Russia against the Tupamaros

Peter Kemp

Last week I considered the impact of the Cuban revolution and the influence of the Catholic Church on the rise of the revolutionary Left in Latin America during the 1960s. The action of the Soviet Union in ensuring the destruction of Che Guevara's guerrilla movement was followed by a similarly devious operation in Uruguay against the Tupamaros (MLN). A former Tupamaro leader, whom I refer to as Andres, helped me, over several weeks, to unravel this tale of treachery.

The MLN, founded in 1963, admitted to no defined ideology. 'Action unites us,' Raoul Sendic, one of its leaders, used to say, 'ideology divides.' The movement enlisted in its ranks Social Democrats, Marxists and Christians of all denominations; however, `MLN Documents 1-5', the only written statements of its political philosophy, were unmistakably Marxist in tone. But the movement was strongly anti-Soviet. Intensely nationalist in sentiment, it was opposed to all forms of 'foreign imperialism,' American or Russian, and deeply suspicious of the CPU (Communist Party of Uruguay). 'We would sooner trust a policeman than a Communist,' Andres told me emphatically. Nevertheless, official relations between the two were not always bad. In December 1966, when the Tupamaro leaders were on the run, the Communists gave them money and shelter. Sendic was grateful but he wondered 'what the Bolsheviks have up their sleeve.' He found out a year later when Rodney Arismendi, First Secretary of the CPU, asked him to send his followers to fight with Guevara in Bolivia. Sendic rejected this transparent attempt to destroy his organisation.

Despite the Cuban inspiration, relations with Castro were distant under Sendic's leadership. The Cubans wanted the Tupamaros to adopt their own methods of 'rural guerrilla,' but in Uruguay the country is quite different—there are no mountains, forests, or jungles to hide in. Instead, the MLN initiated urban guerrilla action, after the Brazilian example; but the Tupamaros used it as their basic strategy to undermine the government.

Both men and women joined the ranks' of the Tupamaros. Most of them were young and very idealistic, and most came from the middle rather than the working classes—which invalidated their claim to be 'the vanguard of the people.' Coming from well-to-do families, they had little idea of the real problems of 'the people,' such as wages and housing; and 'the people,' Andres told me, never considered them representative. They were proud of carrying arms, and their training manuals included, curiously, that popular novel, The Godfather, but they had no experience of, and no practical training in, the use of weapons.

'We had a slogan,' Andres told me, 'that a man and a woman are never so equal as when they are behind a .45 calibre pistol.' 'But,' he added with a grin, 'with us they were only equal because neither of them knew how to use it.' It is only fair to say that the majority tried to avoid bloodshed in their operations. Psychopathic killers and 'lunatics at large' (as Andres once described the notorious 'Carlos') were rejected as damaging to the Tupamaro image.

'Clandestinity' was their watchword, and the 'need to know' principle governed the dissemination of orders and information: nobody should be told more than was necessary for the performance of his task. The same applied to recruiting—it was onlY done by personal contact, and took a long time because the candidate was kept under careful though secret scrutiny before being admitted. Partly for security reasons and partly because Sendic was opposed to what he called cauddlismo, the MLN had no single leader. Control was in the hands of an executive committee, each member of which had his special responsibilities; onlY a few senior Tupamaros, who had to confer with them, knew who its members were.

There was always a shortage of moneY, and the Tupamaros, in contrast to what many of them had known at home, lived in extreme indigence, often having no money for a meal or a bus fare; arms too were scarce, and many of the guerrillas' opera' tions were designed to secure one or the other. Favourite targets were banks and other financial institutions, and because the raids were well planned, daring, and usual" successful they gripped people's imagination and evoked a romantic picture of a band of Robin Hoods. Ironically the press and radio, especially the right-wing element among them, added to their reputation by attributing to the Tupamaros actions they had not carried out, and exaggerating the importance of those they had—a nulcil more valuable kind of publicity than the crude propaganda leaflets they themselves distributed. Finally the Pacheco govern" ment was stupid enough to forbid both press and radio even to mention the TuPa" maros by name; thereafter the media, to everyone's delight, referred to actions bY, 'Los Innombrables'—`the unnamable ones; In August 1970 the Tupamaros suffereo a shattering reverse. Sendic, his three cofounders, and the entire executive com tee of the MLN were arrested by the policg in a house in the Calle Almeria. Alth0nt. there is no conclusive evidence, and Pro ably never will be, many Tupamaros ares convinced the CPU betrayed the rendezvou to the authorities. 'They had the house stir" rounded and every exit from the street blocked,' Andres pointed out. 'And so theY must have had some tip-off. The CPU knewts of the meeting and they had plenty of agell among the police.' It was partly to offset this blow to the movement's morale and prestige that the the new MLN leadership ordered, in 1971, kidnapping of the British Ambassador, Deldi Geoffrey Jackson. It was skilfully plan°

oral. and executed, and certainly raised m rionslY

among the Tupamaros as well as se ,_..t embarrassing the Pacheco governmenrvit; it was of very doubtful value to lac prestige. The Ambassador was PoPLI among the Uruguayan people, who strongly resented such violence offered to an official guest and shared their government's embarrassment. Even more damaging to the Tupamaros was their kidnapping and murder, the previous year, of the American ban Mitrione, a technical adviser to the Uruguayan government, This cold-blooded Shooting of a helpless prisoner was utterly rePugnant to all public opinion in the Country and, according to Andres, per

manently damaged the movement's reputation.

'One of the major objectives of the CPU,' declared Arismendi, 'was to gain control of the Tupamaros.' Whether or not they collaborated with the police in the Calle Almeria arrests, the Communists had some Years earlier infiltrated their agent for just such an occasion. Mauricio Rosencoff was a former actor and writer who had ostensiblY left the CPU, to which he had Previously belonged for many years. Having already ingratiated himself with Sendic hY producing a flattering book about him, he was easily accepted into the MLN, where his political experience and tactical ability soon brought him to the top. After August 1970 he was appointed to the new executive coMmittee, which he soon controlled. He was more than a match for his colleagues on the committee, who lacked his gifts of intellect, energy, and cunning, and they seldom opposed or even questioned his leadership. With his exceptional flair for °rganisation he was soon directing all the keY sub-committees, notably those liaising With the press, with other groups among the ,YruguaYan Left, and with foreign revolu"°flaries. Moreover when Sendic and the old leaders escaped in September 1971 in a n'tass jail-break of over a hundred TupaMaros, Rosencoff had no difficulty in persil.ading them to move away from Montevideo into the countryside, partly for their own safety and partly because, he said, the ,T °venient had become too complicated for People to lead who had been away so long. wOefectors are not normally so popular witIt their former comrades, particularly r 1th Communist comrades. Yet Rosencoff .etriained on the friendliest terms with Yisnlendi and the other CPU leaders, and was able to effect a rapid improvement in o4ncial relations between the CPU and .LI\T. Significantly, he had a daily meeting %ovttilth

er aCPU representative, at which no upamaros were present. He also

to sits visits to Cuba—now a firm adherent the Soviet line—which began to send the money arid even a few arms; Allende's s'amle also provided assistance, as well as a netuarY for fugitives. Rosencoff was successful in manoeuvring allnedIVILN into co-operation with the CPU firiallY, in 1971, into an alliance, despite Lie disapproval of the rank and file Tupa„'",aros, who were powerless to prevent it. ,i,nee alliance was a blanket organisation,

'Broad Front' ostensibly representing

I, the Uruguay Left, and formed to ht the 1971 election campaign. In fact it

was directed by the CPU, who dominated all its important committees. Its leader, General Seregni, a parliamentary deputy, had been a secret Communist since his youth as a subaltern, when he had formed a party cell in the army with Arismendi, then a sergeant. Rosencoff persuaded his executive committee to join a 'general staff' within the Btoad Front, which would coordinate action between all groups. In fact, this proved to be a Communist device to learn about the Tupamaros' operational plans.

Moscow now had two parallel sources of information about the MLN. One was Rosencoff and the CPU; the other was a certain Dumnova, an attractive and vivacious blonde in early middle age who was married to a Uruguayan diplomat and lived in a luxurious penthouse in one of Montevideo's most expensive quarters. She was an old friend of Rosencoff, who arranged for the MLN executive to meet in her flat; one of its members has told me that highly confidential matters were discussed at these meetings in her presence. She had an interesting history. Starting as the mistress of an NKVD ( before the war, she met and married her husband while the latter was a junior official at the Uruguayan Embassy in Moscow in 1944. She was allowed to leave with him for Uruguay in 1945; that was a time when Russian women who married westerners were not allowed out of the country—unless they were approved by the NKVD. In Montevideo she joined the Uruguayan-Soviet cultural institute, and had close contacts with the Soviet Embassy. None of the executive committee, except possibly Rosencoff, suspected her.

By the beginning of 1972 it was evident to Moscow and the CPU that, despite their success with Rosencoff, they would never bring the Tupamaros under their control. They therefore decided to destroy them— or better still, cause them to destroy themselves—by involving them in a confrontation with the army. Hitherto the armed forces had kept aloof from politics, and the Tupamaros had been careful not to provoke them.

The scheme worked out by Rosencoff and the CPU was based on the activities of a sinister organisation, the 'Death Squad,' believed to be directed by the police. Over the last year it had murdered a number of prominent left-wing figures—mostly Communists because the 'clandestinity' of the Tupamaros protected their identities. Rosencoff and Arismendi now persuaded the MLN to join in

to attack the government for failing to suppress the Death Squad. On 13 April 1972 the Communists would call a general strike, through the trade unions, to paralyse the country for a week; on 14 April the Tupamaros would 'execute' four Death Squad members the CPU claimed to have identified; and the following day, in Parliament, Seregni would move a vote of censure to bring down the government. As intended by the Communists, the plan was a disaster. Their general strike on 13 April lasted for one day only; the Tupamaros carried out their assassinations, but the names the CPU had given them proved to be members, not of the Death Squad at all, but of the army; and Seregni's resolution was soundly defeated by ParkaInent, which instead declared a state of emergency.

The reaction of the armed forces was immediate and vigorous. Within three months they had destroyed the Tupamaros, arresting or killing many of them, including most of the leadership, and driving the rest underground or into exile. Rosencoff is still in prison, as is Sendic, who was severely wounded, putting up a hopeless fight when trapped in a basement.

The Communists at first made no attempt to hide their satisfaction. 'The CPU is especially pleased at the MLN's loss of people and prestige,' declared a member of the central committee. 'Because the party now has the opportunity to recover some of its members, especially among the youth.' But their triumph was brief. The fury of the armed forces did not cease with the collapse of the Tupamaros; they turned on the Communists and any other left-wing group they considered subversive. Despite their frequent boasts of the number and quality of their armed militants, the CPU put up no resistance, and it suffered the same fate as the MLNalthough most of its leadership escaped abroad.

If the CPU had been willing to cooperate wholeheartedly with the Tupamaros and fulfil their part of the 'threepronged plan' they might well have overthrown the Uruguayan government by their concerted efforts. Instead, the devious and treacherous course they followed, in blind obedience to Moscow, resulted .in their own destruction along with the Tupamaros. It is strange that the men in the Kremlin did not foresee the consequences of their own orders to their protégés.

The same story has been, or is being, enacted in other Latin American countries, where—often following a similar pattern— strong right-wing military governments are established. 'Out of twenty-one Latin American republics, there are today only five elected Presidents,' Andres concluded bitterly. 'The Communists have destroyed the revolutionary Left here for the next decade or more.'

That may be an exaggeration. There is evidence that some of these movements still exist underground in their own countries, and it is known that the Tupamaros, for one, have cells in Europe, notably in France and Austria. But they have certainly ceased to threaten established governments. The moral of this long story is that the Soviet Union will not tolerate indefinitely any independent left-wing revolutionary organisation, however sincerely Marxist. ft is a thought on which the Left outside Latin America might care to reflect,