History of Uruguay from Early Columbian times to the Conquest

History of Uruguay from Early Columbian times to the Conquest. 1811-20 The Great War Artigas's Revolution 1843-52 The Society The Government Economy Culture Tourism. URUGUAY WAS ONCE KNOWN as the Switzerland of South America as a result of its relative governmental stability advanced level of economic development and social peace. Indeed in the creation of a welfare state it was far ahead of Switzerland during the first half of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1950s however Uruguay's economy began to stagnate and the oncevaunted welfare state became increasingly poor. Commentators talked of the Latin Americanization of Uruguay as it descended from the ranks of the developed nations to the level of the Third World. Political and social unrest eventually culminated in the military coup of 1973; by then the case for seeing Uruguay as very different from the rest of Latin America was largely undermined. During the sixty-year period from 1870 to 1930 foreign immigrants flooded into Uruguay mainly from Spain and Italy to improve their standard of living. A historical study of social and economic development ranked Uruguay fourth among all independent nations in the world in the 1880s. In 1990 Uruguay's levels of education and nutrition were still among the highest in Latin America as well as its per capita ownership of radios televisions and telephones and its newspaper readership