In this three-part series, Eva Newton explains the continuing importance of political disappearances in Uruguay, a country where impunity is still operating for those responsible for the illegal kidnap, torture and disappearance of political opponents of the military regime in the 1970s.
Stella’s early childhood memories are of a big house, noisy with lots of music. Windows and doors always open, neighbours often popping in. An obnoxious (her words) older brother who she adored. This was early 1960s Uruguay, in a working class neighbourhood of the capital city, Montevideo.
Gradually over the next few years ‘the sunshine started getting darker and darker’. She became aware of her parents’ struggle to find food. Supplies were limited, and at the shops she would join long queues for a bottle of milk, or a loaf of bread. Her brother would queue two people behind her, her mother further down, stocking up as much as they could.
Since the mid-1950s Uruguay’s economy had been stagnating. In response, by 1963, an urban guerrilla group known as the Tupamaros formed, aiming to overthrow the government and build a more equitable economy. They rapidly adopted more and more militant actions while the government, police and army reacted with increasingly brutal and authoritarian measures. This was when the Doctrina de Seguridad Nacional (the National Security Doctrine) entered the training curriculum of military and intelligence officers. The doctrine justified military intervention in state and civil affairs by promoting the idea of ’the enemy within’.
By the time Stella started secondary school in the late 1960s, widespread civilian protests had also erupted in response to the economic crisis. In June 1968, inflation reached an all-time high of 183 per cent. At Stella’s school, older students would stop younger students entering the school gates, and encourage them to strike. This appealed to Stella, who had seen her father come home and pretend to the family that he had got work, rather than admit he had been waiting all day at the docks for an opportunity that never came.
‘Subversive’
The student movement gave Stella the tools to resist the injustices facing her family. And soon, to oppose the wider injustices she witnessed: the government invoked emergency powers, known as Prompt Security Measures, in reaction to the protests. Strikers found their wages frozen, five left-wing parties were banned and the police and military could now implement ‘discretional’ arrests of students and trade unionists.
As tension mounted, Stella threw herself into underground work. The house that had always been lively with family visitors now instead received a steady flow of activists for covert meetings. From 1972, citizens accused of subversion were tried in a military court. The disappearances of ‘subversives’, with or without being put on trial, had become more common. The disappeared were either imprisoned, forced into exile, or murdered – but whatever the punishment, it was most often preceded by torture.
On June 27th, 1973, President Bordaberry suspended the constitution due to the ‘criminal actions of the conspiracy against our country’, despite the Tupamaros being militarily crushed in 1972. The National Doctrine of Security was legally codified to define state policy around the threat of the ‘internal enemy’, but Stella continued her activities – puncturing the tires of military vehicles, handing out seditious leaflets – until one day, someone told her ‘they know you and they know where you live’.
Forced to flee
A fellow activist had been caught, and they were likely to give up information about Stella. So in 1974, at only seventeen years old, Stella had to flee the country, with her then-partner, Marcos (name changed).
She took refuge in Buenos Aires, just a two hour ferry crossing from Montevideo. Sometimes she met up with two activists in exile – a couple, the woman pregnant –who appeared to be high up in the leadership. After a month in the city, they told her it would be safe for her to go home – whoever had been captured obviously didn’t talk.
Stella and Marcos rushed home to surprise her family, planning to visit Marcos’s father on the way at the newspaper kiosk that he ran. By chance, their plans changed last minute. Stella felt ill, so they went straight to her parents instead – narrowly avoiding the army, who had been waiting for Marcos at the kiosk, having just arrested two other ‘subversives’ there.
Oblivious to the danger she was in, Stella was sitting with her family, drinking mate, when an employee of Marcos’s father arrived. About to enter the kiosk to collect papers, he had noticed the army van outside, and officers hiding in nearby windows. Not a militant himself, but a good friend of Marcos’s, he rushed to warn him.
Marcos had been printing a ‘seditious’ newspaper in the basement of the kiosk. Whilst he and Stella were able to flee back over the border to Argentina, 205 Uruguayans in total are believed to have been disappeared in this period for similar dissidence, including the pregnant couple that Stella met in Buenos Aires.
Of that total, the whereabouts of only 43 victims have so far been deemed resolved by the INDDHH – the Institución Nacional de Derechos Humanos y Defensoría del Pueblo (National Human Rights Institution and Ombudsman’s Office). The 205 were disappeared either by the Uruguayan authorities alone, or in cooperation with the regimes of nearby countries, through the framework of intelligence-sharing and repression in the Southern Cone known as Plan Cóndor. Plan Cóndor targeted left-wing activists and was backed by US intelligence agencies.
Stella was lucky to escape persecution, and emigrated to the United Kingdom. She now campaigns passionately for the desaparecidos (the disappeared), helping the group Diáspora Uruguaya por la Memoria to organise the annual London March of Silence in their memory. Stella launched the London march in line with the March of Silence that was established in Uruguay by the Madres y Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Mothers and Families of the Detained-Disappeared), the most prominent group advocating for the desaparecidos in Uruguay.
Although the dictatorship ended in 1985, very few of its leaders have faced prosecution for their violations of human rights. Under duress from the military, the first post-dictatorship government introduced the ‘Expiration Law’ in 1986, a statute of limitations which provided immunity to military and police personnel for crimes committed between 1973 and 1985.
The government claimed that any attempt to repeal this law could provoke a military coup: consequently, referendums upheld the law in 1989 and 2009. In 2009, then-presidential nominee José Mujica, despite himself being a former member of the Tupamaros, argued that repeal would have a ‘politically destabilizing effect’. Only in 2011 was the law finally annulled following the 2011 Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) landmark ruling that the Expiration Law was a violation of the American Convention on Human Rights.
Uruguay’s armed forces have never formally apologized for the dictatorship or its actions, unlike the military of other countries in the Southern Cone who led authoritarian regimes during the same period. Many in Uruguay believe the military still maintain a pact of silence today, in some cases actively preventing further details of their dictatorship atrocities from coming to light. Graciela Montes de Oca from Familiares maintains that ‘this mafia code keeps the truth hidden’.
The next article in this series covers how Familiares believe this pact functions, and how it can best be dismantled.
Main image: President Bordaberry reviews a military parade, probably in March 1973, shortly before full military dictatorship was established.
Eva Newton is an aspiring investigative journalist interested in movements challenging capitalist and neo-colonial exploitation, particularly in Latin America. She is currently based in London, and has previously volunteered with the United Voices of the World Union, the Socialist Party and the Latin American Bureau.
This article was published previously as a single article in NACLA.
