The Tupamaros: re-gendering an ungendered guerilla movement

Abstract

The Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros was a clandestine armed urban guerrilla that existed in Uruguay between 1962 and 1973. While most of the guerrillas in Latin-America were peasant struggles in the countryside, this guerrilla's urban nature made it atypical in the region. Furthermore, the Tupamaros were mainly an organization composed of young middle-class members, making it especially susceptible to the conterminous cultural global transformations of the time. The guerrilla movement appears as a dialectical space where present and futures intermingle and the transitory nature of guerrilla movements often makes them fertile soil for disputes and gender contestations. Through an analysis of the testimonies of both men and women who were active militants in the movement, the paper sheds light on how armed movements that do not necessarily define themselves along gendered lines, nonetheless come to construct visions and practices of relations between women and men. While these are often attuned with the ideological prisms through which they see the world, discourses also oftentimes emerge in sharp contradiction with the gendered practices.

Keywords:

• gender
• Latin-America
• guerrilla movement

Notes on contributor

Gabriela Gonzalez-Vaillant is a sociology Ph.D. candidate at State University of New York at Stony Brook. She obtained an M.A. in Sociology and a Diploma in Women and Gender Studies from this same institution. She has undertaken numerous investigations on diverse issues in the field of political sociology, such as contentious politics in Latin-America, youth social movements, memory and politics, politics and gender and education. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the social power of student movements in the Southern Cone at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. This article is a further development of some of the arguments presented by the author in Gonzalez-Vaillant, Kimmel, Makekamadi, and Tyagi (2012).

2. Name refers to the famed Incan rebel Tupac Amarú.

3. Its official foundation was in 1965. After 1973 there were failed attempts to reunite the movement. A second stage begins after in which most of the organization's members are either in prison or in exile. We limit the scope of this analysis to the guerrilla warfare stage.

4. Che Guevara stated in his visit to Uruguay in 1961 that the country was not fit for an armed revolution. He then suffered an attempt of assassination.

5. Demographical data available for the Tupamaro's composition are limited due to its clandestine nature. According to data collected by Porzencanski (1973), based on 648 members captured or killed in action between 12 December 1966 and 22 June 1972, the median age in 1966 was of 30.5% and 61% were students or middle-class professionals and technicians. These data are based on information released to the press by police and armed forces and should therefore be interpreted with care.

6. Mauricio Rosencof in Aldrighi (2009, p. 43).

7. Actas Tupamaras, El Papel de la Mujer, p. 21, 1971 (original in Spanish).

8. The idea of a new man is associated with Che Guevara's idea of a revolutionary man that was more egalitarian, altruistic, and more socially conscious than the ones of the old regime (Kampwirth, 2002, p. 1).

9. Actas Tupamaras, 1971 (original in Spanish).

10. Actas Tupamaras, El Papel de la Mujer, p. 21, 1971 (original in Spanish).

11. Interview to Yessie Macchi, by RolandoW. Sasso in the Archive of Documentation and Press on Recent History.

12. This idea of proletarization, which found its inspiration in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, became a main issue of debate in the ‘Symposium of Viña del Mar' in 1973. It was suggested that the lack of classist consciousness of members of the Tupamaros had led to the failure of the movement. Antecedents of this idea can also be found before, see, for example, Gilio (1969, pp. 12–13) and ‘Document 4 – January 1969' Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros. At first the idea of proletariat was used in the Tupamaro lexicon as synonymous of the poor, marginalized, have-nots, dispossessed and exploited, and not necessarily in a Marxist-Leninist sense of the word.

13. 23 May 1969 in Marcha. ‘Los Robin Hood de la Guerrilla: como ve TIME a los tupamaros' in the Archive of Documentation and Press on Recent History.

14. Document: Las Fuerzas Armadas al Pueblo Oriental, p. 428.

15. 17 February 1969 in El País ‘PENSAMIENTO Y ACCIÓN DE LA MUJER COMUNISTA' in the Archive of Documentation and Press on Recent History.

16. Interview by Tagliaferro to Mujica and Topolansky, available in the Campora Archive, 15 June 2001.

17. See, for example, interview with Alemañi in Aldrighi (2009).

18. No quantitative study has been done on the types of activities undertaken by different genders and in a clandestine organization it is very difficult to have a real sense of this.

19. Interview by Tagliaferro to Mujica and Topolansky, available in the Archive, 15 June 2001.

20. See, for example, interview to Yessie Macchi by Rolando W. Sasso in the Archive of Documentation and Press on Recent History.

21. Interview to Yessie Macchi, by Rolando W. Sasso in the Archive of Documentation and Press on Recent History.

22. Graciela Sapriza, ‘Mujeres de los sesenta' (Women in the sixties) in Historias y Memorias. Retrieved October 10, 2015, from http://historiasymemorias.jimdo.com/feminismo-violencia-de-g%C3%A9nero/

23. Viglietti ‘Gurisito' in 1971 – Canciones Chuecas.

24. See, for example, interview to Celeste Zerpa in Aldrighi (2009, pp. 307–314).

25. ‘Al Rojo Vivo’ Montevideo, 18 March 1969, in Aznares and Cañas (1969).

26. Point 374 in Las FFAA al Pueblo Oriental, p. 417.

27. An exception, focused on life in prison, would be the work of Semplo (2010).