New Winds in South America

Uruguay is one of the smaller countries in South America's southern cone. Like its neighbors in the region (Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile), Uruguay has suffered under a brutally repressive U.S.-backed military government for most of the past decade. But new winds are blowing in South America, including Uruguay, where a massive nonviolent movement of workers, church people, and human rights activists is bringing new hope for justice and freedom.

Ever since the 1973 military coup which broke Uruguay's long democratic tradition, Uruguayans have found creative ways of registering their opposition, despite a climate of totalitarian control and repression. The coup itself was followed by a general strike that paralyzed the country for two weeks. In the years that have followed, the Uruguayan people have consistently registered their discontent by ingeniously exploiting and expanding the very limited political space available to them.

In November, 1980, the Uruguayan military government lost its own plebiscite. Despite extensive government propaganda and severe restrictions on campaigning by the opposition, approximately 57 per cent of the Uruguayan voting population rejected the proposal to legalize the military's participation in government. That election was said to be the first time that a government's own illegitimacy was ratified by the people.

In 1982 elections were permitted for the leaders of the three "legal" parties in Uruguay. The government publicly stressed that voting was not mandatory and that the internal elections were only for the parties to elect their leaders. But the opposition within the traditional parties presented the elections as an opportunity for the Uruguayan public to register their feelings about the military government. This created a second plebiscite in which the military was again defeated by an overwhelming margin.

On May 1, 1983, 150,000 people swelled the streets in the largest demonstration ever seen in Uruguay. They demanded freedom, employment, higher wages, and amnesty for political prisoners. Since then the opposition has become increasingly visible and vocal. Strikes, demonstrations, and work stoppages or slowdowns attest to the fact that the Uruguayan populace has had it with military rule. Students circulate humor magazines underground which attack the walls of competition and isolation that the military government has built over the past decade.

Monthly and sometimes weekly protests have become common in Uruguay during the past year. Organizing largely by word of mouth, people have darkened cities by concerted blackouts of lights at a given hour, an action which is quite difficult to punish, even within the closed Uruguayan system. The banging of pots and pans, a tactic borrowed from the Chilean monthly days of protest, has become a powerful vehicle for expressing massive opposition. The use of a common household item such as a pot makes it difficult for the military to single out offenders.

In November, 1983, approximately a half million people of a total population of 2.7 million gathered in Montevideo, Uruguay's capital, to reiterate their demands for freedom, jobs, and a return to democracy. On Christmas Eve, instead of the usual fireworks display, Uruguayans throughout the country sounded their pots and pans.

The involvement of thousands of Christians has been crucial to the birth of the nonviolent struggle unfolding in Uruguay. One notable example of this can be seen in the life and work of Father Luis Perez Aguirre, a Uruguayan Jesuit and journalist. Perez Aguirre believes that it is possible to create a community of people which operates as an alternative model of human relations, a model different from that engendered by the ideology of national security under which he lives.

This belief is made visible in the nine-year-old Christian community of La Huella (the footstep) in southwest Uruguay, where community members, including some eight adults, provide a home for abandoned children. La Huella was designed not only to meet the physical needs of the children, but to give them the chance to develop their capacities to change and empower their lives. The orphans are involved in all facets of community life, including decision-making, a process from which their poverty had previously excluded them.

"There's much in Uruguayan society that needs changing," says Perez Aguirre. "It isn't just the political system—it's the family, the roles of men and women. At the community, we interchange roles, manual work and intellectual work, male and female duties." The adults, who all hold other professional positions, also work the earth, process milk, and sell pigs. Their material goods are held in common.

La Huella is located 25 kilometers from Montevideo, where Perez Aguirre challenges the assumptions of Uruguay's national security state in his capacity as leader of Servicio Paz y Justicia (Serpaj), a human rights advocacy organization recently closed by the Uruguayan government.

Serpaj's method of influencing public opinion and affecting national policy was chosen based on its analysis of and experience with the Uruguayan doctrine of national security. Its choice for active nonviolent resistance deemed that respect for life must be the principal organizing element of all human relationships, whether among individuals or between individuals and institutions. Staff members of Serpaj believe that the weak are inherently powerful because they are able to adapt to changing environments. They assert that truth is not a tactic to be manipulated for political gain, rather, its expression is an act of liberation.

Serpaj's organizational history in Uruguay demonstrates that the empowerment of people and the unmasking of truth in the death-dealing Uruguayan reality has been costly. Soon after it was started in Uruguay in 1968, Serpaj was forced to suspend operations because of the arrest, exile, and intimidation of its members. In 1980, at the request of Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Perez Aguirre rejuvenated Serpaj's activities in Uruguay.

Until a government decree on August 30, 1983, illegalized it, Serpaj was the only human rights group operating openly in Uruguay. "I did everything publicly, openly," Perez Aguirre recalled. "For the first few months the government let us operate. Then the arrests began, interrogation, jail. Still we continued, but we had to be careful."

A month before it was closed, Serpaj had publicly denounced the torture of several students, including the violent rape of three women. It was the first time any such denunciation had been made publicly inside Uruguay. Perez Aguirre reflected, "We understood that silence made us accomplices. That's why we assumed the responsibility of making the denunciations."

Aware of potential confrontation, Serpaj decided to take drastic action. Perez Aguirre and a colleague began a two-week hunger strike on August 11 that was to culminate in a "Day of National Reflection." Serpaj requested that Uruguayans refrain from unnecessary activity during that evening in order to reflect on the social, political, and economic problems of the nation and the population's expectations of the country's leaders.

Perez Aguirre hoped the fast would generate international attention for the organization and make the expected crackdown by the Uruguayan government as politically costly for the regime as possible. The ongoing harassment, torture, interrogation, detention, and indictment of Serpaj members has discouraged internal unity and forced Serpaj to rely quite heavily on external pressures for protection.

The public response to the fast was extraordinary. "In Uruguay you can't advertise this in the newspaper, or talk about it on the radio," Perez Aguirre commented. "But somehow the word got out. For two weeks people surrounded the office where I was fasting with two other priests ... to give their support. And the police arrested them at the rate of 100 a day."

Some local church groups fasted in solidarity with Serpaj and brought the food they didn't eat to the hungry. Catholic women religious, some very old and clutching rosary beads, knelt in prayer in front of Serpaj headquarters. When police came to arrest them, they continued to pray and refused to leave, disorienting the police officers, who resorted to force to move them.

Nonviolent protests at the local and national levels in Uruguay are only occasionally visible in the United States, and frequently underplayed in official public forums. Yet the activities at communities such as La Huella and the networks that are developing in spite of the repressive military apparatus suggest that personal, social, and economic relationships can be rooted in justice and hope rather than in fear, control, and the threat and use of unbridled power.

Our Uruguayan sisters and brothers present a challenge to North American Christians to examine our own political and economic system and to live in a manner consistent with the belief that the God of justice and shalom is also the Lord of history.

Virginia Bouvier was a staff associate for the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Gail Lehman was a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer at WOLA when this article appeared.