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Show The Great Escape • 3 house on Solano Garcia where the tunnel ended. A small man in greasy work clothes approached, excitedly offering to give us a tour of the area. "This is where we broke out in the seventies," he said. Arturo smiled. "Not me personally," said the small man, "the Tupamaros. Tunnel went right under here." He pointed down to the street. "Greatest escape in history." Arturo presented himself, never mentioning that he was a key orgamzer of the escape or that he worked eight hours a day for sixteen days digging the famed tunnel. The small man got to talking about ages. He was nearing eighty, he said. Arturo said, " I 'm sixty, with sixteen years in the shade." This was the first time Arturo Dubra had been back to Punta Carretas since he escaped on September 6, 1971. Of the 111 escapees, most are still living in Uruguay, though some have died and some never returned after then exile durmg the military dictatorship that began in 1973. Because Uruguay is relatively small, with about half of its three million people living m the capital city of Montevideo, I had no trouble finding friends of friends who had escaped and were willing to talk with me. Arturo, the friendliest, most willing, and most anecdotal of the men I met, was the first alternate for Eleutorio Fernandez Huidobro, another escapee, in the Uruguayan National Senate. Two Tupamaros, Fernandez Huidobro (whom everybody calls "Nato" or "Flatnose,") and Jose Mujica (called "Pepe") were elected to the Senate in 1999 after a term m the House of Representatives. They'd come a long way since the early 1960s when Raul Sendic (nicknamed "El Bebe" or "Baby" for his childish face and soft voice) quit law school in Montevideo, traveled north to Bella Union, on the Brazilian border, and organized sugar cane workers in a union to demand higher wages and safer working conditions. Despite decades of prosperity buoyed by a surplus of agrarian |