18 de febrero 2025
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President Luis Lacalle Pou of Uruguay has blocked invitations to Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela to the inauguration of president-elect Yamandú Orsi, according to the Uruguayan newspaper El País, and confirmed by sources at the Foreign Ministry.
After beating the ruling party's Alvaro Delgado last November in the second round of Uruguay's presidential elections, Orsi, of the leftist Frente Amplio (Broad Front) party, became the country's president-elect on November 24.
Orsi's inauguration and investiture ceremony will take place on March 1. The outgoing president must sign the invitations to the delegations of other countries.
In 2020, Lacalle Pou announced his decision to not invite representatives from Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela to his own inauguration. He later spoke of those countries on several occasions during his term.
Critical of dictatorships
During the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) held in Mexico in 2021, Lacalle Pou harshly criticized Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela for not having “full democracy.”
The outgoing Uruguayan president also had a tough confrontation with the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, which culminated in the Uruguayan leader reciting a verse from the song 'Patria y Vida' (Homeland and Life): “Let blood not continue to flow for wanting to think differently. Who told you that Cuba belongs to you, if my Cuba belongs to all my people?”
And after last year's presidential elections in Venezuela, Uruguay recognized opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia as the winner.
On January 4 of this year, González Urrutia visited Montevideo and was received by Lacalle Pou, whom he thanked “for his solidarity” with the Venezuelan cause.
This article was originally published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated by our staff. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.
