Luis Lacalle Pou hit a punching bag and memes exploded in Uruguay

Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou visited the department of Salto, in the north of the country, and in the middle of his journey he came across a punching bag. He couldn't hold back and hit her, leaving it recorded on video, which ended up going viral on social networks and, in addition, generating a large volume of memes about it.

Among the events that the president would visit was the inauguration of the Social Policy Reference Centre, which consists of a conglomerate of public offices. During his trip to northern Uruguay, there were several people who asked him for selfies and it was in this context that he came across the punching bag.

He gave him a few strokes, left and right, although he was not agile because he was wearing a suit. When he approached to do so, he was applauded and motivated by those who were there. In addition, the laughter of those present was heard. “Esaa...” one of the people accompanying him shouted at him, an expression used in Uruguay to motivate something difficult to do.

The video was uploaded to his stories, on his personal Instagram profile and lasts less than ten seconds. It had thousands of views and led to several users creating memes and comparing it to Rocky Balboa and other viral video fighters.

The viral images of Lacalle Pou

The last image that went viral of the Uruguayan president was when, at the end of January 2022, he was caught surfing on a beach in the department of Rocha, in the east of the country. That day, surf photographer Luis Pereira Costa had gone to that beach to take pictures of surfers who were in the water because there was a “sea in the background”.

By sea in the background, surfers refer to the movement of waves that happens outside where it was generated. That is to say that those waves, like the ones that the president surfed at around 19:00 hours, had no relation to the wind present at that time, although their cause is the wind that originated in another area.

For Pereira Costa, finding the Uruguayan president in the water was purely by chance. “I went to take pictures in Los Botes and, suddenly I take a picture, and I zoom in and see that it's him. It was hard for me to recognize him, but then I saw that it was him and I confirmed it when he came out,” the photographer told the newspaper El País.

In fact, the president didn't agree with anyone and the photographer didn't know Lacalle Pou would be there. However, it is publicly known that the president is a surfer and that he has his summer home in the La Paloma spa.

Prior to this image, the others that circulated with greater intensity were those of Lacalle Pou spending Christmas Eve and Christmas with the Uruguayan military participating in the UN stabilization mission (MONUSCO) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Pou Street arrived on the same day for the Christmas Eve celebration in Goma (in the north-eastern Congolese province of North Kivu), where Uruguay - one of the ten countries that contributes the most military to MONUSCO - has deployed a contingent of 550 blue helmets.

The president moved on a plane borrowed by Argentine businessman Francisco De Narváez, owner of several investments in Uruguay, and left Carrasco International Airport early Thursday afternoon. He drove to Recife Airport in northern Brazil on a three-hour flight and then traveled 12 more to Rwanda's capital, Kigali.

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