MONTEVIDEO: During the two decades Daniel Gomez spent in the cigarette business at Philip Morris in Uruguay, he never imagined he would one day be promoting and enforcing anti-tobacco laws.
But when the tobacco giant pulled out of Uruguay amid a dispute over a strict smoking crackdown, Gomez and seven coworkers reinvented themselves as anti-tobacco police, joining a government program that sends them around the country to monitor compliance with the new measures.
“It’s unusual, but we were left without work from one day to the next, on the street, and it was hard to reinsert ourselves into the labor market,” said Gomez, who spent most of his career in cigarette quality control.
“It completely changed our lives,” he told AFP.
Their group is called the “October 21 Cooperative,” named for the day in 2011 that Philip Morris International shut its Uruguayan factory, complaining that anti-tobacco rules and black-market cigarettes were putting it out of business.
The small South American country has some of the world’s strictest anti-tobacco laws.
It was the first country in Latin America to ban smoking in public spaces, a measure it enacted in 2006 under then president Tabare Vazquez, a cancer doctor who made anti-tobacco legislation a personal crusade.
AFP
