Uruguayan Maoists
Uruguay was famous for many years as “the Switzerland of the Americas,” as a country that in the first decades of the twentieth century had enacted a number of substantial reforms under the influence of President José Batlle y Ordóñez. These included nationalization of some parts of the economy, establishment of one of the first social security systems in the Americas, and a very tolerant attitude toward organized labor. In the early 1950s, Uruguay adopted the Swiss form of “collegial” government, with a nine-member Council of the State in place of the President.
However, in the decades following World War II, the solid economic situation and apparently secure democracy of Uruguay deteriorated. Failure to deal with growing economic problems, and irresponsibility in the government under the “collegial” system, brought a major political and institutional crisis by the late 1960s.
In the face of the reforms launched by Batlle and continued by his successors, the Communists remained a small minority party. The Communist Party traditionally battled with the Socialists for control of the labor movement and for the votes of those favoring the far Left in national politics. Through all of this, the Communist Party of Uruguay remained loyal to Moscow. This was demonstrated in its support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which provoked one Italian Communist leader to remark that the Uruguayans were “more Catholic than the Pope.”[532]
In the 1960s, the Communists were challenged by various groups to their left. The most important of these was the Movement of National Liberation (MLN), popularly known as the Tupamaros, which were basically followers of Fidel Castro, although their terrorist-guerrilla activities were carried out in the cities instead of the countryside.
In the elections of 1968 and 1972, the Communists organized the Broad Front (Frente Amplio; FA), a coalition including the Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats, and splinters of the country’s two major parties, the Colorados and the Blancos. In the 1972 election, the FA succeeded in gaining more votes than the far Left had ever before received in Uruguay. However, within a year of that election, in spite of the fact that the military had succeeded in virtually breaking the Tupamaros, the armed forces seized power and established a rigid military dictatorship, that lasted for more than a decade, the first such regime in Uruguay’s twentieth-century history.
It was against this background of deterioration of the economy, growing political crisis, and outbreak of political violence, particularly by the Tupamaros, that Maoism made its appearance in Uruguay. This took the form of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), which was established in 1963 by dissident younger members of the Communist Party and its youth group. Its leaders included Julio Arizaga and Washington Rodriguez.[533]
The name the new party took was noteworthy, because in other Latin American countries in which Movements of the Revolutionary Left were formed at about the same time, they were Castroite, not Maoist. These included Venezuela, Peru, and Chile.
The MIR did not participate in the electoral process. It refused to join the Frente Amplio when it was organized in the late 1960s, supposedly because of its unwillingness to work with the proMoscow Communist Party.[534] However, in 1972, the MIR reversed this position, and in the election of that year, it endorsed the Frente Amplio program.[535]
William Ratliff noted in 1971 that “The MIR is one of the most important of the six small but active organizations which gathered around the newspaper Epoca and were outlawed in December 1967 for advocating overthrow of the government. The MIR regained its legal status in December 1970. In recent years it seems to have had working relations, at least at some levels, with various movements of the Left.”
In September and November 1970, the Peking Review reprinted editorials of the MIR paper, Voz Obrera, which set forth the position of the MIR. These editorials stressed the need for a “Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party” that would be imbued with “Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-tung Thought, which is Leninism of our era.” They also stressed the need for doing away with “bourgeois individualism and egoism, the core of the world outlook of the exploiters,” and its replacement by “the world outlook of the proletariat… in the midst of the broad masses and in the course of the class struggle.”
Although the editorials of Voz Obrera stressed the need also to build a “people’s liberation army led by this party” and a “united front of all revolutionary classes and sections,” the MIR attacked the Tupamaros. In a special MIR pamphlet published in September 1970, the Tupamaros were accused of “adventurism, subjectivism, leftist opportunism and terrorism,” and were said to be “totally at odds with Marxism.”[536]
The MIR maintained contact with some of the Maoist parties in other Latin American countries. In mid-1969 it published a pamphlet entitled Viva el Ejército Popular de Liberción, praising the guerrilla efforts of its Colombian counterpart.[537]
In 1973, the MIR changed its name to Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR). On December 1 of that year, the PCR was outlawed by the new military dictatorship, and its paper, Causa del Pueblo, was suppressed.[538]
In spite of being legally banned, the PCR maintained contacts with China, perhaps from exile. On January 9, 1976, it sent a letter to the Chinese party, lamenting the death of Chou En-lai. On September 23 of the same year, it sent a message to the Chinese, deploring the death of Mao Tse-tung. It also sent a delegation to Albania in January 1976, on the invitation of the Albanian Central Committee.[539]
The PCR remained loyal to the Chinese after the death of Mao Tse-tung. In December 1976, Mario Echenique, the party’s Secretary-General, sent a telegram to Hua Kuo-feng, congratulating him being the successor of Mao.[540] Subsequently, Echenique publicly endorsed the Three Worlds Theory.[541]
The Uruguayan Maoists suffered severely at the hands of the military regime. In addition to being banned from all open activities, the PCR saw its Secretary-General, Mario Echenique, jailed in January 1976, and by the end of that year, it was announced that all members of the party’s Central Committee had been jailed.[542] For the rest of the decade, whatever activity the party was able to maintain was necessarily conducted in the greatest obscurity.
In Uruguay, the Maoists never succeeded in becoming a significant influence, even in far Left politics, being unable to challenge the dominance of the pro-Moscow Communists, Socialists, and Tupamaros effectively. Although it may have had some influence among students, Maoism’s impact on the organized labor movement was virtually nil.
Venezuelan Maoism
Maoism in Venezuela was unique in that it emerged out of a guerrilla war instead of launching one. Also, its history underscored the conflict in Latin America between the Castroite conception of the violent road to power and that of Mao Tse-tung and his followers.
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