The successful candidate who emerged from national elections here this week as Vice President of the country, Enrique Tarigo, is a well-known jurist who chairs the Uruguayan Committee for the Rights of Soviet Jewry, the World Jewish Congress reported. Tarigo himself is not Jewish.
“Like the remainder of the Uruguayan people, the Jewish community of the country welcomed with joy the return to democracy,” an analysis by the Latin American branch of the WJC stated.
The analysis found that of the 40,000 Jews of Uruguay — almost all of whom reside in this capital — the overwhelming majority voted for the victorious Presidential candidate Julio Maria Sanguinetti of the Colorado Party. Tarigo was his Vice Presidential running mate.
The Colorado Party is the traditional liberal power in Uruguay, of left of center trend, and Uruguayan Jewry has always tended to favor it. But there were also Jews among the followers of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), a coalition of the left which included the Communists, and of the Partido Nacional, which is conservative leaning, though more radical at this time because of the imprisonment of its leader, Wilson Ferreira Aldunate.
NO JEWISH CANDIDATES TO NATIONAL POSITIONS
There were no Jewish candidates for national positions. Nevertheless, the Central Jewish Committee, the representative body of Uruguayan Jewry and the WJC affiliate here, organized a convention with over 500 delegates of Jewish institutions at which the main candidates of the various political parties spoke.
The only issue of specific concern to the Jewish community during the electoral campaign was the appearance of a “Zionism equals racism” plank in the party platform of the most extreme faction within the leftist Frente Amplio. The Central Jewish Committee reacted vigorously and its press conference on the issue had wide coverage.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
