33 - Uruguay

Summary

The literature on Uruguay since 1930 is very uneven in its coverage. The 1930s and 1940s in particular have been neglected, and it was not until the crisis years of the 1960s that a substantial literature developed on Uruguay’s contemporary situation and recent past. During the military regime (1973–85), the publication of serious work on recent history and current problems was inhibited, but the position was eased to some extent after 1983. Henry Finch, Uruguay, World Bibliographical Series, vol. 102 (Oxford, 1989), is an annotated bibliography of books and articles on all aspects of Uruguayan affairs, the majority of them in English. Among basic source materials, newspapers are a significant source for political developments, but traditionally each newspaper represents a political faction and none could be regarded as authoritative. The number of daily newspapers published after 1985 was greatly reduced, and the process of democratization was marked by a proliferation of political journals. The weekly Búsqueda, published since 1981, comes closer than other papers to being a journal of record. The radical weekly Marcha, founded in 1939, is an indispensable source of perceptive analysis and comment on all aspects of the period until its closure in 1974. For basic social and economic data, the Anuario Estadístico of the Dirección General de Estadística y Censos (DGEC) is central. Population, housing and economic census data are also published by DGEC, as are household survey data on employment and income distribution. Since 1967 the monthly Boletín Estadístico of the Banco Central del Uruguay (BCU) has been a principal source of economic and financial data; before 1967, the Suplemento Estadístico of the Banco de ia República (BROU) published less complete information.