Who Materially Built Uruguay? From Lafone to Jodal

An unexpected question from Yitzhak Rabin about Fernando Secco Aparicio opens a broader one: why does Uruguay remember those who governed it better than those who produced, invested and built companies?

FROM LAFONE TO JODAL
HOW IS FERNANDO SECCO APARICIO?
An unexpected question from Yitzhak Rabin leads to a much more uncomfortable one: why does Uruguay remember those who governed it so well and those who made it produce so poorly?
By Santiago H. Pereira Testa

One of the greatest surprises of my life occurred in 1995, when I had the opportunity to greet Yitzhak Rabin.
After learning that I was Uruguayan, he asked me:
“How is Fernando Secco Aparicio?”
I confess that the question impressed me.
The prime minister of Israel knew perfectly well who a businessman from Tacuarembó was.
For many years I kept that episode in my memory as a curiosity.
Today I think it contained a much deeper question.
Perhaps what was truly surprising was not that Rabin remembered Fernando Secco Aparicio.
Perhaps what was surprising was that it could seem strange to us that a foreign head of government remembered a Uruguayan businessman.
Fernando Secco Aparicio had promoted the creation of Frigorífico Tacuarembó in 1960, at a time when establishing an industry of that scale four hundred kilometers from Montevideo was a considerable undertaking.
The enterprise began modestly, hired workers from the city itself, developed markets in Europe and other destinations, and grew until it profoundly transformed Tacuarembó’s economy.
In 1973 it entered the Jewish market.
In 1978, Frigorífico Tacuarembó became Uruguay’s leading beef exporter, with more than 109,000 cattle slaughtered and some 22,854 tons exported.
I do not know exactly what personal relationship Secco Aparicio had built with Yitzhak Rabin.
I do know what I heard.
And that question demonstrates, at the very least, that his name had traveled much farther than Tacuarembó.
Years later I came across a reflection by Tomás de Mattos that helps explain the human dimension of all this.
While touring the meatpacking plant with Secco Aparicio, its founder pointed out to him the difference between writing a novel and running that enormous organization, because many families depended on that “novel of steers and cold-storage chambers.”
That is perhaps where the fundamental difference lies between observing a company and understanding it.
A company is not merely the property of its owner.
It is a human organization.
It is work. It is knowledge. It is suppliers. It is customers. It is technology. It is taxes. It is wages. It is families that can plan their lives because someone, before them, decided to take a risk.
And it is also failure when things go wrong.
I remembered that conversation with Rabin while discussing with my friend Daniel Cervini (Centinela CEO) the work of Tatiana Cortazzo and her persistence in giving visibility to Uruguayan entrepreneurs and enterprises.
I told him that one characteristic of our country had always caught my attention.
Uruguay naturally recognizes its politicians, military figures, doctors, writers, intellectuals and statesmen.
And it is very good that it does.
But it seems to experience much greater discomfort when it has to recognize the entrepreneur.
Naturally, there are exceptions.
Tacuarembó itself named one of its avenues after Fernando Secco Aparicio and in 2025 inaugurated a square in his honor.
In doing so, the mayor explicitly spoke of an “outstanding debt” to the man who had created something that transformed the department.
The expression is revealing.
Because if there was an outstanding debt to Secco Aparicio, there are probably many others.
I then thought of the Carrau family. I thought of Joaquín Serratosa and Alberto Castells. I thought of Campomar. Of the Salvos. Of Piria. Of Harriague.
And I realized that the list could be extended almost indefinitely.
Then a much more interesting question appeared.
Who materially built Uruguay?
Not only who governed it.
Who made it work.
Someone established the first saladero.
Someone built a mill.
Someone imported a machine that nobody here had ever seen.
Someone experimented with a grape variety until discovering that an extraordinary wine could be produced.
Someone opened a building-materials yard. Someone built a textile factory. Someone built a meatpacking plant. Someone created a bank. Someone organized a transportation company. Someone found a foreign market for something Uruguay could produce. Someone persuaded others to invest.
Someone mortgaged a property.
Someone lost everything.
And someone started again.
Those men and women also built Uruguay.
Yet they occupy a surprisingly small place in the narrative the country constructed about itself.
We learned the history of our civil wars.
We learned who was president.
Who defeated whom.
Who enacted a law.
Who founded a party.
Who held a ministry.
Much less often do we ask who created the economic organizations that made it possible to pay wages, export products, incorporate technologies and transform small towns into cities.
That is where this series begins.
From Lafone to Jodal.
Samuel Fisher Lafone developed businesses in a Uruguay that was practically just beginning to build itself as a nation.
He was a merchant, industrialist, lender, owner of saladeros, promoter of colonization and founding partner of Banco Comercial, at a time when the state and the private economy were still searching for the form they would take in the new country.
Almost a century and a half later, Breogán Gonda and Nicolás Jodal founded Artech in 1988 and launched GeneXus in 1989.
The raw material was no longer cattle, hides, wool or land.
It was knowledge.
And from Uruguay they began developing a technology designed to automate software creation and later take it to dozens of countries.
Between Lafone and Jodal lies a substantial part of Uruguay’s economic history.
But this series does not intend to build a business hagiography.
Entrepreneurs are not heroes by definition.
Some innovated.
Others lived protected by the state.
Some competed.
Others sought privileges.
There were extraordinary successes and spectacular bankruptcies.
There were complex relationships with political power, labor conflicts, mistakes, abuses, achievements and contradictions.
All of that is part of history and will have to be told.
What does not seem reasonable is to ignore them.
Because it is impossible to explain Uruguay without also explaining those who produced, traded, invested, invented, exported and created organizations capable of surviving even their founders.
Perhaps that is why I still remember that question from Yitzhak Rabin more than thirty years later.
“How is Fernando Secco Aparicio?”
Rabin knew who he was.
The question we should ask ourselves is another one.
How many Fernando Secco Aparicios did Uruguay have whom almost no one remembers anymore?
Finding them will be the purpose of this series.

Uruguayan business memory
Uruguay’s economic history
Entrepreneurship and productive development

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