem to have practised some farming and made pottery, while Guaraní groups, related to the great Tupí-Guaraní peoples of Paraguay and Brazil, lived on islands and riverbanks, alongside smaller peoples such as the Yaro and Bohane. The country's name comes from the river, in Guaraní, and may mean "river of the birds".

The first European to land was Juan Díaz de Solís, who entered the estuary of the Río de la Plata for the Spanish Empire in 1516 and was killed with most of his landing party. Uruguayan tradition long blamed the Charrúa, and the story of their fierce resistance became a national legend, though many historians now think the attackers were Guaraní. Ferdinand Magellan anchored at the future site of Montevideo in 1520, and Sebastian Cabot explored the rivers from 1526, but there was no gold or silver and no permanent settlement for a century.

The land's wealth turned out to be grass. In 1603 Hernando Arias de Saavedra, governor at Buenos Aires, had cattle and horses released on the plains, and within decades huge wild herds roamed the Banda Oriental. Hunters from both empires came to slaughter them for hides, and the Charrúa took up the horse, which strengthened their resistance. The first lasting settlement was a mission on the Río Negro, Santo Domingo Soriano, founded around 1624.

The real contest was between the two Iberian crowns. In 1680 the Portuguese founded Colônia do Sacramento on the north shore of the estuary, directly opposite Buenos Aires, to push the frontier of Colonial Brazil south and to smuggle goods into Spanish territory. Spain answered by founding San Felipe de Montevideo in 1726 as a fortified port, settled with families from Buenos Aires and the Canary Islands, whose fine harbour soon rivalled Buenos Aires itself. In 1732 Spanish authorities signed a peace with the Charrúa that recognised their autonomy, but ranching kept eating into their hunting grounds.

In 1776 the Banda Oriental became part of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, ruled from Buenos Aires. By 1800 about 10,000 people lived in Montevideo and 20,000 in the countryside, and roughly three in ten of them were enslaved Africans, brought through the port as part of the Atlantic slave trade. In 1807 a British army of about 10,000 men occupied Montevideo for several months.

The collapse of Spanish authority during the Napoleonic Wars set off revolution across the region. In May 1810 Buenos Aires replaced the viceroy with a junta, while Montevideo stayed loyal to Spain and became the royalist base in the south. In February 1811 the rural leader José Gervasio Artigas called the countryside to arms, and on 18 May he defeated the Spanish at Las Piedras and laid siege to Montevideo. It was one front of the Spanish American wars of independence.

Artigas soon fell out with Buenos Aires, which wanted a centralised state. He led a League of the Free Peoples that favoured a loose federation, began a land reform that divided estates among small farmers, and counted many Charrúa and Guaraní among his soldiers. His radicalism alarmed the Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro, and in 1816 its army invaded. Montevideo fell in January 1817, Artigas was finally defeated in 1820 and went into exile in Paraguay, where he died in 1850, and the territory was annexed as the Cisplatine Province, which passed to the new Empire of Brazil after 1822.

On 19 April 1825 the Thirty-Three Orientals, exiles led by Juan Antonio Lavalleja, crossed from Argentina and raised the countryside. On 25 August an assembly at Florida declared the province separated from Brazil and joined to the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, now Argentina. The resulting Cisplatine War ended in stalemate, and under British mediation the Treaty of Montevideo of August 1828 recognised an independent Uruguay between the two powers. The first constitution was adopted on 18 July 1830, and the victor of the war, Fructuoso Rivera, became the first president.

By independence the Charrúa had been reduced by two centuries of disease, warfare and the loss of their land to cattle ranches. Those who kept their way of life still moved freely across the north, and settlers demanded their removal. Rivera, who had fought alongside Charrúa warriors and knew their leaders, agreed to a campaign against them.

In early 1831 Rivera called the principal Charrúa chiefs, including Venado, Polidoro, Rondeau and Juan Pedro, to a meeting on the banks of the Salsipuedes Creek, saying he needed their help to guard the frontier. On 11 April 1831, after the Charrúa had gathered with their families, troops under his nephew Bernabé Rivera surrounded and attacked them. The official report gave 40 dead and some 300 taken prisoner, while others escaped. Further attacks followed that year to hunt down survivors. The captured women and children were marched to Montevideo and handed out to settler families as servants, in conditions close to slavery.

In 1833 four survivors, the healer Senaqué, the warrior Vaimaca Perú, and a young couple, Laureano Tacuabé and María Micaela Guyunusa, were shipped to France and exhibited to the paying public in Paris. Three of them died within a year, as did the daughter Guyunusa bore there; the fate of Tacuabé is unknown. Historians describe the Salsipuedes campaign as genocidal, and it ended the Charrúa as an organised people in Uruguay. Their language is extinct, yet descendants survived in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, and since 1989 Charrúa organisations have worked to reclaim the identity of a people long treated as vanished.

Independent Uruguay quickly divided into two parties named after the colours of their armbands: the Colorados, the "reds" of Rivera, tied to Montevideo's merchants, and the Blancos, the "whites" of the second president, Manuel Oribe, rooted in the countryside. Entangled with Argentina's civil wars, where Juan Manuel de Rosas backed Oribe, their rivalry became the Guerra Grande, the Great War, of 1839 to 1852. With Argentine troops behind him, Oribe held most of the country, while the Colorados defended Montevideo through a siege from 1843 to 1851, helped by foreign volunteers including an Italian legion under Giuseppe Garibaldi. In 1851 a coalition of Brazil, the Colorados and the Argentine general Justo José de Urquiza ended the siege and then overthrew Rosas.

The price of victory was dependence on Brazil. Treaties in 1851 gave up Uruguayan claims north of the Cuareim River, fixing the country at about 176,000 square kilometres, and allowed Brazilian intervention. In 1864 and 1865 Brazil and Argentina helped the Colorado general Venancio Flores overthrow the Blanco government, and Uruguay then joined them in the Triple Alliance against Paraguay, whose ruinous war lasted until 1870. A peace in 1872 introduced coparticipación, under which the Blancos governed several departments while the Colorados held the presidency, a power-sharing habit that long shaped Uruguayan politics.

From the 1860s Uruguay was transformed. Immigrants from Italy and Spain poured in, the number of sheep rose from 3 million to 17 million in eight years, British capital built railways converging on Montevideo, and the country began to export wool, hides, beef and the meat extract and corned beef of Fray Bentos. Population grew from under half a million in 1879 to about a million in the early twentieth century.

Between 1876 and 1890 the army ruled. Colonel Lorenzo Latorre and his successors centralised the state, armed the national army with modern rifles, made ranchers fence their land and policed the countryside, ending the era of free-roaming herds and gauchos. In 1877 a law inspired by the reformer José Pedro Varela created free and compulsory primary education, which helped turn immigrant children into Spanish-speaking Uruguayans. Civilian government returned in 1890, though the Blancos rose in arms in 1897 under Aparicio Saravia to win more representation.

José Batlle y Ordóñez, a Colorado newspaperman who was president from 1903 to 1907 and again from 1911 to 1915, shaped modern Uruguay more than anyone. After defeating the last great Blanco rising at Masoller in 1904, he used the state to build a welfare system ahead of most of the world. His governments allowed divorce, including at a woman's request, set up secondary schools in every departmental capital, introduced the eight-hour working day in 1915, and nationalised or created state companies in electricity, insurance, mortgage banking, telephones and urban transport. The constitution of 1918 separated church and state, and divided executive power between a president and an elected National Council of Administration. Uruguay stayed neutral in the First World War but broke with Germany in 1917.

The 1920s were prosperous. The football team won Olympic gold in 1924 and 1928, and in 1930 Uruguay hosted and won the first World Cup. The Great Depression brought that confidence to an abrupt halt as meat and wool prices collapsed. In March 1933 President Gabriel Terra dissolved parliament and the council with police support and ruled until 1938 under a new constitution. His successor Alfredo Baldomir moved the country towards democracy and the Allied side in the Second World War. In December 1939 the damaged German warship Admiral Graf Spee was scuttled off Montevideo after the Battle of the River Plate, and Uruguay broke with the Axis in 1942.

Wartime demand for beef, wool and leather made the late 1940s and early 1950s, under Luis Batlle Berres, a nephew of the reformer, a high point of prosperity and state-led industry. British-owned railways were taken over in 1949 against wartime debts, and in 1950 Uruguay won a second World Cup, beating Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. A 1952 constitution replaced the presidency entirely with a nine-member National Council of Government.

From the mid-1950s falling export prices exposed an economy that had stopped growing. Inflation rose, the peso was devalued, and the Blancos, who won power in 1958 for the first time in nearly a century, could not stop the decline. Labour unrest and student protest grew, and from the mid-1960s the Tupamaros, a left-wing urban guerrilla movement led by Raúl Sendic, carried out bank raids, kidnappings and killings. After a one-man presidency was restored in 1967, Jorge Pacheco Areco governed largely under emergency measures, banned left-wing parties and newspapers, and handed the fight against the guerrillas to the armed forces. In 1972 parliament declared a state of internal war, and by the end of that year the army had crushed the Tupamaros, but the military's political power kept growing.

On 27 June 1973 President Juan María Bordaberry, with the backing of the armed forces, dissolved both chambers of parliament and replaced them with an appointed Council of State. The unions answered with a fifteen-day general strike, the longest in the country's history. The regime is called civic-military because civilians held the presidency while the generals took the decisions; the army removed Bordaberry in 1976 and later installed General Gregorio Álvarez as president. Parties and unions were banned, and Uruguay took part in Operation Condor, the Cold War alliance of the Southern Cone dictatorships, including Chile and Argentina, for hunting down opponents across borders.

Repression in Uruguay relied above all on mass imprisonment and torture. More than 5,000 people were imprisoned for political reasons, giving Uruguay one of the highest rates of political prisoners in the world for its population, and close to a tenth of Uruguayans emigrated. Around 180 Uruguayans are known to have been killed, most of them in Argentina, and many of the disappeared have never been found. Among the prisoners held for years in harsh isolation was a Tupamaro named José Mujica.

The regime's attempt to legitimise itself failed when voters rejected its proposed constitution in a referendum in 1980, by 57 per cent. Mass protests followed, and the Naval Club Pact of 1984 set the terms of transition. Elections that November brought the Colorado leader Julio María Sanguinetti to the presidency in March 1985. Political prisoners were released, but a 1986 law shielded military and police officers from prosecution for crimes under the dictatorship, and voters upheld it in referendums in 1989 and 2009. Prosecutions nevertheless followed in cases outside it, and Álvarez and Bordaberry were convicted in 2009 and 2010.

Luis Alberto Lacalle of the Blancos, president from 1990 to 1995, brought Uruguay into the Mercosur trade bloc with Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay in 1991, though voters used referendums to block several privatisations. Uruguay's dependence on its neighbours showed in 2002, when the Argentine collapse triggered a banking crisis, unemployment near 20 per cent and a sharp rise in poverty.

In 2004 the left-wing Broad Front, a coalition founded in 1971, won the presidency for the first time with Tabaré Vázquez, ending the long dominance of Colorados and Blancos. Under José Mujica, the former guerrilla who was president from 2010 to 2015 and became known worldwide for his austere way of life, Uruguay legalised abortion in 2012 and same-sex marriage and the cannabis market in 2013, the first country to regulate cannabis fully. Union membership roughly quadrupled during fifteen years of Broad Front government.

Luis Lacalle Pou of the Blancos won the 2019 election and governed from 2020 to 2025, handling the COVID-19 pandemic without compulsory lockdowns and facing a severe drought in 2023 that left Montevideo's tap water salty. Mujica died in May 2025. In March 2025 the Broad Front returned to power with Yamandú Orsi, a former history teacher. With about 3.4 million people, Uruguay remains a small country that ranks among the most democratic, secular and socially liberal in Latin America.