At more than 10,000 kilometers up, Tabaré Vázquez had his mind set on what was coming. France was a land more than known to the Uruguayan president, who would now meet with President Francoise Hollande with the aim of sealing a Cooperation treaty and at the same time bringing positions between Mercosur and the European Union.
But in the middle of the trip he felt a call that made him jump out of his seat. A teenage girl had eaten peanuts and was finding it difficult to breathe. A mother was desperate, the crew asked for a doctor and found him in the Uruguayan head of state.
“Her throat was almost closed, to illustrate it in a simple way. That’s when we decided to apply the intravenous injection. If we didn’t treat her on the spot, I don’t know what would have happened,” said Mario Zelarayán, Vázquez’s personal physician, who also attended. to the young woman in the heights.
Everything was left in an anecdote that was soon replicated on international portals, but the random story says a lot about how Tabaré Vázquez, who died this Sunday, December 6, conceived his political career.
Initiated into the party arena in the late 1980s, Uruguay’s twice-president oncologist long considered himself an “outsider”: a doctor rather than a politician.
Before and after taking office, he made it clear that he would not abandon his professional activity. Doctor in the Spanish Association since 1980, during his first Presidency he dedicated up to two days a week to attend to his patients there, which earned him constant criticism from the opposition, which defined him as a “part time” president.
Vázquez remarked that this activity did not make him neglect any detail of the management, he insisted that one never ceases to be a doctor –and fate, as happened on the plane to France, took his side– and even claimed the need to find an escape from the dizzying task of government.
“They have told me that the president has to be fulltime. Okay, it has to be fulltime and i think i do fulltime. If they call me at 2 or 3 in the morning, or at 5 in the afternoon, I am. Now, there are presidents who have their hobby and develop it during their presidential term. Here there were presidents who liked to play tennis, two or three times a week, others liked horse races, and Saturday and Sunday they went to the racetrack, others like to paint or write. They are hobbies and it is good that they have them. Because the task of president is very heavy, very stressful. It’s good to have a bloat. Well, my hobby is medicine. I don’t play soccer, I don’t play tennis, I don’t go horse racing or paint pictures. I do medicine, ”he said in an interview on the Encuentro channel.
“It is that I will always continue to be a doctor. Always. You cannot stop being a doctor. When you choose a career of this type, you do so from a deep vocation,” he told Gente magazine in August 2005.
-Maybe there are cases of people studying medicine because it suits them, but the vast majority of doctors, I am convinced,
we do by vocation. Instead…
-Instead?
– You can stop being political.
For the second presidency, Vázquez changed his routine and moved away from clinical activity. On December 1, 2014, after winning the ballot over Luis Lacalle Pou, he was present at the Spanish Association and announced that as of March he would dedicate himself “exclusively” to his position as head of state.
The doctor, however, was still there on August 20, 2019, when from the second floor of the Executive Tower and before the television cameras he reported that a nodule had been detected in his right lung, which was only the harbinger of the disease that he fought for a long time until this Sunday.
– .
