Life in Uruguay - Maria Colucci

Maria Colucci is one of the many people who have lived in the suppressive government of Uruguay. She remembers many of the violent events that happened in her time. Uruguay was a country, which was falling into an economic crisis, starting into a chain of violent events until enough people protesting had the government to change their minds.

I was born in 1958 in Montevideo, Uruguay. My education there was a nurse. Uruguay is a beautiful country in the Atlantic between Argentina and Brazil. It used to be very prosperous in the first part of the 20^th century, but around 1950 the economy changed and inflation took place. The economic crisis started around 1960 and the inflation was very high and in Uruguay, I used to export a lot of meat and cattle and after the Second World War, everything started to change. The economy started to decline and there were a lot of labor strikes, student demonstrations against the government and a lot of street violence. Every day something happened between the students and the police. And it was about that time that a movement called the “Tupamaros” started, who was against the government.

The tupamaros were a group who were a very refined marxist urban guerilla that was started in the sixties. They tried to avoid bloodshed whenever it was possible. They preferred to create embarrassment for the government and general disorder and capture the public minds doing something like outrageous and winning followers with their Robin Hood philosophy. They stole from banks and gave money to the poor. And most of the members in the tupamaros held positions in the government like: banks, universities, teachers, students, and even people from the military and police belonged to the tupamaros movement. Because they want like everybody to have the same rights, they went to a high-class disco place where people were dancing and they trashed everything and they put a sign “O Bailan Todos O No Baila Nadie...” That means everybody dances or no body dances.

The government could not stop the tupamaros and in 1968 until 1972 the tupamaros were persecuted by the government and the state declared a state of emergency. About that time the tupamaros kidnapped Ulises Pereyra Reverbel who was their first political kidnapping. He was the president of the State Telephone Company and was very unpopular. Nobody liked him or his ideas. All the population acclaimed that they kidnapped him and when the police was looking for him, they began to search in the campus of the university in Montevideo and they started to fight with the students and this ended up with the death of a student. Five days later, the tupamaros finally released Ulises Pereyra Reverbel. Until 1960 the military mostly were overlooked by politicians. Nobody liked the military and most of the people who joined the military were people in lower middle class living in the small towns in the interior of Uruguay. They were recruiting from the lowest strata and nobody paid attention to them because they were not cultured. But after the second half of 1960, the military started backing up the national police, mostly with the confrontations between students and members and protesters. You used to see long crowds of people like in the downtown protesting about the government and all the politics in Uruguay.

The military started to arrest people, mostly tupamaros and using torture for them to talk. They used different techniques to make them confess until that they didn’t know. People were very, very afraid. And because they start using the torture, all the tensions in Uruguay went up, and then the tupamaros kidnapped Dan Mitrione. Dan Mitrione was a policeman from USA. He was born in Indiana and he joined the FBI in 1959. In 1960, he was assigned to South American countries to teach torture. He was a very cold person whose favorite words was, “The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, to make the desired effect.” Well the types of torture that they used the most were: electric shock to the genitals, electric needles under the fingernails, burning the bodies of people with cigarettes, and for men they used the compression of the testicles. One of the things they used most was the physical, psychological torture. They used to put one person in one room and they would torture him, making him talk and in the next room, they would record the voice of their parents. And the person who was tortured, he thought that his family was there. It was very bad. They even kidnapped women and pregnant women; and after they gave birth, they made all the children disappear. One of my cousins spent time from 1973 to 1985 in jail for just his ideas. He never killed anybody and he never did anything against the government. He just thought that the leftists were a good chance for the country. The tupamaros kidnapped Dan Mitrione but they never tortured him. In exchange for his liberty, they demanded the release of 150 prisoners, but the government of Uruguay asked Nixon –back in that time, Nixon was the president of the United States– and he said no and they refused. On August 10, Dan Mitrione was found dead in the back of a stolen car. 

It was very hard to live during this time. You were not able to go outside with your friends because the military were doing rounds and if they see you like two or more people together, they thought you were doing conspiracy against the government. In all the schools, they got a new director, new principals were more political and reliable, and each class were also given teacher aids to take notes and observe the students to see if they were talking against the government. If you want to have a birthday party, you need to have a permit. You couldn’t even have a birthday party in your house because if your neighbors see people entering your house, they thought that you were doing something against the government and they would call the military. The military would come into your house and they wouldn’t even care. They would arrest and torture you even if they didn’t find anything.

  In 1980 the government did a plebiscite to see if the military rule was vote off– to see if the military is supposed to continue or not. The population voted down the military rule, bit the government didn’t do anything by 1984 and there were a lot of protests against the government and the dictatorship. After twenty-four hours, all of the population started sharing strikes. I remember back then that every day, for like two months, at 9 pm., all of the population, all of the neighbors would start clapping their hands and you can see all this noise against the entire city. Well after all these strikes started, the armed forces announced the plan to return to civil life and elections were held in 1984. Then, the president elected was Julio María Sanguinetti, he won the presidency and he served for four years from 1985 to 1990. And he started to do the merging between the military and the democratic life following all the years under military rule.The entire military rule left the country very poor, like the crisis, there weren’t a lot of job openings and there were many people without jobs or big opportunities to succeed. Especially the good ones, I had a job as a nurse but my husband was a journalist, a reporter. And there were not many jobs offering in that field. I then moved to the United States for another better job.

Interviewed by Damian Colucci