Abstract
Three decades after state terror in Uruguay, counter memory making has endured in successive waves despite the official politics of oblivion, a transitional politics based on the denial of state abuses, absence of redress for victims, and impunity for perpetrators of the crimes of state terrorism. The Uruguayan case illustrates the impossibility of foreclosing memory through political engineering and the unsustainability of blanket impunity. It also highlights the long-term effects of ongoing social mobilization for memory and personal memorialization after social trauma and offers a sociocultural and intersubjective approach to the understanding of the generation of social memory after massive political violence.
Tres décadas después del terrorismo de estado en el Uruguay, la construcción de la contramemoria ha resistido en oleadas sucesivas a pesar de una política oficial del olvido, una política de transición basada en la negación de los abusos del estado, la ausencia de reparaciones para las víctimas y la impunidad para los responsables de los crímenes del terrorismo de estado. El caso uruguayo ilustra la imposibilidad de impedir la construcción de la memoria por medio de la ingeniería política y la falta de viabilidad de una impunidad general. También pone de manifiesto los efectos a largo plazo de una continua movilización social por la memoria y la memorialización personal después del trauma social y ofrece un enfoque sociocultural e intersubjetivo para entender la generación de la memoria social después de periodos de enorme violencia política.
He who controls the past controls who we are.
Speaking before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Argentine poet Juan Gelman said, “This onerous search [for the disappeared] has been shrouded by omertá,” using the Sicilian mafia’s word to convey the silent pact between civilian and military in Uruguay (Peralta, 2011: 209–210). Most negotiated transitions in the region have been severely limited in their exercise of the right of redress, recognition, truth, identity, memory, and justice. This article focuses on the less well-known case of Uruguay, a country that has gone from being called “the torture chamber of Latin America” for having the most political prisoners per capita in the world to being identified as having one of the developing world’s best records in human rights (Cardenas, 2010: 132). Uruguay’s remarkable history is full of paradoxes. It is the only country in the world whose citizenry voted for amnesty for perpetrators of gross human rights violations twice, 20 years apart (in 1989 and in 2009), yet it is the first country in world history to have prosecuted its civilian dictator for crimes against the constitution (Burt, Fried, and Lessa, 2013: 306–308). Beyond this, in the same national elections in which they upheld the law sheltering perpetrators in 2009, Uruguayans also voted in a former guerrilla leader and political prisoner of the dictatorship as the nation’s president. In May 2015, 30 years after the initial transition, Uruguay inaugurated its first truth and justice commission, yet torturers are for the most part still free to walk the streets alongside their victims. Victims, survivors, and their relatives are still pursuing memory, truth, and justice. Far from dwindling, their collective remembering efforts have been on the rise in recent decades despite the politics of denial manufactured to hinder them. The fact that this remembering has endured despite official denial and impunity aimed at suppressing the reemergence of counter memories is the subject of this study. It argues that the Uruguayan case illustrates the impossibility of foreclosing memory through political engineering and the unsustainability of blanket impunity. It also highlights the long-term effects of ongoing social mobilization, activism, and personal memorialization.
Despite claims of success, the politics of impunity and denial became unsustainable over time given the complex interweaving of transitional processes not only from above but also from below. An elite-driven policy-making process was marked at every turn by initiatives—legal, political, social, cultural, socio-emotional, intergenerational, domestic, and transnational—from the realm of civil society. This case highlights the long-term effects of relentless engaged public-initiated action and social mobilization in collective memory making over time against the official politics of denial and silencing. Despite the fact that successive posttransitional governments maintained a politics of oblivion and institutionalized impunity for decades, individual and collective processes of memory and redress seeking kept counter memories and the search for truth and justice alive.
This article looks at Uruguay’s history of state human rights crimes during the civic-military dictatorship (1973–1984), its transitional politics of oblivion in the aftermath of state terrorism, and the contentious process of counter memory making to restore recognition of and accountability for those state crimes during Uruguay’s prolonged transition (1985–2015). It examines Uruguay’s surprising and belated waves of memory that followed the initial transition when the state politics of oblivion—an elite-driven policy (misnamed “transitional justice”) aimed at the maintenance of institutionalized impunity and social amnesia—had practically ensured immunity for perpetrators of state crimes for two decades. The waves of memory were irruptions of counter memories of the dictatorship that stirred debate and placed in evidence the unresolved conflicts woven into the fabric of contemporary Uruguayan society and politics. 1 Halbwachs (1980 [1925]) first conceptualized “currents” of memory as a plurality of heterogeneous collective memories that opened conceptual space for individual freedom and agency to articulate with a diversity of group experiences and ideas publicly available. The notion of “undercurrents” of memory, undeveloped in Halbwachs’s (1997 [1950]) original work, helps make visible the sources of sustenance and memory processing that produce these waves of memory.
Two decades into the transition, counterhegemonic processes had succeeded in bringing an end to public silencing, and three decades into the process challenges to the law establishing impunity for the perpetrators of state crimes under the dictatorship have finally succeeded, although institutionalized impunity remains. To understand the past three decades in Uruguay it is important to look at the layers of memory since the era of state terror and their persistence in social space and subjectivity. Waves of memory irrupting at critical moments and becoming turning points are the effects of these “undercurrents,” the unprocessed, unmourned experiences that survive in the privacy and intimacy of everyday life and across generations. Since 2003 there has been a slow but steady emergence of posttransitional claims, the pendulum swinging from oblivion to increasing public memory and from institutionalized impunity to increased accountability. This article seeks to account for the rise and resilience of countercultural waves of memory of state terror by looking at collective memory-making efforts from the bottom up.
My analysis here is informed by extensive ethnographic and sociological fieldwork I have conducted since 2000 in Montevideo. It draws on qualitative interviews with key participants in human rights organizations (such as Servicio Paz y Justicia [Peace and Justice Service—SERPAJ], the human rights section of the national union central Plenario Intersindical de Trabajadores–Convención Nacional de Trabajadores [PIT-CNT]), and victims’ or “blood”-based groups such as Madres y Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos del Uruguay (Association of Mothers and Relatives of the Uruguayans Detained and Disappeared—Familiares) and Crysol (Association of Former Political Prisoners), as well as independent participants in memory collectives. These communities have mobilized for decades to sustain collective memory making and to shape policy making regarding the abuses suffered during and after state terrorism in the past three decades. My research draws on extensive immersion in the field, taking advantage of my insider-outsider status as an Uruguayan-born researcher, a child of exiles, and an expatriate. It also draws on personal communications and collaborative work with historians and political leaders specialized in the Uruguayan transition and their work. 2 This perspective is useful for an intersubjective and culturally nuanced understanding of how private and public civic mobilization ultimately produced the waves of memory that shape present political outcomes. The analysis focuses on reconstructing the waves of memory of el pasado reciente (the recent past, as the dictatorship era is euphemistically referred to among Uruguayans). What needs accounting for is how over time these waves have managed to break through the walls of oblivion.
The following analysis has two parts. The first part presents the rise of the politics of oblivion after the end of state terrorism, providing the socio-historical background of state terrorism under the civic-military regime and examining the emergence of the politics of denial and oblivion. The second part looks at the rise of truth seeking, the challenges to oblivion and impunity, and the growing advance toward justice.
The Politics of Oblivion
The Wounds of State Terror, 1973–1984
The 1973 military coup came as a shock to Uruguay’s image as “the Switzerland of the Americas,” with its legendary stable democratic and progressive welfare states and its relatively homogeneous and highly literate population of barely 3 million, but the demise of its democracy had in fact been a gradual process from 1968 to 1972 in the context of the region’s cold-war-era National Security Doctrine (Landau, 1988). Breaking with the nation’s democratic liberal tradition, the Colorado (Red) Party elites in power called for expanded security measures to combat the radical and revolutionary young movements of the 1960s, the so-called communist subversion. The state’s escalation of militarized counterterrorist repression gave rise to a civic-military authoritarian regime with aspirations to totalitarianism. This led to the June 27, 1973, self-made coup by civilian President Juan María Bordaberry, who called in the military hard-liners to “fight the war against subversion.” By 1976 a military junta headed by General Gregorio Álvarez had succeeded him. This reign of state terror was ideologically supported by the National Security Doctrine, an extreme nationalist ideology born of French colonialism and U.S. imperialism holding that the region was in an internal state of war (covert or “dirty”) against a purported Marxist conflagration that threatened Western Christian civilization’s moral values (and capitalist private property). In the national-security discourse, communist subversion was described in medical terms as an “international cancer” dangerously infiltrating all levels of society. The armed forces had to assume their “moral duty” as the “guardians of the nation” and use any means to “eliminate the cancer” from the nation’s social body (CONADEP, 1984; SERPAJ, 1989). The enemy could be growing literally anywhere and everywhere, and therefore armed security forces confronted civilians in an ideological “political cleansing.” These ideologies and practices were disseminated and made operational in 1975 through Operation Condor (CELS, 2015), a secret transnational coordination of counterinsurgency undercover operatives across the region established by the Chilean General Augusto Pinochet and fostered ideologically by Uruguayans such as Juan Carlos Blanco, Bordaberry’s civilian defense minister (Blixen, 1995; Fried, Lessa, and Michelini, 2016). 3 In this framework, Southern Cone national-security regimes used state-sponsored terrorist tactics against their own civilians in the 1960s–1980s (Weinstein, 1988; Weschler, 1991). State terrorism produced massive human rights violations against persons or groups considered subversive, including political imprisonment, new forms of torture, exile and displacement, political assassination, and a new category of crime, forced disappearance (CONADEP, 1984).
In a small country with a highly concentrated urban population, there was no place to hide: the fear experienced was no less intense than in Pinochet’s Chile after September 1973 or Videla’s Argentina in 1976. The authoritarian behavioral project aimed at total control by “wip[ing] out the historical memory that allowed the idea of resistance to be passed from generation to generation” (Franco, 1992: 112). The Uruguayan regime developed its own Orwellian forms of control over public and private life to instill fear in its citizens. State terrorism produced the world’s highest percentage of political detainees, 1 in every 50 citizens, with more than 60,000 detained and more than 6,000 long-term political prisoners suffering systematic physical and psychological torture. Some 200 Uruguayans were forcibly disappeared, most of them in Argentine or Uruguayan jurisdiction by Operation Condor operatives. Children were detained with their parents, born in captivity, or illegally abducted to be adopted into military or police families. An estimated 300,000 were forced into exile or displacement, and an estimated one-sixth of the population left the country between 1972 and 1984 (Informe histórico, 2007–2009). While the number of citizens disappeared was smaller, it was highly significant as a tool of terror. In addition, more than 40,000 public servants—teachers in particular—were purged from their jobs in accordance with a highly sophisticated system of citizen classification, and an estimated 10,000 children were directly affected by the fragmentation of their families. This would leave long-term scars of fear and silence on the national culture as well as in the intimate sphere by “subverting the relationship between the public and the private” (Gil and Viñar, 1998: 312).
Sealing the Past, 1984–1989
In these regimes’ aftermath, despite (or because of) the historic example set by Argentina’s initial transitional policies of accountability, Uruguay’s initial transitional government implemented one of the most extreme policies of denial and impunity in the region. Paradoxically, the Uruguayan transition was triggered when the junta was unexpectedly defeated in its own referendum in 1980, while the repression, fear, and silence were still very much alive. The referendum was unique in that the dictatorship not only lost its own election but also accepted its defeat. Gabriel García Márquez wrote, “The generals in Uruguay believed their own story” (El País de Madrid, November 1, 1980). By 1983 the streets of the capital were crowded with massive mobilizations, such as the legendary July 18 “river of freedom” at the Obelisk. Political negotiations followed between the major political forces and the military junta, which still held a relatively strong position in the pact negotiated at the Naval Club on August 3, 1984. Popular expectations of the liberation of all political prisoners and accountability were high, but a secret (or tacit) pact had been negotiated (Roniger and Sznajder, 1997: 128) the conditions of which remain undisclosed to this day.
The first transitional president, Julio María Sanguinetti (1985–1989, 1994–1999), who had been education minister under Bordaberry (1971–1976), did not attempt any substantial public investigation or prosecution for state crimes despite his initial electoral rhetoric. Instead, he engineered a political consensus to grant complete immunity from prosecution to all military and police perpetrators, without any investigation or due process (Carlos Demasi, interview, August 10, 2001). What I have called the politics of oblivion was a deliberate political and cultural-ideological operation to block access to justice. State-sponsored oblivion operated through veiled amnesties for perpetrators and accomplices, the use of euphemistic language, and the denial of victims’ experiences and realities. These elite-led strategies reinforced the public silencing and helped delegitimate alternative civic forms of truth telling and memory. They drove a “no truth, no justice” formula to control polarization by moving forward and turning a blind eye to human rights abuses (Felipe Michelini, interview, August 18, 2001; see also Fried, 2011: 160). Built upon a dominant discourse that fostered amnesia and impunity, they permeated the population sectors least affected by or identified with the antidictatorial struggle.
The 1986 Ley de Caducidad de la Pretensión Punitiva del Estado (Law of Expiry of the Punitive [Criminal Justice] Pretensions of the State) was the legal-political cornerstone of this politics of oblivion. It functioned as an unlimited amnesty for perpetrators and remained unchanged through four successive administrations despite two popular electoral challenges 20 years apart. It was crafted by Sanguinetti and his cabinet just as the court had issued citations for key military perpetrators and General Hugo Medina, the army commander at the time, had refused to comply. 4 Appealing once again to the rhetoric of national security and institutional crisis (then referred to as “the logic of the situation” in the vague text of the law), this controversial “backdoor” amnesty, prohibiting the prosecution of state crimes perpetrated by military and police officers between 1973 and 1984, was passed in December 1986. In Eduardo Galeano’s words, a law that “offends language and humiliates democracy” (The Nation, March 27, 1989) was approved by both traditional Colorado and Blanco (White) Party majorities with the opposition of the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio (Broad Front). 5 In the official national security discourse, the military had won “the war against subversion” and “saved the nation.” The grave human rights abuses were justified under a rhetoric of “excesses” and inevitable “casualties of war” (Carlos Demasi, interview, June 30, 2010; see also Demasi, 2011). Pro-expiry-law officials argued that pacification and democratic consolidation could be regained only by forgetting the traumatic “wounds” of the past. In this peculiar national official psychology of healing, it was implied that certain emotions were dangerous. As Sanguinetti (2008 [1991]: 35–36) wrote, “the fires of passion” (presumably of the victims and former revolutionaries) needed to be “managed and placated.” Appealing to the language of emotional healing and a Weberian ethics of responsibility, Sanguinetti’s oblivion appealed to “pacification” rhetoric to control not only the public debate but also emotional expression about the past atrocities. In the official political psychology, alternative forms of memory or truth telling were dangerous. Healing was to be accomplished by avoidance of certain stories and emotions, and forgetting came to be understood as liberation from the “ghosts of the past.” The fallacious discursive construction of atrocities perpetrated “by both sides,” now known as “the myth of two demons,” established a false equivalence between state and revolutionary violence. Accordingly, memory advocates and critics of oblivion politics were labeled “revisionists” seeking revenge or accused of having “eyes in the back of their neck” (Sanguinetti’s oft-quoted phrase). This perspective was hailed by the political elites as “the Uruguayan way” of transition by consensus. The discourse actually helped to sustain institutionalized impunity and silence, thus keeping debate out of the public eye for over a decade. The culture of oblivion held that the wounds would heal only through forgetting, maintaining consensus, and turning the page.
The Double Seal: The Referendum, 1987–1989
Given the popular effervescence of the transition, impunity was not to go unchallenged. Popular mobilizations against the “impunity” law started the very day after its passage. On December 26, 1986, a wide coalition of social forces spearheaded by a broad network of human rights organizations announced a campaign to overturn the law via referendum (Burt, 1989: 6) with the slogan “Let the people decide.” It was led by Matilde Rodríguez and Elisa Dellepiane, the widows of two legislators, Representative Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz and Senator Zelmar Michelini, murdered in Buenos Aires in 1976, and María Esther Gatti de Islas, a well-known member of Familiares whose daughter María Emilia, son-in-law Jorge Zaffaroni, and baby granddaughter Mariana Zaffaroni had been disappeared in Buenos Aires by Uruguayan operatives of Operation Condor. 6 Among its illustrious board members were Tabaré Vázquez (now in his second term as president) and the celebrated writers Mario Benedetti and Eduardo Galeano. Campaigners, identified as Verdes (Greens), denounced the expiry law as immoral, unconstitutional, a violation of Uruguayan traditions and moral obligations toward the victims, and a deviation from the 1984 electoral campaign promises of accountability and argued that there would be “no peace as long as we do not know what happened”(Matilde Rodríguez de Gutiérrez Ruiz, quoted in Burt, 1989: 6). Massive street mobilizations in Montevideo succeeded in broadening the public debate. 7 In opposition, the “yellow vote” was sponsored by the two traditional parties, which argued that the state had no power to investigate or prosecute the human rights crimes under “the logic of the situation” (Article 1) and that the law was needed to avert an imminent “institutional crisis.” Uruguayans were deeply polarized, with the mainstream media exploiting lingering fears of a military comeback as well as anticommunist sentiment (Burt, Fried, and Lessa, 2013).
Sealing the Past from Below, 1989
After two years of canvassing for signatures and a highly contested campaign, the impunity law was upheld in April 1989 by 57 percent of the vote. 8 The result would serve as a double seal for human rights cases, and impunity was legitimated at the cost of democratic principles (Carlos Demasi, interview, Montevideo, July 21, 2010; see also Demasi, 2011: 75–95). The popular movement accepted its defeat and attributed it to fear and propaganda. 9 Official politics claimed the “success” of “the Uruguayan way.”
Members of Familiares vowed not to forget and to continue their pursuit of truth and memory, calling for investigations pursuant to Article 4 of the law (Luisa Cuesta, Luz Ibarburu, and Amalia González, interviews, February 21, 1996, and March 14, 2000). Green campaigners had succeeded in reshaping the transitional process, making enduring divisions visible. They were also planting the seeds of a legacy, but a decade-long public silence about one of the nation’s darkest chapters ensued. Against all odds, these processes increased in intensity over the next decades. Powerful processes of personal and collective memory making were sustained in hibernation and emerged periodically as waves of public mobilization.
Truth Seeking and the Path Toward Justice
In the late 1990s, collective counter memories and new forms of contestation started to reemerge as new groups—female former political prisoners (Fried, 2006), children of the disappeared (Fried, 1999; 2001; 2009; Levey, 2014; Sempol, 2006), and civic youth groups mobilized against police brutality and impunity—joined in the traditional demand for memory, truth, and accountability.
In 1995, news of former Captain Adolfo Scilingo’s military confessions about the “death flights” over the Río de la Plata (Verbitsky, 1995) in Argentina, where most Uruguayans had been disappeared under Operation Condor, broke the silence on both sides of the river, stirring public memory and renewed demands for investigation. In May 1996, Senator Rafael Michelini (son of the assassinated senator Zelmar Michelini) and Familiares jointly convoked all human rights and civic associations to a silent march across downtown Montevideo demanding truth, memory, and justice, and it became a multigenerational civic demonstration that drew thousands. The silence spoke louder than any slogan. Two decades later the annual march has become a new tradition (Felipe Michelini, interview, Montevideo, April 10, 2014).
Another wave of memory took place when Sanguinetti’s successor, President Jorge Batlle, addressed the problem of the disappeared in his inaugural speech on March 1, 2000. Breaking 15 years of official silence, he vowed to work toward a “new state of the soul” and a more inclusive peace and reconciliation among all Uruguayans. While Sanguinetti had literally turned his back on the Familiares, Batlle waved at them as his caravan passed by and openly looked them in the eye (Familiares, interview, March 2, 2000). This compelling moment sent waves of emotion across the human rights community.
A third wave of memory came just a month later, when Batlle announced the identification of the Argentine poet Juan Gelman’s long-lost granddaughter, Macarena Gelman. Macarena had been born in captivity in November 1976, after her mother, María Claudia Iruretagoyena de Gelman, had been illegally transported to Uruguay. Gelman had been writing to then-President Sanguinetti soliciting his help in investigating the rumor that the baby had been illegally adopted in Uruguay. The popular movement had renewed demands for investigation during the last year of Sanguinetti’s second term, 1999. This forced upcoming President Batlle to take a public stance if he wanted to distinguish himself from his predecessor (Carlos Demasi, interview, Montevideo, July 21, 2010). On April 4, 2000, in stark contrast with Sanguinetti’s public denials, 10 Batlle, accompanied by Gelman, announced the first reappearance alive of a disappeared child in Montevideo. The announcement revealed the cold-blooded planned execution of a young pregnant woman right after childbirth and dispelled the myth that all of the disappeared were dead. Macarena Gelman became living proof of the brutality of Operation Condor cooperation on both sides of the Río de la Plata. This new gesture of official recognition, coming from the center of political power, helped publicize and legitimate what the civic associations had been claiming for decades (Ariela Peralta, Gelman’s attorney, interview, Montevideo, June 3, 2010; Peralta, 2011).
Another landmark in official public memory in response to popular demands was President Batlle’s establishment of the Comisión para la Paz (Peace Commission) in August 2000. This initiative was a response to Article 4 of the impunity law, which called upon the executive to investigate the fate of the disappeared, an obligation that Sanguinetti had left unfulfilled. Batlle named respected honorary commissioners (including an appointee of Tabaré Vázquez, then leader of the Frente Amplio) but directed them to investigate the fate of the detained-disappeared privately, through military sources. This secrecy limited the scope, legitimacy, and results of the commission’s work.
A prominent challenge to the controversial commission’s work came from Sara Méndez, a former political prisoner, a victim of Operation Condor, and a survivor of the dictatorship, in her indefatigable 25-year search for her long-lost baby Simón Riquelo, who had been kidnapped and separated from her when he was barely 20 days old (Amorín, 1996). Simón had been an iconic poster child in the search for disappeared children. The Peace Commission had declared him dead in 2001, but Méndez had refused to believe it, and on March 14, 2002, he was located alive in Buenos Aires through private efforts (Raúl Olivera, personal communication, June 18, 2013; Amorín, 2002), 11 causing a tremendous public stir and exposing Batlle’s and the commission’s limited political will. News of Simón’s emotional private reunion with his biological mother once again stirred deep emotional reactions. It was followed avidly in mainstream and social media both in Uruguay and in Argentina.
While Batlle’s recognition resulted in some limited—and perhaps unintended—advances in memory, 12 he continued the well-established tradition of sheltering perpetrators, illegally extending the reach of the expiry law beyond borders to cover Operation Condor crimes. 13 By the early 2000s, however, a countercultural movement had made its way back into the public political arena, and court cases filed by families of victims and leading human rights lawyers and organizations developed (Fried and Lessa, 2011). The progress of Gelman vs. Uruguay in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights became the catalyst for the resurgence of demands for justice in the past decade. These demands contributed to the rise of a new campaign to nullify the expiry law in 2009.
The periodic resurgence of memory highlights the fact that its persistence not only is a political effect but also has a deep-seated moral dimension. Despite the official politics of oblivion and institutionalized impunity, personal and collective (civic) processes of memory kept the demand for truth and justice alive for decades, bringing to an end the silence and inertia of the justice system and unearthing the social trauma previously denied.
The Winding Road to Justice
Putting the Dictatorship’s Leadership on Trial, 2003–2011
Following this grassroots strategy, shortly after the two missing children were located a landmark case developed new legal reinterpretations of the expiry law. The attorney Pablo Chargoñia managed to file suit in 2003 in the case of the disappeared teacher and activist Elena Quinteros 14 on behalf of her mother, Tota Quinteros. Chargoñia used the Chilean Judge Guzmán’s innovative argument that disappearance is an ongoing crime, thus opening a first breach in the expiry law in 2003 (Pablo Chargoñia, interview, Montevideo, July 21, 2010; Chargoñia, 2011), and this led to the first prosecution of a state terrorism crime. The Quinteros case had been blocked by institutionalized impunity in 1991 when the executive wrongly directed the courts to archive the case to shelter a civilian minister of the former regime, Juan Carlos Blanco, while he was a senator. Political and cultural generations were changing, however, and the former foreign minister was the first civilian authority to be found responsible for having participated in the decision to disappear Quinteros. Chargoñia argued that civilians were not covered under the expiry law, thus opening another breach in the law. Blanco was sentenced to 20 years in prison for “especially aggravated illegal deprivation of freedom” and “aggravated murder” and is now serving his sentence (Chargoñia, 2011). In two more landmark cases, the former civilian dictator Bordaberry was condemned to 30 years in prison for crimes against the constitution and the former military dictator Álvarez was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment for 37 “aggravated murders” (De Leon, 2011). 15 Also convicted were eight infamous Operation Condor operatives responsible for the systematic torture of thousands and the disappearance of hundreds, including the former officers José “Nino” Gavazzo and Manuel Cordero, sentenced to life in prison (Observatorio Luz Ibarburu, 2015). 16
The Frente Amplio and the Opening of Political Opportunity, 2005–2011
During the first historic Frente Amplio (left-wing coalition) government, the new President Tabaré Vázquez (Socialist Party) was determined to break new ground by attempting to follow (albeit only partially) his constituents’ mandate. The Frente Amplio had made the issue of the dictatorial past part of its identity since its origins in the early 1970s. Vázquez, as the first leftist president, had a tightrope act to perform, given the need to strengthen democracy and respond to the growing demand for accountability while keeping the military, which still held substantial power and had never undergone any kind of reform or purge, under control. In his inaugural speech on March 1, 2005, as had his predecessor Batlle, he referred to the problem of the disappeared, but he took another step that distinguished his administration from those before it: he explicitly signaled the political will to circumvent the expiry law and specifically excluded the Gelman case from its scope, thus giving the courts a green light.
New challenges to the politics of oblivion: Gelman vs. Uruguay, 2006–2008
The disappearance of Juan Gelman’s son Marcelo and his pregnant daughter-in-law María Claudia García Iruretagoyena de Gelman and the abduction of their baby 17 had led to an international campaign sponsored by public figures in the arts and letters. The search for Macarena Gelman had helped bring the little-known case of Uruguay’s disappeared children into the international spotlight. Human rights networks and sympathetic public officials used these high-profile cases to pressure for investigation and accountability, and the Gelman case led to the first regional human rights sentence condemning Uruguay for breach of responsibility (Ariela Peralta, Gelman’s lawyer, interview, July 25, 2010; Burt, Fried, and Lessa, 2013; Peralta, 2011). Despite Vásquez’s political opening, the dynamics of institutionalized impunity had caused the prosecution to close the case in the Uruguayan courts. Juan and Macarena Gelman had then filed suit against the Uruguayan state with the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, arguing that the expiry law had blocked the state’s obligation to investigate the disappearance of Macarena’s mother and prosecute those responsible. The commission’s 2008 report strongly recommended that the Uruguayan state comply with the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights. Although this affected Uruguay’s international standing, it did not seem to resonate in the domestic sphere with the strength its sponsors had hoped for.
In the face of Uruguay’s failure to comply, the commission sent the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in January 2010. In February 2011 the court ruled in favor of the Gelmans and ordered Uruguay to guarantee that the expiry law would no longer block the investigation and prosecution of those responsible in the case. In accordance with previous rulings establishing that amnesty laws intended to guarantee impunity to state agents responsible for grave violations of human rights violated the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights and thus lacked legal validity, the regional court affirmed that the expiry law was invalid. 18
The 2009 Plebiscite for the Nullification of the Expiry Law
The national elections of October 2009 presented a paradox: Uruguayans elected José “Pepe” Mujica, a former Tupamaros guerrilla leader and former political prisoner of the dictatorship, president for a second Frente Amplio term, while a plebiscite to nullify the expiry law narrowly failed once again. As 47.8 percent of the active civilian population voted to challenge impunity, the remaining 52 percent stood still, 19 despite wide mobilization and a well orchestrated public campaign that seemed to touch the younger generations’ sensibilities, and the world watched in puzzlement. These two events were symptomatic of the changing political, cultural, and generational landscape of the collective memory of these crimes and the demand for accountability for them. It also showed that Uruguayans remained deeply divided and ambivalent on these issues decades later.
A major political factor was that the campaigners’ natural allies in the Frente Amplio had not been as supportive as they might have at a different political juncture. Many progressive interviewees presented the situation as a dilemma between supporting a (radical) political program for the advancement of forward-looking socioeconomic rights and supporting a “liberal” program of equality before the law for past crimes. 20 What is clear is that the 2009 plebiscite had different effects from the 1989 referendum. It reopened debate and stimulated widespread mobilization on these issues, made the enduring polarization visible, and broadened coalitions between existing and new civic youth networks against impunity, galvanizing the civic participation of an entirely new generation. This new generation coined new slogans and produced new images, indicating an important widening of the public circle of empathetic listeners and a shift in civic perceptions of the crimes among youth. These youth groups popularized slogans emphasizing the importance of equality before the law and stimulating civic legal participation in support of that of the relatives and families of victims of disappearance (We Are All Relatives). This development showed both the versatility of the memory of state crimes and the impact of impunity and duplicity on social culture and subjectivity. It also underscored how crucial the tenacious involvement and pressure of civil society actors was. Over time, communities of memory were resilient beyond what could be anticipated in the 1980s and 1990s, and the human rights leaders and key actors and victims’ groups permeated the sectors in power and held posts in decisive institutions.
President Mujica (2010–2015) had “inherited” the Gelman case as it moved through the Inter-American Court of Human Rights during his first year. His administration failed to prevent a condemnatory sentence because it lacked consensus and the political will to resolve what are called the “human rights issues of the past.” This resulted in several aborted draft laws, months of debate and revision, and inconsistent behavior throughout 2010. Following the sentence handed down in March 2011 and facing tremendous international as well as domestic and internal party pressure, on May 20, 2011, as the sixteenth anniversary of the silent march in memory of the disappeared approached, a bill that would void the effects of the expiry law’s Articles 1–3 reached a stalemate of 49 votes to 49, amidst strong criticism, presidential ambivalence, and marked polarization that would continue to galvanize public opinion for months (Cesar Orrico, Frente Amplio, interview, Montevideo, August 21, 2010; Brenda Falero, Crysol, interview, May 21, 2011; and Felipe Michelini, Frente Amplio, interview, Montevideo, May 25, 2011). Barely a month later, Mujica made a significant symbolic gesture. On the thirty-eighth anniversary of the coup, June 27, 2011, he issued a decree that, in essence, nullified all previous executives’ administrative decisions in the application of Article 3 of the expiry law, which required judges to consult the executive, declaring them “incompatible with human rights treaties and international sentences.” The complexities of the Tupamaro administration in power with regard to the memory of and accountability for the human rights violations of the era deserve further study.
Last Call for Justice? 2011–2016
Just months later, in October 2011, public shock followed the news of the exhumation of the remains of the public intellectual and beloved disappeared teacher Julio Castro, which revealed a cold-blooded execution that contradicted mainstream accounts of disappearance. The Senate finally passed Law 18.831, canceling the effects of the expiry law in a clearer and bolder way than the draft law derailed on May 20. The “interpretative law” restored the state’s ability to punish crimes and declared that there was no statute of limitations on due process, thus eliminating the main legal barrier to prosecution. It also clarified another matter of profound importance—that the statute of limitations could not apply to dictatorship-era crimes, which were categorized as “crimes against humanity” in line with international law and the requirements of the Inter-American Court. The very next day, some 88 cases were allowed to be reopened in their original jurisdictions, including for the first time since the transition a case of torture, and over 200 new cases of torture were filed in an avalanche of civic participation. For the first time since the transition, cases of sexual violence against women and children during interrogations that had never been referred to in public before were brought to light, along with cases of the torture of minors and crimes against children born in captivity. Only a handful so far have been processed (Observatorio Luz Ibarburu, 2015; 2016).
The parliamentary act of October 2011 was followed by an official speech in recognition of the state’s responsibility by President Mujica in response to the Inter-American Court’s decision of March 21, 2012, which was followed by much public controversy. These significant steps were, however, only the beginning. They did not end institutionalized impunity or the demand for memory, truth, and accountability. As the above-mentioned cases were slowly advancing through the courts in 2012–2013 after over 25 years of inertia, in February and March 2013 the Supreme Court canceled the effects of Law 18. 331 when it declared its key articles unconstitutional and arbitrarily transferred the leading judge in human rights cases, Mariana Mota, to a civilian court, amidst popular outcry for the blatant illegality of the process, leaving more than 50 human rights cases under her jurisdiction subject to further institutional inertia (Burt, Fried, and Lessa, 2015). 21 This signaled a dismaying continuity with the historical pattern of obstructing prosecutions and using delaying tactics and inertia to shelter perpetrators despite public mobilization. These latest developments have meant considerable stalling of prosecutions (Brenda Falero, case petitioner, interviews, Montevideo, October 29, 2011, and April 11, 2014, and Mirtha Guianze, public prosecutor, interviews, Montevideo, October 27, 2011, and April 11, 2014). A wave of popular and distinctly anti-impunity demonstrations, along with regional and even international condemnation, 22 has followed each of these controversial court rulings.
The Supreme Court’s 2013 argument betrays a sharp disconnect between national jurisdiction and developments in international law and contains serious mistakes, among them disregarding international conventions since Nuremberg, appealing to antiquated doctrines, and prioritizing the rights of those prosecuted for perpetrating crimes against humanity over the right to justice for the victims of state terror. As Felipe Michelini (2012: 8) declared, the judgment showed “a complete lack of empathy for the most horrific and hideous crimes in the history of Uruguay.”
This pattern of slowing down the move toward justice in human rights cases clearly shows that institutionalized impunity is still alive (Raúl Olivera, human rights labor leader, interview, Montevideo, June 18, 2013). As the historian Gerardo Caetano said (interview, Montevideo, June 18, 2013), “Impunity may be dead, but it still needs to be buried!” Following this pattern, on July 22, 2015, the Supreme Court rendered another dismaying ruling for the human rights community and relatives of victims in the Julio Castro case, dismissing charges against the agent Zabala, who had apprehended the teacher (anonymous informant, e-mail communication, Montevideo, July 22, 2015; Crysol, 2015). The ruling, which ignored international law, deeply affected Uruguay’s international standing.
There were, however, signs of resistance. Judge Juan Carlos Fernández Lechini defied the court in the Castro case by arguing that crimes against humanity cannot be subject to a statute of limitations according to international law, setting a new precedent although the case has since been closed by an appellate court. On July 29, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that the statute of limitations did not apply in the Castro case and recognized that the expiry law was “an insurmountable obstacle for the exercise of the penal action.” Justice Ricardo Pérez Manrique also supported the thesis that politically motivated crimes such as homicides, disappearances, and torture, such as in the case of Aldo Perrini, must be considered “crimes against humanity” and as such cannot be subject to a statute of limitations (personal communication, Mirtha Guianze, Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos, July 30, 2015).
As President Vázquez, already a pioneer in the opening of humans rights cases in his first term, took office for a second time on March 1, 2015, he created a Grupo de Trabajo por Verdad y Justicia (Working Group for Truth and Justice) headed by two respected commissioners, the former Representative Felipe Michelini and the new Frente Amplio Representative Macarena Gelman. This furthered the historic work done in his first administration and was the first time since the transition that a governmental committee had been charged with investigating the fate of the disappeared through archival and testimonial research to be used independently by the courts without the executive’s interference. All this shows that the past is not past but remains a pending task. As Vásquez’s working group announced its strategic plan on March 17, 2016, and began preparing a first annual progress report, the demand for truth and accountability and expectations of progress remain high. 23
Conclusion
These waves of postdictatorship memory powerfully illustrate four interrelated arguments. First, they show that the generation of collective memories involves a far more complex set of social and intersubjective forces than was first thought, one that takes decades and political-cultural generations to crystallize. They also show that a politics of denial and silencing can close up political and institutional spaces. Yet they also vividly describe the obstacles to the full political manipulation of the past. Despite all the systematic actions to erase the unresolved human rights issues from the public agenda and against earlier claims of the “success” of “the Uruguayan way,” the recent past remains alive in the present. It is a historical experience that, when considered over time, shows that such policies cannot ensure the closure of private, intimate, collective and even sociocultural processing of alternative truth-telling or counter memory-making processes. Powerful processes of memory making in personal and collective subjectivities have been sustained, alternating with public latency. Paradoxically, rather than waning in the cultural memory of the nation, these processes have increased in intensity over the decades, leading to surprising and contradictory developments to this day. A torrent of new developments concerning that contested process is emerging, among them the polemics over Defense Minister Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro’s refusal to open archives to researchers and judges in criminal investigations and to honor tribunals for military perpetrators, the arrest of a former military collaborator, Amodio Pérez, while he was visiting the country to promote a controversial book (sponsored by the conservative newspaper El País), the suicide of a high-ranking officer, General Pedro Barneix, indicted in one of the cases of torture and disappearance, and the location of new secret archives.
The politics of oblivion may have had the unintended paradoxical consequence of prolonging the unresolved conflict and projecting it onto the realm of the symbolic and countercultural struggle for hegemony. Public interest has grown exponentially, and controversial reports about actors and events in the unfolding drama of the recent past continue to attract public attention. The quality of cultural memory has been transformed over the past decade, and there are signs that new alternative understandings may finally be finding public space and more receptive sensibilities.
Second, the Uruguayan case illustrates that unresolved human rights issues and the possibility of their resolution are intimately linked to the preservation of a living memory through personal and collective witnessing, identification, and mobilization. This process has been sustained by emerging generations and communities of memory and emergent narratives that managed to move the categorization of the state crimes as mere “excesses” to a recognition of them as crimes against humanity, crimes that attack the core of human sensibility. These processes are not just political struggles but have a moral dimension, as Honneth (1996) has eloquently argued. The historical and ethnographic evidence of recurring and growing memory waves show that both the violence of state terrorism and the violence of the prolonged transition in Uruguay—not a process of “transitional justice” but one based on oblivion and institutionalized impunity—had enduring individual, collective, and social effects that remain unresolved. What was denied three decades earlier has become a potential social trauma.
Third, while it is important for social scientists to understand cases shrouded in silencing, duplicity, denial, and oblivion/impunity from the top (at the elite level), it is also crucial to have a richer and more nuanced understanding of pacted transitions from the bottom up, looking at civic mobilization and the undercurrents of memory where it is generated.
Lastly, in order to understand the past four decades of oblivion and impunity during Uruguay’s state terror regime and the transition, it is important to develop a sociocultural and psychosocial analysis of enduring social and collective emotions, processes of social trauma and healing, and the legacy of distrust, fear, and duplicity. The persistence of a culture of oblivion and civil support for impunity has been enabled by such cultural and intersubjective processes and is a serious obstacle to democratic culture building and the growth of the rule of law (see Corradi, Fagen, and Garretón, 1992; Lira and Castillo, 1991; Lira, Salimovich, and Weinstein, 1992). The processes manifested in public waves of memory include generational processes in families and political communities whereby the direct witnesses of and participants in the events transmit aspects of their experiences to the young through stories, symbols, and non-narrative processes that nourish contemporary collective emotions, forms of language, and moral judgments; intersubjective and cultural processes from the personal and intimate sphere to the public realm; and the generation by communities of memory (including memory professionals and historians) of alternative versions of the history of the contentious period bidding for political, symbolic, and moral recognition (see Fried, 2016). This is the case with a long list of events, including the publication of paradigmatic documents that set the record straight and provide platforms for historical debate, forensic anthropological research on illegal graves and human remains in the context of academic or judiciary investigations, and newly published letters, diaries, and witness accounts. Despite attempts to purge or hide archives and disappear documents and bodies, the erasure of the past can hardly ever be complete.
Often ignored or submerged, psycho-emotional and socio-emotional processing after state-sponsored political violence may take the form of silencing and denial of trauma. In the Uruguayan case, both the violence of the period of state terrorism and the violence, based on oblivion and impunity, of the postauthoritarian transition generated powerful emotional effects of denial and psychic numbing at the collective and sociocultural levels. This processing must be taken into account in attempts to understand how transitional events and processes unfolded in Uruguay as the nation as a whole comes to recognize that what happened in its recent past may be understood as historical or social trauma (see Alexander and Smelser, 2004; Fried, 2012; 2016; Prager, 1998; 2008; 2011; Volkan, Ast, and Greer, 2002).
The Uruguayan transition shows that the politics of oblivion is a highly contested and paradoxical process despite its systematic thrust and endurance. It ultimately failed to fulfill the state’s obligation or the public’s expectation of peace, justice, and reconciliation. It arguably unnecessarily prolonged the political transition and institutionalized impunity and failed to address the country’s polarization and put the conflictive past to rest. This legacy of the violent recent past is still occupying political and social space, affecting the social imagination, emotions, and social relations, and shaping social and political decisions to the detriment of present and future-oriented tasks. This historical fact highlights the possible healing effects of ongoing mobilization, activism, and personal remembrance such as shared truth telling and truth seeking in a social world that can recognize and sustain them (see Fried, 2012; Prager, 2008; 2009; 2011). As Felipe Michelini (2015) has said, “Three decades ago Uruguayans were told to turn the page. Our civil society has clearly responded, ‘You have to read the page before you can turn it.’” As the pendulum swings from institutionalized impunity to growing demands of increasing accountability, civil society’s efforts at memorializing this experience in public seem vibrant and well established. The last chapter in the social struggle for a diversity of memories of state terror against oblivion and for justice in Uruguay remains to be written, but it will be written.
Footnotes
Notes
Gabriela Fried Amilivia is an associate professor of sociology and Latin American studies at California State University Los Angeles and the author of State Terrorism and the Politics of Memory in Latin America (2016).