In his space for reflections on M24, former president José Mujica reiterated his dissatisfaction with “the injustice that is being committed against the rural laborer” and clarified that “I am talking about the rural laborer of the important agricultural companies; I am not referring to the small horticultural agriculture of Canelones, much less to family agriculture, the small dairy farm, the small rancher; I am referring to the large agricultural companies, which are doing well, they are doing well, and it would be time for the rural laborer to be tied up, at least, the purchase rate of the salary he lost (…) because not all of them were bad during the pandemic.”
In that direction, he pointed out that “our current sociocultural and political reality imposes a type of policy that tends to favor the concentration of wealth”; He exemplified it by citing “data from the Central Bank” according to which “in these two years of the pandemic, bank deposits increased considerably, but the ones that increased the most were large deposits, from 250,000 dollars up; And what a coincidence! In the midst of the crisis, when thousands and thousands of Uruguayans ate in popular pots, capital exports increased (…); Not everyone did badly.”
And in this context of agro-export and capitalist boom, “the worker, the rural laborer, speaking clearly, who is the one who really works, bends his back, breaks his hands, sweats, makes an effort, (…) those that generate calluses, those that thicken their fingers; they could remember those, but they don’t, and the government looks up, because naturally it looks at the ‘golden mesh’, that things go well for them, because it dreams -just as there are utopists on the left, there are utopists on the right- it dreams that if The ‘gold mesh’ are doing very well, they are going to spill down”, he noted.
100,000 rural workers are forgotten at a time of agro-export boom and the government looks down on the ‘golden mesh’
The former president paraphrased what “some say” in that “‘crises open up opportunities'” and noted that “in any case they create opportunities for those who have a lot of money, but for the vast majority of humble people, crises do not nothing but aggravate the hardships of your life; That is why I think and will continue to think that when broad sectors of the economy are doing well, they have to be prodded a bit so that they share a little more with the people who work with them; and in this case there are no less than 80, 100,000 rural workers who are being forgotten at a time when the agro-export economy is booming; we should not be so unfair, and not only look at those above but look at the ground”.
