The Rest Is History - 261: Uruguay: The Tupamaros

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

In 1963, with the influence of the Cuban Revolution strong in South America, the left wing guerrilla group the Tupamaros emerged. Listen to tales of kidnappings, shootings, imprisonment and torture in the Tupamaros' quest for political power. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the Dominic, is I think the country I probably know least about, Uruguay. Uruguay, yes. Even Costa Rica I knew about the kind of, you know, the dinosaur element, the Jurassic World element, but Uruguay, I don't really know anything about it at all. So I'm looking forward to being educated. Excellent, excellent. Well, we'll have a little potted history of Uruguay later in this podcast. Uruguay, of course, the country that won the very first World Cup in 1930, as you'll remember if you listen to our podcast about the history of the World Cup.

So I'm not even sure where it is. I know it's Latin America somewhere, South America somewhere. North, South America? Is it? I have a kind of weird blank spot over Uruguay. So Uruguay is nestled between Argentina and Brazil. It is on the east bank of the river Uruguay. And it is across the bay of the river Plate from Buenos Aires.

Okay. You see, I thought it was opposite the Caribbean. I'm obviously getting... No, no, no, no. Yeah. I'm parading my ignorance. I will shut up from now on. Uruguay is one of the most European.

And a lot of people would say the most European of all South American countries. But Tom, we were meant to start with this sort of children's encyclopedia, just sort of standard discussion. Because I wanted to start like a James Bond film with a free creditcredit sequence. How have you haven't ruined it?

So, listeners, clear your minds. The camera focuses in, and we find ourselves in the suburb of Positos in the city of Montevideo, this great port on the coast of the south atlantic and uh the british ambassador jeffrey jackson is saying goodbye to his wife the date is the 8th of january 1971 so you can picture the scene he's slightly flared trousers no doubt yeah his his wife is in the bath um so she just calls out to him you know have a nice day darling or whatever or whatever. He says, I'm off now. I've got a meeting at the embassy in Montevideo, in the central town. The office will ring when I'm coming home for lunch. So he goes downstairs out of his house.

His driver is there with his Daimler. The ambassador gets into his Daimler and he's looking at his watch, Tom, because he's worried that he's got an appointment with a visiting British businessman at 10.15. So they have to hurry. So they're making their way through the streets of Montevideo, this very European looking city in South America. They turn into a particularly narrow street. And at that point, as luck would have it, a red van pulls out and bumps into them. And, you know, Jeffrey Jackson in the back is obviously furious.

This is going to slow him down for his meeting. His driver gets out for a moment to swap details with the driver of the red van. And Tom, that was his mistake. Because at that moment, a group of men leap out from the shadows. They jump into the car, pull open the doors. They pull out their pistols, aim them at Jeffrey Jackson. The next thing he knows, they are driving off, his driver left behind. They're herring off through the streets of Montevideo. And eventually they stop. He doesn't know where

they are. They drag him out and throw him into another van, a blue van this time. One of them rips off the sleeve of Jeffrey Jackson's suit, rolls up his shirt, jabs in a syringe as they inject him with jugs. His head is swimming, but he doesn't pass out they put they say tie a handkerchief over his eyes so he's very groggy he's half aware of where he is he's conscious that they're moving again off they go sort of um rocking over potholes and things and eventually he's conscious of them stopping and stuff going on around the van. And then the door is opened. He's still blindfolded. They drag him out.

And then they pull off the handkerchief. And he finds himself in an underground basement. Here's Tom, a prisoner of the Tuber Maros. What was that music? That was Pampipes. That was South American Pampipes. I thought it was good to have a music... I thought it was good to have... I mean...

To have a music... So that wasn't what they actually played? That's... This is... No, they didn't play any music at all. They were gorillas. They were urban gorillas. So they didn't even play...

Oh! No, that's how the film starts. Oh, I see. I told you it was a James Bond-style opening. Oh, I see. And then it cuts from that. Somebody says to him... That's not very James Bond.

I think somebody would say to him, you're a prisoner of the tuba malos. And then cue music. It would be much more Ennio Morricone. Is that what Ennio Morricone does? That's exactly what he is. It wouldn't pan pipes for a guy who's just been kidnapped. Well, anyway, listen, let's do the history behind this.

I like your idea of infusing the podcast with music. I think we should do that more often. Yes, it's a brilliant idea. I'm sure no one has thought of that before. Of course they haven't. So, okay, Uruguay, you want a bit of a backstory on all this. What on earth is going on? So the subject of today's podcast is this urban guerrilla group called the Tupamanros

and their impact on Uruguayan history. But first of all, as you said before we started, we really do need a sense of Uruguayan history and what's going on. So by South American standards, Uruguay is very, very small. It's nestled on the east bank of the river Uruguay, which basically flows out from the interior of Brazil all the way down to the Atlantic. And the port of Montevideo was founded by the Spanish as part of their competition with Portugal. So it's across, and it's got a kind of sister port, a rival, which is Buenos Aires.

So the rivalry between Buenos Aires and Montevideo is incredibly intense. So, I mean, this is a World Cup podcast, and that first World Cup final, 1930, Uray and argentina i mean it's to some sense that's a final really between montevideo and uh and river plate now why was it why does this exist at all why isn't it just part of argentina well the one reason is that um when the spanish empire collapsed at the end of the napoleonic wars the port of Montevideo was seized by Portuguese Brazil. And actually, there was a war between the Empire of Brazil and the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata, which became Argentina, for control of Montevideo. It's called the Cis-Platine War.

And it was actually the British, as always, meddling in South American affairs. They basically wanted a rival to Buenos Aires that they kind of had a controlling interest in. The British negotiator who had the splendid name Lord John Ponsonby, he wrote privately, he said, the interest and security of British commerce will be greatly promoted in a state in which the governors cultivate a friendship with England.

The Eastern Strip, so this is the eastern sort of bank of the river by which he means Uruguay, contains the key to La Plata and to South America. And we must perpetuate a geographical division of states that benefits England. So this is another reason why Britain is so popular with Argentina, presumably. Exactly, yes. So basically what they do is they create this or what's called the oriental republic of uruguay oriental as on the eastern side yes the eastern side it's a buffer state between brazil and portuguese brazil on the one hand and the united provinces which become argentina on the other the uruguay's history after that so effectively what you've got is one port monte video and then it's it's hinter. So it's a very small country.

Its population throughout the 19th century was less than a million. It fought wars against its neighbors from time to time. It was dominated by a single party, the Colorado Party. And the big thing that transformed it was immigration. So immigration from Spain and from Italy. There's virtually no indigenous population there now whatsoever. So it's all Spanish and Italian immigrants. So in other words, it's like a little Argentina that is very conscious that it's not Argentina. The thing with Uruguay is that rather like Argentina,

it seemed at the beginning of the 20th century to be set fair for an absolutely splendid future. So it's this port and then farming land around it, basically. It's rich. It exports loads of wool and loads of meat. There's high price, high world prices for these things. So by the interwar years, it has paid for tons of schools and hospitals. It's got a very advanced welfare state. It has done things like it has abolished the death penalty. It has instituted women's suffrage. So when it wins the World Cup in 1930, as always in sporting history, this is actually, the sporting success is a reflection of economic success. So people often think it's a bit weird

that a country as small as Uruguay wins that first world cup. It's not weird at all. It wins it because it's a very, very successful country. The highest per capita income in Latin America, very complicated social welfare system. People call it the Switzerland of the Americas. So it's a sort of haven of stability. It's a very small army, small police force. There's very little crime. Everything is great. But then after World War II, things start to go wrong, as they do across Latin America more generally. So I said that they exported wool and meat.

Both of the prices for those things go into very steep decline. Uruguay is struggling to make ends meet to support its welfare system. Inflation goes through the roof. You get mass unemployment becoming a factor. to make ends meet to support its welfare system. Inflation goes through the roof, you get mass unemployment becoming a factor, the peso, the currency has to be devalued, and you start getting people writing about this intense poverty as people feel that they're missing out and that they're not getting the rewards that they expected. So it's a Uruguayan writer called Eduardo Galeano, who wrote a book that you can still see. You know, you go into a Wollaston's to the Latin American history section and they will have it.

It's called The Open Veins of Latin America. It's seen as a classic of Latin American political historical writing. And Galeano, it's a sort of left wing account of how Latin America has been betrayed by world capitalism. And he wrote in 1971, this gives you a sense of the sort of very fevered tone of the conversation. The human murder by poverty in Latin America is a secret. Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth. And what Galeano was writing reflected what a lot of young Uruguayans thought.

They thought that basically their dream had been taken away from them and that they were condemned to life with kind of inflation and unemployment and all of these kinds of things. Thank God that doesn't happen here. Exactly. And there's no, yes, exactly. Well, will we get a Tupper Maros of our own? I don't know.

So one of these people who thinks this is a guy called Raoul Sendik. So his father was a peasant outside Montevideo. He's that classic example, which you see time and time again in kind of extremist groups or terrorist groups, of somebody who was the bright boy from a poor family who's gone away to university and sort of, you know, he's educated himself. He's filled his head with stuff. But there's a lot of anger and resentment there when that society doesn't really seem to have a niche for him. So like Prince Harry. Yes, exactly.

Just like Prince Harry. Prince Harry did not go to university, though, Tom. That's true. Yes, that's true. I think Raoul Sendik was a more, how should I put this? I think he was a more academically accomplished man than Prince Harry. I think he was more academically accomplished than Prince Harry. So Raoul Sendik, he went to university in Montevideo. He did a law degree. He joins the Socialist Party. He was very active in kind of young socialist politics.

He's horrified by what he sees as the mistreatment of agricultural laborers outside the city. He starts a campaign to get better working conditions and things for cane workers and they might that he organizes a protest in montevideo which is very violently repressed and that sort of pushes him um further and further to the left and so in 1963 so we're just up we're not that long after the cuban revolution yeah a lot of very bright people in these places are influenced by what's happening cuba he sets up a group called the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, but it's better known by its nickname, the Tupamanos.

So it's named specifically after the last great kind of Peruvian Inca rebel, who was a guy called Tupac Amaru II, who lived and died in Peru in the 1700s, so 1740 to about 17, to 1781. So he was the, he himself, Tupac Amaru II, was a descendant of the last ruling Inca, Tupac Amaru I. So this is all very Tintin. Yeah, absolutely. Tintin and the Picaros. Is that kind of thing? Yes. So presumably that's where Hergé is drawing on. I think there's a huge, exactly. I think there's a huge... Exactly.

I think there's a huge element of Tintin and the Picard Ross about this. So Tupac Amaru II had rebelled against the Spanish in the 1770s. He had been captured. He was taken to Cuzco. What happened to him was horrific. He was forced to witness the execution of his wife and his sons, and then he himself was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and then beheaded. So very grim end for Tubac Amri II.

But before he died, he said in Quechua. How's your Quechua, Tom? I thought it was Quecha. Is it? Well, there you go. It's better than mine. That's clearly better than mine. So you'll be able to please judge my pronunciation.

He said, That's clearly more best than fine. So you'll be able to, please, judge my pronunciation. He said, Tikrashami hunu makana koipikasha. And obviously you all know what that means. Yes, but probably for the benefit of those who don't, you should say what it actually means. He said, I'll be back and there'll be millions of us. Hasta la vista.

Yeah, he said, I'll be back and there will be millions of us. And since then, Tupac Amaru II's words had resounded down the generations. For people who basically dreamed of an alternative to what, I suppose, what they saw as conservatism, capitalism, Hispanicization. But I thought you said that everyone there weren't that everyone there was spanish and that's the that's the glorious irony that um ryle sendic i'm assuming from his from his surname that his surname was probably originally sendich and he was perhaps balkan that there was some yeah balkan immigrants in his background but the people of uruguay are of spanish and italian

extraction but there's this kind of romanticization isn't there of the indigenous But the people of Uruguay are of Spanish and Italian extraction. But there's this kind of romanticization, isn't there, of the indigenous. And you see this in Latin America. You see it every, I mean, you see it in lots of places, but not least in Latin America. This romanticization of the sort of indigenous resistance, which becomes melded. Despite the fact that he was a king. This is a Marxist group, but they're identifying. So there's lots of weirdness going on then.

Yeah. They're Spanish, but they're identifying with the indigenous people of a totally different country but this was very yeah but this was very much the trend and they're communists they're marxist but they're identifying with a king yeah yeah okay the downtrodden masses yeah a representative of the downtrodden masses tom yeah um so they set up this uh this urban guerrilla group. Cellular structure, the classic thing that you get among urban guerrillas. They start off from 1963. They basically start off as bank robbers because they need to make money. They have no resources.

They have all kinds of heists. They get a sort of slightly Robin Hood reputation. So they rob a casino in the resort of Punta del Este, and there they steal all the money, and then they send back tips for the people working at the casino. So they do all these kinds of things. The government tries to crack down and fails, gets the United States to help. So the United States says,

we will send people to train your police in counterinsurgency and so on. This will become important. This will become important later on. And so this is this is um americans training latin american countries police forces in the 70s and stuff it's generally not yeah well we'll come to this because this is a really really important point should we take a break at this point uh if you're like if you want to if you're if you want to go and listen to some

more pan pipes is that what it is well do you want to play us out with some panpipes? Do you have some to hand? It's sort of the same. Well, let's have it again. I'm sure that people enjoyed it the first time. So goodbye. We'll be back very soon. We'll leave you for a moment with the Tupper Maros theme. Take us out. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. i think that everyone will agree uh after the end

of the first half that this whole idea of integrating music stop it dominic of integrating music into history podcasts is a ludicrous idea and it will never work so um so dominic please no more pan pipes um but we're talking about the two pomaros yes i've never heard of before but i now know lots about but i want to know what happens dominic so could you could you tell me and could you tell the listeners i will do i will do it and maybe you know what tom we could i mean maybe we could sneak a bit of music back in later okay well if i tell you what if if you do a good job i will let you do that yes brilliant but you've got to do a good job so 1968 the uruguayan government declared a state of emergency they were completely failing to deal with these the two pomeros uh the

two pomeros up their game and are they growing at this point yeah it's still just a kind of barnabine hoff small there i think they're larger than barter than a barnabine hoff kind of red brigade that kind of level a bit like italy maybe yes exactly i would say a little bit like that they have one they have a couple of tactics that I don't think we should adopt on the rest of this history, and one they do. So the ones that I don't recommend are the intimidation of the police by selective assassinations of policemen. We're not really in favour of that, I think.

No, we're not. The other is kidnapping. We'll come back to kidnapping because, of course, we started with the kidnapping of the British ambassador. So you're categorically ruling that out? I'm ruling that out. But the one thing I would like to see us doing, Tom, is a bit more armed propaganda.

Okay. So what that means is that they would basically invade, groups of them with weapons would unexpectedly invade places where people were meeting. So they'd invade restaurants or cinemas or theatres. And they would make, it says in the thing I read, they would make speeches to a literally captive audience. Yeah, well, that's a way of promoting the Restless History Club.

Absolutely, exactly. If not enough people join the Restless History Club, we will be forced to take extreme measures, burst into cinemas or whatever, and do podcast force people to listen to our podcasts yeah at machine gun point kidnapping became their sort of signature tactic so for example they kidnapped the head of the state telephone company in the summer of 1968 and then in 1969 they kidnapped one of the Uruguay's leading bankers. And what did they do to them?

They usually hold them for sort of 10 weeks or so in support of a strike or something or demanding a ransom. And then release them? Or do they chop ears off? By and large, they're not unnecessarily cruel. Right. I mean, these are people who began as... But are they saying, give the workers better rights?

Or are they saying, give us $200,000? I mean, what was... No, it's a bit of both. It's a little bit of both. So, for example, when they kidnapped the guy who was the banker in September 1969, they held him for 10 weeks, but that was in support of a strike by employees at his bank. Right. So they said better terms for the...

And did it work? I think it did work. Yeah, I think it did work. Okay. The government is completely unable to deal with this. The government is calling up, starts to call up more and more kind of paramilitaries. So what's happening is actually the Uruguayan government, which is previously more democratic, is moving towards more and more authoritarian measures.

So you've got this ratchet. Yeah. The more that the Tuber Maros sort of carry out their sort of spectacular coups, the more the government becomes the government that they think it is if you know what i mean they think it's fascistic and all this sort of stuff so as i said we began that thrilling scene at the beginning of the podcast in january 1971 when jeffrey jackson was imprisoned so he was kept in prison tom for 244 days goodness that is a long time that is a very long time.

So it was quite a big story in Britain at the time. Utterly forgotten now, but it was quite a big story. They released one photograph of him, his kidnappers, showing him having grown this colossal... He wasn't allowed to shave, so he looked like Moses. He'd grown this huge, flowing white beard. The Uruguayan government were completely embarrassed by this. They sent people out all across Montevideo searching for him never found all through the during the time he was a

prisoner his captors wore masks and what did they want well they basically wanted um the very this is a very confusing thing they never issued any ransom demand at all they basically just issued a letter saying the british of the British piratical leeches have stolen all Uruguay's wealth, representatives of capitalism, imperialism, and so on. But they didn't really issue any very concrete demands, so it's quite hard to deal with them. They told Jackson, they said,

if the security forces ever find where we've got you, we will kill you on the spot. So that was bad news from his perspective because it means, you know, does he hope for escape or not? They did arrange an interview for him with a Cuban journalist in which he talks to this Cuban and he sort of says, well, I jog around my cells, keep fit and all this kind of thing and I'm in decent health. But he wasn't actually released until the 9th of September

1971 they had been demanding the release of some of their their fellow prisoners so they'd finally issued a proper demand but that presumably is the responsibility of the Uruguayan government so it's not it's nothing the British have done no nothing the British can do about it they basically wanted the British they wanted the Uruguayan government to release all these prisoners, 106 prisoners in a jail in Montevideo. Eventually the prisoners just escaped anyway. Okay.

Or do you think they were sprung by MI6? Well, not by MI6. I mean, it might have been some collusion with the Uruguayan government. So Geoffrey Jackson had been in prison for eight months. He was left out, he was blindfolded, and he was taken and left outside the church. And then he flew back to Britain.

Ted Heath gave him a knighthood. Oh, so it wasn't all bad. No, for services to being a hostage. So that was nice for him. But of course, the one reason perhaps we don't remember it is it was eclipsed by what is by far the Tupper Maris' most famous kidnapping. And this was of a man, I mean, I say famous,

a lot of people won't have heard of this, although it was later made into a film. This was a man called Dan Mitrioni, and this happened in 1970. So Dan Mitrioni, Tom, you were talking about Americans training Latin American policemen and so on. Yeah. Dan Mitrioni is an American policeman. He'd been the police chief in richmond

indiana and in the 50s and 60s and then he joined a program called the international cooperation administration which sounds like nothing sounds very sinister exactly it was it provided us training to civilian policemen so his first posting posting was to Belo Horizonte in Brazil, and then he's transferred to Rio. And it's later been claimed that when he was in Rio, he helped to train the Brazilian police and has tortured their own people. And then he goes to Uruguay. Now, what Mitrioni was doing in Uruguay remains the source of great controversy.

And it's a very good example of how sometimes in history, I think you just have to admit, we don't know and we will never know. The truth is unattainable. But presumably people are prone to favouring their opinion of what was happening, reflects their political assumptions, I would guess. Totally, totally and utterly. So some former Uruguayan policemen and people who worked with the CIA in Uruguay said, they said Mitrioni was the head of torture.

So Mitrioni taught you how to, literally taught you how to electrocute people's genitals. And his credo, his guiding principle was the precise pain in the precise place in the precise amount for the desired effect, which is quite sinister. A Cuban guy claimed that he had infiltrated the CIA as a double agent. He said Mitrioni would abduct homeless people from the streets of Montevideo, and he would use them as guinea pigs in his torture classes. He said Mitrioni would keep the victims alive for multiple torture sessions, but eventually they'd die, and then Mitrioni would dump their bodies in the streets. So that's kind of very sinister. On the other hand, some people who worked with Mitrioni in the CIA say this is absolute nonsense,

he didn't do this at all. He was advising in kind of, you know, counterinsurgency and riot control and these kinds of things, but torture was completely not part of his remit and he would never have dreamed of this. And how reliable are they? Well, this is the thing, Tom. How can you possibly know? You could say, well, they would say that, wouldn't they? I think I would say that. They would say that if they were covering up for him, but equally, Tom would say that if he was it was innocent and they were just his mates but they don't but but by and large people don't fix on one person and say he was the chief torturer i mean there must have been lots of lots of americans kind of playing a role in in a similar

role right but the reason we're having a conversation about him is because he was kidnapped. Here's the twist. Raoul Sendik later was asked, why did you kidnap Mitrioni? This is 1987. And he said, because he trained the police in riot control and because the policemen had killed some student protesters while suppressing riots. But he didn't mention torture or electrodes or anything.

They're the head of the Tupper Maros. So why didn't he mention it if the torture was the main issue? So in other words, it's a very confused story. And listeners will probably have already jumped to their own conclusions based on their own politics, which is what we all do. I think the only honest answer we can say is that we just don't know whether he did all this we do know though what happened to him he was kidnapped on the 31st of of july but then within a week the uruguayan police captured a lot of the tupermaros leadership so that meant that mityonis captors the guards were left without instructions about what to do with him so he's still in some basement somewhere they demand the release of political prisoners. And they say, if you don't release them, 150 political prisoners, we will

kill Mitrioni. And the Uruguayan government says, well, we're not going to release them. And so a few days later, Mitrioni is found dead in a car, having been shot twice in the head. And the reason this is well known, became briefly well known is because it was made into a film by costa gavris the guy who made zed if you've ever seen the film zed or uh missing with jack lemon and sissy spacek so he made very political kind of hollywood thrillers in the 60s 70s and 80s and mitrioni in the film is played by Yves Montand, a great French actor. In a funny twist, the film was all about the Mitrioni kidnapping, but it was filmed in Chile under Salvador Allende. So in that brief window of time before Salvador Allende himself

was toppled by the Pinochet queue. Why did they cast a Frenchman to play an American? Yves Montand had already played the protagonist in Costa Gavras' film Zed, which is about the Greek colonels and about repression in Greece. So Costa Gavras, he's a very great filmmaker, and his film State of Siege is incredibly atmospheric. It's very pan-pipey, Tom. It's sort of, everything is very misty and gloomy in Montevideo.

It's always kind of raining. And so pro? The Tupper Maros. Yeah, in a way, although, I mean, it's one of those films from the 70s where there were just... Everyone's terrible. Everyone's terrible. And there were just colossal stretches of people

having political conversations in basements, wearing hoods, talking about the means of production or something. But it's oddly watchable. Anyway, in the aftermath of the Mitrioni kidnapping, the Jeffrey Jackson kidnapping, the Uruguayan president basically announced a massive crackdown. He said, we're in a state of war. I mean, hence the title of the Costa Gavras film, State of Siege. There's mass arrests, there's all kinds of tortures. Basically, the government wins, but it crushes the Tupper Maros, but at the price of destroying Uruguayan democracy. So to give you a sense of that, the army in Uruguay before this crisis had accounted for about 1% of Uruguay's national budget. By the time it's over, it accounts for almost 30%. And presumably a lot of that is being spent on reflective sunglasses and

cattle prods. Exactly. Yeah, a lot of braid absolutely it is so in other words it's become a very very repressive garrison kind of state trade unionism for example is outlawed all trade unions are outlawed 5 000 people are thrown into prison what a sad story what a sad story so one in five uruguayans was arrested one in in five? Yeah, at some stage during the dictatorship. So basically democracy suspended between 1973 and 1985 in this sort of Switzerland of South America.

And during this period, Uruguay has the highest number proportionate political prisoners in the world, more than anywhere else. So it's like Argentina, it's a kind of terrible warning that a prosperous advanced welfare state yeah tom i can see where you're going with this i don't know i'm not i'm not i'm just leaving it hanging there but but but argentina is always the example that

is cited but uruguay as well but it's arguably you you might say even more extreme now i think that was a bit bleak, so I think we should have a slightly happy ending. I mean, we'll get there through some... The medium of music. No, no. We'll get there through the medium of even greater torture and horror. But we'll get to the happy ending, I promise.

So the two Primaris leadership were almost all arrested. Some of them fled the country, but by and large, they were all arrested and thrown into prison where they were treated abysmally. Raoul Sendik, he was in prison. He ended up later on going to Paris, and he died in Paris in 1989. But the more famous example, certainly, I mean, I don't believe we do have any Uruguayan listeners, but if we do, they will know where I'm going with this, was a man called Jose Muica. So Muica, he's Uruguay in one person. His parents are kind of immigrants from the Basque country and from Italy, from Liguria. He had joined the Tupomeras

in the mid-60s. He had led some of the sort of robberies and stuff. He had been shot in 1970 by the police and was and only just lived he was taken to hospital the surgeon sort of managed to just about sew him back together um his insides and afterwards muhika thought that the surgeon had saved him because the surgeon was a jupiter sympathizer actually the surgeon said later he did it just because it was his medical job duty yeah exactly hypocritical but exactly but he is then captured in 1972 muiga and the um the hunter the people who run uruguay they keep him at the bottom i mean this will give you a sense of the conditions they keep him at the bottom of a horse watering trough he's basically trapped in this horse trough for two years two years yeah in a horse trough which is which is pretty awful um he is he's he's because he's been injured by bullets and he's got this problem with his guts he's in

terrible pain for a lot of this time he's driven kind of half mad he's not allowed any form of toilet like a lot of the prisoners weren't they They were allowed family visits from time to time. His mother brought him a potty. She bought a potty from a shop and took it because he said it's the one thing he wanted that would make his life more bearable. But the guards wouldn't give it to him. They only relented and gave it to him after one day the jailers had a party. And Mujica made such a fuss, screaming and shouting and sobbing and shouting for his party that they finally brought it to him.

And he insisted on taking it with him whenever they moved him to a new cell or a new prison or anything like this. He saw it as a sign of his victory over the Jays, but he also refused to clean it, which I think is a – so he had sort of been driven half mad. Anyway, he, Mujica, was released in 1985, and he wanted to still be involved in politics. He sort of moved slightly towards the more pragmatic center.

He was still left wing, but he wasn't a Tupomaros anymore, or a member of the Tupomaros. Anyway, the people who had tortured him and kept him in prison and all this sort of stuff, in 2009, the Uruguayan people voted on a law to give them amnesty, to have an amnesty for everybody who had been involved in state repression. And the law passed.

It was basically a referendum and the Uruguayan people approved it. So that's, you know, you would say for Mujica, quite bad. But on the very same day, they picked him to be the president of Uruguay. And he was the president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. He was an extraordinary figure by the standards of world leaders.

So he was a former urban guerrilla. And he was married to a fellow urban guerrilla called Lucia. They didn't have any children. They lived in a farm on the outskirts of Montevideo where they cultivated chrysanthemums for sale. So a chrysanthemum farm. That was basically their job. When he became president, he refused to move into the presidential palace. Why was he chosen as president?

He didn't run for it. He just got... He did run for it. Yeah, he did run for it. He ran as a sort of left-wing maverick, I suppose. But it's a symbol of humility and frugality because they lived on this farm with a dog with three legs called Manuela. He drove a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle.

He refused to use the state limousines and all this kind of stuff. He was paid $12,000, American dollars a month, 90% of which he gave to charity, or refused to take any of it for himself. And he presided over a very, very liberal regime, so people would say, of Uruguay in the last few years. It had the world's most sort of liberal government. So legalized abortion, legalized cannabis, gay marriage. But anyway, yes, so he retired in 2015.

He's still alive, 87 years old. Doesn't spend his time, I imagine, in a horse trough, but is back on his farm cultivating his chrysanthemums. Does he still have his potty? I don't know about the potty. I feel like if I did meet him, that's not what I would ask. It would be tasteless to ask, Tom. It would be insensitive to ask.

No, that's a great story and a great end. And Dominic, you pulled it off so well that I'm going to allow you to play the pan pipes again to play to play us out tom that's lovely so that was uruguay do you feel educated now do you feel you know about uruguay i feel so educated and isn't that isn't that what this tour of the globe is all about it's a process of self-education for us oh isn't that as much as anything else yeah so that's the two primaris kind else. Yeah. So that's the Tupper Maros. Kind of a grim story. But let's hope that one day you too don't become a prisoner of the Tupper Maros. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

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