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.