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Author’s note to The Hand That Feeds You
On 6 September 1971, a hundred and eleven Tupamaro guerrillas escaped from Punta Carretas Prison, through a tunnel and without firing a single shot. It was one of the largest break-outs in history, and became known as El Abuso. The event occupied a prominent role in Uruguayan popular culture, on a par with Ernesto Che Guevara’s visit to the country in 1961, or the appearance of the German cruiser, the Admiral Graf Spee, in the Bay of Montevideo in 1939.
Ramiro Sanchiz, La Diaria
Then, as now, Uruguay was a small country but one with pretensions. The three million or so inhabitants call it el paisito, the little country, with false modesty and evident pride. And to illustrate our glorious past, we like to recount how it became known as the Switzerland of South America. This epithet – coined by a US journalist in the early 20th century, used and abused by the leaders of successive governing parties, proclaimed to the four winds, repeated a thousand and one times over the years until it was engraved in the collective subconscious – now clashes head-on with a very different reality, one that is a long way from the Europeanizing optimism of the original comparison. But Uruguayans, citizens of a country that has known better days, refuse to let go of this view of our country as an island of exceptionalism in a sea of injustice, illegality, ignorance and crime. As we sip our coffee, pass round the mate or savour a glass of tannat, we boast of our country’s historic achievements in social and educational rights, we brandish some positive contemporary statistics – the high regard for democracy, the atheism or secularism of our institutions – and, of course, we recall old triumphs on the football field. If our companions appear unimpressed by the list of these achievements, if they are unmoved by this rosary of exceptions, then we bring up a fact that, at least for a time, earned our country a place in the Guinness Book of Records: operation El Abuso.
It was 1971 and, although the dictatorship had not yet come to power, it was already waiting in the wings. El Abuso was the slyly humorous codename given by those who masterminded it to the break-out of more than a hundred political prisoners from Punta Carretas Prison shortly before the military dictatorship took over. Epic, incredible, cinematographic, the operation freed a hundred and eleven political activists, including the leaders of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros, striking a blow at the government and stunning the entire country. The newspapers, with black and white photos, recount how, on 6 September, Uruguayans awoke to dramatic news: the escape from Punta Carretas Prison (a high-security jail built at the start of the 20th century and located not far from the city centre), an establishment that had already had its five minutes of fame in 1931 when a group of eight anarchists tunnelled their way out.
In the 1971 jailbreak, the prisoners filed through bars, drilled through cement, dug through the earth, made lanterns, propped and ventilated the passageway and constructed a fifty-yard tunnel that led from cell 73, on the ground floor, passed below Calle Solano García and emerged in a private residence. That morning, the owners of the house watched as more than a hundred people emerge through a hole in the floor measuring 20 inches by 24. An hour after the escape they alerted the police, who didn’t believe them until an inspection revealed numerous empty cells, and a headcount confirmed that a hundred and eleven of the jail’s inmates were absent. Astonishingly, the engineering work to dig the tunnel had gone unnoticed, and the escape itself took place without a single shot being fired. After this, the government called on the army to intervene in the fight against the armed groups, and it may be around this time that the notorious Órgano Coordinador de Operaciones Antisubversivas was created and tasked with repressing the opposition.
Many years later, after democracy had been re-established, several of the guerrillas who had escaped through the tunnel came to occupy positions in government. One of the escapees, José Pepe Mujica, was elected president in 2009, while another, Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, became Minister of Defence.
Nine years after the end of the dictatorship, a shopping mall was built on the site of the prison. “We prefer not to identify with the prison, although we have maintained some of its architectural elements,” explained one of the developers of Punta Carretas Shopping, who added, “Our idea was always to associate the shopping centre with freedom and traditional values. We have transformed a prison into a space of complete freedom.” Former president, José Pepe Mujica, offers a different view. “This was a monument to pain and monotony, and today it has a festive appearance. The same stones but with different paint.”
In the centre itself, there is no trace of the Tupamaros’ tunnel, no reference to Operation El Abuso, nothing to recall what was one of the most important jailbreaks in history. Part of our paisito’s past has been erased.
