Anarchism In Uruguay feat. Andrew, Pt. 1

Andrew is joined by James to talk about the history of anarchism in Uruguay.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cozon Media, Hello and welcome to it could happen here.
It's time to finally continue our journey through Latin American anarchism. Now,
so far we've covered almost every country in Latin America
at this point, including Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Central America.

(00:24):
The country is the former Grand Colombia, like Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia,
and also Cuba and.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
A few other islands in the Caribbean.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
And now before we get to the really big history
that I've kind of been saved as the finale, that
is anarchism in Mexico, we're going to be talking about
the anarchist movement in Uruguay.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
So my name is Andrew Sage.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
You can find on YouTube as Andrewism and you can
also find the bulk of the research for today's episode
in an Hill Capialities, aptly titled Anarchism in Latin America.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
I'm joined today by James me again and it's been
a while.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
Yeah, it has been a while.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Nice to be back, great to be back in conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, So before we could really get into the history
of anarchism and Uruguay, I probably should give some context
as to how Uruguay became Uruguay, and well, my source
for this history is primarily the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
So, before the whole scoot of.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
European clonalism, what is now known as Uruguay supports it
a population of about five thousand to ten thousand people,
which were organized in semi nomadic groups. You had the Taroua,
the China, and the Guarani Indians primarily. So the first
European visits took place first in fifteen sixteen, and they

(01:54):
weren't particularly successful or of interest. Spain was looking for
gold and looking for silver. That was their incentive for
colonization at the time, and they didn't see any of that,
so they didn't have much motivation to stick around. It
was until the sixteen twenties, over a century later, that
Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries set up religious settlements, but unfortunately,

(02:16):
by then, Uruguay's native population had already begun to collapse.
Thousands of people were succumbing to European diseases, so they
had no immunity to a couple of centuries later, in
eighteen hundred, Uruguay continued along with a very small population.
At this point it was about thirty thousand people in total,

(02:37):
and a third of their population lived in the capital
city of Montevideo.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Another thirty of their population.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
Were African slaves who worked on ranchers and meat processing
plants and as domestic servants. Meanwhile, the elite, whether they
be wealthy traders, bankers, or landowners, mostly traced their routes
to Catalonia, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands other parts
of Spain. We get into eighteen ten, when a lot
of the Latin American countries had been fighting for their independence.

(03:08):
Buenos Aires Argentina was among them. But while Argentino was
fighting for its independence, Montevideo was a Royalist stronghold backed
by the Spanish military and naval forces. On the country side,
it was a different story though Uruguay's greatest independence zero
kind of came out of that space. His name was

(03:29):
Jose Grevasio Artigaz, and he originally led a Spanish cavalry unit,
but eventually turned against the crown in eighteen eleven and
rallied an army of rural fighters, freed African slaves and
anti royalist leaders from Montevideo. So with the back in
from Bernos Airis. His forces were able to score key

(03:50):
victories and eventually oust the Spanish, but Artigas had much
bigger ambitions. He wanted a confederation of provinces to resisted
the domin Buenos Aires. In fact, he wanted Montevideo to
become the center of a rival confederation, as prior to
Argentina becoming Argentina, it was sort of a loose confederation

(04:13):
centered in Buenos Aires. Artigas's ideas also included things like
redistributing the land to freed slaves and Poiuguayans, which made
him obviously very popular among the poor and very much
a threat to the elite. Eventually, he was forced into
exile because he made some enemies that basically sat on

(04:34):
their hands as the Portuguese Brazilian forces invaded and took
over the region. Despite his exile, though the fight really
wasn't over, you know. After the occupation, which was often
called Brazilianization, it was resisted very heavily by locals and exiles,
and of course Argentina, which had become some lot of

(04:56):
a rival power to Brazil in the region. Brazil's influence
in Uruguay as a threat so eventually one of Artigas's
exile officers, a guy named Juan Antonio Lavayer, would lead
a force that would cross the river and reclaim Uruguay.

(05:17):
The fight would end in a steel meat and then
British deplomat to step in, because of course the British
had their own interests in the region. But eventually, in
eighteen twenty eight, a treaty was signed officially creates in
Uruguay as an independent Nasia, a buffer state between Argentina
and Brazil. In eighteen thirty, Uruguay's first constitution was ratified,

(05:38):
and at the time the country had a population of
just seventy four thousand people.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
All that war kind of left the country in ruins.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
A lot of the once wealthy colonial families were devastated,
the cattle numbers had plummeted, and the threat of both
Argentina and Brazil still persisted despite the treaty at being signed.
So then the nation ended up being split into two
rival factions. You had the faction that was led by

(06:08):
Uruguay's first president and then you had the faction that
was led by Uruguay's second president, and they became face
rivals that ignited a civil war known as the Gera
Grande or Great War.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
I'd to make a long story short.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
The first President's supporters became known as the Colorado Party
and they controlled Montevideo, and the second president's supporters became
known as the White Party or the Blanco Party, and
they dominated the countryside. And so they were fight from
time to time, each side being backed by different parties.
The Blancos were backed by Argentina, the Colorados were backed

(06:46):
by France and England and then eventually Brazil, and after
about a decade of war, there was still no clear
victory as to who you know, came out of it
as a success in state. The interior of the country
was devastated, government was bankrupt, its very existence as an
independent nation came into doubt, and the divisions between the

(07:10):
people who backed either party became more stark than ever. Eventually,
the Colorados were able to force Blancos out of power
thanks to their back in by Brazil, and that move
ended up alarming Paraguay, who was also a fred in
Brazil's influence. So Paraguay ended up launching what became known

(07:31):
as the War of the Triple Alliance, which is something
I covered in the episode of Paraguay and anarchism. Eventually,
after getting out of the civil wars and all these
disputes and foreign powers medal inst affairs, we have the
situation Huruguay found itself in in the nineteenth century, a
situation that waves of immigrants and also anarchism would find

(07:55):
themselves in. So Capelletti identifies a few of the early
forces that shaped you requ radicalism before anarchism and cynicalism.
The first factor shape in the radical landscape in Uruguay's

(08:17):
eighteenth century was utopian socialism. It came to Uruguay with
Eugenio Tandinet in eighteen forty four, and he was a
French utopian socialist and follower of Charles Freer, who's one
of the founders of utopian socialism. That whole milieu advocated
for reconstruction of society based on communal associations of producers

(08:40):
known as falangis. And then with their influence afterwards came
the next force of influence the Italian migrants who had
fought in the Civil War. These were republicans who eventually
became socialists. And in the next influence was the mutualist
movement that was inspired put On in the eighteen seventies,

(09:02):
first the rising in Uruguay among artisans and workers and
establishing mutual aid societies to meet people's needs. A friend
of Pedros of Prodona himself, a guy named Jose Ernesto Gilbert,
had actually moved to Montevideo for a bit after being
exiled from France. And I don't think he did anything
too actively political. He did pursue botanic studies in Uruguay,

(09:27):
and I believe there was some kind of creature.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
Named after him. So let's cool, you know, so fun fact.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
Finally, as we kind of exit the nineteenth century, you had,
of course the rise of unions and internationalist organizations in
the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. You had fights for workers' rights,
You had the struggle for an international socialism. And you
have what Capital identifies as a Uruguayan section of the
Association International de Trabajadores which was established in eighteen seventy two,

(10:00):
and engage in a public action in eighteen seventy five
that had some two thousand attendees. They established something of
a manifesto where one lion had asked who better and
of greater faith than ourselves can destroy the criminal exploitation
to which we are condemned as a whole. The manifesto
basically asked workers to unite, and this was in a

(10:23):
time where anarchism was finally starting to pick up in
the region.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
Another group formed in eighteen seventy six.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
This was the Ferracion Regional de la Republca Oriental del Uruguay,
later called the ferracanal Uruguaya or f O r U,
and they published peoples like Social, La Luca Obrera, La Fravadores,
Liman Spasion, and Siddy Dad. And it was a very

(10:52):
small but virgin in movement, but they didn't take very
long to start making some moves as cap Latino in
they celebrated the anniversary of the Paris Commune in March
eighteenth and collected forty pesos on behalf of libertarian prisoners
in Lyon. They also collected money to support their papers
and to support papers and efforts elsewhere, like in France.

(11:16):
What's interesting about the Uruguayan anarchists is that they were
among the most internationalists that I have found so far.
You know, like other parts of Latin America, they did
have a large immigrant population yeah, but because I suppose
the size of Uruguay compared to those other countries, the
immigrant population was probably larger proportional to their neighbors. So

(11:39):
they ended up having a much greater connection to movements
and you know, things that happened in other parts of
the world, including their home countries.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
Yeah, that makes it was sir. I'm trying to remember
exactly when this began, but like there was a movement
among anarchists I guess in the early more in the
early twentieth century to like learn esperanto as part of
their internationalism.

Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yes, that's actually a history that I would love to
cover in an episode.

Speaker 3 (12:06):
I will connect you to somebody who wrote books about
it with pleasure.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Really yeah, yeah, it'll be fantastic.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
My first book was about the anti Fascist Olympics and
the last surviving Popular Olympian, the Guardo Vivancos, died in
twenty twenty two in Canada and an old people's home.
I've been trying to visit him, but because of the
COVID restrictions for in the old people's home, I wasn't
able to. But he he had served as a Esperanto

(12:33):
translator at the Popular Olympics, and like lived out his
whole life with this dream of like if we can,
if we can break down the linguistic barriers between workers,
and we can we can get together and change things.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
Wow, that is fascinating. You know what's interesting about the
whole Esperanto connection to anarchism is that long before I
really got into anarchism or even learned about anarchism, I
actually try to learn Esperanto.

Speaker 3 (13:01):
Let's here you go. It worked. Did they see that
this is what they wanted? You saw the barriers fall
down once you there, once you began speaking esperandi.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
I didn't get very far.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
I think it was around the time when like dueling
I first introduced it into their like courses, Okay, and
I saw it and I like did like a brief
reading on it, and I was like, oh, this looks interesting,
and so I tried to pick it up and I
studied it for a little while, but.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
I didn't get particularly far.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
Yeah, but now we're looking in the connection between Esperanto
and a Nikus, I'm just like, wow, you know, the
seeds were already there in a sense, yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you were ready for it. That was
a dream of the of the nineteen twenties and thirties.
I'm glad that you're living in for sure.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
And actually we're about to enter, well at least the
twentieth century in our little historical review here, and it's
almost really started to finally pick up steam by this point,
becoming very commonly known across Iraquai. In fact, by nine
team eleven, according to Capitaletes research of the official stats,

(14:05):
there were one hundred and seventeen thousand industrial workers in
Uruguay and of those, ninety thousand were affiliated with the FRU.
So what's seventy six percent of those industrial workers were
affiliated with an explicitly anarchist organization that included port workers,

(14:25):
construction workers, metal workers, horse drivers, railway workers, and a
lot more. And to be honest with you, I'm not
entirely sure what kept them from taking Boulder action compared
to some of their neighbors, considering their proportion the numbers
they had, But unfortunately didn't take very long for the
movement to be divided, particularly after the Russian Revolution. There was,

(14:51):
of course, the influence of Bolshevik ideas that had split
the movement somewhat, bringing workers onto the Bolshvikkers and then
of course you had sponsorship. It was within the USSR's
interest to support USSR aligned movements worldwide, and so a
lot of libertarian groups around the world went into decline

(15:12):
in that time, including in Uruguay some of the unions
and up faltering under the pressure of both the state
and of course the new draw that was the Marxist
Leninist groups. But of course the libertarians never really gave up, as.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
They don't tend to historically speak it.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
So the unions and groups continued acting, continued producing papers.
In fact, there was a major siurge and unionization in
the nineteen forties, according to Paul Sharki's The Ferracrio and
Anarchista i Uruguaya, especially among the textile workers, real women talkers,
construction workers and meatbackers. And then outside of the union
and people pushing scene, you're at Uruguayan writers that continue

(15:57):
to shape the cultural scene with anarchist ideas. Florencio Sanchez,
for example, was a playwright in the Riore La Plata
region whose experience in nationalist militias led him to align
himself with anarchist circles. He worked as a journalist while
actively participating in anarchist organizations and publications, including La Protesta

(16:18):
in buros Airis. His plays tackled social issues such as
class struggle, intergenerational conflicts, and the hardships of the working class.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
Then you also had.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
Other Urquian literary figures influenced by anarchism and contributing to
the libertarian literary movement, including poet Julio hirera Iseg, novelist
Torrecio Kiroga, and Bohemian writer Roberto de las Carreras. And interestingly,
there was another notable figure in anarchism connected to perhaps

(16:48):
the most or one of the most notable figures in anarchism,
and that was the friend and biographer of Erko Mala
Testa himself, Luigi Fabri. Fabri founded the journal Study Sociali,
which was one of the strongest libertarian publications in Uruguay
and Latin America, and after he died, his daughter, Lucy

(17:09):
Fabrie continued his work and edited the journal until nineteen
forty six. Lucy Fabrie was also one of the founders
of the FAU and she also published quite a few
books in her time, many of which have yet to
be translated into English. I wish I could you know,
check them out.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
Yeah, Paul Sharky, you just mentioned he's the guy. He's
translated like a library of anarchist text.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, I think translators they don't get as much praise
as they should. You know, they're really an underrated contribution
to the movement and to the propagation of the movement
in new spaces.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah. Absolutely. I translated some text for a zine last year,
and it is a lot of work.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
Oh, yeah, massive respect to people who do that.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
Unfortunately, translation is not as simple as just word for word,
you know. You really do have to get the spirit
of the text out of it somehow, sometimes with different
phrasing and that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (18:08):
Yeah, exactly, it's difficult.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
Google can't do that for you, yep.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
I mean I appreciate its having the ability to like
go on a website and like have Google translates translate
the web page quickly for me, But that has very
clear and obvious weaknesses, you know, when you go through
it in terms of actually translating the information. Yeah, it's
good for like getting like a vague gist, right, but

(18:33):
professional translators aren't going away anytime soon.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
No, No, it's a great thing to do if you
if you have a couple of languages, like to make
the world visible from someone else's perspective. It's such a
such a wonderful thing to be able to try and
share that. It's really special.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, particularly for the last less well known or less
popular languages. Yeah, you know, although you'll be surprised, some
of the most popular languages, most widely spoken languages in
the world, are still lacking some key translations of some
very key literature. You know, you'd be surprised, Like the
kinds of text that we take for granted, the theory

(19:09):
and stuff we take.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
For granted, that's just not available and visivily, sir.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
You know, there's probably a lot of gems out there
that I've yet to hit.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
The English language definitely.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, yeah, like just because especially if it's a big language,
like a language is something like Arabic of Spanish, Mandarin
where so many people speak it already, like there's less
need to translate it because like it's it's getting out there.
I suppose that pizza isn't quite the same like urgency
to translate it, but the ideas get out through sort
of powerphrase, I suppose because enough people can readly in

(19:45):
the ritual language and then paraphrase it in other languages.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yeah, as long as the idea gets there, you know,
the exact words may not necessarily be important.

Speaker 3 (19:54):
Yeah, there's some beauty, and like the piece I translated
was pretty sure. But it's the Belgian anarchists who fought
in the Spanish Civil War and then went into exile
in South America. But the way he writes about the
revolutionary moment is one of the most perfect and beautiful
encapsulations I've ever read, So like, it was nice to
be able to share that.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
You should send that to me. What is it called.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
It's called rejecting or refuting the legend by a guy
called Louis Merci A Vega was the name he went by.
Sometimes he also called himself Charles Riddle. That neither of
those were his real names, but there's the names he
lived most of his life under. I've been reading a
lot of translations, if to Ruti column memoirs. Another wonderful
one is called Sons of the Night, which is by
an Italian anarchist who fought in Spain and they lived

(20:36):
the rest of his life in France. And then it's
a beautiful book because he was a groundskeeper at the
Libertarian Club in Marseille, and the young people of the
Libertarian Club were so influenced by his life and his
experiences and the way he talked about the world that
after his passing they translated his diary and then wrote
this huge historical sort of The footnotes are four times

(20:58):
long as a book because the footnote explain that the
things that he's talking about and who the characters are,
and it's it's a really kind of beautiful text. And
it has the authors called themselves the she Monologues like
that the followers of Antoine she Minez, So it's kind
of anonymously offered. And I thin it's a really special
like literary project.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
Wow, that's something that always moves me, you know, when
somebody is able to have such an impact on the
lives of others that even in their absence, people you know,
continue their life's work.

Speaker 3 (21:31):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a really special thing. I'll send you
a link to it when we've them, but I've diverted
us a long way from Uraguai.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
I'm sorry. Oh, that's fine, that's fine.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
I think for this episode, there's just one other interesting
moment in Uruguay's anarchists history that I want to cover,
and I'll leave it at that before the next episode.
But going down this rabbit hole was actually really interesting
for me. So there was an experiment in the fifties

(22:07):
in Uruguay called the Communidad del Sur, which was an
anarchist's intentional community experiment, and capolet He talks about it
briefly as an effort by folks to live and work
and eat and rare children together away from the injustices
of capitalism on the state. Now, anarchism is not about
establishing intentional communities, but many anarchists have found great reprieve

(22:33):
and great joy in establishing those communities, in finding love
and care and connection in those spaces. So these people
spent about twenty years living together, making decisions together, sharing finances,
and sharing education. But the Uruguayan military dictatorship stepped in
and put an end to the project in nineteen seventy six.

(22:55):
They spent that time afterwards living in exile. First they
settled in and then they ended up in Spain, and
then after that they found themselves in Sweden, of all places,
where they continued their communal life and engaged in international
political education, so that's all I ended up learning about

(23:15):
them at first, But I wanted to dig a little
deeper and find out what happened to them after that,
and I wasn't finding that information in English language sources,
so I ended up, unfortunately having to lean upon Google
Translate for the Swedish and Spanish wikipedias, but those pages

(23:35):
went into a little bit more depth, and so I
was able to find out that this group ended up
taking part in the occupation of the Mulvaden neighborhood in
the late seventies, and they also translated Latin American anarchist
texts into Swedish and vice versa. And then when the
dictatorship in Uruguay ended, they returned to Uruguay with the

(23:58):
money they raised with the hell of this Swedish comrades,
and initially a few stayed in Stockholm, so there was
a split effort between Uruguay and Sweden for a bit,
but the ones in Sweden were able to send money
and equipment home and so eventually they were all able
to focus in Uruguay and set up a printery and
established a farm in the countryside outside Montevideo on land

(24:19):
purchased with money collected in Sweden, where they focused on
collective farm and organic agriculture. I mean, apparently there's still
active today. I found what seems to be their website,
but it's not accessible.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
It's down.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
I tried to dig fit on web archive, but I
wasn't getting much information out of that. But I also
found a Swedish website that was talking about the activity,
and I'll drop that in the.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Show notes as well. Yeah, that'd be cool.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
So that particular website they said, and this is the
grual translation of what they said, but it was quote.
In parallel with the other activities, the organization runs a
farm which produces sweets from figs, goofer, blackberries, and such
as fruits. It also pursues stables such as peppers and eggplant,
and produces its own tomato sauce. This small scale industry

(25:06):
that the organization has built up is mainly run by
a women's group, Comunidad. The Assurro also participates in the
collective lapig Tanga that works for equality between women and
men and against violence against women endquote. So they're doing
some really important work in Uruguay. After all these years,
I can't find their exact location, but it seems they're based.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
Somewhere in La Palce.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
If anybody wants to reach out for four the details
what they're up to these days.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Their story is really fascinating to me.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
So I'd love to find out just that whole idea
of this group facing this dictoria repression, resettling somewhere else,
catching their breath, incasion actions elsewhere, and then me are
being able to return home and continue the work. I
find that very inspiring.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
Yeah, that's really cool. That's what we hope for, you know,
when like people are forced into exile, to be able
to return eventually and to be like accepted into the
community where they find themselves and able to like, like
you say, catch your breath and build their strength and return.
That's really cool.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Yeah, I mean shout out to the Swedish anarchists who
would have, you know, moved in solid arity with them
and help them set up in that kind of thing
if they did.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
Yeah, Swedish has been really good at accepting migrants and refugees. Unfortunately,
a number of people who had received assignment Sweden were
killed this week, so fucking sucks rb to them.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yes, I think it was just the moodish shifting as
a lad.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
Yeah, all around the world thanks to the wonder of
social media.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
I think, yeah, but you see the digression we had
about translation and ended up connecting.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, beautiful. Yeah, everyone listening, start learning Esperanto.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
I think that's a great hobby. Yellow, I do question.
I think it was like a really cool project and
it's time. I don't know how well it can pick
up today.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
He like, Esperanto in the Age of Ai is an
interesting I'd love to hear from Esperantis, honestly, like, if
we have Esperantis who listen, I still have a great
deal of admiration for the project and like for the
people who participate in it, and I've had a lot
of communications with them because of their relations to Spanish anarchism,
and they've always been the nicest, most interesting, welcoming people.

(27:22):
So like, yeah, if you want to be I Esperanto guest,
please hit me up.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
Maybe eventually I will get back into Esperanto and pick
it up again. I'm still still working on my Spanish,
as listeners can probably tell.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
But we'll get there. Yeah, So we'll leave it here.

Speaker 1 (27:42):
For today, but next time we're going to venture into
how anarchists stayed active throughout the twentieth century and also
contributed to the development of anarchist strategy internationally. Until then,
I've been Andrew Siege, I've been here with James Stout,
and you can find on YouTube dot com, slash Andrew Zone,

(28:03):
on picture dot com, slashly and Drue.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
This is it could Happen here, peas to be with you.

Speaker 4 (28:11):
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