Montevideo is in parts a ghost city, its nouveau riche splendor still new. It is a city full of statues—copies of the David, the Colleoni statue in Venice, elaborate historical tableaux in bronze. But letters have dropped off inscriptions and have not been replaced; and the public clocks on street corners have everywhere stopped. The plane trees in the center are not old; tall carved doors still open onto marble halls with fine ceilings that still look new. But the shops have little to offer; the pavements are broken; the streets are too full of people selling chocolate and sweets and other little things. The three or four fair restaurants that survive—in a city of more than a million—do not always have meat; and the bread is made partly of sorghum.
Even without the slogan on the walls—STOP TORTURING SASSANO, THE MILITARY ARE TORTURING SERENY, DEATH TO THE DICTATORSHIP, TUPAMAROS RENEGADES THIEVES SWINE, PUTAMAROS (puta, a whore)—the visitor would know that he is in a city where, as in a fairy story, a hidden calamity has occurred. A fabulous city, created all at once, and struck down almost as soon as it had been created.
“The country has grown sad,” the artist said. He survives by living to himself, doing his work, and pretending that Uruguay is somewhere else. He doesn’t listen to the radio or watch television or read the newspapers. What—apart from the football—had he missed in that morning’s El País? A plane hijacked to Bolivia; five hundred secondary-school students suspended; five “extremists,” three of them university students, indicted by the military court for “conspiring against the Constitution.”
When Uruguay was rich, politics were a matter of personalities and the army hardly existed. Now the money has run out, and the little country—almost as big as Britain, but with less than three million people—tears itself apart.
“The army came for me at four in the morning. In the jail—they play pop music in the torture cells—I was made to stand with my feet together for ten hours. Then I was given the ‘submarine.’ I was winded by a heavy blow in the stomach and my head was held under water. They’re expert now. But they’ve had accidents. Then I was made to stand again. When I collapsed I was prodded between the legs with a bayonet.” The “submarine” is “soft” torture. People who have been burned by the electric prod don’t talk about their experiences.
Everyone in Uruguay, whether on the Right or Left, knows now—sixty years too late—where the trouble started. It started with the president called Batlle (pronounced Bajhay); it started with the welfare state Batlle, after a visit to Switzerland, began to impose on Uruguay just before the First World War.
Uruguay had the money. Her exports of meat and wool made her rich; the peso was on a par with the dollar. “In those days,” the banker says, “out of every dollar we earned abroad, eighty cents was pure surplus. A surplus provided by the land—the rain, the climate, the earth.” The land might be said to be Indian land, but the Indians had been exterminated in the nineteenth century. A monument in the Prado park commemorates Uruguay’s last four Charrua Indians, who were sent as exhibits to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where they died.
Pensions, every kind of worker’s benefit, women’s rights: month after month Batlle handed down the liberal laws to an astonished pastoral people. And suddenly Uruguay was modern, the best-educated country in South America, with the most liberal laws; and Montevideo was a metropolis, full of statues.
Sábat, the cartoonist, who left Uruguay eight years ago and now works in Buenos Aires, says: “Uruguay is a big estancia. Only a megalomaniac like Batlle could think that it was a country. It remains a big estancia with a city, Montevideo, that is crystallized on the 1930s. Creativity stopped then. The country was developing intelletually. After Batlle everything was crystallized.”
The socialist teacher, more romantic, grieves for the gaucho past. “Batlle should not have been born in a bucolic country. He went to Europe and got all those lovely ideas and then looked around for a country where he could apply them. And as the country didn’t exist he invented it. He invented the industrial worker, bringing in people from the country to the town. People used to drinking maté, watching sheep, sitting under the ombú tree—which wasn’t bad, you know: it was beautiful: the twentieth century doesn’t want us to live like that. He invented the workers and then he invented the social laws and then the bureaucracy—which was terrible. I am not certain why this should have led to corruption and venality, but it did.”
The businessman: “Utopia is the worst thing for a man. He is old at thirty. That happened to us.”
The banker: “All the productive infrastructure was built between 1850 and 1930 and was based on existing British investments. Very little was done afterward. A power plant was finished after 1945; that was the most important addition. No new roads, no new bridges. The country was living like a retired person on a pension.”
And with the new state, a new glory. Football, introduced by British railway workers, became the Uruguayan obsession. Sábat: “Our provincialism was backed up by our football—a proof of greatness that had no relation with reality. In 1924 in Paris and in 1928 in Amsterdam we were the Olympic champions. We were the world champions in Montevideo in 1930 and in Rio in 1950. And we thought: If we are world champions in football, then we must be world champions in everything.”
In the park named after Batlle, the great football stadium, built in 1930 (together with the Legislative Palace) for the centenary of Uruguay’s independence, and named after Batlle, still draws the crowds. The newspapers still devote half their news space to football. But football has decayed with the economy; and now, like the cattle, the better footballers have to be sold off to richer countries as soon as they are reared.
There are many jokes in Uruguay about the bureaucracy; and they all are true. Out of a work force of just over a million, 250,000 are employed by the state. PLUNA, the Uruguayan airline, used to have one thousand employees and one functioning airplane. The people at ANCAP, the state oil company, tried to get to the office before it opened: there were more employees than chairs.
In 1958 the Ministry of Public Health recruited fifteen hundred new staff. In 1959 in Public Works there was one messenger for every six civil servants. In Telephones and Electricity there are forty-five grades of civil servants. Nothing is done by post; everything requires a personal visit. The service is slow; but the public, scattered among the messengers and the sleeping police dogs in the foyer, is uncomplaining: many of them are civil servants from other departments, with time on their hands.
It is a kind of ideal: government offices are like clubs for public and staff, a whole country living the life of a commune, work and leisure flowing together, everyone, active and inactive, a pensioner of the state. But Uruguay still lives off meat and wool; and Montevideo, which contains more than a third of the country’s population, is an artificial metropolis. The padding of the civil service, which began thirty years ago, in the time of wealth, disguises unemployment and urban purposelessness. Everyone knows this, but too many people benefit: the whole state has been led into this conspiracy against itself. “Everyone is pension-minded,” the businessman says. And even the left-wing slogans of protest against the military government can be cautious and practical: Paz Salario Libertad: Peace Wages Liberty.
The girls in blue nylon coats in Telephones and Electricity earn about 120 dollars a month. In summer, from December to March, they work from seven to one. They go off then to a second job. Or they go to the beach. Montevideo is built along a beach; all roads south end in white sand and a bay.
And this is where Uruguayans regularly lose all sense of crisis, and the will to action is weakened: on the too accessible beach, in the resort developments just a few minutes outside Montevideo where many modest people have summer houses amid pines and dunes, and in Punta del Este, one of Uruguay’s economic disasters, built mainly in the 1950s with loans from the Mortgage Bank, the satellite resort town of the artificial metropolis.
Everyone rejects Batllismo, but after sixty
years everyone in Uruguay has been made by it. The resort life is all they know; its crumbling away leaves them confused. “Spiritually,” the journalist said, “we feel we have gone back.” Spiritually? “I don’t like to be stressed permanently.” He was a two-house man; but he had to do two jobs, one with the government; and his wife was doing two jobs. And cars were expensive, because of the 300 percent tax. A new Volkswagen cost 8000 dollars; even a 1955 Rover cost 3500 dollars. “We won’t progress. What’s progress, though. America? That’s consuming and stressing, keeping up with the Joneses. We don’t have that kind of shit here, if you pardon the expression.”
But there was the high price of cars.
“I’ll tell you about Uruguay in one sentence,” the architect said to me on my first evening in Montevideo. “The last Jaguar was imported in 1955.”
These are withdrawal symptoms and they add up to a kind of spiritual distress: Montevideo, spreading along its beach, needs the motorcar. Without the motorcar, tracts of the city will have to be abandoned, as the Prado park has been abandoned. All that resort life, all that modernity of which the Uruguayans were until recently so proud, depends on consumer goods, which Uruguay bought from more “stressed” countries and—wasting the talent of two generations in a padded civil service—never learned to make.
The antique cars of Montevideo—pre-1955 Citroens, baby Morrises and Austins, Fords and Chev-rolets of the 1930s, and other names now abandoned or superseded: Hupmobile, Willys-Overland Whippet, Dodge Brothers, Hudson—are not as gay as they first appear, part of the resort life. The country is under siege. The simplest things are smuggled in by lorry from Argentina; the supplies of modern civilization are running out.
Uruguayans say that they are a European nation, that they have always had their back to the rest of South America. It was their great error, and is part of their failure. Their habits of wealth made them, profoundly, a colonial people, educated but intellectually null, consumers, parasitic on the culture and technology of others.
The Tupamaros were destroyers. They had no program; they were like people provoking a reaction, challenging the hidden enemy to declare himself. In the end they picked on the armed forces and were speedily destroyed. “The Tupamaros were not the beginning of a revolution,” Sábat says. “They were the last whisper of Batllismo. They were parricides, engaged in a kind of kamikaze. In Uruguay now, everybody, whatever slogans he shouts, is either a parricide or a reactionary.”
There is no middle way. Political attitudes have grown simpler and harder; and it is impossible not to take sides. On the last Saturday in October a student in the engineering faculty of the university blew himself up while making a bomb. The army closed the university—independent until that day—and arrested everybody. Parricide or reactionary, left-wing or right-wing, each side now finds in the other the enemy he needs. Each side now assigns a destructive role to the other; and, as in Chile, people grow into their roles.
Those who can, get out. They queue for passports at the rear entrance of the pink-walled Foreign Ministry, formerly the Santos Palace (built in 1880, the basin of the fountain in the hall carved from a single block of Carrara marble). In October there were reports of people queueing all night. At Carrasco Airport the other day someone chalked on a wall: “El último que saiga que apague la luz”: “The last person to leave must put out the light.”
4 The Brothels Behind the Graveyard
May—July 1974
The prophecy—according to some old Argentine book of prophecies, which I often heard about but never saw—was that Perón would be hanged by his followers in the Plaza de Mayo, the main square in downtown Buenos Aires. But Perón died with his legend intact. “MURIO”: “He is dead.” The headline filled half the front page of Crónica, a popular Buenos Aires newspaper; and there was no need to give the name.
He was in his seventy-ninth year and in the ninth month of his third presidential term; and his legend had lasted for nearly thirty years. He was the army man who had moved out of the code of his caste and shaken up the old colonial agricultural society of Argentina; he had identified the enemies of the poor; he had created the trade unions. He has given a brutal face to the brutish land of estancias and polo and brothels and very cheap servants. And his legend, as the unique revolutionary, survived the incompetence and plunder of his early rule; it survived his overthrow in 1955 and the seventeen years of exile that followed; it survived the mob killings that attended his triumphant return last year; and it survived the failure of his last months in office.
The failure was obvious. Perón could not control the Argentina he had called into being twenty years before. He had identified the cruelties of the society, and yet he had made that necessary task seem irresponsible: he had not been able to reorganize the society he had undermined. And perhaps the task of reorganization was beyond the capacities of any leader, however creative. Politics reflect a society and a land. Argentina is a land of plunder, a new land, virtually peopled in this century. It remains a land to be plundered; and its politics can be nothing but the politics of plunder.
Everyone in Argentina understands and accepts this, and in the end Perón could only offer his words. In the end he had become his name alone, a presence, above it all, above the people who acted in his name, above the inflation and the shortages and the further steep decline of the peso, the faction fights, the daily kidnappings and guerrilla shootouts, the strong rumors of plunder in high places: above the Argentina whose brutality and frenzies he had divined and exploited, the Argentina he had returned to save, and which he now leaves behind him.
He was very old, and perhaps his cause had become more personal than he knew: to return to his homeland and to be rehabilitated. He made his peace with the armed forces, who had previously stripped him of his rank. He made his peace with the Church, against whom, in his second term, he had warred: he was to die holding the rosary given him by Pope Paul. He came back from exile a softened man, even philosophical, with ideas about ecology and the environment and the unity of Latin America (“By 2000 we shall be united or dominated).” But these ideas were remote from the anxieties of his followers and the power conflicts of the country. And toward the end he seemed to have recognized that the country was beyond his control.
Two years ago, when the military still ruled, everyone was Peronist, even Maoist priests and Trotskyist guerrillas. Perón, or his name, united all who wanted to see an end to military rule. But, inevitably, when Perón began to rule, it became necessary to distinguish the true Peronists from the “infiltrators.” And the man who-had returned as a national leader, as the “conductor” of all the warring elements of the movement that carried his name, began once again, like the old Perón, to detect enemies. There were enemies on the Left, among the guerrilla groups who had helped to bring him back to power. There were enemies on the Right. So many people were seen, as the months passed, “sabotaging the current political process.” Week by week the semi-official El Caudillo identified new enemies. So many enemies: toward the end it was possible to detect in Perón’s words the helpless, aggrieved tone of his writings after his overthrow in 1955.
On June 10th, Perón’s wife, the Vice-President, in a speech printed the next day in full-page advertisements in the newspapers, spoke of the speculators and hoarders and other “executioners of the nation” who were responsible for the shortages and the high prices. Perón couldn’t do it all, she said; and she wondered whether the country wasn’t failing Perón. On June 11th, Perón’s former secretary, companion and soothsayer, Lopez Rega, now Minister for Social Welfare, spoke more clearly. He told a group of provincial governors: “If General Perón leaves the country before his mission is accomplished, he won’t be going alone. His wife will go with him, and your humble servant [este servidor].”
Perón, Rega said, couldn’t do it all, and he shouldn’t be expected to. “The philosophy of Justicialism isn’t only a matter of shouting Viva Perón. It means taking to heart the me
aning of this philosophy, which is simply that we should all, without question, comply with the objectives of greatness and fulfillment so that we might have a happy nation.” Meaningless words—the translation is the best I can do; but after the identification of enemies, it was perhaps the only way Pero-nism could be defined.
The wife had spoken, the secretary had spoken. The next day Perón himself spoke. Abruptly, at a meeting where he had been expected to talk of other things, he announced that he was fed up and disheartened, and that if he didn’t get more cooperation he was willing to hand over the government to people who thought they could do better.
The trade unions responded immediately. They asked their members to stop work. In the Córdoba Hills, where I was, the bus drivers didn’t even know what it was all about or where the action was; they only knew, strike-hardened union men, that the buses weren’t going to run after midday. The action, as it turned out, was confined to Buenos Aires, where in the Plaza de Mayo a great union rally was swiftly conjured up. Perón addressed the rally and received their applause; he pronounced himself satisfied, and it was assumed that he wasn’t after all going to leave the country to stew in its own juice. The whole cabinet resigned that evening; one or two ministers gave grave interviews. It seemed at least that some treachery was going to be exposed and that some heads were going to roll. But no heads rolled; the whole cabinet was reappointed.
It was a curious event: so well prepared, so dramatic in its effect, and then entirely without sequel. The newspapers, full of crisis one day, reporting the entire republic in a state of tension, the next day quietly forgot about it. Newspapers are like that in Argentina. It was Perón’s last demagogic act, his last political flourish. And no one will know what, if anything, lay behind it, whether illness and death put an end to some new development, something that was going to make clear the purpose and plans of the new government. It was what people were waiting for. No one knew what was happening in Argentina; and some people were beginning to feel that there might be nothing to know.
The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad Page 13