President of Uruguay from 2005 to 2010 and from 2015 to 2020, Tabaré Vazquez died Sunday, December 6, his family announced, from lung cancer. “It is with deep sorrow that we announce the death of our darling father,” his children Álvaro, Javier and Ignacio Vázquez wrote, stressing that it was a “natural” death caused by his illness.
Oncologist by training and champion of the fight against tobacco, Tabaré Vazquez died “while resting in his home surrounded by relatives and friends,” his son Alvaro said on Twitter. “We want on behalf of the family to thank all Uruguayans for the affection he has received for so many years,” he added. The former president’s funeral will take place on Sunday afternoon in the strictest family privacy due to the pandemic.
His family called on the Uruguayans to follow on television the funeral procession which must leave the town hall of Montevideo, the city of which he was mayor, and go to the cemetery of La Teja, district of the former head of state. His personal physician had announced in August 2019 that Mr. Vazquez, then president, was suffering from lung cancer while stressing that this disease did not prevent him from performing his duties.
His fight against tobacco
Tabaré Vazquez has twice ruled Uruguay under the label of Frente amplio (FA, left). His first five-year term was from 2005 to 2010 and the second from March 1, 2015 to March 1, 2020. The oncologist distinguished himself by making the country in 2006 the first in Latin America, and the fifth in world, to ban smoking from public places. A fight that had a personal resonance for Tabaré Vazquez, marked by the death, between 1962 and 1968, of his sister, his mother and his father from cancer.
More recently, he had lost his wife Maria Auxiliadora Delgado, who died at the end of July 2019 at the age of 82. Over the years, the legislative arsenal has grown, imposing increasingly large warning messages on packages or prohibiting all advertising in points of sale as well as the designation “light”. As a result of these measures, the multinational Philip Morris filed in 2010 an appeal against Uruguay before an international arbitration court, claiming 25 million damages from this small country of 3.3 million inhabitants. In 2016, justice ruled in Uruguay.
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