Social Movements in Latin America
Student and Labor Activism in Uruguay, 1960-1973
During the early twentieth century, Uruguay’s export-oriented economy led to the growth of a sizable middle class and working class. Beginning in the mid-1950s, however, Uruguay’s economic growth stagnated.[1] The decline in the global demand for the nation’s beef, leather, and wool exports led to inflation and wage devaluation.[2]
By the early 1960s, the central government implemented policies that reduced government spending and increased taxes at the recommendation of the International Monetary Fund.[3] However, this policy only worsened the devaluing of living wages and the sustainment of social welfare programs.
Left-leaning university students began to organize to protest the economic crisis. In turn, student and teaching organizations, alongside labor unions, began to produce flyers, leaflets, manifestos, newsletters, and pamphlets. The ephemera shown below communicate what these student organizations understood as being the causes and effects of the national economic crisis.[4]
Early on, the Convention of University Students argued that domestic elite and foreign interests had benefited from exploiting sectors of the national population, causing the crisis. These included the large agricultural estate owners, industrial and political elites, as well as international monopolistic capital. This Convention’s manifesto underscored that the economic downturn affected the education of students, the employment of workers, and public health. In calling for action, the manifesto advocated for greater unity between student and labor organizations to oppose these national and international elite actors.
Students and Labor Working Together
Throughout the 1960s, student and labor organizations coordinated strikes and rallies to protest the declining wages and standard of living. These protests soon resulted in the central government’s implementation of “Prompt Security Measures” that suspended civil rights and liberties to protest and assemble in a limited state of siege. The measures prohibited union meetings, strikes, and demonstrations, militarized public space, as well as introduced censorship of the press.[5] While the world fell to civil unrest during the late 1960s, students in Montevideo rose up against the government’s repression.
While United States President Lyndon B. Johnson was in Uruguay for the second Summit of the Americas during early 1967, students and labor unions protested against his visit, producing flyers like the one shown on the left. Besides connecting the crisis to the United States’ economic interests in Uruguay, the flyer also frames their movement as one advocating for national sovereignty. This piece of paper boldly declares Uruguay as the “land of Artigas,” linking the current crisis with José Gervasio Artigas’ struggle for Uruguay’s national liberation during the early nineteenth century. To these students and labor unions, the United States, as represented by U.S. President Johnson, posed a threat to Uruguay’s national sovereignty.
The double-sided leaflet shown on the right also frames the economic crisis as a threat to national sovereignty. The leaflet asks its reader to consider how the diplomatic visit of New York Governor Rockefeller to Uruguay in late June 1969 was indicative of Uruguay’s central government favoring foreign interests over national ones.[6] The students also considered the United States’ imperialism and the central government’s “fascism” as the reasons behind the current economic state of the nation. Social unrest galvanized by the students led to Governor Rockefeller’s meeting in Montevideo with Uruguayan government officials and private interests to ultimately move to Punta del Este.[7]
1968 and University Autonomy
Although the National Workers’ Convention (CNT) metaphorically asked in this manifesto where Uruguay was headed, it was clear to them that the country was headed toward authoritarianism and acted upon it. On June 12, 1968, the Coordinating Unit of High School Students of Uruguay (CESU), the Federation of University Students of Uruguay (FEUU), and the National Workers’ Convention (CNT) jointly coordinated a rally in front of the university.[8] Afterward, they marched into downtown Montevideo, erecting barricades and throwing Molotov cocktails at the Metropolitan Guard that awaited them there. The latter responded to these protesters with brutal force, arresting nearly three hundred students. The next day, Uruguay’s president, Jorge Pacheco Areco, pointed to the “profound disruption of the social peace and the public order” as justification for his reimplementation of “Prompt Security Measures.”[9]
Tensions only escalated between the students and militarized police forces as the year progressed. On August 12, police fired upon Líber Arce, a university dentistry student, resulting in his death two days later.[10] Not long after his tragic death, the police shot and killed university students Susana Pintos and Hugo de los Santos on September 20.[11]
Some university officials condemned the central government’s oppression. Óscar Maggiolo, the rector of Universidad de la República, addressed a letter to the central government in the university’s gazette, criticizing the central government for inciting the cycle of violence and targeting students who were demonstrating. Additionally, he accused them of undermining the university’s autonomy, as well as violating the Constitution and the Law, through its suspension of classes. These attacks on the student body and the university’s autonomy led some faculty members to align with the student organizations who were mobilizing in the downtown streets of Montevideo.[12]
Differing Ways of Conceptualizing the National Crisis
However, not all students had identified with the left. Some who leaned further to the right perceived that the crisis and its social unrest was instigated by “communists” on the left.[13] These students considered President Juan María Bordaberry (elected in 1971) and the nation’s armed forces as the defenders of liberty, the Law, and the Constitution against the left-leaning “anti-nationalists.”
President Bordaberry staged a self-coup to preserve his power.[14] By late June 1973 Uruguay’s armed forces suspended parliament, initiating a civic-military dictatorship that would last the next twelve years.[15]
The Legacies and Memories of Student Activism in Uruguay
During the mid-to-late 1970s, the student movement had limited its efforts due to fears of violent repression from the civic-military dictatorship. By the early 1980s, however, the students gradually organized themselves as the Social and Cultural Association of Students of Public Education (ASCEEP), beginning with the objective of reinstating the university’s autonomy.[16] With the gradual transition to democracy in 1984, the ASCEEP merged with the FEUU. The nation’s return to democracy in 1985 provided the FEUU the means of promoting educational reforms alongside the university’s administration.
Student activism in Uruguay during the 1960s and early 1970s continues to live on and inspire present day students. University students annually recognize the memory of student martyrs in particular, such as the aforementioned Líber Arce, Susana Pintos, and Hugo de los Santos, on August 14th with a march through the downtown streets of Montevideo.[17] Despite years of repression under authoritarian rule before and during the civic-military dictatorship, student activism continues to persist in Uruguay.[18]
-- organized by Adrián Fernández (History and Latin American Studies)
[1] Francisco E. Panizza, Uruguay: El Batllismo y después: Pacheco, militares, y tupamaros en la crisis del Uruguay batllista (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1990), 19-54. See also, Ana Frega, et al. Historia del Uruguay en el siglo XX (1890-2005) (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental; Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores; Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, 2007), 17-71.
[2] Panizza, Uruguay: El Batllismo y después , 78-100. See also, Ana Frega, et al. Historia del Uruguay en el siglo XX , 123-150.
[3] Ana Frega, et al. Historia del Uruguay en el siglo XX , 150-161.
[4] For further discussion of Uruguay’s mid-twentieth century crisis, see Ximena Espeche, La Paradoja Uruguaya. Intelectuales, latinoamericanismo, y nación a mediados de siglo XX (Bernal, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2016).
[5] Troy Andreas Araiza Kokinis, “An Anarchy for the South: Third Worldism, Popular Power, and the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation, 1956–1976,” Uruguay in Transnational Perspective , ed. Pedro Cameselle-Pesce and Debbie Sharnak (New York: Routledge 2023), 317. Jeffery L. Gould, “Solidarity under Siege: The Latin American Left, 1968,” The American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (2009): 355.
[6] Before becoming Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller was the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs from 1940 to 1958 (a position he was appointed to by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt). As Coordinator, Rockefeller oversaw a program aimed at promoting and improving U.S. cooperation with Latin American nations. See Gisela Cramer and Ursula Prutsch, “Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940–1946) and Record Group 229,” Hispanic American Historical Review 86, no. 4 (2006): 785-806.
[7] Juan de Onisspecial, “Rockefeller Shifts Uruguay Talk Site,” New York Times , 20 June 1969, https://www.nytimes.com/1969/06/20/archives/rockefeller-shifts-uruguay-talk-site-rockefeller-shifts-his-uruguay.html.
[8] Vania Markarian, Uruguay, 1968: Student Activism from Global Counterculture to Molotov Cocktails , trans. Laura Pérez Carrara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 33-34.
[9] Markarian, Uruguay, 1968 , 34.
[10] Markarian, Uruguay, 1968 , 38.
[11] Markarian, Uruguay, 1968 , 39-40.
[12] For further discussion of the central government’s intervention of the university, see M. Blanca París de Oddone, La Universidad de la República: Desde la crisis a la intervención, 1958-1973 (Montevideo: Universidad de la República, 2010).
[13] For further discussion of students on the right, see Magdalena Broquetas, “Las juventudes conservadoras en la educación,” in Ganar la guerra: Cultura, sociedad, y política en el Uruguay autoritario (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2024), 1967-1973, 95-130.
[14] Ana Frega, et al., Historia del Uruguay en el siglo XX , 181-191.
[15] For further discussion of Uruguay’s coup d'état in 1973, see Gonzalo Varela Petito, El golpe de estado más largo: Uruguay; Febrero-Junio 1973 (Montevideo: Planeta, 2023).
[16] Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios del Uruguay, “¿Quiénes somos?,” https://feuu.uy/somos/.
[17] “Marcha por el Día de los Mártires Estudiantiles: movilización comienza a las 18 horas en la Explanada de la Universidad,” M24 (Uruguay) , 14 August 2024. https://www.m24.com.uy/marcha-por-el-dia-de-los-martires-estudiantiles-movilizacion-comienza-a-las-18-horas-en-la-explanada-de-la-universidad/
[18] See “Pit-Cnt sostiene que el gobierno ‘mintió al Parlamento y al Poder Judicial’ y ‘no alcanza con las renuncias’,” El País (Uruguay) , 13 November 2023.
