Cooperativas, Estado y Mercado. Privatización del transporte público de Montevideo a través de cooperativas (1947-2017).

In 1947, Act No 10.980 was passed creating the Public Transportation Administration of Montevideo (AMDET) to provide public transportation to Montevideo. Throughout its history, the management of AMDET was presented with many difficulties in addition to delivering negative economic results. After the coup d'état of June 1973, and within the framework of neoliberal policies, the Uruguayan government undertakes a reform of the state apparatus. In the case of the municipality of Montevideo, the reform is to get rid of the AMDET, and for this, the cooperativization of the workers is proposed as an alternative to the loss of their source of work. This will be substantialized through Resolution No 37.588 of 1974 of the Municipal Government of Montevideo. It establishes the bases of the cooperativization that provides, among other things, the granting of the concession of the service to the cooperatives and the sale of the units of transportation that must be paid by the cooperatives. The process of privatization of AMDET allows us to reflect on the role of the State in the promotion of cooperatives. We seek to understand why the State opts for cooperatives to carry out its policies and how these conditions the subsequent development of the cooperative. We analyze the program of privatization of public transport in Montevideo under the figure of worker cooperatives. We are interested in understanding the reasons of the public policy and to what extent it responds to the intention to promote cooperativism or is the product exclusively of the attempt to reduce the State. As working methodology, the analysis of the cycle of public policies was used, and for that, it was based on the survey of documentary sources (regulations and documents of the municipality), interviews with qualified informants and press releases of the time. This analysis shows that cooperativization responds more to a political use by the municipal authorities to reform the State in the framework of market reforms than to a policy of promoting cooperativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]