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Show The Great Escape • 14 Two weeks later, the first escapees were recaptured, ratted out by one of the common prisoners who had escaped with them. He had robbed a bar, was arrested, and quickly sang what he knew about his conspirators. Arturo was recaptured seven months after the escape, while washing dishes m the back of a home in downtown Montevideo. He spent the next thirteen years in prison, until the country's return to democracy in 1985 included amnesty for political prisoners. Because most of the escapees returned to active duty in Montevideo, they were almost all recaptured within a year and suffered similar fates. The escape was an embarrassment for Uruguayan President Jorge Pacheco, whose illegal reelection campaign that year (he hoped to amend the Constitution, which prohibited presidential reelection, but he failed) was run on the platform of zero tolerance for the terrorists and a promise of swift action to return the country to normalcy. But the escape was also^as Don Henley says, the end of the innocence for the Tupamaros. Where they once raided banks, carting out ledgers in order to publish illegal activities, where they once stole groceries and distributed them to the poor, where they once carried on most of their propaganda with spray paint and mimeographs, they now began the Revolution m earnest. They targeted mostly torturers and members of death squads, but then blood lust turned the once-intrigued populace against them. What was worse, with the escape, Pacheco breached the Constitution further than he had yet dared. The Tupamaro hunt was turned over to the military, who went after suspects with relentless disregard for civil or human rights, torturing and terrorizing even those flimsily connected to the Tupamaros, to the point where one m fifty Uruguayans had been tortured, a percentage reportedly higher than anywhere else in the world. By the end of 1972, the entire Tupamaro leadership was m prison, with nine of the most important men held hostage by the government. They were kept in wells or dungeons and transferred regularly from one part of the country to another under the threat that if then companeros acted agam, the hostages would be killed. Said Sendic, principal among the |
