Public Security in Black Hands

A chronicle of interrupted innocence: when guns had better intentions than grammar

PUBLIC SECURITY IN BLACK HANDS
Chronicle of Interrupted Innocence: When Guns Had Better Intentions Than Grammar
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

There is something profoundly tender —in the most veterinary sense of the word— in Uruguay’s persistent illusion that a country’s history is defined in the records of a notary’s office or at the counter of a neighborhood bar at vermouth hour.
For decades, the country looked at itself in the mirror with the self-satisfaction of someone who knows he is the diligent student of the global middle class: the country of lukewarm soup, subsidized suburban bus fares, and a president who went to the movies without security, buying candy with the exact change.
But, alas, the mental tropics always find a way to slip through the cracks of the Government Palace, even if the tropics here are made of mist, beach, and rum.
It turns out that a group of enthusiastic young men from the 1960s, equipped with an implacable pedagogical vocation and a bedside bibliography of guerrilla warfare manuals, decided that the best way to explain surplus value to a bank teller in the provinces was through the persuasive method of hot lead and express kidnapping.
Those were the days when national politics suffered from a severe shortage of Marxist-Leninist epic, a deficiency the selfless Tupamaros set out to remedy with gunfire, convinced that freedom was conquered by robbing bowling alleys or charging headlong through the city of Pando.
What is fascinating about the local historiographical thesis is that marvelous causal alchemy that reduces the continent’s institutional breakdowns to a couple of capricious exceptions.
As though universal history were a game of truco in which a couple of clever fellows caught on too early and ruined recess.
To argue that, without those mischievous young men and their endearing partners in the Communist Party —always ready to tune the ideological violin while the Soviet Marseillaise played— Uruguay would have traveled the road of perpetual harmony like an electric streetcar with no stock shortages is supremely naive.
It is the River Plate version of Eden before the serpent: an Eden where no one overcharged taxes, unions discussed the price of barbecue wearing bow ties, and Caribbean military men spent their afternoons drinking rum and making toys for children.
Of course, reality tends to be somewhat messier than a bronze-plated editorial.
To attribute the shaking of institutional structures to a single factor is to ignore that theaters of operations do not catch fire merely because someone walks by with a match, but because the shack was already full of dry shavings and drafts.
But in the kingdom of left-wing nostalgia, the blame always lies with the neighbor who arrived late to the distribution of utopia or with whoever prevents them from skipping the steps of bourgeois legality, under the excuse that crime must be fought.
Today, seen from a distance, those café guerrillas who ended up signing ministerial decrees and distributing subsidies with the same naturalness with which they once robbed an armored truck or kidnapped the Brazilian consul remind us that, deep down, Uruguay is an extraordinarily indulgent country.
Here no one ever fully retires from his past; he simply recycles it with a sprig of mint and a good image consultant. In one stroke, he goes from terrorist to “a supreme life”; enough to justify ignoring how he bought a small farm with no previous income.
Some have reasons to complain. They were a popular part of the sluggish democracy, waiting for a sufficient number of revolutionary cells to take shape in education and industry; they barely had an arsenal in the making, a natural argument for persuading opponents of any institutionalized political party, when the adolescent recklessness of the Tupas generated a tsunami that swept them into jail.
They will never forgive such an affront by the system they wanted to destroy, even though nothing yet suggested they would use such a Russian-Caribbean arsenal, when they were summarily regarded as pre-terrorists.
After all, if that endearing barricade epic taught us anything, it is that in Uruguay even the fiercest revolutions end up, sooner or later, debating special pensions in a parliamentary committee.
Some suspicious minds suppose that, even under democracy, those old fundraisers still occasionally go out armed to raise cash, out of sheer nostalgia.
Others attribute to those same indelible ideological atavisms that empathy with those who carry out “jobs” against capitalism in someone else’s pocket, which the perverse system maliciously regards as criminal acts,
Others, more naive still, expect public security from those who “legitimately” believe, in a democracy, that the system is a perverse creation to be destroyed, the work of an empire stubbornly bent on abusing them.

Uruguay’s political violence
Tupamaro political memory
Public security and power

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