The former President of the Republic, José Mujica, said in a recent interview with the French channel R.F.I. that the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional – Tupamaros (MLN-T) was not exactly a guerrilla, although it behaved like one for a period of time. “This would take a long time to explain. There is an author, Real de Azúa, of the time, who clearly defines it. Our most spectacular action was a financial denunciation of what the financial system was doingwhich did not cost a shot or anything like that, but an assault on a clandestine financial institution of a bank, for example, “Mujica said in the interview with the French media.
“We had a long period of armed propaganda, but later it got complicated because we had too many people. You cannot have a clandestine organization of too much volume. We made the saturation mistake. We should have changed our strategy and we didn’t. Perhaps we remained prisoners of a military ‘actionism’ and lost our political perspective”, he added.
And he remarked: “With or without Tupamaros, there would have been a coup d’état, because the engine that created the Tupamaros was the same one that created the Central de Trabajadores (CNT) in response, and that will lead to the founding of the Broad Front. That is to say, our society stopped being social democratic and began to polarize between a popular current and a right, with certain interventions from outside the region”.
Arrests, torture and murders after the coup
After the military forces, led by then President Juan María Bordaberry, seized power on June 27, 1973 by force, Human Rights violations began and intensified over time. But, unlike other regional dictatorships, the Uruguayan one wants to give the impression of being democratic and gives a speech of supposed legality.
Mujica was one of the dissidents who ended up being arrested for years without due process, tortured, and his most fundamental Human Rights violated. “They changed our barracks every six, seven months. I spent seven years without books, without being able to read. The first months of that prison I spent tied up with wire. The night they put me on a mattress to sleep on, I felt happy. Sometimes I went two months without bathing. I bathed with a glass of water and a cloth like the people of the desert. And in absolute solitude, with a visit from my relatives once a month, from my mother particularly”, recalled Mujica.
He also recalled the Condor Plan, a coordination between the dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay (with lateral participation in Ecuador and Peru). “It was a piece that he participated in. Actually, the ideological knot of the Condor It came with the courses that were given, in Panama, to the military and the police. Here torture was frequent, they were taught to respond, the seeds of the terrorist State were being sown,” said the former leftist president.
“El Cóndor is an intellectual product of creation, from outside that was implanted, assumed, from the clandestine struggle of the State, from things that legally could not be done and that were done in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Brazil, in Paraguay, in Chile, with a private communication and with a clandestine collaboration between those resources, to persecute people, to do infiltration work, to torture, to assassinate, that cost the lives of distinguished compatriots, legislators from the National Party and the Colorado Party (Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz and Zelmar Michelini) and the persecution of many others”, Mujica specified.
