Island of Clemency : In Uruguay, Old Rebels Are Forgiven

The guerrillas of yesterday were playing street soccer in a poor part of town. Their goalkeeper was white-haired but tenacious, and his old comrades in revolution scored few goals against him. Maybe it was the light. In Uruguay, it looks like dusk for the guerrillas, although they think it is dawn.

Julio Marenales Saenz, 56, watched the play with paternal affection. He is strong and wiry, with a thick shock of gray hair. He is a teacher, a mason, a Marxist, a bank robber, a terrorist.

The workman’s clothing Marenales wears today hides the scars of prison and torture, yet he retains a commitment to revolution that survived both. He is a believer.

Scramble for Influence

“There are the Tupamaros,” Marenales said, nodding toward the players and smiling. “It is nothing to be a Tupamaro in Uruguay today.”

In a way, Marenales is right. The Tupamaros, scrambling for influence on the extreme left, are not politically significant. But the National Liberation Movement-Tupamaros, the proper name of the organization, is no passing fad. There was a time when the Tupamaros were the world’s most successful urban guerrillas.

The 33 members of the present Tupamaros’ Central Committee have spent, collectively, more than 400 years in jail. Thirty-one of the 33 committee alternates have also served long prison terms. These people went to prison for murder, robbery, kidnaping--activities that once made them a model for radical leftists in the rest of Latin America and in the United States and Western Europe.

Now, after more than a decade of prison and exile, the Tupamaros are back, diminished in stature but not in fervor. They are reorganizing in unaccustomed legality and seeking support among blue-collar workers, something that was fatally lacking in their clandestine days.

Stand on Violence

If the Tupamaros no longer espouse violence, neither do they renounce it.

“We don’t support violence, but we do believe in using all resources in defense of the people,” Marenales said. “We don’t discard the eventual use of violence.”

The Tupamaros live, work, lobby and play soccer openly in Uruguay, for this tiny country is intensely proud of its democratic tradition, one of the firmest in South America, and it wants peace with its traumatic recent past.

Uruguay has officially forgiven the Tupamaros, whose urban terror from 1965 to 1972 convulsed society. It has also forgiven the armed forces, which were called in by a desperate president to combat the Tupamaros and then muscled democratic government aside in a 12-year dictatorship.

Some former Tupamaro prisoners have even returned to their old jobs in government, making Uruguay an island of clemency in a part of the world where defeated guerrillas are most often found in paupers’ graves.

Such extraordinary accommodation, overcoming deep-seated bitterness on both sides, is as startling in vengeance-prone Latin America as the sight of the Tupamaros playing amiable host at Sunday afternoon rap sessions aimed at wooing recruits.

In a region where failed Marxist guerrilla movements are commonplace, Uruguay is unique in the thoroughness of its official forgiveness, but it is not alone in the attempt. In Colombia, the government has agreed to an indefinite but uneasy truce with the country’s largest guerrilla movement. In Argentina, the Montoneros, weakened by a 1976-80 “dirty war” from which about 9,000 victims of military terror are still missing, are stirring again as an above-board political movement.

But for every revolutionary who has been persuaded to seek peaceful reform, there are hundreds who continue to embrace violence as the only remedy for perceived social injustice.

Salvadoran Backlands

Dogged Marxist guerrillas still range the backlands of El Salvador, Colombia and Peru. Less effective movements are active in Guatemala and Chile, and a small extremist group has recently sprung up in Ecuador. In an anti-Communist variation on the theme, U.S.-supported contras are fighting in Nicaragua from bases in Honduras.

Guerrillas have won twice in Latin America: in Cuba in 1959 and in Nicaragua 20 years later. In between, and since, dozens of insurgencies failed in countries as distinct from one another as Brazil and the Dominican Republic.

At the peak of their terror, the Tupamaros turned Uruguay topsy-turvy. Fewer than 100 people died, but the insurgency shredded the fabric of a sturdy, middle-class society with European roots. By the time it was over, more than 8,000 Uruguayans were in military prisons, about 4,500 of them accused Tupamaro militants and their supporters.

The military’s last 63 prisoners, Marenales among them, were released a year ago with the restoration of democratic government. Now, for the great majority of Uruguayans, the Tupamaros are more curiosity than cause.

‘An Elite Movement’

They represent no electoral threat, according to President Julio Sanguinetti, because “they never had any important popular support. . . . The Tupamaros were an elite movement which never achieved any sympathy or penetration among the workers of the country.”

Interior Minister Carlos Manini Rios told a reporter: “The Tupamaros represent no threat to our stability. As long as they play by the rules, there’s no problem. If they should win an election, why, then it’s their government.”

Some of the more radical Tupamaros are still in exile in Sweden. But in Uruguay, the Tupamaros go about with no official harassment.

The Tupamaro gunman who murdered Dan A. Mitrione, a U.S. adviser to the Montevideo police who was kidnaped by the Tupamaros in 1970, is now in Madrid “in heavy analysis,” his comrades say. The Tupamaro “combat surgeon” who killed a blundering peasant with a lethal injection to protect an arms cache now works in a hospital here.

Luis Rosadilla, who became a Tupamaro at 16 and went to prison at 19, for nine years, said: “I was a baker before I went to jail. When I got out my father and I found an oven and I started baking again.”

Ideas, Not Gain

Now 32, and married to a like-minded revolutionary who also served time in prison, Rosadilla is a ranking Tupamaro official today.

“We have brought hope for people who had none,” he said. “We are proof that there are those who will lead the revolution not for personal gain, but for ideas.”

The Tupamaros, founded in 1963 by a handful of middle-class radicals of Marxist and anarchist heritage, spent about two years accumulating arms and funds, mostly through raids and holdups. Their first publicized urban terrorist act was the bombing of a pharmaceutical warehouse here in August, 1965. They left behind flyers proclaiming “Death to the Yankis--Killers of Vietnam! Long Live the Viet Cong!”

Influenced by Ernesto (Che) Guevara, a prophet of rural guerrilla theory, the Tupamaros nevertheless opted for urban guerrilla warfare on the advice of Abraham Guillen, a Spanish Marxist theorist whose books have inspired several major Latin American guerrilla movements. Uruguay lacks the mountains essential to Guevara’s theory, while more than half of its population, today about 2.9 million, is concentrated in this capital city.

In a liberal, low-key land ill-prepared for modern urban terror, the Tupamaros at first marauded with impunity. A dozen spectacular kidnapings humiliated a weak and nonplussed democratic government. When 106 guerrillas tunneled out of jail in 1971, Uruguay’s prisons were still administered by the Ministry of Culture.

Late that same year, with the police clearly outmatched, President Jorge Pacheco Areco called in the armed forces. They came out swinging. Torture became a common interrogation technique, according to the testimony of its survivors.

By August, 1972, when founder Raul Sendic and all but one of the other top leaders were captured, the Tupamaros were through. Sendic, a law student and farm workers’ organizer before going underground, is now a white-bearded 60. He is at present in Cuba for medical treatment, as militant as ever, his comrades say.

Once big losers, now free again, scarred but appearing unbowed, the Tupamaros grope through the wreckage, searching for a future in a society that appears to have passed them by.

In a renewed democracy, Uruguayan Marxism has recovered its historic legality. A Marxist-led coalition, with the veteran, Moscow-lining Communist Party of Uruguay in the vanguard, won 21% of the vote in last year’s presidential election and has strong representation in Congress.

Unshaken Conviction

If the Tupamaros continue to shun violence, they will be hard-pressed to assert leadership among stronger Marxist forces that also suffered under military rule. But if they should turn again to violence, they would invite instant political isolation and swift military repression. The dilemma does not shake Tupamaro conviction.

David Campora, a bespectacled, 51-year-old accountant who sits on the Tupamaro’s nine-man executive committee, said that “communism is what joins the people.” He added: “If you don’t have it, then you must fight for it. No means of struggle can be discarded, legal or illegal. Violence is one instrument, to be used or not.”

Among such Tupamaro elders as Campora and Marenales, there is a faith that seems nearly mystical. All have suffered, many have lost their families. But for true believers the Tupamaros are a special, chosen family all to themselves.

Campora said: “Those of us who spent so much time in jail are not complete men. We lost a piece of life. But I am satisfied with what I have done. How many people can say that? We are one, we are many.”

‘Balance Is Positive’

Marenales, a professor in the National University’s School of Fine Arts during the Tupamaros’ heyday and a Marxist activist for four decades, said: “We made a lot of mistakes, but the balance of the Tupamaros is positive. Our work is not done.”

Marenales supports himself now by repairing furniture, but Campora is able to devote his full energy to the revolution. Under legislation enacted last year, government employees jailed or fired by the military regime got their jobs back with full seniority.

“Suddenly I found myself with 26 years’ service in the Ministry of Energy--enough to retire,” Campora said. “I will get a government pension for having been a Tupamaro!”