Seminar (1/4): The Rise To Power of Uruguay's Legalised Tupamaros (Prof Stephen Gregory)

This seminar was hosted by the Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies (based within the College of Arts & Social Sciences, at The Australian National University), on Thursday 25 March, 2010.
For more events and details about our organisation, please visit: http://anclas.anu.edu.au

From Imprisoned Guerrillas to National Government: the Rise to Power in Uruguay of the Legalised Tupamaros 1985-2010
Professor Stephen Gregory

Uruguay is frequently considered and has often considered itself to be an exception among the countries of the Southern Cone, and for this reason is largely omitted as a case study in comparative examinations of continental phenomena such as the rise of left-of-centre governments in Latin America. On 1 March 2010, all but thirty-five years to the day since his release from prison after thirteen years of detention and torture at the hands of the Uruguayan military dictatorship, José Pepe Mujica, one of the founders in the early 1960s of the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement, an almost legendary clandestine urban guerrilla organisation, will be formally invested as President of the Republic for the next five years. This paper will examine the rise to power in Uruguay of the centre-left coalition known as the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), the role of the legalised Tupamaros within it, and the gradual dominance of both by the Movimiento de Participación Popular, the sector led by Mujica. The story of this process on the Uruguayan left illuminates the debates that have characterised the left in Latin America as a whole over the last thirty years or so.

The Speaker:
Dr Stephen Gregory retired in 2004 as Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of New South Wales, where he is now an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics. He recently published Intellectuals and Left Politics in Uruguay, 1958-2006: A Frustrated Dialogue (Sussex Academic Press, 2009) and is currently writing a book on politics in Mario Benedetti´s literary and political essays. In addition to Uruguayan politics and culture, he has also published on Alejandro Pizarnik, Ariel Dorfman and Harold Pinter, Subcomandante Marcos and John Berger, Isabel Allende, and postmodern narrative. His most recent publication is Anglophilia and Argentinity: The Eccentric Politics of Jorge Luis Borges, in Estela Valverde (ed), A Universal Argentine: Jorge Luis Borges, English literature and Other Inquisitions (Sydney, Southern Highlands Publishers, 2009), 1-17.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Uruguay
• Tupamaros
• Guerrullas
• Political
• science
• Social
• movements
• Latin
• America
• American
• Studies
• Professor
• Stephen
• Gregory
• ANCLAS
• Australian
• National
• Centre
• for
• University
• Canberra
• Montevideo
• 2010