Born in Montevideo as one of the four children of Don Domingo Frugoni and Doña Josefina Queirolo, Emilio Frugoni joined José Batlle y Ordóñez's camp during the political fighting in 1904, and rose to the rank of Lieutenant. Upon the end of the conflict, he decided to, in his own words: In December 1904, Frugoni wrote his Profesión de fe socialista - which was partly published in the newspaper El Día. This was the start of a process leading to the creation of the PS. A while after that, he commented in his El Socialismo no es la violencia, ni el despojo, ni el reparto :
Opposition to dictatorships
In 1920, he demanded a Party agreement on its position towards the October Revolution and Bolshevism. In the 1921 Congress, the PS voted to join the Comintern, and turned itself into the Communist Party of Uruguay ; Frugoni refused to adhere to the party line, and refounded the PS as a non-communist group. In the 1928 elections, the PCU obtained 3,911 votes, and the PS 2,931. He became an opponent of authoritarianPresidentGabriel Terra in the 1930s, and was imprisoned, then exiled. Elected deputy in 1934, he had opposed the dictatorship enforced by the legislature, and, upon the swearing in of Terra, declared: He walked out of the Parliament to the PS headquarters as the former was stormed by police forces. In 1942, Frugoni was named Uruguay's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Soviet Union by President Juan José de Amézaga. He resigned his position in 1946 and returned to Montevideo, as he had become a harsh critic of Soviet policies. In La Esfinge Roja, the book containing his experiences, he wrote:
In January 1963, he left the PS over internal disagreements, and created Movimiento Socialista, with which he ran in the elections of 1966. In 1966, he authored an Open Letter to the Socialists; among other things, it stated that "an electoral campaign is nowadays an economical adventure", and showed Frugoni's willingness to contribute his personal wealth. When the government of Jorge Pacheco Areco outlawed the PS and closed down El Sol and the PS headquarters, Frugoni rejected the possibility that the patrimony could pass to the Movimiento Socialista. After his death, the Movimiento Socialista entered a tight alliance with the PS; nowadays, Frugoni's political thought is integrated in the party line of the PS.
