Speaker 1: Hoo hoo hoo, May Christmas. This is Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: the podcast about Robert trying to do a festive introduction
Speaker 1: and then losing steam because he didn't really have a plan. Chris,
Speaker 1: can you insert in a sound of me murdering Santa
Speaker 1: Claus here and some jingle bells, jingle bells and stabbing?
Speaker 1: Put it all in right here where we're talking, over
Speaker 1: us talking. And now I'm going to introduce our guest today,
Speaker 1: Margaret Killjoy. Margaret, you are the host of a podcast
Speaker 1: called Live Like the World Is Dying. You just published
Speaker 1: a book through a k Press called A Country of Ghosts, um,
Speaker 1: which is fucking awesome. I read it last weekend in
Speaker 1: a single long day of obsessive reading. How are you
Speaker 1: doing today, Margaret, I'm doing good, good, Um. Well, Margaret,
Speaker 1: how do you feel about Christmas? Very complicated? I feel
Speaker 1: I think most people have complicated feelings about Christmas. How
Speaker 1: do you feel about heroes? Um? You know, actually also complicated?
Speaker 1: Also complicated, right, fundamentally problematic idea. Well are subjects today?
Speaker 1: I don't know that I would call heroes, but I
Speaker 1: do I think they do the most heroic thing that
Speaker 1: you can do. Which is, uh, change with the times,
Speaker 1: rather than repeatedly doing the same thing and hoping for
Speaker 1: different results. Um, which there's there's an element of heroism. Um,
Speaker 1: they're also terrorists kind of. Uh so this is going
Speaker 1: to be a complicated episode, Margaret. Have you heard of
Speaker 1: the Tupamorrows of Uruguay? I have not. Okay, Well, this
Speaker 1: is good. And by the way, if you look up Tupamorrows,
Speaker 1: there's also a Venezuelan Marxist Leninist political party called the Tupamorrows.
Speaker 1: This is a different, very different thing. Um. If you've
Speaker 1: heard much about Uruguay and politics in recent years, it's
Speaker 1: probably that they were the first nation on earth to
Speaker 1: legalize marijuana. This is back in two thousand thirteen. Uh.
Speaker 1: They also legalized gay marriage the same year, which was
Speaker 1: about two years faster than the US of A. Both
Speaker 1: of these reforms were signed into law under the presidency
Speaker 1: of a dude named Jose Mujica. Now, if you know
Speaker 1: a single Uruguayan politician, he's probably the guy. The most
Speaker 1: prominent piece of international press relating to him is an
Speaker 1: article from the Guardian in two thousand fourteen titled is
Speaker 1: this the World's most radical president. And this is the
Speaker 1: Guardian article is very much like radical from like a
Speaker 1: centrist liberal standpoint, um, but it refers He's referred to
Speaker 1: a lot as Uruguay's anarchist president again and a lot
Speaker 1: of like not anarchist media because he's not. He's not
Speaker 1: an anarchist, although it is fair to say he's got
Speaker 1: there's anarchist influences in his in his politics and his attitude. Um.
Speaker 1: You might have guessed that he's not an anarchist by
Speaker 1: the fact that he's a president, right, but he is.
Speaker 1: He's he's he's pretty rad. It's hard not to love
Speaker 1: this guy when you read about like aspects of his personality.
Speaker 1: The thing he's most famous for is his humility. Like
Speaker 1: he drives his own car. He well, usually he rides
Speaker 1: a bicycle, the same bicycle he's maintained for sixty years.
Speaker 1: But he has a small Volkswagen he refuses to have
Speaker 1: like a limo or a driver. Um. He usually wears
Speaker 1: sandals and like warren Ole, he would just usually he
Speaker 1: used to wear like stained jumpers was like the only
Speaker 1: thing he would wear. And they finally got him to
Speaker 1: like at least wear a clean shirt. So there's like
Speaker 1: photos of him with like Hugo Chavez and Obama. And
Speaker 1: he's just like dressed like a dude who lives in
Speaker 1: Latin America. Is just like going to work. You know.
Speaker 1: He's like a farmer a lot of the time. Um,
Speaker 1: Like he runs a farm and has for most of
Speaker 1: his life. Um. He's just like not a guy who
Speaker 1: looks like other world leaders. Um. And one of the
Speaker 1: reasons he's become so popular again is like the every
Speaker 1: every liberals favorite quote unquote radical politician. Um, was this
Speaker 1: moment in two that's in fourteen, when he gave a
Speaker 1: speech to the United Nations that included this bit which
Speaker 1: Sophie's gonna play for us now, and this is uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's a UN speech. So he's speaking in Spanish,
Speaker 1: but the UN is, you know, doing They've got like
Speaker 1: a guy reading in English. So that's not actually Jose's voice.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and that allows us to contemplate the beauty
Speaker 1: of nature. We have destroyed the Jungles, the green Jungles,
Speaker 1: the true Jungles, and we've created anonymous, cemented Jungles. We
Speaker 1: have tackled uh, sedentarianism with walkers, insomnia with pills, solitude,
Speaker 1: with electronics, and are we happy when we are so
Speaker 1: far from the human essence? We have to ask ourselves
Speaker 1: this question, stunned. We have fled from our biology, which
Speaker 1: defends life for life itself as a superior cause in itself,
Speaker 1: and we've replaced it by functional consumerism and accumulation politics. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's that's uh, pretty rad um for a world leader.
Speaker 1: And then yeah, that's the most I've ever agreed with
Speaker 1: anything of president said and long time, especially in the
Speaker 1: U n UM. I think you'll feel that way about
Speaker 1: this next segment here too. But today, today, it's time
Speaker 1: to begin to fight to prepare a world without borders.
Speaker 1: The globalized economy has no other inclination but private interest,
Speaker 1: the private interests of very few, and every nation state
Speaker 1: looks at its own stability. Yeah, so getting up there
Speaker 1: talking about how we shouldn't have borders, Uh, I don't
Speaker 1: know that. That's to me pretty rad to hear a
Speaker 1: president saying at the United Nations. Um. Yeah, And you
Speaker 1: can see why people, uh, you can see why people
Speaker 1: win gaga for this guy, right, and why they call
Speaker 1: him an anarchist because there's there's anarchistic elements of what
Speaker 1: he's saying, especially the whole we should be moving towards
Speaker 1: a world without borders. But you know he's also a president, um,
Speaker 1: and it's it's like, well, we'll talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about Jose later. But one of the things I
Speaker 1: do think that's interesting about him because you can find
Speaker 1: other world leaders like saying good ship, talking a good
Speaker 1: game about all this stuff, and then like going back
Speaker 1: home to their mansions and taking private jets places, and
Speaker 1: like Jose does. One of the things that kind of
Speaker 1: separates him is he um he wears not not only
Speaker 1: does he like not live in a mansion or anything,
Speaker 1: but like he flies coach like he's not he's not
Speaker 1: living to sort of like yeah, but what if he's
Speaker 1: like a secret mansion bunker underneath his his tiny house. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's not impossible. Although most of the time,
Speaker 1: when like journalists come to visit in him his home,
Speaker 1: like there's a couple of different stories, like some some
Speaker 1: Japanese or Korean film crew will come and he'll like
Speaker 1: meet them at his front door and they'll go drink
Speaker 1: jim bean under a tree, um, which is how I
Speaker 1: would create a film crew. If Yeah, that's good because
Speaker 1: people always talked about that. George Bush was like the
Speaker 1: president you drink a beer with. That was like his
Speaker 1: whole thing was like, He's the one you would want
Speaker 1: to drink a beer with. But I think that the
Speaker 1: president that you drink Jim being under a tree. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Yeah, yeah, I I think that would be
Speaker 1: I would I would prefer that to like having a
Speaker 1: staged photo op beer with a president at the White House,
Speaker 1: which seems horrible. Um. Again, we'll cover later. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of criticisms of of Jose from the left, primarily
Speaker 1: like most of the people who have issues with him
Speaker 1: are are like leftists. Um. But what I find more
Speaker 1: interesting than than his presidency is where he came from,
Speaker 1: uh and the kind of intellectual and moral journey he represents,
Speaker 1: not just from himself, but for the political organization that
Speaker 1: he came from. Because Jose, because Jose Music, got his
Speaker 1: start in politics through what you might call non traditional means.
Speaker 1: He was a terrorist as a young man. Um and
Speaker 1: not like a we're not like like that, not like
Speaker 1: in a light way like and it got shot repeatedly
Speaker 1: in gun fights with the cops, way like. He went
Speaker 1: as hard as he possibly could have um without dying. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the group that he was a member of is
Speaker 1: one of the most fascinating insurgent organizations I've ever heard about,
Speaker 1: the Tupa Morrows. UM. So in order to explain the
Speaker 1: Tupa Morrows, we're gonna have to get into a little
Speaker 1: bit of what Uruguay is. It is A. It's a
Speaker 1: It's the second smallest country in South America. It's like
Speaker 1: middling sized as countries go. It's about the size of
Speaker 1: Washington State, UM, which is bigger than a lot of
Speaker 1: European countries. So it's not not a tiny country, but
Speaker 1: tiny for South America. UM. Before you know, white folks
Speaker 1: showed up and started doing what white folks do. Uh.
Speaker 1: The indigenous inhabitants of Uruguay were the Charua Uh. They
Speaker 1: had been pushed into the area by another tribe up
Speaker 1: in Paraguay and the generations before European conquest, and when
Speaker 1: the Spanish showed up on their shores in fifteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: their overall response could be best characterized as fucked this ship.
Speaker 1: You know. They did the they did the fight thing,
Speaker 1: and they were really good at fighting. They fought like hell,
Speaker 1: and that synergized what with the fact that Uruguay didn't
Speaker 1: have anything colonizers wanted at that time. There was no
Speaker 1: like gold or silver there, so the locals were pretty
Speaker 1: good guerilla fighters and there wasn't anything valuable, so it
Speaker 1: didn't really get settled when all, it didn't get colonized,
Speaker 1: when like all of the areas around it, we're getting colonized.
Speaker 1: It took longer, so there were some light attempts by
Speaker 1: the Europeans to settle there in the fifteen hundreds, but
Speaker 1: the first permanent Spanish settlement there wasn't founded until six
Speaker 1: teen twenty four at a place called Soriano. About fifty
Speaker 1: years later, the Portuguese came and built a fort, and
Speaker 1: this sparked uh in Uruguay rush between Spain and Portugal,
Speaker 1: who started gobbling up chunks of land as fast as
Speaker 1: they could. And again the reasoning seemed to be less
Speaker 1: their stuff here we want, and more the other guys
Speaker 1: are starting to take stuff here, so we should we
Speaker 1: should do that. Um it's great. Uh So I went
Speaker 1: really well for everyone, right, Yeah, I mean it goes,
Speaker 1: it goes the way it goes in all of what's
Speaker 1: now Latin America. Terribly, yeah, terribly yeah, terribly all I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess less bad. Uruguay kind of gets off better
Speaker 1: than well no, not really. Yeah. So today the capital
Speaker 1: of Uruguay's Montevideo, which was founded by the Spanish in
Speaker 1: the early seventeen hundreds as like a fortress city and
Speaker 1: trading port, and it was specifically founded because the Portuguese
Speaker 1: had buenos aires and so the Spanish needed a port
Speaker 1: near there that could be their port, right, Like that's again,
Speaker 1: it's all part of this like co war kind of
Speaker 1: kind of ship going on between Spain and Portugal. Um.
Speaker 1: And so for the next century or so, Uruguay wound
Speaker 1: up in the cross hairs of a bunch of different
Speaker 1: spats between colonizing powers. And it wasn't just the Spanish
Speaker 1: and the Portuguese. The British occupy monte Video at some
Speaker 1: at at one point, like everybody's going through here now,
Speaker 1: like right, they get kind of a hundred years off
Speaker 1: compared to everybody else. But once colonizing comes for Uruguay,
Speaker 1: it comes hard, you know. Um. So people don't often
Speaker 1: like being battled over by foreign powers. And by eighteen eleven,
Speaker 1: a guy named Jose Artigas launched a revolution against the
Speaker 1: Spanish crown, which Uruguay one Artigas was adamant that the
Speaker 1: new government should be a federal system with high levels
Speaker 1: of political autonomy for each region. This led to a
Speaker 1: civil war between the people in Buenos Aires and the
Speaker 1: people in monte Video. And there's all of this fighting
Speaker 1: between forces, most of which is like less it's not
Speaker 1: quite like states fighting as much as it is like
Speaker 1: it's these cardios, these these war lords right who have
Speaker 1: like are kind of aligned with one side or the
Speaker 1: other in control regions, and they're all kind of murdering
Speaker 1: each other, um, and a civil war, but it's between
Speaker 1: Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires and Montevideo are kind of broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: it seems to be like the main sides here um
Speaker 1: and there there's a bunch of murdering and and all
Speaker 1: of the fighting in this period effectively wipes out most
Speaker 1: of the remaining indigenous people in the region. And so
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people in Uruguay have some
Speaker 1: like like a lot of Latiman have some indigenous ancestry
Speaker 1: down the line, but like the communities are just wiped out,
Speaker 1: and most Uruguayans are actually um Spanish and Italian heritage
Speaker 1: UM kind of as a result of this. Like again
Speaker 1: we're talking in really broad terms. So when for its independence, sorry,
Speaker 1: when independence, it wasn't indigenous folks, it was instead they
Speaker 1: considered themselves that, but it was like the children of
Speaker 1: children of children of people who had come to colonize.
Speaker 1: And there was again some like intermarrying and stuff between
Speaker 1: the communities. But yeah, it was the people who I'm
Speaker 1: sure at that point considered themselves the indigenous people of
Speaker 1: Uruguay fighting against the colonial power, but who were also
Speaker 1: the descendants of Yeah, you know, this is like all
Speaker 1: a lot of Latin American history, you know. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh. Things started to settle down by the turn
Speaker 1: of the next century, and in nineteen o three, the
Speaker 1: fairly new state of Uruguay elected a president named Jose
Speaker 1: Baz buz A. He's generally just known as buz A.
Speaker 1: Um was a socialist UM, or at least close enough UM,
Speaker 1: and the New Republic credits him for building quote, perhaps
Speaker 1: the most perfectly rendered socialist society of the world has
Speaker 1: ever seen. Now, that's how the writer from the New
Speaker 1: Republic describes it. I have found actual academic theses on
Speaker 1: Uruguay and politics. None of whom say anything close to that. Um.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, Like the writer from the New
Speaker 1: Republic actually went there, did a lot of work. I'm
Speaker 1: sure knows more about our Aguay than me. But I'm
Speaker 1: sure these scholars no more than that person. So I
Speaker 1: think it's probably fair to say that it's a little
Speaker 1: overstated to call it the most perfectly rendered socialist society
Speaker 1: the world's ever seen. Um. But Baz did do a
Speaker 1: lot of rad shit. He taxed landowners and he put
Speaker 1: the money into pensions for working people. He was an
Speaker 1: advocate of union's. Healthcare in Uruguay was ruled to be
Speaker 1: a universal right. And this is like in nineteen eleven
Speaker 1: or something like that. Um. Higher education was made free,
Speaker 1: and under him the literacy rate hit n UM. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from the New Republic here, quoting a historian.
Speaker 1: His idea, Girardo Katano, Uruguay's foremost historian of the Baz era,
Speaker 1: explained to me was that you can't have liberty without equality.
Speaker 1: There is no psychic liberty, in other words, for the
Speaker 1: poor unless they can imagine themselves equal to the privileged.
Speaker 1: One of the many new laws Baz implemented was to
Speaker 1: correct perceived imbalances and gave women greater rights to request
Speaker 1: divorce than their husbands. The logic was that men are
Speaker 1: more powerful, Katano said, so to treat men and women
Speaker 1: equally would result in an outcome that's still favored men.
Speaker 1: So this is like again nineteen o three, and I like,
Speaker 1: this guy is pretty you keep running into this in
Speaker 1: Uruguayan history. These dudes were like, well, I didn't expect
Speaker 1: that from somebody saying this in like nineteen o five.
Speaker 1: People are still struggling with that basic Yeah, like that's
Speaker 1: incredibly controversial today. And this guy is like, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: all rubbing dirt into our wounds. And also, you can't
Speaker 1: just treat men and women equally because structural inequality means
Speaker 1: that men will still have more power, which is like,
Speaker 1: it's pretty dope, I would say, pretty dope. Um, And
Speaker 1: it's it's fair to say, like it is the New
Speaker 1: Republic overstates things, but it is I think fair to
Speaker 1: say that like most recently colonized nations and most recently
Speaker 1: colonized nations in Latin America, because like the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: is kind of the period where a lot of them,
Speaker 1: you know, have their revolutions and get free from the
Speaker 1: Europeans who had dominated them. Uruguay winds up better off
Speaker 1: than a lot of places. Um. But the new Republic
Speaker 1: does give an incomplete idea of Bezazis time and power.
Speaker 1: I found a master's thesis from Thomas Moore of Texas
Speaker 1: Tech which gives it goes into a lot more detail
Speaker 1: and cites a lot of other scholars um, and notes
Speaker 1: that buz A socialist reforms weren't just incomplete. They also
Speaker 1: carried with them the seeds that would sprout right there
Speaker 1: violently in a few generations. Quote. No matter how democratic
Speaker 1: the government appeared to be, there were some serious drawbacks
Speaker 1: and flaws. The main problem which plagued the government for
Speaker 1: years was that executive responsibility was divided between a president
Speaker 1: and a national council. This division of responsibility created no
Speaker 1: serious problems so long as things ran smoothly and all
Speaker 1: the council members were in agreement. This was apparent during
Speaker 1: the prosperous nineteen twenties. Presidents and councils could toss problems
Speaker 1: back and forth with no damaging effect because of the
Speaker 1: evidence of economic affluence during that period. It was during
Speaker 1: the depression years nineteen nineteen thirty three that the Collegiato,
Speaker 1: the National Council um demonstrated its incapacity for coping with
Speaker 1: a rising inflation and employment. And basically, when there's not
Speaker 1: factionalism and strong political party disputes, this works okay. When
Speaker 1: there is everything grinds off, grinds down the gridlock. And
Speaker 1: in Uruguay you have kind of two broad parties and
Speaker 1: the history of these parties goes back to the Civil
Speaker 1: War period. I'm not we don't need to get into
Speaker 1: a lot, but it's the Colorado Party and the Blanco Party,
Speaker 1: and um, I think the Colorado Party is kind of
Speaker 1: broadly liberal ish and the Blanco parties a little more conservative.
Speaker 1: Um not that they not to like, they don't like
Speaker 1: graft onto the Republican and Democratic Party obviously right like,
Speaker 1: but that's probably broadly right. Um. So the president at
Speaker 1: the time when the Great Depression hits and like ship
Speaker 1: gets sucked up, is a dude named Gabriel Tera, and
Speaker 1: he gets piste off at the fact that Council members
Speaker 1: couldn't come to any solid ideas about how to deal
Speaker 1: with the economic collapse, right like, nobody can agree on anything,
Speaker 1: and so this system that had worked when everyone was
Speaker 1: rich stops working when the money stops flowing, which happens
Speaker 1: a lot in world history. Um. All of his attempts
Speaker 1: to remedy the situation got shut down by the Council
Speaker 1: because of political divisions. So a nineteenth three he bypasses
Speaker 1: the political gridlock in the council by doing a kudata
Speaker 1: against his own government. Uh. He dissolves the National Council
Speaker 1: and Congress, He censors newspapers, and he basically basically makes
Speaker 1: himself a dictator for a while there. Right, Um, but
Speaker 1: not quite, because he also calls for a new constitution,
Speaker 1: which is written nineteen thirty four and establishes a new
Speaker 1: one man presidency with a Senate which would be permanently
Speaker 1: divided in half between the two major parties. Um, I
Speaker 1: don't know that this. I'd say this helped, But like,
Speaker 1: also by thirty four, things are starting to get better economically,
Speaker 1: So it's it may be that this reduced gridlock somewhat.
Speaker 1: It may just be that like money starts coming in again,
Speaker 1: and so all of the problems are lessened because there's money. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Politics are kind of like a relationship
Speaker 1: in that regards great until you're broke. Yeah yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So the problem though with this this new constitution is
Speaker 1: that it completely enshrines a two part system into law
Speaker 1: because like you have to have the Senate split between
Speaker 1: the two parties. It's very immovable two party system. Um.
Speaker 1: But still like, even though this has got to create
Speaker 1: problems later, uh, kind of during the late thirties, Uruguay
Speaker 1: starts doing a lot better. They are in the thirties
Speaker 1: up to the four and up through like the forties.
Speaker 1: They're the most urbanized and prosperous nation in Latin America.
Speaker 1: And this is a very urban country. Most of the
Speaker 1: population lives in cities, like the vast majority. So it's
Speaker 1: not like a lot of Latin America where you have
Speaker 1: like this really geographically spread out populations and a lot
Speaker 1: of them are in the mountains or something like that. Um.
Speaker 1: Kind of everybody lives in the cities in Uruguay, and
Speaker 1: it has the lowest level of social inequality in Latin
Speaker 1: America and one of the lowest levels of social inequality
Speaker 1: in the world. Some of this is due to government policy,
Speaker 1: because baz does do a lot of like good socialist
Speaker 1: e stuff. Um. But It's also a lot of it
Speaker 1: has to do with Uruguay and culture, which I'm not
Speaker 1: an expert on but sounds fascinating. One of the cool
Speaker 1: things about it, it's considered to be like the classic
Speaker 1: car capital of the world, not because everybody's like collecting
Speaker 1: old cars, but because it's considered shameful to not keep
Speaker 1: a car working, like to buy in if you're buying
Speaker 1: a new car too, because your old vehicle cannot be
Speaker 1: fixed under any circumstances um or at least this yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly where it's just like, well, no, you keep fixing
Speaker 1: the car. You don't buy a new car, like unless
Speaker 1: your car is just like shattered, you know, but season
Speaker 1: is more like chosen instead of just because goes yes,
Speaker 1: And there's you know, there's rich people and there's poor people,
Speaker 1: but they often, especially throughout most of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: you know, you couldn't necessarily tell the difference apart from
Speaker 1: on them based on how they travel or how they dress,
Speaker 1: because there's this distaste culturally for displaying your wealth. So
Speaker 1: even if you're super rich, you kind of dress like
Speaker 1: a working class person because that's again it's there's there's
Speaker 1: just kind of like cultural morays against showing off when
Speaker 1: you have money, and that contributes to the lessened levels
Speaker 1: of social inequality in the country. Um. So, when World
Speaker 1: War two comes and knock and Uruguay winds up producing meat, leather,
Speaker 1: and a handful of other goods for the Allies, and
Speaker 1: this is one of the things Bez's, Like the scholars
Speaker 1: I've been reading criticized Bez Force. He kind of started
Speaker 1: this attitude of like, we have this socialist welfare state
Speaker 1: and it's going to be entirely supported by uh, providing
Speaker 1: these products to Western countries. And in fact, whose name Musica,
Speaker 1: the president of Uruguay or former president of Uruguay says
Speaker 1: that basically the big mistake Uruguay made was turning itself
Speaker 1: into a lackey of the British Empire and supplying all
Speaker 1: of their needs and kind of tying it's so it's
Speaker 1: welfare state and its prosperity to the British Empire continuing
Speaker 1: to need these supplies. Right, um, but during World War two,
Speaker 1: it's great to be selling shipped to the British and
Speaker 1: the Americans, right. Uh, It's it's a good time to
Speaker 1: be selling them ship. They're buying up everything. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: this big economic boom and it again kind of hides
Speaker 1: the gridlock, um of the that that has been put
Speaker 1: under this second constitution with a permanent two party state.
Speaker 1: So again, as long as there's cash to blow and
Speaker 1: cash to keep the welfare stuff going, everything's all right. Um.
Speaker 1: And in fact Europeans in the forties and fifties called
Speaker 1: Uruguay the Switzerland of South America um, which is not
Speaker 1: accurate um and based you know on eurocentrism and ship
Speaker 1: but because they're very much doing their own thing and
Speaker 1: they're not all not neutral, not primaria primarily a place
Speaker 1: for rich people to store their money. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: like there's a lot of reasons why that's not a
Speaker 1: good way to describe them. Not surrounded by mountains that
Speaker 1: they've turned Yeah, yeah, it's just because it's nice they're
Speaker 1: compared to like a lot of places they're having wars
Speaker 1: and like difficulty, like fighting between the government and Uruguay.
Speaker 1: There's a lot less conflict socially in this period, so
Speaker 1: that they're just like, oh, basically they're saying, we didn't
Speaker 1: funk up Uruguay as much as we sucked up a
Speaker 1: lot of places around it. So it's the Switzerland of
Speaker 1: South America. Yeah, you know who else didn't funk up
Speaker 1: Uruguay and definitely isn't neutral. Yeah yeah, yep, all right,
Speaker 1: we're back and we're talking about Uruguay. So, um, things
Speaker 1: are going great in Uruguay through the forties. World War
Speaker 1: two is great for them, and they keep making bank.
Speaker 1: They kind of transition from serving through the British Empire
Speaker 1: to servicing the American Empire through through the Korean War.
Speaker 1: So we keep buying a shipload of stuff from Uruguay
Speaker 1: through the Korean War, and then the United States enters
Speaker 1: a permanent era of peace that was completely unbroken for
Speaker 1: the next seventy years, which is you know, everybody knows
Speaker 1: about that period the packs Americana where where we weren't
Speaker 1: involved in any wars. Um but Agwaiste movement to try
Speaker 1: and get us to be involved in wars. All those
Speaker 1: people who wanted us to get into Vietnam. Yeah. John
Speaker 1: Lennon had a big song about that. Yeah, war starting.
Speaker 1: I think if you want to merry Christmas, let's get
Speaker 1: into a war. Um. Yeah. Um, So Uruguay stops getting
Speaker 1: big fat government paychecks after the Korean War and the
Speaker 1: economy contracts heavily, like it's it kind of goes into freefall. UM.
Speaker 1: The government short on money. It can't pay for these
Speaker 1: social programs they've built, and they don't want to do austerity,
Speaker 1: so they spend, they like burn through the country's currency
Speaker 1: reserves and they start taking on debt from international lenders
Speaker 1: at kind of ruinous rates. This happens to a lot
Speaker 1: of other places in this period of time. This is
Speaker 1: kind of like the birth of the kind of global
Speaker 1: debt system that exists to this day, because a lot
Speaker 1: of countries get quote unquote like liberated from the colonial
Speaker 1: powers and then take on loans from those powers to
Speaker 1: like anyway, it's it's a fund up period. A bunch
Speaker 1: of fund up ships happening in this period, and it's
Speaker 1: happening to Uruguay to UM. So this is this is
Speaker 1: kind of disastrous and it leads to a massive political reorganization. UM.
Speaker 1: Members of Congress push a plebiscite UH that the country
Speaker 1: votes on UM and this plebiscite reinstitutes the National Council
Speaker 1: and uses it to replace the presidency. So they get
Speaker 1: now they don't have a president anymore, and they have
Speaker 1: this National Council and the Senate who are trying to
Speaker 1: do everything. Um. And even though this is a plebiscite,
Speaker 1: because kind of the social stability is starting to crumble
Speaker 1: in this period of time the mid to late fifties,
Speaker 1: most Uruguayans don't vote for the plebiscite, so it passes
Speaker 1: narrowly and it completely changes the political situation. Um. And
Speaker 1: it does. I'm sorry. That's when that's when the government says, hey,
Speaker 1: we gotta we gotta make a big change and instead
Speaker 1: of doing normal political things, everyone in the country gets
Speaker 1: to vote ye your name on this thing that we're
Speaker 1: going to do. It would actually be rabbed if we
Speaker 1: could do some stuff that way, because things might we
Speaker 1: might be able to do some good stuff that everybody
Speaker 1: agrees on. Um, but we can't seem to pass. But
Speaker 1: well never we don't. It's there's a bunch of reasons
Speaker 1: why it's not really possible in the US right now. Um.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't great there because like, this is a plebiscite,
Speaker 1: but most Uruguayans don't vote, um. And it's it's about anyway.
Speaker 1: All it does is kind of reinforce the factionalism that's
Speaker 1: been getting worse and worse and worse throughout the twentieth
Speaker 1: century in Uruguayan politics, and in the late nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: there's just massive unemployment UM and there's these huge labor protests,
Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds of them UM as a result of
Speaker 1: the fact that this this welfare state and this kind
Speaker 1: of very pro union environment has like broken down. A
Speaker 1: lot of workers aren't unionized at this point, and a
Speaker 1: lot of them are like starving basically. UM. And the
Speaker 1: National Council, this new government with the National Council, proves
Speaker 1: that they can be as vicious as a government with
Speaker 1: the president. And they cracked down horribly on these protesters,
Speaker 1: Like they Arguay doesn't have a lot of police or
Speaker 1: a big military, but they throw them out there to
Speaker 1: just beat the absolute piss out of people who are
Speaker 1: are protesting. Like that's kind of where the government immediately
Speaker 1: goes once Uruguay has its first like mass civil disobedience campaigns. UM.
Speaker 1: What they couldn't have a number of people more they
Speaker 1: are a number of people, the less violent they have
Speaker 1: to be, Like, yeah, some of the most violent police
Speaker 1: are the ones who, yeah, you know, that's the way
Speaker 1: that they can take I mean yeah, there's not a
Speaker 1: lot of police in Portland, but they're pretty fucking violent, um,
Speaker 1: so they can. What's interesting to me is that this
Speaker 1: National Council government, despite being like very split by the
Speaker 1: two party system, all agree, well, yeah, we have to
Speaker 1: we have to have the police brutalized protesters. But they
Speaker 1: can't agree on anything any ways to fix the economy,
Speaker 1: like they can't, they can't get that together. They're just like, well,
Speaker 1: the poor people are getting organized, so we should like
Speaker 1: funk them up, Republicans and Democrats because it does a bit.
Speaker 1: I only just in this one way, like and that
Speaker 1: everyone agrees, Like I think I've got this right. I've
Speaker 1: read scholars who are smarter than me, and this seems
Speaker 1: to be what they're saying, and I'm just sort of
Speaker 1: rephrasing it. I never want to be saying too directly.
Speaker 1: It's just like here, even though there's patterns throughout different
Speaker 1: countries and history that are similar, because people are all
Speaker 1: basically the same aim. So yes in power agree that
Speaker 1: you should beat up the people who are trying to
Speaker 1: stand that. That is the thing that maps onto every
Speaker 1: country ever exactly. It's the uh, it's everything from yeah,
Speaker 1: it's everything. It's every country. It's every government, socialist or capitalist.
Speaker 1: Uh people are angry, send the cops and to funk
Speaker 1: them up. Uh So they do that. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: people stick in this case. Uh So in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: well kind of because this is also like this is
Speaker 1: it's not really the people's stick. It's way too much
Speaker 1: to call this. It is a country with a lot
Speaker 1: of socialist policies, it's certainly not like a socialized socialist nation. Um.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty eight, there's another election and the party
Speaker 1: that wins is the party who had kind of been
Speaker 1: slightly in the minority before and had never like been
Speaker 1: the party in power. And they win election by promising
Speaker 1: and like take control over all of the government by
Speaker 1: promising to fix a bunch of ship that they've been
Speaker 1: So they've been the minority party for years and had
Speaker 1: thus gained power by saying, look at how much the
Speaker 1: people IMpower wars suck. We'll do it differently. Now they're
Speaker 1: in power and they have to like reform everything. So
Speaker 1: they try to fix the welfare system which was going broke.
Speaker 1: But nothing they do works. Um, and nothing they do
Speaker 1: stops the protests in the labor marches. Now, all of
Speaker 1: this comes to pass in the late fifties as the
Speaker 1: first generation to truly benefit from Uruguay's massive educational reforms
Speaker 1: grows into adulthood. Because remember Baz had made college free,
Speaker 1: and like people after him too, they had been like repeated,
Speaker 1: they built up a pretty good, a really good educational
Speaker 1: system in the country. Um and you know, widespread literacy
Speaker 1: and whatnot. And in like the late fifties, the people
Speaker 1: who were like eighteen to thirty or so are like
Speaker 1: the first generation who had really taken full advantage of this.
Speaker 1: In Uruguay in this period has like one of the
Speaker 1: highest percentages of of individual print publications per capita um
Speaker 1: of anywhere in the world. Um And they had like
Speaker 1: for an dy of like how big this educational boom was.
Speaker 1: Between the fifties and the seventies, the number of students
Speaker 1: receive in college degrees in Uruguay increased by a hundred
Speaker 1: and seventeen percent. So you've got you've got the economy collapsing, inequality,
Speaker 1: growing protests in the streets, increasing government crackdowns, and the
Speaker 1: largest most educated generation in the country's history comes of age. Right,
Speaker 1: what is historically what happens when all those things go
Speaker 1: to go down at the same time. Awesome ship, really
Speaker 1: awesome ship. Yeah, oh, Margaret, you're gonna like some of
Speaker 1: the graffiti we're about to talk about. So by the
Speaker 1: late nineteen sixties, you've got this situation whe Uruguay is
Speaker 1: a decade into the uh well, mid nineteen sixties, you
Speaker 1: get the early to mid nineteen sixties, you've got a
Speaker 1: situation where Uruguay is in a decade into economic contraction globally,
Speaker 1: not just in Uruguay, but like the left all over
Speaker 1: the world in the early and mid sixties is engaged
Speaker 1: in an increasing series of protests and revolts. Domestically, Uruguay
Speaker 1: has this huge population of educated people who have all
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time reading Marx and Mao and
Speaker 1: Guevera and Bakunen, and they're they're watching this two party
Speaker 1: system tilt right words and get more violent and militarized
Speaker 1: police for and everything keeps getting worse, right, a situation
Speaker 1: no one else in the world can identify with um
Speaker 1: And all of these trends kind of coalesced, as they
Speaker 1: sometimes do, into a single person, or at least they
Speaker 1: kind of washed through this person and his because of
Speaker 1: unique things about him, it kind of colored the way
Speaker 1: that they flooded over the rest of the population. And
Speaker 1: this guy's name was Raoul Syndic. He was an agricultural
Speaker 1: law student from Montevideo and in nineteen sixty three he
Speaker 1: decided to do something about the fact that all the
Speaker 1: sugar cane and beat cutters, like sugar cane cutting. Sugar
Speaker 1: cane and sugar beat is like this horrible, really unpleasant
Speaker 1: like job that is necessary to process a cash crop, right,
Speaker 1: And these people are despite you know how socialized Diruguay
Speaker 1: is supposed to be, they're not unionized. They're barely getting
Speaker 1: by on poverty rate wages, and they're attempting to unionize
Speaker 1: and protesting against unfair working conditions. And Raoul Syndic is
Speaker 1: kind of like a middle class, upper class like law student,
Speaker 1: and with a bunch of other law students, he tries
Speaker 1: to help organize these workers and they gather a bunch
Speaker 1: of these people together into a march, and they have
Speaker 1: a three hundred and fifty mile protest march into monte
Speaker 1: Video that ends in a huge fight with the cops.
Speaker 1: Um and stuff like this is happening all over the place.
Speaker 1: Raoul is just like one of the organizers who's part
Speaker 1: of this massive labors like labor protests surge at the time. UM.
Speaker 1: The fact that the government had used such violence to
Speaker 1: stop a union drive leads Raoul to kind of reconsider again.
Speaker 1: He'd been a law student. He was planning to like
Speaker 1: work within the system to change it. And seeing the
Speaker 1: police beat the ship out of all these these people,
Speaker 1: UM makes him decide that the two party system is hopeless.
Speaker 1: He's like, well, they're both willing to beat us when
Speaker 1: we when we try to organize for better conditions, So
Speaker 1: why would I try to work within that system? Um
Speaker 1: is kind of what rival thinks. Um, I know wild
Speaker 1: right that you would conclusion become to a very conclusion.
Speaker 1: So he's not the only guy thinking this way. He's
Speaker 1: kind of I think the most arismatic got to think
Speaker 1: this way, and the best probably the best of organizer
Speaker 1: of them. And he starts getting together small numbers of
Speaker 1: like minded men and women. Um, this is a very
Speaker 1: gender equality group that he starts to build. But they're
Speaker 1: all kind of agreed about the fact that they should
Speaker 1: affiliate together and find ways to execute their desire to
Speaker 1: overthrow the government. Right, that's the conversations these people are having. Um,
Speaker 1: and their numbers start to grow. Protests overtook Uruguay in
Speaker 1: streets in the early nineteen sixties, um and um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all of this state violence keeps bringing more and more
Speaker 1: people to Rule Roule's way of thinking, and the they
Speaker 1: start to kind of formalize their attitudes towards like we
Speaker 1: should be organizing to overthrow this system. Now. One of
Speaker 1: the positives about Rule is that he fucking hated explosives. Um.
Speaker 1: He was like, did not like bombing things. Um. In
Speaker 1: the group like they would eventually use some explosives, but
Speaker 1: they kind of landed on firearms as the natural tool
Speaker 1: to seek to execute some of the things that they
Speaker 1: wanted to do and over to overthrow the government. Um.
Speaker 1: Guns would enable them to carry out a variety of
Speaker 1: actions and do it in a way that would target
Speaker 1: people rather than killing like random as much. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: slightly more discriminate forms of violence. UM. Well it always
Speaker 1: goes well yeah, yeah, and his he was also very
Speaker 1: committed to the idea that you don't target people, you
Speaker 1: target institutions, um, like banks, the police, and the impotent
Speaker 1: government that had been squandering their future. So as they
Speaker 1: increasingly talk and increasing things get more and more formalized,
Speaker 1: they eventually decided to like form an organization which they
Speaker 1: called the Tupamaros UH. Now this was actually an acknowledgment
Speaker 1: of the history of indigenous resistance in Latin America. Tupac
Speaker 1: Amaru was the last living member of the Incan royal
Speaker 1: family and he led an insurrection against Spanish rule and
Speaker 1: was murdered in fifte one. So they kind of as
Speaker 1: they are starting to form what becomes this insurgent organization,
Speaker 1: they're kind of looking back to specifically to get Even
Speaker 1: though most of these people are like primary early Spanish
Speaker 1: and Italian descended Uruguayans, they're they're very much identifying with
Speaker 1: the history of indigenous resistance to colonialism. Like that's it's
Speaker 1: not a it's not for nothing that they name their
Speaker 1: group that um, which is real blurry. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like there's a lot that could be said about
Speaker 1: that that I don't quite know how to say, And
Speaker 1: I'm certainly not nearly enough of an expert on like
Speaker 1: indigenous struggles in Uruguay to like try to make more
Speaker 1: of I just think it's worth noting that's who that
Speaker 1: that's what they're trying to signal, Like that's important for
Speaker 1: understanding how they conceive of themselves. Um. The first two
Speaker 1: Tomorrows were largely middle class, young white collar workers and students.
Speaker 1: Since more than half of the Uruguayan population lived in
Speaker 1: monte Video. Most is successful in surgery groups and the
Speaker 1: groups that they're looking at, because they're directly looking at
Speaker 1: like Cuba and che Guevara and stuff, and like a
Speaker 1: lot of the successful and surgeon groups in Mouth that
Speaker 1: they're they're they're um modeling themselves after our mountain fighters, right,
Speaker 1: like because it's the best place to be if you're
Speaker 1: an insurgent' is the mountains, right, That's it's why there's Kurds, right,
Speaker 1: It's because mountains are a good place to fight in
Speaker 1: um but u Uruguay. The places where people live at least,
Speaker 1: there's not really mountains. Everybody lives in the city, like
Speaker 1: more than half the population live in monte Video. So
Speaker 1: these are urban guerrillas, and in fact, in Latin America,
Speaker 1: I'm not mistaken, they are the very first urban guerrilla
Speaker 1: organization UM. And so they have to they have to
Speaker 1: carry out and plan and organize themselves very differently. As
Speaker 1: a result, they carry out their first attack in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty three against the Swiss Gun Club in Montevideo, which
Speaker 1: is like a rich person gun club in the capital. Um.
Speaker 1: Nobody gets harmed in this attack, but they steal dozens
Speaker 1: of guns, which they've always Yeah, you've got to get guns.
Speaker 1: You find the place with the guns, and you rob
Speaker 1: it with the gun you happen to have or stick.
Speaker 1: I think in this case they just kind of burgle
Speaker 1: it because like none of these people were expecting anyone
Speaker 1: to break in and steal their mousers. UM. So they
Speaker 1: get a shipload of guns from the Swiss gun Club.
Speaker 1: They you know, they get handed out to people, YadA YadA.
Speaker 1: UM and from the start, Rule and other early members
Speaker 1: of the group UM knew that it was going to
Speaker 1: be there was going to be state repression at some point.
Speaker 1: And so there's the way it's organized as there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of independent cells that are like five to I
Speaker 1: think the biggest ones were like a couple of dozen people,
Speaker 1: but usually like five to fifteen people. And each cell
Speaker 1: is supposed to be have its own find its own
Speaker 1: sources of funding, usually robbing stuff, find its own weapons,
Speaker 1: and be able to completely replicate the entire organization from
Speaker 1: within itself and also be unaware of the other cells,
Speaker 1: although there is like a nine person coordinating council that's
Speaker 1: responsible for organizing stuff. Um so, they you know, they
Speaker 1: set this up in and again they're they're very consciously
Speaker 1: patterning themselves off of other insurgent groups at the time.
Speaker 1: They are not while a lot of their inspirations are
Speaker 1: Marxist Leninists, they're not really Marxist Leninists. A lot of
Speaker 1: inspirations are anarchists. They're not really anarchists. They're very much not.
Speaker 1: While there's a lot of theory and ideology and they're
Speaker 1: reading all of these guys. It's very kind of like
Speaker 1: a pan left insurgent movement. Um Yeah, which is which
Speaker 1: is interesting to me. Um So, from nineteen sixty three
Speaker 1: to nineteen sixty eight, their attacks gradually escalate again. Their
Speaker 1: first actions get them guns, which they then used to
Speaker 1: carry out what they call armed propaganda. Now, this is
Speaker 1: a local idea in Uruguay and radicalism that that is
Speaker 1: influenced by the old anarchist idea of propaganda of the deed.
Speaker 1: Right in the late eighteen hundreds and nineteen hundreds, anarchists
Speaker 1: are murdering presidents and kings and in the hope of
Speaker 1: inspiring other people to do more of that so that
Speaker 1: eventually there's no presidents and kings. I think that's like
Speaker 1: a fair broad strokes description of the idea. The idea
Speaker 1: was like, these people don't know how to read texts,
Speaker 1: let's show them what we mean, which actually didn't start
Speaker 1: out as UM didn't actually start out as assassination, to
Speaker 1: start out as like burning property records and like answer
Speaker 1: and what's interesting to me about the Tupamorrow as you said,
Speaker 1: the propaganda of the deed didn't start out is being
Speaker 1: based around murdering people Tupamorrow armed armed propaganda is never
Speaker 1: focused primarily around killing people. There, that's aspects of it
Speaker 1: later on UM, But from the beginning they have a
Speaker 1: very different attitude for what armed propaganda should be. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from a rite up by a War
Speaker 1: is Boring article about their first action. One of their
Speaker 1: first actions quote. One of the group's first actions involved
Speaker 1: hijacking a truck filled with chickens and turkeys that was
Speaker 1: headed to a Christmas banquet. Twenty Tupamorrows holding revolvers and
Speaker 1: knives attacked the truck. They called themselves Junior Jose Artigas Unit,
Speaker 1: a reference to Uruguay and independence fighter Jose Gervasio Artiguas.
Speaker 1: The tupamorrow Is left a note that read revolutionary share
Speaker 1: in the Christmas of the poor and call upon them
Speaker 1: to form committees in each district to fight against rising prices.
Speaker 1: They handed out the turkeys and chickens and poor neighborhoods
Speaker 1: of the capital. Yeah, so, like that's the armed propaganda,
Speaker 1: Like we're going to use our guns to rob a
Speaker 1: banquet for rich people and redistribute the food to the poor,
Speaker 1: which is great. That's awesome, Like it's hard to have
Speaker 1: an issue with that, right, Yeah. Yeah, So, over the
Speaker 1: next couple of years, the tup Tomorrows engage in ever
Speaker 1: grander acts of armed propaganda. They would rob banks and
Speaker 1: take piles of cash and redistribute it immediately to the poor.
Speaker 1: They would also rob banks to like fund their operations,
Speaker 1: but a lot of time they're taking cash and then
Speaker 1: immediately handing it out to poor people, and it's like
Speaker 1: they're robbing specifically often investment banks and saying like these
Speaker 1: people have been robbing you, so let's rob them and
Speaker 1: give it back to you. Um. At one point they
Speaker 1: hoisted a popular casino for foreigners and the resort town
Speaker 1: of puntadale Este, and they realized after they get away
Speaker 1: with the bag that they had also stolen the employee
Speaker 1: pool of tips, which they return because they're like, we're
Speaker 1: not here to funk with working people, like your tips
Speaker 1: are yours? Like, we're not taking your fucking tips, don't
Speaker 1: worry go. That is classy as hell, where they're like, well,
Speaker 1: we wanted to steal from this casino, but we didn't,
Speaker 1: like we understand you guys work in there, like you
Speaker 1: didn't do nothing on here's your tip money back. Um.
Speaker 1: And the fundamentally pro social ends of most Tupamarow crimes
Speaker 1: endear them to people write like they're extremely popular obviously, um,
Speaker 1: their antics make them famous the world over. One time
Speaker 1: they robbed a fancy nightclub and spray so like they
Speaker 1: go into this rich person night club in a nice
Speaker 1: part of Monte Video and like Robert at gunpoint and
Speaker 1: then they spray paint on the wall. Everybody dances or
Speaker 1: nobody dances. U. Um yeah, that's just incredibly incredibly cool. Um.
Speaker 1: Time magazine declares them the Robin Hood Guerillas and their
Speaker 1: motto evinced. They also had a motto that kind of
Speaker 1: I was saying. They're very pan leftist and open minded
Speaker 1: towards questions of tendency and political theory. And their motto
Speaker 1: is words divide us, action unites us. Okay, m hmm,
Speaker 1: Like in these guys so far, Um, yeah, yeah, they're
Speaker 1: they're pretty dope. So one of these guerrillas is a
Speaker 1: young Jose Musica Um, you know, the for the future
Speaker 1: president of Uruguay. Pepe, as he's most commonly known, was
Speaker 1: born on May nineteen thirty five to a poor farming
Speaker 1: family outside of Montevideo. He was the first born of
Speaker 1: several brothers. His family was Basque on one side and
Speaker 1: Italian on the other. His dad was the foreman for
Speaker 1: a small farm which went belly up when Jose was five.
Speaker 1: When he was in third grade, at I think age eight,
Speaker 1: his dad dies, which throws the family into total poverty.
Speaker 1: It forces young Pepe to take to the streets selling
Speaker 1: flowers and working as a bakery to support his siblings
Speaker 1: and his mom. He was from an early age a
Speaker 1: generous person. Walter Purnas Mujica's biographer notes that as a child,
Speaker 1: Jose offered all of his toys to other kids in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood because he wanted to share everything that he had. Um.
Speaker 1: He was born about six years after the death of Baze,
Speaker 1: that president who had made all that lovely policies. Um.
Speaker 1: And even though he grew up during what has generally
Speaker 1: seen as Uruguay's old in years, his family is dirt
Speaker 1: poor and he is mired in poverty, so he never
Speaker 1: he doesn't have like a Rosie lens towards the past.
Speaker 1: He's very progressive in part because he comes up during
Speaker 1: Uruguay's golden age and like, yeah, life's sucking hard for
Speaker 1: poor people. Yeah. Um. One of the most influential moments
Speaker 1: in his young life is there there's a butchery near
Speaker 1: his house, um, and the union for it is an
Speaker 1: anarcho syndicalist union, and the workers there go on strike
Speaker 1: and during a negotiation they get angry at their employers,
Speaker 1: so they hold up his trucks at gunpoint and redistribute
Speaker 1: all the meat in them to the poor. Um. So
Speaker 1: this is like one of the defining moments of Jose's
Speaker 1: childhood is being like, oh, that's pretty You see why
Speaker 1: this guy becomes at tubamorrow because he's like, oh yeah
Speaker 1: that that fucking rules. Yeah um one day. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: how I ate one day. I know what I know
Speaker 1: what makes people appreciate an organization is when they help
Speaker 1: you eat. Yeah. Um yeah, it's pretty pretty rad. Uh.
Speaker 1: The action stirred something in him, and given the similarities
Speaker 1: betwe this in a lot of Tuop tomorrow action. Again,
Speaker 1: it's easy to see why he winds up where he is. Uh.
Speaker 1: He's also political and kind of the legal sense from
Speaker 1: an early age. His uncle is a nationalist and part
Speaker 1: of the National Party. Um, and he becomes a general
Speaker 1: secretary for the youth of that party. Uh. There's a
Speaker 1: passage from The Guardian that gives good insight into how
Speaker 1: his initial foray into legitimate politics led to his radicalization. Quote.
Speaker 1: As a young man, Mujica went for went to work
Speaker 1: for Enrique Arrow, a popular left wing politician, but had
Speaker 1: a political epiphany when he met che Guevara in post
Speaker 1: revolutionary Cuba. As much of Latin America fell victim to
Speaker 1: crises in decline, it was an Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Gagliano,
Speaker 1: who penned a new bible for the continent's left wing.
Speaker 1: The Open Veins of Latin America. The human murder by
Speaker 1: poverty in Latin America is secret, Galliano wrote in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one. Every year, without making a sound, three hiroshiuma
Speaker 1: bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering
Speaker 1: with clinched teeth. She is a good way to phrase
Speaker 1: the devastation that poverty reeks in a pop elasition like
Speaker 1: the West is nuking us every year, um, you know,
Speaker 1: as a result of and our our leaders are nuking
Speaker 1: us every year as a result of like starvation. By
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four, after a year of escalating robin hood
Speaker 1: raids by the tupamarrows and several years of escalating police violence,
Speaker 1: Jose two decided that his country's political system had left
Speaker 1: him with no peaceful options. So he tries to get
Speaker 1: into legitimate politics, but he's very influenced by Seguavarre in
Speaker 1: particular UM, And in nineteen sixty four he decides, like
Speaker 1: fuck it, I'm going to join the guerrilla, and he
Speaker 1: joins the Gorilla Um. He receives training, and he's soon
Speaker 1: living a split life. By day he's a humble farmer,
Speaker 1: and by night he's a revolutionary robbing banks and ship.
Speaker 1: He joined at a period when the Tupamarrows were rapidly
Speaker 1: expanding and growing more comfortable with increasingly extreme acts of
Speaker 1: armed propaganda. In nineteen sixty five, the Tupamarrows bombed a
Speaker 1: local Bear factory. Um and their justification for this, So
Speaker 1: they blow up this factory because Bear internationally is making
Speaker 1: gases used by the US military in Vietnam. So it's
Speaker 1: very much an attack. And it's one of I think
Speaker 1: it's their first attack where it's not like we're doing
Speaker 1: this to protest local things. We're doing this to assert
Speaker 1: ourselves as part of the international struggle. Yeah and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty interesting. Um, and things escalate from there. I want
Speaker 1: to quote now from a graduate thesis by Thomas Moore
Speaker 1: of Texas Tech University. Quote the two p Tomorrow suffered
Speaker 1: their first fatality in December nineteen sixty six, two weeks
Speaker 1: after a robbery at an armory, police located a vehicle
Speaker 1: that was suspected to have been involved. While in pursuit,
Speaker 1: a fierce gun battle erupted between the police and the
Speaker 1: occupants of the vehicle. During the battle, the vehicle ran
Speaker 1: into a tree and the occupants fled on foot. One
Speaker 1: of the occupants, later identified as Carlos Flores Alvarez, remained
Speaker 1: behind and covered his comrades retreat with machine gun fire.
Speaker 1: The police returned fire and Flores Alvarez was killed. Inside
Speaker 1: the vehicle were two more machine guns and two pistols.
Speaker 1: Less than a week later later, another shootout with police
Speaker 1: cost the life of Mario Robiana Mendez, another tupamarow. So
Speaker 1: the first couple of years they've got going on, nobody
Speaker 1: gets killed. Everything's pretty I mean like violent, like violent
Speaker 1: in that they're using weapons and stuff, but like it
Speaker 1: they avoid things escalating to that level. Sixty is when
Speaker 1: like now we're getting into gun battles and the cops
Speaker 1: and people are and people are dying. Um. And occasionally
Speaker 1: it's like people who are bystanders who are shot by
Speaker 1: either the tupamaros over the or the cops not intentionally,
Speaker 1: but because they're firing machine guns at each other wildly
Speaker 1: in a city. You know, like like car chases are
Speaker 1: not exactly safe for it's not safe for anybody. Um.
Speaker 1: And again they avoid as much as possible direct gunfights
Speaker 1: with the police. Like, this is never something they seek out.
Speaker 1: They are never like let's ambush a bunch of cops
Speaker 1: and kill them kind of group. Like when they ambush police,
Speaker 1: it's generally to let's take their guns and like then
Speaker 1: rob this place and tie them up and stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is largely just like it's not smart to
Speaker 1: get into a bunch of gunfights with the cops because
Speaker 1: your guys get killed. Um Yeah, it's usually yeah, not
Speaker 1: the strategic choice that one could make. Yeah, you guys
Speaker 1: and your ladies. Because kind of like the p k K,
Speaker 1: but much earlier, the Tupa Marrows are like very gender
Speaker 1: equal um. And like one of the decisions they come
Speaker 1: to early and it's like there's no reason women shouldn't
Speaker 1: be fighting too. Um. So a lot of the people,
Speaker 1: some of the people who die are like women who
Speaker 1: are getting into machine gun fights with the cops. Um.
Speaker 1: In this group, it's a very like egalitarian insurgent organization.
Speaker 1: We can all get we can all get murdered by
Speaker 1: the state. Everyone is able to do that. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: the Tupa Marrow organizational structure, the fact that there's all
Speaker 1: these independent cells allows for a tremendous amount of group
Speaker 1: autonomy and experimentation. I haven't found much about this, but
Speaker 1: one of the cells has led by a priest, and
Speaker 1: I'm really interested in, like how that went down. Yeah, yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: the whole liberation theology you think went on, and that's
Speaker 1: big in Uruguay. Yeah. Yeah. In ninety sixty six, a
Speaker 1: monte Video theater was putting on a production of a
Speaker 1: play that necessitated military uniforms and rifles for some of
Speaker 1: the actors because it's good. Pr the military is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll loan you guys outfits and we'll give you some
Speaker 1: Mouser rifles. And so they're just being like stored at
Speaker 1: this theater. And so one day before the play, a
Speaker 1: group of pistol armed Tupamorrows like busts in and steals
Speaker 1: all the guns in the uniforms. Then they dress up
Speaker 1: as soldiers and they rob a bank, making off three
Speaker 1: and one thousand paces, which is fucking very funny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I hope it was someone who worked at the theater.
Speaker 1: Tip to mof I think it was, like, I believe
Speaker 1: it was an employee at the theater who was like
Speaker 1: a Tupamorrow or sympathetic who like tells them there's this
Speaker 1: stuff here. Yeah. It was from It was like oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: give us some mousers, you know, the show be more
Speaker 1: authentic if you yeah, mousers. Yeah, and some big machine guns.
Speaker 1: Really a lot of ammunition for set dressing. Yeah. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven, the government struck back, rounding up several
Speaker 1: dozen Tupamorrows and building what they thought was an accurate
Speaker 1: picture of the group's membership. So this big bank rate
Speaker 1: like inspired like the government does a huge crackdown. They
Speaker 1: actually catch and arrest a bunch of Tupa Morrow's um
Speaker 1: and they feel like, oh, we know who everyone, we
Speaker 1: know everything. Now we've got like this whole organization dead
Speaker 1: to rights. Let's roll them up. And they they arrest
Speaker 1: a bunch of people and think that they've they've destroyed
Speaker 1: the organization, and so they announced in the press that
Speaker 1: they've dealt a mortal blow to the Tupa Marrows. Now
Speaker 1: this was a mistake for the state because they actually
Speaker 1: had not um, and the tupamorrow proved that with the
Speaker 1: launch of their next major operation, the incredibly named Plans
Speaker 1: Satan Wow. I hope it was the priest who came
Speaker 1: up with it. Yeah, it's a fucking price. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: as their war had escalated, a number of guerillas had
Speaker 1: suggested they start assassinating government officials in the street. Um
Speaker 1: decision Satan, Well, that's not what plans, Satan is because
Speaker 1: they don't they do eventually do that. They don't start
Speaker 1: doing that because they're like, well that might backfire maybe,
Speaker 1: like they're never that operation. It just to escalate towards
Speaker 1: it does because they decide instead of assassinating people, they're
Speaker 1: going to carry out a campaign of kidnapping prominent business
Speaker 1: leaders and politicians and then ransoming them back to fund
Speaker 1: the revolution. Um. And also, this will this will show
Speaker 1: that the state is ineffective, right, Like you can't even
Speaker 1: stop us from kidnapping government ministers, Like, clearly you're not
Speaker 1: capable of running this country, right. That's like the big
Speaker 1: idea behind this is like we will show the people
Speaker 1: that the state is not capable of governing them by
Speaker 1: proving how impotent it is. That's that's kind of there,
Speaker 1: like the propaganda justification of this, I mean, they can
Speaker 1: also backfire really easily. It does like we need the
Speaker 1: state because people are running around kidnapping people. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: doesn't quite. I mean, we'll talk about there's a lot
Speaker 1: of debate over the gree to which this backfires. Um,
Speaker 1: but our Peppe, our future Uruguayan president, is intimately involved
Speaker 1: in Planned Satan And I'm gonna quote from the Guardian here.
Speaker 1: I love that one managed to get elected after being
Speaker 1: part of plans Yeah. Yeah, a guy who was part
Speaker 1: of Plans Satan gets selected precedents. It's it is, it's
Speaker 1: pretty dope. It's it's it's extremely dope. Yeah, So from
Speaker 1: the Guardian quote. On a spring day in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: Manus was at home with his sister Beatrice when the
Speaker 1: future president burst out of the lift outside of their
Speaker 1: penthouse in Montevideo with a pistol in his hand. Turn around,
Speaker 1: shut your mouth and keep your hands above your head,
Speaker 1: he barked. Manus immediately recognized the pinched eyes and thick,
Speaker 1: wavy brown hair of one of the most notorious members
Speaker 1: of the daring violent Tupamaro guerrillas. After his initial sense
Speaker 1: of panic subsided, he recalled he felt strangely calm. I
Speaker 1: remember telling the young gunman who was with him not
Speaker 1: to worry that I wasn't going to do anything, the
Speaker 1: sixty two year old travel agent told me when we
Speaker 1: met in his favorite Monte Video bookshop, a short distance
Speaker 1: from the murky waters of the Immense River Plate. His sister,
Speaker 1: who suffered from polio and used a wheelchair, was taken
Speaker 1: off to another room. Don't worry, Mouica Musica told her,
Speaker 1: You'll be fine. This has nothing to do with you.
Speaker 1: Um and yeah menaces. Stepfather, Jose Pedro Purpura, was a
Speaker 1: notorious judge with ties to Uruguay's far right and a
Speaker 1: stock of pistols. After the gang had left, taking documents
Speaker 1: and weapons, Many's told his relatives that he was only
Speaker 1: upset that the two Pamorrows had stolen a typewriter he
Speaker 1: used for his schoolwork. The following day, the phone rang,
Speaker 1: It is us, the same people from yesterday, A voice said.
Speaker 1: He suddenly felt scared again. Somehow they knew about the typewriter.
Speaker 1: If he wanted it back, the voice told him he
Speaker 1: could find it in the lobby of a nearby building.
Speaker 1: Sure enough, it was there. He said. They had left
Speaker 1: a type typed message in it for my stepfather, careful doctor.
Speaker 1: It read, we are watching you. Yeah, hey, kids, we
Speaker 1: know this In your fault, but we gotta take your
Speaker 1: stepdad's guns. Um, oh, we stole your typewriter. We'll give
Speaker 1: it to you back, but we're also going to send
Speaker 1: a threat for your stepdad. Um, it's it's pretty it's
Speaker 1: pretty pretty funny. Yeah, I'm glad they kept a classy longer,
Speaker 1: like keeping fairy classy, because most groups start a little
Speaker 1: classy and then get real bad, real quick. We can debate.
Speaker 1: I don't think they ever get real bad. They do
Speaker 1: get much more violent, and then you get comfortable assassinating
Speaker 1: people and like you can feel about that the way
Speaker 1: that you want. They are never like the I Rara
Speaker 1: where they're setting off bombs and bars filled with just
Speaker 1: random people. Like, they do not do that kind of ship. Right.
Speaker 1: There are civilians who get killed as a result of
Speaker 1: their actions, never intentionallymore as like, yeah, we're we're it's
Speaker 1: not that like, we're not going to set off a
Speaker 1: bomb and it kills people and we're fine with that,
Speaker 1: But we are going to get into gunfights with the
Speaker 1: cops sometimes and people will die as a result of that. Right,
Speaker 1: But they don't get in the people's death. They do
Speaker 1: not put on a an ethical No, there's an ethical
Speaker 1: line somewhere, and I don't know where to draw that
Speaker 1: kind of line. They do, know what I My ethical
Speaker 1: line I guess is they do not as far as
Speaker 1: I've read, they do not target groups of civilians for
Speaker 1: murder in order to create fear. Yeah. That that's not
Speaker 1: a thing that they do which is good people, which
Speaker 1: is good. I think that's a bad thing to do.
Speaker 1: Like I think it is worth stopping people here that Yeah,
Speaker 1: for all of my enjoyment of IRA music, I think
Speaker 1: bombing random bars is bad behavior. No, sir, Some other
Speaker 1: people have done similar anyway, A lot of people have
Speaker 1: done similar things. Yeah. Um, and it's it's never a
Speaker 1: good thing. I don't like. You know, I call them terrorists, um,
Speaker 1: because they are. Um. But there's a spectrum of things
Speaker 1: that you can do as terrorists. Um. And they are
Speaker 1: not like, let's set off a suicide bomb in the
Speaker 1: middle of a packed market. That's not these dudes and ladies.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you know who does set off bombs and whit? No? Okay, Um,
Speaker 1: savings bombs yea, savings bombs bombs of financial with the
Speaker 1: line responsibility. Those kind of bombs, the best kind of
Speaker 1: bombs are products now you got you got out punned
Speaker 1: on that one, my friend. Yeah, that was that was
Speaker 1: much better. All right, we're back and I'm going to
Speaker 1: continue to try to pronounce Jose music is name, right.
Speaker 1: I keep needing to listen to the pronunciation because it
Speaker 1: might I keep drifting as I read it. Um, but
Speaker 1: Jose Musica was part of Some of them were creative
Speaker 1: acts of armed propaganda that the Tupamarrow's breached out into.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from that same article, The Guardian
Speaker 1: article quote. In the summer of nineteen sixty nine, a
Speaker 1: police officer knocked on the door of a small monte
Speaker 1: Video investment bank, which was partially owned by a government minister.
Speaker 1: The employees let him in, only to discover he was
Speaker 1: a tupamorrow. Several other guerillas followed. They took the equivalent
Speaker 1: of a hundred thousand dollars in today's money, but also
Speaker 1: demanded the bank's account ledgers. One of the employees, Lucia Topolanski,
Speaker 1: had tipped off the Tupamorrows that the bank was doing
Speaker 1: illegal currency deals. Her twin sister, Maria Elia, was one
Speaker 1: of the guerrillas who conducted the raid. The Tupamrrows dropped
Speaker 1: off the ledgers at the home of a public prosecutor,
Speaker 1: and some of those involved in the illegal trading were
Speaker 1: subsequently jailed. Um, that's fucking awesome. We're going to rob
Speaker 1: this bank to get evidence of corruption and government and
Speaker 1: then we will hand that over to a prosecutor. Right
Speaker 1: and again you see like this is there. They are
Speaker 1: such a creative and flexible group that they're like we
Speaker 1: are trying to overthrow the state. We're also not against recognizing, oh,
Speaker 1: this prosecutor is an honest man, will give him information
Speaker 1: that will that will reduce corruption and stuff, because that's
Speaker 1: also good. Like they're they're they're they're very pragmatic and
Speaker 1: willing to embrace like a real diversity of tactics, like
Speaker 1: they're doing a lot of different ship and also very
Speaker 1: like I think that shows the sort of non ideological
Speaker 1: nature because I have a hard time, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: up with someone who with with almost any isms, including
Speaker 1: my own, who would do that, yeah, do that? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: But they're very much Um, yeah, they're very They're very
Speaker 1: good at pivoting, and this is the thing throughout there
Speaker 1: up to the modern point, they're really good at just
Speaker 1: like kind of flowing um, which I think is why
Speaker 1: they have the impact that they do. That said, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine was what you might call the last good
Speaker 1: year for the Tupamorrows, because after this point things get
Speaker 1: a lot less fun and creative and a lot more
Speaker 1: violent and funked up and scary, which is inevitable when
Speaker 1: you are trying to overthrow a government using force. Right,
Speaker 1: Like that is every single one of these stories. Um.
Speaker 1: Things come to a head first near the end of
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, when the tupamorrow Is execute a raid
Speaker 1: on a town called Pondo, which is like a part
Speaker 1: I think it's like, it's kind of a neighborhood of
Speaker 1: it's called a town. It's kind of like I think
Speaker 1: it's more of a town at this point. It's now
Speaker 1: I often hear a refrid to it, just like a
Speaker 1: part of Monte Video. But it's like a it's it's
Speaker 1: high end, um, right, it's a it's an area in
Speaker 1: this urban sprawl where people with a lot more money live.
Speaker 1: And on October eight, the Tupamorrows carry out their largest
Speaker 1: action ever, more than a hundred guerillas um a symbol
Speaker 1: inside Pondo and in order to all get together and
Speaker 1: into position that being noticed. A lot of them dressed
Speaker 1: in a costume as members of a funeral entourage in
Speaker 1: order to elude suspicion. Once the signal was once they're
Speaker 1: um in pondo groups of five to ten guerrillas a
Speaker 1: symbol outside a series of targets, and at one o'clock
Speaker 1: a signal is given. Commandos put on white arm bands
Speaker 1: to identify themselves in the even of a gunfight, and
Speaker 1: they carry out simultaneous attacks on the police commissary, the
Speaker 1: police station, the fire department, and two local banks. And
Speaker 1: again they never their goal is never to get into gunfights,
Speaker 1: so these are not they're not just like coming and
Speaker 1: shooting to murder people. There's almost no resistance and so
Speaker 1: nobody gets killed initially, like they're they're just taking guns,
Speaker 1: tying up people, you know, like they're there to raid
Speaker 1: and rob and take ship. They're not attempting to murder everybody.
Speaker 1: UM and another group, one of the groups raids the
Speaker 1: bank armed with machine guns and pistols, and while to
Speaker 1: tupamrrows remove money from the bank. A third hands out
Speaker 1: leaflets to civilians at the bank explaining why they're taking
Speaker 1: the money and what they're going to do with it, um,
Speaker 1: which is again awesome. So they everything works out. The
Speaker 1: initial stage of this raid goes great. They steal millions
Speaker 1: of pacos, but as their ex fol trading, they've got
Speaker 1: like a caravan of vehicles leaving. The police catch up basically,
Speaker 1: and there's a series of gun fights. There's a car
Speaker 1: chase and a roadblock and like the founder of the
Speaker 1: role gets away with the money, but like a group
Speaker 1: of Tupa Morrows get their vehicle stopped and like have
Speaker 1: a big gunfight with the cops. Three Tupa Morrows get
Speaker 1: killed in twiny get captured. Um, so it's it's a
Speaker 1: it's it's a very like pyrc victory right, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it. Things get a lot uglier for the
Speaker 1: Tupa Morrows after this point. Um. For their part, they're
Speaker 1: panning out the flyer. I mean someone designed it, and
Speaker 1: so somewhere there's someone who went to school for graphic
Speaker 1: design who's like, this is my contribution. I'm the flyers.
Speaker 1: That person. I hope that person made it through the
Speaker 1: entire thing totally unscathed. Her grandkids are like, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: believe what Grandma used to do. Yeah, she was in
Speaker 1: that gunfight with the cops. Yeah, she made the flyers. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So everything gets uglier though after this point. Now, for
Speaker 1: their part, in terms of things getting uglier, the t
Speaker 1: start carrying out target assassinations of some government officials in
Speaker 1: police officials. At this point, um. And for it's part,
Speaker 1: the government cracks down by going ultra authoritarian. And I
Speaker 1: think the two per Mars would argue, we started assassinating
Speaker 1: people when the government started torturing our people, right. Um.
Speaker 1: I think the police would say that, like the Tupamrrows
Speaker 1: were so violent that like we had to use these
Speaker 1: these radical measures. I think the torture comes first. Um.
Speaker 1: From what I can read, their Tupermorrows are being tortured
Speaker 1: by the time they start carrying out assassinations. Um. And
Speaker 1: the government also cracks down by restricting freedom of speech,
Speaker 1: so the news media is forbidden to refer to the
Speaker 1: Tupamarrows by name. Um. And in order to get around this,
Speaker 1: the Tupamorrows set up a radio transmitter in monte Video
Speaker 1: to hijack government run radio channels and broadcast propaganda about
Speaker 1: their actions. Um. Which is again, are they during all
Speaker 1: this quite We'll talk about that in a bit, but
Speaker 1: like that's part of why they get away with it
Speaker 1: is most of the people seem to be pretty supportive
Speaker 1: of this, Like they're extremely popular. UM. In July nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: the tupamrrows made would prove to be one of their
Speaker 1: worst strategic decisions. They kidnapped Dan Matrion, an American citizen UM,
Speaker 1: which is always a dicey thing to do, especially for
Speaker 1: a leftist movement in nineteen seventies Latin America. UM. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: one source I found described Dan Matrio as quote an
Speaker 1: American policeman on loan to the Uruguayan security forces. I've
Speaker 1: also heard him described as an FBI agent working with them.
Speaker 1: When you hear an American policeman on loan to the
Speaker 1: Uruguayan security of wars is what do you assume his
Speaker 1: was his actual employer? Yeah, it's the c i A.
Speaker 1: And Dan Matrio's job is to teach people how to
Speaker 1: do torture. UM. He had previously consulted for the Brazilian
Speaker 1: government and his specialties were electrocution and slow strangulation. So
Speaker 1: I feel really good about that having chosen I'm like,
Speaker 1: how it wasn't a strategic plan. It's not a good
Speaker 1: strategic move morally, if your job is to travel to
Speaker 1: different countries and teach them how to strangle people. I
Speaker 1: don't think you getting kidnapped as bad that. That is
Speaker 1: my moral line. Yeah. Um, and I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from a write up by war is Boring here. While
Speaker 1: torture was part of the government's unofficial policy prival to
Speaker 1: Matrio's arrival, he is often create credited with making it
Speaker 1: widespread among the Uruguayan police force and extolling the value
Speaker 1: of applying quote and this is Dan, the precise pain
Speaker 1: and the precise place and the precise amount for the
Speaker 1: desired effect. He was known in particular for his expertise
Speaker 1: in applying as much electrical doc as possible to the
Speaker 1: genitals without causing death, and for pioneering the use of
Speaker 1: thin wire that could be placed between the teeth to
Speaker 1: intensify pain during electrocution. So a cool dude, Dan, Yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely not just the fodder of like every trashy spy
Speaker 1: movie ever. You know that this guy has like black
Speaker 1: gloves that are very yeah, and some weird sexual hang ups.
Speaker 1: Probably a serial killer back in the US. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: like particular about how where everything in the apartment goes.
Speaker 1: So the Tupamrrows responded to the escalation of violence and
Speaker 1: kind and specifically targeted Matrion. They kidnapped the CI agent
Speaker 1: in July of nineteen seventy. The Tupamrrows rarely killed anyone
Speaker 1: and did not have a reputation for killing those they kidnapped. Instead,
Speaker 1: they would exchange them for cash ransoms or release them
Speaker 1: of the imprint of imprisoned tupamarrows. However, with the government
Speaker 1: assault on them proving more effective, several leaders of the
Speaker 1: movement were killed or arrested while Matrion was being held
Speaker 1: in the Tupamrrows Underground People's Prison. When the headline for
Speaker 1: Matrion's ransom came and went the new t P Tomorrow
Speaker 1: leadership was uncertain of how to respond, they executed him.
Speaker 1: And I should know there are allegations, at least I
Speaker 1: don't know how. I haven't found a lot of the
Speaker 1: tail that there are allegations that the People's prison tortures
Speaker 1: folks as well. Um, I don't probably, I don't know. Again,
Speaker 1: they're also allegations from in a lot of cases guys
Speaker 1: doing tortures, so like I don't, I don't know, but
Speaker 1: probably right there, probably doing some of that themselves. Um,
Speaker 1: which you know, Uh, nobody's a good guy when you
Speaker 1: when it comes time to be a war, Um, there's
Speaker 1: a better guy. And I think the people who are
Speaker 1: not being helped by the traveling torture electrocute your testicles, dude,
Speaker 1: are probably the better people in this situation. People kidnapped
Speaker 1: the strangler are often better than the strangler. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would say better than the strangler, even though as things
Speaker 1: get brutal, perhaps they do some strangling themselves, or at
Speaker 1: least like holding people in solitary confinement and ship. Um. Look,
Speaker 1: I'm sure the people's prison isn't nice either, you know. No, Um,
Speaker 1: so they execute dan um, which again I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't have a moral problem with that. If your job
Speaker 1: is to hook up electrodes to people's testicles, and like her,
Speaker 1: you're torturing like kill you, I don't have a moral
Speaker 1: issue with that. But it's not a great I don't
Speaker 1: think it's a good idea for them for a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons, Like it doesn't work well, I guess it didn't.
Speaker 1: It doesn't go well a lot of the sources you'll find,
Speaker 1: especially like the Guardian, kind of more liberal sources will
Speaker 1: say that this is what leads to a loss of
Speaker 1: public support, and they they often are kind of sources
Speaker 1: that leave out the fact that Dan tortured people for
Speaker 1: the CIA. The ones that are like, this was like
Speaker 1: a bad move for them. I don't know how badly
Speaker 1: this hurts them locally. I don't know how much this
Speaker 1: is actually an unpopular move. UM. We get one hint
Speaker 1: in that in nineteen seventy two there's an Uruguay and
Speaker 1: gallop poll Um and this is two years or so
Speaker 1: after they kill Dan Um and after two more years
Speaker 1: of because the violence s lights after they killed Dan.
Speaker 1: In this nineteen seventy two Pole finds that they're still
Speaker 1: widespread support for the guerrillas UM even though the majority
Speaker 1: of Uruguayans want non violent resolution to their political yields.
Speaker 1: So most most Uguayans do not support violent revolution, but
Speaker 1: they are also broadly feel fondly towards the Tupamarrow's right UM.
Speaker 1: In a lot of cases, because the government is increasingly militarizing,
Speaker 1: they're like carrying out these huge dragnets that impact people's lives,
Speaker 1: so like the Tupamorrow's Rabba bank and that doesn't really
Speaker 1: funk with people living in the area. But then the
Speaker 1: police set up a huge dragnet and that fox up
Speaker 1: things for everybody, and so like they're angry at the
Speaker 1: cops more so than the tupamrrows. I don't know that
Speaker 1: killing Dan hurt the Tupamorrows with uruguayans, um, But it's
Speaker 1: not good for another reason, which is that now a
Speaker 1: CIA agent has been killed. Um. And so the United
Speaker 1: States is like, well, that's all the justification we needed
Speaker 1: to get way more involved in this ship. UM. So
Speaker 1: the US accelerates their support of the increasingly right wing
Speaker 1: Uraguayan government. The CIA funnels money and equipment in and
Speaker 1: they they funnel all of their money and equipment in
Speaker 1: manpower through one of their favorite vehicles. The US Agency
Speaker 1: for International Development or u S aid, like that is
Speaker 1: how all of their like here's how to torture people.
Speaker 1: Guys get like ledgered out as like this is part
Speaker 1: of an aid package, you know. UM. I want to
Speaker 1: quote from a paper called Tracking the Tupamorrows by Lucas
Speaker 1: Hall of Union College. Quote, the United States began to
Speaker 1: offer its assistance in the form of military aid to
Speaker 1: the Uruguayan government throughout the nineteen sixties and into the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies throughout the civic military dictatorship. Although the United
Speaker 1: States initially provided military aid in order to squash the Tupamorrows,
Speaker 1: eventually it provided aid in order to suppress the left
Speaker 1: in general. For example, the Uruguayan government first declared a
Speaker 1: state of siege government limitation on personal freedom in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty three following a worker strike at an electric company
Speaker 1: in Montevideo, and thereafter in nineteen sixty five, sixty seven,
Speaker 1: sixty eight, and sixty nine in response to various protests
Speaker 1: organized by labors or insurgent activities perpetrated by the Tupa Marrows.
Speaker 1: Such governmental decrees intensified conflicts among laborers, guerilla movements like
Speaker 1: the Tupa Morrows, and the increasingly authoritarian government. Moreover, following
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty six elections, Buruguay re abandoned the National
Speaker 1: Council and reinstituted the presidential system, which reinforced executive power.
Speaker 1: Following the death of the newly elected Colorado president and
Speaker 1: military general Oscar Diego Gastito, pose a A year later,
Speaker 1: Gastito's vice president, George Pacheco Areco, assumed the presidency and
Speaker 1: used his executive power to pursue and defeat the Tupamrrows.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy one, he decreed that the armed forces
Speaker 1: would intervene in the battle against the military movement against
Speaker 1: the guerrilla movements. So that's kind of like the political
Speaker 1: and and this is one of the points. A lot
Speaker 1: of people will say that the Tupamrrows brought on the
Speaker 1: dictatorship that is coming because of their resistance, and as
Speaker 1: kind of that passage points out, they were a part
Speaker 1: of the process by which the state became increasingly dictatorial.
Speaker 1: But a lot of the state's dictatorial decrees are in
Speaker 1: response to just workers protests, um, that are not organized
Speaker 1: by the Tupamorrows, because other stuff is happening in the
Speaker 1: left here. Um. And I think that like when when
Speaker 1: primarily Western sources but although not entirely there are some
Speaker 1: eric Wades will blame them for it too. But when
Speaker 1: I think primarily when like western sources say well we
Speaker 1: got there, we got the dictatorship because of the Tupamrrows,
Speaker 1: they're ignoring the fact that the dictatorship came in and
Speaker 1: was backed by the US as part of a broad
Speaker 1: attempt to stop all left wing organizing in the country,
Speaker 1: including all of these like workers movements and the Tupamorrows
Speaker 1: because they were the guerilla movement. Are a really convenient
Speaker 1: group to blame because kind of liberals always like to
Speaker 1: blame the people who are accepting violence, even though like,
Speaker 1: well they also instituted states of emergency because they were
Speaker 1: fucking protests, like but like, don't don't put this all
Speaker 1: on the tupamrrows. Yeah, it's a very very classic means
Speaker 1: by which to try and get the left to eat itself. Yes, um,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't really work in Uruguay, which is interesting.
Speaker 1: But well, well we're getting to that. So a reco
Speaker 1: the president who like brings the military and to fight
Speaker 1: the Tupamrrows doesn't isn't quite a dictator, although Quays make
Speaker 1: equipbal with that, Like, I don't think he doesn't. He's
Speaker 1: not quite as far as the next guy. Is what
Speaker 1: I'll say. How did the guy die in the I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't know. I think it was natural causes,
Speaker 1: though it was not. I don't think so. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: so a reco is the tri angler. Um, he preps
Speaker 1: the path for dictatorship, and he kind of ushers Uruguay
Speaker 1: into the dictatorship that's coming. I've mentioned a few times
Speaker 1: that the Tupamaros escalated their violence in response to state violence,
Speaker 1: and the Hall credits this less with desperation than to
Speaker 1: again the fact that this is a very pragmatic group.
Speaker 1: So the two Borrows are like, let's try not killing people,
Speaker 1: and then when it escalates to a more violent, more
Speaker 1: gunfight a thing, they're like, well, let's become a straight
Speaker 1: up insurgent group. You know. Um. They're very willing to
Speaker 1: kind of like weave with things, and so they pivot
Speaker 1: because they don't have a hard and fast ideology. They're
Speaker 1: kind of happy to be mostly non violent or happy
Speaker 1: to be mostly violent, depending on what the situation calls for.
Speaker 1: And in the early seventies, when the military gets in
Speaker 1: there like well now it's time to kill with more people. Um,
Speaker 1: and not a lot of people. I think about three
Speaker 1: Pmrrows get killed and they they kill about fifty people. Um.
Speaker 1: So as insurgent movements go again, these guys are not like,
Speaker 1: we're not bombing military convoys and stuff. You know. Um,
Speaker 1: that's what they wanted. They could have had a more
Speaker 1: close if they if they wanted to, Yes, um, but
Speaker 1: this doesn't work in any case, violence escalates and the
Speaker 1: government's much better at doing violence right that the mars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like if you're going I think it is this situation
Speaker 1: where like, if you're gonna do that, um, they will
Speaker 1: probably be better than you. Add it. It's it's very
Speaker 1: rarely that a guerrilla movement takes all the entire apparatus
Speaker 1: of the state and uh and wins. It happens, and
Speaker 1: usually they have to do some very ugly ship in
Speaker 1: order to make that work, um, and have some other
Speaker 1: things break their way and have a lot of foreign
Speaker 1: aid and all this stuff. Anyway, whatever, it does not
Speaker 1: work here, President Pacheco grows increasingly dictatorial. Everybody knows ship
Speaker 1: is bad. And again there's a lot of left wing
Speaker 1: organizing outside of the Tupamorrows critical of the Tupa Morrows.
Speaker 1: There's the what what a lot of scholars I read
Speaker 1: we'll call the legal left in Uruguay who has this
Speaker 1: kind of mixed relationship where they appreciate them, they may
Speaker 1: agree with overall goals but not the means. And kind
Speaker 1: of as they Uruguay hits this point where like the
Speaker 1: military has been brought in, we can all see that
Speaker 1: a dictatorship is coming. The whole left kind of unifies
Speaker 1: behind this idea of like, well, let's try one last
Speaker 1: legal push to stop this. Let's see if there is
Speaker 1: a way within the democratic system to to avoid this
Speaker 1: before it becomes a straight up dictator ship. Um. And
Speaker 1: so all these folks on the legal left form an
Speaker 1: organization called the Frente Amplio, which means broad Front, and
Speaker 1: it's like it's a popular front coalition. Right. We've talked
Speaker 1: about this in the Behind the Insurrections episodes, and like
Speaker 1: happens in Spain, happens in France, happens in a bunch
Speaker 1: of places. So they build a popular front coalition of
Speaker 1: left parties and groups aimed at resisting the authoritarian creep
Speaker 1: under Pacheco reco Um. By nineteen seventy one, dozens of
Speaker 1: Tupas have been killed, hundreds tortured, and the guerilla organization
Speaker 1: agrees to sit down with the Frente Amplio, with the
Speaker 1: legal left and work together in this this effort to
Speaker 1: try and legally stop a dictatorship. Um. The Tupamrrows announced
Speaker 1: a sort of ceasefire from the nineteen seventy one elections, like,
Speaker 1: we're not going to do insurgent ship. We're gonna we're
Speaker 1: gonna try to do electoral ship again. They're good at
Speaker 1: pivoting right Um. And they form a political wing, the
Speaker 1: March twenty six Movement or twenty six m which declares
Speaker 1: support for the Frente Amplio. So the two bars are like, hey,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna do any attacks right now. We're let's
Speaker 1: we formed a political organization and we have joined this
Speaker 1: broad front coalition of left wing political parties. Um. This
Speaker 1: was a really difficult thing to pull off, because again,
Speaker 1: Uruguay has a two party system at least as fucked
Speaker 1: up as ours as currently. It is hard. Then they're
Speaker 1: trying to make a third party, right like, they're not
Speaker 1: unified with kind of the vaguely liberal party. They are
Speaker 1: trying to do their own thing. Um, and it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a significant attempt, right like. It is not an
Speaker 1: easy thing to pull off. Quote from Lucas Hall's article,
Speaker 1: The Tupamorrows beyond expressing their support for the party through
Speaker 1: the formation of them humbled themselves in order to further
Speaker 1: strengthen the front as electoral position amid rumors of a
Speaker 1: military coup. For example, the Topamrrows participated with former members
Speaker 1: of the armed forces and other members of the security
Speaker 1: apparatus in Plan Contra Goulpe, a movement intended to prevent
Speaker 1: the onset of authoritarian dictatorship. However, despite such efforts, the
Speaker 1: Fronte amply failed to gain the support needed to topple
Speaker 1: the traditional parties. However credible it's written program in general
Speaker 1: principles might have been for a large sector of the citizenry,
Speaker 1: the support of the Tup Tomorrow party positioned the Fronte
Speaker 1: Amplio as an extremist option. As a result, it was
Speaker 1: especially difficult for the Fronte to win the support of
Speaker 1: voters on the countryside, even that of voters outside Montevideo. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: the results of the elections were surprising. First, although he
Speaker 1: received the most votes, the constitution prevented President Pacheco from
Speaker 1: serving a second term, and the electoral effort to amend
Speaker 1: that law was disapproved. As a result, Pacheco's handpicked suppressor,
Speaker 1: Juan Maria Bordaberry A Rosina won the presidency second, although
Speaker 1: it only won eighteen percent of the vote. The front
Speaker 1: A Amplio won thirty percent of the vote in Montevideo.
Speaker 1: In other words, nearly a fifth of the total population
Speaker 1: and a third of the population of Montevideo was disaffected
Speaker 1: with the current political system, although the other four fifths
Speaker 1: of the population voted for the traditional parties. This figure
Speaker 1: represents the first time in Uruguay's a total history that
Speaker 1: a non traditional party garnered considerable support from a significant
Speaker 1: portion of the population, suggesting that at least in the city,
Speaker 1: the Tupamaros armed propaganda campaign has had had been successful
Speaker 1: in influencing all sides of the left to challenge the
Speaker 1: established order. And this is interesting to me because again,
Speaker 1: a lot of the non scholarly sources who are kind
Speaker 1: of like journalists summarizing the history will say that, like
Speaker 1: they they lead to the failure of the left electorally
Speaker 1: and going anyway, Yeah, left wasn't gonna win anyway, But
Speaker 1: this some academics at least I'm not I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to claim what's in this Lucas Hall article, although he
Speaker 1: does cite a number of Uruguayan academics. I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to say that this is the absolute consensus, but there
Speaker 1: is a substantial academic argument that actually the Tupamaros armed
Speaker 1: propaganda campaign is why, for the first time ever, the
Speaker 1: Left as a third party gains a really significant chunk
Speaker 1: of the vote. UM, that's an argument you can make
Speaker 1: that said time had run out. Uh, the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: one election was sadly their last attempt to for their
Speaker 1: last chance to forestall a dictatorship. UM. The Frente Amplio
Speaker 1: did succeed in destroying the two party system in Uruguay,
Speaker 1: but the election of nineteen seventy one destroyed democracy. President
Speaker 1: border Berry seized total power after taking office, although he
Speaker 1: himself was more or less just a stand in for
Speaker 1: the military. This is not really like a fascist thing
Speaker 1: where like he's taking power. He is the guy the
Speaker 1: military has being the face of the military dictatorship. Right.
Speaker 1: That's kind of how it works in Uruguay. It's less
Speaker 1: like about the individual and more that like and not
Speaker 1: that like. He's not part of the decision making apparatus,
Speaker 1: but he's like one of a bunch of guys making
Speaker 1: this military dictatorship. Be a thing. Um. From what I
Speaker 1: can tell, the military's attitude is like, well, we let
Speaker 1: you civilians try to get things under control. It's time
Speaker 1: for like the military to function up for everybody because
Speaker 1: that'll be um and spoilers. It's not it's a real
Speaker 1: bad dictatorship. Yeah. Um, a lot of kind of casual sources. Again,
Speaker 1: like they will blame the tupamaros for the onset of dictatorship.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to say they didn't have any Like
Speaker 1: obviously they are a major part of Uruguayan politics. As
Speaker 1: the country descends into a dictatorship, of course they had
Speaker 1: a role in what happened, right, Um. I think saying
Speaker 1: that because of the tupamaros Uruguay gets a dictatorship number one,
Speaker 1: it ignores that Uruguay falls a dictatorship alongside Chile, Argentina,
Speaker 1: El Salvador, Guatemala, like a bunch of other countries, all
Speaker 1: of whom the US is doing the same ship they're
Speaker 1: doing it to Uruguay and and none of whom have
Speaker 1: to pamaros themselves. Um. So I when you when you
Speaker 1: knock everyone off the fence, when you polarized society, you're
Speaker 1: like lining up for a fight, and you're even gonna
Speaker 1: win or lose. It's not inherently like, it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: the fault of the people who knock everyone off the fence.
Speaker 1: You know. No, they are again part of this process.
Speaker 1: It certainly would be unreasonable say they had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with the dictatorship, right, Like they're a huge factor
Speaker 1: in Uruguayan politics. But also the dictatorship comes into power
Speaker 1: in part because the government's trying to crack down on
Speaker 1: like unions and labor organizing and stuff out. That's not
Speaker 1: people pulling guns. Um, that's a big chunk of what happens.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that is what we're going to end part
Speaker 1: one because thankfully, Margaret, unlike a lot of unfortunately a
Speaker 1: lot of Latin American history we're not talking about, Like
Speaker 1: and then they get crushed and right wing governments take
Speaker 1: power for the next sixty years, and the US trains
Speaker 1: their security forces over and over again, and now they're
Speaker 1: burning down the like whatever. Like, this is not that story.
Speaker 1: It does not have that ending. Um, But we'll get
Speaker 1: to that into Christmas. Now, it is a Christmas miracle, Margaret,
Speaker 1: That's what everybody says. Um, I'm gonna go get my
Speaker 1: Irroguay tree tomorrow. Um, you got any plug holes to plug? Yes,
Speaker 1: I do. I have a new book out. It was
Speaker 1: actually a book that's been out for a while, but
Speaker 1: it's been re released with a new publisher. It's called
Speaker 1: A Country of Ghosts. And it's my attempt to answer
Speaker 1: the question of people always ask, well, they we know
Speaker 1: what you anarchist are against, what are you for? And
Speaker 1: so I tried to write a book. Um, that's fiction
Speaker 1: because I don't read a lot of theory and yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's yeah. It just came out a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks ago. I think, Um, that's my main plug able.
Speaker 1: I'm also on the internet as good as hell and
Speaker 1: very relevant to the story we're telling here, although more
Speaker 1: mountains uh les. Yeah, No, it's the it's the Switzerland comparison.
Speaker 1: It's it's it is kind of a Switzerland sort of deal.
Speaker 1: But yeah, um, I reckon. I tore through it uh
Speaker 1: in a in a long weekend day last weekend and
Speaker 1: thoroughly enjoyed it. Um. And it's also I mean kudos
Speaker 1: to ak on this one of the books that has
Speaker 1: like the little flaps on the inside of the cover
Speaker 1: so that you can manage without folding the pages over
Speaker 1: which I really appreciate. I was really excited. It's my
Speaker 1: first yeah, I use book with French flaps, and it's
Speaker 1: my first book with a painted fantasy cover on the cover.
Speaker 1: You have such a good cover. I'm so excited about it.
Speaker 1: And then so now I need to write a book
Speaker 1: with a dragon. You can write a sequel to this
Speaker 1: book with a drag. But oh, that's actually okay. Anyway, um,
Speaker 1: all right, well you can find me nowhere because I'm
Speaker 1: a great ghost baby. That's the end of the episode. Sophie. Okay,
Speaker 1: hello world, I'm Robert and I'm doing a live stream
Speaker 1: with my good friend Prop if you want to listen
Speaker 1: to that. Sophie won't let me curse. So this ad
Speaker 1: isn't very entertaining, but it's going to be February at
Speaker 1: six p MPST and you can find it at a
Speaker 1: moment house dot com slash behind the Bastards allegedly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a you know, a good holiday gift or
Speaker 1: allegedly or not a holiday gift or allegedly, but we'll
Speaker 1: be doing that. We'll be doing it behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: in and in a little Q and A be there
Speaker 1: if you want to Where? Where can people find that again?
Speaker 1: Robert Minhouse dot com slash behind the Bastards