INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS IN THE URUGUAYAN CRISIS, 1960-1973

This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of New South Wales

1998 And when words are felt to be deceptive, only violence remains. We are on its threshold. We belong, then, to a generation which experiences Uruguay itself as a problem, which does not accept what has already been done and which, alienated from the usual saving rituals, has been compelled to radically ask itself: What the hell is all this?

Alberto Methol Ferré [1958]

‘There’s nothing like Uruguay’ was one politician and journalist’s favourite catchphrase. It started out as the pride and joy of a vision of the nation and ended up as the advertising jingle for a brand of cooking oil. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Carlos Martínez Moreno [1971]

In this exercise of critical analysis with no available space to create a distance between living and thinking, between the duties of civic involvement and the will towards lucidity and objectivity, the dangers of confusing reality and desire, forecast and hope, are enormous. How can one deny it? However, there are also facts.

Carlos Real de Azúa [1971] i

Acknowledgments ii Note on references in footnotes and bibliography iii Preface iv

Introduction: Intellectuals, Politics and an Unanswered Question about Uruguay 1

PART ONE - NATION AND DIALOGUE: WRITERS, ESSAYS AND THE READING PUBLIC 22

Chapter One: The Writer, the Book and the Nation in Uruguay, 1960-1973 23 Of Names, Dates and Generations: Who and When 25 Who Did What to Whom: A Political Group Portrait 46 The Nation and the Book: Readers, Writers and Publishers 73

Chapter Two: The Nation as Problem and The Essay as Diagnosis 101 Roberto Ares Pons and the Search for Transcendence 108 Carlos Maggi: Tango and Metaphysics 130 Albert Methol Ferré and the Nation as a Problem 161 Washington Lockhart and the Demise of the Spirit 181

PART TWO - FROM DIALOGUE TO MONOLOGUE: INTELLECTUALS AND THE POLARISATION OF POLITICS 199

Chapter Three: From FIDEL to the Frente: The Left Searches for Someone to talk to 200 The Intellectuals Come In from the Political Cold 200 Frictions and Fractions(1): Towards the Disaster of 1962 209 Frictions and Fractions(2): Towards the Congreso del Pueblo 220 Onward Christian Soldiers: from Television to Political Vision 240 Severing and Forging Links: On the Threshold of the Frente 251 Liber Seregni as the Good Father and the Frente Amplio as Home and Family 261 Participation, Cooperation, Equality: The Frente Amplio’s Internal Structure and Political Platform 269 The Right of Reply: Responses to the Frente Amplio 285

Chapter Four: From Analyst to Activist: Mario Benedetti’s Uruguayan Politics, 1960-1973 299 Four Prefaces 300 From the Consolations of Conscience to the Nastiness of the Nation: Expanding El país de la cola de paja 307 From Chronicles to Political Essays - and Back 330 ‘Them’ and ‘Us’: Structure in Crónicas del 71 and Terremoto y después 336 Benedetti as Activist: The Movimiento de Independientes 26 de Marzo 357 Benedetti the Writer on Benedetti the Activist 374

Conclusion 382

Bibliography 390 ii

This thesis could not have been completed without the professional and good-humoured help of Ruth Arentz and her successors and colleagues in the Interlibrary Loan Department of the Social Sciences and Humanities Library at the University of New South Wales. While I was able to undertake initial searches for documents and books in the libraries and bookstores of Uruguay and the United States, after I returned to Australia I relied on the safe and prompt delivery of items from libraries all over the world. My first debt of gratitude, then, is to all those who helped to provide them.

My second vote of thanks goes to my supervisors, Drs. Jim Levy and Diana Palaversich, whose constant support, good humour and critical intelligence have made writing this thesis more congenial, if not always easier. I am also grateful to Dr. Peter Ross, who made cogent and valuable comments on an earlier draft of the whole text, and to Associate Professor John Brotherton, who first thought that this topic could become a thesis at all.

I should also like to thank Dr. Susan Keen and Associate Professor John Perkins, who found time from their own busy schedules to read earlier versions of sections or chapters of the thesis.

Two parts of the thesis have been published in modified form as follows:

The pages on Uruguayan book publishing in Chapter One have appeared as "Uruguay as a Problem and the National Book Industry, 1960-1973" in Anales[Sydney], iii, 2(1994), 43-58.

The section on Carlos Maggi in Chapter Two was published as "Maids, Ruminants and Pincushions: Carlos Maggi's Essays on the State of Uruguay" in AUMLA, 87(1997), 75-92.

S. G. iii

The chapters of this book can be read separately. This has involved a minimum of cross-referencing and repetition. Also, full referencing for books and articles begins again at the start of each chapter, short titles being used in the text once a complete reference has appeared in a footnote.

All books are published in Montevideo unless otherwise stated. I only give the place of publication for a serial if the text does not clarify that it is Uruguayan and if it is not well known to professional Latin Americanists.

All translations from Spanish are my own except the one noted in the Conclusion.

The following are abbreviations and acronyms used throughout the notes and bibliography. The list does not include political parties and trade unions whose acronyms are given in the text as required.

ANB Agrupación Nuevas Bases CEDAL Centro Editor de América Latina CLAEH Centro Latinoamericano de Economía Humana CNT Central Nacional de Trabajadores EBO Ediciones de la Banda Oriental FCU Fondo de Cultura Universitaria FUCCYT Fundación Uruguaya para el Fomento de la Cultura, la Ciencia y la Tecnología INDAL either Información Documental de América Latina [Caracas] or Information Documentaire d’Amérique Latine [Heverlee-Louvain] n. p. No page number(s) n. publ. No publisher given Suppl. Supplement iv

PREFACE

The following study makes only passing reference to the imaginative literature of the period it studies. In this it differs from the other studies of Uruguayan cultural history to which it frequently refers. For example, Rodríguez Monegal's Literatura uruguaya de medio siglo, Benedetti's Literatura uruguaya siglo xx and Rama's La generación crítica are almost entirely studies of fiction, poetry, theatre and criticism, although the latter takes a more sociological approach than the others. Trigo's Caudillo, estado, nación,1 although making creative use of historical and political documents, concentrates its detailed literary analysis (somewhat unusually) on Uruguayan theatre, and, what is more, covers the whole period since Independence. It is also clearly intended to be an intervention in current intellectual debates in Uruguay, whereas the earlier books were important during the period under scrutiny here.

Instead, this thesis seeks to combine cultural and political history with the thematic and rhetorical analysis

1 Full bibliographical details of these works can be found in the footnotes to the chapters which follow and the Bibliography at the end of the thesis. v

of literary and political manifestos, essays, interviews, speeches, newspaper articles and editorials and trade union documents, all of which have received scant attention in

Uruguay itself,2 and virtually none outside that country's borders. For this reason, and also for the sake of stylistic consistency, I have taken the unusual step of translating all quotations from sources in Spanish into English. The four chapters of this study will examine and explain successive phases of an argument announced in the Introduction that follows. However, to some extent, they can also be read separately, as their subject matter, though not their overall theme, is on the surface quite different. Consequently, I have preferred a structure of four long chapters, each divided into shorter sections with subtitles, rather than the more usual one of a larger number of shorter chapters, which, in this case, would have artificially divided material which, in the author's view, belongs together.

2 Such attention, where it has occurred, is fully acknowledged in footnotes to the chapters which follow. 1

INTELLECTUALS, POLITICS AND AN UNANSWERED QUESTION ABOUT URUGUAY

Every intellectual in Latin America is a failed politician Daniel Cosío Villegas

It cannot be said that the social and political panorama of recent times fails to offer problems capable of awakening the intelligentsia’s interest Roberto Ares Pons[1953]

By the end of the 1960s, it began to look as though the entire fabric of Uruguayan society might fall apart. Barely two decades before, such a situation would have seemed incredible to the majority of the country’s citizens. For the best part of half a century, largely under the tutelage or posthumous influence of Don José Batlle y Ordoñez (1856- 1929), who had twice been elected president of the republic, Uruguay had basked in the earnings from the high international demand for its excellent meat, wool and leather products and in the far-reaching social and political reforms such income made possible for a progressive state.1

However, the Korean War only

1 Hence the somewhat mocking comment by Alberto Methol Ferré (some of whose work is discussed below in Chapter Two) that Uruguay was a "Welfare State with feet of earth, grass and hooves". Quoted in G. de Armas/A. Garcé: Uruguay y su conciencia crítica: intelectuales y política en el siglo xx(Trilce, 1997), 20. 2

postponed the exposure of the vulnerability of the nation’s economy, brought about by the fall in demand and prices for Uruguay’s traditional exports after 1950, the failure to create a strong manufacturing base and the limitations of a tiny internal market. By 1960, it had become clear to many that the political and economic structures that had served well in times of plenty were increasingly unable to generate the changes necessary if the population of under 3,000,000 were to maintain the quality of life that had earned their country its petname of the “Switzerland of Latin America”.

As the decade wore on, what became generally and simply referred to as ‘the crisis’ deepened at an alarming rate. Burgeoning foreign debt coupled with economic stagnation, capital flight, major bankruptcies and galloping inflation; labour unrest due to unemployment, declining real wages and an unwieldly state administration’s failure to deliver much-needed social services; political corruption at all levels, and an initially successful (and surprisingly popular) urban guerrilla campaign looked like eroding the country’s institutions as well as its somewhat complacent idea of itself. Indeed, it might tenably - if contentiously - be argued that by 1969 Uruguay 3

(and not Chile in 1970) was the Latin American country most likely to emulate the Cuban experience of 1959.

In fact, however, from 1968, the government took a sharp and often brutal turn to the right and clamped down on all forms of opposition (not only the armed insurgency), continuing the counter-revolutionary movement begun in Brazil in 1964 which was to be unleashed throughout Latin America during the 1970s and frequently resulted in military coups (most infamously in Argentina and Chile). Uruguay was not to escape this fate. The armed forces, having been called upon for what became universally condemned internal security purposes, refused to return to barracks, demanding instead greater involvement at all levels of government decision-making and eventually assuming power themselves in June 1973, where they remained for nearly twelve years.2 Clearly, the more recent periods of the military dictatorship and the subsequent redemocratisation and modernisation since 1985 offer more than ample scope for a

2 Many sources chronicle this period, among which are the following: M. H. J. Finch, A Political Economy of Uruguay since 1870(London, Macmillan, 1981); E. Kaufman, Uruguay in transition(New Brunswick, Transition, 1979); M. Weinstein, Uruguay, The Politics of Failure(Westport, Greenwood, 1975), and Uruguay, Democracy at the Crossroads (Boulder, Westview, 1988). While these are general histories - and are sometimes contentious because of their authors' clear political sympathies, other more detailed sources, Uruguayan and foreign, will be used as required in the course of this thesis. 4

study of the relationship between intellectuals and their society in Uruguay. However, I have studied the vexed and highly charged atmosphere of economic decline, social turmoil and all but total political disintegration of the decade or so prior to the military coup of June 1973 because it illustrates more sharply the options open to progressive intellectuals to participate in the political arena and the dilemmas such participation posed for them. I am not going to begin by rehearsing yet again the myriad ways in which sociology has tried to grapple with the category ‘intellectuals’ and their social and political roles in different types of society.3 Instead, I shall simply state that throughout this study I use the words ‘intellectuals’ and ‘intelligentsia’ as catch-all terms to refer to those people, usually of petit-bourgeois or middle-class origins and allegiances, who work in the arts, social sciences, journalism and such liberal professions as the law and secondary or tertiary teaching, and who seek through words or deeds to

3 A representative sample of such attempts can be found in the following compendia: G de Huszar(ed), The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait (Glencoe, Free Press, 1960); A. Gella(ed), The Intelligentsia and the Intellectuals (London, Sage, 1976); P. Rieff, On Intellectuals (New York, Doubleday, 1970); I. Maclean, A. Montefiore, P. Winch(eds), The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals (Cambridge UP, 1990), as well as R. J. Brym, Intellectuals and Politics (London, Allen and Unwin, 1980) and N. Birnbaum, "The Problem of a Knowledge Elite", Massachussets Review, xii (1971), 620-636. 5

influence the organization of the society in which they live.4 Similarly, politics needs to be understood not only in the narrow sense of denoting particular parties or established ideological theories and positions (although both will figure extensively in the pages that follow), but also as referring to broader investigations into the way a society or nation has evolved the structures which organise it. However, establishing a convincing link between the two terms has frequently been highly problematic:

Few subjects must have aroused as much controversy as that of the relationship an intellectual may - or even must - have with the politics of his country or the whole world. It must be supposed that a not inconsiderable part of the discord comes from the fact that the terms ‘intellectual’ and ‘politics’, besides being vague, seem to have a meaning which changes with every political dispute.5

4 In this I follow a host of other commentators on the role and nature of intellectuals in Latin America and other parts of the so-called developing world. See, for example, H. J. Benda, "Non-Western Intelligentsias as Political Elites", in J. H. Kautsky(ed), Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries [1962](New York, John Wiley and Sons, 7th ed., 1967), 235-251; R. A. Camp, Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth Century Mexico (Texas UP, 1985); J. G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After The Cold War (New York, Knopf, 1993), chapter 6; R. Dalton, "Literatura e intelectualidad: dos conceptos", in I. Riera(ed), Literatura y arte nuevo en Cuba (Barcelona, Laia, 1977), 117-128; J. Friedman, "Intellectuals in Developing Societies", Kyklos, xiii, 4(1960), 513-541; E. Shils, "The Intellectuals and the Political Development of the New States", in Kautsky, Political Change, 195-234; C. Varlin, "Concepto de intelectualidad", in Riera, Literatura y arte nuevo, 61-64. 5 D. Cosío Villegas, "El intelectual mexicano y la política", in G. Careaga(ed), Los intelectuales y el poder (Mexico, Sepsetentas, 1972), 115. 6

One could also add that there seems to be a lack of an agreed method or theory about how the social and political influence of intellectuals can be assessed.6 Despite these discouraging comments, some generalisations relevant to the Uruguayan case do seem possible. First, intellectuals throughout Latin America and the developing world generally tend to oppose prevailing political parties and policies and to be alienated from their society’s political mainstream, chiefly because either they see themselves as having very little influence on the political and social establishment or their professional expertise and educational level far outstrip their society’s ability to offer them appropriate kinds of useful employment.7 Second, as a result of this marginalisation, intellectuals will frequently see as their self-imposed task an interrogation of the historical or ideological foundations of their

6 See the remarks by Brym, Intellectuals and Politics, 73 and F. Bonilla, "Cultural Elites", in S. Menton and A. Solari(eds), Elites in Latin America[1967](New York, Oxford UP, 3rd ed., 1973), 236. 7 See Benda, "Non-Western Intelligentsias", 240 and 244-245; Bonilla, "Cultural Elites", 247-248; Brym, Intellectuals and Politics, 17-18; J. P. Harrison, "The Role of the Intellectual in Fomenting Change: The University", in J. J. Tepaske and S. Nettleton Fisher(eds), Explosive Forces in Latin America (Ohio State UP, 1964), 35-36; E. Shils, "Intellectuals and Responsibility", in Maclean, Montefiore, Winch, Political Responsibility, 267 and 275-277; V. Teitelboim, "Problems Facing Latin American Intellectuals", World Marxist Review, 11(1968), 34-38; F. Uricoechea, Intelectuales y desarrollo en América Latina(Buenos Aires, CEDAL, 1969), 79 and 86, n. 42. 7

society which they usually see as still in a state of flux,8 or they will tend to cluster around a radical oppositional ideal which seems to offer, however remotely, the possibility of building an alternative social and political order more in keeping with their aims and skills and their understanding of their society’s needs.9 In short, intellectuals are in general far from being opposed to politics per se; they shoot barbs from the outside when they feel excluded or undervalued, but are more than willing to participate in one way or another once a viable alternative suggests itself. Indeed, one of the central arguments of this study will be that, in the Uruguayan case, intellectuals who defined themselves as hostile to the political mainstream were willing to redefine themselves after the emergence of a vehicle which seemed to promise a

8 See Bonilla, "Cultural Elites", 241; Friedman, "Intellectuals in Developing Societies", 535-537; Harrison, "Role of Intellectuals, 35; J. F. Marsal, "Los intelectuales latinoamericanos y el cambio social", Desarrollo Económico, vi(1966), 313; Uricoechea, Intelectuales y desarrollo, 20 and 77. 9 As was the case of many Latin American progressive intellectuals who rallied round the banner of the Cuban revolution during the 1960s. Among many examples, see J. E. Adoum, "El intelectual y la clandestinidad de la cultura", in Riera, Literatura y arte nuevo, 39-45; J. Cortázar, "Politics and the Intellectual in Latin America", in J. Alazraki and I. Ivask(eds), The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar (Norman, Oklahoma UP, 1978), 37-44 and "El escritor y su quehacer en América Latina", Cuadernos Americanos, ccxlvii, 2(1983), 7-16. Mario Benedetti is an influential figure in this context. However, as his politics are extensively discussed in Chapter Four below, I have omitted all reference to him here. 8

different but realistic way of reentering the political sphere and to give them a specific and appropriate role in the process. The preceding remarks suggest that it is more than apt to refer to Latin American intellectuals as the “superego of the social personality”(Uricoechea, Intelectuales y

10 desarrollo, 21). However it is Castañeda who best states this position:

In a region where a vacuum has been generated by the chronically weak institutions of civil society, the figure of the ‘intellectual’ - writer, priest, journalist, academic, artist, activist - has often played a key role. The intellectual frequently articulates the perceived national, social and democratic demands of the region’s people through the press, academia, government and from abroad.11

10 This notion of intellectuals as a loosely defined group which acts as society's dissident conscience fits well with the descriptions of them given by Uruguayan commentators writing during the period with which I shall be chiefly concerned. See R. Ares Pons, La intelligentsia uruguaya y otros ensayos (EBO, 1968), 37-39 and U. Graceras, Los intelectuales y la política en el Uruguay (El País, 1970), 7-8. This non- conformist definition is supported by A. Solari (El desarrollo social del Uruguay en la postguerra [Alfa, 1967], 121-122), who goes on to argue that, since there was effectively no conservative intellectual tradition in Uruguay, such a conception included virtually the entire intellectual community. This statement, while largely correct when Solari made it, is somewhat cavalier from a historical perspective. As Trigo has shown, it is possible to trace a tradition of serious conservative thinking in and about Uruguay from Domingo Ordoñana and Carlos Reyles to the historian Luis de Herrera, Batlle's political rival from the National (then Blanco) party. This line was effectively defeated or absorbed by the consensus politics of the Batllista hegemony (see A. Trigo, Caudillo, estado, nación: literatura, historia e ideología en el Uruguay [Gaithersburg, Hispamérica, 1990], 38-48, 99-107). It reappeared in bowdlerised form as the Federal League of Rural Action under the leadership of Benito Nardone (see below in the Methol Ferré section of Chapter Two) which, although instrumental in securing the Nationals' election victory in 1958, quickly snuffed itself out in the the caudillo Nardone's personal inability to deal with the realities of wielding power from the centre. 11 Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, 20-21. 9

Elsewhere, he goes on that “[t]o a large extent, [intellectuals] have served as mediators between . . . a strong state and a weak civil society”(179). This kind of mediation - between state and society - leads directly to the principal argument of this thesis, which is framed throughout, as indicated in its main title, by the notion of dialogue. In essence, the thesis will argue that Uruguayan intellectuals and a new, increasingly anxious public turned to each other in order to explain and understand the widening fissures they observed in the society in which they both lived. This dialogue between intelligentsia and readers was converted into various attempts, in which intellectuals actively participated, to change that readership into a constituency for a new kind of politics, itself built on the need to revive the principles of consensus and dialogue in a society whose traditional political institutions proved increasingly incapable of dealing with an ever worsening situation. This endeavour foundered because the social and political rifts in Uruguayan society became so great that they permitted only a militarist solution from which all forms of dialogue were excluded. I should clarify immediately, however, that my use of this term has nothing to do with the currently fashionable 10

concept of dialogue derived from Bahktin. Rather, it refers to the principles of conciliation and negotiation through reasoned argument and discussion, or, in more idealised terms, to the aim of the public or politically involved intellectual as being that of generous-spirited, lucid conversation among equals, these being either their colleagues or a receptive and responsive audience. In the Uruguayan case, and more historically, it appeals to the ideas of consensus, shared benefits and solidarity which formed a major part of the legacy of the ideology (and later, the mythology) of the politics of ‘Batllismo’. Batlle y Ordoñez, leader of the dominant faction of the Colorado Party and President of the Republic in 1903-1907 and 1911-1915, having put down Uruguay’s last armed rebellion from the rural interior in 1904, set about the foundation of a modern, secular civil society. He did so by judiciously balancing the growing political power of the urban middle and working classes against the economic interests of the traditional large landowners, whose exports ensured Uruguay’s prosperity but who mostly supported Batlle’s political opponents, the National Party. Through a 11

careful and not too radical redistribution of income, ‘Batllismo’ was able to construct an advanced welfare state with progressive reforms in all areas of social and industrial legislation. In addition, it gave the opposition an important if minority role in decision making by introducing its ‘co- participation’ in major state enterprises. In short, as one commentator has it, “[t]he ideology of ‘Batllismo’ . . . promoted class harmony, social mobility and middle class values, through a paternalist and interventionist state”.12 It is this image of a people at peace with both itself and the state which I wish to encapsulate in the notion of dialogue, and which would progressively break down after the onset of the economic crisis in the mid to late 1950s. To illustrate this argument, I begin with a portrait of two generations of intellectuals, the first now widely known as the ‘45 Generation and the second less easily defined group who produced their first mature work around or just after 1960. While the former, as part of their effort at self- definition, felt obliged ostentatiously to cut themselves off from what they saw as the complacency and obsolete aesthetics of their predecessors, the 60s generation, partly under the influence of the increasing social and political turmoil and partly because they largely valued the

12 J. Pearce, Uruguay: The Generals Rule (London, Latin American Bureau, 1980), 20-21. 12

achievements of the ‘45 Generation, were mostly able to see their predecessors as allies in the ever more urgent task of assesssing the state of the nation. Despite potentially damaging ideological differences between members of both generations, they were able through dialogue to establish effective links with one another. Chapter One closes with an account of how, in line with the so called ‘boom’ in Latin American literature generally, writers of both generations and the publishing industry in Uruguay responded to readers’ imperative need to understand the national crisis that was accelerating around them all. There was now a fertile dialogue within the intelligentsia and between it and a new and growing public.

Chapter Two engages with the essay, the literary genre that depends most on the idea of dialogue in that it puts a reasoned argument before readers who are encouraged to make their own judgement on it. Noting that this literary form has long been associated throughout Latin America with the search for national identity, the chapter proceeds to give an account of essays on the state of Uruguay by four writers: Roberto Ares Pons, Carlos Maggi, Alberto Methol 13

Ferré and Washington Lockhart. I argue, however, that, as instructive and entertaining as these attempts to dialogue with the public were, the perspectives on the nation’s problems which they offered were too narrow or eccentric to be wholly convincing, and more importantly, that they appeared during a period when the leisurely form of the essay was becoming less and less appropriate as a response to the increasing urgency of the situation such books were designed to illuminate.

Chapter Three begins the analysis of intellectuals’ more direct involvement in the Uruguayan crisis and opens the second half of the thesis which tilts the balance slightly away from writing towards political action. I start by looking at the document which rallied just about all the major intellectual figures in Uruguay around the banner of the centre-left coalition, the Frente Amplio, just prior to the national elections of November 1971. Paralleling to some extent the section in Chapter One which explored two generations of intellectuals’ attempts to talk to one another, the chapter uses interviews, formal documents and manifestos to retrace the tortuous path followed by various groups on the left and from the progressive sections of the major parties in their many efforts to build a working dialogue with each other, efforts that remained frustrated 14

until the creation of the Frente Amplio early in 1971. I then examine the ways in which the principle of dialogue was embedded in both the Frente’s internal organization and its political platform, and claim that this was especially attractive to intellectuals who were searching for more direct ways of reaching and influencing their public. It was also the first fully viable reply to Juan Flo’s question “What is to be done?” mentioned in the Introduction and to the complaint by Solari, documented in Chapter One, that the left intelligentsia was incapable of devising realistic proposals that would address Uruguay’s political and social problems. The chapter closes with an account of the Frente’s modest showing in the national elections of November 1971, suggesting that while it had enabled and strengthened dialogue among its member groups, the Frente’s attempt to reinvigorate productive dialogue with and in the nation at large foundered on a badly polarised political scene in which any space for dialogue was steadily being eroded.

Chapter Four in effect uses the situation of one intellectual, Mario Benedetti, as a case study to show how the same contradictions between intentions and the situation in which those intentions were enacted occasioned on an 15

individual level frustrations analogous to those suffered by the Frente Amplio on a wider scale. Tracing the trajectory of his thinking about Uruguayan politics from the first publication of El país de la cola de caja [1960] to the openly propagandist essays, speeches and articles of 1971- 1973 and outlining his political activities as co-founder and co-leader of a movement that was closely if ambiguously aligned with the Tupamaros, I try to show how the ethics he espoused as an intellectual and writer entered into barely concealed conflict with the politics he professed as spokesperson of a radical group that oscillated between support for a revolutionary, militarist organization, and participation, under the umbrella of the Frente Amplio, in national elections. In short, Benedetti’s need as an intellectual for dialogue collided head-on with the necessity to work as an activist in a situation where dialogue was proving impossible, a contradiction that left its mark on his work both as essayist and militant. Both Benedetti’s project as an individual and the Frente Amplio’s as a political party were shipwrecked on a national crisis that would, in the end, give space only to a monologue.

To open my analysis and close this introduction, however, I want to go back in time to 1952. It is Rodríguez 16

Monegal who comments that the essay competition on “Problems of Youth in Our Country”, jointly organised by the leftist weekly Marcha and the Uruguayan Young Christian Association, indicates that the theme was important from the first days of the economic crisis and was not a discovery of the 60s.13 This is not the competition’s only claim to fame, however. As Angel Rama points out,14 the judges15 were in the position of either assessing their peers or effectively being themselves assessed by representatives of the generation which, in succeeding them, would critically evaluate the intellectual legacy it inherited. The authors of three of the five essays became important figures in Uruguayan culture in their own right: the historian Ares Pons (whose entry won first prize)16 and the sociologist Carlos Rama were also both born in 192117 while Flo,

13 E. Rodríguez Monegal, Literatura uruguaya de medio siglo (Alfa, 1966), 44. 14 La generación crítica (Arca, 1972), 214-5. 15 Of the five members of the jury, four were well-known writers and critics associated closely with Marcha: the intellectual and cultural historians Arturo Ardao and Manuel Claps were born in 1912 and 1920 respectively, the political historian Carlos Real de Azúa in 1916 and the literary critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal in 1921, while the other, Hector Caselli, represented the Young Christian Association. See C. Real de Azúa(ed.), Problemas de la juventud uruguaya (Marcha, 1954), 11. Further references will be given in parentheses. The volume contains a preamble on the objectives, conditions of entry and the results of the competition (9-13), Real de Azúa's introduction (15-43) and the text of the four prize-winning essays and the one honourable mention. 16 This essay is mentioned in the Ares Pons section of Chapter Two. 17 The rules stipulated that entrants should be no more than thirty years old on the last day for submission of scripts, December 1, 1952(10). Ares Pons satisfied this requirement by just 4 days, since he turned 31 on December 5. Presumably, Carlos Rama was a December baby, too. 17

an essayist and, later, Professor of Aesthetics at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, was born in 1930. He could, therefore, make some claim to represent, at least partially, the generation whose problems were being addressed in the competition, a situation he would exploit fully, as we shall see. Real de Azúa’s extensive introduction, a digest with some commentary largely of the twelve unrewarded entries, testifies to the disillusion felt by the contestants and the relevance of the essays to the analysis of Uruguayan society as a whole. However, it will be just one of the five best entrants that will concern us here. Juan Flo’s contribution, “Problemas de la juventud en nuestro país”(143-156), challenges his intellectual predecesssors and contemporaries to find adequate anwers to Uruguay’s problems. It is simultaneously a critical essay and a demand. Its polemical and controversial qualities are glimpsed in the problems Flo’s essay posed for the judges. Real de Azúa nominated it for second prize, while Claps gave it his vote for fourth place. Eventually, it became the competition’s only “honourable mention”(12). Flo realises that, at the age of 21, he is himself part of the “problem of youth in Uruguay”. By 18

the same token, he is also both an obstacle to and part of the solution, a paradox to which he gives full rein in his short essay and which determines that he cannot afford the luxury of presuming to have any or all of the answers:

We are faced with a generation which, bound together by an urge toward renewal, . . . , not realising its more tragic destiny of being part of the very reality it is rebelling against, tries to modify it without knowing what its basic vice is and so falls right into it (146).

The first person and the reference to Flo’s own generation in the third person betray the difficulty of being both analyst and analysed, just as the paragraph refers to a collective lack of self-awareness which the writer obviously does not suffer. Having asserted the difficulty of creating a viable system of authentic values and the pervasive feeling of unreality generated by the condition he finds Uruguay to be in (147-149), Flo then opens the section of his essay entitled “Nuestra derrota” [”Our Defeat”] as follows: Here we are, then, in a circle of hell where everything has been reduced to images or words, where reality has fled on the back of all transcendence and an innate rootlessness prevents any holding on or going back. . . [U]nsure in a world embarking on excesses which are alien to us, we emerge into that presumed reality believing in our lucidity, in a responsibility which unites us, in our right to bully some of our contemporaries and segregate them from the no less heterogeneous mix that we are (150). 19

We have become, Flo says, “a critical generation,18 the enemies of bad taste and bombast, not realising that nothing remains to back up our urge for sobriety and that the world and life have slipped through our hands along with what what we believe to be cheap”(151). Illness and cure produce the same results since the remedy carries the symptoms of what it is supposed to be combating. With these thoughts as a base, Flo can now impugn Marcha itself, which the competition entrants undoubtedly buy.19 Marcha’s contributors set themselves above the fray, carefully putting themselves beyond the reach of their own finely honed analytical knives: “Marcha has adopted, perhaps out of sheer professional pride, a revealing term, chronicler, which may be applied to us all and define us as a generation of chroniclers, of experienced spectators. Marcha

18 Thus anticipating by some two decades the title of Angel Rama's book devoted to Uruguayan culture between 1939 and 1969. See note 13 above. 19 Somewhat younger than Flo and writing twelve years later, the historian José de Torres Wilson, referring to his youth in the 1950s, supports Flo's contention about the widespread reading of the weekly: "Above all, more than anything else, we read Marcha. Marcha, the Friday Bible, as someone called it, was our spiritual food, the theme of our discussions, the thread of our consciousness. Our week, our time, was almost measured from Friday to Friday"(La conciencia histórica uruguaya [Feria Nacional de Libros y Grabados, 1964], 27-8). He also admits that he and his friends misread it. Reflecting the prevailing tendency to turn their backs on local issues, in their anxiety to get the exotic news from abroad, they jumped over what would later seem to be the most important sections of Marcha, namely, its coverage of national economic and political matters (28). 20

does well to gather us together to inquire into our problems”(152).20 Once again, Flo insists that reality dissipates into performance and the participants into a theatre audience, a frequent motif in the essays discussed in Chapter Two below. Having surveyed this “landscape in which everything is mere appearance”(155), Flo ends by confronting his mentors and sponsors:

[A]s our problem is specifically cultural, it seems reasonable to direct our questions to those who make a vocation out of threatening to solve every problem of that kind. It is also worth stating that no particular problem can be detached from the general picture, from this big problem of our failure. What shall we do then? If it were possible to make predictions, we would say that our destiny is to save ourselves as exceptions or individuals, for none of us, except as little more than a ‘promise’, will be able, even modestly, to justify this ashen life we lead (156).

Flo has no grand schemes to offer, only a perplexed and desperate question. It is undoubtedly Flo’s rejection of totalising solutions, the caustic and ironic tone, the anxious probing of current cultural values, his questioning of the nation itself and, most importantly, his refusal to set himself outside or above the

20 Mario Benedetti, a major supporter of and frequent contributor to Marcha, would take up some of these issues in an exercise in self- criticism included in his El país de la cola de paja [1960], which is discussed below in Chapter Four. 21

problem he both interprets and experiences as his own, that leads Angel Rama to describe his essay as the “first coherent manifestation” of a new attitude (Generación crítica, 214). Yet Flo’s interrogation of Marcha's - and his own - intellectual assumptions still takes for granted the possibility of dialogue between questioner and respondent. However suspicious he may be of some of the results, Flo implicitly accepts or at least hopes that this relationship can be an active and creative one. What follows is, in effect, an analysis of the intelligentsia’s attempts to find a convincing reply to Flo’s question. 22 2 2

NATION AND DIALOGUE: WRITERS, ESSAYS AND THE READING PUBLIC

A large number of Uruguayans begin a dialogue these days by asking each other about the state of the nation: how do you see it? Interviewer’s opening question to ex-Colorado Raúl Goyenola [1971] 23

THE WRITER, THE BOOK AND THE NATION IN URUGUAY

1960-1973

The fact is that for a large percentage of Uruguayans . . . there exists an absolute disconnection between the history they learned and the present they are living in. And that fact conditions, limits, fragments their knowledge, preventing them from knitting together an authentic culture. Because a culture needs a community and a sense of roots, and today’s Uruguayans have neither J. A. de Torres Wilson [1964]

The publication of Wilfredo Penco's Diccionario de literatura uruguaya1 has been called "a symbol of the history of Uruguayan criticism of the last two decades".2 This work is especially significant because it originally began life in the early 1970s before the military coup but "suffered the same fate as the country after 1973". It could only be completed after the return to civilian rule in March 1985, as "[t]here were authors of entries who had to go into exile, [while] others were imprisoned and a similar number of the writers being reviewed were subject to the same experience"(Penco, Diccionario, I, 9). Of the 169 intellectuals who put their signatures to the

1 Arca/Credisol, 1987. 2 See H. Achugar, "Primeros apuntes para una historia de la crítica uruguaya (1968-1988)", Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, xvi, 31/2(1990), 228. 24

public letter of support for the formation of the centre-left coalition (Frente Amplio) to fight the national elections in November 1971,3 Penco includes 89 (slightly over half), which converts his publication, as may be surmised from the tenor of the quotations given above, into a concerted attempt to repair some of the cultural damage caused during the dictatorship by reinstating many of the names which had been, as it were, summarily struck off the nation's intellectual register.

Virtually all of these were figures from the two generations of intellectuals and writers introduced in this chapter. This presentation is done in three stages. The first discusses the dialogue between the two generations and offers an account of the similarities and differences between them, largely with reference to documents they wrote about themselves and each other. The second section examines the political morass in which they found themselves, their simultaneous lack and need of a constituency and the significance of that absence for their own internal political wrangling. The third and last looks at the collaboration between writers and the publishing industry and their combined attempts to cater to changing reader demands and thereby create and dialogue with a new public which they could hope to influence and which might form a support

3 Published in Marcha, No. 1572(26 November, 1971), 7 and reprinted in A. Barros-Lémez, Intelectuales y política: polémicas y posiciones, años '60 y '70 (Monte Sexto, 1988), 214-5. For further discussion of this document, see the opening section of Chapter 3. 25

base for the increased political militancy analysed in the second half of this study.

Of Names, Dates and Generations: Who and When

Alejandro Paternain, a teacher of literature, novelist and critic who began writing in the 1960s, wrote in 1983 that there was "nearly as little material on the so-called '45 generation (especially from recent years) as on younger writers", the reasons being, not surprisingly, the combined effects of exile, censorship and the pressures of economic hardship on writers and publishers. Consequently, he believes, Angel Rama's La generación crítica (1972), however debatable its perspective and conclusions, remains "a pivotal text" because it is the "last attempt to encompass Uruguayan literature globally".4 Rama (1926-1983) had begun his own literary career in the late 1940s and his book, which appeared just one year before the blanket imposition of censorship following the military coup would have made its publication impossible, covers the period 1939-1969. In other words, Rama has no alternative but to analyse events in which he was himself involved, and to assess the work of authors who were rivals or colleagues, opponents or supporters of what he was doing.

4 A. Paternain, El testimonio de las letras (CLAEH, 1983), 145-6. Rama’s book has since been supplemented, but not superceded, by A. Trigo, Caudillo, estado, nación. Literatura, historia e ideología en Uruguay (Gaithersburg, Hispamérica, 1990). 26

Rama hints at the difficulties involved in such a situation in the title of a much earlier piece which refers to its "testimonial", "confessional" and "evaluative" role, highlighting the writer's personal stake in the events mentioned and the attitudes adopted towards them.5 However, it is his arch professional and ideological rival, Rodríguez Monegal (1921-1985), who recognises most explicitly the dilemma. As early as 1952, at the end of a provisional assessment of works by then younger writers which had appeared in the previous few years, he confessed that "[a]fter all, one is trying to keep a distance while being very much in the midst of things".6 Fourteen years later, he felt obliged to make the following rider at the very outset of his Literatura uruguaya del medio siglo:

As I have intervened directly in the two and a half decade-long process now under consideration, I have had to refer to myself on occasion. I have preferred to make no excuses for it, but not to use even one qualifying adjective, either my own or others', limiting myself to merely stating my role. I figure here because I have figured in the reality studied in this book (10).

That Rodríguez Monegal did not in other instances always manage to be so self-deprecating is perhaps suggested in the following characterisation of the book

5 A. Rama, "Testimonio, confesión y enjuiciamiento de historia literaria y nueva literatura uruguaya", Marcha (3 July, 1959), 17B-22B, 30B. 6 E. Rodríguez Monegal, "La nueva literatura nacional", Marcha, 655(26 December, 1952), 27. 27

by the younger novelist and critic, Alberto Paganini (b. 1932) as "a work which, though at times uneven, at others reads like a novel. The novel of the '45 generation".7 However, what was a hindrance to those working in the thick of things can be turned to advantage by those of us who come later, and I shall make full use in the discussion which follows of documents which reveal how different groups of intellectuals see their predecessors and their successors, as well - of course - as themselves,8 in order to illustrate the difficulties intellectuals encountered in establishing a dialogue with each other.

Around 1940 there occurred something of a seachange in Uruguay’s literary life, brought about by intellectuals working in the areas of the arts generally, journalism and the social sciences, whose birthdates cluster around the years 1920-25 and who produced their first mature work during the mid-1940s. By the 1960s, they had secured positions of prestige and influence based on 15 to 20 years of concerted effort, when the first of their successors arrive on the scene and

7 Los críticos del 45, Capítulo Oriental No. 35 (CEDAL, 1968), 548. 8 Today, the best way to get a feel for the whole question is to read the extended accounts in the already cited books by Rodríguez Monegal and Rama. The first retains more vestiges of the often acrimonious tone of the argument (although it should be remembered that Rodríguez Monegal's quarrels with his colleagues - and with Rama especially - were usually over literary or political matters of more moment than the name of the generation to which nearly all of them belonged). The second enjoys the advantage of coming some six years later and is more painstakingly systematic in its references to arts other than the literary and to the social sciences. 28

all confront a Uruguayan society whose very fabric is threatening to come apart. They have been variously christened (or have entitled themselves) "the Critical Generation" (because of the trenchant critique they mounted of Uruguayan social mores, political and other institutions, cultural life and national mythology). Another name was "the Marcha Generation" (one of the many talents of Carlos Quijano [1900-1984], the founder of Marcha and its editor throughout its 35-year run [1939-1974], was recognising talent when he saw it, and a review of the staff and regular contributors to the weekly journal over the years would include virtually the entire gallery of the finest Uruguayan writers and journalists from this and the next generation).9 Finally, they became universally known as "the '45 Generation", a term first coined by Rodríguez Monegal which, as its use in the Paternain quotation above shows, has come to be seen as the best indication of when this group first began acquiring a distinctive profile.

There is less agreement about the second change of direction. While all concur that the crucial period is 1958- 1961 and that it involves writers in whom an increased sense of urgency promoted more than a little precociousness (their dates of birth straddling 1940), establishing a generally accepted name for them has proved more difficult, as numerous entries in Penco's

9 See, for example, the host of names that parade through the pages of H. Alfaro, Navegar es necesario: Quijano y el semanario Marcha (EBO, 1984). 29

Diccionario make clear. Their immediate predecessors, without any apparent intention of sounding patronising, simply called them "los nuevos" or "los jóvenes" ("the new arrivals" or "the young ones"), terms that lose all cogency with the passing of time. The same may be said of the good-natured, self-mocking epithet "the generation of the appendix", which refers to the first global survey of their work, which is to be found in the 'Appendix' to Rodríguez Monegal's Literatura uruguaya del medio siglo (1966). The first of the two more favoured titles is "the crisis generation" (which suggests the incipient social and political effects of the sharp downturn in the Uruguayan economy occasioned by the translation during the 1950s of the 'hot wars' in Europe and Asia, which had absorbed Uruguay's primary products, into the 'Cold War', which allowed the rebuilding of the strife-torn countries that had previously imported them but now began to cater to themselves). The second is "the 60s generation" (which both correctly places this group's local time frame and, with some justification, relates it to the contemporary international youth counterculture).

As the attitudes of both generations to their immediate predecessors are examined, a major difference emerges. In 1957, the historian and essayist Carlos Real de Azúa (1916- 1977) summarised the presuppositions about culture during the first third of the century as follows: the arts were "superior" activities 30

of the spirit characterised by idealism and universalism and the purpose of all intellectual and artistic endeavour in Latin America was to secure a "felicitous and enriching synthesis of diverse national cultures". In addition, the Uruguayan situation as

an ethnically Europeanised, small country, without excesses or tragedies in matters of climate, geographical extension or race (we were not a 'republic of Indians') put us proudly on the margins of the characteristics (conceived as dead weight rather than as potential) of what was Latin American. Our place on the Atlantic edge of the hemisphere would thus allow us to be characters but not protagonists in shared vicissitudes (23).

Moreover, there prevailed in Uruguay the "conviction that spiritual, social and economic freedom plus the formal guarantees of democracy made up an environment that could not be bettered".10 He went on:

[The] alienation of the country's intellectuals is not . . . merely the consequence of a traditional concentration on our own local affairs and plainly could never be. It is rather the result of living in a limbo as cut off from what matters and continues to matter . . . as it is from the impact of the violent meteors of the present, of the world historical situation, of the increasingly novel human condition (23).

The '45 generation set out to change all that.11

10 C. Real de Azúa, "¿Adónde va la cultura uruguaya?", Marcha, no. 885(25 October, 1957), 22. 11 It is important to underline that the '45 generation's attacks were directed largely at what they saw as the complacency of their immediate predecessors, not at Uruguay's cultural past history in general. As G. de Armas and A. Garcé show (in Uruguay y su conciencia crítica: intelectuales y política en el siglo xx[Trilce, 1997], 8-34), they learnt a lot from the writings of José Enrique Rodó and Carlos Vaz Ferreira. See, for example, Mario Benedetti's appreciative if at times critical study 31

A sense that the Second World War had changed everything, the growing intuition that it had allowed Uruguay to rely on a " period of false prosperity" that would be artificially extended by the Korean War (1950-2) (Rodríguez Monegal, Literatura uruguaya, 35) and the climate of cultural desolation and alienation suggested in the above remarks by Real de Azúa, are what perhaps best account for the venom of the '45 generation's attack on their immediate past.

It is Rama who in 1959 conveyed this hostility most vividly. Recalling that they were once seen as "scorpions" and, briefly, "wolves"("Testimonio, confesión", 20B), he then proceeds to describe the ‘45 intellectuals as having somewhat exaggerated their own importance: “at the time no-one thought homerically that generations of people are like generations of leaves but rather felt themselves to be a historical force, a revelation”(21B). Noting that their indiscriminate break with the past was an unusual phenomenon in Uruguayan literary history aided (in his view) by the transfer of the "bourgeoisie's typical rationalistic analtyical gifts" to the area of literary

of Rodó, Genio y figura de José Enrique Rodó(Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 1966), which he was still happy to reprint unchanged twenty-two years later under the title "Rodó, el pionero que quedó atrás"(Literatura uruguaya siglo xx[3rd. edition, Arca, 1988], 53-143). 32

research (20B), he denounced (self-critically, perhaps?) their parricidal fervour in the following terms:

Many things were mixed together in a rich and patchy process: a violent desire to see reality clearly and truly; a confused longing for their own original means of expression; a typically juvenile, negativist, unscrupulous and cruel attitude, at times ill-informed about what it examined; a disparity of opinions and trends within a movement which was never a monolithic and homogeneous block (17B).

Rama's last point had already been similarly made seven years earlier by Rodríguez Monegal, writing at a moment when, as he admits, he could have no critical distance from the authors he was introducing, and when not only had they not reached anything like full maturity but it was even posible that new members of the generation were still to appear("La nueva literatura", 27):

Dividing them are intergenerational polemics and pain, vanity and an intolerance toward some of the neighbours. But despite everything, they have a family resemblance. One recognises them because they have still not 'bourgeoisified' themselves, because literature is still more important to them than anything else and because they are prepared to hate (and love) on its behalf (26).12

This non-assimilation into the dominant set of class values would become important not only in the realm of literary writing but also in the eventual creation of alternative political forces such as the Tupamaros

12 For a similar view, see also R. Cotelo, Los contemporáneos , Capítulo Oriental 2 (CEDAL, 1968), 26 and 28. 33

and the Frente Amplio. However, it was not enough to prevent a major error both cultural and political: the illusion that what happened in Montevideo reflected accurately the state of the nation as a whole, a mistake for which the Frente Amplio, for example, was to pay a heavy price.13 Real de Azúa makes the crucial point that nearly all the intellectuals of the '45 generation were based in or around the capital, Montevideo,14 while Rama adds that they were the first group of writers in Uruguayan history to come predominantly from the middle classes ("Testimonio, confesión", 20B) which had been the main beneficiaries of the progressive social policies initiated during the Batlle era. In 1963, he was to say that the 1960s generation continued Montevideo's "hegemony",15 almost as though they had responded to Martínez Moreno's call for a place to be created in the Uruguayan literary tradition for the depiction of life in the nation's capital.16 The ensuing tendency to see the nation as a whole as though it were all merely an extension of Montevideo is what, for later commentators such as Delgado Aparaín, "seriously compromised" where it did not "invalidate" the '45 generation's analysis of the nation as problem.17

13 See the final section of Chapter Three below. 14 C. Real de Azúa, "Legatarios de una demolición", Marcha, No 1186(27 December, 1963), 7. 15 A. Rama, "Los nuevos compañeros", Marcha, No. 1186(27 December, 1963), 2. 16 C. Martínez Moreno, "Montevideo y su literatura", Tribuna Universitaria, 10(December, 1960), 44-55. 17 M. Delgado Aparaín, “Reflexiones sobre una generación desgeneracionada”, La Hora (1 November, 1986), 8. He goes on to say pithily that while Montevideo-based intellectuals were bemoaning the collapse of the Uruguayan welfare state, he and his friends in Minas were wondering when it was ever going to reach them, and quotes the 34

This continuing dominance of Montevideo in the country's cultural life notwithstanding, it has proved more difficult to delineate the contours of the 60s generation than was the case with the '45's members. In fact, for Mercedes de Rossiello, they are too heterogeneous to even merit being called a generation at all,18 whereas Maggi acknowledges - at least as a "working hypothesis" - the existence of two quite distinct generations, the later of which he describes in the following way:

[T]hey compensate a lower preoccupation about literary knowledge and techniques with a more permanent and sensitive concern for the political; they are more precocious, more daring and more prolific than their immediate predecessors; from a very early age they confront problems located right here; they enjoy the dangerous but salutary obligation to work under pressure.19

Despite her feelings about the disparateness of the group, de Rossiello does go on to attempt an overview herself:

To them has fallen the privilege of creating [literature] at a time when the natural collapse of a world is taking place and of being protagonists of the contemporary history of a country

critic and publisher Heber Raviolo (b. 1932) to the effect that the Europeanised Uruguay which had turned its back on the rest of Latin America ended with the capital's outer suburbs since much of the interior resembled it only too closely!(8-9). 18 M. Mercedes de Rossiello, Los nuevos narradores, Capítulo Oriental No. 38(CEDAL, 1969), 593. 19 C. Maggi, Sociedad y literatura en el presente: el "boom" editorial, Capítulo Oriental No. 3(CEDAL, 1968), 39. 35

which was relatively fortunate but has for years been doing nothing else but count the number of its growing misfortunes (Los nuevos narradores , 596-7).

The theme of disillusionment is strongly emphasised by Real de Azúa, who sees the 60s generation as victims of a "historical pessimism"which not only makes them different but leaves them "perhaps given to extremes and torn apart, perhaps inert, withdrawn, insolent"("Legatarios", 8), a description which seems to liken them to an unruly bunch of self-regarding adolescents.

They were better than that, as their own exercises in self-criticism show. One mini-manifesto, formally accredited to Alberto Paganini (b. 1932), but actually a collage of interventions by himself and five other fiction writers (no poets) who comment on his and each other’s contributions,20 has an entire generation stranded between making a literature of or for the revolution and simply revolutionising literary forms(10-15). As Conteris put it: “We act - write - on the periphery, without knowing what to do to get to the vortex”(9). Paganini sensed a feeling of alienation and betrayal, because they had been left with a situation in which decisions could not be made because the alternatives were too few and too extreme: “the 60s generation . . . leaves me

20 A. Paganini, “Tesis polémica sobre la generación del 60”, Prólogo, 2- 3 (1969), 9-18. The others are Híber Conteris (b. 1933), Glen Eyherabide (b. 1934), Jorge Musto (b. 1927), Jorge Onetti (b. 1931), and Juan Carlos Somma(b. 1930). 36

with a certain bitter taste, a piercing impression of solitude and abandonment, of acute anxiety about its future, stuck amidst forces and at the mercy of circumstances I fear are inexorable” (16). Eyherabide agreed that they were an “abandoned” generation, and went on: “at the crossroads of a liberal . . . Uruguay that has finally died, we find ourselves suddenly faced with the increasing ‘fascisticization’ of the ruling classes”, but nonetheless found an important role for the writer: “for me, the key to the writer’s function in a society as sick with lies as ours, is demystification”(17, his emphasis).

Paganini summed it all up: “We are already sliding down the steep slope of concrete problems. Fine. That’s where we are and that’s what it’s all about. But can literature be made out of it?” He was “convinced” that it could, but was rather incoherent about it all: revolution was “defined” as a series of reforms, and he asked his colleagues to accept that “to write in a revolutionary way is to write well”(18). Admittedly, 1969 was a bad year in which to make difficult political choices: the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (the MLN-Tupamaros) was in its heyday and the government was responding with an increasingly violent and indiscriminate repression to which the main political parties seemed to be accomplices, while the Frente Amplio was still in the early stage of its gestation period. 37

There is general agreement on the resurgence of nationalism in Uruguayan culture after the mid- 1950s(Rodríguez Monegal, Literatura uruguaya , 420 and Rama, Generación crítica , 24),21 which the latter associates with the growth in the social sciences(59). However, accounts of the politics of the younger writers become muddied by the political differences among the critics trying to define them. So, Rodríguez Monegal, who may here be taking a final potshot at his many ideological adversaries among his erstwhile colleagues, finds among the 60s writers a well-justified "more sober and reticent attitude to political commitment":

The later and growing deterioration of national institutions, the hardening of the Cuban Revolution along Soviet lines, the transplanting of international friction to Asia, China's access to atomic power, made many of the '45 generation's postures look flimsily based. At the same time, they reveal the sanity of the [new one] (Literatura uruguaya , 409).

Rama, on the other hand, who would certainly be one of those Rodríguez Monegal may have been trying to get at, agrees with de Rossiello. For him, the younger writers arrive on the scene in a climate made ripe for change by the result of the 1958 Uruguayan elections (which saw the Colorados ousted from office for the first time in

21 As the young novelist Mario César Fernández put it : nobody was writing “in order to get translated”, quoted in F. Aínsa, “Catarsis liberadora y tradición resumida: las nuevas fronteras de la realidad en la narrativa uruguaya contemporánea”, Revista Iberoamericana, lviii, 160- 1(1992), 809. 38

nearly a century) and by the heady news emanating from the feverish early period of the Cuban Revolution:

The best of this group are militants in what might vaguely and with all its nuances be called the left, a movement which starts from discontent with the current state of the nation, the desire to improve it through change, and the faith generated by the knowledge that others have done it and therefore they can too ("Nuevos compañeros", 3).

If the list of signatories to the public letter in support of the formation of a new centre-left coalition in 1971 is anything to go by (see Chapter 3), the facts are on Rama's and de Rossiello's side. For example, of the six writers who contributed to Paganini’s manifesto, five were to sign it (the absentee being Paganini himself).

Paternain (Testimonio de las letras, 152) suggests that some of the differences between the two generations can be explained simply by the need felt by their younger successors to differentiate themselves from their more illustrious and established elders, despite the similarity of circumstances in which both were required to work. Certainly, the virulence of the attack by Flo(b. 1930) in 1952 (see this book’s Introduction), which both Rodríguez Monegal (Literatura uruguaya , 416) and Rama (Generación crítica , 174) see as the first rounds of sniper fire aimed at the '45 generation, might in part be a response to some such impulse. Paternain also draws our attention (148 and 153) to a 1968 document which reveals more 39

readily the complexities and ambiguities of the relationship between the two generations: Mántaras' "La generación del 45".22 The opening paragraphs explain that the piece had been commissioned by the editors of the Capítulo Oriental encyclopedia of Uruguayan literature, and had then been rejected by them as being too general and abstract, as concentrating more on "what the ‘45 generation wanted or believed they wanted to do in the early days" than on what they had actually achieved since, and because they already had enough instalments (four, in all) devoted to the topic. The author's response is, in effect, to wonder why, if this were the case, the essay had been requested at all and to doubt the editors' good faith.

Now, Mántaras "feels herself to be an intellectual daughter of the '45 people", three of whose most prestigious figures (Martínez Moreno, Maggi and Real de Azúa) so happened to make up the editorial board of the encyclopedia. She goes on to reach what is, for her, a somewhat sombre conclusion:

I honestly believe that what they did not like is that, in the name of what they themselves taught me (independent critical thought, the courage to recognise and state defects and defections, an honest handling of documentary evidence), I was capable of examining them. It would seem that my more 'rebellious brothers and sisters' were right. Patience. Parents get old and one must accustom oneself to this happening. It does not mean that one stops loving them or putting into practice the good things one learned

22 G. Mántaras, “La generación del 45”, Prólogo, 1(1968), 13-22. 40

from them(13).

This is clearly a version of an argument used by intelligent children or students against the criticism of parents or mentors everywhere: all I am doing is to practice what you preached; what you really do not like is that I should apply it to you. It also perhaps seeks to untie the oedipal knot by abandoning an entranced reverence for the more difficult mingling of respect and the need to take an independent stand.

In retrospect, the editors were probably right. Much, though admittedly not all, of the information in Mántaras' essay is available elsewhere in the encyclopedia, and not only in the issues specifically dedicated to the '45 generation (see especially Real de Azúa's El Uruguay como reflexión I, for example). More importantly, the tone throughout is less that of an even-handed survey than of a balancing of accounts which apportions praise, often very flattering (as in the case of Real de Azúa[20]), and blame (as at the close of the section on the journal Asir [18]), albeit in more or less equal amounts. Moreover, Mántaras ends the piece with what is explicitly a 'debit and credit' entry entitled "Inculpaciones y absoluciones", where she sums up and assesses the attacks on the '45 generation made during the course of their twenty years' work, whether from within or later by representatives of her own age group (21-2). 41

If Mántaras' essay throws into sharp relief the hazards lying in the gap between the two generations, for many others there is little or no evidence of either pitfalls or no-man's-land. Paternain exemplifies the contradictions frequently met when dealing with this issue by first affirming the existence of two distinct generations (Testimonio, 145) and then beginning his section on the later of them with the subtitle "Break or Continuity?"(151).

The extreme side of the case for continuity is to be found in Benedetti's seminal, much reprinted and frequently quoted essay "La literatura uruguaya cambia de voz", written in January 1962 and used as the introduction to the three editions of his Literatura uruguaya: siglo veinte.23 He simply bypasses the entire generation issue altogether by referring globally to the intellectuals: "Curiously . . . there is one sector which, without prior agreement among themselves (rather each of them off their own bat) seems to have decided to play the card of sincerity, of the determined and uncomfortable incursion into the real causes of the crisis . . . the intelligentsia"(37). He does, however, single out what most see as the crucial year:

Suddenly, in 1960, the public seemed to wake up. Overnight, it discovered that a national literature existed; moreover, that it was readable and, lastly,

23 As elsewhere in this book, I refer to the third edition (1988). 42

that it set in motion people, feelings and problems that had something to do with the public's own world. . . 1960 was a moment of maturing. A maturing of the reader even more than of the writer; really the latter had been maturing for 15 years (32).

Benedetti may be here pointing back to the beginnings of the '45 generation (to which he himself belongs, of course), but for him any 'break' (to return to Paternain's terminology) occurs in the perception of the reader, not in the development of the country's writers and intellectuals.24

In their respective overviews of the period, Rodríguez Monegal and Rama, while acknowledging differences of emphasis, both come heavily down on the side of continuity. For the former, the 60s writers often began publishing so precociously that it is easy to confuse their work with their predecessors' (Literatura uruguaya, 406), while both groups, together with a select few from the first half of the century, have all combined to give Uruguayan literature a new and higher profile: "These last twenty years [ie. 1945 to 1965 approximately] are years of confusion, chaos and national sadness. But they are also the years in which literature has acquired a much clearer awareness of its value and importance"(428-9). Rama is more emphatic:

24 A point made indirectly by Cotelo (Contemporáneos , 29) who states that the 60s writers inherited a public already formed by the ‘45 generation. 43

Thirty years (1939-1969) measure the work of at least two generations of intellectuals between whom no clear hiatus is revealed but rather the continuation, progression and acceleration of an identical will (Generación crítica , 20).

Elsewhere, he adds that the young post-1955 group showed themselves to be "in favour of an intellectual continuity which hooks up with the work of their elders [and] with the lessons to be derived from the historical realities of the country"(176), thus attributing any change in cultural direction to the increasing pressures observable in the world outside.25

For participants at the time, the sense of community was often so strongly underlined that it recalls the "family resemblance" Rodríguez Monegal saw in the then emerging '45 generation in his 1952 article quoted earlier. In 1963, Rama effusively welcomed the new generation in these terms: "In these confident, impulsive and even insolent faces, I do not see my children, but simply those of my new comrades in the hard, joyous enterprise of culture. . . [R]ight now, I cannot perceive any hiatus between those who are young - some in age, others by dates of publication - and those who are young no longer"("Los nuevos compañeros", 2).26

25 Other critics offer little more than minor variations on the same theme. See, for example, de Rossiello, Los nuevos narradores , 594; Paternain, Testimonio , 152, A. Bárros-Lémez, "La larga marcha de lo verosímil: narrativa uruguaya del siglo xx", Casa de Las Américas , No. 170(1988), 43 and Trigo, Caudillo , estado , 178. 26 Two years later, he wrote a pugnaciously appreciative introduction to an anthology of their work in A. Rama, “Por una cultura militante”, Marcha , 1287(31 December 1965), 2-3. Similarly, another ‘45 generation writer, Sylvia Lago, in an illustrated lecture to a Cuban 44

This feeling of togetherness was reciprocated from the other side of the generational divide. One of those "young by dates of publication", the poet, dramatist and journalist Milton Schinca (b. 1926), was representative of the response to a survey of the new generation:

[I]n what matters, we all belong to an identical movement, a broad wave in our literature, which takes in with no appreciable break the '45 generation up to the present. . . It must be because historical reality hits us ever more harshly, and makes us feel with greater clarity that, beyond our tangential differences, there bind us an identical transcendental mission and a common responsibility which we should communally meet.27

There are, then, two generations but they exist - or coexist, even - on a historical continuum which justifies them being considered together, despite their

audience, included extracts from both generations’ work among her readings, while emphasising that intergenerational squabbles were the last thing anybody could afford in the political climate of the early 1970s. See her “Expresiones literarias del Uruguay en conmoción”, Casa de Las Américas , 73(1972), 67-75. 27 M. Schinca, "La época nos convoca a todos por igual", Marcha , 1186(27 December, 1963), 4. See also in the same survey the poet W. Benavides, "Encuentro conmovedor con la revolución cubana" and the young dramatist M. Rosencof, “No hay separación generacional”, on the same page of the same issue of Marcha . In the same vein, the novelist and critic Fernando Aínsa, who began writing around 1960, rehashing an earlier article also from 1963(“Los jóvenes conquistadores de la ciudad”, Gaceta de la Universidad , 31[1963]), reaffirmed the continuity between the two generations by underlining the unflagging creativity of the earlier(see his Tiempo reconquistado , 162-3). De Armas and Garcé also note the clear links between the two, while emphasising the increased leftwing politicisation of the second (Uruguay y su conciencia crítica, 37 and 60). 45

differences, as a single unit. This situation is best summed up by Real de Azúa who, once more in 1963, saw "this incipient 1960 generation" as "not too different from the previous one", and, in a phrase which became famous at the time, described the intellectuals who comprised it as "legatees of a demolition whose passion and initial difficulties they can neither understand nor, obviously, share". He went on to explain: "The '45 generation had to reorganise a perspective on the cultural past which I have the impression that its followers have inherited and which they will not revise"("Legatarios", 8).

Real de Azúa perhaps meant only to refer to a job well done - after all, it was his intellectual powers as much as anybody else's that had made the "demolition" and "reorganisation" possible - but he inadvertently refers to the one fact that sets the 60s generation off from the preceding one. One of the reasons why they would not revise their cultural inheritance too much is that what they could have legitimately expected to be a natural development which would have led them to the positions of maturity and influence enjoyed by the '45 intellectuals was abruptly curtailed or rudely transformed by the turmoil that culminated in the June 1973 military coup. Which leads back to the word which closed this chapter's first section: politics. As Ainsa has recently observed, “if the beginnings of a polemic were seen at any time, what led to the inevitable 46

coexistence of the ‘45 and 60s generations was the solidarity of their thinking when faced with the breakdown of the social and political system and with the growing hostility of the reactionaries”(“Catarsis liberadora”, 811).28 Circumstances brought two literary generations together and helped them to learn how to talk to one another. Things were not quite so easy for those working closer to where the political action was, however.

Who Did What to Whom?: A Political Group Portrait

Politics was an obstacle to dialogue which intellectuals would spend much of the decade trying to overcome. Barros-Lémez writes that "[f]rom its early days as a politically independent entity, Uruguay developed a close relationship between the literary and political process"("Larga marcha", 42), a sentence which sums up a widely held view. Exactly thirty years before, Real de Azúa had stated categorically that from the early period of the country’s formation onwards, due to the all but zero possibility of professionalisation, to the weakness of its institutions, the ubiquitousness of political control and the lack of financial return on literary activity, "Uruguayan writers will see themselves more immersed in politics than any European intellectual and more dependent on it, in this

28 A very similar view can be found in P. Rocca, “35 años en Marcha: escritura y ambiente literario en Marcha y en el Uruguay, 1939-1974”, Nuevo Texto Crítico, vi, 11(1993), 107. The first writers to fall foul of the new climate of general political repression would do so in 1968- 9(113-4). 47

way, through their possible activities as parliamentarian, bureaucrat, journalist, diplomat or revolutionary”.29

Two moments in the more recent past must be at least briefly discussed as clear antecedents to the attitudes taken up in the 1960s. The first of these was the coup d’etat of March 31, 1933 headed by Gabriel Terra who had been elected to the presidency in the 1930 elections. This event was the first major interruption to due democratic process since the ascendancy of the reformist Colorado government of Batlle y Ordóñez in 1904 had curtailed the tradition of armed insurrections inherited from the nineteenth century, and the last until the military coup of June, 1973. It was a purely civilian affair brought about through a series of cross-factional deals across the two major parties as conservative forces tried to take advantage of the economic slump following the Great Crash of 1929 and the disarray caused by the death of Batlle in the same year to reverse or at least diminish the pace and scope of socially progressive reforms and redistributive economic policies.

Prior to the 1930s, under the Batllista reformist state, intellectuals had, according to Graceras (89), shared

29 C. Real de Azúa, “Partidos políticos y literatura en el Uruguay”, Tribuna Universitaria , 6-7(1958), 102. See also Benedetti, Literatura uruguaya, 34, and U. Graceras, Los intelectuales y la política en el Uruguay(Ed. El País, 1970), 134. 48

to a large extent the values of the majority of their society and had gone about the task of constructing a national mythology. Solari likewise believed that “[u]ntil the crisis of 1929, intellectuals found in the traditional political parties an opportunity for access and influence that seems to have been perceived as fairly satisfactory”.30 More recently, Achugar has argued that even though there were, as might be expected, some conservative opposition to the cultural hegemony of the interventionist Batllista state, no concerted attempts to find any real alternative modes of participation were made until the end of the 1920s.31 As Trigo put it, the country was “Batlle-ised”(Caudillo, estado, 80).

The 1933 coup shattered this apparent consensus by revealing the fragility of institutions and social values which both the intelligentsia and the general populace had perhaps too complacently taken for granted. Virtually all Uruguay’s major intellectual figures opposed the coup and the suspension of democratic rights,32 initiating a rift beween them and the political mainstream that would be the keynote of the relationship between intellectuals and the governing elite for decades to come. From this emerges the beginnings

30 A. Solari, El tercerismo en el Uruguay (Arca, 1965), 100. 31 H. Achugar, “Vanguardia y batllismo: el intelectual y el estado”, Río de La Plata , 4-6(1987), 420-1. 32 As eventually did the population at large. In June 1938, a pro- democracy rally brought 200,000 people on to the streets of Montevideo, a phenomenal number given that the capital’s total population at the time was only 700,000. See G. W. Rama, La democracia en Uruguay (Buenos Aires, Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1987), 53, n. 23. 49

of the moralistic critique of political life centered around issues such as nepotism, opportunism and corruption which the ‘45 generation would develop after the return to formal democracy in 1942 and which would inform the leftist intelligentsia’s radicalisation in the 1960s(A. Rama, Generación crítica , 80 and G. W. Rama, Democracia , 93).

As Varela points out , this critique of ethics in politics received a leftwards push by the coincidence in time between the opposition to Terra and the Uruguayan contribution to the worldwide intellectual resistance to the rise of fascism in Europe and the equally international move to rally support for the Spanish republic against the nationalist uprising led by Franco in 1936.33 If the intellectual rejection of Terra was centered in the Ateneo, where oppositionists dominated the institution’s executive by 1934,34 the same period saw the foundation of anti- fascist solidarity groups such as the Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales del Uruguay, the Asociación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores and the Organización de Intelectuales y Artistas Católicos, a splinter group of the Asociación. These organisations had no more influence on Uruguayan society at large (Graceras, 93) than did their political counterparts, the hastily formed ‘Popular Fronts’

33 G. Varela, De la república liberal al estado militar: Uruguay 1968- 1973 (Ed. del Nuevo Mundo, 1988), 41. 34 R. Jacob, El Uruguay de Terra, 1931-1938 (EBO, 1983), 74. 50

which made up the first doomed attempts at forging some kind of unity on the Uruguayan left (Jacob, Uruguay de Terra, 75-6).

To the feeling of marginalisation implied here can be added the sense of alienation and unreality glimpsed in de Torres Wilson’s evocation of Montevideo at the end of the 1930s as “a balcony on to the universe”. Compared with the “drama” of the Spanish civil war and the Second World War, he goes on, “our reality was bound to seem smaller, lesser, more irredeemable than ever”.35 Ares Pons suggests yet other reasons why the wider world might be attractive to what he terms the “intellectual proletariat”, part of the burgeoning bureaucracy created by the Batllista state’s increasing control over most of the country’s affairs: “For the more sensitive, intelligent or snobbish individuals of this social stratum, the disproportion between the cultural information at their disposal and the narrowness of their real lives resolved itself in a sense of frustration which often found an outlet in intellectual and artistic preoccupations”.36 Here we have a fertile breeding ground for self-delusion fed simultaneously by disconnection from immediate reality and fascination with farther shores, a superior critical gaze coupled to doubts about the efficacy and pertinence

35 J. A. de Torres Wilson, La conciencia histórica uruguaya (Feria del Libro, 1964), 27, building on remarks in Flo’s 1952 essay analysed in the Introduction above. 36 R. Ares Pons, “Militancia y desarraigo de la intelligentsia uruguaya”[1953], quoted from the collection La intelligentsia uruguaya y otros ensayos (EBO, 1968), 45. 51

of the critique it produces. All of these dubious qualities appear to a greater or lesser degree in the second moment prior to 1960 to be analysed here, that of the so- called ‘Third Position’,37 a trend not only of some importance in itself but also because it generates an acrimonious debate during the 1960s which indicates its continued relevance and illustrates the political tensions among intellectuals in a decade even more fraught than the 1940s.

The ‘Third Position’ has its origins toward the end of the Second World War in a refusal of the imposed stark alternative between ‘Allies’ and ‘Axis’, which was transposed at the onset of the Cold War into a rejection of the equally bald option between democracy and communism or between the USA and the USSR.38 These bare bones were fleshed out with a firm belief in a democracy more pinkishly socialist than just social, an anti-imperialism equally opposed to the expansion of both Soviet and American spheres of influence (but which in Uruguay and Latin America inevitably concentrated on the dangers of the latter), and a nationalism tempered by the need for integration with the rest of the continent. Its perspective, then, was largely international as it looked to find a role for the underdeveloped world in the maintenance - or creation -

37 I shall use this phrase to translate what appears in Uruguayan texts as either ‘el tercerismo’ or ‘la tercera posición’. 38 If the ideology of Peronism in Argentina had an influence on the Uruguayan intellectuals who took up this cause, none of the Uruguayan sources acknowledge it . 52

of global peace. The Korean war of the early 1950s brought the ‘Third Position’ under attack from both sides as the postulated middle ground between the Americans and Soviets became increasingly unsustainable either in theory or practice, while Uruguay’s intractable economic crisis which began in the mid-50s and would erode the country’s social and political structures during the 60s made its formulations look puny and irrelevant to the nation’s needs.

The theoretical origins of the ‘Third Position’ are North American and French, so it is unsurprising to find that its main advocates in Uruguay were to be found writing in the pages of Jornada and Tribuna Universitaria (journals published by the Uruguayan University Students Federation), and Marcha, the weekly founded by Quijano in 1939, all of them reviews put out by and for a progressive intellectual elite. Neither is it unexpected to discover that, whereas some have seen traces of the ‘Third Position’ in the political program of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (the MLN - Tupamaros),39 others have found in its appeal to a select group further evidence of the Uruguayan intelligentsia’s failure to construct projects realistic enough to influence either the general population or the course of national events.40

39 For example, R. Debray, The Revolution on Trial (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978), 228 and L. Costa Bonino, Crisis de los partidos tradicionales y movimiento revolucionario en el Uruguay (EBO, 1985), 59. 40 See Graceras, 97, G. W. Rama, Democracia , 64 and Varela, 41-2. 53

The source of this latter approach is almost certainly Solari’s El tercerismo en el Uruguay (see note 29), the standard work on the ‘Third Position’ in Uruguay, although it was preceded and, to some extent, anticipated ten years earlier by Ares Pons’ 1955 essay “Sobre la tercera posición”.41 Solari’s book offers an historical account and a critical analysis of the movement, followed by an appendix of a selection of articles from Marcha and short pieces and a manifesto taken from student publications, all produced between 1946 and 1954. That such an apparently inoffensive book should produce so much polemical heat on its publication testifies to the fact that, more than ten years on, at least some considered the ‘Third Position’ to be terrain still worth fighting over, although, as will soon become clear, it may not be only Solari’s argument about the ‘Third Position’ that his critics found upsetting. For he had other axes to grind and it is worth seeing in some detail how he set about sharpening them.

The crux of what will be Solari’s thesis comes in the preface. Having first declared a personal interest (“in some senses of the term, I agree with the ‘Third Position’”) which obliges him to stick as closely as possible to the documentary evidence (Tercerismo, 7), he continues: “it is nearly impossible to find an intellectual who is not either for or against the ‘Third Position’, so it is reasonable to hope

41 Collected in his La intelligentsia uruguaya , 59-68. 54

that an investigation of it may say something about intellectuals in Uruguay and especially about those who see themselves as belonging on the left”(8). It is this statement that justifies taking his book as a guide by which to sketch out the political portrait of the intellectuals active during the decade.

Having once established that he sees his inquiry as referring to virtually all supposedly progressive intellectuals, Solari goes on to mount a swingeing attack on them. He notes the contradiction between many students’ radical non-conformism in politics and their conservatism in matters of everyday life, concluding that their radicalism is reserved for areas in which they have little influence and less control (24-5). His attack on the advocates of the ‘Third Position’ is trenchant to the point of being entirely dismissive: their attachment to absolutist principles (54) allows them to feel superior and “see themselves more and more intensely as the truly pure in a society increasingly corrupt, especially in politics”(102); their view of democracy is “romantic”(64) and divorced from the real world (68-9); their anti-imperialism is a “magical procedure very common in ideologies: destroying the enemy at the level of ideas takes the role of destroying him in reality”(71). Moreover, he sees this anti-imperialism as escapist in two respects: it justifies intellectuals’ inactivity by allowing them to ignore pressing real issues which have nothing to do with it (72-3) and is out of touch with a general public favourable to the US (75). 55

Supporters of the ‘Third Position’, he argues, “have neither power nor any possibility of getting it, which makes inevitable their tendency to promote it more as the development of certain fundamental principles than as a politics of effective action”(115).42 Solari encapsulates his whole argument in one leading question: "How to be effective if one renounces all links with power?"(103).

The conclusion widens the scope of his argument still further. If in the preface the advocates of the ‘Third Position’ stand for intellectuals as a social group, now their deficiencies become the failure of a whole society:

The drama of the ‘Third Position’ is the drama of Uruguayan society. Without doubt, there has never been an effort made with better intentions, with greater critical scope, to overcome the continually worsening situation of this society.43 Because all the criticisms that can be made of it, some of them fully justified, cannot get round the fact that the ‘Third Position’ is the only serious alternative to communism amidst the quietism of the traditional parties. The failure by the ‘Third Position’ to find an image of Uruguay that can be turned into an instrument of action, whether or not its own fault, is one more indicator of a society which has lost its physiognomy, its commitment to a clearly defined collective task which can be the basis for the transformation so many groups hope for and which even the most cursory analysis shows to be indispensable(132).

42 Trigo seems to be largely following Solari when he calls the ‘Third Position’ an example of “ideological schizophrenia” (Caudillo, estado, 179). 43 Ares Pons also emphasises the importance and limitations of the ‘Third Position’ as negative critique (Intelligentsia uruguaya , 65). 56

Solari ends the analytical section of his book with a more assertive and more desperate reformulation of his earlier question: “What is it that makes realism an adventure so difficult for the Uruguayan intelligentsia?”(133).

In effect, Solari impugns the progressive - which, for him, is virtually all - intellectuals with being unable to construct practicable, relevant projects which might be translated into realistic programs well adapted to Uruguayan conditions and capable of persuading a disillusioned populace and reluctant politicians that they are worth the effort required to implement them. Moreover, he implies, intellectuals are perhaps content to put up pie-in-the-sky abstractions instead only so that they can delude themselves into believing that they are doing something. In short, a failure of nerve, imagination and communication. These attitudes continue a trend in Solari’s thinking begun in “Réquiem por la izquierda”, an influential if controversial essay on the 1962 national elections,44 and extended in the section on intellectuals in his later study of post-war Uruguayan society.45 There he states baldly that there is no body of conservative thought in modern Uruguay because intellectuals “are or claim to be on the left”(121), argues that the politicisation of intellectuals in Uruguay (and

44 See Chapters 3 and 4 for further remarks on this essay. 45 A. Solari, El desarrollo social del Uruguay de la postguerra (Alfa, 1967), 121-131. 57

underdeveloped countries, generally) is both inevitable and ineffective(126-7), and concludes:

The intellectual class and the political class - if one may use these terms - are still essentially opposed to one another with no adequate channels of communication. Therefore, the chances of constructing a kind of thinking which might become a feasible project for getting the country out of stagnation are slim”(131).

Clearly, Solari had seen nothing in the intervening two years to change the gist of his 1965 argument; if anything, his pessimism had deepened.46

46 In fact, over the next twenty years Solari’s view of the role the intelligentsia played in the mid-late 1960s was to become even more negative. In a 1986 paper “El proceso de redemocratización en el Uruguay” (collected in his Uruguay: partidos políticos y sistema electoral [El Libro Libre / FUCCYT, 1988], 227-253), he repeats some of the points outlined here but goes on to suggest that the net result of the intelligentsia’s trenchant criticism of the main political parties was to undermine even further the very notion of democracy itself (229-230). It might be argued, however, that Solari himself is a victim of the very process he is analysing. He stands apart from the fray and shoots barbs from the outside but does not feel obliged to offer solutions himself. In this, he epitomises the very situation of the intellectual already studied, with greater self-awareness, in Juan Flo's 1952 essay discussed above in the Introduction. This seems, at best, overstated. Having for years taxed the intellectuals with being impractical, ineffective and alienated from both the popular will and the centres of political powermongering, it is inconsistent to then credit them with a major role in the demise of the nation’s democratic institutions. Moreover, it could be argued (see my Chapter 3)that the intellectuals’ impressive support of the Frente Amplio coalition in 1971 expresses their hope not of destroying democracy but of returning to it after the depredations of the Pacheco and Bordaberry régimes. (To be fair to Solari, he also sees the parliament’s own weak if tacit complicity in the progressive involvement of the military in affairs of state as a crucial factor in preparing the way for the coup [232-3]). One might go further and say that, if anything, the coup actually vindicates the intelligentsia’s critique of the ruling elite as impotent. 58

In view, then, of the challenging nature of Solari’s attitude to the local intelligentsia, the initial response to Tercerismo might be considered oddly bland. The historian of ideas and colleague of Carlos Quijano, Arturo Ardao, wrote a long and scathing review of Solari’s book in five parts, or seven if one includes his two responses to Real de Azúa, whose opinion was more favourable towards Solari as well as critical of Ardao himself.47 Ardao, it transpires, also has a vested interest in the topic:

Most of the texts in the so-called “Documentary Appendix” come from [Marcha], the majority being from my own pen, even though they are a minuscule and unrepresentative selection of all that I have written on the subject over the years. And [Solari] has not been what might be called impartial with my ‘Third Position’, to which, if only from outside, he once professed allegiance (17 December, 1965, 14).

Professional rivalry, personal betrayal, ideological wrangling: as the political stakes rise, the personally vindictive tone intensifies. It will be precisely these differences that the Frente Amplio will try to resolve, as shown in Chapter Three below.

Having objected to Solari calling the work an “essay” because of its pretensions to objectivity (a point disputed by

47 “ Sobre el tercerismo en el Uruguay”, Marcha (17 December 1965), 14-15; (24 December 1965), 14-15; (31 December 1965), 12-13; (6 January 1966), 13; (20 January 1966), 8. The two replies to Real de Azúa, who started writing his piece after reading the opening salvos fired by Ardao, are in the same journal: “Respuesta a un tercero”(6 January 1966), 13 and 24; “Segunda respuesta a un tercero”(20 January 1966), 8. 59

Real de Azúa [“Respuesta”, 13], and settled later by Graceras[139], who accepts the label because all efforts in the social sciences were bedevilled at the time by a lack of local empirical research data), Ardao announces his intention of dismissing Solari’s argument by exposing three “basic errors” of fact, method and concept(14). The first of these, broached in the remainder of the 17 December piece and concluded in the next, counters Solari’s claim that the ‘Third Position’ had been by 1965 a contentious issue “for more than twenty years” (Tercerismo, 7) by outlining Ardao’s own version of its history to show the absurdity of dating the movement before the beginning of the Cold War.48 Ardao’s attack on Solari’s method consists of rejecting his selection of documents as arbitrary and illogical, his arrangement of them as unchronological and his referencing for them and other quotations in the text as slack or misleading (31 December, 1965). Solari’s major conceptual error, according to Ardao, is to call the ‘Third Position’ an ideology when it was simply an approach to international politics which people of any ideological persuasion could adopt (6 January, 1966).49 This first mistake leads Solari, according to the final

48 Ares Pons had anticipated Solari’s dating with his statement that the ‘Third Position’ was born at the time of the German army’s first major defeats and took real shape among university students in 1943- 4(Intelligentsia uruguaya, 60). Even Graceras, who generally accepts Ardao’s approach, underlines the congruency between the ‘Third Position’, whose beginnings, like Ardao, he places in 1946-7, and student attitudes of 1940-44(103-4). Neither Solari, Ardao nor, for that matter, Graceras refers to Ares’ 1955 essay. 49 All writers vindicate Ardao on this point, although Ares Pons is careful to distinguish the general run of adherents from those groups centred around the Students’ Federation and Marcha who “typified themselves ideologically through the ‘Third Position’”(Intelligentsia uruguaya, 61, his emphasis). 60

article, to confuse the ‘Third Position’ with neutrality, anti-imperialism, a kind of ‘Third World-ism’ and nationalism.

What is striking here is that throughout the lengthy review, Ardao at no point takes up the really contentious issue of Solari’s analogy between the fate of the ‘Third Position’ and the political inefficacy of Uruguay’s leftist intelligentsia as a whole. It is as though demolishing (to his satisfaction, at least) the first term of the comparison absolves him of the obligation to even mention the other. Time would provide different ways of avoiding this distressing matter.

In November 1969 Carlos Rama, like Solari a sociologist, gave at the Ninth Latin American Sociology Congress in Mexico a paper entitled “Uruguay en crisis”.50 In the section on Uruguayan sociology, he mentions just himself and Solari, whose career is summarised in terms the real import of which cannot be guaged unless quoted in full:

Aldo Solari, author in 1953 of an excellent Sociología rural [uruguaya], republished in 1958 with an added favourable opinion of the Liga Federal de Acción Ruralista.51

50 Collected in his Uruguay en crisis (El Siglo Ilustrado, 1969), 9-42. 51 An organisation particularly important during the 1950s, which proved to be rabidly reactionary but whose calls for renewal had initially misled a number of youthful progressive intellectuals into believing it would reinvent nineteenth century pastoral socialist mythology, and start a genuine reform movement which would overturn the ignorance and indifference of the urban bourgeoisie and political elites. See also Chapter Two of this book, especially the section on Methol Ferré. 61

In the 1962 elections he actively supported the Unión Popular, an electoral group headed by the Socialist Party with the collaboration of sectors of the National Party, which failed and Solari wrote “Réquiem por la izquierda”, a text in which he expressed his discouragement and disillusion with the left to which he ceases to belong. In 1965 he wrote for the Congress for Cultural Freedom his book El tercerismo en el Uruguay, criticising the position of the Student Federation and Marcha, which is answered by Arturo Ardao. Since then he has belonged to ILARI [Latin American Institute for International Relations], a dependent organisation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, under whose auspices he organised in Montevideo the colloquium on ‘Elites in Latin America’.52 Finally, in 1967 he left the country. (Uruguay en crisis, 14-15)

It is difficult to imagine a more thorough attempt at character assassination. Rama engages in a tactic typical of political squabbles: disqualify the messenger by pronouncing him guilty by association, so as to be justified in ignoring the message. The guiding structure here is that of the good man corrupted: his first book was “excellent”, but the tainting of its republication through its connection with a reactionary group is a sign of things to come. He may briefly recover enough to align himself with the left, but after that it is all downhill. He not only abandons the left but betrays them even further by

52 See the identically titled volume, edited by Solari and S. M. Lipset (New York, Oxford U. P., 1967). The colloquium was held in June, 1965. 62

turning round to attack them. He compounds this by working openly for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which by 1969 had been revealed as a front organisation for the CIA’s anti-communist propaganda machine, a fact undoubtedly not lost on Rama’s audience.53 The tone of finality in the last sentence suggests that it is only to be expected that such a perfidious and unreliable character would leave the country for good, abandoning its people to their fate.54

In retrospect, the 'Third Position' itself seems like the product of a failed attempt by an intellectual elite to find some alternative to the political orthodoxy surrounding it. It was empowering during the short

53 The whole debate in Uruguay over the nature and role of the Congress can be read in articles and letter columns of Marcha between May 1965 (i.e. during the preparations for the colloquium on elites)and May 1967(when the truth finally became public knowledge). The international brouhaha had a strong Uruguayan flavour because one of the renowned journals to disappear in the fallout of the affair was Mundo Nuevog, edited in Paris by none other than Rodríguez Monegal, who had vacated the literary editor’s chair at Marcha to do the job. His political standing with his erstwhile colleagues was not good before he left (as the tone and the odd acid comment in parts of Literatura uruguaya del medio siglo make clear), but the revelation of the CIA’s involvement in the funding of his magazine sent it to rock bottom. A judicious selection of documents, including letters by Solari, Lipset and Rodríguez Monegal as well as searching articles and editorial notes by Angel Rama, can be found in Barros-Lémez, Intelectuales y política, 34- 107. There seems no evidence whatever that Solari wrote Tercerismo “for the Congress for Cultural Freedom” other than that Rama disapproves of both. He also omits all reference to most of Solari’s pivotal work in Uruguayan sociology during the 1960s, such as Desarrollo social (see note 49 above) and the two volumes of Sociología del Uruguay (Arca, 1964-5). 54 Solari did indeed leave Uruguay to teach in various parts of the Americas and to work for the United Nations, but returned at the close of the military dictatorship and has since held responsible posts in the administration of public education. 63

period when its tenets,however construed, seemed viable, but became disenabling once historical realities exceeded its capacity to account for them. Solari's own progression through adherence, disenchantment to critique of both the movement and its followers can be seen as responses to the same kind of frustration.

Similarly, it may be that Ardao and C. M. Rama could not answer Solari’s exposure of the intellectual’s ineffectiveness because there was no way out of the intelligentsia’s dilemma until and unless the political nexus that was nothing short of a stranglehold could be broken first. Rama’s kind of vindictive casting of slurs at supposed traitors is a typical product of a left caught in an ascending spiral of two mutually reinforcing self-destructive elements: powerlessness and fragmentation. While the left taken as a whole had never obtained more than ten per cent of the vote in any national elections, by 1966 there were 25 separate leftist organisations (see Debray, Revolution on Trial, 203- 4). Moreover, between the period of the ‘Third Position’ and November 1969, much had happened to exacerbate matters. On the international front, the fall of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 and the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic (not to mention the escalating Vietnam War) had done a lot to strengthen distrust of the United States, while the Cuban Revolution of 1959 aroused hopes for radical change throughout the 64

continent.55 Uruguay’s giant neighbours to north and south suffered ominous military coups: Brazil in 1964 and Argentina two years later. At home, between 1960 and 1967 the average annual inflation rate was just over 50% while real wages had fallen in 1968 to a mere 34.7% of what they had been in 1957.56 The hopes placed in the National Party’s historic election win in 195857 after nearly a century of uninterrupted Colorado rule had all been frustrated, as had those invested in the fledgling leftwing alliances of 1962 and 1966. From the mid-1960s, the trade union movement began to assume the role of a de facto para- political opposition, while the Tupamaros were beginning their campaign of exposing the ineptitude and corruption of the political and financial elites.

The potential for violence in this situation, largely if not completely held at bay prior to 1967, was released

55 All writers agree that the Cuban Revolution received the virtually unanimous support of the Uruguayan intelligentsia. As C. M. Rama put it: “Leading intellectuals who have declared themselves against [it] are so few they do not amount to the fingers on one hand”(Uruguay en crisis, 88). One of the few not wholeheartedly to applaud it or unreservedly condemn the U. S.’ hostility to it, was Rodríguez Monegal, as is made clear in the opening chapter of Literatura uruguaya. This formalised a major rift with his colleagues. For example, July 1959 was the last time Angel Rama and Rodríguez Monegal appeared in the pages of the same issue of Marcha (Rocca, “35 años”, 72). Rodríguez Monegal went on to teach at Yale and, during the dictatorship, was the only expatriate or exiled member of the ‘45 generation to have his passport renewed by the military. 56 See figures quoted in M. Machado Ferrer, C. Fagúndez Ramos, Los años duros: cronología documentada (1964-1973) (Monte Sexto, 1987), 51 and 77. 57 See de Torres Wilson, Conciencia histórica , 26 and 33-5, for clear evidence of 1958 conceived as a watershed in the nation’s affairs. 65

during 1968 after Vice-President Pacheco assumed office following the sudden death of the elected incumbent, Oscar Gestido, in December of the previous year. Aided by constitutional changes which had strengthened the powers of the presidency, Pacheco froze wages and prices (in practice, more the first than the second), initiated a campaign designed to halt the activities not only of the Tupamaros but of perfectly legal organisations such as trade unions, student groups and leftwing parties, and censored the opposition press, while circumventing parliament whenever he could by the dubiously legal repeated use of Prompt Security Measure legislation, which all but allowed him to govern by decree.

In the light of all this, the severity and unfairness of Rama’s judgement of Solari must be referred to tensions which have little to do with his personal feelings. As Real de Azúa had written as far back as 1958: when the alliance between political and economic structures is so strong as to be impervious to all manifestations of national or popular culture, “such an extreme panorama brings to the intellectual a heavy responsibility, politically speaking”, and, as political parties lose their influence, “the cultural class’ options become not easier but more complex”(“Partidos y literatura”, 117).

Despite these difficulties, a group of Marxists elsewhere seemed to be trying to keep the channels of 66

communication open. In the editorial to the first number of a new journal, Praxis, they saw Uruguayan intellectuals as suffering under "a weighty legacy of eclecticism and lack of commitment" and criticised the '45 Generation for being prisoners of a "critical attitude which masks an ultimate scepticism and which impedes the adoption of certain commitments because every program, doctrine or slogan is suspicious".58 However, the journal professed to want to remain open to all kinds of genuinely investigative thinking, marxist or not:

We know that. . . without real exchange, without dialogue, it is not possible to persuade and we do not forget that non-marxist thought can offer us questions, even solutions, to which it is necessary to pay attention. This sense of dialogue is the one we will try to pursue by accepting works that do not reflect our points of view but whose interest and abiltity to raise issues open to genuine research will justify their appearance in these pages (4).

Clearly, some marxists could see the futility of doing what Rama had done to Solari and had the intention of being more generous to their ideological opponents in the interest of elucidating common problems.

None have been more eloquent than Real de Azúa in a paragraph composed five years later that now reads as part prophecy, part self-criticism, in describing the political tasks facing the intellectual in the early 1960s:

Perhaps the 60s generation’s duty and mission is to seek an attitude towards the country less

58 Praxis editorial board, "De redacción", Praxis, i, 1(1967), 5. 67

vulnerable than that displayed by the ‘45 generation as it matured, which was transposed on to the Unión Popular.59 Less vulnerable than that confidence (sustained more than anything by its own fervour and fuelled by its own fire) that to go to the roots of the ills, to point to transcendental remedies was equivalent to placing oneself on the road to victory.

While this reveals an “ignorance” of political realities, neither does Real de Azúa think it feasible to go back to “the professorial, superior, slightly pedantic tone” with which an even older generation had tried to “‘educate’ the electorate”:

Actually, it is going to be difficult to find an approach both elegant and effective with which to vomit on the country as it stands, to loathe constructively this kingdom of uncontaminated democrats, ventriloquist journalists, rapacious politicians, sordid and powerful dollar exporters. (“Legatarios”, 8)

Real de Azúa’s sense of the urgency of the situation is as acute as the anger and frustration at what he sees as his own generation’s failure.

For Angel Rama, both generations, although in different circumstances, find themselves working within “this process which today [ie, 1972] seems clearly drawn as the curve of the decomposition of liberalism”(Generación crítica, 21). One major element in this is purely economic: as the country’s fortunes go

59 See Chapter Three below on the Unión Popular’s somewhat dismal political fate in 1962, and Chapter Four for remarks about it by one of the intellectuals, Mario Benedetti, who naively put too much faith in it. 68

further into decline, Uruguayan society can find less and less for its increasingly well educated middle and lower- middle classes to do. While the state bureaucracy and the expansion of public education, especially in the humanities, absorb significant numbers of people, resources and real wages in these areas fall, so that the reward for education becomes impoverishment. For Varela(41), the politicization of intellectuals, teachers and students comes about largely because of this disjuncture between intellectual capabilities and employment possibilities; the democratisation of culture since the days of Batllismo had produced a whole sector of politically aware but unemployed dissidents. For G. W. Rama, this situation parallels a process of state industrialisation that had catered little or not at all for scientific research and technological development, thus simultaneously denying the entire notion of vocational education60 and producing a fertile ground for negative criticism, since there was little other use to which knowledge could be put(Democracia, 90-92). This distances the intellectual even more from the political mainstream, which, as Graceras points out(132), disinclines the government still further from investing in high level research and other intellectual work. In addition, of course, although Uruguay’s social stratification and general development seems to have been sufficient to absorb an intellectual sector playing a

60 See C. Real de Azúa(ed), Problemas de la juventud uruguaya (Marcha, 1954) for some early complaints on this subject. 69

specific role, the chances of actually earning a living from purely intellectual pursuits such as writing were just about zero; so much so that the intellectual was defined in some quarters as “someone who gets a living from something else”(Solari, Desarrollo social, 123).

The ability to see how they themselves were disadvantaged by a system that looked increasingly on the verge of collapse understandably made intellectuals, and the better educated in general, more sharply aware of how the deficiencies of the political structures and institutions (as well as of the individuals enmeshed in them) were hampering the development of society as a whole. It is to be expected, then, that the period 1955-1970 should see the rise and slow growth of research in the social sciences (Rama, Generación crítica, 59)61 as well as some forlorn attempts to reform the two main political parties from within. Carlos Quijano finally gave up on the National Party in 1958 and declared for democratic socialism. Zelmar Michelini withdrew his reformist and electorally quite successful faction from the Colorado Party late in 1970 to be instrumental in forming the Frente Amplio. However, the most convincing of such attempts was that of the National Party liberal democrat

61 See Graceras, 139-140 for a report on the fears aroused through unfamiliarity by a sociological survey of university students in 1966. Martorelli dates the rise of the social sciences between 1963 and 1967 and their peak in the years up to 1973. He is also eloquent about the devastation of University- or government-funded research in the social sciences caused by the dictatorship (La promesa de las ciencias sociales [CLAEH, 1983], 133 and 136-7). 70

Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, whose 1971 election platform contained major reforms, some of them astutely if opportunistically borrowed from the Frente Amplio’s program. His faction not only received more votes than any other within the National Party but among any of the parties contesting the elections. He was almost undoubtedly deprived of the presidency by fraud (see Chapter Three below).62

The dismal fate of endeavours such as these undoubtedly helped to sustain the feeling among the majority of intellectuals that such exercises were hopeless. Unfortunately, this situation virtually leaves them with only two options: to ally themselves with the already fragmented left or become more or less independent, increasingly discontented snipers from the margins. Both will reinforce the tendency to indulge in utopian wishful thinking or rarified ideology, thus earning them descriptions such as the following, written from a perspective sympathetic to the MLN-Tupamaros,63 who would choose armed revolution as the as the engine of social and political change:

62 He was probably deprived of it again in 1984 only because he was one of just two major political leaders the military refused to de-proscribe in time for the elections in November (the other being, predictably, the Frente Amplio’s Liber Seregni). Ferreira Aldunate’s prominent and outspoken anti-military stand during his exile had ensured that he remained Uruguay’s most popular political figure throughout the dictatorship. He died in 1988 before being able to try again for the presidency in 1989. For an admiring account of his career set in the context of the development of the National Party, see L. Costa Bonino, Wilson Ferreira Aldunate y la lógica nacionalista (Celada, 1986). 63 It is worth pointing out that this movement was originally founded by intellectuals: students of law, engineering and visual arts (Costa Bonino, Crisis de los partidos , 60). Two of its leaders, Raúl Sendic and Julio Marenales were, respectively, a law graduate and a teacher at the School 71

. . . the intellectual or literary dilettantism of the in- groups of the Uruguayan left, restricted by tradition to the academic or literary intelligentsia of Montevideo. Its social base and sphere of action were as atrophied as its ideological ramblings were wildly over-extended. In the early sixties there could have been no better objective illustration of the comment one Tupamaro once made that ‘where the only unifying factor is a theory, it takes only one disagreement to produce a schism’ (Debray, Revolution on Trial , 203).

This would seem to justify the view that, as the crisis mounted, divisions and alliances among writers and artists were made less on intellectual grounds and more on the basis of political similarities or differences, coupled with a pronounced trend toward a committed, realist aesthetic (A. Rama, Generación crítica, 84-5).64

Costa Bonino is almost certainly right in noting that the alienation of both the intelligentsia and youth in general from the traditional parties was a factor in their inability to project an imaginative and creative response to the

of fine Arts (A. Labrousse, The Tupamaros (London, Penguin, 1973), 37. 64 Until 1967-8, that is. The years leading up to the coup in 1973 saw the publication of important fictional works which explored the worlds of fantasy, dreams and the unconscious, adapting techniques borrowed from surrealism and science fiction, as Rama himself discusses in the last chapter of the same book, “El estremecimiento nuevo en la narrativa uruguaya”(220-245). It is as though the literary imagination anticipates in its own terms a breakout from the vicious circle of impotence that the Tupamaros and the Frente Amplio would attempt, and the military would achieve (however temporarily), in the political arena. Likewise, it does not seem coincidental that the publication of Hector Galmes' doom- laden novel Necrocosmos(EBO, 1971) coincides with the fraudulent national elections in the same tumultuous year, as well as with the subsequent increased involvement of the army in internal security affairs, which would lead not only to the military defeat of the Tupamaros but also to the near total destruction of the legal forces of the conventional left side of politics. 72

deepening social and political crisis precipitated by the nosedive taken by the Uruguayan economy (Crisis de los partidos, 37). As we have seen, its marginalisation also prevented the intelligentsia from accomplishing this much needed task. Such polarisation ends up by reinforcing both positions, producing the ironic result that progressive intellectuals wind up abetting the very status quo they are so eloquent in condemning. At this point, Varela washes his hands of them: “they were progressives in words but conformist in their acts”, caught in the double bind of being “for the masses” when “the masses followed the parties [they] despised”, victims of the “stalemate between a stagnant social system and a state unable to impose change (since it is dominated by the first) in spite of retaining the consensus of nearly 90% of the electorate”(42). For, as G. W. Rama laconically summed up the situation, “the peculiar paradox of the Uruguayan case is that the waged masses in conditions of security and liberty elected a leftist [trade union] leadership while in national elections it supported in the majority the traditional parties”(Democracia , 100). And there would be no palliative to this bleak outlook until the advent of the Frente Amplio in 1971.

In the meantime, one could write. But for whom?, a question which, Uricoechea has observed, becomes crucial for intellectuals at moments of major social and 73

political upheaval.65 When Angel Rama’s Generación crítica appeared in 1972, the lower two thirds of the front cover featured, framed in green so dark as to look almost black, a white rectangle containing the outlines of twelve clenched fists, drawn in pop-art style and facing outwards, each with the index finger raised to point directly at the observer. This book, it implies, is meant for readers who are seen as part of the nation and part of the problem. They are critical (in every sense), and in a critical condition. Yet, somehow, intellectuals have got to get through to them.

The Nation and the Book: Readers, Writers and Publishers

A book might be aimed at a certain public, but how could an author be sure it reached them? “It will never be superfluous to insist on the close relationship between the creative level of a literature and its material conditions, the ways the printed word circulates, the state of the publishing industry, etc.”(Paternain, Testimonio, 167). This section, taking its cue from these words, seeks to combine some pointers towards a political sociology of Uruguayan publishing with the reconstruction of a fragmented historical narrative in order to explore how that industry thrived on spreading the bad news among the population and built a

65 F. Uricoechea, Intelectuales y desarrollo en América Latina (Buenos Aires, CEDAL, 1969), 29-30. 74

readership for serious intellectual work on the state of the nation. That this had been achieved by the end of the 1960s, whatever the country’s other economic woes, everyone was agreed: Uruguay had joined up with the publishing “boom” then under way across the entire continent:

As the quiet ground on which they walked cracked open, as they were thrown into an ever more unnegotiable crisis, as they saw the political hopes invested in the new government dashed,66 Uruguayans have felt the urgent need to understand what is happening and have begun to scrutinise their past and to revise their present in the light of new information which has to do with the great Latin American debate of the present. Therefore, it is a new public, a public which wants quick and clear answers . . . But it is first a national and then a Latin American public, a child, therefore, of the great commotion which began in 1959 and which has started to debate the sociopolitical and cultural reality of the Latin American continent, which has generated a library about our destiny and the flowering of its great novelists.67

Interviewed by Rodríguez Monegal a year after Rama’s article, the publisher Benito Milla was of a similar opinion:

66 National elections in November 1966 had produced a government headed by the mild-mannered retired General Oscar Gestido, who was deemed to be outside the tainted ranks of either of Uruguay’s major political parties. Unfortunately, he died in the very month Rama published this article. He was succeeded by his vice-president, Jorge Pacheco Areco, whose first act in office was to deregulate a number of leftwing political organisations (including the Socialist Party, which had been legally if not very successfully functioning in Uruguay since its foundation in 1911) and ban a number of their publications. This turned out to be a sign of more draconian things to come. 67 A, Rama, “El boom editorial”, Marcha, No 1385(29 December 1967), Suppl., 4. 75

I think that what is happening now in Uruguay is similar to what is going on throughout Latin America . . . While I would not say euphorically that Latin America now lives with its back to Europe and the U.S.,68 the major influences still come from there, there now exists on our continent a new awareness, a desire to face up to our own problems, to study and analyse them. This occurs not only among authors but principally among readers . . . I think there is a new generation of readers [who] have a not only national but even more genuinely international way of judging the problems of the modern world, beginning with those of their own country.69

Views such as these were confirmed rather more jocularly by Carlos Maggi when he was able to calculate in the same year that in 1967 there had been more readers of Uruguayan literature than spectators at soccer matches (Sociedad y literatura, 41).

But things had not always been this way by any means. Fifteen years earlier, Rodríguez Monegal had felt obliged to begin an essay on the state of book publishing in Uruguay with the following anecdote:

A SERIOUS SITUATION - A few months back, a librarian at an English institution which has one of the best collections of [Uruguayan] books which can be consulted overseas, asked a Uruguayan friend to send her some of our publishers’ recent catalogues. The friend had to reply that there were no such

68 Milla is reversing the frequent complaint by dissident intellectuals that Uruguay looked too much to Europe and had presumptuously turned its back on the rest of Latin America. 69 B. Milla, “La nueva promoción de lectores”, Mundo Nuevo, 19(1968), 85. 76

catalogues, that in fact one could hardly talk of publishers either. This reply was perhaps a bit too sweeping. Of course, there are publishers: one for secondary school materials, one for mimeographed notes to get through university exams; and another for small volumes of verse or prose written by the directors of the publishing house themselves, or their friends and relatives. Those are our publishers; those are their arbitrary and parochial characteristics and strictly limited usefulness.

He went on to lament the “incredibly burdensome” high cost of publishing in Uruguay and threw his weight as literary editor of one of Montevideo’s most prestigious journals behind a proposal to remove all taxes from the costs of raw materials and distribution, to have a special exchange rate on materials that had to be purchased abroad and to make any profits earned on investments in publishing tax-free for the first ten years.70 He then asked: “Where is the public?”, and wondered why those few who bought modern writing from abroad rejected even the better local offerings. He concluded that because of the general paucity and poverty of newspaper reviewing, they probably did not even know such work existed(15). Rodríguez Monegal knew what he was talking about; he had previously had occasion to sum up the young Uruguayan writer’s plight as follows: “[He] must be ready today to finance his own publishing enterprise, whether it be a novel or a volume of stories, or resign himself to remaining unpublished and unacknowledged”(“Nueva literatura”, 26).

70 E. Rodríguez Monegal, “El escritor y el problema editorial en nuestro país”, Marcha , No. 662(13 February 1953), 14. 77

The situation did not improve much during the 1950s, it would seem. In 1956, Uruguay’s most admired modern novelist, Juan Carlos Onetti, wrote scathingly: “Apart from [official government] prizes, purchases for the National Library and bank loans, the writer does not receive what you might call encouragement”.71 Similarly, when Benedetti came to respond to a questionnaire about the Uruguayan writer’s situation circulated by a major Montevideo daily, he stated baldly that “[i]t is not good business to be a publisher in Uruguay” because the local market is too small and Uruguayan books are too expensive abroad. He then describes exactly the same scheme outlined by Rodríguez Monegal four years earlier (which had presumably never got beyond the planning stage),72 and writes mournfully: “To sell fifty copies through bookshops in this country is to be a bestseller, and this should make us cry from shame, if we had not used up all our shame on other woes”. He too concludes by calling for more responsible criticism and reviewing.73

71 J. C. Onetti, “Literatura 1956: Sagan y M. Drouet”, collected in his Requiem por Faulkner y otros artículos (Buenos Aires, Calicanto, 1976), 146. 72 Some tax relief on book production and distribution was finally provided in 1965. See the summary in Equipos Ltda./Cámara Uruguaya del Libro, El libro en Uruguay (Centro Regional para el Fomento del Libro en América Latina y El Caribe, 1987), 17-18, and S. Taubert(ed), The Book Trade of the World (London/New York, Andre Deutsch/Bowker, 1976), Vol. 2, 322. 73 El País , “El escritor nacional y nuestro medio”, El País (8 December 1957), 3. 78

Even where this desireable type of writing about books did exist, there was trouble afoot of a different kind. In mid-1952, Rodríguez Monegal found himself trying to fend off a complaint from “a certain A. S. V.” (presumably, a relatively young Arturo Sergio Visca, who became a well established critic in the 1960s) about the large number of anglosaxon authors reviewed in Marcha. Its literary editor was clearly rather more than somewhat exasperated:

If he had bothered to examine the last six months of Marcha , he would have noticed that of the 49 books reviewed, only 13 were English and 3 North American. The remainder were divided between Uruguayan(7), Spanish American(6), Spanish(2), French(6), Italian(5), German(2), Swedish(1), Hungarian(1),plus 2 by Gerald Brenan about Spain and 1 by Samuel Greene Arnold [USA] about Latin America.

He deduces from this that “books in Spanish or about Hispanic themes are greater in number than any other kind” and points to the “scarcity and mediocrity of published work from Uruguay” and the “abundance of translations (especially from English) in the production from the Spanish-speaking world”.74 It does also mean that of the forty-nine volumes, thirty-six were by European or North American writers, which does not exactly imply a high strike rate for Latin America as a

74 E, Rodríguez Monegal, “Nacionalismo y literatura”, Marcha (4 July 1952), 14. He goes on (15) to suggest that misplaced nationalism in this area can lead to literary parochialism, and that, while he will always review good Uruguayan books, his job is to place before the reader intelligent notices about high quality literature, whatever its provenance. 79

whole, let alone Uruguay. We are certainly a far cry from the nationalist and Latin Americanist optimism and enthusiasm of Rama, Maggi and Milla in the late 1960s: no publishers, no catalogues, no books, no public, little criticism, and accusations of Anglophilia to boot. Clearly, something must have happened in the interim.

One of the things that happened was the happy conjunction in 1960 of two books by Benedetti that would capture the popular imagination throughout the decade and two new publishing ventures that could launch, and be launched by, them. El país de la cola de paja,75 a collection of essays that wittily dissected the moral foibles of the urban middle class (see Chapter Four), came out under the imprint of Asir, a cooperative established around the journal of the same name. Some of Benedetti’s works from the 1950s (such as Quién de nosotros and Poemas de la oficina ) had also been published in similar fashion by the journal Número76 but with nothing like the success that awaited him in 1960. El país sold 1100 copies in two weeks77 and 5000 in nine months, earning its author something less than 4000 pesos(Rodríguez Monegal, Literatura uruguaya, 87),78

75 This work is discussed at length in Chapter Four below. 76 For some discussion of Asir and Número, see the Washington Lockhart section of the next chapter. 77 E. Rodríguez Monegal, “¿Qué es un bestseller uruguayo?”, El País (5 December 1960), 32. 78 What a Uruguayan peso was worth during the period (and the pressure on the economy generally), can be gleaned from the following statistics. In the late 1950s, 4 pesos would buy 1 US dollar. In December 1959, as part of a stabilisation program, the rate was fixed at 11. By October 1962, it was 16.5 and in November 1965, 59. As one of further stabilisation measures , it became 200 in November 1967 but had risen to 250 by April 1968, where it was artificially maintained for three years. By December 1972, over 700 pesos were needed to buy a US 80

while, according to one of its founders, Sergio Visca, when Asir folded in 1962, all of its ten titles had sold out, yielding the modest profit of about 1000 pesos per title.79 El país, under different imprints (a fact which itself suggests the novelty and instability of the phenomenon), would be into its third edition before the end of 1961, and in versions augmented by additional essays to keep the book up to date, went on to run through five more by the end of the decade.

The importance of La tregua, the second of Benedetti’s successful books to appear in 1960, is rather different. Combining in diary form the chronicle of an ill- starred love affair between a widower in his mid fifties and a woman twenty years his junior with an account of

dollar. For the same period, inflation averaged 11% in 1951-6, about 35% in 1957-60, 10%in 1961-2, over 50% for 1963-6, over 120% in 1967-8, was stabilised at 15%in 1969-71, but shot up to over 90% in 1972 and nearly 80%in 1973. Upper and lower figures for the decline in real wages between 1957 and 1973 are 31% and 23%, some 10% needing to be added for people on fixed incomes. Expressed in a different way, the more alarmist analysts calculate that the food that had cost an average family 461 pesos in 1955, had reached 45,581 by 1970 and a staggering 200,879 pesos by 1973. For the extreme version of such statistics, see A. Melgar/ W. Cancela, El desarrollo frustrado: 30 años de economía uruguaya, 1955- 1985 (Montevideo: CLAEH/EBO, 1986), while the same trends are more conservatively calculated in M. H. J. Finch, “Stabilisation Policy in Uruguay since the 1950s”, in R. Thorp/ L. Whitehead(eds.), Inflation and Stabilisation in Latin America (New York, Holmes and Meier, 1979), 144-180. 79 See El País, “El libro uruguayo”, El País (2 June 1963), Suppl., 5. This is a panel discussion on the Uruguayan book trade organised by the newspaper and includes contributions from the writers Francisco Espínola, Roberto Ibáñez, Sara de Ibáñez and Clara Silva, the critics Arturo Sergio Visca and Ruben Cotelo, the publishers Benito Milla and Heber Raviolo, and the bookseller Andrés Castellanos. 81

the former’s problems as nonplussed father and minor bureaucrat approaching the end of his working life, the novel dealt with topics close enough to the experience of its potential middle-class readership to make of it an exposé of the dilemmas facing two generations. It was the second Benedetti title (the first having been Montevideanos, a year earlier) to be put out by Alfa, the new publishing house founded by the Spanish exile Benito Milla, which would flourish throughout the decade as a home for the vibrant new literature of the crisis, until coming to grief on the rocks of the dictatorship.

Rama names these two books as signalling the move towards both the language and interests of a large community of readers(“El boom editorial”, 3), while Milla himself was more precise about the matter: they bore the marks of the frustrations of the middle classes, whose intellectual and cultural elite (apart from those few of its members who had embraced communism) were immersed in a crisis they could neither resolve nor overcome, remaining condemned to express “an unease which cannot define itself”.80 The extremely personal identification of author and public via the text is given eloquent expression in de Torres Wilson’s recollection of his generation’s emotions on reading Benedetti’s Poemas de la oficina in 1956: “You felt like going round to his house to give him a hug”(Conciencia histórica, 31). The

80 B. Milla, “Notas para una situación de la nueva literatura uruguaya”, Acción (22 October 1963), Suppl., 19. 82

urban middle classes and petitebourgeoisie had finally achieved recognition in a literature addressed to their concerns and created by people of similar background and experience.

If Benedetti had “gathered a public together” and had thereby become “the bestseller of his generation”,81 he had done so principally through publicity in minority or specialist magazines (Rodríguez Monegal, “Qué es un bestseller”, 32) or by word-of -mouth recommendation and the subscription method used by Asir (Sergio Visca in El País, “El libro”, 5). A major event in December 1960- January 1961 indicated that there was to be a transformation in the way the Uruguayan book communicated to its new public. The poet Nancy Bacelo, supported by Milla and others(but not the Tourist Commission, which did not feel that Uruguayan books and writers were important enough),82 organised the first Feria Nacional de Libros y Grabados, an annual festival of Uruguayan writing, arts and crafts which continues to this day.83 They grossed about 20,000 pesos in book sales, moving around 3000 books (at a low unit price, before the steep rise in inflation), most being

81 Economically, this did not mean very much. Rodríguez Monegal later quotes an Argentine interviewer as saying: “Taking you [Benedetti] as an example of a bestselling author, we would like to study the Uruguayan writer who lives off his books”. Benedetti retorted: “Forget the problem. I don’t”(Literatura uruguaya, 87). 82 A. Rama, “La feria por dentro o el arte de vender uruguayos”, Marcha, No. 1044(27 January 1961), n. p. 83 It has now expanded to include stands, exhibits and invited guests from other South American countries. 83

publications of the previous few years(according to Rama, “La feria”). This would seem to confirm Rodríguez Monegal’s opinion that “the Uruguayan writer has at last found his public, even though it may not add up to more than one to two thousand interested people” who have an increased awareness and curiosity for “the truly national, for reality seen through passionately committed eyes, for reality created and poeticised in the imagination, . . . an interest that coincides with the general crisis in the country”(“Qué es un bestseller”, 32).

That coincidence was not without its problems, though Rodríguez Monegal remained optimistic. Writing after the first Feria, he points out that Uruguayan books are often cheaper than their foreign competitors, confirms Rama’s report of high sales for Uruguayan authors and emphasises the importance of the Press’ growing interest in the popularity of the new local literature.84 Rama and Rodríguez Monegal, of course, made major contributions to this process, as did critics such as Visca and Cotelo, not to mention those writers like Benedetti himself who regularly reviewed local and foreign works.85 Rama, however, sounded a warning note.

84 E Rodríguez Monegal, “¿Es posible una industria editorial ?”, El País (6 February 1961), 18. 85 The bibliographical sections of Penco’s Diccionario give a very clear indication of how much literary journalism was being done during the decade, as well as who was doing it and where. In fact, all the major daily and weekly papers that did not already have at least a weekly review column inaugurated one in the early 1960s (for a partial list, see Rocca, “35 años”, 63-4), although the quickening of the economic crisis took its toll on some of these as the newspapers and their contributors began to feel the pinch (according to a letter from 1968 included in Barros-Lémez, Intelectuales y política , 142-4). Benedetti’s work in this 84

In March, 1960, he wrote that “the principal problem for current Uruguayan literature is to keep alive and broaden the the contact between writer and reader”(quoted in Rocca, “35 años”, 78). In an informal, anecdotal survey he made at the end of that year, he quoted the owner of one average bookshop on the main street of Montevideo as saying that, because of the economic crisis, “the ten book per month customer now buys only three”. He went on to suggest that no Uruguayan writer had the readership they might expect, even allowing for the reduced size of the market [the country’s entire population being under 3,000,000 at the time].86 By mid-1961, he was noticing that the price of books had risen sixfold since 1955, and that, although this trend had evened out in the previous two years, the buyer had grown poorer. He saw fewer foreign books and felt that Uruguayan publishers were bringing out a smaller number of new releases, relying instead on books that had traditionally brought at least adequate returns.87

After the second Feria, Rama sounded all the alarm bells. Cheap books still sold well, he noted, but they were

area is outstanding in both quantity and quality, and no doubt provided him with the beginnings of a regular income. His Literatura uruguaya is entirely made up of essays reprinted from the regular press, as are Letras del continente mestizo (Arca, 1967)(on works and authors from other Latin American countries) and Sobre artes y oficios (Alfa, 1968)(on European and North American writers). 86 “¿Qué leen los uruguayos?”, Marcha, 1038(9 December 1960), 23. 87 “Un país sin libros”, Marcha, 1061(9 June 1961), 29. 85

imported “subproducts” that had nothing to do with Uruguayan concerns and were bought by a majority who had no access to serious local work and, therefore, no involvement in the important national issues aired in it. He complained that Uruguayans suffered "a deep-rooted confusion which equates the nation or people with the middle class - the origins of most of our writers” and prevents the emergence of a “professional” attitude which would lead writers to insert their experience into collective habits of feeling and to achieve a “real communication with readers which creates in them an equally real need for their works”.88 In short, he was anxious that the gains made in this direction by the likes of Benedetti and his publishers would be lost before they could be consolidated. At about the same time, Maggi, in his usual vividly laconic style, worried about communication on a grander scale:

The fact is that in Uruguay, and, more importantly, in the entire hispanic world, we are living through something like the period before printing. . . There are no journals, no telegrams, no advertising by publishers. There are no critics in a position to know and bring order to what is produced, so that consumers are informed and become interested in what they can buy. With regard to its own culture, the Spanish-speaking world is still in the feudal era, cut into pieces, silenced, dispersed, unwoven. . . The Spanish world is a dance of deaf mutes, where nobody can converse with anyone else because of the lack of the means to communicate.89

88 “Los escritores y el público”, Marcha, 1077(29 September 1961), n. p. 89 C. Maggi, “Alegría de pobre”, Marcha, 1084(10 November 1961), 9. 86

The cassandras need not have worried. The process that had made a faltering and unsure start in 1960-1 gathered pace and rhythm over the next two years. Benedetti was able to describe 1962 as a “good year” for publishing. Some fifty new titles had been added to the national literary canon, with “an obvious improvement in the general quality of the Uruguayan literary product”, while the third Feria in December had grossed 64 500 pesos from book sales.90 Rama himself had begun a new collection in 1960 (Letras de Hoy) and in 1962 he joined forces with his brother Germán and the novelist and academic José Pedro Díaz to found Arca, which was to be the only serious rival to Alfa throughout the decade as the publisher of major new works but, unlike its competitor, would survive the dictatorship, battered but intact. In 1961, young activists whose political interests centred on the rural interior and refugees from the editorial board of the defunct Tribuna Universitaria, formerly published by the Students Federation, united to set up Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, which emphasised imaginative literature and historical essays about the country’s pastoral and agricultural tradition. The remaining Rama brother, Carlos, bought up and rejuvenated an ailing press, El Siglo Ilustrado, and turned it over to publishing new writing and leftwing political and social analysis.91

90 M. Benedetti, “Un panorama de la producción literaria nacional en 1962”, La Mañana (30 December 1962), 13. 91 As reported in E. Rodríguez Monegal, “El escritor uruguayo encuentra a sus lectores”, Comentario, 37(1963), 39. 87

In 1960 Nancy Bacelo had begun her Siete Poetas Hispanoamericanos series, which was joined two years later by Ruben Yacovski’s Aquí Poesía collection (which numbered 42 titles when it ceased publication in 1970), to which he added the Aquí Testimonio series in 1964. The early to mid-1960s also saw the foundation of Ediciones Carumbé by the poet Sarandy Cabrera (for leftist literature and texts and records of poetry and songs), the release of Ediciones de Río de La Plata of recent and classic books about Uruguay (Rodríguez Monegal, “El escritor”, 39), the conversion of Cuadernos Uruguayos into Ediciones del Nuevo Mundo, the creation of Editorial Tauro and the transformation of the Medical Students Association into the the first scientific book publishers in the country’s history (A. Rama, “El boom”, 4). Literary competitions organised by the Feria and journals such as Marcha also generated the publication of fiction, poetry and essays under the imprint of those awarding the prize. As Rodríguez Monegal was to say later:

the proliferation of small or even tiny publishers is not always a sign of health, printings tend to be minuscule and the distribution (even in the capital) precarious. But it means quite a lot if this situation is compared to what was, until a while back, a wasteland (Literatura uruguaya , 106-7).

In 1963, the same writer had stated proudly: “Twenty years ago the majority of Uruguayan writers were resigned to writing for nobody (‘I write for the 88

courtesy of foreigners’, one important poet apologised). . . Now they write and publish for their country”(“El escritor”, 39-40). It was perhaps time to take stock of the situation and the El País round-table debate can be seen as an attempt to do this. Mistakes were still being made: Milla had failed to anticipate the furore which would greet the publication of Martínez Moreno’s El paredón,92 published in Barcelona by Seix Barral as it had been a finalist in their coveted Biblioteca Breve prize, and had brought in only 500 copies, believing they would be enough for five months; in fact, they sold out in five days (“El libro uruguayo”, 3). Consequently, despite the portentous mystique of the “Book” which permeates the anonymous introduction (“The life of a people becomes flesh and consciousness in Literature. . . The activity which produces the Book works with the most exsteemed of raw materials because it is nourished by the collective soul”[1]), it was only to be expected that the discussion should focus primarily on the numbers of books printed and sold and the numbers of people who bought and read them.

Milla got the ball rolling by stating that it was still rare for a print-run of one to two thousand to actually sell out and that he had needed to do only one or two reprints. He put this down to the smallness of a market which renews itself only very slowly and expressed mild

92 This novel provocatively contrasts the compliant quietism in Uruguay (especially among its intelligentsia) with the heady dynamism of the early days of the Cuban revolution. 89

satisfaction if half of an edition sold relatively quickly leaving the remainder to go at a trickle. He pointed out that in Mexico and Argentina, 3000 copies was the norm for a book to be distributed throughout the continent (2-3), to which the bookseller Castellanos retorted that, although common in Latin America, an edition of 1000 copies was very small for a population of three million, and that 3000 was necessary to ensure commercial success (3). Cotelo offered the interesting estimate, based not only on book sales but attendance figures at theatres, art-film clubs and the like, that the Uruguayan “intelligentsia” numbered about 25,000, and that of these only about 5000 (ie. 1 in 6000 of the whole population) might be regular bookbuyers (5-6) - a figure only half of even the most pessimistic assessment used earlier in the discussion by Milla and Visca (4-5). Cotelo went on to suggest that the average age of this public was about 25, that it had been built up over the last ten or fifteen years (that is, since the advent of the ‘45 generation), and that its main interest was the nation itself and its current crisis (6). Milla (2) and Raviolo (8) agreed that there had been slow but steady growth over the last ten years but were optimistic enough to believe - rightly as it turned out - that it would continue (7-8).

The problems identified by the panel were the high cost of production; the local relevance of a book’s theme; the need for more and better publicity (advertising, reviewing and even shopwindow design)(5-6); the 90

difficulty of distribution abroad (4), and the reluctance of booksellers to trust the local product (7).93 In addition, Espínola put the onus back on the writer by restating Rama’s argument, mentioned above, that serious writers must find a way to reach the mass public without betraying their own standards or patronising the audience (4 and 6). Cotelo summed up:

The destiny of the national culture, of which the book is merely one chapter, is mixed up with the political destiny of Uruguay and, with it, with the political destiny of Latin America, because we are not an island here, even though we might like to be(6).

This looks forward to the kind of optimism noted earlier in remarks by Maggi, Milla and Rama and and suggests one strand of the argument in this section: namely, that it was precisely the threat of political and economic collapse in Uruguay that brought about the creation of a public demanding locally produced and socially relevant literature, as well as the infrastructure needed to get it into their hands.

93 One problem not mentioned by the panel or in any of the literature reviewed here was the difficulties undoubtedly encountered in distributing books in Uruguay’s own provinces. According to one later source, there were still no reliable data for book sales in the interior in 1987, though it was estimated that Montevideo accounted for 70 percent of all sales (Equipos, El libro, 27), a percentage one suspects would have been even higher twenty or so years earlier. The problems referred to here and in the previous paragraph are confirmed by a report of the findings of a seminar on "The Role of the Book in Change Processes in Latin America"(held in Costa Rica in 1974) in A. E. Augsburger, The Latin American Book Market: Problems and Prospects(Paris, UNESCO, 1981), 38. 91

The panel’s guesses at the size of the reading public, while reflecting the almost total unavailability of such data in Uruguay at the time, were to prove wildly underestimated. As Rama points out (“El boom”, 4), the early spread of secondary education into the interior following laws passed in 1912-3 and the expansion of the same system since the mid-1940s had brought both lower middle and working classes into the cultural arena, and had led to a high incidence of newspaper reading which boded well for the publishing industry. Maggi fleshes this out somewhat (Sociedad y literatura, [38-9]), stating that some 200,000 students completed at least the first stage of secondary school in the period 1942-60, to be followed by 240,000 more for the years 1960-3, while there were 15,000 tertiary students in 1960, ensuring an adult (15 years and up) literacy rate of over 90 percent.94 This relatively well informed generation began maturing at precisely the time the Uruguayan economy was becoming least able to satisfy their expectations and needs. As their prospects worsened, their questioning of the very principles on which their society was based stimulated still further the examination of the nation as problem.

94 In 1958, daily papers were sold at the rate of 230 per 1000 inhabitants, the highest figure in Latin America (C. M. Rama, Sociología del Uruguay [Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 1965], 75, n.2). On the same page, Rama suggests that the 1963 literacy estimate, repeated by Maggi, is some 5% too optimistic. However, according to figures quoted by Kaufman, newspaper sales had reached 310 per 1000 by 1970 (Uruguay in Transition [New Brunswick, Transaction, 1979], 46). 92

The book trade responded to the challenge. Using admittedly incomplete statistics from the National Library, booksellers, authors and official figures for the sale of paper, Maggi suggests (40-1) that, if in 1959 about 100 titles were published in the area of literature and the humanities generally at an average print-run of 500 and resulting in sales of 50,000 books in all, then by 1967 the number of titles had doubled, the average number of copies printed had risen five-fold and the number of volumes sold had multiplied by ten. This process was helped by the arrival of the smaller and cheaper ‘pocket book’ series, inaugurated by Arca in December 1966,95 with Alfa, Ediciones de la Banda Oriental and El Siglo Ilustrado following suit during 1967 (Rama, “El boom”, 4). The economic crisis itself undoubtedly accelerated such developments. According to Rama, in 1965 the depreciation of the peso had trebled the cost of imported books while that of the local product had doubled since the previous year(“Por una cultura militante”, 2).

Such attempts to beat the inflation spiral speeded up a trend towards the democratisation of culture exemplified in the period 1968-1971 by the production of huge projects in economical weekly instalments.

95 Thus coinciding with the first period of uncontrolable inflation. In 1965, Onetti had written caustically: “Of course, when book prices jump from ten to fifty pesos and those fifty are needed to buy food, buyers’ interest in literature tends to wane. Prospects for 1966 are . . . appalling . . . There will be books exclusively for those who managed to make millions. Idiots like me who live off a salary will have to limit ourselves to writing them and hoping we can survive into 1967”(Requiem por Faulkner, 184). 93

“Capítulo Oriental” offered the history of Uruguayan literature with each instalment being accompanied by an anthology or unabridged example of the works analysed, the entire collection making available at a less than modest price a whole library of texts, history and criticism. The “Nuestra Tierra” and “Enciclopedia Uruguaya” series achieved similar ends in the areas of social and political history. All the major intellectual figures of the time participated in these enterprises, as coordinators, editors or contributors, and often in more than one of these capacities. Similarly, from mid-1967, Cuadernos de Marcha, an offshoot of the well-known weekly paper, put into its readers’ hands a 100-page monthly detailed analysis of a theme of national or continental concern, often usefully reprinting otherwise inaccessible essays from foreign sources.

Moreover, the mid to late-1960s, and particularly the period between June 1968 (when the almost permanent imposition of the Prompt Security Measures began) and November 1971(the month of the presidential elections in which the traditional two-party system would be challenged seriously for the first time), saw the creation of a plethora of small publishing houses whose aims were overtly political. Many of them announced their intentions with combative names such as Sandino, Girón, Pueblos Unidos and Grito de Asencio,96 while

96 The last is named after the rallying cry in one of the popular uprisings against the Spaniards in 1811that heralded the opening of the fight for independence. 94

others basked under inoffensive titles such as Comunidad del Sur, Medina and Ediciones de la Pupila, but all effectively joined forces with the better established companies such as El Siglo Ilustrado in deliberately opposing the state. Authors published under these imprints knowingly wrote because of and about the crisis and addressed readers whose response to it they sought to influence. Thus, in the preface to Carlos Rama’s Uruguay en crisis, we read:

Nobody forced the author to take on such a polemical and, if you like, even risky theme. He could have gone on officiously teaching exclusively foreign sociological theories or techniques of social research in his courses, as required by the programs. He thought, however, that he should communicate to others his observations, at times merely his worries, about the crisis the country was suffering. He has not lacked difficulties in doing it, to the point of being denied the right to continue teaching, being punctually replaced by more conformist or less polemical teachers, well disposed servants of our world’s masters(5).

The same author’s Historia social del pueblo uruguayo (Comunidad del Sur, 1972) ends: “This schematically is the social History of the Uruguayan people, a history it is necessary to rescue, principally in order to confront the kind of monopoly on the past cultivated by ruling minorities everywhere” (154, his emphasis). The blurb on the back cover of A. Fernández Cabrelli’s De Batlle a Pacheco Areco 95

(Grito de Asencio, 1969) reads: “NOT the idealised Batlle y Ordóñez; NOR the Batlle abused by the political hacks. BUT the Batlle who matters today, the one who stated: ‘Oppressive regimes are those that suggest and nourish revolutionary ideas. Instead of discouraging protest, they are the ones who give it life and bring it to the point of violence’”.

While these are conventional expessions of political opposition, it is perhaps the Editorial Girón publications which are most evocative of a whole climate of revolt. They started business in 1971 with two series, ‘La Invención’ and ‘Los Uruguayos’, opening the first with Cristina Peri Rossi’s first volume of poems Evohé, provocatively subtitled poemas eróticos, which, despite the identification of the female beloved with language itself and the use of masculine adjectives to describe the “yo”, hints at lesbianism at a time when no form of homosexuality could openly state its name. The second book was a collection of five new stories, three by members of the ‘45 generation (Benedetti, Martínez Moreno and the novelist Sylvia Lago) and two from the 1960 group (Eduardo Galeano and Peri Rossi again), but all are tales about struggle, armed or otherwise. The book came in a bright red cover and was called Cuentos de la revolución. In the prologue, the critic and regular Marcha contributor Danubio Torres Fierro, after giving the Spanish Academy Dictionary’s definition of ‘revolution’ as a “violent 96

change in a nation’s political institutions” and as implying, by extension, “disquiet, disturbance, sedition”, goes on: “Nobody living in modern Uruguay, which has at last enmeshed itself with the whole of Latin America, can say truthfully that that is not exactly what has been going on in the country for at least three years”(7).

The first offering in the ‘Los Uruguayos’ series was María Inés Silva Vila’s novel Los rebeldes del 800, a fictional recreation of the early days of the independence struggle against Spain. In the prologue titled “Instructions For Use”, the author’s husband, Carlos Maggi, exclaims: “How right it seems that around the end of the 1700s there should be in this country97 scandalous young dissidents who did not observe established rules and who mortally upset their elders! History repeats itself ”(n.p., his emphasis). In the second volume of the series, the political sociologist Nestor Campaglia’s El Uruguay movilizado, a convincing and laconically written study of the collapse of the ideological coherence and legitimacy of the state, the second paragraph of the author’s brief introductory note is typically oblique but no less pointed for that: “Neither does [this book] seek to attribute responsibilities, because actions have consequences quite independent of the people who made them possible, and of their intentions. After a certain period

97 Maggi bends the truth a little here; Uruguay did not formally exist at that time. 97

of time, history - temporal distance - will assign them the definitive place they each deserve”(n. p. ).

The rebellion of youth, sexual openness, ideological analysis - Girón seems to be trying to harness the 1960s counterculture to the political demands of local time and place. As far as the book trade was concerned, there seemed little to check this heady enthusiasm for change. 300 000 people visited the Feria in 1968, new immediately publishable authors were emerging regularly (Milla, “La nueva promoción”, 86) and Maggi found that 20 of the 30 advertisements in the December 1967 issue of Marcha were for Uruguayan books(Sociedad y literatura, 38). True, Rama took up points raised in the 1963 round table debate and suggested that the book boom might not last because of the natural limitations of a small market, the continuing lack of any official policy on the publishing industry and the steady decline in everyone’s disposable income brought about by inflation, devaluation and the wage freeze (Rama, “El boom”, 4), while Milla was still worried about the protectionism of many Latin American countries (“La nueva promoción”, 86-7). That a military coup might bring all this to an abrupt end98 seemed to be on nobody’s mind. In fact, it

98 Which it did, and with something of a commercial wallop. Paternain (Testimonio, 168) reports that of the 425 and 445 Uruguayan books published in 1976 and 1977 respectively, only 68 were in the literature and humanuities areas in each year, and these included a “considerable number” of translations , while Alberto Oreggiano, then general manager of Arca, told him in 1979 that the number of profitable publishing houses had more than halved over the previous decade. In similar vein, Achugar records that one interested but anonymous informant had asserted to him that, if in the 1960s a successful publisher could expect to bring out 50 titles and sell 150, 000 books, the corresponding figures for 1979 had plummeted to under 24 and less than 98

was precisely the social and political crisis that would lead to it that had made the national book industry culturally relevant and commercially viable.

So much was this the case that Maggi states confidently that essays about Uruguay were bestsellers year after year (Sociedad y literatura, 40), prefacing this generalisation by informing us that a popular but unnamed essay on the nation had sold out its third printing of 4000 copies in the 20 days of the 1967 Feria (38). And he should know, since the book he coyly refused to name was his own Uruguay y su gente [1963]. Like its even more successful rival, Benedetti'e El País de la cola de paja, it eschewed detailed sociological analysis and political sloganeering to concentrate on providing a convenient language with which readers could interpret for themselves their own experience of the crisis they were all living through and trying more or less in vain to negotiate. To these and other works, fictional or otherwise, can be applied the terms Rama reserved for

20, 000, rising only slowly in 1989 to 35 and 27, 000 (H. Achugar, “Transformaciones culturales en el Uruguay del fin de siglo”, Hispamérica , 59[1990], 52, n. 17). Other statistics confirm the trend. In 1960 there were 36 booksellers in Uruguay but by 1974 this number had dropped to 31. Similarly, the total number of enterprises involved in the production, publishing and distribution of books in the same two years were, respectively, 81 and 76, while the printing paper consumption per thousand people was 4.5 tons in 1965, rose to 4.94 in 1970 but collapsed to 3.41 in 1975 (two years after the coup) and only picked up a little to 3.7 in 1976, still well below the 1965 figure (see Augsburger, Latin American Book Market, 39, 59 and 64). 99

Benedetti specifically; that they exemplified "a different conception of the writer's function", one which required the author to "to see himself as a servant of contemporary society's needs, adapting himself to its capacity to appreciate literature, to its demand for relevant themes and for interpretative models" (Generación crítica, 62).

Such books were designed to stimulate among the reading public a dialogue with itself,99 and to the extent that they had secured a regular audience by the end of the 1960s for imaginative, historical and sociological literature on the state of the nation, the enterprise must be counted a success. The problem was going to be to turn that readership into a constituency. For while literary intellectuals had found ways to collaborate with each other, the limited relevance of the 'Third Position' and the controversy surrounding Solari's book about it, suggest that fragmentation, marginalisation

99 This dialogue was cut short, and all its potential consequences repressed, only by the intervention of the armed forces. As an ironic witness to the importance of the social and political critique they silenced, the military felt obliged to publish their own weighty substitute for it: La subversión (Junta de Comandantes en Jefe, 1976). They undoubtedly intended its title to refer to the attempt to undermine the solid values of patriotism, tradition, home and the family. However, it is also an eloquent homage to what many involved in the business of literature had, willy-nilly, been helping to promote during the previous decade. To achieve its aims as self-justification and propaganda, La subversión could not but record the actions of writers whose names and works were banned, of newspapers and journals now closed down, of organisations that had been made illegal, and of individuals banished, imprisoned or, sometimes, ‘disappeared’. It is, then, sombrely gratifying to know that it had one thing in common with the more popular of its censored predecessors: it was into its fourth printing within a year. 100

and frustration undermined the urge to actively participate in changing the structures of the state which intellectuals had become adept at calling into question. As will be shown in Chapter Three, this difficulty was being replicated at the same time - that is, during the early to mid 1960s - more directly in the political arena in the first fumbling steps toward building a viable reformist centre-left coalition. Suffice it to say here that that project would come to fruition at the same time the readership of the new literature reached its maximum numbers (around 1970) and that one of the most popular authors, Mario Benedetti, would be an active participant in it. 101

THE NATION AS PROBLEM AND THE ESSAY AS DIAGNOSIS

Uruguay, a country without problems, turned suddenly into a problematic country J. A. de Torres Wilson [1964]

At the outset of the 1960s, there appeared a collection of essays which perfectly enunciates all of the principles I wish to include in my conception of dialogue. The very title of A. Sergio Visca's Un hombre y su mundo1 has a separate if not solitary individual communicating his experience of the world around him, while the volume's third essay is called "Solitude" and the fourth bemoans what the author feels is a Uruguayan national trait: the tendency to use the other person as an echo chamber for one's own ideas rather than engage in a genuine exchange of views (28-9).2 Sergio Visca clearly hopes that his own efforts might aid in reversing this trend: his preface says that "after all, the author is just one Uruguayan who wants to start up a dialogue with other Uruguayans" (n. p.). The essays examined in this chapter are phases in the struggle - which would in the end prove vain -

1 Asir, 1960. 2 One reviewer thought these pages should be included in all future anthologies of Uruguayan essays. See R. Cotelo, “Repentinismo y mito”, El País (9 January 1961), 16. 102

by many intellectuals to pursue a dialogue of exactly this kind about the state of the nation with as wide a public as they could muster.3

Edward Said, paraphrasing Jean Genet, has written: "the moment you publish essays in a society you have entered political life; so if you want not to be political do not write essays or speak out".4 This comment is especially relevant for Latin American countries where the essay has since the wars of independence been closely associated with the search for national identity.5 Another not unrelated reason has also been given for the use during that time of "the more or less literary essay": the need to reach a wide audience.6 This chapter will be concerned with Uruguayan writers who tried to influence the course of political events in

3 No examination of Uruguayan essays on this theme could exclude the best known of them all: Benedetti's El país de la cola de paja (1960). In order to deal here with important material largely unknown outside Uruguay, I have delayed consideration of Benedetti's book until Chapter Four, where it is studied in the context of the development of its author's politics. 4 E. W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual(London, Vintage 1994), 82. 5 A few of the best known of such works in this century are: E. Martínez Estrada, Radiografía de la pampa[1933]; E. Mallea, Historia de una pasión argentina[1939]; O. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad[1950]. A pioneering but still authoritative study of such writing is M. S. Stabb, In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890-1960(North Carolina UP, 1967), which also uses the image of essayists as diagnosticians of national or continental problems (12-33). The same author has updated his thoughts on the topic in his The Dissenting Voice: The New Essay of Spanish America, 1960-1985(Texas UP, 1994). For some succinct remarks on the same theme, see also J. M. Oviedo, Breve historia del ensayo latinoamericano(Madrid, Alianza, 1991), especially chapters 3 and 4. 6 J. F. Marsal, "Los intelectuales latinoamericanos y el cambio social", Desarrollo Económico, vi(1966), 298. 103

their country by penning essays about the state of the nation for intelligent lay readers who might then act as an informed voting constituency.

In contemporary Uruguay, the locus classicus for discussion of the essay remains the selection by Real de

Azúa,7 whom Martínez Moreno names as the best essayist of his generation,8 an opinion supported by Rodríguez Monegal who pithily but correctly comments that "in many cases the preliminary note by the anthologist is not only more intelligent but more conceptually rich than the selected extract".9 The subject of this homily, Real de Azúa, also closely relates the essay to what he calls the "national theme":

It becomes a question of knowing what the country is. What our consistency is as a nation. What its qualities and defects, its advantages and dead losses are. What the causes and background of its extreme political uniqueness are. What face is drawn by its foreseesable destiny. What the economic, political and social forces which guide it consist of. The nature of its structures and how stable they are. How it differs from its neighbours and other more distant communities: to what extent one can speak of a 'national personality' (even of a pretentious, mystified

7 Antología del ensayo uruguayo contemporáneo (2 vols., Universidad de La República, 1964). All references are to the introduction in I, 11-59. 8 C. Martínez Moreno, "Real de Azúa: una semblanza", Jaque, i, 31 (July 13, 1984), Separata, 16. To be fair, he also makes the point that Real de Azúa had little competition since the extended essay became increasingly unfashionable, an important fact to which I return later. 9 E. Rodríguez Monegal, Literatura uruguaya del medio siglo (Alfa, 1966), 380. 104

'Uruguayanness') (53, his italics).

The much younger historian de Torres Wilson puts the same point more succinctly but also more urgently, at the same time adding a very significant detail:

Stuck as we individually are with just our own resources, without an idea, without a movement, almost without a country behind us, the essay, that hybrid genre between art and science, that personal and often solitary lucubration, becomes a weapon of combat, the first and only one within reach in the confusing times we are living through.10

Lacking a sense of solidarity or, at least, a group with which to share it, he offers the essay as a way out of the feeling of aloneness, as an attempt to reach out to, and fight on behalf of, others in the same desperate situation. As one commentator has put it, "the essay . . . is the literary response to a world which has become problematic".11

Both Real de Azúa and de Torres Wilson merge the abstract idea of 'nation' with the more concrete conception of the 'state' as an amalgam of political, social and economic structures which have legal status and a verifiable history, as

10 J. de Torres Wilson, La conciencia histórica uruguaya (Feria del Libro, 1964), 8. Within five years, this same sense of urgency had touched Real de Azúa. See the restatement of his views on the essay in El Uruguay como reflexión I , Capítulo Oriental 36(CEDAL, 1969), especially p. 565. 11 Quoted in D. Meyer(ed), Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries(Texas UP, 1995), 4, where the editor emphasises the attractiveness of the genre's flexibility for authors writing about awkward issues under difficult circumstances. 105

do many conventional studies of nationalism and national identity.12 Trigo, somewhat schematically, would keep these apart as radically separate categories, even though he admits they are often confused for anything but innocent reasons.13 Benedict Anderson, too, would seem to accept such a division, since he barely mentions the state as such in his influential discussion of the nation as "an imagined political community".14

None of the four essayists analysed in this chapter can be said, if only for reasons of chronology, to conform to the Foucaultian sense of discursive construction which, at least in part, lies behind both Trigo and Anderson. However, three of them (the exception is Methol Ferré) certainly treat the nation as abstraction, myth or ideal. Ares Pons, despite his continual references to Uruguayan history, largely conflates nation and national character, while Lockhart is exclusively concerned with the latter. So is Maggi, although he goes about it more obliquely, judiciously selecting objects, people and events that can serve as emblems or

12 For a recent example, see A. D. Smith, National Identity(London, Penguin, 1991). 13 A. Trigo, Caudillo, estado, nación. Literatura e ideología en el Uruguay(Gaithersberg, Hispamérica, 1990), 256-257. 14 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities(London, Verso, 1983), 15. He expands on this definition in his introductory chapter (11-16). For persuasive analyses and extensions of the idea of nation as discursive formation, see T. Brennan, "The national longing for form" and H. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation" in Bahbha(ed), Nation and Narration(London, Routledge, 1990), 44-70 and 291-322, respectively. Most of the other essays in this volume also make at least passing reference to the concept. 106

symbols on which he can hang meditations about the moral state of the nation as he sees it. Methol Ferré, while as interested as the other three in Uruguay as "imagined community" (to use Anderson's phrase), is much more concerned with the political and economic history of Uruguay as a state, because his essays record his faith and subsequent disappointment in a particular political grouping (not a fully-fledged party) which he vainly hoped would transform it.

However these writers conceived the nation, they all intended to influence the public they addressed, a desire which points to one of the essential characteristics of the essay. As Real de Azúa puts it, the essay is fuelled by "the social, impersonal conviction of the inexhaustible, provisional nature of truth, of the ultimate destiny of any opinion to vanish into thin air" as it comes into contact with opposing arguments or is subject to the vicissitudes of time. Consequently, "the final port of call . . . of the essay's opinion or proposition is persuasion "(19, his italics), an idea underlined by Rodríguez Monegal in his appreciation of Real de Azúa's work (Literatura uruguaya, 368). The essay requires an actively engaged reader willing to spar with its argument. In brief, the essay as a form seeks dialogue. 107

Such a dialogue was not to last very long, however, partly because of what all commentators see as a slow decline in the cultivation of the essay since its hey-day at the turn of the century, despite its continuation well into the 1960s. Angel Rama attributes this phenomenon precisely to the trend towards increased specialisation, particularly in the arts and social sciences, which led to fragmentation rather than the synthesis favoured in the extended essay: "Uruguayan culture's . . . excessive lack of faith in the more seductive and lively aspects of the essay" meant that "figures such as Ares Pons or Real de Azúa had no followers (except, perhaps, Alberto Methol Ferré)".15 Real de Azúa himself also refers to this invasion by the sciences of areas previously the exclusive province of the essay (22), but adds two further explanations for the essay's gradual demise: the average reader’s growing dislike of more ornate prose (23) and a preference for the shorter journalistic article (24), an observation confirmed by Benedetti's El país de la cola de paja [1960] and Maggi's Uruguay y su gente [1963], both of which started out as series of newspaper articles.

These causes are obviously connected and relate also, no doubt, to the professionalisation of literature itself, as more writers of poems and novels tried to earn their living as critics or journalists with the daily or weekly press (the other

15 A. Rama, La generación crítica (Arca, 1972), 206-7. 108

common profession for intellectuals being teaching).16 I would add that, as the country's crisis deepened, the leisurely discursiveness of the essay became less and less appropriate, and writers sought out more immediate means of intervening in the national emergency and of reaching an audience far larger than would be expected for a long essay.17

ROBERTO ARES PONS AND THE SEARCH FOR TRANSCENDENCE

Roberto Ares Pons (b. 1921), a secondary school teacher of history by profession,18 had been associated with the pro-Soviet Communist Party but left to form in 1950 the University Alliance for a Latin American Federation with his friend and mentor Servando Cuadro(1896-1953).19 In 1952 he won an important essay competition on the problems of young people in Uruguay with an entry that deplored the disappearance of spiritual values from modern life and advocated in its final paragraphs what amounts to a revival

16 See many of the entries in W. Penco(ed.), Diccionario de literatura uruguaya (Arca/Credisol, 1987). 17 Which was exactly what Benedetti would try to do, as shown in Chapter Four. 18 See such publications as his Curso de historia nacional y americana (Casa del Estudiante, 1956; 13th ed., 1968) and Uruguay en el siglo XIX (Río de La Plata, 1964). 19 Cuadro, a self-educated journalist, had been expelled from the Socialist Party after a serious ideological wrangle with its leader Emilio Frugoni, and preached an eclectic mixture of non-doctrinaire Marxism, nationalism within a Latin Americanist framework, and psychoanalysis, elements which would leave their mark on Ares Pons' own work. One of Ares Pons' major efforts was a much-praised anthology of Cuadro's articles published after their author's death: Los trabajos y los días: hacia la federación latinoamericana (Nexo, 1960). 109

of a Rodó-like ‘Arielismo’.20 Three years later, Ares co- founded with other like-minded intellectuals the important journal Nexo21 which propagated the view that the best hope for the development of a country as small as Uruguay lay in the revival of Bolívar's great dream of Latin American unity, particularly as it would affect the nations around the River Plate.22 The first issue of the journal explained that the immediate reason for starting it had been the US-sponsored overthrow of the progressive Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954, while in the third Ares Pons admitted to another influence on his intellectual development, the so-called

"Third Position",23 which wanted liberal democracy without imperialism and socialism without Stalin.24

20 R. Ares Pons, “Aproximaciones a la problemática de nuestra juventud”, in C. Real de Azúa(ed), Problemas de la juventud uruguaya (Marcha, 1954), 45-69. 21 One of the journal’s other co-founders, Alberto Methol Ferré (the subject of one of this chapter’s later sections) has since explained that its title referred to the editorial board’s belief that the key to solving Uruguay’s problems lay in its becoming a nexus and not a wedge between Brazil and Argentina. See I. Palacios Videla, “Conversación con Methol Ferré: un profeta realizado - del Uruguay opulento al Mercosur”, Todo es Historia, xxv, 297(1992), 39. 22 That Ares Pons has remained remarkably faithful to this intellectual and ideolgical background can be seen in the combination of democratic socialism, ecological sanity and cultural and economic nationalism in a continental perspective, which make up his America Latina: raíces y opciones (Ediciones del Nuevo Mundo, 1988). 23 R. Ares Pons,"Sobre la tercera posición", Nexo, Nos. 3-4(1956), collected in his La intelligentsia uruguaya y otros ensayos (EBO, 1968), 59-68. 24 See A. Solari, El tercerismo en el Uruguay (Alfa, 1965) for a study of the movement and an anthology of essays which debate its ideological direction. I discuss Solari’s book and the polemic which greeted its publication in the previous chapter. 110

In 1958 Ares Pons tried to transfer these concerns to the arena of more direct political action. The Agrupación Nuevas Bases [ANB] he was instrumental in starting and whose 30-page political platform25 he wrote, has been described, perhaps too optimistically, as "without doubt, one of the intelligentsia's most serious attempts to participate in political events".26 Attracting a number of figures who were or would become quite well known (among whom are two already mentioned in this study: Real de Azúa and de Torres Wilson), Nuevas Bases was not a political party as such but rather a pressure group working within the ambit of the Socialist Party (Graceras, 113), of which its manifesto was supportive but critical (Examen, 21) and which received

Ares’ vote in 1958.27 Examen de la realidad nacional closes by looking for the formation of a new party or coalition of progressive groups without exclusions that would be nationalist while seeking to promote Latin American unity, honest in its presentaion to the electorate, and not philosophically or ideologically monolithic (25-30). Not surprisingly, therefore, ANB was a strong supporter of the move to create a 'Popular Front' centred on the socialists (Graceras, 114), one of the two left-wing coalitions formed prior to the national elections of 1962, and happily joined the

25 Examen de la realidad nacional (ANB, 1959). 26 U. Graceras, Los intelectuales y la política en el Uruguay (El País, 1970), 114. 27 As Ares reveals in his “Sobre fascismo y ruralismo”, Marcha, 949(27 February, 1959), n. p. 111

Frente Amplio in 1971, with the clear support of Ares Pons.28

Written in 1959 and the only prize winner in an essay competition organised by Marcha on "The Destiny of the Uruguayan Nation", Uruguay: ¿provincia o nación? 29 shows traces of all these preoccupations and activities. Divided into three parts, the essay offers a revisionist view of the history of Uruguay since independence in a manner both schematic (perhaps inevitable, given the limitations of an essay competition) and almost structuralist. Proceeding through a series of binary oppositions and strings of analogies, the first two parts map out a mythology of national history and the patterns of a national character, into which, in the third, Ares Pons inserts an interpretation of, and projected solutions to, the current crisis. Rather than attempt a summary of the entire argument, my analysis will centre on the way in which the terms of the analogies and oppositions operate as hinges joining up phases of its development.

28 He is among those who signed the document to that effect. See INDAL, El Frente Amplio del Uruguay y las elecciones del 1971(Heverlee-Louvain, INDAL, 1973), 154. 29 Buenos Aires, Coyoacán, 1961. Further references will appear in the text. 112

The first and, in many ways, the most important term in Ares' equations is the gaucho. Nomad, solitary individualist, jack-of-all-trades on the cattle ranges, the gaucho is, for Ares, a spiritual orphan of the plains. With no roots and no possessions of his own (except horse and knife), he has no sense of private property and the only limit to his world is the horizon (10-13). In this image lie the "specific characteristics" of the Uruguayan national psyche (11) because, although the modernisation of the country would make the gaucho "historically unviable", when this social type died out, "he rendered up his spirit, which still kindles the depths of our collective unconscious"(13). So much is this the case that, for Ares Pons, "to the degree that it resists Spanish [or, later, other foreign] domination, the whole country . . . becomes gaucho to a greater or lesser extent"(15),30 including the gaucho's chief antagonist at the other end of the pole: the native urban élite.31

"Resident in Montevideo although the property which guarantees its wealth lies in the interior [and] linked to the colonial authorities and the import-export trade"(15), this group, like its counterpart in the rival port of Buenos Aires,

30 This particular piece of sweeping amateur psychologising gets a hoot of derision from one reviewer not disposed to like the book anyway (see R. Cotelo, “Una interpretación enajenada”, El País[9 October 1961], 8). 31 A paraphrase for the Spanish term 'patriciado' which has no exact equivalent in English. Ares' understanding of it will be clear from what follows. The classic study of this social sector (its constitution as a 'class' being a matter of debate) is C. Real de Azúa, El patriciado uruguayo(Asir, 1961). 113

because it looks to Europe and North America for its bookish culture and ideology and seeks to protect its business interests with England, will play a "denationalising"(17) role in the struggles which produce, first, independence from Spain and finally - for Ares Pons, tragically - the creation of Argentina and Uruguay as separate nations. Opposing the move to centralise power in the Port are the rural population and its leaders who, having brought to the revolution against Spain "a national and popular character which the urban élites cannot engender"(16), go on to become the "federal movement which carries the seeds of Latin American nationality"(17).

The first and, for Ares Pons, definitive failed attempt to fuse these various forces focuses on the figure of Artigas: "the archetype, the paragon, the sublimated imago which illuminates the collective unconscious"(17, his italics). Situated at the topographical centre of the essay's first part, Artigas is the pivot about which the whole work revolves and who reappears as an emblem in its conclusion, for "his legacy is still germinating and will soon produce its unforeseen flowering"(18).32 Myth and person are not

32 Almost twenty years later Ares Pons was still prophesying along the same lines although this future had become of necessity somewhat less immediate. Artigas' and others' advocacy of continental federation, "frustrated in the first stage of [Latin America's] emancipation, . . . will surely be realised in a perhaps not too distant future"("Artigas, una figura de proyección continental", Comercio Exterior [Mexico], xxviii, 10[1978], 1277). 114

identical but in the case of Artigas the former is firmly anchored in historical reality:

In [his] innovations one does not find the emphatic trans-culturation conceived by the the learned élite but, on the contrary, the way of harmonic development, the conjunction of foreign contributions and the century's new inventions with the living traditions of the country . . . In Artigas lives the seed of all our national solutions: political and economic independence, federalism, unity of the River Plate area, regional market, progress harmonised with tradition, democracy (18-19).

The repetition here of the notion of harmony indicates how Ares' view of Artigas as a historical figure dovetails into the energy which drives the whole essay (and, for that matter, the much later América Latina: raíces y opciones): the urge towards the reconciliation of discontinuities and contradictions.

Artigas' project, which would have recuperated even the gaucho as "a builder, . . . the founder of family and nation"(19), foundered on the opposition of the urban élite and the "decisive intervention" of British imperialism (21).33

Paradoxically, for Ares Pons the existence of Uruguay as an independent nation is the result of the "denationalising" efforts of the 'patriciado' for "there was nothing in Artigas' plans which allows the supposition that he desired national

33 Treated in more detail in the earlier "El mar es ancho y ajeno"(1958). See Intelligentsia uruguaya, 69-83. 115

separation "(20, his italics).34 Just as "[n]o objective fact legitimised the formation of three distinct nations in the Plate basin", nothing indicates that the people of the eastern province, despite having developed unique characteristics and wanting some autonomy, desired the national sovereignty rejected by Artigas (22-3, his italics).

While Ares Pons sees the very existence of Uruguay as the product of conflicts and contradictions whose resolution was blocked by separatist class interests, the first decades of development in the fledgling nation are characterised by oppositions carried over from pre- independence times but now exacerbated. \The dismemberment of the River Plate region is paralleled by the "discord between the conscious and deliberate formulation of political proposals and the living reality of cultural and psychological fact ['contenidos']", an opposition misleadingly transposed by "Europeanised or 'Yankified'" intellectuals into another: that of "civilisation against barbarism"(24, his italics). Those who perpetrated this misrepresentation did so in the interests of an urban bourgeoisie which imported not only the trappings of its increasingly consumerist way of life but also its ideas and attitudes, and thus found itself more and more divorced from the life and culture of the rural

34 A point also underlined in "Artigas, una figura", 1277. 116

population of the interior (25-6).35 These two antagonistic trends are embodied in the confrontation beween the 'doctor' (the legal and administrative expert who, in the name of the large landowners residing in the capital, devised laws based on foreign models to regulate rural property) and the 'caudillo' (the local political boss who organised resistance whenever the imposition of metropolitan interests became too disruptive). "The government of Uruguay during the 19th century [writes Ares Pons] was a constant transaction between these two styles, which imply two counterposed ways of seeing and acting"(26-7). The two occasionally meet in the person of the "gauchidoctor"(27), of whom, the reader can infer, Artigas was the first and greatest, and the only one to reach the level of statesman.

These oppositions are gradually diluted into "the political duality of Blancos36 and Colorados [the two long- standing national political parties], which in a way disguises the action of the already mentioned factors and presents another antithesis". The emotional pull of these groupings is

"one of the enigmas of our history" which is only being understood now that their mythology is "on the eve of being overtaken by the living reality of history"(28), a prediction

35 The dissociation of, and the consequent need to rejoin, the two notions of culture as acquired learning and as lived experience is a major theme, globally expanded, of América Latina: raíces y opciones . 36 Later called the Nationals or National Party, terms in current use in Uruguay and which I use throughout this thesis. 117

no more successful than Ares Pons' previous one about Latin American federation. His own explanation of this puzzle proceeds by elaborating two strings of analogies. The gaucho (whose spiritual orphanhood is part of the collective unconscious, according to Ares), "[i]n his search for the father . . . finds the caudillo; in his search for God, the Fatherland; and, in the absence of both, the political emblem ['divisa']". Parallel with this runs another series: "The secession of the River Plate region paradoxically made possible the myth of the Fatherland. . . [T]he viable River Plate Confederation having been replaced by the illusory sovereignty of a State which was only a legal shell, . . . the myth of the emblem replaced the myth of the nation"(30). The attraction of the political party is explained as a re- enactment of a constantly deferred meeting with an authoritative father figure.37

There is, however, more to it than this, as Ares Pons admits. While there are historical reasons to associate the Nationals more with the concerns of the interior and the Colorados with the urban masses (32), both parties can easily contain elements more naturally linked to their opposite number as well as subgroups which represent the extreme ends of either spectrum (32-3). Consequently, Ares Pons

37 It is, presumably, this kind of thinking which leads Graceras (104) to say that Ares Pons seems to have inherited the "psychologistic and over- simplifying tendencies" of Cuadro's approach. 118

refers to the two groupings "not as parties but as currents" whose "directions, rather than propositions, are tendencies, affinities, sympathies and antipathies"(31-2, his italics). He goes on: "Perhaps what fits them better than anything else is the biological term tropism, which goes well with the spontaneity and protean plasticity of this political phenomenon"(32).38

It also goes well with the merging and splitting of myths and symbols which has guided Ares Pons' interpretation of the beginnings of the Uruguayan nation. Indeed, the political parties are almost one more failed attempt at uniting the various competing forces. Each is capable of absorbing portions of its opposite, but neither can bring about a fusion of the two threads that justify and explain the parties' existence. This is not surprising since, as we have seen, for Ares Pons these antagonistic forces are as much fragments of the collective unconscious as they are facts of history. All of which, I believe, explains the title to this first part of the essay: "La nebulosa originaria".

38 With the collectivity's relations to politics established by way of psychoanalysis rather than economics, Ares dismisses historical materialism as irrelevant to the explanation of the roots of Uruguayan political loyalties in precapitalist habits of mind(31), an observation which suggests the philosophical basis of his quarrel with the Communist Party around 1950. See also Real de Azúa's remarks in his prefatory note to the Ares Pons extract in Antología, II, 536-7. The climax of Ares’ departure from materialism is, perhaps, the final sentence of América Latina: raíces y opciones : “socialism is, first and foremost, a state of the spirit”(173, his emphasis). 119

If the first section of the essay had centred on one figure (Artigas), the second, entitled "Condensación" (in the sense of consolidation), is concentrated around two: Latorre (military dictator, 1876-1880) and Batlle y Ordóñez (president, 1903-7 and 1911-15), as it covers the period between the 1870s and 1933, with a hiatus dividing it in half at 1904. Within this framework there operates Ares Pons' now familiar strategy of oppositions.

Latorre's task was "to make the state a reality" and he did it, according to Ares, by the only means available to him at the time: "blood and fire"(36). In short, he behaved, with state and military authority behind him, like the rural 'caudillos' he defeated, at the same time wiping out the gaucho whose way of life was incompatible with what he had to do. What this amounted to was the imposition on Uruguay as a separate nation of a structure which would allow it to take its place within the system of international capitalism(36-7).

In his analysis of the transformations effected on rural life during this process, Ares Pons explores further the dichotomy between culture as a set of learned abstractions and culture as vibrant life experience. He differentiates between the 'estancia patricia' (large landholdings organised in a relatively efficient way and owned by absentee landlords often members of the urban élite) and the 'estancia charrúa' 120

(often smaller ranches with less wealthy owners who lived and worked on the property and shared the life and values of their employees and the region's other inhabitants)(39). While the former were better suited to the necessary changes, the latter was "less a unit of production and an economic enterprise . . . than a unit of life, whose participants were linked by relationships more communal than societal (40, his italics).

While the railway and refrigeration transform the infrastructure of the agricultural industry, at the more mundane level of rural daily life, the 'caudillo' is replaced by the policeman and "[a] world of relationships, customs and life experience, ethical and emotional, . . . is abruptly substituted by the hegemony of abstraction" in the form of paper, either the legal documents to secure contracts and property rights or the circulation of paper money (43). Under these circumstances the gaucho disappears as a historical agent (44), only to reappear as an image in the national unconscious or as an icon in the mythology of the traditional political parties.

If Artigas attempted a fusion of two political and social forces and two ways of life, the Latorre project results in the effective suppression of an entire culture which is not only the occasion for nostalgia on Ares' part but is also precisely what the Artigas plan would have preserved. Indeed, given 121

Ares Pons' tendency to psychoanalyse history, it might be more appropriate to speak of the repression of what had earlier been rejected. It then becomes possible to see "the last great resistence to the advances" of the ideology emanating from the capital, led by "the last rural 'caudillo', Aparicio Saravia"(49), as the last violent irruption of the repressed into the consciousness of the nation. The 1904 rebellion was put down with relative ease because, according to Ares Pons, the country folk who rallied spontaneously, almost irrationally, to Saravia's call lacked a strong sense of private property or collective ownership, and were unable to generate an ideology strong enough to give them a reason for a sustained war (48-50).

The losers kept to “ways of life on the verge of disappearance” and made a “cult of values the new order denied or ignored”. However, “some of those values cannot be killed off, and will have to be salvaged, if we wish to have genuine progress and not merely superficial innovation. They are values belonging to culture, whereas the forms attacking them correspond to civilisation”(51, his italics). Civilisation is here the Europeanised 'culture' which the urban middle and upper classes have acquired along with capitalist economics, both of which they impose on an organic, spontaneously developing way of life that instinctively resists them. Since he feels it cannot be destroyed but only overlaid (repressed), 122

Ares will reinstate it, along with the Artigas program which is its articulation in Uruguayan history, when he comes to offer his solutions to the national crisis.

Victorious in 1904 was the ideology known as 'Batllismo', named after the president of the day but dominating Uruguayan political life until Batlle's death in 1929 and still influential decades afterwards. According to Ares Pons, it was made up of "bourgeois humanism, nationalism, faith in linear and indefinite progress and a tacit utilitarian materialism"(53). Its progressive social and industrial legislation and interventionist economic policies won over the vast majority of the urban masses and dramatically improved their standard of life, but the benefits were felt less in the interior (52-4) where the conservative opposition either forced policies aimed at the rural sector to be diluted down or simply refused to implement them (58).

More important for Ares, however, is the universally held mythology created by 'Batllismo': “[A] new mysticism based on the ideals of liberal-democratic legality and material and social progress. . . [T]he exercise of reason, the insights of knowledge and the presence of the new civic morality . . . would exempt us from crises and catastrophes"(54). This, together with "the illusion of constituting a Nation"(55), gave rise to a sense of 123

uniqueness, of being "singled out for a special, better, different destiny", expressed in slogans such as "'There's nowhere like Uruguay', 'The Athens of the Plate Region' [and] 'The Switzerland of Latin America'"(56). As a result, Uruguay failed to see "its real condition as a privileged trading post", attempting to develop "as an island, ignoring its position as a geographical and historical enclave of

Spanish America"(55).39 Hence, Ares believes, the other "cruel metaphor" coined to "show the reverse of the ingenuous optimism of the happy decades: 'Gibraltar'"(56).

It is clear that, in Ares Pons' scheme of things, 'Batllismo' completes the task begun in the time of Latorre by trying to bring all sections of society into the ambit of the national project so they can share in the benefits. The price was a deepening of the schism in the collective psyche and a curtain of false security between the dominant part and the reality which surrounded it. There was no cushion against the shock when it came. The title of the essay's third part offers Uruguay a choice: "Decadencia or Resurgimiento?", while the subtitle to the opening section leaves the answer open: "La crisis nacional: 1933 - . . . ?"(57). For Ares, the coup by

39 Ares Pons borrows here from ideas he developed earlier in an important essay "Militancia y desarraigo de la intelligentsia uruguaya", written in 1953, first published in 1955 in the second number of Nexo , reissued as a pamphlet in 1961 by the New Foundations Group and collected in Intelligentsia uruguaya, 37-57, the source of my reference here (see especially pp. 40 and 48). 124

President Terra40 begins a crisis which the periods of prosperity during the Second World War and the Korean War only temporarily postpone. Its bottom line is Uruguay's lack of viability as a "separate nation", although it is hardly a surprise to find the author maintaining that the crisis is "primarily a basic unease in our collective being, the alienation of our people. Ultimately, it is a drama of a spiritual nature, as are all the crucial dramas of History"(57, his italics). The nation is a mental construct, not to be confused with the structures that make up the state.

The comforting mythology surrounding 'Batllismo' produced a conformist majority which looked at the vicissitudes of history as though they were "a film which moves us without involving us"(62), an alienation mentioned by many writers of the time, as we have seen. The fragility of this complacency was exposed once world peace brought diminishing markets for Uruguay's primary products and increased competition from the rebuilt industries of war- ravaged Europe (63). As the economic crisis deepened, material deprivation combined with what for Ares were the deficiencies of the national psyche to

40 Ares Pons, writing for a Uruguayan readership, does not feel it necessary to say so, but it is important to realise that this was not a military coup. The army played no part either in the derrogation of parliament or in the decision making during the nine years before full democracy was restored. In fact, the coup was the result of a cross- factional, inter-party conservative alliance, including the anti-Batllista Colorado president, which took advantage of the disarray caused by the slump following the Great Crash of 1929 to assert itself against many of the reforms of 'Batllismo'. 125

produce a "rebellion against a kind of existence which does not correspond to [the people's] essential coordinates, to the original contours of its soul"(65, his italics).

Ares Pons goes on to suggest, in his now familiar psycho-historical style, that these "original contours" are a dialectical combination of the Hispanic origins and the native gauchesque modifications which produces a thus far unfulfilled capacity for transcendence of a quasi-religious kind. It is this which the secular materialism of capitalism has disguised but not expunged (66-7). This "vocation for transcendence", which found partial realisation in the notion of the Fatherland and in the early heroic days of the political parties, could have been fully incorporated into the Artigas project (68), but was completely overlooked in the structures created by 'Batllismo': "The reformers of [the] twentieth century wanted to convince us that at the end of human life we find a pension, whereas what really awaits us is death, which impels us toward transcendence as the only possibility of victory".41 It follows quite logically from this that "the lack of this collective ideal" should produce "pathological symptoms, behind which there hides a tenacious ghost . . . which wanders through the social geography of the Republic, promoting here and there

41 This had been the main theme of Ares Pons’ prize-winning 1952 essay mentioned in the Introduction. 126

disorder and disquiet, generating a fear which cannot quite understand its origins"(69).

It seems a long road from the objective contingencies of history through the existential problem of death and on to the inner or other world of souls, spirits and ghosts, but perhaps Ares Pons' pages on his proposed solutions to the crisis can lead us back along it. He begins with a very specific reference to the National Party's victory in the 1958 national elections. Since it was their first win in 93 years, he can be forgiven for seeing in it an event of major significance ("Uruguay is no longer the same "[71]), which Ares relates to his advocacy of the long-postponed Artigas alternative: "the country is beginning to understand that the interior exists, that Uruguay depends on agricultural production and that it is in Latin America"(72). He goes even further in his comments on one of the National party factions, the 'Federal League of Rural Action', whose skillful use of the media had won enough votes to secure the victory, seeing in it the first successful attempt to organise the rural population which excluded the large landowners, the first trade union style organisation to penetrate the national political scene and a major step in going beyond traditional party politics. These elements are sufficient, Ares Pons believes, "to confer on the [Nationals’] triumph the quality of something entirely new"(72).42

42 He was forced to eat his words. In a prefatory note added just before printing (June, 1961), he castigated the Blanco government's "reactionary nature and its departure from everything in the Blanco tradition implying a popular and national uprising which might be used positively on the way towards progress and national liberation"(7). Despite this later retraction, Ares Pons' original statements indicate that he was, initially at least, more taken in by this faction's propaganda than Graceras(113), Rodríguez Monegal(Literatura uruguaya , 378) and Ares himself (“Fascismo y ruralismo”) are ready to admit. 127

Identifying Uruguay's major problems as the backwardness of the rural sector and the over-populated cites and over-staffed public service (72-3), Ares Pons returns to the idea of the crisis as "serious illness" with which he began: "To cut out the tumours without them poisoning the nation's entire blood supply and causing fatal disruptions, . . . it is necessary to create genuinely productive jobs. Industrialisation is the way, without doubt. But for there to be healthy industries, there has to be a broad market" and "the only feasible perspective is a Latin American Common Market"(73).

Appealing to his mentor Servando Cuadro, he calls the ideal of a Latin American Confederation Uruguay's "salvation", and recalling the quasi-religious "vocation" he previously emphasised as the distinctive legacy of the Hispanic tradition, he goes on: "the mere presence of that aspiration in the spirit of our people would, for a long period,

I return to the theme of the 'Federal League' in the introductory paragraphs to the section in this chapter on Methol Ferré, whose most widely read work prior to the essay which gives this book its title was a grandiose assessment of the League's contribution to the development of the National party's ideology. He, too, would find himself obliged to recant, but in terms much more bitter than Ares'. 128

more than satisfy our vocation for transcendence, providing a Myth capable of replacing to advantage our defunct illusions"(75, his italics). Ares expands this urge for a revaluation of values to continental proportions:

Spanish America is admirably endowed to be the land of syntheses, the crucible in which the elements today dispersed will fuse together in a new and richer union. [It] can be the cradle of a new humanism which reconciles the antithetical extremes of tradition and progress, community and individual, earth and spirit, the unique and the universal (77).

In the final sentences, he writes a name on the banner which will rally people to the cause: "Today there is only one Myth capable of fulfilling this function in our history and it is personified in Artigas"(78).

Rodríguez Monegal reports that Ares Pons "has been accused, quite simply, of having very few ideas"(Literatura uruguaya, 389), while Real de Azúa perhaps gets closer to the crux of the matter with the opinion that his work is "centred almost obsessively on a few themes"(Uruguay como reflexión I, 574). It is true, as I have indicated, that over the years Ares has remained extraordinarily consistent, even single-minded, in the advocacy of his point of view. This is, also quite simply, because what he pursues is a matter of faith for him and he is still a true believer. His credo, as we have seen, states that to heal the divisions he finds in the 129

collective Uruguayan psyche involves a resuscitation of the essence of Artigas' program abandoned at the moment of the nation's birth. The realisation of this ideal would revive the autochtonous cultural values generated through the experience of living in the interior and redefine the idea of Uruguayan nationality, first, as part of a union of the states in the River Plate basin and, on a larger scale, as a member of a Latin American Confederation.43

Moreover, the crusade Ares Pons wishes to mount on behalf of this proposition would satisfy the "vocation for transcendence" which, in his view, Uruguayans have inherited from their Hispanic background and which remains untapped and frustrated in the modern secular state. Being explicitly the product of a quasi-religious devotion to a single cause itself, Ares' work can be seen as a contribution to the project it enunciates, particularly as it also seeks to "transcend" the limitations (as Ares sees them) of a materialist view of society and history. While the resulting attempt to map out a psychoanalytical interpretation of the national character and its cultural underpinnings may now strike the reader as quaint or too literal-minded, it does testify to the depth and seriousness of the problem, as Ares Pons conceived it. If it is still easy to agree with Rodríguez

43 Hence, Cotelo’s view that Ares Pons imposes a predetermined ideological pattern on Uruguay’s history (“Una interpretación enajenada”). 130

Monegal that "the most important element in Ares is his felicity for converting ideas into formulas", it is more difficult to accept, over thirty years later, the same critic's opinion that "the most important thing in Ares is his power of persuasion"(Literatura uruguaya, 390-1). What is true, however, is the Ares Pons was attempting a dialogue with a notion of Uruguay that was fast disappearing.

CARLOS MAGGI: TANGO AND METAPHYSICS

Carlos Maggi (b. 1922) has been a lawyer as well as one of Uruguay's most prominent intellectual figures. While still a student at pre-university level, he wrote (with Manuel Flores Mora, who was to be a Colorado senator, a journalist of note and one of Maggi’s life-long friends and colleagues) a prize-winning historical essay44 and followed this by founding in 1942 a short-lived review, Apex , Latin Americanist in ideology and avantgardist in its aesthetics. He worked extensively as both writer and editor on Acción, a newspaper put out by the militantly pro-Batllista faction of the Colorado party,45 just as much later he would collaborate on Jaque, a weekly review of cultural and current affairs

44 José Artigas: primer estadista de la revolución (Montevideo: Consejo Nacional de Enseñanza Secundaria, 1942). The pamphlet was distributed free throughout the high school system and is part of the revisionist view of Artigas which Ares Pons recounts in "Artigas: una figura" and expands idiosyncratically in Uruguay: ¿provincia o nación? . 45 As opposed to El Día, one of Uruguay's most important daily papers founded in 1886 by Batlle himself, which largely follows the official Colorado party line. 131

edited by Flores Mora, which began publication towards the close of the military dictatorship and voiced the perspective of the more progressive elements within the same party.46

Maggi has also had regular columns in Marcha and has written a historical essay on the life and work of his party faction's mentor, José Batlle(1955), some zany short stories or vignettes 47 and a "Magical History" of Montevideo.48

Despite his long career in journalism (the fruits of which form the basis of the two books of essays analysed

46 Graceras (134) names Maggi as virtually the only 'Batllista' intellectual who feels comfortable with his party allegiance, while Mario Benedetti - whose politics are to the left of Maggi's - refers affectionately to this aspect of his activity as though it were a charming eccentricity(Literatura uruguaya, siglo XX [3rd. edition, Arca, 1988], 309). Rodríguez Monegal, on the other hand, tries to explain what he sees as Maggi's sentimentality as partly a result of his Italian ancestry but also as a corollary to his participation "in the same fraction which by its misrule brought us to the swamp we are in today"(Literatura uruguaya , 356-7). This political disagreement may, at least in part, explain why Rodríguez Monegal is gratuitously nasty about Maggi at several moments in the book. He magisterially castigates what sounds like a piece of polemical belligerence against Marcha from as far back as 1948(in which Rodríguez Monegal, as the magazine's literary editor, clearly felt himself alluded to since he intervened in the subsequent debate)(38-9) and insultingly suggests that Maggi's first collected volume of journalism only sold well because his friend Flores Mora wrote a review that was all but an advertisement in the widely read literary columns of Marcha (349). As my earlier reference to similarly offensive remarks about Angel Rama indicates, Maggi is not the only writer to suffer from Rodríguez Monegal's poisoned pen. In fact, the entire book could be used as a case study in the personal (and other) politics of literary criticism. Its author himself refers to the group who worked on or published in Marcha as having a strong sense of community(38). Literatura uruguaya, while containing much information and judicious commentary, reads as a whole like the last salvo of someone who, rather than leaving voluntarily for bigger game in the wider world of Paris and Yale, was settling old scores with a group of former colleagues who had expelled him. The vituperative tone means that many of the opinions and asides in the book need to be treated with scepticism. 47 Cuentos de Humoramor (Arca, 1967). 48 Invención de Montevideo (Alfa, 1968). The term "Magical History" is Maggi's own from the preface. 132

below), his main claim to fame, established during the ten years beginning in 1958, is as a dramatist. Benedetti observes that Maggi's theatre has often disconcerted or irritated local critics; one might add that it has been all but ignored outside Uruguay. The reasons could well be different in each case. Benedetti cites the "provocative combination of humour and seriousness, crude brush strokes and delicate touches, tango and metaphysics, the avantgarde and the traditional, foreign borrowings and individual creativeness", all wrapped up in "a shamelessly River Plate regional language" rather odd to those who expect their theatrical experiments to come from Europe (Literatura uruguaya, 307). While Maggi's colloquialisms are a genuine source of difficulty for both international theatre audiences and potential translators alike, I suspect that the chief explanation of the lack of interest by non-Uruguayan critics is that his experimentalism is not aggressive enough nor his politics revolutionary enough to satisfy the demands of a fashionably radical criticism.49

49 Maggi's major plays are La biblioteca (1957), La noche de los ángeles inciertos (1960), Mascarada ( 1961) and Esperando a Rodó (1967). 1985 saw the production of his first major play since the 1960s, Frutos , named after its protagonist Fructuoso Rivera, the first Colorado president of the fledgling republic. It, too, divided early reviewers. See the entry for Maggi in W. Rela, Diccionario de escritores uruguayos (Ediciones de La Plaza, 1986), 209-210. The main Uruguayan critical studies of his plays remain Benedetti's "Carlos Maggi y su meridiano de vida"(1966)(Literatura uruguaya siglo xx, 307-321) and Rodríguez Monegal, Literatura uruguaya , 346-366. Penco, Diccionario (Vol. 2, 49-50) records only three entries (two reviews and an interview) since 1968. Outside Uruguay, general histories of Latin American literature and theatre apart, there are L. H. Quackenbush, "Theatre of the Absurd, Reality and Carlos Maggi", Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century , No. 3(1975), 61-72, J. Cordones-Cook, “Entrevista a Carlos 133

This digression on his theatre is not merely essential background on Maggi's literary activities. If it is true, as Benedetti maintains in the same article (318), that a previous acquaintance with his essays is a prerequisite to understanding at least some of Maggi's plays, it is also the case that much of Benedetti's description of these applies equally to his journalism. In Maggi's articles we also find an off-the-cuff colloquial style, a gift for communicating the flavour of life in Montevideo, an affectionate if slightly jaundiced survey of the customs and foibles of its inhabitants (especially the middle classes), and a concern with rebuilding the national character: in short, "tango and metaphysics".

Maggi compiled four compendia of these pieces between the early 1950s and the period immediately

Maggi”, Latin American Theatre Review , xx, 2(1987), 107-112, E. Szoka, "Carlos Maggi: sobre su teatro", Dactylus , No. 9(1988-9), 11-14 and O. Pelletieri, “El patio de la Torquaza: Cambio y productividad en el realismo reflexivo de los sesenta en el Río de la Plata”, Latin American Theatre Review, xxv, 1(1991), 51-61. Maggi is excluded from N. Eidelberg, Teatro experimental hispanoamericano 1960 - 1980: la realidad social como manipulación (Minneapolis: Institute for The Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1985) despite the fact that all of his most ingenious experiments were written after 1960. 134

following the military dictatorship.50 A distinguishing feature of these volumes is the extraordinary degree to which the later ones rely on the earlier: nearly half of Gardel is made up of articles published 13 years before in Polvo; Los militares, while including pieces written for Jaque in 1984-5, also reprints the entire text of Uruguay y su gente, composed of articles written for a regular column in Marcha during 1961. This tactic of regularly reproducing earlier work, however common in the work of other writers, is for Maggi neither just an individual way of going about things nor the result of a presumptuous desire to remain in print. Rather, it condenses certain tenets which form the kernel of Maggi's way of reflecting on the nation: the only way of illuminating the present is to throw light on the past; what was the present ten or twenty years ago is still relevant as today's immediate past; since habits of mind and modes of behaviour change slowly if at all, an appreciation of the experience - as opposed to just an intellectual understanding - of present and past will allow some foresight of the future, unless something is actively done to change the pattern; a small part of what can be done is to keep writing and reprinting articles which urge that something be done.51

50 Polvo enamorado (Fábula, 1951), now a collector’s item; El Uruguay y su gente [1963](3rd. edition, Alfa, 1967); Gardel, Onetti y algo más (Alfa, 1964); Los militares, la televisión y otras razones de uso interno (Arca, 1986). 51 I therefore oppose the rigid periodisation of Maggi’s essays in A. S. Visca, “Maggi, la realidad nacional , y algo más”, El País (14 March 1964), Suppl., n. p., preferring the view of J. P. Díaz (“Carlos Maggi 135

In "El caso de la bola de vidrio", an early section of Los militares, Maggi writes: "Around 1961 I predicted the future and it was useless to have predicted it; at the same time I think it was not useless; you never know what period words are meant for . . . [words] are rats which gnaw away in the darkness"(8). He then quotes his own prologue to the third edition of Uruguay y su gente where he refers to:

our ongoing economic ruin and our exquisite moral sense, unchangeable, which makes me appreciate more and more the people of this country. I know no examples of any other human group capable of becoming impoverished with greater dignity . . . How long can we go on getting closer to destitution and violence without falling headlong into one of these two hells?(Los militares, 8)

There follow Maggi's reasons for including in its pages the complete text of the earlier volume: "This book states certain things which were staring us in the face before the 1973 coup and there they still are, unchanged, without anyone feeling scandalised by it"(9). Besides being a sideswipe at the military, who apparently changed nothing in over eleven years, Maggi clearly wants his readers to feel as offended as he does. So much so that he repeats, in somewhat more urgent terms, the closing sentence of the the book published 23 years before: "We must do something with ourselves, I

ensayista: un libro apasionado y generoso”, Marcha [21 February 1964], 31), who sees clear links across Maggi’s work from Polvo enamorado to Uruguay y su gente . 136

think"(10). Uruguay y su gente had ended: "It would be a good idea if we were to do something with ourselves, I think" (123), both versions being good examples of Maggi's use of ironic understatement.

The military undoubtedly found in other pages of Uruguay more reasons to withdraw it from sale and destroy it, which they did in 1974, so Maggi informs us (Los militares, 69). When the demands of capitalism collide with the needs of democracy, he foresaw, it is what turns out to be expendable that will give way: “in the end, the whole political game of a democracy like ours with its freedoms, parties and varied forms of tolerance, is little more than a luxury”(Uruguay, 23). Elsewhere in the same book, Maggi turns the rhetorical heat up a notch or two in a passage in which solemnity, sarcasm and vitriol combine to create a nearly biblical prophetic tone:

There go the black inquisitors requesting violence and coercion in the name of freedom, shouting democracy when they mean dividends, investments, percentages. We are watching them as, puffed up with advanced age, they poison the country. They are organised by name, head office and their faithful rubber stamp. They are the sons and grandsons of those who condemned people for witchcraft, the same ones who presided over the torture chambers but still had time to arrange book burnings . . . They refuse to see that they are grotesque, a hindrance, an offence, a plague in the community they inhabit(100). 137

This is from a chapter on Uruguay's "gerontocracy": those who acquire prestige and influence in the same way they accumulate birthdays and not through any talent they possess (96). While the barely concealed anger here will find a resonance in any reader frustrated by the immobility of some aging authority figure, Maggi is not only appealing to such predictable emotions. What is impugned here is a state of mind which could develop in directions Maggi finds frightening: "They are sterile so they become cruel. Because they have no imagination, they are very cut and dried. And above all: because they are full of fear, they are dangerous"(99).

In Gardel Maggi broadens these thoughts in a splendidly grotesque "Visita y anatomía de la cabeza de un derechista". Looking into the brain "of the first person I met who I heard shout liberty when he meant the opposite"(112), the protagonist (named Don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, after the Spanish baroque poet and specialist in the grotesque) reads the following notice: "One's whole life must be dedicated to collecting objects, things, stock for trading. . . What you have is what you're worth. Property is joy, use and abuse. . . Kneel down: the peso is god and inheritance his prophet. Millionaires or death. Landowners or death. Privileges or death"(113-4), parodying the Uruguayan national anthem - which contains the words 'liberty or death' 138

- as well as nationalist liberation mottoes as "Land or death"and “Fatherland or death", but indicating how far reactionaries would be prepared to go to protect their wealth and advantages.

It is easy to accuse Maggi of imprecision in such passages (Is wealth "handed round"?; who are the rich and powerful?; how do they get and maintain their wealth and influence?), of relying on analogy, approximation and metaphor to do his arguing for him. Unlike Ares Pons, he has no easy familiarity with Marxist terminology and is not trying to write even a popular sociology. Benedetti (Literatura siglo, 310) refers to the "complicity" between the author and an almost "tangible" reader, and Maggi is, in fact, counting on his (mostly Uruguayan) readers' experience to fill in the specifics. He assumes that they know in advance what he is getting at, who it is he means to describe, that they will have met or heard of such people in the course of their daily lives. Maggi's job is to provide a verbal focus around which the reader's perhaps hazy and only half acknowleged impressions can cluster and thereby become the basis for further thought.

It seems to be this tacit invitation to the reader to share his feelings that earns Maggi the unkind and somewhat stuffy censure by Rodríguez Monegal (Literatura uruguaya, 379) that he cultivates an essay form not merely "popular" but 139

"crassly populist". This accusation is more than countered in the following extract, my last example of Maggi staring into his "bola de vidrio": “The worst thing about a despot is not the limited number of injustices and atrocities he commits; the worst thing is the unlimited seeds of confusion he sets germinating in his country”(Uruguay, 116). Even though in Gardel Maggi was to retract part of this ("the only positive thing about [Latin American] dictatorships [is that] at least they do not confuse the soul of the people by degrading their concept of freedom"[179]), it remains true that few Uruguayans in 1961 would have had such thoughts; equally few, having lived through the experience of the 1970s and emerged the other side into the 80s and 90s, would deny their accuracy. Given these circumstances, the military censorship of Maggi's book is almost a compliment, and one he would not have been paid if he merely conformed to Rodríguez Monegal's patronising description of him as "a good superficial observer of River Plate regional customs"(Literatura uruguaya, 362).

Maggi conceives both individual and national life in the voluntarist terms of a popularised version of existentialism, in which living is a perpetual becoming which always contains an innate potential for (self-)transformation. In the same year he was writing the articles reproduced in Uruguay y su gente, he included the following sentences in a 140

program note for one of his plays: "[A]uthenticity is a long exercise in patience, because it is not easy to be in one's own space, to succeed in being what one is; especially here, in a country only half completed. And so, every day we are and are not Uruguayans, we are and are not ourselves"(quoted in Rodríguez Monegal, Literatura uruguaya, 352-3). Individuals are no more a finished product than the nation:

"humans are beings in the process of becoming;52 they make projects and project themselves and cannot just let themselves go”(Uruguay, 43-4). The positive role assigned here to the intellect will be clarified when we come to consider the central place he gives to art and culture, but for the moment we should note that this conception of being as constant potential contains an ethical imperative: "One must be and at the same time invent oneself"(87). From this Maggi develops a harsh, purist and impractical notion of freedom:

To be free consists of becoming completely what one is; it is to give one's all, to realise one's potential, to live life in the broadest, most personal way without being diminished or damaged by the injustice around you, by the lack of opportunities, by the constricting nature of the environment, by poverty, fear or coercion(115).

There is some complacency here in the suggestion that the unemployed or the starving might nonetheless engage in a project of self-realisation. This may stem from

52 The verbal noun in Spanish here is 'devenir'. In Gardel (169) he finds another: 'quehacer', a task to be completed. 141

the optimism of Maggi's 'Batllista' politics in which the state is the provider of the wherewithal by which everyone is assured of a minimum decorous standard of living. Be that as it may, the over-simple analogy between individual and collective allows for no social or class differences and no conflict between the various sections of the nation's inhabitants. However much it may be at odds with his own remarks on the "gerontocracy", Maggi implies that the body politic is a homogenous entity whose potential for inner growth is apparently equivalent to his own: "[T]he goal of collective life is to let each individual be fully what he is and how he wants to be it"(90).

The chief difficulty encountered by Maggi is that the populace at large either refuses or does not know how to participate in this personal and collective program of self- enhancement: "Like drinking mate53 until it is cold, we suck our life away in unhurried sips. Mate is the reverse of enthusiasm; it supports the tendency to let ourselves drift [dejadez]"(43). Consequently, "the main problem with our country is the Uruguayans. We have surrendered: we are upset by the presence or activity of a madman, a fanatic, anyone who puts their life and soul into what they are doing.

53 The bitter herbal tea sucked through a thin pipe from a gourd or a special, often ornamental drinking vessel shaped like a small gourd. Its importance for Maggi is that maté is an essential part of the mythology of life as a pastoral idyll which all Uruguayans (and other inhabitants of the River Plate area) inherit from the rural past of earlier generations. 142

It interrupts our mate"(48). The results of this attitude are funereal: "We do not take ourselves seriously even as symptoms . . . Since we cannot see one another, we do not exist"(80-1). Later, he was to address the question with more urgency: “the people born and bred in this country do not recognise themselves, do not know who they are, are disoriented, cannot make plans for themselves”(Gardel, 104). The threat here seems to be the fragmentation of society, the break-up of a shared sense of purpose capable of holding the social fabric together. It is, therefore, ironically expressive of the dilemma in which Maggi finds himself that the existentialist terminology he largely uses to voice his concerns is borrowed from a philosophical tradition focused on the individual.

As the problem is, for Maggi, primarily existential and psychological (as it also was for Ares Pons), the first step towards a solution must be an effort of the intellect: "We must learn how to think about ourselves" (Uruguay, 77):

A community incapable of seeing itself and reflecting on itself will be, as a community, a flock or herd docilely subject to its impulses, given over to a mechanical voraciousness and, therefore, a slave to its most immediate needs, with no human civility and no cultural enjoyment. And this is precisely our problem (79).

It is also exactly what essays such as these seek to overcome. As with Ares Pons, what Maggi seems to find is a flaw in the 143

national character. Consequently, faced with the dilemma of choosing between "discouragement and revolution", he asks: "Won't we be needing something deeper than the profound change of structures we hear so much about as the solution?"(113).

Gardel, Onetti y algo más puts flesh on these philosophical bones as we pass, to use again Benedetti's felicitous phrase, from "metaphysics" to the "tango". Indeed, in the course of the book Maggi refers to himself as one of "the nation's metaphysicians"(60), while the opening article, "Gardel", makes generalisations based on the world of the tango. Both essay and book begin with a sentence which anticipates Maggi's principal strategies throughout the pages of the volume reprinted from Polvo enamorado and which also inform his whole relationship with the past: "Around December 1941, my classmate [at pre-university college] did not turn up on the day of his final exam"(7). This combination of recollection, anecdote and the focus on the particular or trivial is used not only to evoke memories of places, people, objects and events from the author's own past. They also give a sense of intimacy to his treatment of occurrences both more remote in time and on a larger historical canvas: "Yes, there were wars of independence. And for a long time afterwards, there kept on being civil wars. I found out about it by looking into the faces of the old 144

men who had fought them"(31). Similarly, in "Batalla de Las

Piedras"(73-82),54 a well known event in the nation's history which, Maggi admits, "had never mattered to me much"(73), is reassessed and given new vitality by way of the private letters of the unfortunate Spanish naval officer who commanded the losing side.

To return to the more personal element, it turned out that his friend had stayed at home "drinking mate and listening to records" on the radio. He told Maggi: "'I just couldn't go. I wanted to and all that, but I couldn't. Gardel was singing like never before". Maggi comments: "The image of my friend turning his back on the world while he drinks maté and listens to Gardel appeared to me as the vignette of a great national event"(7). He then elaborates the theory about maté we have already seen in Uruguay y su gente, adding that something of the life of the cattle ruminating across the ranges seems to have rubbed off on the Uruguayan populace(8-9)! Turning to the tango itself, Maggi finds that through its melancholy, "we cry and pine for something we have lost even though we have not lost anything"(10). Lying in wait at the back of all Uruguayans' minds, this "transparent and shadowy yearning" also accounts for the special attractiveness of "Carlos Gardel's nocturnal voice, capable of saving us from the world and of

54 The victory by Artigas' troops at this encounter on May 18, 1811 ensured that the defeated Spanish forces remained holed up in Montevideo. 145

leaving us alone with our solitude"(11). Cows graze on grass just as Maggi's friend daydreams over mate and the tango. Maggi himself ruminates on the state of the nation.

We have here a vague sense of a past lost and irretrievable but which lingers on as a fantasmal presence in the collective memory and can, as in the case of Maggi's friend, become at times so overwhelming that it produces a divorce from, and an evasion of, the demands and concerns of the real world in the present. This same feeling carries over into the second piece in the book, the title essay from the 1951 Polvo enamorado, in which Maggi formalises the ideas from the first essay, suggesting how objects themselves can provoke similar effects:

Things and habits possessed before still rest at arm's length from us but as if banished from time. The melancholy they provoke . . . is . . . a shudder of self-pity . . . [They are] a secret word spoken by time to warn us that our own death has exploded in the future and is hurling its first fragments back towards the present (13-4).

In other words, human beings, too, must accept that they will eventually assume the sad status of having served their purpose, a point he makes rather differently, in a further reference to his 1951 book, in Uruguay y su gente: "It becomes necessary . . . for many people in this country to live and struggle admirably with the noble aim of decomposing into dust; useful, beloved dust; an anonymous, 146

radiant and fertile substance"(75). This secular, modest but optimistic acceptance of life's limitations is a prelude to Maggi's existentialism and is a far cry from the cosmic proportions of Ares Pons' quasi-religious transcendentalism.

Maggi's evocation of the past is idiosyncratic and humorous, as though to emphasise both the emotions called forth in the author by the memory of it and the wealth of lived experience accumulated around whatever it is he is conjuring up. Consequently, well over half of the vignettes about objects either open with or include the conversational gambit "and, yes, there were . . .", giving the impression of resuming an interrupted dialogue partly with the reader and partly with the object itself. Equally frequent is the strategy of personalising the object, as though it had absorbed some part of the lives that had gone on around it and now had a life of its own in Maggi's memory. Thus, in what amounts to a fable about, of all things, long johns, we find: "Since he [ie. a pair of long johns] was a complete idiot, he could die like a hero, in silence. He was wiped out by the greatest plague of the century: hygiene and sport"(29). About trams, he tells us: "The tram is so young, so happy and carefree that it isn't even a fatalist"(37), despite being trapped on the rails that determine its destination. Maggi waxes lyrical on the first electric light bulbs: “The light bulb was a young, blond romantic girl who blinked a lot and was crazy and given to fainting like Marguerite Gauthier”(49), while the pin cushion 147

was an "unrestrained masochist [who] sought out the hand armed with a stiletto, needed it, courted it, to enjoy the morbid pleasure of its wound"(57) - a perfect image of the state in which Maggi found Uruguay in the 1960s.

Along with this personification of the object goes the pervasive use of metaphors and similes to bring the past briefly back to life. What Maggi says of the 'vintén'(an old coin worth about two cents) applies to many of the people or the common articles he invokes: "Only the most figurative language will do to give us a representation of the 'vintén' as an object"(47). Thus, green tablecloths, long johns, chimneysweeps and the 'vintén' itself are "like institutions"(23; 28; 41; 46). "History is a sad, old stretched long john, and time is as punishing as pain"(30); chimneysweeps are the opposite of bakers because "they work vertically in the chimneys, suspended between a fire and the sun, whereas the breadmakers, being materialists, sweat out their fatigue horizontally in front of the ovens"(42); "A penal code is a delta where liberty is the river and crimes are the islands"(177). At times the image can be extended to become the focus of a general observation:

On the dining room table, that is, at the epicentre of the class struggle, the table cloth, a kind of flag starched and laid flat like a sheet, became through its unique qualities the synthesis of 'bed and board', the two prizes fought for by the modern world which, 148

as is obvious, has the soul of a servant(24).

Maggi does genuinely seem to regret some of the features of urban life such as the widening gulf between the city dweller and the natural environment (see the pages on the disappearance from Montevideo of the spatious patio[39] and on the zoo[63]). However, it should not be taken for granted that the point here is a naive attack on the crass materialism Maggi finds characteristic of what he calls "the modern world", in the name of some superior values only to be found in the past. We need to look at the typical mixture of affection and gentle mockery noticeable in all the examples of the previous two paragraphs. This irony often cuts both ways: backwards, as it were, at those who live in the past, as well as towards people who embrace modernity as though even the recent past had no relevance. At times, Maggi's irreverent sense of fun overtakes his affection: "For the green tablecloth to exist, we had to have Don José Batlle y Ordóñez, the inventor of the middle class. The rich and the poor do not know of the green tablecloth"(23). Presumably, the rich prefer lace or polished mahogany while the poor can barely afford a table. But the middle class is Maggi's own just as Batlle is his political hero. Maggi's mockery extends to himself and his own attitudes, including the temptation to dwell too lovingly on (or in) the past. 149

His descriptions of women need to be seen in the same ironic light. In an elegy on the passing of the dressmaker's dummy, which was "the pure form of woman, her symbol, her idea, the site of her ineffable resurrection"(44), we read what today can too easily be judged merely as clear examples of the most objectionable sexism: "Woman is the only perfectly superficial being we can know". She lacks the "seriousness" of horses, never "meditates conscientiously" like the cow or "plunges into the depths of her own soul" like "large dogs". Women, therefore, cannot do metaphysics, which is the reserve of "superior animals". However, since her "visible surface" is the point of contact with "the other world", "only" women can be "angels, demons, apparitions, captivation, anguish, madness or a pure object of love"(44-5). Elsewhere, in an article entitled simply "Women"(116-121), we find that "[f]at is the hell of beautiful women"(117), followed by a page of hyperbole telling us why, whereas "a shapeless, thin, sporty woman ready to do the boogy-woogy, is a hopeless skeleton where a woman might have formed but, instead, there is nothing"(119).

How much irony and self-mockery there are in such passages is hard to decide given modern sensitivity to such language, but this is not so in the poignant piece on the 150

young servant girls who came from poverty in the interior into domestic service in the middle class homes of Montevideo (50-53). Maggi begins with general descriptions but gradually these give way to personal recollections:

Maybe they sometimes cried a little just after going to bed, when you are still not sleepy and everything seems so sad and useless. But this was never obvious. Some turned out to be bad and tried to steal an orange or a swig of egg liqueur, just as we would steal tomato preserve at siesta time. I remember one, the worst of them all, who nibbled a steak which later appeared on the dinner table with horrid, accusing teeth marks. Her name was Violeta, but my mother called her María (51-2).

Behaviour tolerated or expected in the family's own children is enough to brand a servant as "bad", while the girl who bit into the steak may have done so out of hunger or to avenge not being called by her real name. Presumably Maggi's mother did not bother to learn any of the girls' names since he carries on referring to María but leaves it unclear whether he is always talking about the same girl. Nonetheless, he is sure that, on their visits home, the girls never talked about how lonely it was in Montevideo because "they would have been ashamed to appear ungrateful to us who treated them like daughters"(52). On another occasion, María excitedly informs them that her mother is going to buy her a ring, whereupon Maggi's sister retorts that "[i]t will be one of those you get free in tins of coffee", which, fortunately, did 151

not quell the maid's enthusiasm (53). The whole vignette, one of the most successful in the book, illustrates the perfect union of affection and irony. But the affection goes all in one direction, towards the plight of the girls cut off from home and family, as does the irony, which expresses the always only implicit remorse Maggi now feels at the way both he himself and his family treated the maids, made even more culpable by its later repetition in the maids’ rejection as adults of their own past, thus proving how well they had internalised their employers’ values.

I have insisted on the element of irony or (self- )mockery in these articles in order to emphasise that Maggi does not uncritically embrace the values associated with the bits of the past he portrays. This reflective distance serves the same function in his non-fictional prose as the use of anti- realist devices does in his plays: namely, to undercut the potential sentimentality of the themes and settings. In short, Maggi never gives in to outright nostalgia, despite his later description of the book as an “evocation of nostalgias”(Cordones-Cook, 108). In fact, he is acutely aware of the dangers of doing so. Both human beings and societies can, he says, "lose consciousness": “a consciousness blackout is the social method of carrying on our lives with something in front of us which stares us in the face but which we cannot or will not contemplate”(138). This is exactly what Maggi's student friend did in "Gardel". He allowed 152

himself to wallow in the nostalgic mythology of tango and maté in order to "lose consciousness" and not have to cope with what he could not face: his final exam. Maggi, on the other hand, was able not only to do the exam but also to reflect constructively on his friend's experience.

Rodríguez Monegal provides an excellent example of what can happen when even an intelligent critic completely misreads this ironic self-reflectiveness. In his determination to put Maggi down, he spends nearly five pages (Literatura uruguaya, 353-7) in a vain attempt to show that Maggi's "investigation into the reality of the nation depends on a nostalgia for authenticity, which for him lies in the good 'criollo'55 times of yesteryear"(353). He goes on to account for this sentimentality in terms identical to those used by Maggi himself in "Gardel": Maggi is the descendant of migrants who needed to put down roots in an alien country. Consequently, "that nation ends up being viewed through a false, sentimental projection which turns historical values upside down"(357). Rodríguez Monegal does see an

55 'Criollo' literally means someone of direct Spanish descent born in the New World. This was inevitably associated with life in the countryside where many of the early settlers had to go to organise the production of food. As time passed, the specific features of this rural way of life, underpinned by the modified legacy from the Spanish tradition, coalesced into a cultural ideology usually known as 'criollismo'. This, in turn, was appropriated, in Uruguay and elsewhere, to provide a unique, and often picturesque, sense of national identity, the need for which was not easily satisfied in the increasingly amorphous capital cities. In this latter sense, one could subscribe to it without ever having lived in the interior oneself. For a study of 'criollismo' in Uruguayan literature, see A. S. Visca, Aspectos de la narrativa criollista (Biblioteca Nacional, 1972). 153

ambivalence in Maggi's perspective on Uruguay, suggesting that his work since 1958 (thus including Uruguay y su gente and the new material in Gardel, Onetti y algo más) has become more acerbic in tone (354-5). He then (355-6) gives a long and unidentified quotation from Maggi cited not from its source but from Visca’s “Maggi, la realidad nacional”. According to Rodríguez Monegal's introductory remarks, the passage proves that Maggi, in presenting post-1830 Uruguay "as a veritable Arcadia, is suffering an unexpected myopia in someone who began his literary career with a work of history" (355).

Unfortunately for Rodríguez Monegal, the extract chosen by Visca is from Uruguay y su gente (41-2), which should be demonstrating Maggi's less nostalgic style, which indeed it does, although not quite in the manner intended by Rodríguez Monegal. Here is a sample:

Particularly here in Uruguay, for many years after 1830, we looked on peaceably as the cattle loved one another and we listened to the spontaneous and God-given chlorophyll process carpeting these fields. They were the happy times of barbecued steak and imported Swiss paving stones . . . And we accustomed ourselves to that. So much so that today, when the world is collapsing about our ears, there still resides in each of us, as though cradled in the lap of all that luxury, a slow, sententious 'criollo' who can live calmly because he has all the little he needs. 154

It is impossible, I would argue, to take these sentences at face value, to make them imply that Maggi endorses the attitude of the "sententious 'criollo'" as a valid response to the current crisis in which "the world is collapsing about our ears". Yet this is what Rodríguez Monegal does.

To make matters worse, instead of mounting his own counter-argument, he cites Visca's refutation, even though he knows that Visca, an adherent of the "official or National

Party line"(355),56 would hardly be likely to agree with Maggi anyway. What Visca does is to juxtapose Maggi's paragraph with a couple of sentences from José Pedro Varela, the educational reformer who initiated Uruguay's state school system in 1876: "'In forty-five years we have had nineteen revolutions. War is the natural state of the Republic'. War [comments Rodríguez Monegal], not the slow deglutition of mate"(356). If either Visca or Rodríguez Monegal had read Uruguay y su gente closely enough, they would have realised that Maggi knows this perfectly well:

after fourteen years of revolution and seventy-nine years of revolutions; after having fought for independence, the republic, federation, liberty, the constitution, the party emblem, the other liberty, the other constitution and the other party; after having fought for this man, that man and the other one; . . . I end by affirming my initial principle: all those who live here have a right to their dignity(Uruguay, 89-90).

56 El País , the newspaper in which Visca's review appeared, is the National party's counterpart to the Colorados' El Día (see note 44 above). 155

I have included this long digression not only to rescue Maggi from the clutches of one of his most severe and unfair critics but also as an example of the literary critical blindness that can be caused by petty vindictiveness. Like Ares Pons before him and most of the writers still to appear in this study, Maggi had an acute sense of the crisis besetting Uruguay and believed that the first essential step toward dealing adequately with it involved a revaluation of the country's history: "If the past is scorned, the future is weakened"(Uruguay, 84). Therefore, if Rodríguez Monegal were right to maintain that Maggi "turns historical values upside down", it would not only compromise his view of Uruguay but would also vitiate Maggi's whole purpose in writing at all.

In fact, writing and cultural life generally are, for Maggi, intimately bound up with a sense of duty toward future generations.57 Maggi feels this personally, dreading the moment when his own son will ask him: "What shall I do, Dad?", and wonders: "What is there here that is worth an adolescent's marvellous enthusiasm, a man's whole life?"(Uruguay, 105).58 Not surprisingly, then, Maggi argues that "the responsibility for understanding what is going on

57 The second section of Uruguay y su gente is a meditation on José Enrique Rodó's Ariel which, published in 1900 and addressed to the young of Latin America, took the character from Shakespeare's The Tempest as a symbol of the spiritual and idealist values it advocated, and warned against the pernicious consequences of falling in line with the utilitarian materialism emanating from the Anglo-Saxon cultures of the northern hemisphere. 58 In 1985 Maggi's son was to become literary editor of Jaque , as Maggi informs us in Los militares (62-3), recalling this section of Uruguay and reiterating his thoughts on the responsibility cultural workers have toward the young. 156

and even the job of guessing at future prospects begin to weigh on those of us nearing forty"(106).

The outlines of Maggi's idea of the nature and function of cultural activity can be easily and quickly established. "The price of each people [pueblo] is, precisely, its culture" while "underdeveloped countries are, in the first instance, spiritually underdeveloped"(Uruguay, 118). Consequently, "the principle of culture is the subjectifying of reality by turning the world around us into a spiritual matter"(Gardel, 131). Through this close "interaction between a sensitive imagination and the real world", "literature, religion, philosophy [and] the ethnological sciences" can together portray a representative human figure which will amount to "a description of those who have already matured and a model for those just starting out"(Uruguay, 85). As he put it much later, “literature has a cultural purpose: shaping a person’s character”, a civilising function that is betrayed by excessive commercialisation or politicisation (Cordones-Cook, 111).

This responsible and idealist cultural practice has to overcome formidable obstacles in Uruguay where the general "cultural penury" originates in the fact that "among us, the arts and sciences are seen as a source of shame"(Gardel, 172) and where one symptom of the prevailing "sickness of authenticity" is the failure to recognise that "culture is a way 157

of being and not a quantity of knowledge"(175).59 This confusion produces the nefarious influence of phoney intellectuals, "vermin [who], if they do not actually kill anyone, foul up the field with their purple passages, their pedantry, their scandalmongering, their easy cynicism and, sometimes, their difficult style"(131). It is they who create the impression that "culture is an irrelevant elitist game [arielismo]" which can be regarded by the community at large as "a useless luxury"(Uruguay, 119). Against people such as these and those who are too secure with their outdated formulas to be able to change with the times (Gardel, 142), Maggi prefers to draw a long bow. Rather than join those who would "take the truth in their hands and impose it by force", he sides with the "others [who], wiser, less passionate, less hurt, believe that it is better to wait. But to help out while waiting"(143).60

The purpose of this waiting game is to finish the task of bringing together this collection of "impersonal people" who "still do not yet constitute a nation"(Uruguay, 74). Beginning with the "illiterate warriors" who first made the country (Gardel, 32), Uruguay was constructed on three layers: "ground floor: the land, the truth, the tiny bit of planet we bought at independence with so much sacrifice . . . ; first

59 Also lamented by Ares Pons in “Problemas de la juventud uruguaya”(1952) and repeated by Maggi twenty years later in Los militares (32-3). 60 It is precisely this kind of alternative which, for many intellectuals, will no longer seem available by the end of the 1960s. 158

floor: flood plains, immigration, civil commotion, improvisation, happiness; second floor, now up high: reflective thought, university, sonnets and violinists, that is: French gardens and 'clair de lune'"(70). It is on this second floor where the work remains to be done: “Democracy can only exist as a political organization to the extent that it is made up of cultured people capable of forming their own opinions and not a herd of wild men, sleep-walkers or rhinoceros, led along among information blackouts”(184). An over-refined, minority culture must be broadened and made relevant and challenging to average middle-class readers so that they can vote with something other than just their feet.

Real de Azúa is right to see Maggi's work as "representative of that literary mode which tends inevitably to have as its point of reference . . . the nation's society as a whole, which is the hidden but unavoidable backdrop to the figures, features and episodes" in his vignettes and articles(Antología, II, 570). Maggi's penetrating gaze at the surface of Uruguayan society and beyond made him prescient not only, as we have already seen, of the likely actions of ultra-conservative right. Writing in 1961, he also foresaw the pressure to be brought to bear on the society as a whole:

For us, unaccustomed as we are to scarcity or revolution or even to thinking for ourselves, 159

everything will be doubly serious. Therefore, as we go into our coming difficulties, we must use the time left to temper our culture which will be put to the test (Uruguay, 30-1).

He also anticipates the choices facing those the military would try to suppress. "The problem of the century [he wrote a little later] is to attend to the dispossessed and give them the protection they need"(Gardel, 152) and, although thinking himself that between the twin poles of freedom and justice, it was the Uruguayan people themselves and "their ways of thinking and feeling" that most needed change, Maggi nonetheless suspected that one of the reasons why Uruguayans felt "perplexed, disconcerted, immobilised" was that "there are only a few who want justice in exchange for freedom" (Uruguay, 114). Before the end of the decade, however, large numbers would swell their ranks as they joined the extreme left parties that supported or were sympathetic to the aims of the Tupamaros guerrillas.

In the last resort, for Maggi culture in the formal sense is the conscience and foundation of the democratic process itself.61 The contribution to this enterprise by Maggi

61 This idea informs the whole section on television in Los militares (49- 68). It also formed the basis of his thinking during his brief sojourn as director of the Uruguayan public television channel in 1985, shortly after the return to democracy. He spent about six weeks working on a proposal that would have given the station "the best programming possible", as he himself puts it. When the project became known, "its author was obliged to resign"(62), apparently because the commercial channels could not cope with the competition (Cordones-Cook, 110). Readers are left to draw their own conclusions. 160

essays is, in essence, an extended and deliberately hostile gloss on an extraordinary statement of his from an interview in 1964: “Everything in Uruguay waits for what no longer exists, in the belief that it will return”.62 Whatever doubts modern readers may have about the wisdom of defining something as nebulous as national character, few attempts to do so can be as compelling and suggestive as this paradoxical comment.

The principal ruminants in Maggi's essays are not the placid cows grazing on and in the past, as Rodríguez Monegal would have it, but those, like Maggi himself, who anxiously interrogated the state of Uruguay at a moment of increasing social and political discontent. His maids symbolise those who lost most or gained least in the country's development since independence in the early nineteenth century, for all of whom Maggi communicates a heartfelt compassion. That Uruguay wound up being as vulnerable and defencelss as a pincushion was confirmed by events subsequent to the publication of these books. Maggi's sadly ironic evocation of a past that had never quite coalesced into a firm tradition and his mordant warnings about an only too possible future were well aimed, but were too late and perhaps too abstract to be heeded.63

62 J. C. Alvarez, “Maggi, a contrapelo de su popularidad”, La Mañana (29 May 1964), n. p. 63 Although it is outside the purview of this study, it is worth noting that Maggi has been a prolific essayist in the 1990s; so much so that G. de 161

ALBERTO METHOL FERRÉ AND THE NATION AS PROBLEM

Late in 1991, Alberto Methol Ferré (b. 1929) defined hmself as follows: “I am a Uruguayan who refused to accept that his frontiers coincided with . . . Uruguay’s and who always felt part of the whole of Latin America”(Palacios Videla, 37). This theme has been a constant in Methol Ferré's preoccupations since his teens when he was an activist on solidarity committees opposing United States involvement in Latin America, and was finding his political feet in the National Party led by the conservative anti-imperialist Herrera.

In 1955, he joined the group around Ares Pons in the foundation of the journal Nexo, in the early issues of which he published two essays which clearly indicate his intellectual and ideological origins and interests. The first was an appreciation of the work of Jorge Abelardo Ramos, an Argentine trotskyist who combined his political and social analysis with a revival of the Artigas ideal of regional and continental federation.64 In it Methol Ferré lamented the

Armas and A. Garcé see his work as a major link between the leftist critique of the state in the 1960s and the current more liberal (or neoliberal) analysis of the same issues (Uruguay y su conciencia crítica: intelectuales y política en el siglo xx[Trilce, 1997], 36 and 72-74). 64 "El marxismo y Jorge Abelardo Ramos ", Nexo, 1(1955), 24-42. In 1949 Abelardo Ramos had published América Latina: un país(Buenos 162

weakness of Marxism in Latin America while emphasising what he called “communitarian humanism” (28) and stressed the need to link nationalism and socialism (40).

His second essay in Nexo65 reflects his conversion from agnosticism to catholicism in 1947, and was written as a response by a small group of colleagues - including Juan Pablo Terra who, as leader of the Christian Democrats, was to have a major role to play later in the formation of the Frente Amplio - to the Cold War idea that the Church was automatically committed to defending the West. Methol Ferré rejects this coercion by arguing that since both marxism and liberal democracy are fundamentally atheistic, neither can claim the Church’s allegiance. When his dissident meditation on Uruguayan affairs came to an end in 1967, Methol was to pick up the theme of the social mission of the Church as his prime concern until the end of the dictatorship in 1985.

In 1953 there occurred "the most notorious episode in Methol's intellectual trajectory which, through its backlash, made him well known among the younger generation of the country's essayists"(Real de Azúa, Antología, II, 634). The timing is not accidental. A 1951 constitutional reform had

Aires, Ed. Octubre), apparently considered subversive enough to be banned by the Argentine authorities (Graceras, 120, n. 12). 65 "Los católicos y la cultura occidental", Nexo, 2(1955), 30-38. 163

seen the presidential form of government replaced by a collegiate structure which gave the leading opposition factions a minority role in major decision making processes. This attempt to stave off the developing symptoms of the economic crisis largely failed and 1952 saw the first application of the security measures to put down strikes and other political activity by workers and unions. It is in this context that Methol Ferré, together with other intellectuals sympathetic to the radical elements in the mythology of the National Party, felt the irresistible attraction of Benito Nardone's 'Ruralist' movement, with which Ares Pons flirted but to which, unlike them, he did not succumb.

Benito Nardone, the son of working class Italian migrants, grew up on the streets of the Montevideo coastal suburb of Palermo. He had been an occasional contributor to anti-Batllista Colorado newspapers but was working as a minor functionary in the state railway's statistics section when he was picked in 1937 to run the newspaper Diario Rural to support the bid for a Senate seat in the following year's elections by Domingo Bordaberry, a discontented leader of the well-established Rural Federation. More importantly, in the 1940s, Bordaberry also handed over to him the running of his country radio station. For more than a decade, Nardone was to use these two organs to broadcast an eclectic and heady mixture of diatribes against the urban- 164

based pro-industrialisation policies emanating from Montevideo, attacks on the big banks and financial operators who manipulated exchange rates to damage the rural sector, and hatred of communists, trade-unionists and bureaucrats who soaked up the wealth earned by the farmer's sweat. He melded all this together in a racy, colloquial and demagogic style that seemed to understand the clouded minds, entrenched prejudices and worst fears of masses of rural workers and small farmers.

In 1950 he and Bordaberry, after spending two fruitless years trying to make the Rural Federation more representative of the interests of their growing numbers of supporters, broke away to form the Federal League of Ruralist Action, leadership of which Nardone assumed when Bordaberry died shortly afterwards. In addition to his work in the newspaper and on the radio, Nardone initiated a face-to- face campaign style of 'Open Councils', a legacy from Spanish colonial times briefly revived in the early nineteenth century by Artigas, whose mythological reputation Nardone was learning to exploit. By the mid-1950s, he was all but worshipped by an audience whose standard of living was plummeting along with the prices fetched by their products and who felt doubly marginalised: by the policies of the national government in the capital and by their own traditional rural organisations, which were dominated by 165

large landowners whose interests lay as much in the financial and industrial centres as anywhere else.

Up to this point Nardone had studiously avoided formally affiliating the League with any political party. As the 1958 presidential elections approached, however, he took to Montevideo a detailed proposal for constitutional reform which would return considerable political influence and economic power to the rural sector. Mindful of the extensive country vote Nardone could probably command, factions from both major parties expressed interest. After some haggling, Luis Alberto de Herrera, the wily, eccentric and experienced political wheeler-dealer at the head of the National Party, offered Nardone a leading place on their election ticket. It turned out to be a shrewd move. Although the constitutional changes were rejected at the polls, the votes of Nardone's supporters together with the Nationals' ability to present the electors with a united party, in conjunction with the hard-pressed nation's clear desire for a change at any price, sufficed to give the party its first victory in presidential elections for 93 years. As though symbolising the potential meaning of this win, on the day following the announcement of the result, an old, lone farmer was able to ride slowly on his horse the entire length - several kilometres - of Montevideo's main thoroughfare without anyone uttering a word of complaint. 166

Unfortunately, Nardone's ambition and talent for vote-catching were far greater than his capacity as politician on the national stage. Despite some early success, particularly in the area of economic policy, the alliance with Herrera's faction proved unstable and Nardone's fortune began to wane. His faction's share of the vote declined in the 1962 elections and dwindled almost to nothing following Nardone's death in 1964. In essence, Nardone was a reincarnation in modern garb of the rural 'caudillo', although he was the first to have been born and brought up in the suburbs of the capital and the first to have fought long and hard - and to have won - using the modern weapons of the mass media instead of guns and machetes. But like most of the other 'caudillos' before him, his ideology - such as it was - died with the man who personified it.66

Methol's response to Nardone's League, ¿Adónde va el Uruguay?,67 is important in several respects. It remained

66 The previous paragraphs were compiled from the following sources: G. Cosse, "Acerca de la democracia, el sistema político y la movilización social: el caso del 'ruralismo' en Uruguay", Estudios Rurales Latinoamericanos, v, 1(1983), 77-100; G. D'Elía, El Uruguay neo- Batllista, 1946-1958 (Ediciones de La Banda Oriental, 1983; R. Jacob, Benito Nardone: El ruralismo hacia el poder (Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1981); Trigo, Caudillo, estado, 169-177; and, for some pithy judgments and anecdotes, J. L. Clericetti, Historia política uruguaya 1938-1972 (n. publ., 1984). 67 The essay exists in three versions according to Real de Azúa (Antología, II, 633), the last two containing important additions to their predecessors. In fact there appear to be four. The original (in Tribuna Universitaria, Nos. 6-7[1958], 136-173) is dated October, 1958 and therefore precedes the November national elections of that year. The second, published as a pamphlet (no publ., 167

for a long time the only extended appreciation - it is too uncritical to be called a study - of the whole "Ruralism" phenomenon; it summed up the approach of the group of intellectuals who in 1953 formed the Artigas Centre for Economic Studies to evaluate and articulate the movement's ideology (see Graceras, 109-111) and was “a refined attempt to take Ruralism ideologically to the left” (Trigo, Caudillo, estado, 176, n. 64); and it is the direct forerunner to Methol Ferré's major 1967 essay which is the main focus of this section.

From a historical introduction very similar in argument to Ares Pons' in Uruguay: ¿provincia or nación?, two important prefatory remarks emerge: that to be nestled comfortably in the cradle of British imperialism had brought progress to Uruguay even if it had also entailed a "masking" of its real problems (4) and that the "rural masses" had largely always reacted to developments they had had little hand in making and were consequently cut off from a real

1958), has an emotional postscript written just after them. The third, entitled La crisis del Uruguay y el imperio británico (Buenos Aires, A. Peña Lillo, 1959), adds a prologue and substantial explanatory notes for an international readership, retains the original text but breaks it up into subsections with new subtitles, and omits the effusive paean to Nardone and the Nationals' leader Herrera at the close and replaces it with a new but still optimistic sentence added to the end of the main text. The fourth, put out a year later by the same publisher, records in some additional footnotes the author's bitter disillusion at the betrayal of his hopes. I have been unable to obtain a copy of the 1960 publication but it would seem that the main text is identical in all cases; it certainly is in the first three editions. Fortunately, quotations from the notes added to the 1960 version appear in readily available secondary sources and are sufficient, as we shall see, to give a clear indication of their substance and tone. Page references in my text are to the 1958 pamphlet. 168

sense of history (7). Nardone's League had, therefore, to engage in a campaign of continual mobilisation, which it had accomplished by activating the general "sociability" of country people, most notably by its use of the radio (9). The rural population being very dispersed, it had also had to find a theme which could serve as a unifying factor, which it had found in the fluctuation in commodity prices and the policies coming from the city which were responsible for their decline and unreliability (10-11).

Methol Ferré then argues that the alliance between Bordaberry, a dissident large landowner who wants to reach out to the rural lower and middle classes, and Nardone, who seeks to represent those same sectors despite being himself from the urban petitebourgeoisie, is a powerful symbol of a new political movement which can transcend the inherited loyalties to the two traditional parties by being a guild-like organisation bringing together those with common interests (13-15). In this context the League "spontaneously" resurrects Artigas, in whom it finds the "premature" expression of "a whole policy: regulation of land, unity of customs provisions, a call to the people and an awareness of Latin America", which can respond to Uruguay's "instinctual, obscure" sense of being "on the threshold of a new and great change of historical direction"(16), which transcends traditional party allegiances (19). 169

Following the Colorados' election win in 1954, Nardone put forward the projected constitutional reform which would have the national president and all city mayors selected on a non-party basis and proposed the establishment of a central bank to oversee the country's financial activities to avoid artificial manipulation and "to retake control of our own economy"(21-2).68 This was necessary because Uruguay's industry had been built on its agricultural base (26-7) but, unfortunately, agriculture had been allowed to develop through the "spontaneous" generosity of nature rather than the return on the organised investment of human and economic resources which it needed (27-8), with the result that, in effect, agriculture had been allowed to subsidise the nation's industrial and social policies with no provision being made for its sudden inability to satisfy these requirements (29). "What to do, then? What direction do we take? First, we must reinforce directly the agricultural sector, the only source of our export earnings"(31). Uruguay, having an inefficient rural sector and no heavy industry of its own, must "integrate" with other Latin American countries if it wants an industrial future (32).69

68 For a very different view, see D'Elía (94-5) who maintains that the previsions were so extensive that the central bank could have ham-strung any government's freedom to make decisions at all. 69 A view Methol Ferré carried over into his later work on the social role of the Church. See, for example, his “Análisis de las raíces de la evangelización latinoamericana”, Stromata , xxxiii, 1/2(1977), 93-112. 170

Methol Ferré agrees with Ares Pons and Maggi that the current crisis is not "merely economic"(34):

The fact is that, except in the rural middle classes, political awareness now lags behind events. . . the current generation of politicians governing us mirrors and sums up the social groups from which they come - the urban petitebourgeoisie - with their psychology of governing for consumers(35).

Like Juan Flo and Ares Pons before him, Methol Ferré also believes that Uruguayans turn "history into the most vast and exciting spectacle" and live life as "representation",70 the result being a lack of historical awareness and a consequent failure to understand the full dimensions of the current crisis (36):

History has appeared to us as an irrational fetish which brings us good or bad harvests . . . Uruguay cannot grasp the meaning of historical processes and resolves them as anecdote or detective novel. In our eyes, history, that dense, dark monster, dissolves into psychology(38).

The implication is that only by following the lead given by Nardone and 'Ruralism' can Uruguay break free of its age-old

70 “History was for others, not for us”, he was to say thirty years later (Palacios Videla, 38). 171

vices, rethink its past and present and create itself anew.

In the main body of the essay there lurks the doubt that, once in power, they might not be able or know how to follow the "painful" and "prickly" path, but if they do not, "so much the worse for us!"(32), since Methol Ferré does not feel that anyone else can. In the euphoric weeks following the Nationals' historic election win, all such worries disappeared. In the triumphant postscript dated December 5, 1958 (two weeks after the poll) and headed "Primer epílogo y nueva introducción", he writes almost boastfully that "Nardone and Herrera have put an end to the Régime"(39). In the rhapsodic closing pasage, Methol claims that "the victory of the country's essence" is symbolised in:

Luis Alberto de Herrera, the untamed 85 year -old memory of the old Uruguay, and Benito Nardone, the son of migrants [gringos] who transcends the 'gringo' through the roots he has set down in the nation, rural leader and therefore leader of that part of our living history with the longest memory, the history that never got into the textbooks. . . From this point on begins the tough history of a future which . . . will be national, even if it receives hard blows from rifle butts and suffers moments of recoil (40).

Whether or not it would be right to attribute to Methol prophetic powers beyond the almost biblical rhetoric, Uruguayan history would indeed recoil from the blows of rifle butts. 172

By 1960 Nardone and the government had shown their true colours and the pact with Herrera had broken down. Methol Ferré inserted his acid words of retraction, as though he, too, were recoiling from mortal blows:

Nardone's leadership, extremely efficient on the Plains, faced with the qualitative leap into the affairs of the State, has lost its political direction and adopts a clumsily 'repressive' policy against the workers' movement, while simultaneously appealing to external causes as it loses its grasp on the internal ones. He has become more royalist than the king: the United States, that is.

The offense delivered to Mehol Ferré's proletarian anti- imperialism led him to become even more bitterly sarcastic: "[Herrera] believed in 1959 that Nardone was 'a little man' who had served his purpose. He was wrong. Now in 1960 he would be right"(quoted in Graceras, 112). It is easy in retrospect to condemn "the mirage of this association with Nardone" as "the more trivial" side of the group of intellectuals who hoped to forge a convincing alliance between marxism and the revived ideals of Artigas, as Rodríguez Monegal has done (Literatura uruguaya, 378). However, Methol Ferré's 1960 notes and the tenor of his entire exposition make it clear that he saw nothing in Ruralism that anticipated either Nardone's moves against the working class or his accommodating attitude towards United 173

States economic control in the region, despite Nardone's earlier, consistently rabid anti-communism. Graceras' explanation of the error in judgement is both more charitable and more plausible: "A reasonable explanation . . . might be that the ideology Methol attributed to Ruralism corresponded with neither the aims nor the nature of the movement or, better still, that [Methol's essay] put forward objectives which, in the end, [Ruralism] did not adopt"(111- 2). In short, pressure of events had led Methol Ferré to read into ruralism what was not there and to overlook important features of what was.

Ruralism’s collapse would seem to have led Methol Ferré into some political indecision. After some involvement with the Latin American Free Trade Association in 1959, he sought a more progressive line out of his National Party origins. For the 1962 elections, he joined the Socialist leader Vivián Trías, also a historian with National Party roots, in forming the Unión Popular, which Methol later described as an attempt to form a “national left, leaving the Communists out, but bringing in Nationals and Colorados, not rejecting them as the traditional left did”(Palacios Videla, 39-40). He attributed its failure to the Cuban missile crisis, which brought sympathy for the Communists (40).71 This seems to

71 See Chapter Three below for more on the Unión Popular and for some very different explanations for its failure. 174

have been Methol’s last foray into Uruguayan politics for nearly ten years.

A sentence in a passage from ¿Adónde va el uruguay? quoted in full as one of the epigraphs to this study gives Methol's 1967 essay its title: "We . . . belong to a generation which lives Uruguay itself as a problem"(2)72 while a note in El Uruguay como problema73 suggests that, even if time and experience led him to reject Nardone, they have only confirmed the earlier work's "basic approach"(55, note 19). Moreover, as the postscript and later notes to ¿Adónde va el Uruguay? make clear, Methol was able to salvage the figure of Herrera from the wreckage of Ruralism and in the later work he offers a vindication of Herrera's labours as both politician and historian in opposition to his earlier frustrated hypostatisation of Nardone, who scarcely merits a mention in 1967. Methol remains faithful, then, to his belief that it is possible to harness his analysis of the Uruguayan crisis to the anti-imperialist elements in National Party ideology. There is, however, an important displacement. Both essay titles imply a sense of urgent interrogation, but the first articulates a direct question to

72 De Armas and Garcé indicate that this experience of the country as problem can be linked to the existential anguish of the individual put forward in the philosophy of Sartre and Heidegger(Uruguay y su conciencia crítica, 57). This is clearly true, as the fiction of, say, Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Benedetti and Carlos Martínez Moreno shows. However, from a more literary perspective, one would have to add the influence of Albert Camus and the Italians Italo Svevo, Alberto Moravia and Cesare Pavese. 73 Diálogo, 1967. Page references wiil be given in the text. 175

which the text gives an answer which could be immediately implemented in political terms, while the second retreats to an extended survey of the nature and origins of the problem itself.

The basic thesis on Uruguayan history which underpins El Uruguay como problema repeats the scheme used in the earlier work and is accompanied by the same belief that any solution to the current impasse must involve Uruguay in looking beyond its own boundaries and even in dissolving them in the formation of a larger and more viable geopolitical entity. Thus, after a five-page introductory section which defines the problem by conflating the terminology of politics and psychotherapy - "A society without open horizons is an individual with no sense of perspective. . . The political morass translates its uneasiness into a psychological morass"(9), Methol Ferré devotes the remaining 88 pages to an examination of what he calls "International Uruguay", that is, Uruguay in the wider world, because "[t]hree successive Empires put their seal on our history"(15) - the three metropolises being, of course, Spain, England and the United States.

Dismissing the first quickly, Methol effects his rescue of Herrera's contribution to the nation in the context of the second. Herrera has become "the great conservative, the deliberate custodian of Uruguay's existence"(43) because he 176

has founded his entire activity on his awareness of the idea of "URUGUAY AS PROBLEM"(30, his emphasis). Contrasting Herrera's reading of Uruguayan history with others, especially those originating on the left, in which the existence of Uruguay as a separate nation was not an issue, Methol quotes what he calls Herrera's summing up of the nation's "political essence": "With neither Brazil nor Argentina, . . . but also not against either of them"(36, his italics). In Methol Ferré's interpretation of Herrera, this principle of non-intervention is "the country's very reason for existing"(36) since it derives from its birth as a "Buffer State"(37).74

If British imperialism gave Uruguay a cushion of largely spontaneous and, to some extent, guaranteed prosperity, the economic penetration of the United States simultaneously exposes the vulnerability of Uruguay's position and, due to its more global nature, makes it impossible for any individual country, especially one as small as Uruguay, to resist its effects. Consequently, Methol writes, there is "a paradox in the advance of the new Yanki Empire: each step forward it makes will be met by a forward step of its adversary, Latin American unity "(73, his italics). Anticipating what has since become known as the

74 On this theme, see J. S. Tulchin, “Uruguay: the quintessential buffer state”, in J. Chay and T. E. Ross(eds), Buffer States in World Politics (Boulder, Westview, 1986), 213-229. 177

North/South debate, Methol argues that more important than the capitalism/socialism confrontation is the division between the industrialised nations (China being an exception) and "the proletarian, underdeveloped, agro- exporting countries of the Third World, among which is found the balkanised Latin American nation"(79). Unsurprisingly, therefore, Methol (like Ares Pons) believes that Uruguay can be rescued only by aligning itself closely with the River Plate region or by extending its traditional ties with Europe. In 1967, Methol gave Uruguay between ten and fifteen years' grace to make this decision or be engulfed by Argentina or Brazil (90-1). This leads him to conclude that a socialist revolution in Uruguay is not possible as it would bring direct intervention by its two giant neighbours and give rise to the dismembering of the country itself.75 That option, too, only becomes practicable if the entire region adopts it (92-3).

Methol Ferré is now able to go one step beyond Ares Pons. Unfurling the banner of Artigas whose name will set its stamp on the future (80), Methol not only advocates the creation of a Latin American confederation, but sees Uruguay as holding the key to it. The "historical anachronism" that is Uruguay merely heralds "the

75 Interestingly, statements to this effect purportedly emanating from the Brazilian military were widely publicised in Uruguay in the late 1960s at the height of the Tupamaros campaign. 178

anachronism of the whole balkanised cycle of Latin America", for whose countries neither socialism or neocapitalism can offer a model as long as they persist in the delusion of seeing themselves as separate entities(95). By this tortuous route, we return to the book's opening sentence, which both announces its main thesis and foreshadows its conclusions: "Uruguay is the key to the Plate Basin and the South Atlantic, and the uncertainty surrounding its destiny radically and inexorably affects and contaminates the system of relations established between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia"(7). Where Ares Pons saw the revival of the idea of a Latin American federation as a means of saving Uruguay, Methol Ferré argues much more assertively that precisely because this is true, Uruguay can take on the protagonist's role in solving the problems of the region and, by extension, the continent.76

In 1989 Methol Ferré wrote: "Nothing can be overcome if it is not fully understood why objections were made to it, how much truth or error there is in it. I have a tendency toward historicism and try to understand nearly

76 Trigo (Caudillo, estado) vindicates Ares Pons and Methol Ferré (and, for that matter, Servando Cuadro) and their advocacy of a Latin American federation. See especially pp. 195-200, but the entire work may be seen as a series of variations on the theme of the suppression or recuperation of Artigas’ legacy at different moments of Uruguay’s political and cultural history since independence. In this sense, as well as an academic study, it is a polemical intervention in the 1990s version of the debates of the early 1960s. See the final chapter (253-260), where he reveals his hand most clearly. 179

everything historically. I am not a historicist, but I do think that you cannot grasp the nature of something without understanding its genesis".77 Both ¿Adónde va el Uruguay? and El Uruguay como problema use this need to uncover and explain the past as a prerequisite for making predictions about or devising blueprints for the future, but they both do so within the parameters of the traditions of the National Party. There is a price to be paid for such an association. As we have already seen in the case of Maggi, his allegiance to a sector of the other main party which was perceived as outmoded and powerless provoked amusement and disbelief in many of his friends and colleagues. Similarly, Rubén Cotelo points out that the attempts by intellectuals within or around the National Party to present a "traditionalist and anti-modern" analysis of Uruguay were rejected by the progressive sections of the intelligentsia.78 Methol Ferré's arguments, no matter how attractive or convincing some might think them to be, would in the end be shipwrecked on the immediate needs of the rapidly worsening situation within Uruguay’s frontiers. Seen in this light, the ten to fifteen years he had given the country to make up its mind was far too generous.

77 A. Methol Ferré, “Ideología y resistencia en la aplicación de la enseñanza social de la iglesia”, Stromata , xlv, 1/2(1989), 109. 78 R. Cotelo, Carlos Real de Azúa de lejos y de cerca(Ediciones del Nuevo Mundo, 1987), 51, n. 5. 180

The failure of his project led to what Methol Ferré called his “intellectual exile”: “If Uruguay lacks a destiny and any historical viability, . . . I take my meditations on [it] to be over and give it away”(Palacios Videla, 34). He felt called back into the fray briefly in 1971 when he joined the Christian Democrats under his long-time friend Juan Pablo

Terra in support of the Frente Amplio.79 1973 found Methol on the management of the Montevideo Port Authority. When he joined the general strike called after the coup in June, he was sacked and forced into an exile not only intellectual.

The signing of the treaty between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay in January 1991 to create a Mercado Común del Sur in 1994 was welcomed by Methol Ferré as the most important event in Latin American history since independence,80 vindicating everything he had been saying since the 1950s (Palacios Videla, 46). As he put it, "four decades of Uruguay as a ghost have come to an end".81 By this kind of reckoning, his 1967 time frame for the viability of Uruguay was too short. If the title of the Palacios Videla interview is correct, and Methol Ferré is a “prophet” whose prophecy has been “realised” at last, it may say something

79 For a full discussion of the Christian Democrats’ role in the formation of the Frente Amplio, see Chapter Three below. 80 See A. Methol Ferré, “La pérdida de un visible sistema de referencias”, Diplomacia en Acción , i, 1(1991), 37-40, and Palacios Videla, 45. 81 Quoted in de Armas and Garcé, Uruguay y su conciencia crítica, 70. 181

about the reliability of prophets who tresspass into the area of political and economic history. What Methol certainly did not predict was the strength of Uruguay’s resilience, or the heavy price to be paid for it.

WASHINGTON LOCKHART AND THE DEMISE OF THE SPIRIT

With Washington Lockhart (b. 1914) we face a phenomenon as unusual in the intellectual life of Uruguay as it is elsewhere: the writer born, brought up and educated in the capital who deliberately chooses in his early twenties to move to the interior and stay there. Lockhart taught high school maths and physics in Mercedes, the main city of the province of Soriano, for nearly thirty years up to 1963, when he was appointed principal of Mercedes' largest high school, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1974. As Real de Azúa (Antología, II, 432) points out, an intellectual of Lockhart's calibre can make an enormous contribution to provincial cultural life and its impact within the country as a whole, and Lockhart did not disappoint. As a historian he published important studies on the development of education, medicine and the press in Mercedes and Soriano as well as authoritative accounts of the political 'caudillos' who had been based in the area.82 He also founded two

82 For details of these many publications, see the Lockhart entry in Penco, Diccionario, 29. 182

journals devoted to local and regional history and literature: the Revista Histórica de Mercedes (1960) and Cuadernos de Mercedes (1963). He was also a regular contributor to Marcha from May 1960.

Of wider relevance are Lockhart's studies of

Uruguayan intellectual history83 and various contributions to serially published encyclopedias of Uruguayan history and literature of the kind mentioned above in the closing section of Chapter One (see Penco, Diccionario, 29). However, for my purposes Lockhart's main impact on Uruguayan cultural life was the co-founding in 1948, with two other Mercedes luminaries, of the literary journal Asir, which ran regularly up to 1955 and then spasmodically until its 39th and final issue in 1959. Although predating the period covered by this study, the review set the parameters within which Lockhart's thinking operates in the 1960s. Asir adhered faithfully to French and Spanish influences at a time when English, North American and Italian culture was beginning to excite its contemporaries; distrusting a reliance on critical reasoning alone and rejecting the prevailing trend towards the social and the political, it retained an idea of intuitive, spiritual

83 See the monograph length essay which attained first place in a UNESCO sponsored competition to mark the centenary of the philosopher's birth, "Determinaciones fundamentales de le actitud filosófica de Vaz Ferreira", Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional, 17(June, 1977), 55-122, which has an antecedent in the much praised "Vaz Ferreira o el drama de la razón" from Lockhart's first collection of essays, El mundo no es absurdo (Asir, 1961), 47-63; Rodó y su prédica (Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1982). 183

values which, in some contributors, took the form of an openly avowed catholicism and, in others, a holistic view of human beings in the wider world whereby communication was replaced by something approaching communion; it offered a traditionalist, often folkloristic idea of the nation coupled with a disdain for broader Latin American issues; finally, it adopted a moralistic tone of suspicion, contempt or outright condemnation towards all manifestations of what can loosely be termed the 'modern' in Uruguayan life, whether they be avant-garde aesthetics, new cultural forms (especially, the cinema), advertising or the popular subcultures of the urban masses.84 While such deeply felt conservatism undoubtedly produced much valuable cultural analysis, it must have become clear to the review's editors and contributors by the end of the 1950s that they were being outpaced by unmistakable social and cultural trends in

84 For a variety of judgements on Asir, see R. Cotelo,"Repentinismo y mito" and "Las dos tendencias de un ensayista", El País (19 February 1962), 8 (a review of Lockhart's El mundo no es absurdo ); A. Rama, Generación crítica , 51-2; Real de Azúa, Antología, II, 432-445; 489-493 and 502-505 (Real de Azúa [436] justifiably emphasises the importance of Cotelo's two long reviews but, unfortunately, gives incorrect dates for both articles); Rodríguez Monegal, Literatura uruguaya, 101-3. Both Real de Azúa and Rodríguez Monegal mention the contrast often made between Asir and the cosmopolitan, 'modernist' literary journal Número, which was started by the historian Manuel Claps, the poet Idea Vilariño and Rodríguez Monegal himself, and was active during much the same period, with a brief moment of resuscitation in the early 1960s. Even a brief glance at the entries for the two magazines in M. Barite/M. G. Ceretta, Guía de revistas culturales uruguayas 1895 - 1985 (El Galeón, 1989) conveys a sense of this difference. The list of contributors to Asir includes only Uruguayans, many of them with work focused on the rural interior. The corresponding list for Número includes authors from France, Spain, Mexico and Argentina as well as most of the best younger Montevideo-based Uruguayan writers of the time (see pp. 22, 57-8). 184

Uruguayan society at large. It may also be no accident that

Asir ceased publication85 only three months after the newly elected National party government took office in Montevideo in March 1959 and five months after the Cuban Revolution looked as though it might change the face of Latin America for ever.

It is against this background that Lockhart's occasional essays provide what amounts to a personal metaphysics which traces the parameters of his account of Uruguay. In an essay on Romain Gary, he tells us that "the essential theme of our time" is "the appalling solitude of the free individual, the need to become real, to be saved, to open up a way toward Being, toward a meaning which can embody itself in existence".86 In the important statement "En busca de lo que nos conviene"(155-182), he defines it from a different perspective as "the problem of daily life"(155), "of living our days adjusting our capacity for action to that thick mesh of circumstances imposed by the heterogenous culture in which we live"(168). Lockhart believes that the most frequently found solution to it is, in fact, a generalised form

85 However, the Asir imprint continued to publish books up to 1961, putting out Visca's Un hombre y su mundo (mentioned earlier in this chapter), Lockhart's own El mundo no es absurdo and the first edition of Benedetti's El país de la cola de paja (see Chapter Four below). Barite and Ceretta (Guía, 22) give the wrong impression by stopping their list of such publications in 1959. 86 W. Lockhart, El Uruguay de veras (Alfa, 1969), 141. This book, apart from the title essay, reprints some of the author’s occasional pieces. Further references to this and El mundo no es absurdo will appear in the text. 185

of alienation then accepted as normal: "desire and fear, the generators of technology, make people prefer having to being . . . The individual stops being a complete person and degenerates into an alienated producer and consumer"(El mundo, 13). This is "absurd" since it makes people "incapable of using in a human way" what the state and their own labour provide: "The important thing is the self and its unadulterated repertoire of needs"(Uruguay de veras, 172). Similarly, in a long essay on the threat posed by atomic weapons written in 1954 but revised and expanded in 1961, Lockhart argues that a democracy obliged by circumstances to be in a constant state of "exhaustive vigilance" will end up "losing those freedoms it claims to be defending"(El mundo, 23).

The first step taken by Lockhart towards a way out of this dilemma is a recognition of the limits of reason itself: "As always, the flagrant irrationality of the facts is out of phase with our conservative and parsimonious ways of thinking, exceeding their meagre powers of adaptability"(20). Elsewhere, he notes "the almost irresistible tendency" of ideas "to set themselves up as self-sufficient entities", leaving their point of origin behind and becoming an autonomous network of interconnected abstractions(Uruguay de veras, 162). However, when thought is genuinely in the service of the art of living and 186

letting live, it achieves its "true dignity" as "an incarnation of our biological need to preserve ourselves", at which point "we can justly say that our soul has returned to our body" (166). Lockhart's conservative value system here reaches its materialist bottom line in this link with the species' natural urge to survive.

Not surprisingly, then, Lockhart rejects and seeks to oppose all kinds of thinking which tend towards totalisation, towards offering self-sustaining theories whose aim is an all- encompasing explanation of the world and everything in it. Faced with the enormity of the nuclear threat, he says: "I renounce any form of understanding which would claim to include everything; I merely aspire to define more exactly the extent of my ignorance, to get a firmer grip on my astonishment"(El mundo, 20-1), while in the section added in 1961, he warns against the combined dangers of "messianic ambitions . . . precision and 'effectiveness'"(45). Later, in "En busca de lo que nos conviene", his distaste for such matters became even more pronounced: due to "the incontinence of reason", "power becomes remote; it looks but does not see or it freezes what it surveys . . . ; the utopia of a perfect political or economic order makes it renounce imperfect human beings"(Uruguay de veras, 170).

The task of thought is limited to that of "giving everyone access to their own sincerity" by seeking out the 187

"universalism" in "those humble, tender experiences of everyday existence" because only there can "people of all persuasions find shelter". Echoing A. S. Visca, Lockhart finds the sign of this democratic pluralism in dialogue whose "mortal enemy . . . is intimidation, compulsive thinking"(El mundo, 33-4). Just as, for Lockhart, a beleaguered democracy can end up betraying the principles it is trying to maintain, "any militant attitude, as soon as it goes beyond our most immediate field of action" suffers a "fatal degeneration" into a "bankrupt theory" which winds up "befuddling those very people it was thought to be defending"(Uruguay de veras, 170). We have here an approach to thinking and acting on a small scale that seems to parallel exactly the small-town provincial life Lockhart chose for himself.

Finally, Lockhart underlines the idea of community and a shared sense of purpose, which explains why so many of his non-Uruguayan sources are writers such as Bernanos, Camus, Dostoievsky, Saint-Exupery and the French christian existentialists. Since there is, "from the amoeba through to humanity, a clear orientation toward a goal"(Uruguay de veras, 157), human beings, by "giving their all" to something, "reclaim everything, [whereby] the world recovers its meaning and the individual his or her faith. The world is not absurd"(El mundo, 17). Since, for Lockhart, this 188

notion of striving towards an end is a principle shared by all animal life forms, it follows logically that the human expression of it should be communal:

To struggle, to expound our principles, to act are tasks which, if we are to remain faithful to ourselves, demand immediate collaboration, mutual control, a continual confrontation of real experiences, seen and lived personally, a gradual, sensitive and deeply felt accommodation of directly accountable interests and priorities. (Uruguay de veras, 171).

At the conclusion to "En busca de lo que nos conviene", he returns to the idea of dialogue:

Why speak if we do not believe that humanity can preserve its purest urge toward being a community, if we do not believe that, however complex civilisation may become, it will be able to work out a set of desires which can be harmonised with everything else, . . . that in the end our convictions will coincide with what is good for us?" (182)

It is now easier to appreciate why Lockhart would flee the amorphous, increasingly mass culture of the city for the more structured life in the interior where a sense of traditional, communally held values was still strong.

Of the four investigations into the causes, characteristics and likely consequences of the Uruguayan crisis examined in this chapter, the title essay to Lockhart's El Uruguay de veras is undoubtedly the most eccentric in 189

approach and form. Of its 108 pages (7-115) half are devoted to that kind of literary analysis which uses given works merely to illustrate points in a general argument which, in this case, is largely (and predictably) about moral and spiritual decline leading to collective alienation. More extraordinary still is that, while just over thirty pages look at two local sources, most of the books mentioned are not Uruguayan although the attitudes they point to are said to be, a practice Lockhart justifies as follows: "Even if it seems that, by doing this, we are leaving Uruguay, we are merely making a detour . . . through a state of mind which is today cosmopolitan"(64-5). Consequently, he employs the Spaniard Juan García Hortelano's Tormenta de verano to show lives made of triviality and mediocrity (64-7), Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse to exemplify amoral and superficial sexual liaisons (67-73), the Argentine Ada Donato's Eleonora no llegaba to suggest the emptiness of a life with no faith in something beyond itself (73-7) and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces to illustrate the pitfalls of a purely formal democracy imposed from above (99-105).

Not content only with this unusual procedure for uncovering the 'real' Uruguay, Lockhart interrupts himself three quarters of the way into his meditations to justify his method of writing. Associating his intentions with those of "less ambitious scribblers . . . who merely propose to say something about something"(85), he rejects a systematic 190

approach in favour of one which emphasises the "potential value of each aspect" separately (86) and states that his "purpose would be more than satisfied if he succeeded in inducing the reader to consider the importance and measure the possible meaning and relevance of each of the points [he] has been examining". He puts forward his two Uruguayan writers as examples of "real intellectuals" who knew "frustration" and "failure" because they, in different ways, tried to remain "authentic" and "original" in an environment whose increasing uniformity "marginalised" such qualities. They are exemplary because they both present "the problem of daily existence, the drama or tragedy of our salvation in the material immediacy of living". By exposing the nature of their failure, Lockhart intends to make a contribution to the task of "directing hope toward ways of organising society, politics and the economy which are of general relevance", in the belief that each individual will be able to resolve the details as their own lives take their course(87). This digression already suggests how closely El Uruguay de veras adheres to the categories and modes of thought outlined above and which are summarised and occasionally all but transcribed in some parts of the essay (see especially 27-9, 91-97 and 112-3).

The first of the Uruguayan texts is Asdrúbal Salsamendi's La ventana interior,87 a first-person narrative

87 Alfa, 1962. 191

account of the author's childhood and adolescence in upper middle class Montevideo during the 1920s and 30s written around 1960, nearly twenty years after he had migrated to Spain.88 Essentially, Lockhart sees Salsamendi as unable to transcend the limitations of his class-bound background and culture, so all his attempts to do so, of which the memoir and his flight to Spain are two, only end up reproducing the structures he is trying to escape (16-32): "Salsamendi's is . . . a consummate way of being Uruguayan, that is by halves, one half in his surroundings and the other locked up in his alienated consciousness"(32). The second document is the unpublished 500-page journal written between 1952 and 1956 by one of Lockhart's friends and correspondents, Osvaldo Rodríguez Aydo, who had died in 1959 at the young age of 33. Instead of physically removing himself from the scene, Rodríguez Aydo felt forced into a life of contemplation and introspection by his complete inability to find in his milieu a niche where he could be fully and authentically himself (35-46). He described himself as a psychiatric case and Lockhart sees him as stranded "[b]etween the plenitude he glimpsed and the falseness in which his daily life was dispersed"(37). He admires him because "[t]he way in which he assumed his weakness was in fact a refined demonstration of strength"(38) and

88 Autobiography is uncommon in modern Uruguayan literature generally. This one is a memoir composed using the techniques of fiction (Lockhart calls it a novel but treats it as fact) and is therefore a forerunner of one of the forms testimonial literature would take in Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America from the 1970s onwards. Another Uruguayan example from the 1960s is H. Alfaro, Mi vida tal cual es (Alfa, 1964). 192

because his "fidelity"(39) to his quest reveals the inauthenticity of his surroundings and his fellow Uruguayans: "his struggle was ours and it was for us . . . that he suffered his life until his death". He could do it because he had "a feeling, unusual in this country of alienated people, for that being he virtually was (which we virtually are)"(36). Lockhart's friend is here turned into a Christ-like figure who dies that oters might be redeemed.

Given the spectacle of these two individuals defeated by their surroundings, it is not surprising to find Lockhart suggesting at the opening of his book that "our country, which is a magnificent place to be in [estar], is in fact somewhat inadequate to support being [para ser]"(8). In the few pages of El Uruguay de veras devoted to historical reconstruction, he seems to attribute this sad state of affairs largely to the complacent optimism of the turn of the century (12-14), out of which grew the Batlle era which saw the coming of age of a bourgeoisie "flattened by the unmovable solidity of a profane and secularising ideal of stabilised equilibrium, of prudent lay pleasure, of a facile humanism, a ten-cent liberalism and a mediocre 'happiness' with no risks"(15). The process of spiritual deprivation is completed by the importation of "the latest models in anxiety" and half- absorbed bowdlerised versions of foreign modes of thinking (54-5),89 the puerile sensationalism of the

89 Here Lockhart picks up ideas and words from a much earlier essay: "Dos formas de la infidelidad", Asir, 34(April 1954), 22-8. Presumably, one of the foreign intruders would be the 'absurd', borrowed from Camus and the European creators of the Theatre of the Absurd. 193

mainstream press (62) and the alienated and commodified forms of mass consumerism (94-5). Turning once again to foreign sources, Lockhart finds the best representation of the Uruguayan middle-class ideal in the Hollywood cinema of the 1930s, with its phoney heroism, petty sentimentality and its portrayal of clean private lives with no creases, wrinkles or sweat stains (57-8).90

The all-pervasiveness of what Lockhart clearly sees as nefarious influences is inadvertently confirmed by him in that the only example he finds in Uruguay of forces working against them is the rather puny one of the nation's absorption in soccer! On Uruguay's 1924 World Cup victory, he comments: "We had found in ourselves something solid,

90 It is worth pointing out that Lockhart loathed the cinema, or seemed to. In "Sobre el cine y sus posibilidades"(El mundo, 113-121), he offered what purported to be a review of Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which is, arguably, an exceptional film in more than one sense. However, as Rodríguez Monegal correctly says (Literatura uruguaya, 382), it is not clear that Lockhart has even seen it. What he has done is to read the notices about it in the Montevideo press. This is apparently sufficient for him to condemn all movies as stultifying invasions of the audience's imaginative faculties, to dismiss all film criticism as the work of gullible idiots and to reject as preposterous the notion that the cinema could be worth any serious-minded attention at all, which is perhaps why he does not give it any. Rodríguez Monegal (382- 5) has some justified, mostly good-natured if typically ad hominem fun with this article, which is, indeed, a fine example of the sort of nonsense Lockhart's brand of conservatism could produce when provoked into a fit of pique. Lockhart’s attitude to the movies has not changed much over the years, apparently. See the extensive commentary on this essay in Rocca, “35 años en Marcha: escritura y ambiente literario en Marcha y en el Uruguay, 1939-1974”, Nuevo Texto Crítico, vi, 11(1993), 140-1, n. 108. 194

the unheard-of fact of 'being', of occupying a place - the first, no less” (59). Contradicting his own advice that Uruguayans should not look to ready-made solutions but following other essayists in his conviction that, despite "unbelief" being a regional characteristic (56), they retain a capacity for transcendence (110), in his conclusion Lockhart sees in the fans' devotion to their team and its pennant "almost a symbol" of a different Uruguayan way of being: “Here is everything we are and are not”(109). It is here that Lockhart appears to at least glimpse some "sense of basic confraternity without which there can be no politics worth the name"(56): take this enthusiasm away and any attempt at mobilisation in the name of greater causes such as "social injustice, exploitation and hunger will be a mobilisation with no subject and, therefore, with no object either"(112). The fact that, in such an example, Lockhart's distrust of an over- reaching rationality verges on the advocacy of an unthinking irrationalism does not seem to bother him.

Lockhart had begun his essay in risky fashion: "The immaturity of Uruguayans is never more evident than when we start to talk about the immaturity of Uruguayans. When we criticise ourselves is when, in fact, we generally most deserve the very criticisms we are formulating"(7). The danger is, of course, that the impact of these aphorisms will rebound on their author, which is, I would argue, exactly what happens. Lockhart's consistent, if not exclusive, use of 195

foreign examples to illustrate his thesis and the ease with which throughout the essay the first person plural oscillates between meaning 'we, Uruguayans' and 'we contemporary human beings' indicate the degree of penetration into Uruguayan culture of international habits of thought and feeling he seeks to combat. Conversely, they also show the extent of Uruguay's insertion into the concerns and practices of the Western world at large. In short, Lockhart uses, and thereby cannot help but affirm, the very cosmopolitanism he intends to denigrate.

Moreover, in the 'Postscript', he justifies not having concerned himself with "what everyone is talking about" (that is, the social, political and economic crisis around him) by saying that he judged it "more necessary to say what nobody else was saying", in the belief that the "essential aim of anti-imperialist militancy" must be the "preservation [of] that human quality which should be our basic preoccupation". His response to the question "Is Uruguay viable?" is that Uruguayans are, "with or without Uruguay"(113-4), thus underscoring still more boldly his interest in the national psychology over the state of the nation itself. In the 1969 addendum, Lockhart maintains that the current situation confirms "point for point" what he had written two years earlier (114). This is stretching things a little, since the intervening two years had seen the investiture as president of Jorge Pacheco Areco in December, 1967 and 196

the intensification of the repression, censorship, guerrilla warfare and general hardship and social discontent already prevalent under the government of his predecessor, Oscar Gestido, who had died suddenly while in office. Lockhart perhaps makes a gesture toward recognition of this when he writes that "a not inconsiderable advantage of the present state of affairs is that everyone resembles more closely what they are"(115). If this is the case, one could argue that had Lockhart been less concerned with what nobody else was much bothered about and more interested in what did worry them, he might have found more persuasive examples of the 'real Uruguay' than a soccer crowd. That he did not suggests that he was looking in the wrong place altogether.

I would argue, then, that Lockhart's book suffers a fate analogous to that of his friend Rodríguez Aydo: it is marginalised and rendered largely irrelevant by its pursuit of goals unable to provide a sharp-edged focus on the world immediately around it. The editors of Asir were right to close the journal in 1959. A decade later, when Lockhart, still under its sway, published El Uruguay de veras, its philosophy and vision had long since had their day.

In the opening section of this chapter, I mentioned Un hombre y su mundo [1960], an essay collection by A. S. Visca, who was also close to the Asir group. I remarked there 197

on the importance Visca attached to the notion of dialogue in society and its relationship to the function of the essay. For Visca, average Uruguayans’ inability to engage in meaningful dialogue, their tendency to talk at rather than to the Other, had dire consequences:

[It] puts the country in imminent danger of breaking its spine, divided into a series of stagnant compartments in which each political faction, each union or each social group, we could almost say each individual, lives with its back to the others (Visca, Un hombre, 30-31).

What is more, “how easy it would be to overcome!” Uruguayans merely had to “love [their] own and the other’s life a bit more, feel with some intensity the desire to establish friendly contact with reality” and they would break through the “crisis in [their] collective life”(31).

If this doctrine of individual spiritual renewal and communion with one’s surroundings and one’s fellows sounded somewhat hollow one year after the Cuban revolution, by 1969 (as we have seen with Lockhart) it would seem decidedly threadbare and eccentric. Like Lockhart’s, all the books discussed in this chapter assumed that psychological characteristics and cultural or historical events outweighed social and political considerations. As the worsening dimensions of the crisis undermined this point of view, the essay form that embodied it was to die a natural death of exhaustion and irrelevance. Nevertheless, the notion 198

of dialogue itself would not only persist but reemerge as the focal point of a new centre-left party’s strategy in 1971. It is to this topic that we now turn, in the first of two chapters that shift the balance away from writing towards politics, as the nation becomes an ever more more intractable problem and the room for dialogue about it steadily decreases. 199

FROM DIALOGUE TO MONOLOGUE:

INTELLECTUALS AND THE POLARISATION OF POLITICS

All the good and bad in us revolves around the word ‘democracy’ Mario Benedetti [1962] 200

FROM FIDEL TO THE FRENTE: THE URUGUAYAN LEFT SEARCHES FOR SOMEONE TO TALK TO

. . . the only legitimate oratory: that which bases its effusions on truths Mario Benedetti [1961]

The Intellectuals Come In Out Of The Political Cold

Put simply, this chapter tells two stories which gradually become intertwined. Both are intimately connected to this thesis' principal theme of dialogue: one shows how, with the aid of intellectuals (now mostly not of the literary kind), those on the Uruguayan left learnt to talk productively among themselves; the other goes on to examine how they then tried to talk to the community at large. The first covers the tortuous trail from the frustrated attempts to unite the Uruguayan left in the early 1960s to the largely successful campaign to create a unified centre-left ten years later. The other story, more prominent in the second half of the chapter, seeks to show how the structure, program and practice of the Frente Amplio [Broad Front] transposed its solutions to the left’s communication difficulties on to the need to rearticulate a dialogue between mainstream politics and the population in a society ever more fragmented and polarised by increasing violence and repression. Intellectuals of various kinds (journalists, political and 201 social commentators, writers of imaginative literature) from all points on the left of the political spectrum were involved in both parts of this process as major players or active if critical supporters.

The left's search for an expanded public to talk to required first that it find new or better ways for the ideologically (and often bitterly) divided groups that comprised it to enter into a dialogue with each other, which proved to be a formidable task in itself. Both the left's attempt to find new ways of talking to itself and its need to appeal to a different and larger constituency became vehicles by which an alienated but politically energised intelligentsia could reinsert itself into the political mainstream. In effect, the problem was to convert the growing readership for a national literature about national themes (as outlined above in the closing section of Chapter One) into an electorate that would vote for a program that offered a viable alternative to the status quo that seemed to be disintegrating around it. That the whole enterprise was only partially successful and ended up engulfed by the polarisation that resulted in the coup of June 1973 does not detract from the boldness and magnitude of the endeavour to reanimate an entire society's ability to dialogue with itself and thus hold itself together.

My account will be centrally concerned with the declared intentions, promises and statements emanating 202 from congress deliberations and party-political platforms. This would seem to be a hazardous procedure. Debray contends that "[t]he fantastical reflections of the revolution that appear in propaganda leaflets and colour photographs present the glamorous obverse of its true course", for, he adds laconically, "[i]f revolution were simply a matter of manifestos, congresses and press releases, it would be hard to see why it is making such slow progress, for there are plenty enough of those things".1 For his part, Real de Azúa states baldly that the "verbalised level of 'public statements' is the most insecure for the observer, since it is the one most fertile in possibilities for deception".2

Here, I shall try to mitigate the perils of "shadow- boxing" (Debray, Revolution, 14) with some crude facts, especially in the final section which will offer an assessment of the electorate’s response to the Uruguayan left’s attempt to talk to it.

Elsewhere in the essay quoted above, which was dated 18 July 1971 and formed part of a collective volume that, as a work of oppositional cultural and social history and analysis, exemplified the very phenomenon he was describing, Real de Azúa took up the theme, discussed earlier in this study, of the "confrontation . . . Uruguayan governments have had to

1 R. Debray, The Revolution on Trial (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978), 14. 2 C. Real de Azúa, “Política, poder y partidos en el Uruguay de hoy” in L. Benvenuto et al , Uruguay hoy (Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 1971), 186. 203 maintain with just about everything meant by 'culture' and with those creators or transmitters of it covered by the slippery, elastic term 'intellectual'". He then went on:

In this respect, those responsible for government policy [since 1967] have deepened and systematised a marginalisation of the intellectual that was already an established tradition in Uruguayan politics (162).

This antipathy was mutual (163), but five months later, Real’s resignation and frustration must have been satisfied to some extent when, on November 26 1971, just two days before the national elections, there appeared in the pages of Marcha the following paragraph:

The writers whose names are given below, having espoused the Frente Amplio's movement for renewal, at this crucial time for the destiny of our country exhort intellectuals and the people in general to vote on the 28th in support of our Frente's basic program and immediate measures of government, and to remain strongly united after the elections, attentive to the new tasks which await us and solid in the commitment we have made to the nation.3

There follows an impressive list of 170 names which include the three best known Uruguayan novelists of the time (Mario Benedetti, Carlos Martínez Moreno and Juan Carlos Onetti), major poets such as Juan Cunha, Ida Vitale and Idea Vilariño, leading figures from the social sciences (Manuel Claps, Carlos Rama and Real de Azúa himself) and the humanities (Hugo Achugar,

3 Marcha, No 1572, 7. Reproduced in Barros-Lémez, Intelectuales y política (Monte Sexto, 1988), 214-5. 204

Angel Rama, Mercedes Rein and Jorge Ruffinelli), as well as a whole host of literary figures, some older (Mario Arregui, Francisco Espínola, Sylvia Lago and Clara Silva) who already had secure reputations in Uruguay's intellectual life, but most of them younger (such as Híber Conteris, Gley Eyherabide, Jorge Musto) who had just begun to make a name for themselves during the previous decade. The gallery of signatories placed the veteran cultural historian Alberto Zum Felde (born in 1888) alongside writers born in the 1940s and mingled intellectuals associated with the Communist Party (such as Alfredo Gravina and Ruben Yánez) with inheritors of the 'Batllista' tradition within the Colorado Party like Carlos Maggi.

Whatever the Frente Amplio was to achieve in the political arena, it had, at least initially, galvanised virtually all of Uruguay's leading intellectuals and writers into burying their ideological hatchets, abandoning their intergenerational squabbles and helping to build a political consensus radically different from the one that was perceived to be breaking down all around them. The strategic use of the first person plural ("our Frente") marked an unheard of sense of intimacy and affection in the relationship between the personal and the political which had imbued the rhetoric surrounding the Frente Amplio from its beginnings, and which would characterise the way many of its adherents 205

(not just the intellectuals) would go about their work within it.

For cultural workers, the task was difficult but attractive in that it assigned to them specific responsibilities relevant to their expertise and area of activity. Writing in the Communist Party’s journal, one artist pointed to the intellectuals’ potential to be sensitive to the hopes and frustrations of the masses, to identify those progressive currents in creative thought most in tune with collective interests and needs, and to begin to reverse the attacks on all forms of oppositional cultural expression emanating from the regime’s supporters. He saw the artists' and intellectuals’ jobs as breaking down the isolation of the rural interior where the Frente was barely making headway, to expose the regime’s ideological incoherence and to plan the nation’s cultural future.4 After the 1971 elections, the theatre director Ruben Yáñez offered a broader and more realistic perspective. The problem was "to break down the habits, prejudices and customs which the dominant ideology inserts into the individual consciousness, and which make the world and history look unchangeable". This was not going to be easy because the majority of the population clearly still felt that ideology to be "totally or partially valid" and "[i]t will not be us who are going to destroy" its effects but

4 M. Lasca, "Los artistas e intelectuales en el Frente Amplio", Estudios, 59(1971), 93-4, 97. 206 individuals themselves, "based on the exact dialectical relationship between their real experience and the critical tools we can hand them".5 Both writers refer to the support intellectuals gave to the Frente, Yáñez reminding his readers of the literally hundreds of artists who offered their services for nothing (90), while Lasca says correctly that the "near total" involvement of the nation’s intellectuals "constitutes a symbol, a valued prize that no other political force in the country can display"("Los artistas", 94).

The principal reason for this nearly unanimous endorsement by the intelligentsia lay in the Frente's potential as an answer to the basic problems which Solari had identified as the perennial scourge of Uruguay's modern political life:

Uruguayan society has had a party system which has been extremely useful in lowering social tensions and in giving the country the relative political and social stability it has enjoyed; which has been undeniably useful in integrating almost all social groups within the system. But that same party system seems unable to resist the stagnation and constant deterioration of the economic subsystem. The latter is breaking down one by one all the functions which justified it; it is making the erosion of differences [igualación] continually more unlikely, without generating the dynamic needed to create a way out of the situation.6

5 R. Yáñez, "1971: un salto cualitativo en la cultura uruguaya", Estudios, 62 (1972), 90, 93. 6 A. Solari, El desarrollo social del Uruguay en la postguerra (Alfa, 1967), 166. The chapter from which the quotation is drawn is reprinted in the same author's Uruguay: partidos políticos y sistema electoral (El Libro Libre/ FUCCYT, 1988), 16-40, the passage cited appearing on the last page. 207

Moreover, the image the Frente’s organisational structure projected was to prove especially compelling to people accustomed to the cut and thrust of debate amongst equals, as is made clear in these appreciative remarks by Julio Castro, one of the non-aligned leftist journalists clustered around Marcha who had for years been advocating leftwing unity:

The relationship between the citizen and the Frente does not produce tutelage or imposition; nor the award of favours, services or aid. It is a free association, sustained and fortified by the community of ideas and the reciprocal maintaining of common attitudes. For these reasons, affiliation to the Frente is a process of awareness, of consciousness- raising . . . It implies an ideological position but also a moral attitude.7

Another commentator perceived the same issue as an essential part of a general healing process,8 feeling that the Frente’s main task was the reconstruction of the state (68) since the Pacheco government’s policies had sowed such "division and discord" that the "nation’s ability to live together. . . ha[d] been broken and unraveled". So dire was the situation that only neologisms could express it: Uruguayans had to "un-be [anti-ser] many things before being able to be just as many other things"(66). The Frente’s methods could reverse this process and

7 J. Castro, "El Frente Amplio, un horizonte de esperanza", Cuadernos de Marcha, 53(September 1971), 6. 8 F. Urioste Braga, "La gran tarea del Frente", Cuadernos de Marcha, 47(March 1971), 66-9. 208

undo its effects because it wanted to hear what the public had to say and not just talk at it:

This listening . . . is essentially receptive. It is listening in order to make a better start . . . so as to confront the stupefying hysteria which makes people stupid . . . It is a big, generous gesture with arms open (67).

Real de Azúa called upon the language of the 1960s counter-culture to express his notion of the kind of community offered by the Frente, which he described as "the most all-encompassing expression at all levels of the practical collective activity of radicalised sectors of society [which], in their total alienation from the system, have come to make up a real alternative society"("Política, poder", 266). It is not difficult to understand how the chance to participate in a new communal awareness and in a free and open therapeutic dialogue which might help cure the ever growing rifts in their society would prove appealing to a progressive intelligentsia used to feeling disaffected, frustrated and ignored.

Such a situation had been a long time coming. Unfortunately, productive dialogue with a sense of shared goals can hardly be said to have characterised interaction between groups on the left during the previous decade. However, they can be seen to be groping towards it even in their repeated failure to come to grips with what Solari had defined as the "central 209 problem" for any organisation which simultaneously advocated a radical break with the prevailing trends but avoided attempting to foment a revolution doomed to failure: "[t]he intensity of the consensus around the fact that political solutions should be moderate is such that a party which wants to play the electoral game must adapt itself to it as the price for obtaining votes outside a tiny minority".9 By 1971, the various leftwing parties had been impaling themselves and each other on the thorns of this issue for well over ten years.

Frictions and Fractions (I): Towards the Disaster of 1962

The years between 1961 and 1973 saw a rapid decline in the traditionally reliable area of agriculture, contraction or stagnation of an underdeveloped industrial sector, major crises in finance and banking, burgeoning foreign debt, galloping inflation, increasing un- or under-employment, a continuous drop in real wages, corruption at all levels, impossible demands on a cumbersome and under-financed public sector, and seemingly ad-hoc responses by government which, if they temporarily solved one problem, only exacerbated others, often sending shockwaves through the whole system. There were increasing levels of social tension, political unrest and trade union activity, ranging from

9 A. Solari, "Elecciones 1966: cambio sin cambiar", reprinted in Uruguay: partidos políticos, 194. 210 meetings and rallies through frequent and concerted strike action to outright urban guerrilla warfare, accompanied by ever more insensitive, oppressive and indiscriminately violent measures to contain the situation. The increasing fragmentation and factionalism within political parties caused further disaffection and cynicism and an awareness of the traditional political institutions’ inability to deal with the economic crisis, while voluntary or enforced emigration continued throughout the period at levels between significant and massive. It should also be remembered that this was all happening against the background of a new continent- wide political consciousness which generated, following the Cuban example, a search for radical alternatives, and, after the 1970 electoral victory of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular coalition in Chile, offered the enticing prospect of revolutionary social change being voted in at the ballot box.

Vain attempts to unite the Uruguayan left go back as far as the 1930s, provoked largely by the need to oppose the Terra dictatorship (1933-42). Indeed, an Anti-imperialist League had been formed in 1929 which had brought together such figures as Emilio Frugoni, founding leader of the Socialist Party, and Carlos Quijano who, in his politically active pre-Marcha days, had created in the previous year a doomed Agrupación Nacionalista Demócrata Social, as well as Julio César Grauert, a leading member of the Batllista faction of the 211

Colorado Party, who was to be assassinated by Terra’s police in October 1933, eight months after the coup.10 However, it is Basilio Muñoz’s attempt to revive the heroic insurrectionist moments of nineteenth century Uruguayan history by organising an armed revolt against the Terra regime which produced the first call for a united democratic front. On January 27 1935, he issued a manifesto:

This revolution has no political colour and seeks the triumph of no particular party. It is the revolution of national dignity and in its ranks all right thinking men are our brothers. On them we call to form up without distinction of party or faith around a single common program for a government of irreproachable citizens, who will call the country to a genuine election so it can decide its own destiny.11

Muñoz appended to his signature the motto "Victor or Vanquished". Unfortunately, it turned out to be the latter, and rather quickly too, the uprising being snuffed out on February 4. Similar calls were then made from abroad and supported by Quijano in the pages of his clandestine newssheet Acción (12). Following the example of the multi-party anti-fascist and pro-Spanish Republic movements formed in Europe during the 1930s, a number of similar endeavours were made in Uruguay, with the added impetus of the need to oppose the Terra regime. These culminated in 1938 with a

10 See J. Castro, "Una larga marcha"[originally in Marcha, 12 February 1971], Cuadernos de Marcha, Tercera Epoca, i, 7(1985), 53. 11 See M. Aguirre Bayley, El Frente Amplio: historia y documentos (EBO, 1985), 11-12. 212 massive pro-democracy rally in July and the decision by the Socialist and Communist parties to present a single candidate, the Socialist leader Frugoni, for the presidency in the November national poll. It would require a much more slowly maturing crisis than that of the 1930s before these two parties would join so closely together again, but from the early 1960s they started trying.

The 1962 elections consolidated, although with a decreased majority, the National Party’s historic victory in 1958 when it had won government from the Colorados for the first time in 93 years, an event which of itself suggested a widespread dissatisfaction with the state of things and a moderately expressed desire for change. Although 1962 saw an important regrouping and redistribution of influence among the factions of the two major parties, I shall limit myself here to the smaller parties on the left.12 Of historical significance in that regard is the foundation of the Partido Demócrata Cristiano out of the already existing centre-right Unión Cívica in alliance with a few breakaway groups from the

National and Colorado parties. It would later, after several transformations, be instrumental in forming the Frente Amplio. A large step towards future unity was made by the two oldest organisations on the left, the Communist and Socialist parties, which changed their

12 For general accounts of the political and electoral history of the period, see the works mentioned in notes 2, 6, 19-21, 31, 47, 60, 68, 87 and 93 to this chapter. 213 names and form of presentation for the 1962 elections, each attracting to them both smaller independent leftist groups as well as dissident progressive elements from the major parties. The Communist Party formed the nucleus of the Frente Izquierda de Liberación (with its timely acronym FIDEL), which apparently anticipated the Frente Amplio by attracting significant numbers of supporters from the world of culture,13 while the Socialist Party became the centre of the much less stable Unión Popular.14

The Communist Party had been making regular overtures to the Socialists about the formation of a broad left front without exclusions since 195615 and did so again at its 18th Congress in 1962 (INDAL, Partido Comunista, 63-4). The Socialist Party consistently rejected these calls, although it circulated internally in

13 See El Popular, "Mesa redonda de escritores en el FIDEL", El Popular (10 August, 1963), n. p. Graceras refers to a list of adherents from the fields of journalism, literature, theatre, fine arts and the academy stretching to two pages but, unfortunately, printing errors suppress a crucial line of his text and the corresponding endnote(135 and 141). 14 An interesting and full, if also biassed, account of the groups participating in these alliances is A. Collazo, "El Uruguay no es excepción", Pensamiento Crítico [Havana](July, 1967), 83-109. The author’s own organisation, the Movimiento Revolucionario Oriental (MRO), which had broken away from the National Party, had first attempted to allign itself with the Unión Popular but, after ideological disputes, ended up with FIDEL, giving Collazo an insider’s view of both coalitions. The article owes its title to its author’s controversial (and, twenty years later, whimsical) contention that, contrary to the view put forward by Debray in his famous Revolution in the Revolution? (1967), Uruguay could indeed be part of a successful continent-wide revolutionary armed struggle and was, therefore, "not an exception". It is probably unnecessary to add that FIDEL enjoyed Cuban support. 15 See L. Touron, “La brega unitaria: una constante del Partido Comunista”, Estudios , No 57(1970), 47-59, collected in INDAL, Partido Comunista del Uruguay y la formación del Frente de Izquierda (Heverlee-Louvain, INDAL, 2nd. ed.,1972), 211-219. 214

mid-1959 a document which asked: "Should we not try to offer the masses an untraditional and broader path than the one our Party can offer on its own?",16 and went as far as formally vetoing the possibility of incorporating the Communists in any wider movement of its making at its 32nd Congress in January, 1960. Its General Secretary explained that associating with the Communists would make any left coalition too easy a target for conservative propaganda, thereby discouraging broad popular support from the outset and dissuading other groups from joining, not to mention major ideological and theoretical differences in the ways the two parties interpreted the Uruguayan political situation and planned their response to it.17 At its 33rd Congress in 1962, it reaffirmed the 1960 resolution but in a form that seemed to allow a greater openness as to what groups might be incorporated into a wider movement in the future (Galeano, "El partido socialista"). This decision led to the exclusion of a number of the groups that had already formed the Unión Popular, leading some of them (such as the MRO) to join FIDEL. At the same time, the Socialist Party was advocating radical

16 E. Galeano, "¿El partido socialista nace de nuevo?", Marcha (30 March 1962), n.p. 17 E. Payssé González, "Vivián Trías: la crisis y la unidad de las izquierdas"[interview], Marcha (20 October 1961), 7 and 22. Perusal of the editorials in the Communist Party’s paper El popular and the Socialists’ El sol for 1962-3 reveals just how deep the divisions were over such issues as the relative importance of the class struggle nationally as against Uruguay’s place as a dependent economy within the international capitalist system. It should also be remembered that such disagreements had strong historical roots, since the Communist Party had been founded in 1920 by a dissident group that had broken away from the Socialist Party, which had been formed in 1911. 215

changes to the constitution and was receiving widespread support on the left (including the Communists) in the task of collecting the required number of signatures to have its proposal put to a national referendum at the same time as the national elections. It was hoped that, even though formal unification or coalition of the two main leftwing parties remained for the time being unlikely, joint participation in such projects, as well as the regular work in the trade union and Cuban Solidarity movements, would promote a spirit of cooperation at the level of day-to-day political activity.18

The results for the major left parties in 1958 and the new coalitions in 1962 were as follows (the number of votes being followed in parentheses by their expression as a percentage of the total votes cast in the election):19

1958 1962 Unión Cívica 37,625(3.7) PartidoDemócrata Cristiano 35,703(3.0)

Communist Party 27,080(2.7) FIDEL 40,886(3.6)

Socialist Party 35, 478(3.5) UniónPopular 27,041(2.3)

18 See MRO: "Habla el Movimiento Revolucionario Oriental ", Marcha (10 November 1961), n. p., E. Payssé González, "Ariel Collazo: 'Artigas no era Blanco ni Colorado’'"[interview], Marcha (8 December 1961), 8 and 26, the already mentioned interview with Vivián Trías and INDAL, Partido Comunista, 83. 19 The figures are taken from C. Zubillaga and R. Romero, Los partidos políticos (CLAEH, 1983), 115, as will be those for the 1966 poll. 216

The new Christian Democrat Party seemed unlikely to repeat the electoral successes of similar organisations in Europe or, closer to home, in Chile and Venezuela, although it would seem that most of the Unión Cívica’s supporters had followed the new group. The barely papered-over dissensions involving the Unión Popular lost votes to the more viable FIDEL and perhaps, at the other end of the spectrum, to the more progressive factions of the major parties (whose returns are not given here). In fact, they even lost one of their candidates, who defected back to the Nationals at the last minute.20 The result of all this was that, in 1962, the Socialists lost all parliamentary representation.

The electoral performance of these first attempts to bring together the Uruguayan political left in thirty years inspired two influential analyses of the far from satisfactory results, the first by writer and Unión Popular supporter, Mario Benedetti,21 the second by the sociologist and political scientist Aldo Solari, which, as its title implies (“Requiem para la izquierda”),22 suggests that the election’s message for the left was far from reassuring. Benedetti argued that, while the FIDEL group bought unity at the excessive cost of near total

20 See J. L. Clericetti, Historia política uruguaya (no publ., 1984), 67. 21 "Posdata 1963", in his El país de la cola de paja (7th. ed., Arca, 1968), 127-149. 22 In his Estudios sobre la sociedad uruguaya (II, Arca, 1965), 135- 155. 217

domination by the Communists, the "atomization" ("Posdata", 132) of the Unión Popular was only too apparent, especially in the seemingly opportunistic pact beween the Socialist Party and a breakaway group from the National Party led by Senator Enrique Erro, which smacked of the unprincipled and hastily stitched up deals that had given the traditional parties such a bad name (133), an observation also made by Solari ("Requiem", 145).23

Benedetti then urged the abandonment of "sectarianism [and] dogmatic intransigence" which only ensure that the left's "various sectors fight each other with bad faith and bitterness("Posdata", 133) and advocated the burial of "old betrayals, old dogmatisms, reciprocal insults"(145) which kept the groups apart and allowed the past to prevent effective joint action in the present. However, he continued: "for unity to really exist, there would have to be frank and sincere dialogue in which the main aim was not some little advantage for one's own group but hope in something believable, an aspiration towards an achievable goal"(146). Benedetti

23 Senator Erro and his followers had been important in the 1958 National Party victory and their vote had partially decided the majority fraction within the party as a whole. His defection to the Unión Popular in 1962 was electoral suicide for his group. Solari, echoed by many political commentators since, makes the general point that to be a dissident faction within a main party "is, under certain conditions, highly beneficial from the electoral viewpioint", whereas a disagreement that takes the faction right outside it "only leads to disaster" ("Requiem", 137). Benedetti's friend Zelmar Michelini was also to know both sides of this coin: he polled well in 1962 and 1966 as leader of a separate faction within the Colorado Party, but did considerably less well when he joined the Frente Amplio in 1971. 218 was emphatic about the left's potential to offer a solution: "I still believe that the left has not yet lost the possibility of becoming the only viable salvation for this country apparently with no stimulus, no future and no way out" (148). Hence the urgency of his appeal: since the traditional parties were likely to preside over the total bankruptcy of the state, "the left must be ready for when the catastrophe comes, for when the distraught middle class people who always thought in terms of 'there's nowhere like Uruguay' plunge from their false paradise into chaos and insecurity"(147).

Solari was a lot less sure that the left could ever persuade a sufficient proportion of the middle classes to abandon their usual allegiances,24 partly because the act of voting seemed separate from their normal daily concerns and partly because the parties, through their political clubs, supplemented the deficiencies of the state’s social services ("Requiem", 147-152). Because of this, Solari was pessimistic about the left’s electoral fortunes: "it is very difficult here, as it is almost everywhere else, to give a non-communist left a truly

24 The importance Solari and Benedetti give to the middle class vote becomes clear when one remembers that they comprised between 60 and 65 percent of the population. See I. Ganón, Estructura social del Uruguay (Editorial As., 1966), 203 and A. Solari, "Partidos políticos y clase social”, in Estudios, II, 124. However, exactly what constituted the middle class in Uruguay during the 1960s is extremely difficult to determine given the paucity and unreliability of statistics about Uruguayan society at the time. Most authors use estimates based on factors such as income, educational level, property ownership and occupation. For accounts which reveal the obviously very real difficulties in assessing class distribution in Uruguay, see C. M. Rama, Sociología del Uruguay(Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 1965), 81-95 and A. Solari, El desarrollo social del Uruguay en la posguerra(Alfa, 1967), 55-96. 219 leftist feel without losing votes"(145). He was drily eloquent about the way the left tended to delude itself about the real nature of those to whom it wanted to appeal:

Those on the left . . . tend to think that they know what the real needs of the people are, what their real problems will be, and that they have the answers these problems require and that they are the future toward which the Uruguayan people must lean. [However], the very idea of the people is entirely undefined and vague and, in the mouths of politicians on both the right and left, tends to get confused with the idea of the people who support them ("Requiem", 147).

Solari here anticipates a major theme of my analysis both of the Frente Amplio and of Benedetti's essays of the early 1970s (Chapter Four): the 'people' becomes an intellectual construct, a reified mental image that, in a kind of bizarre synecdoche, is identified with the society of real human beings.

Solari concluded by wondering despairingly whether Uruguay might not "end up committing suicide" and by throwing down the gauntlet to those responsible for thinking out the left’s policies: "Of all the defeated [in the elections], those worst off are the vast majority of intellectuals" because they had failed to carry out "the task of thinking about the country as it is, without the escapism to which we are so prone, without empty optimism”("Requiem", 155), recalling his attack on the 220

intelligentsia to which I referred in Chapter One. The efforts made to unite the left around a realistic program between the 1962 and 1971 elections amount to an attempt at retaining Benedetti’s optimism while seeking to attach it to what Solari evidently believes to be impossible: a distinctly leftist political platform which eschews enough of the stereotyped rhetoric of revolution to be of potentially general appeal but does not completely compromise some very basic positions.

Frictions and Fractions(II): Towards the Congreso del Pueblo

The failure of the Unión Popular caused havoc in the Socialist Party. At a special congress in June 1963, it dumped the Unión, much to the glee of the Communists, who now - and as it turned out, erroneously - saw the chances of creating a united left much increased by the weakness of their main rivals.25 The Party then split into two factions, neither taking the ultimate and no doubt suicidal step of forming a separate party. The more radical majority took the name Izquierda Nacional, which takes for reality the dream of a Socialist-led leftwing coalition which was fast becoming a nightmare. The founder of the Party, the more moderate Emilio Frugoni, who had already expressed considerable dissatisfaction with the manoeuvres that had produced

25 See C. Reyes Daglio, "El congreso del FIDEL y los caminos de la unidad total de las izquierdas", Estudios, 26(1963), 62-4. 221 the Unión Popular in the first place, led a minority under the title Movimiento Socialista. These events left the remaining groups floundering, some of them going over to FIDEL and others joining the progressive sections of the major parties (in particular, Zelmar Michelini’s list 99 in the Colorado Party). The rest soldiered on under the now tattered banner of the Unión Popular, led by ex- deputy Enrique Erro’s group, which had defected from the National Party in 1961 to form it.

Although the Sino-Soviet split caused the Communist Party to lose some adherents who formed the Maoist Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, the FIDEL coalition both stayed together and grew. Its first congress, also in June 1963, took advantage of the disarray in the socialist ranks to issue another call for unity:

Union with the Socialist Party, with all forces on the left, with members of the Blanco and Colorado parties who desire a real change in the current situation, will open up huge prospects and expand the people’s battle for a profound transformation of the social, political and economic order. The strength and fighting spirit of working people tell us how broad the political activities of a united left must be. Division can only bring more harm to the Uruguayan people. Union in the political arena facilitates the struggle for immediate objectives and creates the best conditions for more energetic popular action.26

26 FIDEL, "Un llamado a la unidad", El Popular (1 July 1963), 1. 222

This speaks from a position of strength, eschewing all ideological differences and emphasising, quite realistically, the wide variety of political opinion to be found even amongst unionised workers, let alone the others. Such words contrast completely with the resolution on the same issue which emanated from the Socialists’ congress: "On all work fronts the Socialist Party will seek agreement on particular points of common action with the various ideological groups active there. As these are put into practice, the different forces will reveal their ability to form part of the political movement that will realise the objectives of a program for national revolution".27 Staying on the local level of tactics, the Socialist Party implies somewhat patronisingly that all other groups, including the Communists, still have to earn the right to be part of the grand revolutionary strategy. It refuses to engage with other groups at the political level, probably fearing that, in its weakened state, it could lose all autonomy or control. The Communist Party went some way toward allowing for this, itself distinguishing between a party in which "it is supposed there would be total ideological and political unity" and one which would facilitate "unity of action at the political level", with all participants "supporting and working for a common program"(Reyes Daglio, "El congreso del FIDEL", 64).

27 Quoted in an anonymous editorial, "La hora de la unidad ha sonado", El Popular (9 July 1963), 3. 223

FIDEL’s next attempt at forging the necessary links ended in farce. In mid-1965 they set up the Mesa por la Unidad de las Izquierdas, which comprised the Communists and groups close to them, breakaway fractions from both main parties, the catholic left and a number of more or less independent leftist journalists and writers, such as Carlos María Gutiérrez, Julio Castro and Mario Benedetti, gathered around Carlos Quijano at the printing presses of Marcha. When the majority of the Socialists joined the organisation, unity seemed assured (Graceras, 125). Castro takes up the story. The Mesa, he wrote, would seek unity around a common name "that would allow the equidistant and equitable affiliation of all groups or parties. Each of them would contribute its votes, differentiated by name, to the common [ie. umbrella party’s] list",28 an organising principle which anticipates that of the Frente Amplio in 1971. Unfortunately, as he reminded his readers, Uruguayan electoral law only permits this accumulation of votes if the main grouping has what is known as a "permanent" title, one, that is, which has been used before to name a party that has actually gained parliamentary representation at a national level.29 Luckily, one was to hand, the Partido Demócrata, the electoral name for the Agrupación Nacionalista Demócrata Social, created in

28 J. Castro, "La unión de las izquierdas", Marcha (30 September 1966), 6. 29 Whether such a provision promotes stability by discouraging the proliferation of new parties or instability and stagnation by virtually ensuring the fragmentation and continual search for compromises within the established ones is still, and always was, a matter of fierce debate. 224

1928 by Carlos Quijano but not active since 1950, and therefore safe from accusations of bias in any direction. This was agreeable to all, provided, said the Socialists, that their party’s minority, Frugoni’s Movimiento Socialista, would join in. This Frugoni refused to do, leaving the Socialist majority little choice but to carry on disputing with him under the Socialist Party’s banner. The Marcha independents suggested that this impasse could be solved if everyone were to vote under the Socialist Party’s name, a proposal that was, predictably enough, rejected by FIDEL. Castro commented bitterly:

The left wants change - so it says - but resists change itself. The myths about the ownership of party names, the use of the same old methods, sticking with the same people at the top, will ensure that their results are repeated with little variation. When we blame the electors for voting en masse against their own interests and for serving electorally their class enemies, we forget what limited possibilities we offer their vote. The left, surrendering to its own security, has chosen the old ways. We all know where they lead(6).

He was right. In 1963-4 the Partido Demócrata Cristiano moved steadily leftwards, alienating still more of the original Unión Cívica supporters who joined those who had already left in 1961 to form the Movimiento Cívico Cristiano in 1965. The polling for all these groups in the 1966 presidential elections was as follows (percentage of the total vote again being given in parentheses):

Partido Socialista a) Izquierda Nacional 7,894(0.7) b) Movimiento Socialista 3,646(0.2) 225

Unión Popular 3,655(0.2)

FIDEL 69,755(5.7)

Partido Demócrata Cristiano 37,219(3.0) Movimiento Cívico Cristiano 4,320(0.3)

Clearly, the disunity within the Socialist Party had been disastrous; the Christian Democrat alternative did not look like proving as attractive to the electorate in Uruguay as it had been elsewhere, because a mildly reformist platform could not attract votes in sufficient numbers outside the main parties; and support for the left had barely increased over the 1962 poll (the Movimiento Cívico Cristiano not being a leftwing party). On the other hand, the FIDEL result implied that a genuinely progressive alternative put forward from a position of strength and unity had the potential to mobilise support, but would have to be far more broadly based if it was to break the stranglehold of the major parties on the traditional political allegiances of the populace at large. Only after the Frente Amplio was up and running could Julio Castro look back at the 1965-6 débacle with any degree of equanimity: "Throughout 1966 the various groups sought solutions without finding them. A fortnight before the elections, they parted the best of friends to await a better opportunity"("Una larga marcha", 54). 226

It has been said that the 1966 elections substituted "the apparently irrelevant issue of further constitutional reform" for the far more immediate question of the economic crisis.30 While the finally approved conservative Reforma Naranja (so called after the colour of the voting paper) would assume considerable importance later by returning Uruguay to presidential rule after fourteen years of a collegiate system, giving added powers to the executive and providing for five- year terms of government instead of four, it should be said that FIDEL was one of several organisations which had put up proposals for constitutional reform, after having received no small help from the trade union movement in mobilising support for their offering.31 In fact, it would be the unions which made the next crucial step towards the unification of the country’s leftist forces.

They had much to contribute in this regard, their own path to unity having been long and tortuous, to say the least. Cores32 points to at least seven distinct groups of unions in the early 1950s: those led by the anarcho- syndicalists, which had been active since the founding in 1905 of the Federación Obrera Regional Uruguaya, centered around the dockworkers; communist controlled

30 M. H. J. Finch, A Political Economy of Uruguay since 1970 (London, MacMillan, 1981), 20. 31 Y. González Sierra, Cronología histórica del movimiento sindical uruguayo. Hechos, resoluciones políticas y eventos sindicales, 1870-1984 (CIEDUR, 1989), 44. 32 H. Cores, "La lucha de los gremios solidarios", Brecha (11 August 1989), 16. 227 unions which had been grouped originally around the Confederación General de Trabajadores [CGT] in 1929; socialist and other anti-communist unions; an ideologically varied sector of autonomous unions not affiliated to any party; various christian unions; Peronist groups following the Argentine model, and attempts by the Uruguayan government to form unions for its own workers. March 1942 had seen the creation of the larger Unión General de Trabajadores [UGT] out of the CGT, but the almost inevitable conflicts promoted by the Cold War mentality saw sections of this organisation split off in 1951 to form the Confederación Sindical Uruguaya [CSU], which affiliated to the international labour movement controlled by France, Great Britain and the USA. 1956 saw the first systematic attempts at unionising rural workers as well as the creation by the UGT, CSU, various autonomous groups and the students’ union of a coordinating commision to set up a single umbrella organisation.

As the economic crisis worsened, such endeavours continued apace, although a leading trade unionist, Héctor Rodríguez, claimed that as late as 1958 there still "did not exist either unity or coordination among unions".33 After a first consultative assembly in 1959, a Central de Trabajadores del Uruguay appeared in 1961, which had no international allegiances and barred

33 H. Rodríguez, "El Congreso del Pueblo", Marcha, 1263(16 July 1965), 6. 228 representatives of political parties. Unfortunately, it did not include the CSU, but at its first congress in 1963 called for a Convención Nacional de Trabajadores [CNT]. Various state employee unions joined together in February 1964, while in November of the same year the first meeting of the CNT called for unity around work demands and a broad program of social change. Eventually, a Congreso de Unificación Sindical succeeded in September 1966 in turning the meaning of the acronym CNT into a genuinely unified Central Nacional de Trabajadores, a grouping whose "weight was enormous in the social conflicts during the 10 years leading up to the dictatorship"(G. W. Rama, Democracia, 101, n. 54).34

The pitfalls and difficulties encountered along this complicated route have been variously charted. González Sierra (41) lists the main sticking points as being the need to agree on common goals and methods; the devising of a program of solutions to the crisis; the difficulty of overriding already existing groups of unions; the conflict of interest between union and political party loyalties; and the decision whether to have

34 Besides Cores and González Sierra, sources for the foregoing historical survey are: J. R. Bottaro, 25 años de movimiento sindical uruguayo (Acción Sindical Uruguaya, 1985) and C. Rama, "Historia del movimiento obrero y social uruguayo", Cuadernos Americanos , ccxix, 4(1978), 129-145. A reliable summary in English can be found in the introductory pages of M. Gargiulo, "The Uruguayan Labor Movement in the Post-Authoritarian Period", in E. C. Epstein (ed.), Labor Autonomy and the State (Boston, Unwin Hyman, 1991), 219-246. Regrettably, his opening statement is still valid: "Uruguayan labor politics has been largely a neglected topic of research, both inside and outside the country"(219). 229 full-time, paid officers and organisers. Divisions in the union movement were as deep and as basic as those between the political groups and parties on the left.

About a year before the final formation of the CNT, a document dated December 1965 and circulated in preparation for an Asamblea Nacional de Sindicatos tries to address these questions, advocating that the problems of individual member unions should not be allowed to compromise the effort to coordinate union activity generally, that a member union must have its tactics discussed by the central organisation, that there be a unified program to defend the short- and medium term interests of the working class, that individual unions retain their autonomy in the immediate area of action while exchanging experiences and perspectives about the whole idea of unity to break down residual distrust, and that a questionnaire be circulated to all participating organisations.35 Rodríguez, who had been involved in all the principal moves toward unity since the early 1940s, wrote in early 1965 that they had all failed because leaders had put their own, often ideologically blinkered agenda ahead of that of the workers they supposedly represented, and brought the sectarianism and doctrinal squabbling of their politics into the union arena, causing divisions which made working together practically impossible.36 Clearly, the

35 CUI, CNT: 1964-1965. Documentos sindicales , I (CUI, 1984), 18-21. 36 H. Rodríguez, Nuestros sindicatos (1865-1965) (Ediciones Uruguay, 1965), 81-83. 230 general problems raised by attempts to unify the union movement are analogous to those we have seen the Mesa por la Unidad de las Izquierdas fail to solve.

Another obstacle that few probably even dared to broach openly was the divided attitudes of the union members themselves. Both Varela (36) and Rama (Democracia, 102) note the contradiction between workers’ election of radical union leaders to seek the satisfaction of their immediate demands and their constant but perhaps realistic re-electing of the traditional parties into national government.37 Varela suggested (38) that getting a job often depended on political favours granted to an individual, while maintaining wages and conditions once a worker had one required the collective pressure of unions and their members. Rama puts it differently. Workers rejected both the option of a socialist revolution (even if their leaders did not) and a possible deal with the still weak industrial bourgeoisie to formulate a national development program, in favour of a struggle over wages, jobs and conditions, a choice which, in fact, strengthened the principles of the already existing forms of social democracy (106). In short, unionists found themselves obliged to choose between a fully collectivist solution aimed at society as a whole and the defense of

37 On this point, see also H. Handelman, "Labor-Industrial Conflict and the Collapse of Uruguayan Democracy", Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs , xxiii, 4(1981), 371-394. 231 their own and others’ individual rights as citizens and workers.

One way of dealing with this dilemma was to bring workers’ organisations and the general population together, which was exactly what the Congreso del Pueblo in August 1965 attempted to do. This was the result of a meeting of the CNT exactly twelve months earlier, which had produced a "Programa de Soluciones" to the country’s crisis and called for a conference to have it discussed.38 The congress was to be open not only to unions but to students, pensioners, housewives, the unemployed, casual workers and intellectuals - in short, "all sectors interested in the progress and wellbeing of the country" - in an endeavour to construct "a common national policy for all"(Rodríguez, "Congreso", 7). Notable omissions are political parties (an attempt to ward off accusations of specific allegiances) and, obviously, employer and government representatives; those in power were already assumed to be the enemy and were unlikely to see their interests as being served by the congress. They responded accordingly, dismissing the whole exercise as a communist plot (6).39

38 For documents relating to the preparatory stages of the Congress, see Centro Uruguay Independiente[CUI], El pueblo delibera. El Congreso del Pueblo veinte años después(CUI, 1985), 13-35. 39 For a comprehensive account of the attacks on the Congress, see CUI, El pueblo, 201-227. 232

From the meetings held in April to prepare the ground for the congress, there issued a document which ransacked the dictionary to describe the "severe crisis. . . beating down on . . . all sectors of the working people", cramming words such as "stagnation", "slump", "ruin", "deterioration", "destruction", "crisis"(again) and "growing threats" into one short introductory sketch of the nation’s plight.40 It is easy to see why it was thought likely that any piecemeal gains made by any one organisation would be quickly eroded in a situation seen to be as desperate as this, and why, therefore:

it is necessary to pass on to a higher stage, ensuring that individual efforts are channeled into a joint effort which makes it possible to satisfy the just claims of each of the sectors and is principally directed toward achieving the progressive solutions and real changes the current situation requires (210).

In line with its wish to appeal to broad sections of the population, the document ends by extending the invitation to participate in the congress on behalf of eighteen union organisations representing the following areas: banking, print media, education (both sides of the desk), textile and wool industries, transport, public service and oil, not to mention pensioners and recipients of welfare benefits and, of course, the CTU and CNT (211-2).

40 V Turiansky, El movimiento obrero uruguayo (Ediciones Pueblos Unidos, 1973), Appendix 1, 209. 233

The same groups reemerged in the "Llamado al Pueblo Uruguayo",41 but now reformulated as a powerfully united first-person plural. Under the subheading "Who We Are", appeared ten categories, shorn of their union and other affiliations, each introduced by the words "we are" and followed by their professional or social role (such as teachers, office workers, pensioners, etc.)(213-4). This substitution of more personalised terms for the more abstract titles of organisations only underlined the self-conceptualisation of the Congress as a living organism: "Everything which lives, throbs, studies, thinks, works and produces is in our Congress; its vitality is shown by the depth of its roots in the people"(214). The Congress sought to articulate this people’s dialogue with itself as an act of self-affirmation and as a battle cry: “We have unity, we are a driving force; we have faith and confidence in our movement. We know what we are proposing. We march towards its realisation”(217). The Congress hoped to become what was in effect a kind of people’s power: “To all we repeat Artigas’ call which is our watchword: ‘Unite, beloved compatriots, and be sure of victory’” (218), the appeal to the national hero being the first step towards “rescuing a destiny that has been stolen from us”(214), a banner to be raised later by the Frente Amplio.

41 Congreso del Pueblo, "Llamado al Pueblo Uruguayo", El Popular, 3062(16 August 1965), 10, and reproduced as "Mensaje al Pueblo Uruguayo" in Turiansky, 213-218, from which all quotations are taken. 234

The "Program of Solutions to the Crisis", which emerged from the Congress’ final plenary session that lasted an entire night and most of the following morning,42 was, then, not only a radical response to Uruguay’s political and economic woes, but a conscious and concerted beginning to the task of reversing the direction of the nation’s entire history since independence, now conceived as one long despoliation of the people’s patrimony by a privileged minority. It was the first time so grand a scheme had emerged from a union of workers’ and citizens’ groups (CUI, El pueblo, 237) and was still considered valuable enough twenty years later for a new generation of trade unionists to think seriously of reviving it (240, 245, 251). Given these considerations, the document might deserve Graceras’ accolade that the "Congreso del Pueblo represented the most determined autonomous effort by the Uruguayan intelligentsia to acquire an important and stable way of influencing the country’s life"(122, his emphases), a view supported more recently by Abril Trigo.43

The Program44 began selfconsciously: “Crisis is not a word used for propaganda purposes; it is part of

42 According to H. Rodríguez, "El elefante y la caja de fósforos: después del Congreso del Pueblo", Marcha, 1268(23 August 1965), 6. For blow-by-blow accounts of the Congress, see CUI, El pueblo, 65-104. 43 A. Trigo, Caudillo, estado, nación. Literatura, historia e ideología en Uruguay (Gaithersburg, Hispamérica, 1990), 188, note 14. 44 The document exists in at least three widely differing versions. The first was published in El Popular , 3062(16 August 1965), 9, and was reproduced in Turiansky(218-232). The second and most polished appears in CUI, CNT: programa y estatutos(CUI, 1984), 235 everyday reality”(80). After anecdotal evidence of the ravages caused by poverty, unemployment and the general decline in living standards, the remainder of the preamble produced some basic statistics whose implications would determine the thrust of the whole Program’s basic argument. Whereas gross national product would have fallen by 12% between 1955 and 1964 if the loss had been shared equally, rural employers’ real income had actually risen by 5% between 1955 and 1963 (81). Blame for this inequity was thrown squarely on the latifundio as an institution and the political, commercial and financial structures that supported it (81-2). Indeed, the entire system must be overhauled, but without exacting further sacrifices from those who had already made most of them (82).

The details of the Program are gathered unexceptionally under the following headings: Agrarian Reform (83-4); Industrial Reform (84-5); Foreign Trade Reforms (85-6); Public Investment (86-8); Tax Reform (88-9); Credit and Banking Reforms (89-90); Urban

Reform (90); Reform and Coordination of the Transport

15-29 and in H. Rodríguez, Sindicatos: participación y negociación (FCU, 1985), 80-102. It is to this more recent and accessible republication that all references are made. In an affectionate note, Rodríguez reveals that he was co-author of the draft debated by the Congress, and that he republishes the final version “even though, in some respects [unfortunately, he does not specify which], it has been overtaken by the [20] years elapsed since then”(80). However, a considerably longer and more unwieldly version which shows all the signs of being the probably hastily devised document passed on the floor of the Congress itself is in CUI, El pueblo, 113-150. 236

System (90-1); Cooperatives (91);45 Welfare and Social Security (91-98); Education (99-101); Trade Union Rights, Civil Liberties and National Sovereignty (101- 2). However, cutting across all these discreetly separate categories are a number of themes that add up to a much more forthright political agenda.

The most pervasive of them is central planning, which the Program would apply to all areas of economic activity to eliminate those pockets of rural privilege that prolong the artificial conflict between city and interior (83). Centralisation is deemed a prerequisite for land redistribution (83-4), the construction of cheap housing (90), the coordination of national and suburban transport (90-1), the regulation of the job market (94), the fixing of a national minimum wage (96) and the provision of all forms of social security: unemployment benefit, health insurance, retirement pensions and welfare benefits (94-6).

45 The texts published by El Popular and Turiansky end here, although the latter adds as part of the program (230-2) a Congress working party report on the defence of national sovereignty and citizens’ rights, which El Popular prints as a separate document (9) but CUI, CNT: programa (28-9) and Rodríguez (101-2) only summarise. It may be significant that Rodríguez reprints the document in the form re-adopted by the CNT, on whose behalf he and others had produced the first draft as a discussion paper for the Congress (80). CUI, El pueblo is identical to the other versions up to the “Cooperatives” section, but then (123-4) has the paragraphs on national and individual rights as in Turiansky, inserts two sections on the implementation of the program (125-7) and eleven pages (128-139) on “Education and Culture”(of which only the part on education is summarised in CNT: progama and in Rodríguez), before closing with the important proposals on labour and welfare matters (140-146) and other minor resolutions (146-150). 237

National interests and needs, now identified as those of the toiling masses, should prevail in all areas of industry, revenue collection, education and transport (84-98, passim ). While the Program did not envisage the nationalisation of the entire economy, the state should take over all monopoly enterprises, "any others which are decisive for the development of the nation’s economy"(85), and, especially, all finance and banking institutions, in order "to eliminate the concentration of property ownership and economic power" because - and here the document betrays either a praiseworthy idealism or a depressing naivety - "the finance sector is not a productive activity but a provision of services which should not be profit-making"(89).

These often very costly measures were to be funded by the surpluses snatched from the coffers of the economic elite, which were presumed to be overflowing and, apparently, bottomless. Luxury imports were to be prohibited (85), non-productive expenditure reduced (86) and new wealth taxes devised (88) for the rich and infamous. Income and capital gains taxes were to replace the consumption tax (88-9), while the Program explicitly states that high income earners should finance the country’s social services (95).

The corollary to this attack on privilege is a series of provisions to guarantee workers’ rights: "society should protect workers against the social risks which 238 threaten them during their entire life", and the "high income classes" should pay for it through taxes (91). All laws restricting unionisation and the right to strike are to be repealed (101), while the total democratisation of access to education at all levels from childcare centres to universities (98-9) would erode one more bastion of privilege. In addition, a system of cooperatives would ensure full worker participation in all sectors of the economy (91).

Clearly, the political and economic elite were not likely to take this wholesale assault on their accustomed affluence lying down, but the Program seems to imagine they would be powerless46 against a general population converted into a non-aligned mass pressure group, whose ultimate expression was the state itself: "The people will stimulate and the State promote the transcendental task of making the necessary changes for the benefit of society, which will be effected by the people, duly organised"(82). In this circular and somewhat incoherent sentence, the Program apparently sought to bypass adherence to any existing political program (even to escape politics altogether), partly, no doubt, so as not to alienate those groups or individuals suspicious of the established left; and, partly, one suspects, so as not to become bogged down in the left’s already proven inability to line up in comradely fashion

46 So much was their passive role taken for granted that the armed forces merit not so much as a single mention. 239 behind a common plan of action. Similarly, the Program avoided words such as 'revolution', 'socialism' and 'communism'. It is as if it looked merely to provide channels for the expression of the long fettered, collective will of an almost mystical entity called 'the people'. As Rodríguez phrased it after the Congress, "[t]o contain this movement within one of the existing electoral fronts, parties or banners seems to me as difficult as keeping an elephant in a matchbox"("El elefante y la caja", 7).

The limitations of this strategy were not long in making themselves apparent. Rodríguez had a much publicised wrangle with Rodney Arismendi, the Communist Party General Secretary, over the Congress’ refusal to allow its proposals to be subsumed into a conventional political platform (Graceras, 124). In addition, Rodríguez himself freely admitted in 1984 that the Program "was not consolidated" and that the Congress’ standing committees had ceased all effective activity by the end of 1966 (CUI, CNT, 5), largely because of an ill-starred campaign against constitutional reform proposals put up by the major parties and well supported by the public (CUI, El pueblo, 233-4). As the crisis mounted in the mid to late 1960s, the state (the real one, that is, not the benign, provident version of it conjured up at the Congress) took a sharp and increasingly violent turn to the right. Yet, the left remained stubbornly fragmented, while the Congreso del 240

Pueblo’s determined effort to supersede conventional political representation was rapidly overtaken by the pressure of events. Small wonder, then, that when the call came for the formation of what would eventually become the Frente Amplio, its first concern was with the pathetic impression this disarray was leaving in the minds of the left’s potential electorate.

Onward Christian Soldiers: From Television to Political Vision

On January 1 1965, Juan Pablo Terra brought his one hundred strong Movimiento Social Cristiano under the wing of the Partido Demócrata Cristiano [PDC]. In April of the same year, this leftleaning trend became a majority after internal elections, while by mid-1968

Terra had become the party’s leader.47 On June 23, ten days after the Pacheco government had inaugurated a virtual state of emergency to remain in force until beyond the 1971 elections (except for a three-month period in early 1969), and a fortnight before it decreed a wage and price freeze which would in practice only really affect the former, Terra read a statement on Montevideo television’s Channel 12 which was then circulated among all the influential individuals and groups known to be opposed to the Pacheco

47 See the introduction to INDAL, Democracia cristiana del Uruguay y la formación del Frente Amplio (2nd edition, Caracas, INDAL, 1973), 9. A short history of the party can be found in J. L. Cogorno [then General Secretary], “Visión organizativa a través del análisis histórico del PDC”, in the same volume (103-110). 241 administration. Importantly, it coincided with a series of articles in Marcha on the same topic, collectively entitled "¿Qué hacer?"["What to do?"] and written by the militant but unaffiliated pen of leftwing journalist Oscar Bruschera,48 who would have other parts to play in this story.

Terra began by putting forward a premise which represented a major advance over what we have seen to be the Congreso del Pueblo’s virtual flight from politics and which was the tactical reversal of the usual equation that would make the Frente theoretically possible: " . . . behind the economic crisis is a political crisis. We will not overcome the economic crisis unless we overcome the political crisis". He then accused the Colorados of treachery because they had resorted in government to the very policies for which they had in opposition ruthlessly criticised the Nationals; pointed to the incoherence of the Colorado party and the cabinet by claiming that the party "supports the government, saves its ministers in parliament, votes for its essential laws but does not defend government policies"; and charged the executive with using technocrats and economists to make decisions behind the back of both the govenment’s own party and the parliament as a whole.49

48 O. Bruschera, Las décadas infames (Linardi y Risso, 1986), 72. The general title to the series recalls the question in Juan Flo's 1952 essay discussed above in the Introduction. 49 J. P. Terra, “El PDC y la raíces del Frente”, Cuadernos de Marcha, 47(1971), 13-14. This article quotes extensively - and proudly - from the original 4-page statement of which, unfortunately, I have been unable to obtain a copy. 242

With this as background, Terra proceeds to the section which is generally accepted as the immediate origins of the Frente:

Faced with this situation, we must state that it is, however, possible to practise a different policy. But what happens to those of us who talk of such a policy? What does the public see of those of us who argue that there must be government according to completely different principles, who talk about implementing agrarian reform without delay, who speak of putting essential areas of overseas trade in the state’s hands, who speak of controling the exchange rate at least for basic consumer items, who talk about maintaining at all costs the buying power of wages, who use the same terms to talk about so many topics? What does the public see? It sees us fragmented, pulverised, divided among different parties, often paralysed by party discipline, and understands that this offers no alternative kind of government. It does not make up a real new possibility. . . . [A]re those of us who disagree with [the government] line capable of formulating a minimum common program and of uniting our efforts to defend and propose the substitution of the present policy with a different one? Because if the public go on seeing us totally dispersed, incapable of supporting a different policy, they may believe there is no way out at all, that we will go from election to election rotating the main parties in government until doomsday. And the country cannot take that much longer (14).

Stripped of its cajoling and its emotional implication that the more progressive sectors of the opposition were letting the nation down, this amounts to 243

saying that, while there were common themes that ought to make dialogue feasible among the various groups, narrowly self-protective practices made it impossible and thereby, and more importantly, endangered their chances of ever getting the ear of the electorate. Finally, under a banner of "truth in politics" by which government supporters would actually really help it, while the rest would line up really to oppose it, Terra advocated persuading the executive to call fresh elections - a not eccentric proposal given that Pacheco, having inherited the presidency on the death of the previous incumbent, was enacting his legislation for austerity and repression without ever having to face the public at the ballot box.

The idea of an opposition united around a common platform clearly attempted to head off the incoherence and factionism of the main parties, a theme he was to elaborate later:

[A]ll the problems that have come up in recent decades divide [the major parties] transversally. . . they set Colorados against Colorados and Nationals against Nationals. . . In fact, there are twenty parties formally gathered under one name. The consequence is they win power but then cannot govern.50

As Bruschera had put it about ten years earlier: "It all began with the double simultaneous vote"51, which both

50 J. P. Terra, “En los comienzos del Frente”, Cuadernos de Marcha, 46(1971), 46-7. 51 O. Bruschera, Los partidos tradicionales (Librosur, 1984), 39. This book reprints two seminal essays from the late 1950s, "Los 244 kept parties together and encouraged the proliferation of factions within them by allowing the accumulation of votes for vastly different groups of candidates under the one party name. This worked reasonably well in times of plenty when there was a large measure of agreement on essentials in each party. However, in times of scarcity and strife (such as the early 1930s and the post-1955 period), party consensus got destroyed as opinion diverged, resulting in wrangling, indecision and weak or ineffective government. For the electors, the system then often meant that a vote for a progressive ticket could end up getting a conservative president into office. For parliament, it frequently entailed the government factions becoming a minority which had to do deals with their like-minded counterparts on the other side of the house, with the opposition often trying to do the same in reverse with the governing party’s dissenters. In mid- 1968, in an atmosphere of increasing confrontation between police and student or trade union demonstrators, inflation running at over 100 per cent, an ongoing stand-off between the banks and the state over salary increases, followed by the state of emergency and the wage freeze, it is hardly surprising to find the executive tempted to bypass a parliament whose very structure all but paralysed it. Terra’s wish to return politics to a position of primacy by creating a genuine opposition which would reform the way state and

partidos tradicionales en el Uruguay" and "Evolución constitucional del Uruguay en el siglo xx", from which the quotation is taken. 245 parliament functioned reflected a concern fully justified by events over the next five years: voters would see the deliberations of their elected representatives progressively marginalised, ignored, overruled and, finally, silenced.52

As the country’s situation worsened, the PDC repeated its call in October, but now with greater precision and determination. They had concluded by this time that it was not a political party that was in power but a social class out to protect its privileges:

It seems clear that the common program the opposition must achieve - and the unity the program will make possible - cannot be worked out except beyond the known party-political boundaries. The response to the unity of the exploiters must come from the unity of the people, whether they are National or Colorado party members, FIDEL or PDC supporters, or unaffiliated; people from the unions, the interior, the university. It is not a question of abolishing existing parties to create a single, new one; it is a question of the new trends, each conserving their own identity, knowing how to unify their activities in defence of objectives they all share and which the very survival of Uruguay demands.53

Notable here is the early stage of a double tactical and rhetorical move which would have serious consequences for the Frente Amplio in the future. The first step is to

52 Hence G. de Armas and A. Garcé's contention that most of the criticisms launched in the 1960s against the way Uruguay was governed were empirically correct (Uruguay y su conciencia crítica: intelectuales y política en el siglo xx[Trilce, 1997], 76). 53 PDC, "Una salida hacia el Uruguay nuevo", INDAL, Democracia cristiana, 100. 246 set up a confrontation between those over there who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and these others here (including us, of course) who want to change it; the second is to identify the latter group with "the people", a treacherous term which here means simply our supporters, whoever they are, but which can imperceptibly elide into indicating the people or nation as an undifferentiated, monolithic entity, on whose behalf and in whose name it then becomes possible to claim to be acting and speaking. Not unexpectedly, the document later likens the political situation to "trench warfare", with the "privileged class" shooting it out with "the masses"(102), a battlefield imagery that would later become the norm.

After four months of discussions with a range of groups and individuals in and out of parliament, by October the PDC was able to formulate more clearly the issues around which an alternative political organisation might coalesce. The direction was clear: to help those suffering most from inflation and unemployment (101). A joint approach on these people-oriented matters helped to coordinate opposition forces in parliament for the next two years and provided them with more support from outside through the Movement for the Defence of

Civil Liberties and National Sovereignty.54 This had been initiated by a broadly based gathering of political

54 See Aguirre Bayley, 17 and R. Pérez, "La izquierda en la fase post-autoritaria", in C. Gillespie et al, Uruguay y la democracia (EBO, 1984), I, 131, note 2. 247 groups, trade union representatives, students and teachers, intellectuals and religious organisations in the wake of the first censorship laws and the deregulation of the Socialist Party in December 1967. It held its first national meeting on 27-28 July 1968, followed by a general assembly on 1 November.55

However, a tactically determined coordinated perspective on certain selected issues was one thing; a unified political front was something else again, and even the PDC was forced to admit that Terra’s original June 23 statement had not been received with universal acclaim, but rather with "scepticism or suspicion" ("Hacia una salida", 102). Writing just five days after Terra’s television appearance, the leftist journalist and poet Carlos María Gutiérrez considered "unreal" the suggestion that the regime would capitulate before the will of the people in fresh elections, partly because Pacheco was himself the victim of economic forces over which he had no control, and partly because after the 1966 referendum Uruguay was locked into five-year terms of office which constitutional provisions made it difficult to interrupt. In accompanying interviews, Terra admitted the election issue to be “very difficult”, which was also how he described the task of persuading any of their more progressive factions to leave the main parties, while the leader of one of these, Zelmar Michelini,

55 According to J. L. Massera, "Libertad y democracia: contraseña unificadora", Estudios, 48(December 1968), 50-1. 248 resisted the idea of working with the Communists and still entertained hopes of reforming the Colorado party from within (his change of heart on both these questions would be crucial at a later stage). Gutiérrez’s colleague, J. M. Quijano, found at least one other Colorado senator in agreement with Michelini, while Enrique Rodríguez of FIDEL was not persuaded that the time was ripe for an electoral front in a new poll.56 Massera, writing from the point of view of FIDEL and the Communist Party, was even more forthright in his doubts:

The possibility of a third party is completely different [from the use of temporary tactical alliances]. A party presupposes a coherence in its ideological and organic bases which cannot even be glimpsed [among those opposed to the regime] or, at least, it would make no sense to rehash under the rubric of a third party the incoherence in every imaginable form which has been criticised in the traditional parties.

Having touched here on one of the main obstacles which the organisational principles of the Frente would try to overcome, he then asked the very practical and relevant question whether such a party would really be able to break the major parties’ grip on the electorate, and voiced the quite understandable suspicion that any such organisation might repeat the Socialist Party’s long-held rejection of communist participation in any similar previous attempt to form a leftwing coalition("Libertad y democracia", 52-3).

56 C. M. Gutiérrez, "La ilusión frentista, 1: la propuesta del PDC", Marcha (28 June 1968), 8-9 and J. M. Quijano, "La ilusión frentista, 2: entre diálogo y represión" in the same issue, 9-10. 249

In short, Terra and the PDC were willing to countenance breaking off all contact with those they blamed for the disarticulation of Uruguayan society at large, so as to enhance the possibility of communicating with an enlarged potential electorate through an alliance of those forces which had a real alternative to offer. The only problem was that at least some of the necessary participants in such a venture still doubted their ability to talk and negotiate fruitfully with one another.

Fortunately, Terra did not, as he put it, share "the fatalism of alcoholics who, because they think it impossible to break their deep-rooted habits, obstinately cling to them until they destroy themselves"("El PDC y las raíces", 15). So he persevered with his discussions until, in a much more confident interview in Marcha during December 1969, he was able to put forward for consideration nine points which had emerged from his conversations over the previous year, and which form the link between the Congreso del Pueblo’s proposals and the eventual platform of the Frente Amplio. They were: the protection of civil rights and the reform of parliament and the constitution; a "planned policy of structural transformation and development" that was not just "stabilisation and stagnation"; the expulsion of foreign influence and private speculation from the financial sector; reform and modernisation of agriculture; nationalisation of main areas of foreign 250 trade; restructuring of the nation’s industries; expansion of the areas of health, education and housing; a "bold redistribution" of all forms of income; and the integration of Uruguay with other countries of the region to counter the limitations of its own small internal market and to resist foreign domination. He was also adamant that any coalition be as broadly based as possible, rejecting the suggestion of a bilateral agreement with the communists or FIDEL because the differences between them were too great ("El PDC y las raíces", 15-16) and because that kind of accord might create such a wrong impression that the whole process would get stuck there and go no further (Terra, "En los comienzos", 49).

Terra’s efforts over two years can be seen as an attempt to bring forth a political party whose principles, structure and ways of working would be as coherent as his consultative approach was with the ideals of egalitarian humanism and democratic socialism espoused in his own party doctrine.57 In the last few months before the official proclaiming of the Frente Amplio, the key problem was to persuade individuals and groups who had traditional ties to the main parties but were alienated from their party’s dominant ways of thinking and acting, to honour that disaffection by breaking away.

57 See the PDC’s "Fundamentos" and "Programa de principios"(INDAL, Democracia cristiana , 31-35 and 37-42) for illustrations of how the Party’s ideology dovetailed with Terra’s personal qualities as a negotiator on the future Frente’s behalf. He also gives his own account in J. P. Terra, "¿Por qué impulsamos el Frente?" in the same volume, 155-6. 251

They could then aid in the task of building an organisation more in tune with their own convictions as individuals and participate in determining the direction of a collective, perhaps even a mass, of people with similar social and political objectives.

Severing and Forging Links: On the Threshold of the Frente

On October 7 1970, some 49 concerned citizens put their signatures to a brief statement which, in retrospect, appears as the overture to an orchestrated sequence of events leading to the official establishing of the Frente Amplio nearly five months later. It was important that this final initiative be seen to be taken by an apparently informal group of individuals in order to forestall the criticism, at least before it was formally constituted, that the Frente would be merely the plaything of one particular political movement. Among the names were several who have already featured in this study: Oscar Bruschera, Héctor Rodríguez, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Carlos Quijano, Carlos Real de Azúa and Julio Castro. All of these were well known to be of the centre-left but with no particular party affiliations or (in some cases, as well as) to have been associated with the more progressive trends within one of the major parties. Included among the latter and heading the list (which does not seem to be in any particular order), was Arturo Baliñas, a distinguished retired general of 252 impeccable Batllista provenance, who in this regard, is a herald to Líber Seregni, who would be adopted early in 1971 as the Frente’s leader and presidential candidate.

Referring first to "the grave situation" in which Uruguay finds itself due to the Pacheco regime’s policies, the signatories, calling on the leaders of all those parties which profess a "democratic, progressive and anti-imperialist line", "deem it essential to contrive an accord without exclusions between all political forces in the country which oppose the present government’s actions against the interests of the people and the nation". In these few lines, the document sketched the basic motivation for such an organisation, cast its net as widely as possible to catch any group at all that might be even vaguely to the left of centre, avoided any aspersions that might be associated with terms such as 'socialism' or 'revolution' and, most importantly, with the two words "without exclusions" sought to establish a condition of entry that would hurdle the obstacles that had beset all previous attempts to unify the left since 1962. The text also urged efficiency in the new movement’s structure, expressed its unqualified support for the steps already taken (mostly, as we have seen, by the PDC) towards the realisation of the signatories’ aims and, anticipating a problem the Frente Amplio would not be able to solve before the military banned it, urgently demanded a reform of the electoral law, obviously so the new party could participate under its own name, 253 whatever that might be.58 In short, the document stressed the need for inclusiveness - with its implied request for tolerance of the diverse - and for communication and agreement on the basis of a minimum number of common grounds.

If the Frente was to become an effective third force in Uruguayan politics, it would have to attract to its ranks dissident factions from at least one, and preferably both, of the traditional parties. Such groups would require a formula whereby they could justify their change of allegiance to themselves, the party they were leaving and to the people who had voted for them. The lead was taken in this regard in the same month of October by the “Movimiento por el Gobierno del Pueblo” [MGP] faction from within the ruling Colorado party. As Terra admitted, this was something of a coup for the Frente at this stage since the faction had enjoyed not inconsiderable electoral success during the 1960s and its leader, Zelmar Michelini, was widely respected and liked. On October 3-4, the PDC’s National Commission authorised the party’s representatives to pursue formal negotiations with Michelini’s group and, at a public meeting at the end of the month, the MGP’s membership responded by voting to leave the Colorado party ("El PDC y las raíces", 16), a decision formalised in a document dated December 5.

58INDAL, El Frente Amplio del Uruguay y las elecciones del 1971 (Heverlee-Louvain, INDAL, 1973), 90. 254

It is in this text (INDAL, Frente Amplio, 96-7) that the formula to be followed by later defectors is first tried out. The MGP claimed all its attempts to reform the Colorado party from within were rejected by the majority factions "which have, moreover, given unconditional support to the antinational, impoverishing and class-based policies of the present government, policies which are the negation of all promises made to the country’s citizens and of everything Batllismo has stood for historically". It points to the lack of "popular participation" in the party’s decision-making processes, outlines in a highly accusatory tone the various ways the government had violated citizens’ rights and reasonable expectations, and declares that the MGP’s ideological direction was "incompatible with the philosophy and the political and police-state [policíacas] practices of the current government"(96). It then advocated the formation of a "broad political front" and reaffirmed its commitment to the principles it put before voters in the previous election (97). The point was to capture the moral high ground by showing that the party the faction was leaving had betrayed both its principles and its electorate, whereas the faction itself had kept faith with both.

The next move in this direction came from the National Party’s ranks. The youth section of the "Movimiento Blanco Popular y Progresista" [MBPP] 255 issued a public request on November 28 1970 that the faction officially resign from the National Party and take up the cause of "the union of the country’s popular and progressive forces around a nationalist program"(113).59 Its wish was granted. At its national convention on December 7, the MBPP condemned the party’s acquiescence in allowing the "oligarchy to carry out its crimes", declared that its own ideological beliefs could "not be expressed via the National Party" and confirmed "its undying adherence to the glorious traditions of the Party masses; the exploits of its heroes - on all levels - strengthened independence, built freedom, promoted culture and advanced the cause of social justice. Only by serving the people in its struggle against the oligarchy can one be faithful to this immense legacy"(114-5). Other examples could be added (the Agrupación

Herrerista and the Acción Popular Nacionalista60 from the National Party, and the Agrupación Batllista ‘Pregón’ from the Colorados [125, 157 and 155, respectively]), but the basic pattern was now established.

If the main purpose of such documents is to find a way of burning bridges, there were other moves afoot designed to help in the task of building new ones. On December 15 1970, the PDC, MBPP and the PGP

59 The General Secretary who signed this statement was Wilfredo Penco, whose Diccionario de literatura uruguaya figured prominently in Chapter One of this book. 60 The secretary of this group was J. A. de Torres Wilson, a young historian who featured in Chapter One of this thesis. 256 combined "their determination to assist in the people’s rise to power":

There converge around [this objective] three movements well differentiated in modern Uruguayan history, but which the national and international situation has brought closer together over the last three years, which has translated into a similar conception of Uruguay, Latin America and the present and future of the world. This progressive and essentially humanist concept explains their joint political and parliamentary activity. . . especially since June 1968, when we began the rapid fall into what is clearly a police state.

Their awareness of the gravity of the situation had led "each of them to cast aside those points that could eventually separate them, and to strengthen those on which they agree and on which the liberation of the country must be based". They then expressed their desire to form "a broad political front without exclusions, made up of all those forces that ground their activities in a nationalist, progressive, anti-oligarchy, anti-imperialist and popular program", an "authentic 'Broad Front of the People'" with a "genuinely democratic party structure"(92). There is nothing quite like leading by example. The three groups made no bones about the continuing differences and areas of disagreement between them but simply shelved them in the interests of more urgent and shared goals. This was undoubtedly more important at this stage of the process than the repetition of the basic rubric under which the new party might be gathered. 257

Once the Christmas and New Year festivities were over, events proceeded apace. The citizens who had issued the October 7 statement had in the meantime been rallying support for the new movement both publicly and privately, and had constituted themselves into an Organización Nacional de Ciudadanos Independientes for the purpose. On January 7 1971, their provisional executive (which included General Baliñas, Oscar Bruschera and Héctor Rodríguez) issued a report on the results of their activities to date. In their three months of consultations (which had included some 40 round table discussions and panels throughout the country), a number of priorities had emerged: the need for wide participation in the formulation of the Frente’s program; the creation of rank and file organisations open to all; the need for a firmly democratic internal structure for the party; the suggestion of a common electoral formula that might have wide appeal instead of a proliferation of lists that would only attract the already converted supporters of the groups that proposed them (139).

One day later, the same concern with free, open democratic participation reappears in the text which formally constituted a Frente del Pueblo out of the PDC and the PGP (93-5), expressing "their wish to transform the economy into a workers’ democracy, with advanced forms of social ownership and self-management". This utopian socialist democracy extended to the internal 258

organisation of the Frente del Pueblo since joining it "does not imply the loss of [any participating group’s] identity or the abandoning of its ideology or program". The Frente del Pueblo seemed to be aware of its transient status by immediately calling for the formation of a "Broad Front" which would be a "political front and not just a combination for electoral purposes", a "coalition" and not a "fusion" of its affiliates (94), and whose minimum platform turns out to be an elaboration of the nine points of Terra’s December 1969 proposal (94-5). The text’s happy coincidence in time with the Independents’ report is seemingly acknowledged as it closed with a flattering salute to that group’s efforts(95).

These moves by the PDC, MGP, MBPP and the Independents proved decisive. Less than a month later, on February 5, the Frente Amplio was formally established at 11.00 am in a meeting room in the Senate and held its first plenary session that evening at the PDC’s headquarters at 5 pm, with the presence of leaders or representatives of what were now nine groups, including Bruschera and General Baliñas for the Independents (according to Aguirre Bayley, 21), although eleven are named in the Frente’s founding document dated the same day (INDAL, Frente Amplio,

49-50) and formulated by Carlos Real de Azúa.61 The

61 According to P. Rocca, "35 años en Marcha: escritura y ambiente literario en Marcha y en el Uruguay, 1939-1974", Nuevo Texto Crítico, vi, 11(1993), 138, note 83. 259 paragraph relevant to the theme under discussion here runs as follows:

The political unity of progressive movements which culminates in the founding of the Frente Amplio - thus simultaneously closing one cycle in the country’s history and opening another of hope and faith in the future - originated in the people’s struggle against the fascist-like philosophy of force. And that union, . . . through having the people as its protagonist, has allowed the fraternal coming together of Colorados and Nationals, Christian Democrats and marxists, men and women withdiverse ideologies, religions and philosophies, of workers, students, teachers, priests, small and medium producers, civilians and soldiers, intellectuals and artists; in short, all representatives of industry and culture, those who can legitimately speak for the very heart [entraña] of the nation(50).

The identification of the Frente with the 'people' and the very essence of the nation is now complete, as is the open-hearted gesture which will welcome all right- thinking and like-minded individuals and organisations into the fold. If I have not here dealt with the majority of groups which had already joined the coalition at this stage, it is not because they lagged behind: FIDEL was as quick to take up Terra’s initiative as Michelini’s MGP, for example (see Terra, “El PDC y las raíces”, 16). Most of such groups were, however, able to bring their whole organisation with them; they did not have to face the political and psychological consequences of breaking off a dialogue and long-standing ties with one party in order to run the risks involved in opening them with another. What I have wanted to emphasise here is 260 how, from the very outset, the formation of the Frente Amplio made that difficult double movement possible.

Nobody embodies this better than Senator Alba Roballo, who was a poet as well as being leader of the Agrupación Batllista 'Pregón', which defected from the Colorado Party on March 5 1971. Accompanied by her son and other colleagues, she met with eight members of the Frente’s executive, each of whom made a short speech of welcome. In her reply, Senator Roballo addressed several sentences to each of them by name. It is a formalised ritual of establishing new connections, a verbal equivalent of the physical shaking of hands that undoubtedly preceded it. She also spoke of the "painful process" and the "anguished hesitation" in making the decision but also felt, "in a passionate and overwhelming way, that a part of the Batllista tradition" was coming with them (INDAL, Frente Amplio, 156). In an interview a week or so earlier, after she had made up her own mind but before her faction had decided to follow her, she spoke even more personally about leaving a party she had served for forty years: "At first I felt enormous anguish, a sadness similar, I thought, to when you have to leave an old house you have spent most of your life in. But I have come to see that I am not leaving my home. I am taking it with me".62

62 A. Roballo, "'Para salvar al Batllismo, me voy del Batllismo'", Cuadernos de Marcha, 46(1971), 70. 261

Líber Seregni as the Good Father and the Frente Amplio as Home and Family

"In this way our country set a new international record: socialists, communists and liberals of diverse origin all voting for a christian democrat party!"63 This is not, as might reasonably be supposed, a sceptical comment on the chances of keeping the coalition together, although these abounded, even among its supporters (see, for example Real de Azúa, “Partidos, poder”, 267-8), but is rather part of a critique of the vagaries of Uruguay’s electoral law which would prevent the Frente from being able to use its own name in the 1971 poll. It does, however, highlight what the previous section tried to illustrate: that the Frente was the product of over two years of discussions and negotiations between a wide range of very different groups and personalities.

When, in 1989, the Frente’s leader, Líber Seregni, reviewed this period of the coalition’s gestation, it is this aspect of reasoned dialogue which stands out. In the six pages devoted to it in a book length interview which ranges across his whole life,64 the word 'conversation' occurs 12 times, 'contact' 6 times and 'discussion' twice.

63 M. A. Semino, Partidos políticos y elecciones en el Uruguay (FCU, 1984), 63. 64 A. Barros-Lémez, Seregni (Monte Sexto, 1989), 68-73. 262

He also speaks in very personal, even intimate terms of his relationship with many of the key political participants in the process (69-72). A few pages later, he generalises: " . . the political factor was always . . . one of separations, of provoking friendships, affection and hatreds of a kind more intense than other friendships and family or even love relationships"(79). Clearly, close personal contact, a feel for other people as well as respect for or agreement with their ideological positions, are part and parcel of what Seregni understands political activity to be. It led him to describe the Frente in September 1971 as "more a way of conceiving life than a box for collecting ballot forms"65 and to practise what he called "open politics, in an unconventional way"(Barros-Lémez, Seregni, 78), with the aim of setting by example a style and tone which would, if it worked, establish the Frente as something genuinely different in the Uruguayan politics of the time.

Like Arturo Baliñas, Líber Seregni was a retired general with no current party affiliation but who had in the past been associated with progressive sectors of the Colorado Party. He was seen as "honest, respectful of the law, austere and efficient" (according to Varela, 114), all qualities designed to reassure an electorate at a time when their credulity with regard to politicians in general was being daily stretched to the limit. He was

65 L. Seregni, La autoridad del pueblo (ed. G. Wettstein, Editorial Indice, 1984), 27. 263 active but kept out of the spotlight during the months prior to the formal establishing of the Frente, but was officially proclaimed as its presidential candidate in mid- March 1971, and made his first public appearance as its leader at its inaugural mass rally on March 26. It is on his speeches at that and subsequent occasions up to the dissolution of parliament in June 1973 that I have based the following profile of Seregni’s (for Uruguay, at least) unusual conception of leadership and the functioning of a political party.

Reviewing the Frente’s first few months’ existence in mid-June 1971, Seregni characterised the party as follows:

. . . a vast coming together of currents from different party-political, philosophical and religious backgrounds. This means that the Frente is a privileged meeting place for Uruguayans, and for this reason everyone must talk to one another, must understand one another, must revise their own concept of history (Autoridad , 42).

However, the purpose of establishing this space for the exchange of opinions and ideas was not to set up some kind of debating society. As he put it in July 1972, "here can be no effective mobilisation . . . if there is no interaction: of the rank and file among themselves, and between the rank and file and their leaders".66 It is on this

66 L. Seregni, Una línea coherente (Vol. 1, Libros para La Patria Nueva, 1988), 73. 264 basis that he elaborated to party workers in June 1971 on his own role in the Frente:

I am going to give you my opinion, my experience, so you can criticise it and test it against your own . . . My words seek to be merely one more thing to be reflected upon by the people, by you . . . my words will have value only to the extent that they coincide with everyone else’s. They will be valuable only to the degree that they know how to hear other people’s and can interpret the will of all, and to the extent that we all know how to channel that will toward practical political ends. I have repeated everywhere that I was not going to dictate the party line, that I did not come with a set of preconceived answers but that, within the basic criterial aid down in our political program, I would analyse specific problems one by one with all those involved. (Autoridad, 64)

There is here an explicit refusal to dictate terms on the grounds that his leadership is such only to the degree that he speaks for them all. He can only do that by confronting his experience with theirs, if necessary on a one-to-one basis, until all the lessons that can be learned are available to everybody. The leader figures in this process as consultant and facilitator, as creator and interpreter of a conscensus arrived at among equals, always within the general ambit of the Frente’s whole program, since that marks out the general parameters laid down by their group representatives for all of them, including him. "I know [he said in the same speech] the experience of some and I want to know that of everyone, 265 for each individual example must be an example for all"(71).

From such considerations there derives Seregni’s double emphasis on unity and dialogue. In December 1971, during the Frente’s period of self-assessment after the national elections, he had this to say on the subject:

The unity of our Frente is a daily task difficult to put into practice. It needs discretion, good sense, mutual understanding. We are a living entity so unity can be lost at every step. Unity is necessary and indispensable for us. . . Unity implies confidence in one another and loyalty to one another. . . . The Frente is unity through dialogue and, therefore, through criticism. Criticism implies certain disagreements, divergences, different tactics . . . [which] will be disagreements among comrades, with the duty to loyalty and truth that exists among comrades (22-3).

Barely concealed here is the plea not to let post-electoral blues push them back to the squabbles of yesteryear which so much effort had been put into overcoming. Six months earlier, he had stated that only if there were "real communication between its component parts at all levels" would the Frente be "a fruitful experience for itself and Uruguay. Only in this way will it be possible to set up a useful dialogue among its members"(Autoridad, 70). What is more, this process must penetrate right into the heart of the electorate, so that what Seregni does in his relations with party delegates is repeated by party workers with all the Frente’s potential supporters and 266 members. As he put it in May 1972, "to make a place among the masses, what we must do is really understand what the problems are that affect the masses who surround us, we must seek out and find solutions to them and raise these as our standard"(66). This merely returns the Frente to its origins since its existence is not the result of “a decision by political groups or parties driven by circumstances; on the contrary, they interpreted a demand that existed out there on the streets, they have given body and shape to a feeling and an urgency felt by our whole people”(20), here referring during his first public performance to the spontaneous popular support for the idea of the Broad Front which greeted the exploratory work begun by the Independents in October 1970 (Rama, Democracia, 116-7).

It is this notion of dialogue as what on December 18 1971 he called an "exchange of ideas" and a "decanting of everyone’s experience"(Autoridad, 69) that would ideally embrace the entire population, which, in Seregni’s view, sets the Frente off sharply from the prevailing political climate:

The president-candidate67 offers us the guarantee that he will permit no sentence that

67 This unwieldly hybrid term refers to the fact that the preferred election formula for the ruling faction of the governing Colorado Party involved the reelection of Pacheco as president, a procedure forbidden by the constitution. When the necessary constitutional amendment to permit it failed to get the required number of votes, Pacheco’s chosen successor, Bordaberry, was elected on the same faction’s back-up ticket. 267

displeases him.68 He offers us order: the order of silence. He offers us freedom: the freedom to shut our mouths. He offers us dialogue: dialogue in the face of repression and the gag (85).

For Seregni there could never be any excuse for censorship or state violence against the populace. Even in April 1972, at the height of the military campaign against the guerrillas, he noted a "constant fact" in all the many insurrections throughout Uruguay’s history since independence: "the relevant public authorities of the time [had] begun a dialogue with the armed rebels"(Una línea, 47). He then proposed the opening of discussions between the government and the Tupamaros but "not a dialogue to get immobility. No. Rather, a dialogue aimed at moving towards a real pacification [involving real social justice], not a phoney one on paper only or in the cemeteries"(49).

Similarly, in the crisis of February 1973, when the military announced their political agenda in a set of communiqués and when parliament, belatedly waking up to the dangers, weakly began attempts to head off the coup which looked ever more likely, the Frente demanded President Bordaberry’s resignation because of his government’s connivance in the by now all but overt transfer of civil powers to the military authorities. On February 9, Seregni said that his demise was necessary

68 Seregni is probably referring to the July 1969 decree which prohibited all reference to the Tupamaros except by use of certain pejorative terms. 268 to reestablish a dialogue that would make viable "the fruitful interaction between the people, government and the armed forces to begin the reconstruction of the nation in ruins"(107). According to an interview at the time, he even hoped to find in the vicepresident who would replace Bordaberry "an adversary who may also be someone with whom you can talk things over [un interlocutor]".69

Such moves would be too little, too late, however. The military’s course was set. When the people’s elected representatives did finally dig their heels in, if only to protect themselves, by rejecting the armed forces’ demand for the lifting of Senator Enrique Erro’s parliamentary immunity, they gave the military the excuse they needed to dissolve parliament. It is, nonetheless, consistent with Seregni’s desire to share his thoughts with the electorate at all times (and, of course, to justify the Frente’s attitude toward the armed forces, which some found far too moderate) that, in another February 1973 speech at the outset of this final stage in the political crisis, he should say:

I have spoken my thoughts openly, out loud, in the limelight, as one should at difficult moments. Because it is precisely in difficult times that all citizens have theright to know and participate in what is happening, as more than anything else it is their destiny that is at stake (Una línea, 112).

69 O. Prego, Reportaje a un golpe de estado (Ed. La República, 1988), 11. 269

Seregni’s view of the nation as a community of people joined together in productive dialogue informs his September 1971 description of the Frente’s aims: "to make of Uruguay a space in which we can live harmoniously"(Autoridad, 27). This translates politically into one paramount imperative, which he voiced in 1972:

Consult the people for real solutions. Consult the people in order to mobilise them. Consult so the people can participate. Consult so the people can decide (Una línea, 96).

But Seregni’s whole conception of the Frente Amplio is perhaps best summed up in a remark made on June 19 1973 (just one week before the final dissolution of parliament) about the Frente’s rank and file committees (of which more below): "The committee must be a home for the great family of the Frente Amplio, and a school for understanding and self- criticism. Political militancy should never be reduced to a kind of gymnastics"(147).

Participation, Cooperation, Equality: the Frente Amplio’s Internal Structure and Political Platform

A good indicator of any institution’s organisational framework is often the way it arranges its own finances. One glance at the Frente’s plan for raising and distributing funds shows the complexity (and potential pitfalls) of establishing an organisation which 270 was both an amalgamation around a coherent common program of well differentiated entities, as well as a mass political party which encouraged maximum participation by all individuals and groups.

A statement put out on April 6 1971 indicated that initial funding was to be raised by the issue of vouchers in two separate series. In the first case, the money raised was to be shared between head office and the rank and file committees. The second series was to be issued in the name of the coalition’s political groups themselves, most of the money being retained by the groups involved (INDAL, Frente Amplio, 66-7). It is immediately clear that the Frente’s structure depended on maintaining an extremely delicate balance between two axes: one extending vertically from the national executive in Montevideo out to the smallest rank and file unit in some far-flung hamlet in the interior; the other linking horizontally the groups that made up the coalition. The task of this "complex and variable" structure (Bruschera, Décadas infames, 67) was to put Seregni’s dialogic principle into practice.

The "Reglamento de organización"(INDAL, Frente Amplio, 55-8), approved by 15 groups on March 16 1971, established a three-tier structure within the party. The first was that of the rank and file committees [comités de base]; the second at an "intermediate" level for "coordination"; the third being that of the Executive 271 and National Plenary Committee at party headquarters in Montevideo (55). The document devotes most space to the first and third of these, since they do the essential grassroots and top-level party organisation work, respectively; the second had the crucial but probably thankless, and potentially horrendous, task of liaising between the other two, largely at provincial level.

In the words of one later sympathetic commentator:

. . . the Frente Amplio rank and file committees represent one of the most original innovations in the whole of modern Uruguayan political history. A democratising innovation which involved hundreds of thousands of people - many of them children and adolescents without voting rights in 1971 - and who ended up firmly united in their awareness of the themes of democracy, participation and militancy in the bosom of the left and the Frente Amplio.70

Seregni’s view of these committees, as suggested in the quotation closing the previous section of this chapter, was that they should be the Frente’s meeting place:

Therefore, the rank and file committees are the natural place for interaction and integration . . . [They] are essential for the Frente. They are the visible expression of its fraternal reality . . . [They] are the site where all militants together can deliberate, participate, express their thoughts, discuss and organise(Autoridad, 70).

Set up in the wake of the popular support aroused by the Frente from its inception, the rank and file

70 G. De Sierra, "La izquierda de la transición", in Gillespie, Uruguay, 153. 272 committees were intended to be the total antithesis of the traditional parties’ neighbourhood political clubs, of which by 1966 there were an estimated 8000 in Montevideo alone and which had largely become agencies for exchanging welfare for votes.71 The Frente had nothing to offer in this regard, and set up its committees in a way more in keeping with the political club’s original objectives.72 They relayed the party’s propaganda outwards to its supporters and workers, recruited new members and also made recommendations and suggestions to the central office in Montevideo.

If the rank and file committees, by way of the coordinating bodies, were organised along the Frente’s vertical axis, the national Plenary and Executive committees followed the horizontal line in its overall structure. The Plenary was the Frente’s most important body: it formulated and modified its policies and internal organisation, selected its candidates and decided on the inclusion or exclusion of groups within the coalition (56-7). It was constituted on the delegate system, each group’s representation being determined according to the size of the membership (and, perhaps, electoral influence) it brought to the Frente. Such a distribution clearly prevented either the far left or the leadership

71 According to the standard work on the subject, G. W. Rama, El club político (Arca, 1971), and A. Solari, "Requiem para la izquierda", in his Estudios sobre la sociedad uruguaya, II, 148-9. 72 Although it has been claimed that the Frente’s mere appearance on the political scene promoted clientelism by increasing the competition for votes (see L. Costa Bonino, Wilson Ferreira Aldunate y la lógica nacionalista [Celada, 1986], 54). 273 from being able easily to dominate Plenary meetings, while ensuring that on most issues the committee’s likely gravitation would be towards the centre rather than the left.

The aim of the Plenary’s deliberations was consensus: "as a general norm, on all matters that are not merely procedural all ways of arriving at unanimous agreement must be exhausted",73 unanimity being obligatory on policy issues, and a complicated process being laid down to achieve it (57). Everything was done to prevent the marginalisation of smaller groups and the automatic predominance of the more powerful ones, perhaps even at the expense of efficiency, while the Executive only served to implement the Plenary’s decisions and oversee the Frente’s accounts.

The double axis of the Frente’s organisation is mirrored in the theme of unity within diversity which permeates the "Acuerdo Político"(64-5)74 signed by the then twenty member groups on February 9 1972, virtually on the first anniversary of the coalition’s constitutive assembly. Here unity first comes expressed as the acceptance by all groups and their members of the Frente’s constitution, program and internal structure. However, the document then devotes most space to the need to base the party’s

73 Analogously, in the constitutive document of February 5, "the people" were asked "to exhaust" all democratic forms of opposition to the Pacheco administration (50). 74 Reproduced in Aguirre Bayley (119-122) as "Compromiso Político". 274 political activities "on the reciprocal solidarity among the forces that make up the Frente"(64).

In sum, the Frente’s internal organisation reflected what Seregni, in his recollections many years afterwards, called "the Frente’s double character, so much discussed", of being both a coalition of political groups and a mass movement (Barros-Lémez, Seregni, 72). Its status as a unified party was symbolised in its offering of a single, unanimously agreed national election ticket for president and vicepresident,75 as well as single candidates for mayor in Montevideo and major provincial centres. Only in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies at the national level and for lesser positions elsewhere could the Frente’s various groups put up their own preferred candidates (Aguirre Bayley, 29-31). In this sense, despite being an alliance which bent over backwards to ensure representation of its member organisations at all levels, the Frente could advertise a greater degree of unity than pertained elsewhere.76

In the other direction, as Castro went on to explain, "the Frente had opened a new path in the relationship between its leaders and the electorate. Dialogue, direct communication, exchange of ideas, public discussion are the methods used to get its doctrine across". And, as made clear in the final paragraph of the

75 A point emphasised in J. Castro, "Una elección diferente" [originally in Marcha (1 October 1971)], Cuadernos de Marcha, Tercera Epoca, i, 7(1985), 57. 76 The governing Colorado Party, for example, put up seven different presidential formulas for the 1971 elections. 275

Frente’s first thirty government measures, agreed on 25 August 1971, it was this open, democratic structure which was to guarantee the content and implementation of the party’s policies: "the people’s active participation through the rank and file committees ensures fulfilment of the program and control over those who are to put it into effect"(INDAL, Frente Amplio, 63).

Oscar Bruschera recalls that one of the Frente’s aims was consistency between the democratic nature of its internal structures and that of its political platform (Décadas infames, 67). Indeed, the party’s program (INDAL, Frente Amplio, 51-4), passed on February 17 1971, translates Seregni’s commitment to the principle of free dialogue between equals into giving pride of place in its first two sections to the liberty of the country’s citizens and to Uruguay’s ability to act as a genuinely independent agent in its foreign affairs. It opens by guaranteeing the rights of individuals, trade unions and political parties and groups, the autonomy of all educational institutions, and the complete independence of the judiciary, and goes on to call for an amnesty to reintegrate into society all those barred from it for political reasons.

This free association of individuals and organisations within the nation’s boundaries is then mirrored in the program’s view of Uruguay’s dealings with other countries. Attaching the principles of self- 276 determination and non-intervention to its notion of national sovereignty, the program calls for a completely independent foreign policy that would promote "the integration of Latin America" so as to "break [the continent’s] political, economic, social and cultural dependence” and for solidarity with all peoples, especially within Latin America, who are engaged in liberation struggles against “colonialist, neocolonialist and imperialist oppression"(51). Like the Congreso del Pueblo, the Frente seeks an "independent foreign economic policy . . . , attuned to the interests of the nation and its people"(51-2) and not to those of the overseas financiers or the International Monetary Fund (52), as the provision advocating the nationalisation of the banking sector makes more than abundantly clear (53).

The thrust of the idea of unity obtained through the maximum participation of many diverse contributors, already noted as the principal feature of the Frente’s internal organisation, comes to the fore again as the underlying theme of its intended social, economic and political reforms. So, as in the earlier Congreso del Pueblo proposals, the Frente envisions an "independent national planning of the economy, with social objectives" which, even in those sectors not brought under total state control, would be "strongly directive". It called for representation from unions, producers, technicians, 277

government and the University on the body overseeing the process. Similarly, it would seek worker and popular participation in the management of all state agencies, as well as in the whole process of industrial reform (52) and the formation of a wages and prices policy, and would give teachers a major role in the democratisation of all levels of education. In fact, the document makes a special point of the "promotion of cooperativism as an instrument designed to contribute to social and economic development, as much in the agricultural sphere as in industry, consumer affairs and services" and promises to set up mechanisms "to ensure the defense of the popular and progressive character of the system"(53).

For the individual, the program promises a reform of the tax system similar to the one advanced in the Congreso del Pueblo document, moving taxes from services and consumer goods to high incomes, accumulated wealth, unproductive capital and property, and to what are somewhat puritanically termed "social vices". The principle behind the wages policy will be "for equal work, equal pay, in line with the cost of living", while that behind the social welfare provisions (now adding the Congreso’s provisions to the PDC’s principles) is the "[c]reation of a national system of norms designed to guarantee individuals the wellbeing and security [tranquilidad] necessary for their full development as human beings, so as to take in their whole life cycle from conception to death"(53). When five months later the Frente published what it promised 278 as its first thirty measures once in government, it felt obliged to add to a summary of its program an objective not touched on before:

The measures which will bring about economic independence, which begin the essential structural changes, redistribute income in favour of the most dispossessed and generate employment, together with those that enhance social welfare and raise the level of popular participation, are fundamental in beginning a new process of development that brings with it the pacification of the country, since in this way the socio- economic causes of violence are eliminated (62).77

This paragraph clearly reflects the increasing social and political tension as the elections got nearer and implies that the Frente has the answers to it, but can also be read as an attempt by the Frente to distance itself from the armed struggle option represented by the Tupamaros, with whom government propaganda insistently tried to associate it.

On the political front, the program reaffirmed the Frente’s commitment to a pluralist democracy, foreshadowing reforms to the electoral law and the regulations governing political parties to make both more

77 Aguirre Bayley (17) points out that the "30 primeras medidas de gobierno"(INDAL, Frente Amplio, 59-63) are modelled on the 40 measures of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular in Chile. This is undoubtedly the case, but the social welfare reforms bear a striking resemblance to some of the "soluciones immediatas" and "soluciones de fondo" inserted into the version of the Congreso del Pueblo’s proposals as they were readopted by the Convención Nacional de Trabajadores at its founding conference in 1966. See CUI, CNT: programa y estatutos (CUI, Documentos Sindicales No. 2, 1984), 23-26. 279

responsive to electors’ wishes, and promising wider popular participation through greater use of plebiscites and referendums. It advocated the strengthening and democratising of local and municipal government bodies and the implementation of controls to ensure that no public office could be used for furthering its incumbent’s private interests (54), a provision repeated in the regulations governing its own organisation (57). Unlike the Congreso del Pueblo’s resolutions, to acknowledge the change in the tenor of the times since 1965, the Frente’s program ends with some essential if brief references to the role of the armed forces. It proposes to "accentuate" the military’s nationalism, "by invigorating the continuity with the tradition established by Artigas"(54). This reference is crucial, since the left in general and the Frente in particular actively promoted an image of the national hero as a supporter of regional integration, a defender of popular democracy and the leader of a people’s army, as the numerous mentions of his name and quotations from his writings in Seregni’s speeches confirm.78 This amounts to a radicalisation of the revaluation of the Artigas legacy advocated by Ares Pons and Methol Ferré (see Chapter One above). Indeed, for Trigo (Caudillo, estado, 221-2), Seregni himself reincarnated the Artigas myth. However, the hope that this might prise the

78 An even more striking instance of this is the existence amongst the clandestine training materials prepared by the Tupamaros of two reinterpretations of the Artigas legacy. They have since become publicly available, though the publishers maintain that their authorship remains unclaimed. See Anon., Artigas y el Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (3rd. ed., YOEA, 1987). 280 military away from their own slowly unfolding political agenda was to prove forlorn.

Although there was no official trade union representation as such in the Frente’s structure (as distinct from the role played by trade unionists as individuals or followers of member leftwing political organisations), its political platform, as we have seen, borrowed heavily from the final statement issued by the 1965 Congreso del Pueblo, to which the unions had made a decisive contribution. One major feature it inherits is its rejection of such marked terms as 'revolution' and 'socialism', just as the coalition’s name - Broad Front - studiously avoids any overt association with words such as "left" or "popular". While this reflects the attempt to widen the electoral appeal from the traditional left to the liberal, democratic centre, it leaves open how radically or mildly reformist the program actually was.79

Time seems to have clarified this issue. Bruschera, explaining that the program was only "moderately leftwing" and not socialist because of opposition from more than a few of the Frente’s members (Décadas

79 There was considerable disagreement on this score even among the participants. See, for example, Terra, “¿Por qué impulsamos?”, 151-4; M. Benedetti, "La transformación empieza en las bases", Cuadernos de Marcha, 41(1971), 25-28; O. Bruschera, "Las líneas fundamentales del Frente Amplio", Cuadernos de Marcha, 47(1971), 3-7; R. Arismendi, "La revolución uruguaya en la hora del Frente Amplio" and "Un avance sustancial del proceso revolucionario uruguayo" in his Uruguay y América en los años 70 (Mexico, Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1979), 41-58 and 59-67, respectively; Urioste Braga, "La gran tarea del Frente". 281 infames, 60),80 he went on to describe it as salvaging the most progressive aspects of Batllismo and the anti- imperialism of the conservative 1950s National Party leader Herrera, and adding them on to the thinking of a "de-utopianised, non-olympian" left (62). G. Rama, noting the absence of the rhetoric of class struggle (Democracia, 114) and its substitution by the "exaltation of social humanism and solidarity"(116), concluded likewise that the program was not an "innovative project"(115). Rather, it "defended and extended advances from the past which it . . . projected on to the future"(116), a view repeated by Trigo (Caudillo, estado, 219). It also contained elements of the democratic socialism and Latin American integration that Carlos Quijano had been advocating for decades in his Marcha editorials.

This assessment of the program as looking to the future while, Janus-like, having its eyes firmly fixed on the past is not unjustified. Its essential thrust is redistributive, economically and politically. The Frente seeks both greater access by the people to the benefits derived from exploiting the country’s resources as well as greater popular participation in making the decisions about what is to be produced, how and by whom. In other words, it looks to strengthen and broaden the influence and relevance of existing institutions, not to

80 And not from any wish to imply a critique of existing socialism or marxist theory, as claimed in N. Argones/ P. Mieres, "La polémica en el Frente Amplio, ¿pugna por contenidos organizacionales o institucionales?", Cuadernos del CLAEH, 49(1989), 53. 282 overthrow them and start afresh with others, becoming in Trigo’s words, "the most suitable if elusive legitimiser of the system"(219). While obviously hoping to appeal to the electoral middle ground, this fundamental characteristic of the Frente’s platform may owe its existence not only to the Congreso del Pueblo’s resolutions and to Juan Pablo Terra’s nine points for discussion from 1969, but to an authoritative source which may lie behind them all, but which is certainly not frequently associated with the Frente’s proposals.

In 1960, the National Party government founded the Comisión de Inversiones y Desarrollo Económico [CIDE] which over the next few years produced two major reports whose recommendations seem to have been largely ignored by succceeding administrations during the decade. The first appeared in 1963 and was a multi-volume exercise in data gathering about the Uruguayan economy. Two years later, building on their preliminary fact-finding effort, CIDE published the results of what its title reveals as a much more ambitious and forward-looking venture: Plan nacional de desarrollo económico y social. Shortly afterwards, the director of the CIDE team, the prominent young economist Enrique Iglesias, put out as a separate volume the summary of the second report he had written originally as a guide to it.81

81 E. Iglesias, Uruguay: una propuesta de cambio (Arca, 1966). 283

Iglesias listed the rights he feels all Uruguayans should have and which the Plan looked to secure: the right to a job; to work their own land; to have access to decent housing, education, health care and to a full social security system; to participate in the management of the country’s economy, and for all inhabitants to have equal access to all resources and opportunites (47), which adds up to a near résumé of the Frente’s platform. Iglesias wanted the Plan to be "an instrument for social and economic change" that would clearly reveal the "contradictions of the traditional structures" and "the advantages implied in a process of renewing and changing them"(24). Singled out as particularly requiring immediate attention were those structures relating to "the use of natural resources; the management of public savings; the administration of state enterprises; the distribution of resources devoted to social services; the management of overseas trade; access to housing; the state’s ability to stimulate productivity; the participation of all those actively involved in organising and running the country’s economy"(48-9).

Iglesias both anticipated and even exceeded Seregni’s faith in dialogue and consensus as the means to achieve the Plan’s aims, appealing implicitly to exactly the notion of dialogue within the nation and the threats to it that have formed the backbone of this thesis. Pointing out that Uruguay’s situation in the mid-1960s "issues a historic challenge to the community’s leaders 284 to mobilise new bases for action", Iglesias went on to urge them to "seek out through the great powers of communication that this people has shown itself to have in order to rescue it from the lethargy and lack of dynamism that has increasingly taken it over"(31). Iglesias advocated a "Social Accord", to be worked out with equal representation by all players involved in any sphere of economic activity, so that any sacrifices could be shared around, since failure to do this would jeopardise the entire Plan (76). The Plan was, therefore, perhaps more trusting than the Frente’s platform, which, while retaining a state-regulated private sector, proposed wholesale nationalisations to ensure public control of the economy, as did the Congreso del Pueblo statement. However, Iglesias’ Plan contained a crucial proviso:

[W]hatever the proposed changes, no violence must be done to the Uruguayan’s sense of wellbeing, within which stability and security weigh most heavily. The problem will be to convert development into an instrument to provide protection and opportunities so as to maintain and conserve those ideals so dear to the country’s average citizen (30).

Here, the conservatism of the average Uruguayan is accepted and affirmed, with a strong resulting sense that the aim of the proposals was to recover gains made earlier but now lost or under threat, rather than to dismantle the entire social edifice and replace it with one less vulnerable to the vicissitudes that have plunged this one into violence, poverty and chaos. 285

To some extent, then, all three projects for social reform (the Iglesias Plan, the Congreso del Pueblo statement and the Frente Amplio program) can be seen to display what might be called a nostalgia for the future, a product of what one writer has seen as the dominant characteristic of the Uruguayan populace at the time: "a peculiar mixture of utopian expectation and conservative conformity".82 It is now time to see how the most recent of these proposals, complete with its endeavour to reestablish dialogue within the body politic, was received by those whom it sought to address.

The Right of Reply: Responses to the Frente Amplio

The 1971 national elections were a sad blend of farce and fraud. They were farcical (as far as most reasonable definitions of democracy are concerned, that is) in that they took place while a state of emergency and press censorship were in force; while rightwing terrorist attacks on workers, candidates and premises of the Frente or its member organisations were carried out almost with impunity, including one assassination attempt against Seregni himself;83 while the electoral

82 J. Rial, "Makers and Guardians of Fear: Controlled Terror in Uruguay", in J. E. Corradi, P. Weiss Fagen, M. A. Garretón(eds), Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America(California University Press, 1992), 90. 83 With no provocation from the Tupamaros, who observed a truce for the whole election period. 286

laws even prevented the Frente using its own name on the voting papers, forcing them to adopt the ‘permanent’ title of one of the parties making up the coalition, the PDC (rather than the other possibilites, all tainted by their long association with the traditional left).84

Accusations of fraud were rife during the two and a half months it took the electoral commission to release the results. They have multiplied since and it is now taken for granted that the government manipulated the ballot.85 And not without reason. Franco gives instances where it is clear that the electoral rolls had not been vetted to take out the names of those who had died (or, I would add, migrated)86 and points to elementary arithmetical inconsistencies in the published figures which show that in some electoral divisions the number of votes cast exceeded the number of people eligible to

84 Thus confronting the same hurdle that defeated those involved in the 1966 discussions referred to earlier. As Carlos Mártinez Moreno, wearing his lawyer’s hat instead of his more familiar novelist's cap, has made clear, the only way to have a new name declared permanent, thereby giving the party the chance to accumulate the votes of its factions, was through the support of at least two thirds of both houses of parliament, meaning that it required the opposition of only just over 33% of either chamber to prevent the formation of a fully functioning new party. It was therefore easy for parliamentarians to make sure intruders did not threaten their powerbase. See his "Crepúsculo en Arcadia: la institucionalidad y su derrumbe a la uruguaya", in Benvenuto, Uruguay hoy, 412. 85 Which for Varela (110) shows how clearly the executive was under the control of the right. 86 It is estimated that some five to ten percent of Uruguay's population (from 150,000 to nearly 300,000 people) became economic or political refugees during the 1960s and 1970s and that these included an alarmingly high proportion of economically active people and individuals of child producing age. See C. A. Aguiar, Uruguay: país de emigración (EBO, 1982); C. A. Aguiar/A. Cravotto, Población, territorio, ciudades (CLAEH, 1983), and J. L. Petrucelli, "Consequences of Uruguayan Emigration: Research Note", International Migration Review, xiii, 3(1979), 519-526. 287 vote, while in others the sum of the votes allotted to candidates differed from the total number of votes recorded as valid, and so on.87 Other sources would indicate several cases of tampering with sealed ballot boxes and potentially numerous instances of the double counting of votes.88

None of the serious complaints were answered and there has been no subsequent official comment on the figures, so everyone was stuck with the final result as published. This gave victory to the incumbent Colorado Party over the Nationals by a margin of just under 13 000 votes out of a national total of nearly 1 665 000, or less than 1%. The governing faction of the Colorados retained power but under the fall-back formula headed by Bordaberry, since the constitutional change required to allow Pacheco to be re-elected was not passed. However, by far the most solidly supported of the presidential candidates was the National Party’s Wilson Ferreira.

87 See R. Franco, Democracia a la uruguaya (El Libro Libre, 1984), Ch. 4. 88 See INDAL, Frente Amplio, 244-7, 267-270 and 277-285. These pages contain closely argued editorials from Marcha and the journal Cuestión , an official request from the National Party for an investigation into some of the irregularities, and an interview with National Party leader Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, who remains remarkably calm and collected, given that the swindle undoubtedly deprived him of a presidency he would otherwise have won easily. 288

The Frente Amplio’s performance in its first national poll was, at best, promising. It received just over 18% of the vote country-wide, but managed 29% in the capital where its candidate for the position of mayor was the most favoured by the electorate but the accumulation of votes within each party allowed the Colorado candidate to beat him into second place. In the 30-seat Senate the Frente had 5 candidates elected,89 while in the lower house of 99 members, the Frente had 18 deputies,90 of whom 4 were from FIDEL (which included the Communists), 7 from the PDC, 5 from the Unión Popular, while the Socialists and Independents provided one each.91 However, only five of them were elected in the interior, the remainder all coming from Montevideo (Aguirre Bayley, 31-33).92

89 They were Enrique Rodríguez (a Communist), Rodríguez Camusso (leader of the MBPP), Juan Pablo Terra (PDC), Zelmar Michelini (MGP) and Enrique Erro (UP). 90 Some of whose names are familiar, if only as authors of books and articles mentioned in the course of this chapter: Rodney Arismendi, Vladimir Turiansky, Oscar Bruschera and Vivián Trías. 91 This represents a reasonable spread of candidates across the major groups within the Frente, but it is noticeable that none from the smaller groups were elected. They were not the only losers. Alba Roballo’s defection from the Colorado Party cost her a seat in the Senate. In defeat, she remained determined and unrepentant. See the interview in INDAL, Frente Amplio, 256-9. 92 While the development of the Frente Amplio after the return to democracy in 1985 is beyond the scope of this book, it can be briefly said that, after a period of readjustment which involved a realignment of policy to the new situation, the demise or defection of some of the original member groups and the inclusion of new ones (notably, a reformed and legalised Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, formerly the Tupamaros), the Frente got its first taste of real power in the 1989 elections, when it won outright in Montevideo. The trials and tribulations of the coalition can be followed in Brecha , a weekly founded quite explicitly to replace Marcha by colleagues and friends of Carlos Quijano, who had died in 1984 before being able to return from exile. Brecha keeps as watchful but supportive an eye on the Frente now as its predecessor did in earlier days. 289

This hints at one of the Frente’s major difficulties in the election: its message had not got through to the electorate out in the rural areas. In some ways, this is hardly surprising, since political allegiances in the countryside are traditionally often intimately bound up with personal and family ties and with the relationship between employer and worker. However, according to some of the delegates at the congress of the Frente’s rank and file committees a few weeks after the election, countryfolk were not necessarily resistant to the Frente’s policies. Rather, there had been a lack of experienced party workers who knew how to talk to them in their own way, and of propaganda material they could understand.93

The problem of the interior was only one of several points listed by Arismendi in his analysis of the Frente’s performance for the Communist Party Central Committee ("Un avance sustancial", 60), but it is closely linked to another: the fact that the Frente had only existed for nine months. This is, indeed, a very short time in which to get a new party up and running smoothly and to fight a hard election campaign in adverse

93 E. González Bermejo, "Encuentro de compañeros y la unidad crítica", Marcha, 1575(24 December 1971), 10-11. Eighteen years later, Seregni was to highlight this problem in his own recollections of the period, and maintained that it had still not been solved for the election campaign in 1984 (Barros-Lémez, Seregni, 85 and 178- 179). 290

circumstances, and especially so when its policies were more radically reformist than any the electorate was used to hearing and when the party’s structure was something of an experiment. While the Frente could use the networks already created by some of its member groups and their ties through the trade unions, this was not going to help break the stranglehold the major parties had had for about a century on the rest of the population in a country where, as Debray puts it (Revolution on Trial, 147), political loyalties are something one is born with.

The Frente’s limited success in accomplishing this latter task may have been advanced rather than hindered by what Arismendi identifies as another problem: the acts of repression mounted against organisations, publications and individuals on the left generally, and the vicious, hysterical propaganda from the State and most of the mass media which accompanied them. Both de Sierra ("La izquierda", 154) and Argones and Mieres ("La polémica en el Frente", 49) suggest, on the contrary, that the targeting of the Frente by the repressive forces actually enhanced its legitimacy and authority in the eyes of the public, giving its supporters and workers the chance to be seen as leading the fight against the government’s dirty war tactics. It must remain a moot point, however, whether this would have compensated for the practical difficulties created by the constant attacks on the Frente’s property and personnel. 291

The other major problem mentioned by Arismendi, and referred to by others since, was the presence in the National Party of the reformist faction led by Ferreira Aldunate. His influence almost certainly prevented a mass defection of more progressive National Party voters (as happened in the Colorado Party, whose share of the vote dropped by nearly 10% compared to the 1966 results, whereas the Nationals retained theirs). On the other hand, any potential Frente voter, alarmed by government claims that the coalition was Communist-controlled, had available an apparently reform-minded alternative which might have an even better chance of winning because it was under the umbrella of one of the traditional parties. The existence of both options certainly seems to have split the forces opposed to the Pacheco regime. For, as Varela (117) notes, if the results for the Frente, Ferreira and the anti- government factions within the Colorado party are added together, the total is an impressive 63% of the electorate. Arismendi even suggests that many of those who took part in the Frente’s demonstrations and rallies ended up voting for Ferreira ("Un avance", 65), thereby repeating a phenomenon noted earlier in our discussion of trade unions: centre-left sympathisers were prepared to go with a more radical alternative on particular issues but stepped back from this position when asked to translate it into a vote for dramatic change at a more general social and political level. 292

Arismendi’s last point bears on one of the decisive miscalculations made by many of the Frente’s supporters during the campaign. First noted by Castro within days of the poll,94 Seregni incorporated it into his own assessment of the Frente’s election showing in the middle of the following year: "In fact, all or nearly all our voters are activists in the Frente. The old parties, on the other hand, have an electorate much larger than their scant membership” (Autoridad, 38). Indeed, Rama’s later breakdown of those who voted for the Frente as being of the salaried and professional middle class, the traditional leftist sectors of the urban working class or some of those who supported the progressive wings of the major parties, and as being politically active, among the better educated, predominantly young and living in Montevideo (Democracia, 114), reads suspiciously like a profile of party workers or the up to 200 000 people they could bring out on to the streets.95 This confusion between "mobilising capacity" and "electoral capacity"(Debray, Revolution on Trial, 150) led both supporters and opponents to think that the Frente had at a stroke solved all the problems mentioned by Arismendi and was likely to sweep the board.

94 J. Castro, "La lucha recién empieza"[originally in Marcha (3 December 1971)], Cuadernos de Marcha, Tercera Epoca, i, 7(1985), 58. 95 It also recalls Real de Azúa and Flo’s description of the entrants to the 1952 essay competition mentioned in the Introduction. 293

They were wrong. The new organisation had not worked quite that well. The rank and file committees, it was argued, became "more schools for skilling up organisers and centres for debating political arguments than agencies for reaching the masses of unconvinced"(Castro, "La lucha", 59). This opinion, repeated by Debray (152), was not uniformly held, however. Some delegates to the special congress of these committees held three weeks after the poll had hoped for more political discussion than actually took place. Others blamed the overly intellectual content of the Frente’s election material, the failure of the central office to publicise the program widely enough or to provide enough campaign orientation, while a few still had the ghost of sectarianism hovering over their committees and threatening their unity. There was more agreement on another issue: that the communication channels between rank and file and the Montevideo office had not functioned as they were supposed to, resulting in a lack of direction and feelings of being ignored (González Bermejo, "Encuentro de compañeros", 10-11). Bruschera was to feel later that both the juggling between member groups and the composition of the committees had hampered the Frente’s ability reach the quick decisions events often required (Décadas infames, 74-5).

There is considerable uniformity among the overall judgments on the Frente’s early days. In March 1971, Bruschera had begun his summary of the party’s 294 platform with a thumbnail sketch of the interpretation of Uruguayan society which underpinned it: "The alternative is . . . clear: either the oligarchy liquidates the Uruguayan people, plunging it into dictatorship, backwardness and dependency, or the Uruguayan people liquidates the oligarchy"("Las líneas fundamentales", 4). As Varela points out (122-3), one view of the Frente’s 19% rating in the election is that 81% of the population disagreed with this. In 1986, Bruschera recognised his and the Frente’s error, quoting to that effect an October 1972 editorial by Carlos Quijano:

It encourages error to speak of only one real confrontation: that between people and oligarchy. It is to function on a purely abstract level. That contradiction is the fundamental one. It is not the only one nor, on occasions, is it the primary one. . . The issue is purely and simply that military power should not substitute for civilian power. (Décadas infames, 82)

In other words, the Frente was attempting to reform the politics of a society at a time when the real danger was that any or all of the country’s political arrangements might be stood aside.

This is close to the views of Varela and Rama. In a process that accelerated once the elections were over, the Frente - and gradually all opposition political forces and, eventually, even the crudely elected government itself - were left stranded, first between two military solutions 295

(the Tupamaros and the Armed Forces),96 and then by the second as it translated its military victory into a progressive militarisation of the state, a stage set as early as 1968 when Pacheco had first called in the army to break strikes in the finance and public sectors. This increasing polarisation allowed the Frente’s program to be perceived as "dangerous revolutionary talk" by conservatives and as "a great hope for change" by its supporters, and gave the reactionary press the chance to project the elections as a choice between "a new Cuba" and "regressive authoritarianism", as any middle ground disappeared between two extremes (Rama, Democracia, 116 and 154). The issue was not the class struggle or the confrontation between the people and the oligarchy but the rupture between civil and political society (Varela, 164), which led to a total dissociation between the state (identified after June 1973 with the military) and society (171), or to what Rama terms a separation between state and nation (Democracia, 166). As a more recent writer has it: "Caught between insurgent and counter-insurgent violence, the Uruguayan state and society were tested to their limits", both of which were straddled between the possibility of radical change and "the barrier of tradition which validated the rhetoric about an idealised past and

96 See also L. Costa Bonino, Crisis de los partidos tradicionales y movimiento revolucionario en el Uruguay (EBO, 1985), 83. Here, the MLN and the military are seen as espousing symmetrically opposed versions of "a conspiratorial and antidemocratic nationalism", the first trying to destroy the nexus "traditional parties-oligarchy-US imperialism", while the other led a crusade against "parliament-the Left-the insurrection-USSR and international communism". 296

happy future". She continues: "These two utopias - the tomorrow-as-yesterday and the yesterday-as- tomorrow - did not generate a new one capable of mobilizing the citizenry for change".97 There seems little reason to disagree with any of these commentators.

Such a scenario does, however, show Seregni’s (and the Frente’s) emphasis on new forms of dialogue and participation in a special light, as they can now be seen as a means whereby the Frente could have become the vehicle to bring about the reintegration of a society whose fabric was coming apart. In this sense, the Frente was, I would argue, the culmination of all the attempts by intellectuals to address the issue of the nation as problem and of their search for an answer to Juan Flo’s 1952 question: “What shall we do?”(see the Introduction). Had the project been fully realised, one consequence could well have been the prevention of the social and political breakdown underlined by Rama and Varela. Obviously, the program enjoyed - perhaps could only have enjoyed - limited success. Nonetheless, it is easy to see its attraction for intellectuals long concerned about the state of the nation, and Bruschera is right to count their support among the Frente’s achievements (Décadas, 73), since it provided a bridge for them to rejoin the political mainstream for the first time in forty years.

97 C. Perelli, "Youth, Politics and Dictatorship in Uruguay", in Corradi, Fear at the Edge, 212. 297

Similarly, de Sierra is almost certainly correct to maintain that the Frente’s activities strengthened the population’s belief in democracy ("La izquierda de la transición", 155), for, even if the double axis structure did not work as efficiently as planned, those who participated clearly tasted something of the promise offered by one of the Frente’s campaign slogans, directed at people thinking of emigrating: "Brother, don’t go; a hope is born"(152). In addition, despite the residual sectarianism mentioned in the December 1971 congress of the rank and file committees and acknowledged by Bruschera (Décadas, 75), the Frente had gone a considerable way towards healing the rifts on the left and making it possible for different groups to talk to one another and work together in a way not achieved before. On the other hand, the Frente had barely dented the traditional two-party system, which meant that the larger task of finding an expanded electorate to which the centre-left could talk and appeal was obviously going to take longer than a mere nine months.98

98 Chapters 2 and 3 of the last book written by Charles Gillespie before his untimely death, Negotiating democracy: Politics and generals in Uruguay (Cambridge University Press, 1991), cover some of the same ground I have surveyed here and in Chapter One. While we broadly agree on many issues, some of my interpretations depart from his. For example, he is more charitable towards President Bordaberry than I find I can be, and is equally less convinced than I am that the Frente Amplio offered a real alternative to the traditional parties' way of doing politics. 298

To conclude this chapter, I would like to return to the principal argument of this thesis: namely, that politically disaffected intellectuals, provided they have not become so indifferent as to declare their neutrality to all politics, will redefine themselves in relation to the political mainstream if circumstances are such as to produce a vehicle whereby they can do so. In this respect, the Frente Amplio is the core of this study's argument. The conditions which brought it forth could hardly have been more adverse. Yet, the Frente's methods of responding to them, which must include not only its political platform but also the profoundly democratic procedures embodied in its structure, clearly differentiated it, at least potentially, from the two traditional parties. These were seen, by the intelligentsia if not, in the end, by the public at large, as hopelessly implicated in the crisis which was enveloping the country. What is more, the Frente seemed to offer intellectuals a specific role: the principle of dialogue exemplified in its political vision and way of working exactly mirrored the relationship a dissident intelligentsia had been trying to have with its public for years. Unfortunately, this opportunity came too late: the space required by the Frente's and the intellectuals' need for dialogue disappeared in the increased militarisation of a society that had escaped any party's political control. My final chapter will examine the politics of one writer, Mario Benedetti, who lived out this contradiction with exemplary intensity. 299

FROM ANALYST TO ACTIVIST: MARIO BENEDETTI'S URUGUAYAN POLITICS, 1960-1973

At moments of crisis, intellectuals tend to adhere to causes which put in parenthesis even themselves, their class and the conditions necessary for culture to function. It is at these times, when political parties lose their influence as instruments of control, their opacity, their mediocrity, that the writer’s voice is purest, that words reach farthest. Carlos Real de Azúa [1958]

This chapter does not pretend to offer a complete account of the politics of all Benedetti's non-fictional works. Such an endeavour would involve an analysis not only of his numerous articles on Uruguayan, Latin American and world affairs, but also, and more importantly, the politics implied or openly avowed in his voluminous literary journalism and criticism on books and writers from Europe, Uruguay and the Americas. Clearly, such a task is beyond the scope of this study and no reference will be made in what follows to Benedetti's panamericanism, as important a theme as it is. Reluctantly and perhaps artificially, therefore, the chapter will hive off and concentrate on only those essays which illustrate the development of Benedetti's 300

approach to the politics of his native country up to the military coup of June 1973.

Even this limited exercise will entail an attempt to elucidate two flagrant contradictions. The first is inherent in the writing itself. Benedetti's essays of 1971-1973, and to a lesser extent those that anticipate them, inscribe within the imagery which structures them the very symptoms of the collapse of civil society which they name, lament and oppose. In other words, they exhibit the signs of the closing of that space for dialogue between the writing and its readers without which neither intellectual or political work can function at all, let alone flourish. The second contradiction is more personal: that between the essentially humanist ethics of Benedetti the intellectual and the willed, radical politics of Benedetti the militant activist, which will in the end be resolved by the renunciation of the latter in favour of the former. In short, Benedetti will replicate or rehearse on a smaller, individual scale the Frente Amplio's failure to revive the principle of dialogue in the polarised, increasingly violent politics of the national arena.

Four Prefaces

During the period of 'apertura' [opening] between the plebiscite of November 1980 (when the Uruguayan electorate unexpectedly rejected the military's attempt to 301

legitimise itself through a new constitution)1 and the elections four years later, with the relaxation of censorship and of the limitations on the political activities of opposition representatives and groups,2 there began the arduous process of assessing the results of the dictatorship between 1973 and 1984, and of building strategies for the future. The immediate impression shared by many was that the basic economic problems of the late 1960s and early 1970s remained unsolved in the 1980s.3

With the rapid if misguided establishment of this kind of continuity between the state of the nation before and after the interlude of military government,4 it is not surprising to find intellectuals working in other spheres also

1 See Benedetti's own ecstatic appreciation of the result in one of the autobiographical sections of his novel Primavera con una esquina rota (Mexico, Nueva Imagen, 1982), 203-6. 2 Not all, however. The Communist Party remained illegal until March 1985 while Wilson Ferreira Aldunate (National Party) and Líber Seregni (Frente Amplio) were forbidden to participate in the elections, despite being presidential candidates. 3 See, for example, on the economy L. A. Faroppa, Políticas para una economía desequilibrada: Uruguay 1958-1981 (EBO, 1984), 103-4 and J. Notaro, La política económica en el Uruguay 1968-1984 (CIEDUR/EBO, 1984), 255. Indeed, as late as mid-1992, the weekly Brecha could publish unchanged on its back page an editorial on the state of the nation by Marcha's founder Carlos Quijano which had originally seen the light of day on July 16 1965 (see C. Quijano, "Todos somos prisioneros", Brecha [12 June 1992], 32 and the commentary by Esteban Valenti, "Un alegato optimista de Quijano", Brecha [10 July 1992], 10). Similarly, the same journal reminded its readers in August 1992 of some juicily suggestive and apparently still relevant remarks penned even earlier by Real de Azúa in his El impuso y su freno (1964). See G. González, "El Uruguay, su impulso y su freno", Brecha (7 August 1992), 3. 4 It might even be categorised as self-seeking, since it was frequently made by those returning from exile, who ran the risk of being accused of trying to reclaim the authority they had enjoyed before the coup. 302

trying to pick up where they had been forced to leave off. At about the same time that Carlos Maggi republished his Uruguay y su gente (1961) as the finale to Los militares, la televisión y otros artículos para uso interno (1986),5 Benedetti was explaining at length to his friend Hugo Alfaro why he would not allow a reissue of his own best-selling satirical look at the foibles of Uruguay's middle class, El país de la cola de paja (1960), despite persistent requests from publisher and readers. The book had "aged": "[w]hat I would need to do today instead of republishing the earlier book is write another one. The country is different, the middle class I upbraided is different, I myself am different, the world is different, and a country that suffered twelve years of dictatorship cannot be the same any longer".6 This view of Benedetti's book receives support from Achugar, a critic recently much concerned with trying to define the Uruguayan cultural scene since the return to democracy, who adds that even if Benedetti's vision of a homogeneous Uruguay had any validity in 1960 (which he doubts), it most certainly does not some thirty years later.7 Benedetti might have felt that his work from 1960 was no longer relevant but he thought differently about his

5 See the section on Maggi in Chapter 2 for a discussion of these two books. 6 H. Alfaro, Mario Benedetti (Trilce, 1986), 54-5. 7 H. Achugar, "Transformaciones culturales en el Uruguay del fin de siglo", Hispamérica, 59 (1991), 41. See also the negative opinion in M. Delgado Alparaín, "Reflexiones sobre una generación desgeneracionada", La hora (1 November, 1989), 8-9. 303

political essays from the years 1971 to 1973. In June 1985, barely four months after the return to formal democracy had allowed him to disembark in Uruguay for the first time in twelve years, he was penning an introduction to a selection of them. He recognised the need to clarify the situation for readers too young to remember those years and unfortunate enough to have been deprived by censorship of all documentation about them. He also set out what were, for him and many others, the terms of an unacknowledged but only too real civil war between most sectors of society and the forces of conservatism. He characterises the period of social unrest which straddled the presidential election of November 1971 as one "of extreme political tension" in which "in spite of solid, bold and at times desperate resistance by the people, the reactionary forces went around trampling on rights, waving ghosts about and openly calling for a military revolt". Having made it clear whose side he was on, he describes briefly the ambience against which this struggle was played out: "the growing insecurity, the atmosphere of fear, the climate of repression, the feeling of risk, which marked that anxious period".

The battle lines drawn and the author's sympathies established, Benedetti can now state his reasons for republishing some of his most openly propagandist work:

I believe that these notes can document not so 304

much (or not only) the nature of one individual's response . . . to the facts and courses of action for each week, but also that they can serve as a modest testimony to those days of anxiety and harrassment, alarm and death, and definitely of bitter political struggle.8

The reasoning here is both biographical and historical, the former causing Benedetti some minor embarrassment as he seeks to play down his own role and underline the essays’ value as a documentary record of heroic moments in a collective effort whose aims are still to be achieved.

There are further continuities of a different kind. The anthology reprints essays from two earlier books, Crónicas del 71 and Terremoto y después.9 The first of these has no preface but the second carries a two paragraph "Nota" which states that its contents "aspire to be a personal testimony about the dizzying political process" which would end in June 1973 with the military occupation of Congress, the dissolution of parliament, the imposition of a fierce censorship (which included all of Benedetti's own writings), the banning of public meetings and the outlawing of national trade union organisation and of leftwing political parties, Benedetti's among them. The author then goes on to exhort the public "to read not only the lines but between them [because] it is probably there

8 M. Benedetti, Escritos políticos (1971-1973)(Arca, 1985), 5. 9 Arca, 1972 and 1973, respectively. Both books are discussed at length later in this chapter. 305

that my strongest conviction and my deepest faith in the people's cause are hidden away"(Terremoto, 7). Once again, there appears (although less apologetically) the individual writer as witness to large-scale social and political events which transcend both him and his work but in which he participates by merging, through an act of faith, with the people [el pueblo] which, for him, is the protagonist of the events he chronicles.

Equally revealing of the consistency of Benedetti's attitude is the relation beween the preliminary note of Terremoto and the prologue to El país de la cola de paja published thirteen years before. This also begins by emphasising the writer's role as personally involved witness: the book "wishes merely to reflect the personal opinion of someone deeply concerned about the present moment in Uruguay". The importance given to one individual's thoughts and emotions is reinforced in the last paragraph by the introduction of a desire which, though expressed only vaguely, is projected into the future: "I love my country, which is why I would like it to be rather better than it is". This love demands that he first be honest with himself ("This modest warning is primarily a warning to myself, a coming to terms with my own conscience") so that he can than have the hope that his sincerity will find an echo in his readers: "I trust that the reader knows how to recognise the unlearned forms of sincerity; that is why I 306

have decided to speak clearly".10 They indeed responded to this combination of nationalism and personal declarations of good intentions and affection, buying out three editions of the book in its first year and some fifty thousand copies over the decade,11 a fact about which Benedetti expresses considerable gratification in a second prologue added to the 1963 reprint so he could reply to his critics. Here he repeats that the book is, "above all", an expression of "personal concern and testimony" and "the reflection of a private feeling of astonishment" but adds that "the mere act of writing it contributed to clarifying some of [his] doubts and helped [him] to take decisions".12 The hazy desire of 1960 has taken on some more definite shape.

What that shape is can be glimpsed by summing up the similarities and differences between the four prefaces. All of them have in common the recognition not only of the individual as both witness and participant in situations or events that involve others as well, but also of the dialectic between that individual's power to choose and the circumstances which limit or impose the terms on which any choice can be made. The main disparity between them,

10 El país de la cola de paja (1st edition, Asir, 1960), 11. 11 According to Rama, La generación crítica (Arca, 1972), 64. For an idea of how unusual this was compared to the norm in Uruguayan book publishing, see the closing section of Chapter One above. 12 All subsequent editions carry both prologues. I use here the 7th edition (Arca, 1968), 9-10. All future page references will be to this edition, until otherwise stated. 307

however, is that, in 1960 Benedetti's allegiance was to his "country", which included himself and all his readers as equal and undifferentiated human beings, thus implying an even-sided dialogue that could in theory be shared by the entire population. However, by the early 1970s he had aligned himself with the "people", now defined in terms of class and political orientation, which implies something much less than dialogue but more like a shouting match across clear lines of demarcation. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to an account of how Benedetti traversed this difficult ideological terrain by examining the essays in the books whose prefaces I have been reviewing, since "it is in the essay where Benedetti reveals the most urgent and militant aspects of his thought".13

From the Consolations of Conscience to the Nastiness of the Nation: Expanding El país de la cola de paja

1959, the year before El país came out, was an important one for Benedetti. Up to that time, as he told his friend, the Argentine poet Juan Gelman, in 1974, "my only militant action had been to distribute on one occasion . . . some leaflets against the military treaty between Uruguay and the United States".14 In 1959, two things happened

13 J. Mejía Duque in an untitled, specially written piece excerpted in the "Otras opiniones" section of A. Fornet (ed.), Recopilación de textos sobre Mario Benedetti (Havana, Casa de Las Américas, 1976), 263, his emphasis. 14 J. Gelman, "Mario Benedetti: 'el escritor es un trabajador como tantos'", Crisis, ii, 19(1974), 41. 308

which would change all that. First, Benedetti made his only trip ever to North America, which made an indelible impression on him: "what I saw there made me an anti- imperialist; . . . I saw poverty, social injustice, the lie of western democracy, racial segregation, and all in the Mecca of 'democracy' itself".15 The second event contrasted sharply with the first. The Cuban Revolution, Benedetti later recalled in the same interview with Ruffinelli, "represented for me the need to bring myself up to date, and so there was a whole period of self-analysis and self- criticism about the attitudes I'd had up to then. . . [I]t helped me to get in touch with my country, to see Uruguay in a different way" because previously he had shared "the country's attitude [of] being very satisfied with itself"(27- 8). As Benedetti put it to his first biographer:

The Cuban Revolution made intellectuals seek and find, in the area where they themselves lived, motivation, themes and even reasons to become militant. It was from that moment that we all began to write about national and Latin American topics. Cuba had put Latin America in the centre of the world.16

The next few years would see Benedetti grappling with the political implications of these revelations for him.

15 J. Ruffinelli, "La trinchera permanente", in Fornet, Recopilación, 32. 16 M. Paoletti, El aguafiestas: la biografía de Mario Benedetti(Barcelona/Buenos Aires, Seix Barral/Espasa Calpe, 1995), 97. 309

The textual history of El país de la cola de paja in itself suggests the twists and turns of Uruguayan politics in its contents, for in a sense it is at least two books. The first three editions carry the essays as originally conceived but the fourth, in addition to the second prologue, contains a transcription of a speech about the implications for the left of the 1962 election results given by Benedetti at the headquarters of the Socialist Party in May 1963. For the eighth edition (1970) Benedetti added an entire new section, "Otros temas nacionales", with seven essays totalling 40 pages, about a third of the length of the original text. This expanded format is repeated in the ninth printing in 1973, which was the one banned by the military after the coup in June. Of the additional pieces, first published in various leftwing daily or weekly papers, one is dated October 1964, another August 1967, three are from November 1969 and the remaining two from January 1970, just one year before the first article of Crónicas del 71, to which all seven are closer in tone and perspective than they are to the 1960 version of El país.17 In what follows, I shall

17 The price of not taking all this into account is paid in L. Paredes, Mario Benedetti: literatura e ideología (Arca, 1988), which divides his work into three "literary - ideological" periods, of which the second covers the years 1960-8 and the third 1969-1980 (see his chapters 3 and 4). Paredes refers to the first two versions of El país under the earlier period but makes no mention of the 1970 additions in either chapter, thus consigning the book to the early 1960s. In fact, as the dates of the seven later essays suggest, the last editions of it can be used as something of a yardstick to assess the development of Benedetti's thinking about the Uruguayan political scene across the whole decade. 310

look first at the view of national politics that emerges from the original 1960 edition, treat the "Postdata 1963" separately as marking a pivotal change in Benedetti's thinking, and examine the additional articles as forerunners to the 1971-1973 period, the two years of Benedetti's most intense involvement in Uruguayan political affairs, both as writer and activist.

The "cola de paja" in the title alludes to a Uruguayan idiom which describes "a state of mind" that is "the antechamber of cowardice. Not . . . cowardice itself but . . . the mental disposition that will characterise the decisive moment which precedes it. If to have a straw tail is to feel guilty, that sense of guilt takes a definite course: that of an attitude which badly needs to be assumed, but isn't"(17). Taking the Montevideo lower and upper middle class as its norm, the book expands on the thesis that "the present crisis is based primarily on a misappropriation of the moral resources of our people" and that "what has brought us to this nearly desperate apathy, this situation of social collapse, has more to do with the betrayals and cowardice of individuals than theoretical propositions and ideological platforms"(122). What Benedetti was interested in displaying were the deficiencies resulting from what Rial has called "the effective Batllistization of the population", which he defines as "the internalization by a great number of people (particularly by the middle classes that Batlle 311

supported) of a universalistic, tolerant, and lay ideology favourable to state paternalism".18 This emphasis “on tearing apart the solipsistic entrails of the liberal, urban, cosmopolitan individualism of [Uruguay’s] bourgoisie [mesocracia]”19 occasioned the more serious of the criticisms levelled at the book on its first publication: that the concern with a particular social class to the virtual exclusion of all others and the preoccupation with the ethical and the psychological permitted only scant, superficial or misinformed attention to the political, economic and historical roots of the problems Benedetti catalogued,20 although, more recently, Trigo has vindicated the usefulness of Benedetti’s position (186-7). Despite his brusque response to such criticisms in the second prologue of 1963, we shall see that Benedetti’s subsequent development confirms their judgement and converts the book into "a crossroads and a meditation prior to making deeply felt course corrections" (Mejía Duque in Fornet, Recopilación, 265). As Paoletti suggests, El país was an intuitive book written without the aid of political theory,

18 J. Rial, "Makers and Guardians of Fear: Controlled Terror in Uruguay", in J. E. Corradi, P. Weiss Hagen, M. A. Garretón(eds), Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America(California University Press, 1992), 90. (I have coorected the repeated misspelling of Batlle's name in this article.) 19 A Trigo, Caudillo, estado, nación. Literatura, historia e ideología en Uruguay (Gaithersburg, Hispamérica, 1990), 186. 20 See, for example, R. Cotelo, "Joven iracundo", El País (26 December 1960), 6 and A. Rama, "El escritor y su país", Marcha (16 December 1960), n. p. Real de Azúa (Antología, II, 514-7) gives a full summary of the main objections and adds one or two of his own. 312

which Benedetti would begin to read partly as a result of the criticisms made of the book (Aguafiestas, 103).

It was in this general setting that Benedetti took a stick to the institutions and representatives of national politics. In "El subsuelo de la calma"["The Subsoil of Calm"](70-80), he satirised the complacent, self- congratulatory attitude to democracy, which had become for the majority of Uruguayans "a habit, a good habit, of course"(70, his emphasis). So much so that they now believed their own propaganda about it(71-2), but "perhaps we put too much trust in the perfection of our institutions, in the simply theoretical value of the word democracy"(72), a sentence which now sounds prophetic. In fact, Benedetti believed, "democracy in Uruguay is a marvellous network of appearances. . . rather than a terse, polished surface, it is just a shell" which is "almost perfect"(73-4). Inside it, however, hypocrisy was rife(74-6). Benedetti concluded that "[i]nstead of being a guarantee of freedom, a platform for justice and a defence of human rights, Uruguayan democracy has become a refuge for social climbers, hypocrites and the corrupt"(77). Later, he summed up his argument in the following image: "when we stand up and pronounce with carefree happiness the word democracy, we only succeed in looking like the absentminded gentleman who attends the party in full evening dress, but forgets to 313

put on his trousers"(96). For Benedetti, Uruguayan democracy was a sham.

The techniques used here are typical of those employed throughout the book: irony which borders on sarcasm; circumstantial or anecdotal evidence which relies on the author's personal experience alone for its authority; penetrating images or metaphors to pithily sum up a main point. Such methods are, I would suggest, particularly appropriate in a book which concentrates on people rather than more abstract matters such as institutions and laws. For Benedetti never seems to imply that the statutes which regulate the running of parliament, the press, elections and political parties could be strengthened so as to enforce a public accountability which might protect them against manipulation by corrupt individuals. Rather, he always came back to the notion that it was the individuals who ran and used the institutions or devised and implemented the laws who needed improving to make them more ethically responsible people. Paoletti correctly describes El país as "meditations by a moralist convinced perhaps a little ingenuously of the virtues of sincerity"(Aguafiestas, 97). Consequently, his strictures on the practice of democracy in Uruguay are merely symptoms of the moral flabbiness he saw everywhere. In short, Benedetti was at a stage in his intellectual evolution where he wished to think and write about politics, but was as yet unable to do so politically. 314

This may contribute to the vagueness that surrounds Benedetti's description of his own political position. While obviously wanting to disassociate himself from what he saw as the average Uruguayan's lack of commitment (84) and general indifference to political matters (104), the closest he came to making his own loyalties clear is expressed as follows: "I have no intention of denying that I feel more comfortable on the left than on the right"(122). It can legitimately be asked whether being on the left is a question of "feeling comfortable" and even where "on the left" is. The hints offered elsewhere in the book provide only a confused answer. He wrote supportively of the (in 1960) still very young and not yet communist Cuban Revolution, with particular emphasis on the personal qualities of Fidel (84 and 113-4) but expressed doubts about the continual changes of official line by Communist Party representatives in Latin America(115); he spoke out against United States imperialism and in favour of "solidarity" with the rest of Latin America (especially in "De espaldas a América"["With our Backs to Latin America"] [108-117]); he attacked Marcha in terms reminiscent of Flo's (see this study's "Introduction") for its lofty, hands-off critical perspective (87-93) but wrote later that "ours would need to be a revolution from within democracy, but above all a revolution in consciousness [conciencia]"(125, his emphasis); he attempted to rescue 315

Artigas from the clutches of the conservatives and singled out for admiration his "incorruptible sense of dignity"(123- 4).

All of this is far too fragmentary, personalised and even self-contradictory to add up to a coherent political position. It is, rather, a set of political attitudes, as loosely tied together as they are dotted around the text. As he put it in 1973: "[W]ith El país , I took a few more risks in the political area, and that helped me to search for political positions within myself. A kind of challenge I set myself to find out what political position I should take up, at a time when I was full of doubts"(Ruffinelli, “Una trinchera”, 31). As we have seen, he will start his journey toward resolving them from two premises: a deep distrust of the practice (if not the theory) of democracy in Uruguay, and a personal, individualist ethics which demands sincerity and honesty towards oneself as well as others. The road will not be an easy one.

The mere fact that the "Posdata 1963"(127-149) transcribes a speech delivered to the Uruguayan Socialist Party suggests that Benedetti had at least begun to make a firmer political commitment, an idea confirmed in a 1971 interview in which he looked back at this period: "[I] think that the failure of the Unión Popular [the Socialist-led coalition in the 1962 elections] was very important for me. I think it was a pretty serious shock", implying that Benedetti 316

was one of those who had been somewhat naive about the clumsily arranged coalition’s electoral chances. About the speech itself, he explained that one of his preoccupations was that the left had "wasted" its efforts in the campaign because "we had not discovered how to counteract the propaganda unleashed by the "pro- imperialist and pro-oligarchy press", although there was "a potential capital the left had with which the right could not compete. We could at least beat them on the terrain of the imagination".21 Benedetti indulged in some wishful thinking and oversimplification here in magically uniting divided and often antagonistic groups into a vague "left", with which he could identify himself (via the first person plural) and against which he could oppose an equally falsely monolithic "right". In addition, the last two sentences come dangerously close to implying that "we" could not defeat "them" in any area except the imagination.

Near the beginning of the "Posdata"(128), Benedetti makes a direct reference to an essay by the political scientist and sociologist Aldo Solari entitled "Requiem

21 E González Bermejo, "El caso Mario Benedetti", in J. Ruffinelli(ed), Mario Benedetti: variaciones críticas (Libros del Astillero, 1973), 30 and 32. For information on the Unión Popular and other leftwing groups' participation in the elections, see Chapter Three above. In one of the very few serious studies of Benedetti's literary and political essays, Nils Castro gives the incorrect impression that Benedetti's allegiance at the time was to FIDEL, the grouping centred on the Communist Party ("La moral de los hechos aclara su palabra", in Fornet, 73). In fact, he does not mention the split in the Uruguayan left's ranks at all. 317

para la izquierda".22 Written in November 1962 immediately after the elections, it considers the results as a whole, but it serves as a useful counterpoint to throw into greater relief Benedetti's perspective on the post-election problems facing the different groups on the left. For example, although Solari admitted that "[t]he crisis of the traditional parties is real and is very important for the country's future"(144), he also felt that any attempt to supplant the democratic process itself would be dangerous because "it could only benefit forces much worse than those that have triumphed now”(136), an opinion which was in the long run to prove only too well founded. Benedetti, however, was much less moderate: "I confess that I believe less and less in the possibilities of parliament and the election formula"("Posdata", 127). While he still accepted the validity of democracy in its original sense of a "creative, confictual, constructive parliament", he saw no point at all in "this parliament Uruguayan style, in which even the best intentioned are completely absorbed by paralysis, submissiveness, manoeuvering and bureaucracy"(131-2). For Benedetti, the situation glimpsed by Solari had already happened: "Unless the traditional parties radically change their policy . . . , however many elections they win, they will in the end be destroyed by the economic collapse of the country"(148).

22 A. Solari, Estudios sobre la sociedad uruguaya, II(Arca, 1965), 135- 155. I compare the same two essays in Chapter Three with reference to the 1962 elections. 318

Since Benedetti was willing to contemplate alternatives to the democratic process in a way that Solari was not, he could be much more optimistic about the future. It was from this base that he approached the dual theme of fragmentation and unity on the left. Having made the potentially damaging admission that he was not affiliated to any particular group and had no trade union experience, thereby running the risk of sounding "naive or worse", Benedetti announced the aim around which, in his view, any future leftwing unity must be built: “The day the Uruguayan left understands (and acts accordingly) that the most important thing is social justice . . . , only then will the Uruguayan left have become a credible possibility for the average person”(134). The term "social justice" was only defined negatively in the essay as "putting an end to hunger, . . . unrestrictedly large land holdings, the capitalist system [and] mental colonialism". Projecting the Cuban Revolution as the idealised antithesis of Uruguay’s political quagmire, Benedetti underlined the "moral purity" with which it was undertaken (138), stressing that any way out for the left "must include political honesty, constructive dialogue and an attitude of frankness, because these are the only areas in which the traditional parties cannot compete"(146). Although personal ethics could now be added to the imagination as a further advantage the left had over the right, Benedetti highlighted not the nature of the 319

policies to be put forward but the desired qualities of the individuals who should frame them.

For Benedetti, the left had a choice: "I . . . think the left has to make a decision once and for all. At this juncture, it is not possible to play the card of Revolution within an election formula, or to play the card of representative democracy within a revolutionary platform"("Posdata", 135). On which way to jump in this dilemma, Benedetti hedged his bets somewhat. On the one hand, he believed that "the left should not get into the dirty games of parliamentary politics", which had lost all respectability on the left and among some supporters of the main parties, "not only because it has been wisely discarded by all those people with a real urgency to transform their social and political structure, but also because in our country it means only slowness, ineffectiveness and . . . an impressive hole in the budget"(131). Moreover, it would illogically require the traditional parties to participate in the dismantling of the system which secured their own privileges (135). On the other hand, however, here agreeing with Solari, for whom "the promise of a revolution sounds like something totally unreal dreamed up by intellectuals"("Requiem", 153), Benedetti felt that "to think about a revolution, in this country and at this time, will only demonstrate what Eliseo Salvador Porta had called 'disregard of the available 320

individual'"("Posdata", 135).23 Ultimately, Benedetti refused to take sides on this issue, preferring the perhaps utopian possibility that the "available individual" could be persuaded to support a radical political platform proposed by a united left: "I trust that when we make a fair copy of this aspiration, we will find it so persuasive and wholesome, so inevitable and believable, that we will not hesitate in making it highly contagious" (148-9).

Whether the electorate would line up to get their dose depended largely on who, or rather what, the average available individual was. About this Benedetti was admirably clear: "This country's current 'available person' is evidently moderate, indifferent to politics, against violence, has little sense of solidarity, is superstitious about the word freedom"(135) and was distrustful of overtly ideological propaganda (129). In this Benedetti concurred with Solari, for whom "if this election shows anything it is that Uruguay is a moderate country" ("Requiem", 153). To explain the moderate individual's political preferences, Benedetti quoted Solari on the social and economic role of the major parties as surrogate welfare agencies, but added the impact of the political propaganda in the main newspapers (an easy target) and "the celebrated argument

23 The reference is to E. Salvador Porta, Uruguay: realidad y reforma agraria [1961]. The relevant sentence reads: "Disregard for the idiosyncrasy of the available individual is one characteristic of the arbitrariness with which periods of crisis are plagued"(3rd edition, EBO, 1969, 15). 321

about 'not wasting your vote'" on candidates with no hope of achieving even a minor share of power and influence("Posdata", 128-9). He then suggested that the voting habits of the lower middle and working classes reflected their bourgeois aspirations, tacitly confirming along the way the success of the ruling class in molding dominant cultural norms (135). This obviously substituted speculation for knowledge about the people he was discussing and invites the suspicion that Benedetti was largely ignorant of the way the working class approached such matters. Solari was not much help here either, believing that the casting of a vote was more a ritualistic participation in a mythology of nationhood than the reflection of any one person's expectation of influencing the way things were ("Requiem", 151-2).

If Benedetti's description of the "available" citizen was at all accurate, it is not clear how anyone was likely to be receptive to a radical political program or to the requests for self-sacrifice and hard work that would no doubt accompany it. Recognising this, Benedetti deduced that, whatever options the left took up, "it seems indispensable to form in the people a political consciousness which they currently lack". This would take years, but "we are convinced that, even if they are unable or unwilling to realise it, the people need social justice now"("Posdata",143). The separation between an ignorant 322

"people" and a "we" who knew what was good for them was not only dangerously patronising, but determined that, in 1962, "the whole campaign was designed for the converted and not for the unconvinced", when "the vote to win over . . . was . . . that of the reluctant"(139).

The net result was that the left's campaign appealed only to "workers and intellectuals" but the election result was decided by the middle sectors of society who were "accustomed to a certain kind of presentation, to a certain kind of expository language"(139):

Curiously, when we intellectuals demand social justice, the urgency of the demand has less to do with us (who generally have an acceptable standard of living) than with the poorer classes, who, strangely, are those who with their vote reject that social justice, or at least delay its coming (143-4).

Since both Solari and Ganón estimate that the lower and working classes comprised around 30 percent of the population,24 the election results indicate clearly that the left had failed to convince many of them either. Meanwhile, the adverbs "curiously" and "strangely" suggest that, as noted earlier, intellectuals like Benedetti still could not work out why those they wanted to reach would not listen to them. Solari, pointing to the same isolation of the intellectuals from the rest of the community, was much more severe in his judgement. He agreed that intellectuals

24 A. Solari, "Partidos políticos y clase social en el Uruguay", in his Sociología del Uruguay, II (Arca, 1965), 124 and I. Ganón, Estructura social del Uruguay (Editorial As, 1966), 206. As pointed out in Chapter Three, note 24, assessment of class distribution in Uruguay is extremely hazardous, so such figures must be considered only as approximations. 323

seldom needed the services rendered by the political parties to less fortunate members of society ("Requiem", 149), but added later that they simply failed in their duty to analyse the state of the nation realistically (155).

Perhaps because he failed to understand the reasons for the gap between the intellectuals and their potential public, Benedetti's own remedy for the shortcomings of the left's campaign sounds somewhat lame and confusing. He believed that the leftwing parties should "substitute for the dollars they do not have the creative imagination they may have", exploiting humour in particular ("Posdata", 145). His examples of this "new propaganda language" from elsewhere in Latin America are surprising in that they include kidnapping, hijacking ships and the removal of paintings from exhibitions of works on loan from major foreign galleries (144-5). All such possibilites involve varying degrees of civil disobedience and imply some risk to life or limb (of either perpetrators or bystanders) but are only dubiously related to any political program. And while such acts would almost certainly attract considerable publicity, "to avoid any misunderstanding", Benedetti made it clear that he was not suggesting that "we" should rush out and start hijacking Uruguayan ships (145).25

25 The Tupamaros would later evolve daring, innovative and politically relevant versions of some of these tactics, particularly during their first two years of operations. 324

If Benedetti appeared to withdraw here from the consequences of what he said about the forms the new propaganda should take, he was still more reticent about its content:

while the right can proselytise with promises, jobs and gifts, the left cannot use these means, because its posture must be to condemn corruption and is instructive, severe, moral. The people have vices, defects and frustrating habits, but it has been proved (Cuba is obviously the best example) that they can be cured of them, when from their mentors there is imposed on them an unblemished honesty and un-shakeable exemplary qualities (134).

The people, trapped in their servility, blinded by ignorance and false consciousness, weakened by fear and repeated betrayals, would be forced to be free by an enlightened and incorruptible, ideologically and ethically pure vanguard. This vision is certainly an alternative to democracy but seems, on the face of it, to be as unrealistic as any of those Benedetti had been criticising, and even gets close to some of them. And, yet again, the emphasis fell on the personal qualities of the leaders rather than on the substance of the movement they were directing. Solari was much less hopeful:

the other solution for the left is to speak the language of truth. . . It may be suggested that 325

it . . . will probably not bring them many votes but it has been shown that the other one does not get them any either. At least the language of truth has the chance . . . of contributing to the triumph of ideas and the renewal of political discourse which the country so much needs ("Requiem", 153).

In the "Posdata 1963", the choice Benedetti insisted that the left must make between revolution and parliamentary representation mirrored the one he was unable to make himself. He reiterated his distrust of democracy but simultaneously rebuked the left for not knowing how to appeal to the electorate. He believed a radical transformation of society to be all but impossible in the Uruguay of the time but the most positive moments in the speech were clearly inspired by his idealisation of a Cuban Revolution he found simply overwhelming. Oscillating between the projections of his desires and the insights of his reason, he could not fully think through the situation before him, and ended up stranded between an absolute moral imperative and a recalcitrant political and social reality.

Benedetti would not find an opportunity to resolve this dilemma in Uruguay until 1971. In the intervening years, especially from 1966 on, he would, in fact, spend little time in the country, making short trips to various parts of the world as conference speaker, journalist or invited literary guest, spending a year working in Paris (1966-7) 326

and, most importantly, having an extended sojourn in Havana as founding director of the Institute for Literary Research at the Casa de Las Américas cultural centre (1968-71). While preparing for the first of the longer stays abroad, he was asked in an interview why he thought so many Uruguayans were emigrating. He, of course, was not, despite rumours to the contrary to which he refers in the interview,26 but his reply suggests at least one reason for his own journeyings:

[O]thers [leave] because evidently they cannot stand the sense of frustration felt in our country . . . ; the powers-that-be have no intention of renewing anything, and (let's face it) the people don't seem to feel an irrepressible impulse to create their own opening . . . It's a dead end.27

While it might be expected that the essays of the section added to the last two editions of El país de la cola de paja28 would reflect this pessimism and frustration, only the first could be plausibly held to do so. "Esa anastesia llamada fútbol"["That Anaesthetic Called Football"](153-6) is an exercise in conspiracy theory which converts the Uruguayan

26 Since Benedetti himself had branded emigration as one expression of the "antechamber of cowardice" in El país (94), the flurry of innuendo surrounding his departure was potentially very embarrassing. Together with the permanent expatriation of a number of other well known figures (including Rodríguez Monegal), it generated a heated polemic, initiated in the aggressive "Carta a un uruguayo que se va" by the Marcha columnist Carlos María Gutiérrez. This and a selection of responses can be found in Barros-Lémez, Intelectuales y Política , 14- 32. 27 'Epoca', "Benedetti: 'es cierto, me voy, pero como siempre: para volver", Epoca (3 September 1965), 9. 28 References will now be to the 8th edition (Arca, 1970). 327

national sport into an 'opium of the people' by having the fervour it generates manipulated by those in power to divert attention away from the nation's more pressing difficulties. The remaining articles, most of them written in the latter years of the 1960s, reflect the optimism and enthusiasm inspired by Benedetti's increased contact with post-revolutionary Cuba.

There was a marked hardening of his attitude towards the democratic process during the late 1960s. In a 1967 review of a documentary about the previous year's national elections, he wrote of the egotism of politicians and the alienation of the electorate (157-160). By the first weeks of 1970, he was telling his Cuban readers that, however important its place in Latin American history, "liberal democracy" had failed to offer "any guarantee of social justice, economic independence or stimulus for development", had been "squandered, corrupted and debased" to the point that it had become a "totally defenseless and servile apparatus whenever imperialism decide[d] to turn it into its tool"(188).29 Even allowing for a certain amount of rhetorical overkill for the benefit of his socialist audience, the terms of this attack are much stronger than any used in previous editions of El país .

29 In "Un instante decisivo", first published in Pensamiento Crítico [Havana] (February 1970), 220-5. 328

If the foregoing passages draw on and extend Benedetti's treatment of a theme from his earlier essays, "Pacheco Areco, un hombre providencial"["Pacheco Areco, A Providential Man"](171-70) and "El diálogo en el tiempo del desprecio"["Dialogue in the Time of Scorn"](178-182) foreshadow a feature which will become a constant in the essays of the 1970s: biting sarcasm directed at the president who was overseeing the last stages of this erosion of democracy in Uruguay. Pacheco was a gift from providence because "[t]hanks to him [and] his style of government (obstinate, despotic, arbitrary, servile [entreguista]), the average citizen has matured . . . [and] changed politically at an incredible rate"(171). "Thanks to Pacheco", "the State- as-father has turned into the State-as-policeman" (172), and consequently, at long last, he added bitterly, "Uruguay has become a real part of Latin America"(173). We are here at the first stage of drawing up battle lines: locate and name the enemy.

Against Pacheco's increasingly used state of emergency measures and their accompanying censorship, which Benedetti defined as "the institutionalised intention of preventing the truth from being known or communicated"(167), he seems to have taken Solari's earlier advice to the left and advocated a "terrorism of truth"(166). He urged that everyone take part (167) while avoiding "a new kind of manicheism"(166), advice that 329

Benedetti - as we shall see - would find it ever harder to accept himself. Heaping example on example of lies the government hoped to have meekly accepted as fact (167-9), he concluded that "[i]n times like these, so sunk in a politics of deceit, the truth is always an explosion"(169). His own truth is finally revealed in the last article whose title repeated the question from the survey to which it was a response: "¿Qué hacer con el Uruguay?"["What to Do with Uruguay?"](191-4):

because of its structure, its location, because most of its public services are nationalised and, I would even say, because of its people's temperament, Uruguay seems to be a country made for the socialist system. It is so obvious that I am almost ashamed to say it, but the fact is that my reply . . . cannot be different. That is what I think we should make of Uruguay: a socialist country. Which is one way of saying: a revolutionary country (192).

Both Rama (Generación crítica, 64) and Mejía Duque (Fornet, 265) are right to point to the more precise social and political focus of these later essays, and Benedetti did indeed appear to have thrown in his lot on the side of revolution and to have largely overcome the previous emphasis on individualist ethics. On a return visit to Uruguay in 1969, however, when asked in an interview whether he thought there was now space for a new leftwing grouping, Benedetti replied: "I trust that a way has been opened up for a new force, but above all a new force in each individual: that which is born of the presence in 330

solidarity of the others".30 Borrowing from existentialist ethics, Benedetti was trying to find the full self-realisation of the individual in the collective Other. The test which would decide whether he succeeded and whether progressive politics in Uruguay would survive, was still to come.

From Chronicles to Political Essays - and Back

We have already seen that that one of Benedetti's purposes in republishing in 1985 his political essays from 1971-1973 was to aid the reconstruction of the continuity of Uruguayan political history disrupted by the dictatorship. Benedetti had already referred to this important function in the additional section of El país. In "Un momento decisivo"["A Decisive Moment"](dated January 1970), he had written that the conservatives "put all their luck on one decisive card: the amnesia of the people. But now it turns out that this same people seems to be recovering its memory, and the emerging recollections make up a lethal diagnosis for the professional politician"(189-90). The journalistic chronicle is an ideal vehicle for the twin task of immediate recording and urgent recall, particularly when, as in the case of both Crónicas del 71 and Terremoto y después, it is made to satisfy one of the requirements of the essay as a form noted by Real de Azúa: "[W]hat makes a

30 'El Oriental', "Mario Benedetti: 'Hoy, en Uruguay, el que calla no otorga'", El Oriental (29 August 1969), 8. 331

speech, an article, a journalistic sketch or even a propaganda piece 'essayistic' is an always present potential capacity for generalisation which starts from the concrete; a capacity which gives a lasting quality to what is fleeting, permanence and necessity to the contingent".31 To this, John Berger adds an essential element in a useful discussion of the differences between art which seeks to have an immediate and calculated effect and "long term" works whose meaning is less controled and much broader in scope:

The short-term works, which can justifiably be subsumed under propaganda, must reveal in their structure and form their urgent but temporary function. They should be like 'orders of the day'. If they are not, much of their necessary urgency is lost. Their purpose is to inspire for the immediate task or sacrifice; and the inspiration depends upon the critical uniqueness of the moment.32

Also relevant to the classification of these books are Benedetti's own remarks on the pamphlet which, he came to believe, "is as legitimate a genre as any other, with its own laws and . . . difficulties, a genre which can reach optimum levels of denunciation and clarification". He then added, importantly as far as these essays are concerned, that the pamphlet "need not but can be demagogic, without necessarily loosing its efficacy".33

31 C. Real de Azúa, Antología del ensayo uruguayo contemporáneo (Universidad de la República, 1964), I, 25, his emphasis. 32 Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the USSR (London, Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), 54. 33 M. Benedetti, Letras de emergencia (Buenos Aires, Alfa, 1973), 8-9, his italics. 332

This combination of essay and propaganda sums up Crónicas and Terremoto, neither of which were written with the intention that they be either published or read in book form. Rather, they were the product of a day by day, week by week activity as a columnist writing urgent commentaries on events, issues and personalities of the time or as an activist earnestly participating in an unfolding political scene. As such, their frame of reference was largely limited to the demands of the moment, while their intended audience was comprised of readers whose actions and opinions could have repercussions in the same arena which motivated both the essays' composition and their author's own activities. However, their publication in book form can be seen as an intervention in the same process, as was shown by the speed with which they were brought out. Crónicas, completed in January 1972, appeared in March and Terremoto was off the presses even more quickly - its preface and final essay were dated August 1973, the book being printed only one month later.34

Crónicas and Terremoto merely bundle together, with all the arbitrariness of strict chronological sequence, short

34 Other works judged to be of political significance received similarly swift treatment by printers and publishers. Campiglia's El Uruguay movilizado was finished on October 5 1971, carries an aftterword dated the 18th of the same month and came off the presses before the elections at the end of November; Martínez Moreno's Los días que vivimos , whose introduction is dated May 1973, was printed in June. 333

pieces dashed off in the heat of battle and which, both individually and as a group, sought to influence the outcome of the conflict. Escritos políticos, on the other hand, is the result of the far from easy task of constructing at a later date, with the ambiguous benefit of twelve painful years of hindsight, a one-volume selection which would best illustrate Benedetti's overriding concerns during those hectic two years. He did not explain his criteria for selection but did say that “[i]t is possible that, among these texts, the reader will find correct diagnoses and erroneous prophecies” and that he has made no attempt to put right his mistakes (Escritos , 5).

He did not, however, tell his 1985 audience that the anthology omits about one third of the articles collected in the earlier two books. Escritos reprints 26 of the 36 essays, 3 speeches and one poem in Crónicas and 32 of the 48 pieces in Terremoto. The reasons for some of these omissions are quite clear. For example, the poem "Noche de sábado"["Saturday Night"], a sarcastic commentary on the traditional parties' attempt on the eve of the 1971 elections to emulate the Frente Amplio's last tumultuous mass demonstration three days before, appeared in Letras de emergencia [1973] and is regularly reprinted in the successive editions of Inventario, the frequently updated and extended volume of Benedetti's complete poems. "La revolución como hecho cultural"["Revolution as a Cultural 334

Act"](Crónicas, 188-191) was neither directly about the Uruguayan political scene nor intended for a local audience, being a response to a survey by the Buenos Aires literary journal Sur on the topical but general issue of the relations beween culture and politics.

Many of the remaining omissions can be justified on more general aesthetic or intellectual grounds. In addition to Benedetti's expressed wish not to burden the reader with irrelevant or ephemeral details, there is the obvious need to avoid now redundant repetitions. Many themes (such as censorship, rightwing propaganda in the press, the suspension of constitutional rights and guarantees, the nature and role of the Frente Amplio, the policies and personal conduct of the two presidents of the time) recur at different points throughout the essays without a corresponding development in the author's approach to them. Bearing in mind that the essays were produced week by week, such repetition is inevitable and, in some cases, desireable and even politically necessary in order to reinforce or clarify a particularly important issue. Clearly, however, this propagandistic virtue promptly becomes a merely tiresome vice when the pieces are collected together to be read as a whole long after the hue and cry is over. There may also be cases where, with hindsight, Benedetti considered his treatment of a theme to have been ill-judged, although, as we have seen, he does 335

not systematically attempt to hide any errors revealed by the passage of time. Nonetheless, it is certainly possible to see, for example, the optimism of "Hacia el esbozo de un nuevo Uruguay"["Toward the Sketch of a New Uruguay"](Crónicas , 60-65), as overstated (and out of place in 1985) and the analogy between the national sport and the state in "Para el fútbol hay millones"["For Football There Are Millions"](82-90) as too forced, to warrant either essay's republication. All such revisions seem designed to create a streamlined, accelerated and accessible account of Benedetti's political probings.

Most surprising of all is the complete omission of all ten speeches and broadcasts made by Benedetti on behalf of the Movimiento 26 de Marzo, a far-left group which he co-founded in 1971 and co-led during the first and most turbulent period of its operations and which joined the Frente Amplio before the November 1971 national elections. A later section of this chapter will analyse its political platform, Benedetti's own contribution and his thoughts about it both at the time and since. Suffice it to say for now that, by 1985, his attitude towards his period of activism was, to say the least, ambivalent, and he may simply not have wished to revive it. While such pieces might not have been collectively authored, they would almost certainly have incorporated positions worked out jointly with his political colleagues, and might therefore be 336

constrained by the need to present a consensus approach.35

Therefore, they would fall outside the parameters of Escritos políticos which were to present one individual's response to two years of turmoil. It should be remembered, however, that some of them had been included in Crónicas, the preface to which had proclaimed a similar intention. If in 1972 Benedetti had felt the need to give priority to the general struggle for social justice and the collectivist tendencies of the particular revolutionary politics he then espoused, by 1985 he seems to have felt able to reassert his rights and obligations as an independent leftwing intellectual, again reasserting, by implication, the importance he attaches to an individualist ethics.

'Them' and 'Us': Structure in Crónicas del 71 and Terremoto y después

The fact that they are made up of pieces individually written on a weekly basis and not originally intended to be gathered or read together, does not mean that Crónicas and Terremoto lack structure. As Benedetti himself wrote, the second is "in some way the continuation" of the first (Terremoto, 7), and this partial continuity bcomes immediately apparent when they are read consecutively. As befits a series of 'chronicles' all but entirely dependent on

35 Benedetti confirms this in Paoletti, Aguafiestas, 159-160, and emphasises how difficult he found it to make such compromises. 337

the hurly-burly of social and political events, their overall shape is determined by the author's involvement in the direction taken by what was happening outside his study window. Consequently, the essays in Crónicas between January and November 1971 subordinate all other concerns to the requirements of the propaganda campaign waged by the Frent Amplio (and within it, Benedetti’s own 26 de Marzo movement) by incorporating all commentary on events, themes and people into a perspective guided by the Frente's electoral strategy and political program.

The articles dated between December 1971 and February 1972 (which form the pivot between the two books) show a marked loss of momentum, partly because the tensions of the election campaign have, of course, disappeared in this interregnum between the poll and the swearing-in of the new president in March, but also because of the time Benedetti and the Frente Amplio needed to recover from the shock and disappointment of defeat. The remainder of Terremoto, extending up to August 1973, is devoted to a polemical analysis of the issues themselves (the internal security measures, the iniquities of torture, the incoming president, government policies on education and cultural activities), without Benedetti having to tailor his examination to the demands of a campaign with specific goals. Consequently, while the general ideological viewpoint remains constant, there is a 338

clear change of tone between the two volumes: the urgency of the first becomes determination in the second; the propagandist expediency of Crónicas becomes hard-hitting discursiveness in Terremoto.

However, the principal structuring device of both books, though more heavily underlined in Crónicas, is the dichotomy 'us' - 'them', which had already left its mark on the "Otros temas nacionales" section of El país dela cola de paja . In "Grietas" ["Chasms"], a poem from 1968, we find these lines: "There is only one/ really deep chasm/ and that is the one between the miracle of human kind/ and the destroyers of miracles". The poem finished: "Ladies and gentlemen/ you must choose/ choose on which side/ you will put down your feet".36 Three years later, in "Las prioridades del escritor"(published in June 1971), referring to the choice which he felt every writer had to make between revolution and literature, Benedetti glossed these same lines as follows: "This priority [i.e. the revolution] is simply decisive in order to know who is with us and who is with the enemy. And this is not Manicheism; it is a demarcation line [deslinde] in the midst of battle".37 All middle ground disappears; the battlefield conditions abolish any no-man's-land. For Benedetti, there are moments of "critical uniqueness" (to use Berger's phrase)

36 Inventario (5th edition, Buenos Aires, Alfa, 1974), 192. 37 Cuaderno cubano (3rd edition, Buenos Aires, Schapire,1974), 167. 339

when everyone must choose where they stand, and Uruguay in 1971 was one of them.

In Crónicas, Benedetti picks up the same image but broadens it when he refers to the Pacheco administration as having "widened atrociously the chasm which separates rich and poor, the privileged and the marginalised"(165). Elsewhere, he uses near synonyms such as "break" and "frontier"(101) and talks of the "abyss" between "the ruling class and the average citizen"(122). The word 'deslinde' reappears to describe the difference beween the Frente Amplio's policies and those of the traditional parties (61) and the "sharp class divisions" accentuated by government measures (Terremoto, 121). The following paragraphs will first build up a general picture of what is on either side of this divide and then concentrate on the major players in this confrontation.38

We are "victors" because we are strong and united and have a raised political consciousness whereas, in the

38 This sharp dichotomy makes Benedetti's political essays partake of the two main qualities attributed by S. Mallo and A. Marrero to the rhetoric of both the far left and far right in the 1960s and 70s ("Modernidad y posmodernidad y su incidencia en las transformaciones del discurso político en Uruguay y Argentina", Revista de Ciencias Sociales [Montevideo], 4[1990], 34-42): "The privileging of the religious moment of politics through the canonisation of principles as absolutes, which translates into the formation of strong collective identities and solidarity within the group" and "a totalising vision" (37), trends which Mallo and Marrero see as being reversed in the period following the return to formal democracy (37-8). 340

"enemy ranks", they are "defeated" by being divided and condemned by the very violence and brutality which exposes their desperation (Crónicas, 218-9). Since they are on the side of imperialism, they are "foreigners" in our country which excludes them (Terremoto, 66-7). Both sides speak of peace but theirs is equivalent to the "meek submissiveness" with which we are supposed to tolerate whatever they throw at us while ours is "the peace of justice, education, freedom and the complete self- realisation of the human being"(58-9). Our peace is an "oasis"; theirs is a "desert"(72). What opposes us and them is not just a political agenda but two entirely different "worldviews" (Crónicas, 137), "an almost unbridgeable abyss" between each side's "conception of the human being"(141-2).

We, of course, are the people and they the "oligarchy" and its allies. The people's "natural, implacable enemy is . . . the ruling class which dictates copy to the editorial writers, and, above all, the imperialists who give them their support and their ideology"(40) while "the enemy of the oligarchy is the people. It always was and it is now"(Terremoto, 146). The current "confrontation" is not between two political parties "hard to tell apart" but "plainly and simply between the people and the oligarchy"(Crónicas, 152). While "the people always played the part of the swindled, . . . the politician, the oligarch, the banker, the newspaper owner, the large landowner played the role of swindler"(72), 341

although "the ones who do the work are the people and not the oligarchy"(Terremoto, 48).

Comparing the age of the average Uruguayan politician to that of those who flocked to join the ranks of the clandestine or legalised left, Benedetti, recalling Maggi, suggests that:

a country like this one, governed by old men, spoiled by old men, betrayed by old men, ruined by old men, sold by old men (and by young old men, the gerontocracy's faithful, precocious disciples), seems today to be fast approaching a period in its history when it will be rescued by young people, reconstructed by young people, revolutionised by young people (Crónicas, 25).

It is due as much as anything to the influence of the young, that elsewhere he is able to contrast "the complicated hypocrisy of the powerful" with "the hygienic frankness of the people"(Terremoto, 233) and the mediocrity of "official 'unculture'" with the inventiveness and generosity of the "unofficial culture" made by artists who give their time and talent to the left for nothing (2-3).

Their side of this divide is symbolised for Benedetti by the eventually interchangeable figures of the two presidents Jorge Pacheco Areco and Juan Bordaberry.39

39 The page references to Benedetti's characterisations of these and other figures mentioned in the following paragraphs are not intended to exhaust the number of occasions they appear but merely to give an indication of their frequency and ubiquitousness throughout Crónicas and Terremoto. 342

Pacheco is portrayed as an autocrat (Crónicas, 201), a dictator(203, 211; Terremoto, 33, 39), an unenlightened despot (Crónicas, 17, 93; Terremoto, 33) or an absolute monarch sometimes referred to simply as Jorge I (Crónicas, 143, 184-5, 199-200; Terremoto, 32). As such, his qualities are stubbornness (Crónicas, 93, 156, 184; Terremoto, 22, 31, 159, 164, 190), mediocrity (Crónicas, 144, 184; Terremoto, 31, 33), ineptitude (Crónicas, 95; Terremoto, 190), vanity (Crónicas, 145, 184), arbitrariness ( 160; Terremoto, 31) and an overbearing sense of his own power (Crónicas, 145, 184; Terremoto, 32). Among juicier descriptions, we find Pacheco called "a Cromagnon man" (Crónicas, 184; Terremoto, 33) whose "style" was "gruff"[hirsuto] (191), while one of his speeches was a "transparent cocktail of accumulated impotence and rancour"(Crónicas, 145). Benedetti suspects that he would feel "impregnated and ennobled" by Mussolini's sentence: "'No need for dogma; discipline is enough'"(165). Following up a reference to Ionesco's 1962 play Exit The King, Benedetti likens Pacheco to its protagonist, King Bérenger I (143), who made his first appearance two years earlier in the anti-authoritarian Rhinoceros, which may be the source of Benedetti's depiction of Pacheco as "rhinocerontic"(Terremoto, 39, 164). Equally Ionesco- esque is the vision of Pacheco as "a frustrated circus animal tamer who makes noisy whipcracks 343

at a cage with no beasts before an audience of empty seats" (Crónicas, 138).

There is clearly intended to be no pathos - as there is in Ionesco's The Chairs, for example - in this desolate image of a man going through the ritual motions of his show even though he lacks the means to do it and the audience exists only in his imagination. On the contrary, for Benedetti, Pacheco's isolation, his "extraterritoriality", is self-imposed (155). Herein lies his greatest crime. Pacheco is "alien to the country"(91), "a foreigner in our republic" who is "irrelevant to our needs, our temperament, our rhythm of life"(155). He is, in short, rightly seen as an enemy of the people (148), as "something else" [otra cosa](91). Pacheco is hived off from all that is human, placed beyond the pale, relegated to the level of some "thing" between a primitive animal and a blundering neanderthal.

Bordaberry, the "more or less elected president40 (admirer of the Brazilian dictatorship, cattle farmer, reactionary, self-declared enemy of University and Church)"(Terremoto, 23), fares little better, although initially it is a case of guilt by association. He has been "annointed by Jorge I"(Crónicas, 185) and is therefore his "dauphin"(Terremoto, 29) while Pacheco's "ghost hovers in authoritarian fashion" over his chosen successor (236). If

40 For the origins of this quip, see Chapter Three, note 66 above. 344

imperialism is the sorcerer, Pacheco was the sorcerer's apprentice and Bordaberry merely the "apprentice's apprentice"(132), while his attraction to Brazilian authoritarianism and, thereby, his distance from Uruguayan national sentiment, are emphasised by Benedetti's referring to him as "the Cisplatine"(27, 29), after the name of the former Brazilian province which became the site of modern Uruguay in the 1820s. Bordaberry wanted "to change the image" of Pacheco's administration though not its substance (38, Benedetti's emphasis), but both are equally stubborn (250) and both "opted for the submission and humiliation of the individual"(191). While Pacheco displayed "an incapacity for dialogue (and for monologue as well)"(Crónicas, 184), "nobody can doubt [Bordaberry's] incapacity for dialogue" either, although "it remains to be seen whether he really has any capacity for monologue" (Terremoto, 235). If Pacheco was "merely an instrument, a mouthpiece, a poor and mediocre puppet, an errand boy for the bankers, the imperialists, the oligarchy and their ignoble interests"(Crónicas, 211), Bordaberry, whose administration is as "inefficient" and relies as much on force to assert its authority as his predecessor's (Terremoto, 249), also ends up being a "symbol" of the state as "enemy of the people" (240).

While it is perfectly clear from these examples that, for Benedetti, there is a continuum between the individuals 345

who act as figureheads and the practices of the state and international economy of which he sees them as the embodiment, there are moments when he makes this explicit. Asserting that among other politicians closely associated with the Colorado government, "the state is . . . Bordaberry . . . and the dark shade of Pacheco", he goes on:

But, today, the state is also the banks, the huge landholdings, capital investments and the main newspapers; and it is the little group which shamelessly hands over our sovereignty, and it is also in some way the sacred imperialists who pull the strings, accept tributes and pocket dividends (209).

What is at work, then, in Benedetti's characterisation of 'their' side of the conflict is a kind of secular demonisation process which takes in not only the main players but the entire social, political and economic structure of the country. Imperialism is, as it were, an absent but all- controling Satan, Pacheco and Bordaberry are his favoured acolytes and representatives, while the remainder are disciples of greater or lesser importance and renown, all of whom do the devil's work. We shall now see how this pattern is answered almost piece for piece on the other side of the "chasm".

General Seregni, the Frente Amplio's presidential candidate, is a symbol of a quite different order. He is "one of the purest, most capable and most sincere figures on the 346

national political scene", combining "undoubted efficiency" with "maximum honesty". All those who work with him "testify to the frankness and equanimity with which this soldier of serene mind and constructive spirit is capable of giving himself to team work"(Crónicas, 243). Frequent quotations from his speeches show that, for Benedetti, the moral qualities of Seregni the man, his straightforwardness, generosity and honesty, make him fit to be recognised by all as the figurehead of the organisation they are working for and as the chief representative of a political program diametrically opposed to everything which, in Benedetti's formulation, Pacheco and Bordaberry stand for.

Not surprisingly, the Frente Amplio shares the qualities of the man who leads it. Throughout its political proposals "there circulates a sap, invisible but decisive, which is their ethical coherence, their honest wish to serve the real country and not the one made out of words"(78). Picking up a theme from the "Posdata 1963", Benedetti advocates adding imagination to ethics so as to counteract conservative propaganda: "The natural property of the left is the plain and simple truth; that is its battle field, and that is where the élite refuses all confrontation"(80-1). If the Frente is going to convince people to make the necessary sacrifices, it must do so by cultivating a "mysticism of solidarity" whereby each individual realises that their "neighbour [prójimo] is the person right next to them 347

[próximo]. . . , the one next door [vecino], their true fellow human being, the one working together with them, elbow to elbow"(81).41 It is only to be expected that Benedetti would underline the "importance" of Seregni's "reminding public opinion that the people's forces have claimed human dignity as a basic condition for the country finding the path to salvation, both in the economic sphere and in the area of simple living together" (Terremoto, 189).

If General Seregni embodies the qualities of the organisation he leads, the Frente Amplio itself is only an expression of its members and those whose interests it represents: the people [pueblo]. For Benedetti, the people are quite simply the country itself(Crónicas, 43), whereas for the other side, “the people are a shapeless mass whose principle virtue is their propensity for being utilised, used, in short, betrayed"(44). Benedetti displays an almost unlimited faith in the people's essential humaneness: "Unlike the oligarchy, the people not only do not betray or

41 Earlier on (Crónicas, 71), Benedetti refers to "the confidence of the people in the people" as "a modernised, materialist and militant form of the old biblical adage about love for one's neighbour [prójimo]". By tracing the use of the word 'prójimo' through his complete works, it would be possible to show in detail how Benedetti's ideal people [pueblo] is a community of 'prójimos' bound together through the "mysticism of solidarity" by the biblical sense of love. He was to use the word in 1976 to refer to the political organisation (discussed later in this chapter) which he helped to found and lead: "When my neighbour [prójimo] and I participated in the political struggles of 1971-1973, . . . "(R. Fernández Retamar, "Conversación con Mario Benedetti", Cambio , ii, 5[1976], 30). Although he occasionally uses the word, the idea of the 'masses' is quite alien to Benedetti's notion of the people as a communion between individuals who choose to be together. 348

defraud, but embrace every generous impulse with their own irreplaceable generosity"(153) because "no people is insensitive to sincerity, and ours has shown, especially in the last few years, a human quality which today is one of the richest layers of our subsoil"(92). This has allowed them to resist the onslaught of repression, against which Benedetti finds "the serene presence of the people, who show neither fear nor perplexity, not even surprise"(121). On the contrary, they are in a state of constant vigilance: "the people are very awake, one could even say sleepless"(44). Benedetti is able to merge all these qualities into an over-confident, somewhat dreamy vision of the future:

We must show [the oligarchy] that the people (in their faces, with their fists, but above all with their forward strides) are now an ever more overwhelming and determined presence, increasingly aware that their final liberation has ceased to be a utopia and has become a perfectly credible and reachable goal (176).

This triumphalism, which Benedetti criticised but dismissed as tangential after the Frente's election defeat(232), eventually issues in a belief that the people are becoming ready for a new communist society:

For the first time in many decades, the Uruguayan people think, feel and act with a sense of community; for the first time, they imagine and create, not as a consequence of individual conjectures, pain and resentment, but as participants in a transformation that includes us all (217). 349

Given that Benedetti believes that the people, with their new-found strength and determination allied with their essential humanity, can turn on their oppressors, overcome them and build a new society, it is understandable that he would find the religious alegorising of the people's progress in the following passage all but irresistible:

It is true that in these times the crucified Uruguayan people suffer, bleed and die. But the Uruguayan miracle does not consist in the agony, passion and death of the people, but in their certain resurrection(Terremoto, 138).

In such passages, Benedetti indulges in rewriting across an undifferentiated ‘people’ an amalgam of his own desires, the attitudes of his fellow militants, and the Frente's ability to mobilise scores of thousands of supporters in the streets.

If Benedetti sees North American imperialism as the hidden force at work behind the ideology and economic policies of the Uruguayan élite, there is an equally disembodied voice which speaks to those he seeks to encourage. It comes from Uruguay's own past and has a resonant name:

There is [an] older and more noble tradition which is called Artigas, and it is indeed present in this exceptional time in the Eastern Province [ie. Uruguay]. Few public figures sound as contemporary today as that glorious loser; few today have as clear a vision of the present as Artigas had of the future; few have believed as he did, with 350

well-founded and deeply felt reasons, in the people’s reserves of goodness (Crónicas, 149).

It may at first seem contradictory to find a figurehead in a "loser", but Benedetti's point appears to be that the left's task is to complete what Artigas was forced to leave unfinished: the foundation of a state built on the principle of social justice and closely allied to the other peoples of the continent. He appears in the form of quotations42 and what Benedetti says of one of his "sayings", that "today it is more relevant than ever", is clearly intended to be true of them all. The saying in question pertains to Benedetti's constant accusation of the oligarchy's betrayal of the people, and has Artigas writing: "'I will never sell the Uruguayans' rich patrimony at the low price of necessity'", this patrimony being, in Benedetti's conception, the people's moral reserves: "capacity for work, patriotic dignity, a rich imagination, solidarity with other nations, a clear sense of justice and a will towards sovereignty"(Terremoto, 259).43

42 Benedetti's use of quotations and references is constant throughout both books of essays. While some (for example, the references to Lenin in Terremoto , 126 and 128) seem to be the product of the reading of particular works, the vast majority, drawn from just about every conceivable period of human history, give the impression of having been taken from a handy dictionary of quotations, and are invariably used to kick off or round off a particular section of his argument. The cumulative effect is to suggest that the entire range of the best that has ever been thought and said anywhere at any time is on 'our' side in the current struggle. 43 For a sample of many strategic references to Artigas, see Crónicas, 149, 160, 222 and Terremoto, 59, 66, 247. 351

If on the ideologically right hand side of Benedetti's manicheistic division of the Uruguayan political scene into good and bad there is a process of demonisation, it is clear that it is counterbalanced on the left by a similar pattern with the sign reversed. It is, in my view, difficult not to see a near sanctification of the figure of Artigas, with General Seregni and the Frente Amplio as his principle latter day disciples responsible for leading a people which has been made to suffer grievously at the hands of the devil but will now be revived through a mystical notion of community. This blunt edged grand scheme may lack subtlety but performs several functions across both books: it is simultaneously the subject matter, the main rhetorical strategy (constant repetition, each essay being a minor variation on the dominant simple tune), a structuring principle, a moral statement and a political position. In a sense, there are no other themes in the essays, only topics thrown up by the contingencies of the historical process and quickly absorbed into the overall purview. Thus, rightwing youth organisations are distortions of the groups of rebellious young people who support the Frente (Crónicas, 47-8, 101, 208); torture becomes a cowardly and savage assault on the people’s dignity (see especially

Terremoto, 84-9);44 the Law of General Education (passed in January 1973) is seen as the institutionalisation of

44 The avalanche of violence symbolised by, but not restricted to, the practice of torture is the "earthquake" referred to in the title Terremoto (see 89-90, 95-103). 352

punishment to be meted out to the people (Terremoto, 184- 8; 199-205).

If repetition with variations is the predominant technique throughout the essays, the dualism of the basic pattern is reinforced by other subordinate strategies, all of which involve turning words or concepts into their opposites. This may simply take the form of sometimes untranslatable puns: referring to the pettiness and small- mindedness of the mainstream press associated with the traditional parties, Benedetti uses the phrase "la enana prensa grande" (Crónicas, 175; Terremoto, 25; 29); the decrepit old age of some government politicians is expressed in the "gerentes y gerontos de la oligarquía"(Crónicas, 62); the duplicity of the same group is reinforced by their opposing attitudes in front of the cameras ("cámaras") and in the "chambers"("cámaras") of parliament (67); the "useless living" members of the government are contrasted with the "dead" but "always useful" young militants murdered by the security forces (180-1); the people cannot "count on"("contar con") the oligarchy but it can "count with them"("contar con ellos") the millions of dollars they are filching (Terremoto, 93).

More frequently, the play on words becomes a complete inversion of the superficial meaning or intention of a word or phrase so that Benedetti can redirect its 353

implications back at its source. The entire essay "También el presidente dice verdades"["The President Says Truths Too"](Crónicas, 114-120) takes judiciously selected excerpts from one of Pacheco's televised speeches to the nation and turns them on their head to show that he and his cohorts should be the obvious recipients of all the accusations he had levelled against the left. Bordaberry's defense of "rigour and exigency in interrogations"(Terremoto, 83) is converted into the "rigour and exigency "of the people's questioning of the government (90); the supposed depoliticisation of education under the General Law is cast as its rightwing repoliticisation (230); the "illicit" corrupt earnings ("ilícitos económicos")from the financial scandals exposed by the Tupamaros becomes the occasion for unmasking "illicit politicians"("ilícitos políticos")(233). It is clear that all of these and the many others that could be added fall into the ambit of that general rhetorical device for subverting apparent meaning called irony, of which I will give only one instance of a different kind. The final essay of Terremoto, written shortly before Benedetti was obliged by repeated death threats to head off into exile, begins: "It is obvious that our supreme government desires the wellbeing of our people. To argue the opposite would perhaps mean going against the truth, but it would above all mean (and with no perhaps) going against the decree of June 27 [1973]. So we will not argue it."(274).45

45 The third article of this decree, which heralded the dictatorhip by dissolving parliament and permitting the army and police to take "all necessary measures" to maintain essential public services, prohibited 354

Replying to a question about literature and political commitment which mentioned Shaw, Orwell, Sartre, León Felipe, Vallejo and Unamuno as examples, Benedetti commented without elaboration that of the six "the one I feel least close to is Orwell"(Alfaro, Benedetti, 169-170). At first sight, this is surprising, since both men espouse a humanist ethics based on conventional notions of decency but which in turn generates a demand for social justice on a large scale. Orwell, however, was so worried about the moral legitimacy of any politics which might produce it that both conservatives and socialists have been able to vie with each other in alternately rejecting his work or claiming it for their cause.46 There is no such ambiguity in Benedetti, even if a mythologised and idealised notion of 'the people' has to carry the burden of resolving it. Nonetheless, as we have seen, both the people and their opponents, gathered under the vague emblem of 'the oligarchy', are emphatically defined in terms of an individualist morality: the latter

publication in any form of material which might impute "dictatorial intentions to the Executive Powers, or might disturb public order and calm"(Machado Ferrer, Años duros , 186). This page reproduces the cover of Marcha , No. 1649(June 30 1973) which reprints the first four articles of the decree under the splendidly ironic banner headline: "No es dictadura [It is not dictatorship]”, which strictly observes the letter of the decree but blatantly defies its spirit. 46 For a fully documented account of the oscillations in Orwell's reception by his readers, see J. Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of 'St. George' Orwell (New York, Oxford University Press, 1989). 355

being deceitful, hypocritical, cowardly and murderous, and the first sincere, good-neighbourly, brave and frank. Benedetti is not bothered by this:

there are many people, even on the left, who feel somewhat suspicious of the word moral . No matter. I have never felt that way, so I have no compunction about mentioning it. I believe that in the current economic and political struggle there is precisely a moral ingredient which we must not and cannot evade (Terremoto, 130, his italics).

It is this priority which amply justifies Castro's contention that "Benedetti's preoccupation with the coherence of word and attitude is essentially ethical"("La moral", 75, n. 10) and, from a very different perspective, occasions the lament by one anonymous reviewer of Crónicas that "the class struggle", which would "explain what here seems to be absurd despotic arbitrariness" and "elucidate" what "appears . . . as spontaneous popular indignation", has been "left out", and that the volume is "an immediate moral response" to current events by "a middle class mentality".47

This is undoubtedly true as far as it goes, but the essays do not only "document the disposition of one individual's response" to the political situation of the time, as the introductory paragraphs to Escritos políticos put it. They are also a vivid chronicle of how far a "middle class mentality" can go in the direction of the socialist politics which lies in front of (or behind) the conventional Marxist

47 "Crónica y moralidades", El Popular (7 July 1972), n. p. 356

critique which the reviewer sought in vain in Benedetti's writings. Benedetti may be among those who unrepentantly "believe in the individual as the fundamental basis of any collective construction"(Terremoto, 175). He may describe that collective as a group of individuals with responsibilities essentially towards each other (Crónicas, 209), but he is also in these essays what he describes the people as being: "an implicated witness, but also an implacable witness"(171).

In April 1971, seven months before penning this phrase, Benedetti had "implicated" himself in events in a way not easily foreseeable by the readers (or, probably, the writer) of El país de la cola de paja a decade earlier. The move from words to action is logical, however, given the tenor of these essays. The structuring of them around a controlling binary opposition - Us versus Them - incorporates into their very texture the polarisation of the political scene in Uruguay at large, most visibly perhaps in Montevideo where Benedetti lived and worked. As the middle ground disappeared between two increasingly intransigent and, after 1971, increasingly militarised warring parties, any space for reasoned debate went with it. While the essay as a genre, as we have seen in Chapter Two, lends itself readily to dialogue with readers, Benedetti's political essays of 1971-1973 did not seek to persuade or argue but rather to galvanise the will of the already 357

converted. Writing from the sidelines, although Benedetti continued to do it, clearly had severe limitations, so, when the opportunity arose, he joined the fray.

Benedetti as Activist: The Movimiento de Independientes 26 de Marzo

At the end of August 1972, Benedetti wrote: "History pushes in one direction, and anyone who tries to stop it with their obstinacy, their egotism, or with a frankly reactionary spirit, will in the end be defeated”(Terremoto, 150). It was by then well over a year since he had decided to do his bit towards nudging history along its predestined path by helping to found the Movimiento 26 de Marzo. It was formed "in Montevideo, after a series of meetings between groups of unaffiliated individuals [independientes] from the provinces and the capital, at the beginning of April [1971]"48 and took over an already existing magazine, Cuestión,49 in whose fourth number the group set out its program on May 12. Its formal request for admission into the Frente Amplio on May 18 was accepted a week later, the Movement being allowed two voting delegates at the Frente's plenary meetings (INDAL, Frente

48 INDAL, El Frente Amplio del Uruguay y las elecciones de 1971 (Heverlee-Louvain, INDAL, 1973), 159. Further page references will appear in the text. 49 This journal ceased publication in 1972 after 19 numbers but was resuscitated on 28 June 1981 by exiled supporters of the Movement in Malmö, Sweden, on the eighth anniversary of the coup. 358

Amplio, 160). It organised a successful first large-scale public rally in Montevideo on July 31 and Benedetti represented it on the Frente's central executive committee when it was granted a place at the end of September. By then, according to its own documentation, the Movement had some 130 active groups in Montevideo and a further 70 in the provinces, and was represented on the executive of 164 of the Frente's rank and file committees (163), thus giving some substance to its claim to be recruiting militants "in torrents"(159) and the later assertion of its "massive participation . . . in the life of the Frente"(163).

The full title of the organisation points to two factors which distinguish the Movement from most others under the Frente's umbrella. Its members are "independent" in not being attached to any other already established leftwing group or party, but affirm their adherence to the Frente's general political platform, while the date March 26 has both current and historical relevance. It refers to the day in 1815 when Otorgués, one of Artigas' officers, first raised his commander's flag (eventually adopted as the Frente's own standard) in Montevideo after its recapture from the Argentines during the struggle between the Buenos Aires unitarian government and Artigas' federalist forces. The same date was chosen for obvious symbolic reasons for the Frente Amplio's first mass demonstration in 1971. 359

The combined emphasis on an anti-dogmatic approach to each militant's particular political stance and on the issue of national sovereignty is translated directly into the Movement's "Principios políticos y plan de lucha"["Political Principles and Fight Plan"], the preamble to which states:

Two basic postulates guided the birth of the 26 de Marzo: 1) To form numerous local committees for the Frente as permanent elements in the struggle. 2) Not to favour particular lists of candidates but to give complete freedom of choice to its members at the elections (159).

This approach of maximising general support for all of the Frente's candidates does not, as Ruffinelli suggests (Variaciones críticas, 23), in itself imply a wish to devalue the importance of the electoral process, a view Benedetti sees as the result of the Movement's policy having been

"badly interpreted",50 although the reference to an ongoing struggle might be interpreted as doing so, as we shall see shortly. Rather it internalises within the core of the Movement's theory and practice the coalition's anti- sectarian principle of trying to unite the people as a whole behind the Frente as a whole. The conclusion to the "Principles" expands on this:

The Movement has no parricidal aims or any scandal-mongering intention of opposing or attacking its comrades in the Frente for the sake of

50 M. Benedetti, "'La transformación empieza en las bases'", Cuadernos de Marcha, No. 46(February, 1971), 26. 360

some whim or fancy. Quite the contrary. It comes to the Frente to carry out, as far as it can, a modest and unifying task. To struggle, asking for nothing except a place in the struggle (161).

While this may dismiss too cavalierly the often serious ideological divisions between the forces whose unity the

Frente was working so hard to sustain,51 the intention is clear: to promote the interests of the coalition as a whole and to immerse itself humbly in its tasks of the moment.

The first of the Movement's "basic principles" establishes its "adherence to the basic program of the Frente Amplio as the minimum program, common to all the Frente's organisations"(159), the word "minimum" perhaps indicating that the Movement was worried about too many concessions being made to the more liberal centre of the coalition, a suspicion confirmed by Benedetti who had argued earlier in the year that the Frente "was still not the radical transformation our society needs to fullfil itself as a society"("La transformación", 25). The "Principles" certainly radicalise the Frente's notion of the rank and file committees, which it sees as the site where the Frente's campaign to set itself up as an alternative kind of government will be won or lost: "We consider the

51 Benedetti makes a virtue out of necessity by being open about the Frente's internal wranglings, while arguing predictably that this is very different from the traditional parties which often try to keep their factional in-fighting and grubby deals out of the public eye (Terremoto, 60-1). 361

permanent and combative union of the PEOPLE THEMSELVES to be fundamental" in order to create "a large democratic civilian army whose ORGANIC AND FUNCTIONAL permanence is essential from now onwards, both before and after the elections"(INDAL, Frente Amplio, 160, all capitals in the original).

This need to maintain the active participation of the people after the immediate demands of the election campaign have been satisfied leads to what might be termed the pseudo-militarisation of the term "people" in the Movement's statements. Benedetti himself underlined this aspect when interviewed at the time, not about his own politics, but the Movement's:

[B]efore and after November, before and after voting, we will know that no oligarchy was deprived of its privileges in 24 hours, but only after a long, arduous struggle, before and after that day; . . . But it is precisely when brute force is the only argument a dictatorship has left that the people must make their presence felt most powerfully. . . There is nothing which frightens powerful phoneys more than the serene determination and humble courage of a people who now know the path to follow and in what direction their only possible salvation lies.52

While the idealisation of the people and the biblical overtones of words such as "path" and "salvation" are by now familiar from Benedetti's essays, the increased

52 'El Popular', "Ahora sí, el pueblo sabe cuál es el camino", El Popular (10 August, 1971), 7. 362

emphasis on organised militancy is new, and it could encourage militants to take as already prevailing the very conditions that their actions should aim at creating.

The idea of the road to be followed is picked up in the opening of the Movement's political principles in a rather unexpected manner. Benedetti was not the only intellectual and writer to be involved in the inception of the organisation (another being the sociologist and ethnographer, Daniel Vidart). So, it may not be entirely coincidental that, among the groups included within the Frente, the 26 de Marzo should enjoy the bizarre distinction of being the only one to begin its statement of political principles with a literary quotation: "'The important thing is the road and not the inn'(Cervantes)"(INDAL, Frente Amplio, 159). This aphorism clearly inverts the more common one about ends justifying means and fits well the by now familiar preeminence, for Benedetti at least, of the moral principles and attitudes of the agent over the effective result of the action. Whether Don Quixote's muddle-headed idealism would be a useful ally in a political struggle is more open to debate.

This is not an irrelevant consideration if the quotation is considered in the light of the immediately following opening statement of the preamble itself: "We are at the time for action, not words". This is a succinct 363

justification for intellectuals' abandoning their writing desks for the streets and can be read as an adequate gloss on the Cervantes quotation, but it is at least somewhat paradoxical that a sentence which forthrightly proclaims the supremacy of actions over words should lean for its authority on the name of a man whose signal contribution to the Hispanic tradition was precisely an unparalleled feast of words, many of which relate the tale of a man so misled by the words he read as to undertake actions for which the motives were often deluded, the means pathetically inadequate or misconceived, and the results frequently the exact opposite of those intended. The inclusion of the quotation seems to argue that political involvement by writers or intellectuals does not entail the abandonment of their more habitual ways of dealing with the world but, in this case, the urgent need to act did not take in the full implications of the literary reference. This results in a confusion which exemplifies the problems Benedetti, if not his comrades, found in negotiating the difficult terrain at the meeting point of ethics and politics, ends and means, the harsh demands of revolution and the courtesies of democratic debate.

We are, however, a long way from this sort of confusion in the Movement's first “Declaración", made to "the Uruguayan People [pueblo oriental]" in July 1971. Its opening paragraph presents the group's perspective on the 364

current situation in the country and adds up to a very carefully structured, condensed, accelerated and extremely aggressive summary of the entire thesis of Benedetti's political essays:

We are in a Uruguay divided. There are two factions. On one side the oligarchy and the bankers. On the other, the people united in battle. The Pacheco dictatorship has brought together bankers and landowners. They have stolen Uruguay and guard it with forces of repression. That Uruguay, ours, must be saved. The Uruguayan people [pueblo oriental] must save it with their own hands (161).

The 'us' / 'them' division could not be more starkly expressed, while the allusion to the myth of national origins, the near-biblical rhetoric and the military terminology make this a battlecry in a holy crusade. Yet its simplicity is that of a fairy tale: the nation is a damsel in distress, the oligarchy and its allies are the ogre who has kidnapped, raped and imprisoned her, while the people must don the armour of the gallant white knight and rescue her before it is too late.53 This fable has the force of an elementary syllogism: the only possible conclusion is already implied in the opening statement. There is no attempt to persuade; there is

53 The military would later use a similarly constructed fable to justify their intervention in the country's politics, though with the signs reversed. The country would become a healthy organism penetrated from outside by the foreign and alien microbes of international communism, a sickness the amed forces as surgeons were called upon to extirpate and heal. See the introduction to Junta de Comandantes en Jefe, Las Fuerzas Armadas al pueblo oriental, Tomo 1, La subversión (4th ed., Montevideo, Junta de Comandantes en Jefe, 1977). 365

only an inexorable logic which carries over from one brutal affirmation to the next. The apparently implacable progress of the argument almost conceals the crucial change that takes place as it proceeds: whereas it begins by talking about Uruguay and 'them', it ends by addressing itself directly to 'us'. Like most others, and as is to be expected from a tale with which Benedetti would associate himself, this fable has a moral. If the conclusion follows from the premise as night follows day, there is no avoiding our duty to heed the call to arms. To do so would be to betray the land itself - the deflowered innocent virgin - which is crying out for our aid. What this paragraph seeks to do, then, is to resolve the tension between words and deeds by annihilating the distance separating them: the words are, as it were, weapons themselves, all but willing into existence the actions they urge on us.

Unfortunately, this fighting mentality and last- ditch-stand imagery (there is always some measure of desperation implied in any rescue operation) do not fit very well with the peaceful act of casting a vote in an election. With so much battlefield vocabulary, it is easy to forget that, state of emergency or no state of emergency, what everyone was really engaged on was an election campaign and not a military one. Benedetti's organisation, it must be admitted, made a creditable if unsuccessful effort to combine the two. In "El 26 de Marzo y las elecciones” 366

(163-5), published three weeks before polling day, the position is the same as the one portrayed above. Describing itself as "guided by Artigas' watchwords", the Movement "appears in combat formation in the reality of a crisis which separates two irreconcilable enemy camps which confront the people united and organised in the Frente Amplio with the oligarchy armed for war but trembling behind the weapons wielded for now by their mercenaries".

When it comes to the elections themselves, however, it withdraws somewhat from the militarist logic of this position. Although "it has no faith in the value of numbers", it will vote on polling day and participate in the campaign because these are ways of organising the people on "the long but inevitable road to national liberation". In other words, the Movement sees voting as it saw the local committees: "The vote is an effective form of struggle if it is carried out not passively but as a result of being mobilised, if it is charged with meaning, if it represents a consciously assumed position, a declaration of rebellion and not of submission, a means and not an end"(164). Theirs will be "a fighting vote, a vote armed with resolution and certainty, a militant vote, a revolutionary vote . . . [a] positive vote, then, a belligerent vote"(165). This apotheosis of the vote itself is nothing but the transfer to the act of voting - by rhetorical sleight of hand - of the qualities 'we' must have in our struggle against 'them'. 367

However, such emphasis on the moral attitude and political consciousness of the voter is irrelevant in a system in which the key factor is the number of votes cast for each party or candidate, in which any "fighting vote" can be neutralised by the most indiscriminate of donkey votes.

The awkwardness of this position becomes immediately apparent when it is compared to the approach taken by the Tupamaros in the statement of qualified support for the Frente Amplio which they released in December 1970, when the coalition was in the final stages of being formed. The document poses a number of pertinent questions of which this was the last:

Is it likely that this oligarchy, which imprisons, tortures and kills to protect its dividends, will give up its lands and its banks without a fight? No. The oppressed will take power only through the armed struggle. For this reason, we do not honestly believe that in Uruguay today it is possible to make the revolution by means of elections(166).

The MLN then bases its support for the Frente on "the understanding that its principal task must be the mobilisation of the working masses"(167) and not the election campaign itself. This is a radicalisation of the coalition's own position (as shown in Chapter Three, it also saw itself as transcending the electoral context); more 368

importantly, this rhetoric is identical with that used by the March 26 Movement.

It was something of an open secret at the time that the 26 de Marzo was, at least to some extent, the legal front for the clandestine MLN by which it hoped to create a mass organisation dedicated to the work of ideological preparation. This would perhaps explain Benedetti's contention that, of all the groups in the Frente, it had been singled out for particularly vicious treatment by the security forces (Terremoto, 223) who destroyed its central office in

April, 1972.54 The military described it as "an instrument for the expression of the MLN's political line at the social, trade union and parliamentary levels",55 a view confirmed by one of the MLN's leaders who, writing well after the end of the dictatorship, refers to the near total military defeat of the MLN by the security forces in mid-1972 in these terms: "The ship was sinking, it was true . . . The battle was passing more and more into the hands of the MLN's mass organisation: the glorious 26 de Marzo".56 Benedetti's own much later recollections on this theme point to a division in the Movement's ranks, with the more radical element carrying the other with it:

I never belonged to the Tupamaros but I was

54 According to N. Caula and A. Silva, Alto el fuego: Fuerzas Armadas y Tupamaros (5th ed., Monte Sexto, 1988), 35. 55 See Las Fuerzas Armadas al pueblo oriental, Tomo 1, La subversión, 323. It later (325-6) goes on to substantiate these links. 56 E. Fernández Huidobro, La tregua armada (TAE, 1989), 117. 369

perfectly aware they were there behind us, because they were the obligatory point of reference for the revolutionary struggle. And, of course, we were in contact with them (actually, all political parties were). Other leaders of the 26 did belong to the Tupamaros, but at the time we didn't know this. One of the tasks we'd set ourselves was, precisely, to pressure the Tupamaros to accept the political struggle, to get them to understand that in Uruguay there was still room for political work. But the truth is that, Sendic and the odd other leader excepted (they had a more flexible attitude which was open to discussion), the rest were absolutely opposed to that idea. They were convinced that they were going to take power by force of arms. (Paoletti, Aguafiestas, 160)

Bendetti here gives the impression of being himself unaware of how close some of the Movement's leaders and members were to the guerrillas, while the disagreements within and between the Tupamaros and the 26 de Marzo suggest that circumstances were making dialogue as difficult inside the organs of political struggle as it was outside.

Taking all this into account, the apparent incoherence of the Movement's combative revaluation of the vote can be explained away as a tactical move whereby the ballot paper is a metaphor for a bullet, and a vote for the Movement is a camouflaged gesture of support for the Tupamaros, an underground organisation which censorship prevented from being named or discussed. Even so, unless 370

the absurdity of the argument in electoral terms is taken as a deliberate ploy to indicate that it should be read between the lines, its weakness reveals the theoretical difficulty of marrying a revolutionary idealism which logically demands the immediate taking of power by force to the intransigent realities of an election campaign undertaken in adverse conditions against huge odds.

Benedetti's personal attitude towards the MLN is revealing. While his distrust of the institutions of democracy goes back, as we have seen, at least as far as 1963, at no point, either at the time or since, in local or foreign publications, has Benedetti made any comment, favourable or otherwise, on the MLN's strategy and political program as such. What he has done, leaving aside his work with the 26 de Marzo, is express his support implicitly in writings about or dedicated to its founder, Raúl Sendic. Benedetti addressed a poem to him, "Todos conspiramos"["We All Conspired"], as early as 1965, in which everything and everybody, "even the wind which touches the back of your neck/ and blows in the direction of history", conspires so that "you, never more than innocent never less/ can insert yourself into your visions/ into your future-now into that dream/ ramshackle and lovely like few others"(Inventario, 280). Better known is the dedication to him in 1971 of El cumpleaños de Juan Angel, one of Benedetti's most widely read books of the 1970s, running 371

through eighteen printings in Spanish during the decade.57 A narrative poem or "novel in verse" as its author always prefers to call it, Cumpleaños tells the story of the conversion of a modest bank employee into an urban guerrilla fighter. It begins as Osvaldo Puente (the surname is significant: a man of transition, he is the 'bridge' he will cross towards his future of political commitment), the son of a fussy middle class family, wakes on the morning of his eighth birthday and ends at nearly midnight 27 years later as, now with the clandestine name of the book's title, he narrowly escapes capture or death at the hands of the security forces who have surrounded an MLN safe-house.

Commenting on the dedication to Sendic nine years after the book's first publication, Benedetti said that "it points fundamentally to the friend, the human being, the generous, self-sacrificing and courageous militant",58 in other words, to the moral qualities of the man rather than the politics of the organisation he spent years building. In an essay originally published in Cuba (and therefore free from the prohibitions of Uruguayan censorship), Benedetti expands on the terms of the dedication.59 Sendic is a

57 According to F. Pérez Beberfall, "Bibliografía de y sobre Mario Benedetti", Revista Iberoamericana, Vol.47, Nos. 114-5(1981), 364. 58 E. M. Zeitz, "Entrevista a Mario Benedetti", Hispania, Vol. 63(1980), 418. 59 M. Benedetti, "Raúl Sendic: símbolo de una transformación", collected in O. Costa(ed), Los Tupamaros (Mexico, Era, 1971), 78-83, to which reference will be made here. It appeared first in RC-21 [Havana](December 1970). 372

"legendary figure" whose "name alone symbolises the most profound transformation ever in modern Uruguay" and whose photographed face can, like an icon, bring "encouragement, comfort, a hope of justice and a posture of defiance"(78). He has an uncommonly "penetrating and noble gaze" and is a man of "few words" but "voluminous" actions. He is gifted with an "exceptional ability to communicate with the rank and file" because of the "austerity" and "modesty" of his "very special personality", the sense of "certainty" he communicates in "the justice of the cause to which he has honestly and courageously devoted his life" and the ability to speak "simply", "frankly" and "naturally" the language of peasants, workers and comrades despite his lawyer's education (79). This apotheosis of the man is given greater credence if one adds that Benedetti hid Sendic for three weeks in his flat when he was a fugitive from the police because of his militant work with the sugarcane workers in the early 1960s, and took packages and messages to Sendic's comrades in Cuba on his visits there (see Paoletti, Aguafiestas, 127-129).

When Benedetti talks of the organisation itself, he quotes at length but without comment from an MLN manifesto ("Raúl Sendic", 80-1) but then underlines the Tupamaros' "undeniable virtue of always taking into account their compatriots' character and sensibility" by exploiting the Uruguayan sense of humour and avoiding 373

unnecessary violence (81). Benedetti's conclusion plays down the importance of an MLN victory and the chance of implementing its political and economic program, preferring to emphasise that their actions have finally exposed for all to see the hypocrisy and moral iniquity of the governing élite (83).

In short, what Benedetti finds most worthy of admiration in the MLN is, first and foremost, the outstanding moral and personal qualities of its founder and, secondly, those characteristics of the organisation's practice to which he can find analogues in the kind of human personality he most values. Benedetti does not so much translate his ethics into a politics as transfer to the political sphere the qualities he needs to find in any person who might receive his friendship.

With this we have come full circle. While his active participation in the 26 de Marzo marks a notable advance on the still fragmented, ill-defined position revealed in El país de la cola de paja in 1960, the choice this commitment represents seems predicated less on the substance of a particular political program than on having discovered an individual who exemplifies values diametrically opposed to the moral ills diagnosed in the earlier book. It is precisely when Benedetti seems most prepared to submerge himself into a genuinely collectivist 374

politics that his jealously guarded individualist ethics emerges most clearly. For what Benedetti admires in Sendic is exactly the state of revolutionary grace he could not attain himself.

Benedetti the Writer on Benedetti the Activist

Over the years Benedetti has expressed an increasing disenchantment with his two years as a leader of a political party. At the time, however, he always painted a rosy picture of what his political involvement meant to him. On the Movement's second anniversary in April 1973, he dedicated a poem, "Militancia" (Inventario, 167-171), to his comrades in the party. In it he reflects nostalgically on the early days, takes stock of what has been learned but refrains from any wild hopes for the future. He recalls that it was "two years ago that it began to be good/ to meet in large groups to see how few we were" and to pledge that "we would just try to get chaos to let itself be organised bit by bit" and that "if human beings deserved rewards as well as punishment/ they should not have to take either from anyone who owed them nothing". When the killing of "our brothers and sisters" brought home to them that death was not "a Vietnamese child burned by napalm and coca cola in some demilitarised zone", "at the first vomiting up of our anguish we warned that we would not let them cheat us of our lives just like that"(168). He goes on that "we 375

discovered that militancy/ . . . was something as normal as one's marital status/ . . . but was however as unconventional as love"(169), "and if we have at last learned one thing/ it is that rancour is worth almost nothing/ but forgiveness even less"(170). Written in the first person plural throughout, the poem is a homage to his comrades, a record of the impact on Benedetti of the group's experience and, perhaps, a rueful, elegaic reflection on a wager optimistically made against the odds and then close to being lost.

In July of the same year, he wrote: "The almost permanent contact with students, workers, neighbourhood groups, etc. not only gave me another view, another dimension of the very serious problems our community faced, but it also helped me to revise some of my prejudices as a writer" (Letras de emergencia, 8), a remark followed by his already quoted observations on the political pamphlet as literature. In an interview with Ruffinelli during the same year, Benedetti expanded on the benefits of this "contact" in a revealing way:

[T]hese last two or three years have taken a lot of my time, they've stopped me dedicating myself to writing. But I don't regret it; on the contrary, I'm proud of that experience, I can't conceive of myself without it. I can't think of myself currently without those two or three years of political activity, and I think I'd be poorer, both from a human as well as literary point of view, if I hadn't had them. (Fornet, Compilación, 8-9). 376

This positive appreciation of his own experience leads him to the following estimation of the difficulties of writing a genuinely political but aesthetically valid literature:

I think that the big mistake made by many well- intentioned writers who want to write on political themes and communicate a message lies in wanting to pass on that message before transforming themselves as people. . . The essential thing is to transform yourself, and the rest follows almost automatically (9).

Now, my main argument in this chapter has been that, initial impressions notwithstanding, this process of self-transformation did not take place. On the contrary, the political essays of the early 1970s continue the line of the more overtly moralistic work written a decade earlier. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that twelve years of exile gave Benedetti time to reflect very differently on his experience as an activist. In 1984 he said: "I was pushed into political leadership. No one else except me is responsible for that choice. But people pressure you; in my case, my comrades cornered me"(Alfaro, Benedetti, 129) by making "an appeal to my civic conscience so as to demand my acceptance of the responsibilities of political leadership. And once I took it on, I gave myself completely over to it and had virtually no time for anything else"(132). However, he feels that he lacked a "vocation to be a leader"(132-3) and, anyway, the whole episode had left him with "a bitter taste" because of "certain attitudes which I 377

couldn't understand and which seemed unjust to me". He prefers to leave this unexplained but does talk of "the obvious limitations which belonging to a political group imposes on you . . . You can't say what you want or sometimes what you ought to say; it's unpleasant. That's the nature of the political animal, I know. But it's not my nature". This elicits from Alfaro the comment: "So you reacted as an individual". "I know", replies an unrepentant Benedetti, "but that's how I felt so that's what I'm telling you"(133).

With the characteristic frankness he so much admires in others, Benedetti confirms that, despite his declarations in 1973, the longed for transformation into the selfless revolutionary dedicated to the collective struggle did not happen for him. As he put it to another interviewer in 1987, “In my speeches and in my activities as a member of the board of the Frente Amplio I had to defend positions that I sometimes did not believe in. I found myself in conflict”.60 The demands on his integrity as an individualist intellectual were just too great, as his later recollections to his biographer make even more explicit. There, he remembers his period as a political leader "with the same anxiety that we remember nightmares"(Paoletti, Aguafiestas, 159), admits to feeling like an "impostor"

60 A. Graham-Yooll: After the Despots: Latin American Views and Interviews (London, Bloomsbury, 1991), 31-2. 378

when giving speeches (189), and names his decision to get involved with the 26 de Marzo as one of the only three regrets he has about his life: "I didn't have the necessary experience . . . to know how to say no. The truth is it would have saved me a lot of trouble"(256). Consequently, as he went on to Graham-Yooll, "I shall always be on the left, sympathetic to the Frente Amplio, but as there are so many shades within the Frente I want to stay independent, someone who belongs to no party, no movement"(After the Despots, 32). He summed it all up to Greg Price in 1988: "When I was politically prominent . . . I never had time to think".61

61 G. Price, Latin America: The Writer's Journey (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1990), 14. The bitterness and virulence of some of these comments confirm an interpretation I offer elsewhere of Benedetti's novel Primavera con una esquina rota, which I read not so much as a novel about exile but as a fictional vehicle for the author to stage a strategic withdrawal from his radical political positions of the early 1970s. See S. Gregory, "Bourgeois Contentment and the Defeat of Utopian Desire in Mario Benedetti's Primavera con una esquina rota", Anales [Sydney], i, 2(1992), 81-96. This trend has continued into the 1990s. Many of Benedetti's articles published in El País [Madrid] indicate a retreat into the ethical concerns and the rhetorical methods of the early sections of El país de la cola de paja, albeit in an understandably more mature form (see, for example, "Hacia un estado de malestar", "Eclipse de la solidaridad", "Nostalgia del presente" and "Etica de amplio espectro" in his Articulario: desexilio y perplejidades(Madrid, El País/Aguilar, 1994), 215-220, 221-226, 247-253 and 343-349, respectively. The tendency is best encapsulated in the clearly approving repetition of a quote from Lillian Hellman: "'Liberalism lost its credibility for me. I think I have substituted it with something very private, something I usually call, for lack of a more precise term, decency'"(253). While this withdrawal from radical political positions has been common since 1989 following the trauma suffered by the left everwhere with the sudden and total collapse of 'existing socialism' (compounded in Latin America by the defeat of the Sandinistas in the Nicaraguan elections of 1990), I would argue that, in the context of Benedetti's work, it continues a process begun well before the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. 379

At the conclusion of his global study of Benedetti's work up to 1980, Paredes argues that, "starting from a bourgeois liberal ideology, an idealist conception of the universe", the author's "thought and practice evolves towards a marxist ideology, a materialist conception of the universe"(Mario Benedetti, 222). This view is, I believe, entirely false. Benedetti may have read Lenin (at least, in part) but his knowledge of other marxist classics seems to be, at best, sketchy. His work is anything but resonant with marxist terminology, and evidence of a familiarity with (or even an interest in) such fields as marxist economics or sociology is virtually non-existent, while the mystified notion of the 'pueblo'['people'] virtually abolishes the theme of class differences. Benedetti is an ardent nationalist, a fierce anti-imperialist and a socialist, but at no point in even his most highly politically motivated work, such as the essays discussed here (and, I would argue, nowhere else either), does he abandon the humanist ethics based on the individual which has always sustained him.

Benedetti was and remains a man of words, and his flirtation with the world of political action came about through what is for such a person a dilemma of tragic proportions: what to do when the words you love, think and write tell you that they are useless in a social and political climate in which all possibility of consensus has broken down and been replaced by a situation so polarised that 380

"the enemy must never be allowed to be present at those dialogues among the people"(Benedetti, Crónicas, 209). If the Frente Amplio was frustrated in its attempt to forge a socialist practice and political platform partly by its determination to hold on to the average Uruguayan’s commitment to moderation and democratic formulas, Benedetti, in an analogous way, fails to create a convincing revolutionary solidarity because of his reluctance to let go of an ethics based on the sovereignty of the individual.

The shock of his first and only trip to the United States, the impact of the Cuban Revolution and his growing awareness of the deepening crisis in Uruguay itself combined to turn Benedetti into the quintessential example of an intellectual who, at first distanced from the political scene, is willing gradually to immerse himself in it when circumstances appear not only to demand it but also seem to offer him something specific and worthwhile to do. The successively extended editions of El país de la cola de paja began as a dialogue between the author and his many readers about the moral flabbiness both he and they could see all around them as the essence of the petitbourgeois values they had all inherited from what Rial called the "Batllistization of the population"("Makers and Guardians of Fear", 90). As the decade unfolded, however, the book gradually evolved into an expression of the author's dialogue with himself as he, along with his readers, groped 381

towards a possible solution to the country's problems, increasingly defined by Benedetti as more political than ethical and psychological.

Crónicas del 71 and Terremoto y después, Benedetti's most openly propagandist work of the early 1970s, not only put an end to this self-analysis but, in effect, declared the bankruptcy of all further dialogue on such matters. Meanwhile, the wishful thinking that fired Benedetti's admirable commitment to the cause of revolutionary nationalism in Uruguay would eventually be undone by the even more imperious needs of his intellectual temperament, just as the group he helped to found and lead, along with the coalition to which he aligned it, came to grief in a social and political situation which had moved beyond the reach of any form of reasoned mediation.

Individualist ethics had foundered on the reefs of realpolitik; the desired dialogue between intellectual or writer and their public had collapsed into a militarily imposed monologue; a mass readership was not transformed into an electorally victorious constituency. Mario Benedetti's essays of 1971-1973 simultaneously oppose and announce this failure. His writing and activism are emblematic of all that was fought for and, in the end, lost. 382

Dialogue is a word with an illustrious ancestry. It implies tolerance, and cannot be conceived without the complete freedom of the parties involved. There is no dialogue without freedom. Carlos Quijano[1983]

Just prior to the period with which this thesis has been centrally concerned, Real de Azúa, recalling an essay by Lockhart mentioned above in Chapter Two, stated that, although there might be “two forms of infidelity” in current ways of thinking about Uruguay, there was only one kind of fidelity: that which takes on “the ugliness, disorder and injustice” of the world around it and looks for ways of doing something about it. His final sentence could refer to most of those who have featured prominently in the previous chapters: “The brightest of those mentioned here have done just that”.1

Just two years after the military coup brought that same period to an end, the same Real de Azúa was reviewing the immediate past much more sternly. Writing of small countries generally but, I would argue, very much with Uruguay in mind, he had this to say:

With regard to the chances of securing active and able support from the population and of creatively utilising the latent potential for cohesion and inventiveness which may be primarily characteristic of small units, it may reasonably be supposed that the normally compulsive nature of the style and the

1 C. Real de Azúa, “Uruguay: el ensayo y las ideas en 1957”, Ficción, 5(1957), 97-98. 383

very line [an authoritarian system] takes in social and ideological respects are not calculated to win the allegiance of those age groups and sectors of activity (youth, intelligentsia, technicians) which are more inclined to give unstinted backing to an alternative orientation of a more consensual and harmonising character.2

The distance between the praise and determination of the earlier passage and the rueful, understated lament eighteen years later marks the frame of the process this study has tried to illuminate. Around 1960, two groups discovered one another: writers and intellectuals concerned about the state of the nation, and a public anxiously needing guidance about the crisis affecting them all, caused by the breakdown of the consensus and social harmony mentioned by Real de Azúa that had been the product of the Batllista model of the state. Over the next ten years or so, what began as a polite debate over Uruguay’s origins and destiny deteriorated into a literally life-and-death struggle over the viability of the country’s civil society and institutions.

The suspension of parliament in June 1973 and the subsequent persecution of all forms of opposition not already banned were a resounding defeat for a reformist politics that had built a constituency out of a reading public and had allowed intellectuals - and other groups such as those mentioned by Real de Azúa - to participate

2 C. Real de Azúa, “Small nations and the ‘constrictive’ style of development”, CEPAL Review (1977, Second Half), 172. The article is in English. 384

as makers of policy, organisers or party workers and supporters. However, the armed forces waged a successful campaign, aided and abetted after 1971 by an increasingly compliant or impotent executive and parliament, to have Uruguayan society’s options reduced to a choice between two military solutions (their own and the MLN’s). As a result, “an alternative orientation [to use Real de Azúa’s words] of a more consensual and harmonising character” like the Frente Amplio’s simply disappeared in no man’s land. Under such circumstances, almost all intellectual activity, if it was not to be irrelevant, was likely to seem quixotic, self-contradictory or driven to aesthetic or ideological extremes.3

I have attempted to survey this ground by linking the notion of dialogue with this thesis' main argument: that intellectuals not indifferent to politics or to the fate of their country but disaffected from the political establishment which controlled the country's affairs would seek ways to integrate themselves into the political mainstream if circumstances arose which both demanded it and offered them tasks to which they felt they could make a significant contribution. This proposition can itself be rewritten in terms of dialogue. A situation in which the intelligentsia felt that their relations with both the political elite and the public at large had broken down

3 In this sense, Benedetti’s political essays of the early 1970s are the counterpart to the aberrant arbitrariness of the imaginative prose works mentioned in Rama’s “El estremecimiento nuevo en la narrativa uruguaya”, the last section of La generación crítica (Arca, 1972). See above, Chapter One, n. 67. 385

to the point that intellectuals felt marginalised or ignored was changed, under the pressure of social and political upheaval brought about by severe economic crisis, into one in which important sections of the population, and to a lesser extent the major political parties themselves, might be open to the trenchant criticisms and major revisions that only an informed intelligentsia could formulate. This, I have argued, is exactly what happened in Uruguay during the decade or so prior to the military coup of June 1973.

This theme of dialogue as central to a sense of the nation as a cohesive imagined community and essential to the intelligentsia's role within society, the threats to it and the attempts to prevent its breakdown have been one of the two recurring themes of this study, because it was through dialogue, taken literally or metaphorically, that intellectuals sought to respond to the new demands of their public and eventually reinsert themselves back into the political arena. The second theme was the intellectuals’ search for ways to transcend the limitations of critique and to address directly what was to be done, a question first asked publicly in the 1952 essay by Juan Flo discussed above in the Introduction.

Two generations of intellectuals attempted to define themselves and to talk and work with each other, shared their suspicion of mainstream Uruguayan politics and explored its consequences for their own, and, since 386

they had no political constituency, combined with the publishing industry to create a public which they might influence. Their essays on the state of the nation were composed at a time when dialogue about the Uruguay’s difficulties still seemed feasible. Such works presumed that both writer and reader, as well as the nation they were concerned about, had leisure and time enough to allow discussion of the issues at length. As the 1960s unfolded, these conditions would cease to operate.

The Frente Amplio, created in 1971, sought to operate in three ways: as a means whereby disaffected intellectuals could contribute positively to political discourse and activity; as a vehicle through which the members of a long fragmented left could finally debate and act together in a practical way which would allow them to reach a wider constituency than they ever had before; and, finally, with the adoption of the principle of dialogue as the basis of the Frente’s theory and practice, as the springboard for what would be a forlorn attempt to heal the growing divisions in Uruguayan society at large. Mario Benedetti, was the epitome of the intellectual caught between the competing demands of participation and analysis. For a brief period, he subordinated intellectual independence and aesthetic concerns to what he saw as the political needs of the moment. His articles of 1971-3 were written weekly at white heat in the midst of a pitched battle between implacably opposed forces. No longer addressed to an 'Other' now deemed to be beyond 387

the reach of rational argument, these pieces were more like a general’s attempt to strengthen the resolve of his own troops before they marched off to the front line.

Both time and leisure had disappeared in the general state of emergency, and the nation had ceased to be simply a problem for debate or dialogue and had become a terrain to be fought over. Much that was best in the entire project of two generations of intellectuals was extinguished when this battle was lost and the military took over the state in June 1973. While intellectuals had successfully been drawn into the centre of Uruguayan political activity, the dialogue on which that participation depended was brutally and unceremoniously truncated by forces no longer interested in listening.

It is here that this thesis parts company with the argument of de Armas and Garcé in their recent book.4 They are able to write a whole study of the links between the critique of the state of Uruguay and its institutions in the 1950s and 60s and that mounted more recently since the 1980s without mentioning the dictatorship once. Moreover, they can blithely state that the '45 and 60s generations were right to seek a radical transformation of Uruguayan state and society but that, unfortunately, they chose some form of socialism instead of liberalism (75- 76). On the other hand, the more recent interrogation of the nation is possible, they argue, "precisely because the

4 G. de Armas and A. Garcé, Uruguay y su conciencia crítica: intelectuales y política(Trilce, 1997). Page references will appear in parentheses in the text. 388

critical generation's5 program, in its non-utopian aspects, has either been carried out or is in the process of being realised"(76).

This point of view is excessively complacent. It was exactly the "utopian" socialist element in their thinking that the '45 and 60's generations most valued, and many of them - along with a host of other Uruguayans6 - paid a high price for defending it and, in some cases literally, fighting for it. Of the 89 signatories to the public letter of support welcoming the Frente Amplio who also feature in Penco’s Diccionario de literatura uruguaya,7 only seventeen published major books in Uruguay between 1973 and 1983, with seven others producing minor work or offering contributions on safe topics such as the classics or recognised and acceptable figures of more recent world literature. In the same period, twenty-five of the authors produced important publications in exile, while a further twenty-five published nothing in book form until after the dictatorship.8 There were casualties of other kinds, too. Of the major intellectual figures discussed in this thesis, Angel Rama, Carlos Real de Azúa, Carlos Martínez Moreno and Carlos Quijano all died in exile.9 Of the players who

5 De Armas and Garcé prefer Angel Rama's term from his book La generación crítica 1939-1969(Arca, 1972). 6 See the volume Uruguay nunca más(Servicio Paz y Justicia, 1989). 7 See the opening sections of Chapters One and Three above. 8 The balance is made up by those who died in Uruguay during the 1970s or who seem to have stopped writing for reasons unrelated to politics. 9 Emir Rodríguez Monegal also died abroad. However, as a voluntary expatriate with no political stain on his character - as far as the military were concerned, anyway - he was able to arrange a visit home during his fight against cancer. 389

were more activists than writers, virtually all knew banishment, imprisonment or torture (and, in some cases, all three), while, in one of the more blatant examples of complicity beween the Uruguayan and Argentine security forces, Zelmar Michelini was assassinated on the streets of Buenos Aires.

The brief, anonymous prefatory remarks in the collective volume Uruguay hoy celebrate intellectual work which militantly opposes all claims to neutrality and offer a spirited defence of analysis undertaken with passionate commitment and polemical verve.10 In this, they pick up a theme in the Real de Azúa epigraph at the head of this study (which was taken from that volume) and that I have had occasion to stress: the intellectuals discussed here never enjoyed the luxury of leisurely reflection; they had to be participants in the very cultural and political endeavours they felt called upon to analyse. Consequently, many of them paid for their intellectual and ideological convictions with the abrupt curtailment of their work and the violent disruption of their lives. Because they were among the most vigorous advocates and determined practitioners of the idea of the nation as a site for dialogue, they were among those who suffered most when the military forced it to the point of collapse.

10 L. Benvenuto et al , Uruguay hoy (Buenos Aires, Siglo xxi, 1971), 1-2. 390

The following bibliography, already long, lists only those works quoted or referred to in the text or notes. Since the thesis covers aspects of both intellectual and political history, I have preferred to offer an undivided cumulative bibliography ordered alphabetically by author.

Readers are reminded that the key to the abbreviations, acronyms and other conventions used here can be found at the beginning of the thesis. ------

Abelardo Ramos, J., América Latina: un país (Buenos Aires, Octubre, 1949). Achugar, H., “Vanguardia y batllismo: el intelectual y el estado”, Río de La Plata, 4-6(1987), 419-430. ------, “Primeros apuntes para una historia de la crítica uruguaya(1968-1988)”, Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, xvi, 31/2(1990), 219-235. ------, “Transformaciones culturales en el Uruguay del fin de siglo”, Hispamérica, 59(1990), 37- 57. Adoum, J. E., "El intelectual y la clandestinidad de la cultura", in Riera I.(ed), Literatura y arte nuevo en Cuba (Barcelona, Laia, 1977), 39-45. Aguiar, C. A., Uruguay: país de emigración (EBO, 1982). Aguiar, C. A. and Cravotto, A., El Uruguay de nuestro tiempo, 4: población, territorio, ciudades (CLAEH, 1983). Aguirre Bayley, M., El Frente Amplio: historia y documentos (EBO, 1985). Ainsa, F., “Los jóvenes conquistadores de la ciudad”, Gaceta de la Universidad, 31(1963). ------, “Catarsis liberadora y tradición resumida: las nuevas fronteras de la realidad en la narrativa uruguaya contemporánea”, Revista Iberoamericana, lviii, 160-1(1992), 807-825. Alfaro, H., Mi vida tal cual es (Alfa, 1964). ------, Navegar es necesario: Quijano y el semanario Marcha (EBO, 1984). 391

------, Mario Benedetti (Trilce, 1986). Alvarez, J. C., “Maggi , a contrapelo de su popularidad”, La Mañana (29 May 1964), n. p. ANB, Examen de la realidad nacional (ANB, 1959). Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (London, Verso, 1983). Anon., “Crónica y moralidades”, El Popular (7 July 1972), n. p. ------, Artigas y el movimiento de Liberación Nacional (3rd ed., YOEA, 1987). Ardao, A., “Sobre el tercerismo en el Uruguay”, Marcha (17 December 1965), 14-15; (24 December 1965), 14-15; (31 December 1965), 12-13; (6 January 1966), 13; (20 January 1966), 8. ------, “Respuesta a un tercero”, Marcha (6 January 1966), 13 and 24. ------, “Segunda respuesta a un tercero”, Marcha (20 January 1966), 8. Ares Pons, R., “Aproximaciones a la problemática de nuestra juventud”, in Real de Azúa(ed), Problemas de la juventud uruguaya (Marcha, 1954), 45-69. ------, Curso de historia nacional y americana (Casa del Estudiante, 1956). ------, “Sobre fascismo y ruralismo”, Marcha 949(27 February 1959), n. p. ------, Uruguay: ¿provincia o nación? (Buenos Aires, Coyoacán, 1961). ------, Uruguay en el siglo xix (Río de la PLata, 1964). ------, La intelligentsia uruguaya y otros ensayos (EBO, 1968). ------, “Artigas, una figura de proyección continental”, Comercio Exterior, xxviii, 10(1978), 1276-1279. ------, América Latina: raíces y opciones (Ediciones del Nuevo Mundo, 1988). Argones, N. and Mieres, P., “La polémica en el Frente Amplio, ¿pugna por contenidos organizacionales o 392

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