Behind the Bastards - Part One: Christmas non-Bastard: The Tupamaros of Uruguay

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

Robert is joined by Margaret Killjoy to discuss José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica Cordano.Footnotes: https://pepemujica.com/en/#Pepe_Mujica8217s_participation_in_the_8220gu errilla8221 https://upsidedownworld.org/archives/uruguay/an-interview-with-uruguaysjose-mujica-from-armed-struggle-to-the-presidency/ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jose-mujica-hitchiker_n_6573532 https://time.com/3608517/uruguay-president-homeless-man-100-dollars/ https://news.yahoo.com/uruguays-mujica-guantanamo-turned-inmates-halfway-vegetables224344221.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_refer rer_sig=AQAAAAZWgpvLwCbf6hmmQQWlA3xWu_MZyFTeGYxHHhcO3AJO2qBXMvj8Sdwkh eQErRgVyOKss5QVZflkaNF4Hb6rZCr-c4Ohyc_Ctyh58oGaoEstnukpGOzWDp_gmNDq1VrqvWn1TEzotD_TIOaQ9wQ5iTFYrUsxN7DcMlAGwByPq RX https://newrepublic.com/article/120912/uruguays-jose-mujica-was-liberals-dreamtoo-good-be-true https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jose-mujica-necktie_n_5365142 https://latinamericanstudies.org/uruguay/tupamaros-uruguay.htm https://www.thoughtco.com/the-tupamaros-2136128 https://warisboring.com/the-tupamaros-were-propaganda-savvy-urbanguerrillas/ https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Uruguays-Tupamaro-Prison-Break-WasLargest-Coolest-in-History-20160906-0037.html https://nationalinterest.org/commentary/jos%C3%A9-mujicauruguays-robin-hood-guerrillas-9066   Join us on 2/17 for a live digital experience of Behind the Bastards (plus Q&A) featuring Robert Evans, Propaganda, & Sophie Lichterman. If you can't make it, the show will be available for replay until 2/24!Tickets: https://www.momenthouse.com/behindthebastards Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas! This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast about Robert trying to do a festive introduction and then losing steam because he didn't really have a plan. Hey, Chris, can you insert in a sound of me murdering Santa Claus here? And some jingle bells, all that stuff. Jingle bells and stabbing. Put it all in right here where we're talking, over us talking.

And now I'm going to introduce our guest today, Margaret Kiljoy. Margaret, you are the host of a podcast called Live Like the World is Dying. You just published a book through AK Press called A Country of Ghosts, which is fucking awesome. I read it last weekend in a single long day of obsessive reading. How are you doing today, Margaret? I'm doing good. Good. Well, Margaret, how do you feel about Christmas?

Very complicated. I feel very complicated about Christmas. I think most people have complicated feelings about Christmas. How do you feel about heroes? You know, actually also complicated. Also complicated, right? Fundamentally problematic idea. Well, our subject today, I don't know that I would call heroes,

but I think they do the most heroic thing that you can do, which is change with the times rather than repeatedly doing the same thing and hoping for different results, which there's an element of heroism. They're also terrorists, kind of. So this is going to be a complicated episode, Margaret. Have you heard of the Tupamaros of Uruguay? I have not. Okay.

Well, this is good. Anyway, if you look up Tupamaros, there's also a Venezuelan Marxist-Leninist political party called the Tupamaros. This is a very different thing. If you've heard much about Uruguay and politics in recent years, it's probably that they were the first nation on earth to legalize marijuana. This is back in 2013. They also legalized gay marriage the same year,

which was about two years faster than the US of A. Both of these reforms were signed into law under the presidency of a dude named Jose Mujica. Now, if you know a single Uruguayan politician, he's probably the guy. The most prominent piece of international press relating to him is an article from The Guardian in 2014 titled, Is This The World's Most Radical President?

The Guardian article is very much radical from a centrist liberal standpoint. But he's referred to a lot as Uruguay's anarchist president, again, in a lot of not-anarchist media, because he's not an anarchist. So it is fair to say there's anarchist influences in his politics and his attitude. You might have guessed that he's not an anarchist by the fact that he's a president. But he's pretty rad. It's hard not to love this guy when you read about aspects of his personality.

The thing he's most famous for is his humility. Is this the guy who drives his own car? Well, usually he rides a bicycle. The same bicycle he's maintained for 60 years, but he has a small Volkswagen. He refuses to have a limo or a driver. He usually wears sandals and worn all. He used to wear stained jumpers, was the only thing he would wear, and they finally got him to at least wear a clean shirt.

So there's photos of him with Hugo Chavez and Obama, and he's dressed like a dude who lives in Latin America and is just going to work. He's a farmer a lot of the time. He runs a farm and has for most of his life. He's just like, not a guy who looks like other world leaders. And one of the reasons he's become so popular, again, is like the every liberal's favorite, quote unquote, radical politician, was this moment in 2014 when he gave a speech to the United Nations

that included this bit, which Sophie's going to play for us now. And this is, it's a UN speech. So he's speaking in Spanish, but the UN is, you know, doing, they've got like a guy, it reading in English. So that's not actually Jose's voice, but yeah. And that allows us to contemplate the beauty of nature. We have destroyed the jungles, the green jungles, the true jungles, and we've created anonymous cement jungles.

We have tackled sedentarianism with walkers, insomnia with pills, solitude with electronics. Are we happy when we are so far from the human essence? We have to ask ourselves this question. Stunned, we have fled from our biology, which defends life for life itself as the superior cause in itself. And we've replaced it by functional consumerism and accumulation, politics. Yeah, so that's pretty rad for a world leader.

That's the most I've ever agreed with anything a president said in a long time. Especially in the UN. I think you'll feel that way about this next segment here too. But today, today it's time to begin to fight to prepare a world without borders. The globalized economy has no other inclination but private interest. The private interest of very few and every nation state looks at its own stability. Yeah, so getting up there, talking about how we shouldn't have borders, I don't know, that's to me pretty rad to hear a president saying at the United Nations.

Yeah, and you can see why people went gaga for this guy, right? And why they call him an anarchist. Because there's anarchist elements of what he's saying, especially the whole we should be moving towards a world without borders. But he's also a president. And we'll talk a little bit more about Jose later, but one of the things I do think is interesting about him, because you can find other world leaders saying good shit,

talking a good game about all this stuff, and then going back home to their mansions and taking private jets places. And Jose does, one of the things that kind of separates him is he wears, not only does he not live in a mansion or anything, but he flies coach like he's not living the sort of like, yeah. But what if he's like a secret mansion bunker underneath his tiny house? Well, I mean, it's not impossible, although most of the time when like journalists come to visit him as his home,

like there's a couple of different stories, like some Japanese or Korean film crew will come and he'll like meet them at his front door and they'll go drink Jim Bean under a tree, which is how I would create a film crew if I, yeah. That's good, because people always talked about how George Bush was like, the president you drink a beer with, that was like his whole thing was like, he's the one you'd want to drink a beer with,

but I think that the president that you drink Jim Bean under a tree. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I think that would be, I would prefer that to like having a staged photo op beer with a president at the White House, which seems horrible. Again, we'll cover later. There's a lot of criticisms of Jose from the left primarily,

most of the people who have issues with him are like leftists. But what I find more interesting than his presidency is where he came from and the kind of intellectual and moral journey he represents, not just from himself, but for the political organization that he came from. Because Jose Musica got his start in politics through what you might call non-traditional means. He was a terrorist as a young man and not like in a light way, like in a got shot repeatedly in gunfights with the cops way.

Like he went as hard as he possibly could have without dying. And the group that he was a member of is one of the most fascinating insurgent organizations I've ever heard about, the Tupamarros. So in order to explain the Tupamarros, we're going to have to get into a little bit of what Uruguay is. It's the second smallest country in South America. It's like middling sized as countries go. It's about the size of Washington state,

which is bigger than a lot of European countries. So it's not a tiny country, but tiny for South America. Before white folks showed up and started doing what white folks do, the indigenous inhabitants of Uruguay were the Charua. They had been pushed into the area by another tribe up in Paraguay in the generations before European conquest. And when the Spanish showed up on their shores in 1516, their overall response could be best characterized as,

fuck this shit, you know, they did the fight thing. And they were really good at fighting. They fought like hell and that synergized well with the fact that Uruguay didn't have anything colonizers wanted at that time. There was no like gold or silver there. So the locals were pretty good guerrilla fighters and there wasn't anything valuable. So it didn't really get settled when all, it didn't get colonized

when like all of the areas around it were getting colonized. It took longer. So there were some light attempts by the Europeans to settle there in the 1500s. But the first permanent Spanish settlement there wasn't founded until 1624 at a place called Soriano. About 50 years later, the Portuguese came and built a fort and this sparked an Uruguay rush between Spain and Portugal who started gobbling up chunks of land as fast as they could.

And again, the reasoning seemed to be less. There's stuff here we want and more. The other guys are starting to take stuff here. So we should, we should do that. It's great. So. That went really well for everyone, right? Yeah.

I mean, it goes, it goes the way it goes in all of what's now Latin America. Oh, so terribly. Yeah, terribly. Yeah, terribly. Although I mean, I guess less bad Uruguay kind of gets off better than, well, no, not really. So today the capital of Uruguay is Montevideo, which was founded by the Spanish in the early 1700s

as like a fortress city and trading port. And it was specifically founded because the Portuguese had Buenos Aires. And so the Spanish needed a port near there that could be their port, right? Like that's, again, it's all part of this like cold war kind of, kind of shit going on between Spain and Portugal. And so for the next century or so Uruguay wound up in the crosshairs of a bunch of different spats between colonizing powers. And it wasn't just the Spanish and the Portuguese,

the British occupy Montevideo at some, at one point, like everybody's going through here now, like, right? They get kind of a hundred years off compared to everybody else. But once colonizing comes for Uruguay, it comes hard, you know? So people don't often like being battled over by foreign powers. And by 1811, a guy named Jose Artigas launched a revolution against the Spanish crown, which Uruguay won. Artigas was adamant that the new government should be a federal system with high levels of political autonomy for each region.

This led to a civil war between the people in Buenos Aires and the people in Montevideo. And there's all of this fighting between forces, most of which is like less, it's not quite like states fighting as much as it is. Like it's these Codillos, these warlords, right, who have like, are kind of aligned with one side or the other and control regions, and they're all kind of murdering each other. It's a civil war, but it's between Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires and Montevideo are kind of broadly speaking, it seems to be like the main sides here. And there's a bunch of murdering. And all of the fighting in this period effectively wipes out most of the remaining indigenous people in the region. And so I think a lot of people in Uruguay have some like, like a lot of Latin America have some indigenous ancestry down the line, but like the communities are just wiped out.

And most Uruguayans are actually Spanish and Italian heritage, kind of as a result of this. Like again, we're talking in really broad terms. So when Uruguay fought for its independence, sorry, when it fought for its independence, it wasn't indigenous folks, it was instead kind of like the US Revolution. I mean, I'm sure they considered themselves that, but it was like the children of children of children

of people who had come to colonize. And there was again, some like intermarrying and stuff between communities. But yeah, it was the people who I'm sure at that point considered themselves the indigenous people of Uruguay fighting against the colonial power, but who were also the descendants of, yeah, you know, this is like all a lot of Latin American history, you know. Yeah. So things started to settle down by the turn of the next century.

And in 1903, the fairly new state of Uruguay elected a president named Jose Baze. He's generally just known as Baze, was a socialist, or at least close enough. And the New Republic credits him for building, quote, perhaps the most perfectly rendered socialist society the world has ever seen. Now that's how the writer from the New Republic describes it. I have found actual academic theses on Uruguayan politics,

none of whom say anything close to that. So I don't know, like the writer from the New Republic actually went there, did a lot of work. I'm sure knows more about Uruguay than me, but I'm sure these scholars know more than that person. So I think it's probably fair to say that it's a little overstated to call it the most perfectly rendered socialist society the world's ever seen. But Baze did do a lot of rad shit.

He taxed the landowners and he put the money into pensions for working people. He was an advocate of unions. Healthcare in Uruguay was ruled to be a universal right. And this is like in 1911 or something like that. Higher education was made free and under him the literacy rate hit 95%. And I'm going to quote from the New Republic here, quoting a historian. His idea, Gerardo Queitano, Uruguay's foremost historian of the Baze era, explained to me was that you can't have liberty without equality.

There is no psychic liberty, in other words, for the poor unless they can imagine themselves equal to the privileged. One of the many new laws Baze implemented was to correct perceived imbalances and gave women greater rights to request divorce than their husbands. The logic was that men are more powerful, Queitano said. So to treat men and women equally would result in an outcome that still favored men. So this is like, again, 1903 to 1903. Like this guy's pretty, you keep running into this in Uruguay history.

These dudes were like, well, I didn't expect that from somebody saying this in like 1905. Yeah, people are still struggling with that basic concept. Yeah, like that's incredibly controversial today. And this guy is like, yeah, we're all rubbing dirt into our wounds. And also you can't just treat men and women equally because structural inequality means that men will still have more power, which is like, it's pretty dope. I would say pretty dope. And it's fair to say, like it is, the New Republic overstates things,

but it is, I think, fair to say that like most recently colonized nations and most recently colonized nations in Latin America, because like the 1800s is kind of the period where a lot of them, you know, have their revolutions and get free from the Europeans who had dominated them. Uruguay winds up better off than a lot of places. But the New Republic does give an incomplete idea of Bizet's time and power. I found a master's thesis from Thomas Moore of Texas Tech, which goes into a lot more detail and cites a lot of other scholars

and notes that Bizet's socialist reforms weren't just incomplete. They also carried with them the seeds that would sprout right there violently in a few generations. Quote, No matter how democratic the government appeared to be, there were some serious drawbacks and flaws. The main problem, which plagued the government for years, was that executive responsibility was divided between a president and a national council.

This division of responsibility created no serious problems so long as things ran smoothly and all the council members were in agreement. This was apparent during the prosperous 1920s. Presidents and councils could toss problems back and forth with no damaging effect because of the evidence of economic affluence during that period. It was during the Depression years, 1929 to 1933, that the Collegiato, the national council, demonstrated its incapacity for coping with the rising inflation and employment.

And basically, when there's not factionalism and strong political party disputes, this works okay. When there is, everything grinds off, grinds down to gridlock. And in Uruguay, you have kind of two broad parties and the history of these parties goes back to the Civil War period. We don't need to get into a lot, but it's the Colorado party and the Blanco party. And I think the Colorado party is kind of broadly liberal-ish and the Blanco party is a little more conservative.

Not that they don't like graft onto the Republican and Democratic parties, obviously, right? But that's probably broadly right. So the president at the time, when the Great Depression hits and like shit gets fucked up, is a dude named Gabriel Terra. And he gets pissed off at the fact that council members couldn't come to any solid ideas about how to deal with the economic collapse, right? Like nobody can agree on anything. And so this system that had worked when everyone was rich stops working

when the money stops flowing, which happens a lot in world history. All of his attempts to remedy the situation got shut down by the council because of political divisions. So in 1933, he bypasses the political gridlock in the council by doing a coup d'etat against his own government. He dissolves the National Council and Congress. He censors newspapers and he basically makes himself a dictator for a while there, right? But not quite because he also calls for a new constitution, which is written in 1934

and establishes a new one-man presidency with a Senate, which would be permanently divided in half between the two major parties. I don't know that this, I'd say this helped, but like also by 34, things are starting to get better economically. So it may be that this reduced gridlock somewhat, it may just be that like money starts coming in again. And so all of the problems are lessened because there's money. I don't know, politics are kind of like a relationship in that regard.

Things can work great until you're broke. So the problem though with this new constitution is that it completely enshrines a two-party system into law because like you have to have the Senate split between the two parties. It's a very immovable two-party system. But still, like even though this has got to create problems later, kind of during the late 30s, Uruguay starts doing a lot better. They are in the 30s up to the 40s.

They're the most urbanized and prosperous nation in Latin America. And this is a very urban country. Most of the population lives in cities, like the vast majority. So it's not like a lot of Latin America where you have like this really geographically spread out populations and a lot of them are in the mountains or something like that. Kind of everybody lives in the cities in Uruguay. And it has the lowest level of social inequality in Latin America

and one of the lowest levels of social inequality in the world. Some of this is due to government policy because Bezay does do a lot of like good socialistic stuff. But it's also a lot of it has to do with Uruguayan culture, which I'm not an expert on, but sounds fascinating. One of the cool things about it, it's considered to be like the classic car capital of the world, not because everybody's like collecting old cars,

but because it's considered shameful to not keep a car working. Like to buy in, if you're buying a new car, it should be because your old vehicle cannot be fixed under any circumstances. Or at least this was the culture version of like the Cuba thing. Yeah, exactly, where it's just like, well, no, you keep fixing the car. You don't buy a new car. Like unless your car is just like shattered, you know.

But in this case it's more like chosen instead of just because the car goes. Yes, and there's rich people and there's poor people, but they often, especially throughout most of the 20th century, you couldn't necessarily tell the difference apart from on them based on how they travel or how they dress, because there's this distaste culturally for displaying your wealth. So even if you're super rich,

you kind of dress like a working class person because that's, again, there's just kind of like cultural mores against showing off when you have money. And that contributes to the lessened levels of social inequality in the country. So when World War II comes a knock, an Uruguay winds up producing meat, leather, and a handful of other goods for the allies. And this is one of the things Bazay gets, like the scholars I've been reading criticized Bazay for.

He kind of started this attitude of like, we have this socialist welfare state, and it's going to be entirely supported by providing these products to western countries. And in fact, Jose Mujica, the president of Uruguay, a former president of Uruguay, says that basically the big mistake Uruguay made was turning itself into a lackey of the British Empire and supplying all of their needs and kind of tying its welfare state

and its prosperity to the British Empire continuing to need these supplies, right? But during World War II, it's great to be selling shit to the British and the Americans, right? It's a good time to be selling them shit. They're buying up everything. There's this big economic boom, and it again kind of hides the gridlock of the... that has been put under this like second constitution with a permanent two-party state.

So again, as long as there's cash to blow and cash to keep the welfare stuff going, everything's all right. And in fact, Europeans in the 40s and 50s call Uruguay the Switzerland of South America, which is not accurate and based, you know, on Eurocentrism and shit, but because they're very much doing their own thing. And also not neutral. Not neutral, not primarily a place for rich people to store their money.

You know, like there's a lot of reasons why that's not a good way to describe them. Not surrounded by mountains that they've turned to the hollowed out fortresses. Yeah, it's just because it's nice there compared to... like a lot of places they're having wars and like difficulty, like fighting between the government and Uruguay. There's a lot less conflict socially in this period, so that they're just like,

oh, basically they're saying we didn't fuck up Uruguay as much as we fucked up a lot of places around it. So it's the Switzerland of South America. Yeah. You know who else didn't fuck up Uruguay? And definitely isn't neutral. Yeah. It's around the mountains.

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So, things are going great in Uruguay through the 40s. World War II is great for them and they keep making bank. They kind of transition from serving the British Empire to servicing the American Empire through the Korean War. So we keep buying a shitload of stuff from Uruguay through the Korean War. And then the United States enters a permanent era of peace that was completely unbroken for the next 70 years,

which is, you know, everybody knows about that period. The Pax Americana, where we weren't involved in any wars. But Uruguay... Was that protest movement to try and get us to be involved in wars? Yeah, all those people who wanted us to get into Vietnam. Yeah, John Lennon had a big song about that. Yeah, war is starting, I think, if you want to... Yeah, Merry Christmas. Let's get into a war.

Yeah. So Uruguay stops getting big fat government paychecks after the Korean War and the economy contracts heavily. Like, it kind of goes into free fall. The government's short on money. It can't pay for these social programs they've built. And they don't want to do austerity. So they like burn through the country's currency reserves

and they start taking on debt from international lenders at kind of ruinous rates. This happens to a lot of other places in this period of time. This is kind of like the birth of the kind of global debt system that exists to this day, because a lot of countries get quote-unquote liberated from the colonial powers and then take on loans from those powers to like... Anyway, it's a fucked up period.

A bunch of fucked up shit's happening in this period. And it's happening to Uruguay too. So this is kind of disastrous and it leads to a massive political reorganization. Members of Congress push a plebiscite that the country votes on and this plebiscite reinstitutes the National Council and uses it to replace the presidency. So they get...

Now they don't have a president anymore and they have this National Council and the Senate who are trying to do everything. And even though this is a plebiscite because kind of the social stability is starting to crumble in this period of time, the mid to late 50s, most Uruguayans don't vote for the plebiscite.

So it passes narrowly and it completely changes the political situation. Okay, what's up with the plebiscite? I'm sorry, I was trying to... That's when the government says, hey, we got to make a big change and instead of doing normal political things, everyone in the country gets to vote.

Yay or nay on this thing that we're going to do. It would actually be rad if we could do some stuff that way because things might... We might be able to do some good stuff that everybody agrees on, but we can't seem to pass. But we'll never... There's a bunch of reasons why it's not really possible in the U.S. right now.

And it wasn't great there because this is a plebiscite, but most Uruguayans don't vote. And it's... Anyway, all it does is kind of reinforce the factionalism that's been getting worse and worse and worse throughout the 20th century in Uruguayan politics. And in the late 1950s, there's just massive unemployment

and there's these huge labor protests, hundreds and hundreds of them, as a result of the fact that this welfare state and this kind of very pro-union environment has broken down. A lot of workers aren't unionized at this point and a lot of them are starving basically. And the National Council,

this new government with the National Council proves that they can be as vicious as a government with the president and they crack down horribly on these protesters. Uruguay doesn't have a lot of police or a big military, but they throw them out there to just beat the absolute piss out of people who are protesting. That's kind of where the government immediately goes

and Uruguay has its first mass civil disobedience campaigns. What they couldn't... The more they outnumber people, the more they outnumber people, the less violent they have to be. Some of the most violent police are the ones who... That's the way that they can take control. Yeah, there's not a lot of police in Portland, but they're pretty fucking violent.

So, what's interesting to me is that this National Council government, despite being very split by the two-party system, they still agree, well, yeah, we have to have the police brutalize protesters. But they can't agree on anything... any ways to fix the economy. They can't get that together.

They're just like, well, the poor people are getting organized, so we should fuck them up. So you said this doesn't map to Republicans and Democrats? It does a bit. Only just in this one way, and that everyone agrees. I think I've got this right. I've read scholars who are smarter than me

and this seems to be what they're saying, I never want to be saying too directly, it's just like here, even though there's patterns throughout different countries in history that are similar, because people are all basically the same. People in power agree that you should beat up the people who are trying to stop them from being in power.

That is the thing that maps on to every country ever. Yeah, exactly. It's everything from... Yeah, it's everything. It's every country, it's every government, socialist or capitalist. People are angry, send the cops in to fuck them up. It's the people's stick.

Yeah, it's the people's stick in this case. So in 1950... Well, kind of, because this is also... It's not really the people's stick, it's way too much to call this. It is a country with a lot of socialist policies. It's certainly not like a socialist nation. In 1958, there's another election

and the party that wins is the party who had kind of been slightly in the minority before and had never been the party in power. And they win election by promising and take control over all of the government. By promising to fix a bunch of shit

that they'd been the minority party for years and had thus gained power by saying, look at how much the people in power suck. We'll do it differently. Now they're in power and they have to reform everything. So they try to fix the welfare system, which was going broke, but nothing they do works. And nothing they do stops

the protests and the labor marches. Now, all of this comes to pass in the late 50s as the first generation to truly benefit from Uruguay's massive educational reforms grows into adulthood. Because remember, Bazay had made college free and people after him, too,

they'd been repeated. They built up a really good educational system in the country. And widespread literacy and whatnot. And in the late 50s, the people who were 18 to 30 or so are the first generation who had really taken full advantage of this.

And Uruguay in this period has one of the percentages of individual print publications per capita of anywhere in the world. And they had, for an idea of how big this educational boom was between the 50s and the 70s, the number of students receiving college degrees in Uruguay

increased by 117%. So you've got the economy collapsing, inequality growing, protests in the streets, increasing government crackdowns, and the largest most educated generation in the country's history comes of age, right?

Historically, what happens when all those things go down at the same time? Awesome shit. Yeah. Oh, Margaret, you're going to like some of the graffiti we're about to talk about. So by the late 1960s, you've got this situation where Uruguay is

a decade into the, well, mid-1960s. You've got this early to mid-1960s. You've got a situation where Uruguay is in a decade into economic contraction. Uruguay, but like the left all over the world in the early and mid-60s, is engaged in an increasing series of protests

and revolts. Domestically, Uruguay has this huge population of educated people who've all spent a lot of time reading Marx and Mao and Guevara and Bakunin, and they're watching this two-party system tilt rightwards and get more violent and militarize the police for it. Everything keeps getting

worse, right? A situation no one else in the world can identify with. And all of these trends kind of coalesced as they sometimes do into a single person, or at least they kind of washed through this person. And his, because of unique things about him, it kind of colored

the way that they flooded over the rest of the population. And this guy's name was Raul Sindic. He was an agricultural law student from Montevideo. And in 1963, he decided to do something about the fact that all the sugar cane and beetcutters, like, sugar cane, cutting sugar cane

and sugar beet is like this horrible, really unpleasant job that is necessary to process a cash crop, right? And these people are, despite, you know, how socialized Uruguay is supposed to be, they're not unionized, they're barely getting by on poverty wages, and they're attempting

to unionize and protesting against unfair working conditions. And Raul Sindic is kind of like a middle class, upper class, like, law student, and with a bunch of other law students he tries to help organize these workers. And they gather a bunch of these people together into a march, and they have a

350-mile protest march into Montevideo that ends in a huge fight with the cops. And stuff like this is happening all over the place. Raul is just like one of the organizers who's part of this massive labor, like, labor protest surge at the time.

The fact that the government had used such violence to stop a union drive leads Raul to kind of reconsider, again, he'd been a law student, he was planning to, like, work within the system to change it and seeing the police beat the shit out of all these these people makes him decide that the two-party system is hopeless.

He's like, well, they're both willing to beat us when we try to organize for better conditions, so why would I try to work within that system? It's kind of what Raul thinks. I know, wild, right? That you would come to a reasonable conclusion.

Come to a very reasonable conclusion. So he's not the only guy thinking this way. He's kind of, I think, the most charismatic guy to think this way and the best and probably the best organizer of them. And he starts getting together small numbers of like-minded men and women. This is a very gender

equality group that he starts to build, but they're all kind of agreed about the fact that they should affiliate together and find ways to execute their desire to overthrow the government, right? That's the conversations these people are having. And their numbers start to grow. Protests overtook

Uruguayan streets in the early 1960s and yeah, all of the state violence keeps bringing more and more people to Raul's way of thinking and they start to kind of formalize their attitudes towards like, we should be organizing to overthrow this system. Now

one of the positives about Raul is that he fucking hated explosives. He was like, did not like bombing things. In the group they would eventually use some explosives, but they kind of landed on firearms as the natural tool to seek to execute some of the things that they wanted

to do and overthrow the government. Guns would enable them to carry out a variety of actions and do it in a way that would target people rather than killing like random civilians as much. Yeah, it's slightly more discriminant forms of violence. It always goes well.

It always goes well. Yeah, and he was also very committed to the idea that you don't target people, you target institutions. Like banks, the police and the impotent government that had been squandering their future. So as they increasingly talk and increasing

things get more and more formalized, they eventually decide to like form an organization which they call the Tupamaros. Now this was actually an acknowledgement of the history of indigenous resistance in Latin America. Tupac Amaru was the last living member of the Incan royal family

and he led an insurrection against Spanish rule and was murdered in 1571. So they kind of, as they are starting to form what becomes this insurgent organization, they're kind of looking back to specifically to get even though most of these people are like primarily Spanish and Italian descended

Uruguayans, they're very much identifying with the history of indigenous resistance to colonialism. It's not for nothing that they name their group that. Which is real blurry. You know, it's like, there's a lot

that could be said about that that I don't quite know how to say. And I'm certainly not nearly enough of an expert on like indigenous struggles in Uruguay to like try to make more of, I just think it's worth noting that's who, that's what they're trying to signal. Like that's important

for understanding how they conceive of themselves. Yeah. The first Tupamaros were largely middle-class young white-collar workers and students. Since more than half of the Uruguayan population lived in Montevideo, most successful insurgent groups, and the groups that they're looking

at, because they're directly looking at like Cuba and Shea Guevara and stuff, and like a lot of the successful insurgent groups in Mao that they're they're modeling themselves after are mountain fighters, right? Like, because it's the best place to be if you're an insurgent, it's the mountains, right?

And they're in Switzerland, so. It's why there's Kurds, right? It's because mountains are a good place to fight in. Yeah. But Uruguay, the places where people live at least, there's not really mountains. Everybody lives in the city. More than half the population, like 60, 70%,

live in Montevideo. So these are urban gorillas. And in fact, in Latin America, if I'm not mistaken, they are the very first urban gorilla organization. And so they have to carry out and plan and organize themselves very differently as a result. They carry out their first attack

in 1963 against the Swiss Gun Club in Montevideo, which is like a rich person gun club in the capital. Nobody gets harmed in this attack, but they steal dozens of guns, which they then start. It's always the first move. Yeah, of course, you've got to get guns, right? You find the place with the guns and you

rob it with the one gun you happen to have, or a pointy stick. I think in this case they just kind of burgle it because none of these people were expecting them to break in and steal their Mausers. So they get a shitload of guns from the Swiss Gun Club. They get handed out to people, yada yada.

And from the start, Raoul and other early members of the group knew that there was going to be state repression at some point. The way it's organized is there's a bunch of independent cells that are like five to I think the biggest ones were like a couple of dozen people, but usually like five to fifteen people.

And each cell is supposed to have its own find its own sources of funding, usually robbing stuff, find its own weapons, and be able to completely replicate the entire organization from within itself and also be unaware of the other cells. Although there is like a nine person

coordinating council that's responsible for organizing stuff. So they, you know, they set this up in, and again, they're very consciously patterning themselves off of other insurgent groups at the time. They are not, while a lot of their inspirations are Marxist-Leninists,

they're not really Marxist-Leninists, a lot of their inspirations are anarchists. They're not really anarchists. They're very much not, while there's a lot of theory and ideology and they're reading all of these guys, it's very kind of like a pan-left insurgent movement. Oh, interesting.

Yeah, which is interesting to me. So from 1963 to 1968 their attacks gradually escalate. Again, their first actions get them guns, which they then use to carry out what they call armed propaganda. Now this is a local idea in Uruguay and radicalism that is influenced

by the old anarchist idea of propaganda of the deed, right? In the late 1800s and early 1900s, anarchists are murdering presidents and kings in the hope of inspiring other people to do more of that, so that eventually there's no presidents and kings. I think that's like a fair broad strokes

description of the idea. The idea was like, these people don't know how to read texts, so let's show them what we mean, which actually didn't start out as, didn't actually start out as assassination, to start out as like burning property records and like anyway, sorry. And what's interesting

to me about the Tupemaro, as you said, the propaganda of the deed didn't start out as being based on murdering people. Tupemaro armed propaganda is never focused primarily around killing people. That's aspects of it later on. But from the beginning, they have a very different attitude for what armed propaganda should be.

And I'm going to quote from a write-up by a War is Boring article about their first action, one of their first actions. Quote, one of the group's first actions involved hijacking a truck filled with chickens and turkeys that was headed to a Christmas banquet. Twenty Tupemaros holding revolvers and knives attacked the truck. They called

themselves Junior Jose Artigas Unit, a reference to Uruguayan independence fighter Jose Gervasio Artigas. The Tupemaros left a note that read, revolutionary share in the Christmas of the poor and call upon them to form committees in each district to fight against rising prices. They handed out the turkeys and

chickens in poor neighborhoods of the capital. Yeah, so like that's the armed propaganda. Like we are going to use our guns to rob a banquet for rich people and redistribute the food to the poor, which is great. That's awesome. No notes. Hard to have an issue with that, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So over the next couple of years the Tupemaros engage in ever-grander acts of armed propaganda. They would rob banks and take piles of cash and redistribute it immediately to the poor. They would also rob banks to like fund their operations, but a lot of time they're taking cash and then immediately handing it out to poor people.

And it's like they're robbing specifically often investment banks and saying like, these people have been robbing you, so let's rob them and give it back to you. At one point they heisted a popular casino for foreigners in the resort town of Puente del Este, and they realized after they get away with the bag

that they'd also stolen the employee pool of tips, which they return because they're like, we're not here to fuck with working people. Like your tips are yours. Like we're not taking your fucking tips. Don't worry guys. That's how to be classy. That is classy as hell where they're like, well we wanted to steal from

this casino, but we didn't like, we understand you guys work in there like, you didn't do nothing wrong. Here's your tip money back. And the fundamentally pro-social ends of most Tupamaro crimes endear them to people, right? Like they're extremely popular, obviously.

Their antics make them famous the world over. One time they robbed a fancy nightclub and spray, so like they go into this rich person nightclub in a nice part of Montevideo and like rob it at gunpoint and then they spray paint on the wall everybody dances or nobody dances. Yeah.

Which I fucking love. Yeah, that's just incredibly incredibly cool. Time magazine declares them the Robin Hood gorillas and their motto events they also had a motto that kind of I was saying they're very pan leftist and open-minded towards questions of tendency

and political theory and their motto is words divide us, action unites us. Okay. Like in these guys so far. Yeah. Yeah, they're pretty dope. So one of these gorillas is a young Jose

Mujica. You know, the future president of Uruguay. Pepe, as he's most commonly known, was born on May 20th, 1935 to a poor farming family outside of Montevideo. He was the first born of several brothers. His family was Basque on one side

and Italian on the other. His dad was the foreman for a small farm which went belly up when Jose was five. When he was in third grade at I think age eight his dad dies which throws the family into total poverty. It forces young Pepe to take to the streets selling flowers and working as a bakery to support

his siblings and his mom. He was from an early age a generous person. Walter Pernas Mujica's biographer notes that as a child Jose offered all of his toys to other kids in the neighborhood because he wanted to share everything that he had. He was born about six

years after the death of Bazay, that president who had made all those lovely policies. And even though he grew up during what is generally seen as Uruguay's golden years, his family is dirt poor and he is mired in poverty. So he doesn't have like a rosy lens towards the past. He's very

progressive in part because he comes up during Uruguay's golden age and like yeah, life's fucking hard for poor people. One of the most influential moments in his young life is there's a butchery near his house and the union for it is an anarcho-syndicalist union

and the workers there go on strike and during a negotiation they get angry at their employer so they hold up his trucks at gunpoint and redistribute all the meat in them to the poor. So this is like one of the defining moments of Jose's childhood is being like, oh, that's pretty

you see why this guy becomes a Tupamaro because he's like, oh yeah, that fucking rules. Yeah, that's how I ate one day. Yeah, that's how I ate one day. I know what makes people appreciate an organization is when they help you eat. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty

rad. The action stirred something in him and given the similarities between this and a lot of Tupamaro actions, again, it's easy to see why he winds up where he is. He's also political in kind of the legal sense from an early age. His uncle is a nationalist and part of the national party and he becomes a general

secretary for the youth of that party. There's a passage from the guardian that gives good insight into how his initial foray into legitimate politics led to his radicalization. Quote, as a young man, Mujica went to work for Enrique Aero, a popular left-wing politician, but had a political

epiphany when he met Che Guevara in post-revolutionary Cuba. As much of Latin America fell victim to crises and decline, it was an Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galliano, who penned a new Bible for the continent's left wing, the open veins of Latin America. The human murder by poverty in Latin America

is secret, Galliano wrote in 1971. Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth. Which is a good way to phrase the devastation that poverty wreaks in a

population. Like, the West is nuking us every year, you know, as a result of and our leaders are nuking us every year as a result of, like, starvation. By 1964, after a year of escalating Robin Hood raids by the Tupamaros and several years of escalating

police violence, Jose II decided that his country's political system had left him with no peaceful option. So he tries to get into legitimate politics, but he's very influenced by Che Guevara in particular. And in 1964, he decides, like, fuck it, I'm going to join the gorilla. And he

joins the gorilla. He receives training and he's soon living a split life. By day, he's a humble farmer. And by night, he's a revolutionary, robbing banks and shit. He joined at a period when the Tupamaros were rapidly expanding and growing more comfortable with increasingly extreme acts

of armed propaganda. In 1965, the Tupamaros bombed a local Bayer factory. And their justification for this, so they blow up this factory because Bayer internationally is making gases used by the U.S. military in Vietnam. So it's very much an attack.

And I think it's their first attack where it's not like, we're doing this to protest local things. We're doing this to assert ourselves as part of the international struggle. Yeah. Pretty interesting. And things escalate from there. I want to quote now

from a graduate thesis by Thomas Moore of Texas Tech University. Quote, the Tupamaros suffered their first fatality in December 1966. Two weeks after a robbery at an armory, police located a vehicle that was suspected to have been involved while in pursuit of fierce gun battle erupted

between the police and the occupants of the vehicle. During the battle, the vehicle ran into a tree and the occupants fled on foot. One of the occupants, later identified as Carlos Flores Alvarez, remained behind and covered his comrades' retreat with machine gun fire. The police returned fire and Flores Alvarez was killed.

Inside the vehicle were two more machine guns and two pistols. Less than a week later, another shootout with police cost the life of Mario Rabiano Mendes, another Tupamaro. So, the first couple of years they've got going on, nobody gets killed, everything's pretty

I mean, like violent, like violent in that they're using weapons and stuff, but like, it, it, they avoid things escalating to that level. 66 is when like, now we're getting into gun battles in the cops and people are, and people are dying. And occasionally it's like people who are

bystanders, who are shot by either the Tupamaros over the, or the cops, not intentionally but because they're firing machine guns at each other wildly in a city, you know? Yeah, like car chases are not exactly safe for people on the city. It's not safe for anybody. No. Yeah. And again, they, they avoid as much as

possible direct gun fights with the police. Like this is never something they seek out. They are never like, let's ambush a bunch of cops and kill them kind of group. Like when they ambush police, it's generally to let's take their guns and like, then rob this place and tie them up and stuff. Right.

And this is largely just like, it's not smart to get into a bunch of gun fights with the cops because your guys get killed. Yeah, it's usually yeah, not the most strategic choice that one could make. Yeah. Your guys and your ladies, because kind of like the PKK but much earlier, the Tupamaros

are like very gender equal. And like one of the decisions they come to early on is like, there's no reason women shouldn't be fighting too. So a lot of the people, some of the people who die are like women who are getting into machine gun fights with the cops in this

group. It's a very like egalitarian insurgent organization. We can all get murdered by this. We can all get murdered by the state. Everyone's able to do that. Now, the Tupamaro organizational structure, the fact that there's all these independent cells allows for a tremendous

amount of group autonomy and experimentation. I haven't found much about this, but one of the cells is led by a priest and I'm really interested in like how that went down. Yeah. I mean, like the whole liberation theology thing going on. And that's big in Uruguay. Yeah.

In 1966, a Montevideo theater was putting on a production of a play that necessitated military uniforms and rifles for some of the actors. Because it's good PR, the military's like, yeah, we'll loan you guys outfits and we'll give you some Mauser rifles. And so they're just being like stored at this theater. And so one day before

the play, a group of pistol armed Tupamaros like busts in and steals all the guns and the uniforms, then they dress up as soldiers and they rob a bank making off 301,000 pesos. Which is fucking very funny. Yeah. I hope it was somebody who worked at the theater or tipped

him off. I think it was. I believe it was an employee at the theater who was like a Tupamaro or sympathetic who like tells them there's this stuff here. Yeah. Who was probably like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, give us some Mausers. The show would be more authentic if you give us real ones. Yeah.

Machine guns, real. A lot of ammunition for set dressing. Yeah. In 1967, the government struck back rounding up several dozen Tupamaros and building what they thought was an accurate picture of the group's membership. So

this big bank rate like inspired like the government does a huge crackdown. They actually catch and arrest a bunch of Tupamaros and they feel like, oh, we know everyone, we know everything now. We've got like this whole organization dead to rights. Let's roll them up.

And they arrest a bunch of people and think that they've destroyed the organization. And so they announce in the press that they've dealt a mortal blow to the Tupamaros. Now, this was a mistake for the state because they actually had not. And the Tupamaro proved that with the launch

of their next major operation, the incredibly named Plan Satan. Wow. I hope it was the priest who came up with it. Yeah, I hope it's the fucking priest. Yeah. So as their war

had escalated, a number of gorillas had suggested they start assassinating government officials in the street. A decision was made. From Plan Satan. Well, that's not what Plan Satan is because they don't, they do eventually do that. They don't start doing that because they're like, well, that might backfire. Maybe like

they're never. So that's not that operation. It just starts to escalate towards it does because they decide instead of assassinating people, they're going to carry out a campaign of kidnapping prominent business leaders and politicians and then ransoming them back to fund the revolution.

And also this will this will show that the state is ineffective, right? Like you can't even stop us from kidnapping government ministers. Like clearly you're not capable of running this country, right? That's like the big idea behind this is like we will show the people that the state is not capable

of governing them by proving how impudent it is. That's kind of their like the propaganda justification of this. I mean, that could also backfire really easily. It does. We need the state because people are running around kidnapping people.

Yeah, it doesn't quite. I mean, we'll talk about there's a lot of debate over the degree to which this backfires. But Pepe, our future Uruguayan president is intimately involved in Plan Satan. And I'm going to quote from the Guardian here. I love that someone managed to get elected

after being part of Plan Satan. Yeah, a guy who was part of Plan Satan get selected president. It's it is. It's pretty dope. It's it's extremely dope. Yeah. So from the Guardian quote on a spring day in 1969,

Manus was at home with his sister Beatrice when the future president burst out of the lift outside of their penthouse in Montevideo with a pistol in his hand. Turn around, shut your mouth, and keep your hands above your head, he barked. Manus immediately recognized the pinched eyes and thick wavy brown hair of one of the

most notorious members of the daring violent Tupamaro guerrillas. After his initial sense of panic subsided, he recalled, he felt strangely calm. I remember telling the young gunman who was with him not to worry that I wasn't going to do anything. The 62-year-old travel agent told me when we met in his favorite Montevideo bookshop,

a short distance from the murky waters of the immense River Plate, his sister who suffered from polio and used a wheelchair was taken off to another room. Don't worry, Muzika told her. You'll be fine. This has nothing to do with you. And yeah, Manus' stepfather, Jose Pedro Purpurra, was a notorious judge

with ties to Uruguay's far right and a stock of pistols. After the gang had left, taking documents and weapons, Manis told his relatives that he was only upset that the Tupamaros had stolen a typewriter he used for his schoolwork. The following day, the phone rang. It is us, the same people from yesterday,

a voice said. He suddenly felt scared again. Somehow, they knew about the typewriter. If he wanted it back, the voice told him, he could find it in the lobby of a nearby building. Sure enough, it was there, he said. They had left a typed message in it for my stepfather. Careful, doctor. It read, we are watching you.

It's fucking... Hey, kids, we know this isn't your fault, but we got to take your stepdad's guns. Oh, we stole your typewriter. We'll give it to you back, but we're also going to send a threat for your stepdad. It's pretty neat, pretty fun stuff. Yeah, I'm glad they kept it classy longer.

They keep it very classy. Because most groups start a little classy and get real bad real quick. We can debate. I don't think they ever get real bad. They do get much more violent, and they do get comfortable assassinating people. You can feel about that the way that you want. They are never like the IRA,

where they're setting off bombs and bars filled with just random people. They do not do that kind of shit. There are civilians who get killed as a result of their actions, never intentionally more. It's not that we're not going to set off a bomb, and it kills people, and we're fine with that,

but we are going to get into gunfights with the cops sometimes, and people will die as a result of that. Right, but they don't plan the people's death. They do not plan the people's death. I don't want to make an ethical... No. There's an ethical line somewhere,

and I don't know where to draw that kind of line. My ethical line, I guess, is they do not, as far as I've read, they do not target groups of civilians for murder in order to create fear. That's not a thing that they do. Which is good. People shouldn't do that. Which is good. I think that's a bad thing to do.

I think it is worth stopping people who do that. Yeah, for all of my enjoyment of IRA music, I think bombing random bars is bad behavior. No, sir. Some other people have done similar, anyway. A lot of people have done similar things. Yeah, and it's never a good thing.

I don't like... I call them terrorists, because they are, but there's a spectrum of things that you can do as terrorists, and they are not like, let's set off a suicide bomb in the middle of a packed market.

That's not these dudes. And ladies. Oh, yeah. You know who does set off bombs? Robert? No. Savings bombs? Yeah, savings bombs. Bombs of financial... Margaret, with the line!

Responsibility. Those kind of bombs. The best kind of bombs. Are products and services. And on that one, my friend. Yeah, no, that was much better. During the summer of 2020,

some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

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At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set

date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit

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on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. And I'm going to continue to try to pronounce Jose Mujica's name right. I keep needing to listen to the pronunciation because I keep drifting as I read it.

But Jose Mujica was part of some of the more creative acts of propaganda that the Tupamarros breached out into. And I'm going to quote from that same article, the Guardian article. In the summer of 1969, a police officer knocked on the door

of a small Montevideo investment bank which was partially owned by a government minister. The employees let him in only to discover he was a Tupamarros. Several other gorillas followed. They took the equivalent of $100,000 in today's money, but also demanded the bank's account ledgers. One of the employees,

Jose Mujica was doing illegal currency deals. Her twin sister, Maria Elia, was one of the gorillas who conducted the raid. The Tupamarros dropped off the ledgers at the home of a public prosecutor, and some of those involved in the illegal trading were subsequently jailed. That's fucking awesome.

We're going to rob this bank to get evidence of corruption in government, and then we will hand that over to a prosecutor. And again, you see, this is, they are such a creative political group that they're like, we are trying to overthrow the state.

We're also not against recognizing, oh, this prosecutor is an honest man. We'll give him information that will reduce corruption and stuff, because that's also good. They're very pragmatic and willing to embrace a real diversity of tactics. They're doing a lot of different shit.

And also very like, I think that shows the sort of non-ideological nature, because I have a hard time coming up with someone with almost any isms, who would do that. Do that, yeah. But they're very much, they're very good at pivoting.

And this is the thing throughout, they're up to the modern point. They're really good at just kind of flowing, which I think is why they have the impact that they do. That said, 1969 was what you might call the last good year for the Tupamarros, because after this point, things get a lot less fun and creative

and a lot more violent and fucked up and scary, which is inevitable when you are trying to overthrow a government using force, right? Like that is every single one of these stories. Things come to a head first near the end of 1969, when the Tupamarros execute a raid

on a town called Pondo, which is like a part, I think it's like, it's kind of a neighborhood of, it's called a town, it's kind of like, I think it's more of a town at this point. It's now, I often hear it referred to as like a part of Montevideo, but it's like a, it's high income, right? It's an area in this urban sprawl

where people with a lot more money live. And on October 8th, the Tupamarros carry out their largest action ever, more than 100 guerrillas, a symbol inside Pondo. And in order to all get together and into position without being noticed, a lot of them dress in a costume

as members of a funeral entourage in order to elude suspicion. Once the signal was, once they're in Pondo, groups of five to 10 guerrillas assemble outside a series of targets. And at one o'clock, a signal is given, they identify themselves in the event of a gunfight and they carry out simultaneous attacks

on the police commissary, the police station, the fire department and two local banks. And again, they never, their goal is never to get into gunfight. So these are not, they're not just like coming and shooting to murder people. There's almost no resistance and so nobody gets killed initially, like they're just taking guns,

tying up people, you know, like they're there to raid and rob and take shit. They're not attempting to murder everybody. And another group, one of the groups is the bank armed with machine guns and pistols. And while two Tupamaros remove money from the bank, a third hands out leaflets to civilians at the bank

explaining why they're taking the money and what they're going to do with it. Which is, again, awesome. So everything works out. The initial stage of this raid goes great. They steal millions of pesos. But as they're exfiltrating, they've got like a caravan of vehicles leaving,

the police catch up basically. And there's a series of gunfights, and like the founder of the two, Raul gets away with the money, but like a group of Tupamaros get their vehicle stopped and like have a big gunfight with the cops. Three Tupamaros get killed and 20 get captured.

So it's a very like pyrrhic victory, right? Yeah, and it things get a lot uglier for the Tupamaros after this point. If they're panning out the flyer, someone designed it and so somewhere, there's someone who went to school for graphic design who's like, this is my contribution.

I'm going to make the flyers. I'm really excited about that person. I hope that person made it through the entire thing, totally unscathed. Her grandkids are like, you wouldn't believe what grandma used to do. Yeah, she was in that gunfight with the cops. Yeah.

She made the flyers. So everything gets uglier though after this point. Now, for their part in terms of things getting uglier, the Tupamaros start carrying out target assassinations of some government officials and police officials at this point. And for its part, the government cracks down

by going ultra authoritarian. And I think the Tupamaros would argue we started assassinating people when the government started torturing our people, right? I think the police would say that like the Tupamaros were so violent that like we had to use these radical measures. I think the torture comes first.

From what I can read, the Tupamaros are being tortured by the time they start carrying out assassinations. And the government also cracks down by restricting freedom of speech. So the news media is forbidden to refer to the Tupamaros by name. And in order to get around this,

the Tupamaros set up a radio transmitter in Montevideo to hijack government-run radio channels and broadcast propaganda about their actions. Which is again... How popular are they during all this? Quite. We'll talk about that in a bit. But that's part of why they get away with it

is most of the people seem to be pretty supportive of this. They're extremely popular. In July 1970, the Tupamaros made what would prove to be one of their worst strategic decisions. They kidnapped Dan Mitrion, an American citizen,

which is always a dicey thing to do, especially for a leftist movement in 1970s Latin America. Yeah. Now, one source I found described Dan Mitrion as quote, an American policeman on loan to the Uruguayan security forces.

I've also heard him described as an FBI agent working with him. When you hear an American policeman on loan to the Uruguayan security forces, what do you assume was his actual employer? The CIA. Yeah! It's the CIA! And Dan Mitrion's job

is to teach people how to do torture. He had previously consulted for the Brazilian government and his specialties like electrocution and slow strangulation. I feel really good about that having chosen this technique. I can see how it wasn't a strategic plan. It's not a good strategic move. Morally.

If your job is to travel to different countries and teach them how to strangle people, I don't think you getting kidnapped is bad. That is my moral line. Yeah. And I'm going to quote from a write-up by warisboring here.

While torture was part of the government's policy, prival to Mitrion's arrival, he is often credited with making it widespread among the Uruguayan police force and extolling the value of applying quote, and this is Dan, the precise pain and the precise place and the precise amount for the desired effect.

He was known in particular for his expertise in applying as much electrical shock as possible to the genitals without causing death and for pioneering the use of thin wire that could be placed between the teeth to intensify pain during electrocution. So a cool dude, Dan. He is probably not just the fodder of

every trashy spy movie ever. You know that this guy has black gloves that are very tight. And some weird sexual hang-ups. Probably a serial killer back in the US. Yeah. And very particular about where everything

in the apartment goes. So the Tupamarros responded to the escalation of violence and kind and specifically targeted Mitrion. They kidnapped the CIA agent in July of 1970. The Tupamarros rarely killed anyone and did not have a reputation for killing those they kidnapped. Instead, they would

exchange them for cash ransoms or release of imprisoned Tupamarros. However, with the government assault on them proving more effective, several leaders of the movement were killed or arrested while Mitrion was being held in the Tupamarros' underground people's prison. When the deadline for Mitrion's ransom came

and went, the new Tupamarros leadership was uncertain of how to respond. They executed him. And I should note, there are allegations, at least. I don't know how credible... I haven't found a lot of detail on this. There are allegations that the people's prison tortures folks as well. Probably.

I don't know, again, there are also allegations from, in a lot of cases, guys doing torture. So like, I don't know, but probably, right? They're probably doing some of that themselves. Which, you know, nobody's a good guy when it comes time to be a war.

There's a better guy, and I think the people who are not being helped by the traveling electrocute your testicles, dude, are probably the better people in this situation. People who kidnap the strangler are often better than the strangler. Yeah, I would say better than the strangler,

even though, as things get brutal, perhaps they do some strangling themselves. Or at least, like, holding people in solitary confinement and shit. Look, I'm sure the people's prison isn't nice either, you know? So they execute Dan. Which, again,

I don't have a moral problem with that, if your job is to hook up electrodes to people's testicles and like torture her, you're torturing, like, kill you. I don't have a moral issue with that, but it's not a great I don't think it's a good idea for them

for a couple of reasons. Like, it doesn't work. It didn't go well, I guess. It doesn't go well. A lot of the sources you'll find, especially like the Guardian, kind of more liberal sources will say that this is what leads to a loss of public support. And they often are kind of sources that leave out the fact that Dan tortured people for the CIA, the ones

that are like, this was like a bad move for them. I don't know how badly this hurts them locally. I don't know how much this is actually an unpopular move. We get one hint in that in 1972 there's an Uruguayan Gallup poll. And this is two years or so after they kill Dan.

And after two more years of, because the violence escalates after they kill Dan. And this 1972 poll finds that there's still widespread support for the guerrillas, even though the majority of Uruguayans want nonviolent resolution to their political yields. So most Uruguayans do not

support violent revolution, but they are also broadly feel fondly towards the Tupamarros, right? In a lot of cases because the government is increasingly militarizing, they're like carrying out these huge dragnets that impact people's lives. So like, the Tupamarros rob a bank

and that doesn't really fuck with people living in the area, but then the police set up a huge dragnet and that fucks up things for everybody. And so like, they're angry at the cops more so than the Tupamarros. I don't know that killing Dan hurt the Tupamarros with Uruguayans, but

it's not good for another reason, which is that now a CIA agent has been killed. And so the United States is like, well, that's all the justification we needed to get way more involved in this shit. So the US accelerates their support of the

increasingly right wing Uruguayan government. The CIA funnels money and equipment in and they funnel all of their money and equipment in manpower through one of their favorite vehicles, the US Agency for International Development or USAID. Like that is how all of their like, here's how to torture people guys

get like ledgered out as like, this is part of an aid package. I want to quote from a paper called Racking the Tupamarros by Lucas Hall of Union College. The United States began to offer its assistance in the form of military aid to the Uruguayan government throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s throughout the civic military

dictatorship. Although the United States initially provided military aid in order to squash the Tupamarros, eventually it provided aid in order to suppress the left in general. For example, the Uruguayan government first declared a state of siege government limitation on personal freedom in 1963 following a worker strike

at an electric company in Montevideo and thereafter in 1965, 1967, 68 and 69 in response to various protests organized by laborers or insurgent activities perpetrated by the Tupamarros. Such governmental decrees intensified conflicts among laborers, guerrilla movements

like the Tupamarros and the increasingly authoritarian government. Moreover, following the 1966 elections Uruguay reabandoned the National Council and reinstituted the presidential system which reinforced executive power following the death of the newly elected Colorado president and military general

Oscar Diego Gastido pose a year later, Gastido's vice president George Pacheco Areco assumed the presidency and used his executive power to pursue and defeat the Tupamarros. In 1971 he decreed that the armed forces would intervene in the battle against

the military, against the guerrilla movements. So that's kind of like the political and this is one of the points a lot of people will say that the Tupamarros brought on the dictatorship that is coming because of their resistance and as kind of that passage points out, they were

a part of the process by which the state became increasingly dictatorial but a lot of the state's dictatorial decrees are in response to just workers protests that are not organized by the Tupamarros because other stuff is happening in the left here. And I think that like when

primarily western sources but although not entirely there are some Uruguay ins will blame them for it too but when I think primarily when like western sources say well we got the dictatorship because of the Tupamarros they're ignoring the fact that the dictatorship came in

and was backed by the US as part of a broad attempt to stop all left-wing organizing in the country including all of these like workers movements and the Tupamarros because they were the guerrilla movement are a really convenient group to blame because kind of liberals always like to blame the people who are accepting

violence even though like well they also instituted states of emergency because they were fucking protests like don't put this all on the Tupamarros. It's a very very classic means by which to try and get the left to eat itself.

Yes and it doesn't really work in Uruguay which is interesting but we're getting to that so Areco the president who like brings the military in to fight the Tupamarros isn't quite a dictator although Uruguayans make quibble with that like I don't think he doesn't he's not

quite as far as the next guy is what I'll say How did the guy die in the in the reading you just did? I don't I don't I think it was natural causes though. Oh okay. I'm trying to figure out if you got it. I don't think so. Yeah so Areco Was it the strangler?

He preps the path for dictatorship and he kind of ushers Uruguay into the dictatorship that's coming. He mentioned a few times that the Tupamarros escalated their violence in response to state violence and a hall credits this less with desperation than to the again the fact that this is a very pragmatic group so the Tupamarros

are like let's try not killing people and then when it escalates to a more violent more gunfighting thing they're like well let's become a straight up insurgent group you know like they're very willing to kind of like weave with things and so they pivot because they don't have a hard and fast ideology

they're kind of happy to be mostly nonviolent or happy to be mostly violent depending on like what the situation calls for and in the early 70s when the military gets and they're like well now it's time to kill more people and not a lot of people I think about 302 Tupamarros get

killed and they kill about 50 people so as insurgent movements go again these guys are not like we're not bombing military convoys and stuff you know I'm sure they wanted they could have had a more closer parity

if they if they wanted to yes but this doesn't work in any case violence escalates and the government's much better at doing violence right the Tupamarros yeah like if you're going I think it is this situation we're like if you're gonna do that

they will probably be better than you at it it's very rarely that guerrilla movement takes on the entire apparatus of the state and wins it happens and usually they have to do some very ugly shit in order to make that work

and have some other things break their way and have a lot of foreign aid and all this stuff anyway whatever it does not work here President Pacheco grows increasingly dictatorial everybody knows shit is bad and again there's a lot of left-wing organizing outside of the Tupamarros critical of the Tupamarros there's the what

a lot of scholars I read will call the legal left in Uruguay who has this kind of mixed relationship where they appreciate them they may agree with overall goals but not the means and kind of as the Uruguay hits this point where like the

military has been brought in we can all see that a dictatorship is coming the whole left kind of unifies behind this idea of like well let's try one last legal push to stop this let's see if there is a way within the democratic system to to avoid

this before it becomes a trade-up dictatorship and so all these folks on the legal left form an organization called the Frente Amplio which means broad front and it's a popular front coalition right we've talked about this in the behind the insurrections episodes and like happens in Spain happens in France

happens in a bunch of places so they build a popular front coalition of left parties and groups aimed at resisting the authoritarian creep under Pacheco Reco by 1971 dozens of Tupamarros have been killed hundreds tortured and the guerrilla organization agrees to sit down

with the Frente Amplio with the legal left and work together in this effort to try and legally stop a dictatorship the Tupamarros announce a sort of ceasefire for the 1971 elections like we're not going to do insurgents shit

we're gonna try to do electoral shit again they're good at pivoting right and they form a political wing the March 26th movement or 26M which declares support for the Frente Amplio so the Tupamarros are like hey we're not gonna do any attacks right now

we formed a political organization and we have joined this broad front coalition of left wing political parties this was a really difficult thing to pull off because again Uruguay has a two-party system at least as fucked up as ours is currently it is hard

and they're trying to make a third party right like they're not unified with kind of the vaguely liberal party they are trying to do their own thing right and it's it's a significant attempt right like it is not an easy thing to pull off quote from Lucas Hall's

article the Tupamarros beyond expressing their support for the party through the formation of the 26M humbled themselves in order to further strengthen the Frente's electoral position amid rumors of a military coup for example the Tupamarros participated with former members of the armed forces

and other members of the security apparatus in plan Contra Golpe a movement intended to prevent the onset of authoritarian dictatorship however despite such efforts the Frente Amplio failed to gain the support needed to topple the traditional parties however credible its written

program and general principles might have been for a large sector of the citizenry the support of the Tupamarros party positioned the Frente Amplio as an extremist option as a result it was especially difficult for the Frente to win the support of voters on the country side even that of voters outside

Montevideo nonetheless the results of the elections were surprising first although he received the most votes the constitution prevented President Pacheco from serving a second term and the electoral effort to amend that law was disapproved as a result Pacheco's hand picked suppressor Juan Maria

Bordeberry Arrosina won the presidency second although it only won 18% of the vote the Frente Amplio won 30% of the vote in Montevideo in other words nearly a fifth of the total population and a third of the population of Montevideo was disaffected with the current political system

although the other four fifths of the population voted for the traditional parties this figure represents the first time in Uruguay's electoral history that a non-traditional party garnered considerable support from a significant portion of the population suggesting that at least in the city the Tupamarros armed propaganda campaign

had been successful in influencing all sides of the left to challenge the established order and this is interesting to me because again a lot of the non-scholarly sources who are kind of like journalists summarizing the history will say that like

they led to the failure of the left electorally and the left wasn't going to win anyway some academics at least I'm not trying to claim that what's in this Lucas Hall article although he does cite a number of Uruguayan academics

I'm not trying to say that this is the absolute consensus but there is a substantial academic argument that actually the Tupamarros armed propaganda campaign is why for the first time ever the left as a third party gains a really significant chunk of the vote that's an argument you can make

that said time had run out the 1971 election was sadly their last attempt to their last chance to forestall a dictatorship the Frente Amplio did succeed in destroying the two-party system in Uruguay but the election of 1971 destroyed democracy

President Borda Berry seized total power after taking office although he himself was more or less just a stand-in for the military this is not really like a fascist thing where like he's taking power he is the guy the military has being the face of the military dictatorship

right that's kind of how it works in Uruguay it's less like about the individual and more that like and not that like he's not part of the decision-making apparatus but he's like one of a bunch of guys making this military dictatorship be a thing and from what I can tell the military's

attitude is like well we let you civilians try to get things under control it's time for like the military to fuck shit up for everybody because that'll be better in spoilers it's not it's real bad dictatorship a lot of kind of casual sources again like the

we'll blame the two-pomaros for the onset of dictatorship I'm not gonna say they didn't have any like obviously they are a major part of Uruguayan politics as the country descends into a dictatorship of course they had a role in what happened right I think saying that because of the two-pomaros Uruguay gets a dictatorship number one

it ignores that Uruguay falls to dictatorship alongside Chile, Argentina El Salvador, Guatemala like a bunch of other countries all of whom the US is doing the same shit they're doing it to Uruguay and and none of whom have two-pomaros themselves so I and when you

knock everyone off the fence when you polarize society you're like lining up for a fight and you're even gonna win or lose it's not inherently like it's not necessarily the fault of the people who knock everyone off the fence no they are again part of this process it certainly would be unreasonable

say they had nothing to do with the dictatorship right like they're a huge factor in Uruguay and politics but also the dictatorship comes into power in part because the government is trying to crack down on like unions and labor organizing and stuff out that's not people pulling guns

that's a big chunk of what happens and yeah that is where we're gonna end part one because thankfully Margaret unlike a lot of unfortunately a lot of Latin American history we're not talking about like and then they get crushed and right-wing governments take power for the next 60 years

and the US trains their security forces over and over again and now they're burning down the Emma like whatever like this is not that story it does not have that ending but we'll get to that it's a Christmas miracle it is a Christmas miracle Margaret that's what everybody says I'm gonna

go get my Uruguay tree tomorrow you got any plug-ables to plug yes I do I have a new book out it was actually a book that's been out for a while but it's been re-released with a new publisher it's called a country of ghosts and it's my

attempt to answer the question of people always ask well we know what you anarchists are against what are you for and so I tried to write a book that's fiction because I don't read a lot of theory and yeah and that's

it just came out a couple weeks ago I think that's my main plug-able I'm also on the internet it's good as hell and very relevant to the story we're telling here although more mountains less urban

it's the Switzerland comparison yeah it is kind of a Switzerland sort of deal but yeah I reckon I tore through it in a long weekend day last weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it and it's also

kudos to AK on this one of the books that has like the little flaps on the inside of the cover so that you can march without folding the pages over which I really appreciate I was really excited it's my first yeah it's my first book with french flaps and it's my first book with a painted fantasy

cover on the cover you have such a good cover yeah I'm so excited about it and then so now I need to write a book with a dragon you do you need to write a sequel to this book with a dragon but oh that's actually okay anyway um all right well

you can find me nowhere because I'm a gray ghost baby that's the end of the episode Sophie okay hello world I'm Robert and I'm doing a live stream with my good friend prop if you want to listen to that

Sophie won't let me curse so this ad isn't very entertaining but it's going to be February 17th at 6pm PST and you can find it at momenthouse.com slash behind the bastards allegedly yeah this is a you know

a good holiday gift or allegedly or not a holiday gift or allegedly we'll be doing a behind the bastards and in a little Q&A show up be there if you want to where can people find that again Robert momenthouse.com

slash behind the bastards alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protest it involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse

and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns but are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts

I'm Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass

and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days

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