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Show The Great Escape • 5 his cheeks puffed out and his eyes brightened and he looked very much like an older, wizened Wallace from Wallace and Gromit by clay animator Nick Park. I offer this description qualitatively, with no disrespect intended. Arturo was in many ways a typical tranquil Uruguayan old man, chain smoking hand-rolled cigarettes that left his fingertips callused and yellowed, speaking softly in a gruff voice, pausing occasionally to think as he stares into nothing in his Senate office or in the front room of the Tupamaros' headquarters on Tristan Narvaja under the gaze of Uruguayan father of independence Jose Artigas, Tupamaro founder Raul Sendic, and Argentine mercenary Che Guevara, as he tells me about the early preparations for the escape, but his mind wanders: We were always planning to escape, ever since our first companero was arrested. We first studied die possibility of taking over the prison, for example, but that would have been very bloody. We would have had to come in shooting. In addition to the guards inside, there were platoons of sixty or eighty soldiers guarding the outer walls. The place was gigantic, and there was no way to capture it by surprise, without violence. We always toed to avoid violence at all costs and in all our actions. Some of our companeros lost their lives because they wouldn't kill. In general, people weren't afraid of us. They were afraid of the government repression, but not us. One day we broke into a military officer's house, and his wife left their children in the care of one of our companeras and came to talk with the rest of us. She discussed where she thought we were right and where we were wrong, what her husband had told her, what he hadn't told her We got delayed on our way out because she wanted to give us a jar of pickled hot peppers, because one companero had seen them and said "Ooh, hot peppers! I haven't had them for so long!" "My husband told me that you don't eat very well. You can take it." "No, because you're not giving it from your heart." 'Yes I am. Take it." And there they were, back and forth, take it, no I can't, and I was sitting in the car with the engine running yelling, "Man, let's go!" and in the end he had to take the peppers. Arturo and I talked several times about the escape, about the '60s, about politics and economics, and he was always amiable and interesting. For one, he didn't always talk in first-person plural, like a lot of other Tupamaros I met. I think it was because he had actually done some pretty |