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Show The Great Escape • 4 exports through two world wars and the Korean conflict, pockets of manual laborers had remained untouched by Uruguay's social and educational reforms. The caneros, led by Sendic, marched twice on Montevideo from then faraway, forgotten fields, but their protests came to nothing. Worse, the "welfare state" established by previous Uruguayan presidents was becoming too top-heavy.with over twenty-five percent of the work force employed by the state. With technological advances the world over, and without a major war machine to feed and outfit, Uruguay lost the advantages it had previously enjoyed. Inspned by the success of the Cuban Revolution (yet deaf to Che Guevara's 1962 praise of Uruguay as the model for the rest of Latin America, given in a speech at Montevideo's Universidad de la Republica,,at the very law building where Sendic had once studied), Sendic, Fernandez Huidobro, Mujica, and a slew of other students, laborers, unionists, and socialists proposed to spark one of Che's "two, three, many Vietnams" in Uruguay. They began simply, stealing arms and money as the need arose, perpetrating vandalism and distributing anti-government fliers, in a war of propaganda. In those days they were more likely to rob a bank of its financial records than of its money, and when such thefts went unreported, they would publish then findings (of fraud, illegal laundering, hidden accounts) in the local papers. Then guns were mostly for show then, enough to convince a grocery store truck driver to step out of his vehicle so the Tupamaros could distribute staples to poor neighborhoods in northern Montevideo. Thus the Tupamaros continued, publishing their propaganda, Robin-Hooding then way into the hearts of the common people, growing in number and in strength as inspned students half-mentioned then interest m crowded cafes, were contacted, were trained. Then urban guerrilla had begun. But where would it lead? O Arturo was a tall thin man with a thinning gray beard and sunken blue eyes. He wore worn dress pants and always an open-collared button-down cotton shirt, or flannel in the cold. When he smiled, |
