Two days after saying a plan to show a 700-pound Nazi sculpture of an eagle holding a swastika into a peace dove, the Uruguayan president, Luis Lacalle Pou, stated that the challenge had been canceled after hundreds signed a petition calling for it to go to a museum as a substitute.

Mr. Lacalle Pou stated on Sunday that within the hours since he offered the thought at a news convention on Friday an “overwhelming majority” had objected to the plan to recast the eagle, which was discovered on a sunken German warship in Uruguayan waters in 2006.

“If you want to generate peace, the first thing you have to do is to generate unity, and clearly this has not generated that,” he advised reporters in Cerro Largo, Uruguay. Saying that he nonetheless thought it was a good suggestion, he nonetheless acknowledged, “It is up to a president to listen and to represent.”

The six-foot-tall eagle was on the strict of a German warship scuttled by its captain within the Plata River after it had been broken in one of many first main battles of World War II.

The eagle has been contentious ever because it was recovered: The personal salvaging operation that discovered the bronze claimed it had the fitting to promote the sculpture, whereas the German Foreign Ministry and Jewish teams warned that it shouldn’t go to non-public consumers looking for to glorify Nazism. The bronze stayed in a Uruguayan Navy storage unit whereas authorized battles over its possession wound by means of the courts. The Uruguayan Supreme Court ultimately gave custody of the sculpture to the nationwide authorities.

The challenge to soften down the eagle and recast it as a dove had been within the fingers of a Uruguayan artist, Pablo Atchugarry, however after it was introduced hundreds signed an online petition calling for the sculpture to be preserved in a museum. Felipe Artucio, the petition’s creator, wrote, “Remembering the bad, keeping in mind the symbols that represent it, is an enormous responsibility to society, both local and foreign.”

A day after the president’s preliminary announcement, Guido Manini Ríos, chief of the right-wing Cabildo Abierto social gathering, which is in a coalition with Mr. Lacalle Pou’s conservative National Party, got here out towards the thought of changing the sculpture and threatened to introduce a parliamentary bill to prevent the eagle’s destruction.

Mr. Atchugarry, the artist, stated that he would proceed to work on a “symbol of peace” however agreed with the president’s choice to cancel the thought of utilizing the fabric of the Nazi eagle.

“A symbol of peace and union cannot be born out of discord,” Mr. Atchugarry wrote on Facebook.