Cozon Media, Hello and welcome to it could happen here. It's time to finally continue our journey through Latin American anarchism. Now, so far we've covered almost every country in Latin America at this point, including Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Central America. The country is the former Grand Colombia, like Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and also Cuba and.
A few other islands in the Caribbean.
And now before we get to the really big history that I've kind of been saved as the finale, that is anarchism in Mexico, we're going to be talking about the anarchist movement in Uruguay.
So my name is Andrew Sage.
You can find on YouTube as Andrewism and you can also find the bulk of the research for today's episode in an Hill Capialities, aptly titled Anarchism in Latin America.
I'm joined today by James me again and it's been a while.
Yeah, it has been a while.
Nice to be back, great to be back in conversation.
Yeah, So before we could really get into the history of anarchism and Uruguay, I probably should give some context as to how Uruguay became Uruguay, and well, my source for this history is primarily the Encyclopedia Britannica.
So, before the whole scoot of.
European clonalism, what is now known as Uruguay supports it a population of about five thousand to ten thousand people, which were organized in semi nomadic groups. You had the Taroua, the China, and the Guarani Indians primarily. So the first European visits took place first in fifteen sixteen, and they weren't particularly successful or of interest. Spain was looking for gold and looking for silver. That was their incentive for colonization at the time, and they didn't see any of that,
so they didn't have much motivation to stick around. It was until the sixteen twenties, over a century later, that Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries set up religious settlements, but unfortunately, by then, Uruguay's native population had already begun to collapse. Thousands of people were succumbing to European diseases, so they had no immunity to a couple of centuries later, in eighteen hundred, Uruguay continued along with a very small population.
At this point it was about thirty thousand people in total, and a third of their population lived in the capital city of Montevideo.
Another thirty of their population.
Were African slaves who worked on ranchers and meat processing plants and as domestic servants. Meanwhile, the elite, whether they be wealthy traders, bankers, or landowners, mostly traced their routes to Catalonia, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands other parts of Spain. We get into eighteen ten, when a lot of the Latin American countries had been fighting for their independence.
Buenos Aires Argentina was among them. But while Argentino was fighting for its independence, Montevideo was a Royalist stronghold backed by the Spanish military and naval forces. On the country side, it was a different story though Uruguay's greatest independence zero
kind of came out of that space. His name was Jose Grevasio Artigaz, and he originally led a Spanish cavalry unit, but eventually turned against the crown in eighteen eleven and rallied an army of rural fighters, freed African slaves and anti royalist leaders from Montevideo. So with the back in from Bernos Airis. His forces were able to score key victories and eventually oust the Spanish, but Artigas had much bigger ambitions. He wanted a confederation of provinces to resisted
the domin Buenos Aires. In fact, he wanted Montevideo to become the center of a rival confederation, as prior to Argentina becoming Argentina, it was sort of a loose confederation centered in Buenos Aires. Artigas's ideas also included things like redistributing the land to freed slaves and Poiuguayans, which made him obviously very popular among the poor and very much
a threat to the elite. Eventually, he was forced into exile because he made some enemies that basically sat on their hands as the Portuguese Brazilian forces invaded and took over the region. Despite his exile, though the fight really wasn't over, you know. After the occupation, which was often called Brazilianization, it was resisted very heavily by locals and exiles, and of course Argentina, which had become some lot of
a rival power to Brazil in the region. Brazil's influence in Uruguay as a threat so eventually one of Artigas's exile officers, a guy named Juan Antonio Lavayer, would lead a force that would cross the river and reclaim Uruguay. The fight would end in a steel meat and then British deplomat to step in, because of course the British
had their own interests in the region. But eventually, in eighteen twenty eight, a treaty was signed officially creates in Uruguay as an independent Nasia, a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil. In eighteen thirty, Uruguay's first constitution was ratified, and at the time the country had a population of just seventy four thousand people.
All that war kind of left the country in ruins.
A lot of the once wealthy colonial families were devastated, the cattle numbers had plummeted, and the threat of both Argentina and Brazil still persisted despite the treaty at being signed. So then the nation ended up being split into two rival factions. You had the faction that was led by Uruguay's first president and then you had the faction that was led by Uruguay's second president, and they became face rivals that ignited a civil war known as the Gera Grande or Great War.
I'd to make a long story short.
The first President's supporters became known as the Colorado Party and they controlled Montevideo, and the second president's supporters became known as the White Party or the Blanco Party, and they dominated the countryside. And so they were fight from time to time, each side being backed by different parties.
The Blancos were backed by Argentina, the Colorados were backed by France and England and then eventually Brazil, and after about a decade of war, there was still no clear victory as to who you know, came out of it as a success in state. The interior of the country was devastated, government was bankrupt, its very existence as an independent nation came into doubt, and the divisions between the
people who backed either party became more stark than ever. Eventually, the Colorados were able to force Blancos out of power thanks to their back in by Brazil, and that move ended up alarming Paraguay, who was also a fred in Brazil's influence. So Paraguay ended up launching what became known as the War of the Triple Alliance, which is something
I covered in the episode of Paraguay and anarchism. Eventually, after getting out of the civil wars and all these disputes and foreign powers medal inst affairs, we have the situation Huruguay found itself in in the nineteenth century, a situation that waves of immigrants and also anarchism would find themselves in. So Capelletti identifies a few of the early forces that shaped you requ radicalism before anarchism and cynicalism. The first factor shape in the radical landscape in Uruguay's
eighteenth century was utopian socialism. It came to Uruguay with Eugenio Tandinet in eighteen forty four, and he was a French utopian socialist and follower of Charles Freer, who's one of the founders of utopian socialism. That whole milieu advocated for reconstruction of society based on communal associations of producers known as falangis. And then with their influence afterwards came the next force of influence the Italian migrants who had
fought in the Civil War. These were republicans who eventually became socialists. And in the next influence was the mutualist movement that was inspired put On in the eighteen seventies, first the rising in Uruguay among artisans and workers and establishing mutual aid societies to meet people's needs. A friend of Pedros of Prodona himself, a guy named Jose Ernesto Gilbert, had actually moved to Montevideo for a bit after being exiled from France. And I don't think he did anything
too actively political. He did pursue botanic studies in Uruguay, and I believe there was some kind of creature.
Named after him. So let's cool, you know, so fun fact.
Finally, as we kind of exit the nineteenth century, you had, of course the rise of unions and internationalist organizations in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. You had fights for workers' rights, You had the struggle for an international socialism. And you have what Capital identifies as a Uruguayan section of the Association International de Trabajadores which was established in eighteen seventy two, and engage in a public action in eighteen seventy five
that had some two thousand attendees. They established something of a manifesto where one lion had asked who better and of greater faith than ourselves can destroy the criminal exploitation to which we are condemned as a whole. The manifesto basically asked workers to unite, and this was in a time where anarchism was finally starting to pick up in the region.
Another group formed in eighteen seventy six.
This was the Ferracion Regional de la Republca Oriental del Uruguay, later called the ferracanal Uruguaya or f O r U, and they published peoples like Social, La Luca Obrera, La Fravadores, Liman Spasion, and Siddy Dad. And it was a very small but virgin in movement, but they didn't take very long to start making some moves as cap Latino in they celebrated the anniversary of the Paris Commune in March eighteenth and collected forty pesos on behalf of libertarian prisoners
in Lyon. They also collected money to support their papers and to support papers and efforts elsewhere, like in France. What's interesting about the Uruguayan anarchists is that they were among the most internationalists that I have found so far. You know, like other parts of Latin America, they did have a large immigrant population yeah, but because I suppose the size of Uruguay compared to those other countries, the
immigrant population was probably larger proportional to their neighbors. So they ended up having a much greater connection to movements and you know, things that happened in other parts of the world, including their home countries.
Yeah, that makes it was sir. I'm trying to remember exactly when this began, but like there was a movement among anarchists I guess in the early more in the early twentieth century to like learn esperanto as part of their internationalism.
Yes, that's actually a history that I would love to cover in an episode.
I will connect you to somebody who wrote books about it with pleasure.
Really yeah, yeah, it'll be fantastic.
My first book was about the anti Fascist Olympics and the last surviving Popular Olympian, the Guardo Vivancos, died in twenty twenty two in Canada and an old people's home. I've been trying to visit him, but because of the COVID restrictions for in the old people's home, I wasn't
able to. But he he had served as a Esperanto translator at the Popular Olympics, and like lived out his whole life with this dream of like if we can, if we can break down the linguistic barriers between workers, and we can we can get together and change things.
Wow, that is fascinating. You know what's interesting about the whole Esperanto connection to anarchism is that long before I really got into anarchism or even learned about anarchism, I actually try to learn Esperanto.
Let's here you go. It worked. Did they see that this is what they wanted? You saw the barriers fall down once you there, once you began speaking esperandi.
I didn't get very far.
I think it was around the time when like dueling I first introduced it into their like courses, Okay, and I saw it and I like did like a brief reading on it, and I was like, oh, this looks interesting, and so I tried to pick it up and I studied it for a little while, but.
I didn't get particularly far.
Yeah, but now we're looking in the connection between Esperanto and a Nikus, I'm just like, wow, you know, the seeds were already there in a sense, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you were ready for it. That was a dream of the of the nineteen twenties and thirties. I'm glad that you're living in for sure.
And actually we're about to enter, well at least the twentieth century in our little historical review here, and it's almost really started to finally pick up steam by this point, becoming very commonly known across Iraquai. In fact, by nine team eleven, according to Capitaletes research of the official stats, there were one hundred and seventeen thousand industrial workers in Uruguay and of those, ninety thousand were affiliated with the FRU.
So what's seventy six percent of those industrial workers were affiliated with an explicitly anarchist organization that included port workers, construction workers, metal workers, horse drivers, railway workers, and a lot more. And to be honest with you, I'm not entirely sure what kept them from taking Boulder action compared to some of their neighbors, considering their proportion the numbers they had, But unfortunately didn't take very long for the
movement to be divided, particularly after the Russian Revolution. There was, of course, the influence of Bolshevik ideas that had split the movement somewhat, bringing workers onto the Bolshvikkers and then
of course you had sponsorship. It was within the USSR's interest to support USSR aligned movements worldwide, and so a lot of libertarian groups around the world went into decline in that time, including in Uruguay some of the unions and up faltering under the pressure of both the state and of course the new draw that was the Marxist Leninist groups. But of course the libertarians never really gave up, as.
They don't tend to historically speak it.
So the unions and groups continued acting, continued producing papers. In fact, there was a major siurge and unionization in the nineteen forties, according to Paul Sharki's The Ferracrio and Anarchista i Uruguaya, especially among the textile workers, real women talkers, construction workers and meatbackers. And then outside of the union and people pushing scene, you're at Uruguayan writers that continue
to shape the cultural scene with anarchist ideas. Florencio Sanchez, for example, was a playwright in the Riore La Plata region whose experience in nationalist militias led him to align himself with anarchist circles. He worked as a journalist while actively participating in anarchist organizations and publications, including La Protesta in buros Airis. His plays tackled social issues such as class struggle, intergenerational conflicts, and the hardships of the working class.
Then you also had.
Other Urquian literary figures influenced by anarchism and contributing to the libertarian literary movement, including poet Julio hirera Iseg, novelist Torrecio Kiroga, and Bohemian writer Roberto de las Carreras. And interestingly, there was another notable figure in anarchism connected to perhaps the most or one of the most notable figures in anarchism, and that was the friend and biographer of Erko Mala
Testa himself, Luigi Fabri. Fabri founded the journal Study Sociali, which was one of the strongest libertarian publications in Uruguay and Latin America, and after he died, his daughter, Lucy Fabrie continued his work and edited the journal until nineteen forty six. Lucy Fabrie was also one of the founders of the FAU and she also published quite a few books in her time, many of which have yet to be translated into English. I wish I could you know, check them out.
Yeah, Paul Sharky, you just mentioned he's the guy. He's translated like a library of anarchist text.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think translators they don't get as much praise as they should. You know, they're really an underrated contribution to the movement and to the propagation of the movement in new spaces.
Yeah. Absolutely. I translated some text for a zine last year, and it is a lot of work.
Yep.
Oh, yeah, massive respect to people who do that.
Unfortunately, translation is not as simple as just word for word, you know. You really do have to get the spirit of the text out of it somehow, sometimes with different phrasing and that kind of thing.
Yeah, exactly, it's difficult.
Google can't do that for you, yep.
I mean I appreciate its having the ability to like go on a website and like have Google translates translate the web page quickly for me, But that has very clear and obvious weaknesses, you know, when you go through it in terms of actually translating the information. Yeah, it's good for like getting like a vague gist, right, but professional translators aren't going away anytime soon.
No, No, it's a great thing to do if you if you have a couple of languages, like to make the world visible from someone else's perspective. It's such a such a wonderful thing to be able to try and share that. It's really special.
Yeah, particularly for the last less well known or less popular languages. Yeah, you know, although you'll be surprised, some of the most popular languages, most widely spoken languages in the world, are still lacking some key translations of some very key literature. You know, you'd be surprised, Like the kinds of text that we take for granted, the theory and stuff we take.
For granted, that's just not available and visivily, sir.
You know, there's probably a lot of gems out there that I've yet to hit.
The English language definitely.
Yeah, yeah, like just because especially if it's a big language, like a language is something like Arabic of Spanish, Mandarin where so many people speak it already, like there's less need to translate it because like it's it's getting out there. I suppose that pizza isn't quite the same like urgency to translate it, but the ideas get out through sort of powerphrase, I suppose because enough people can readly in the ritual language and then paraphrase it in other languages.
Yeah, as long as the idea gets there, you know, the exact words may not necessarily be important.
Yeah, there's some beauty, and like the piece I translated was pretty sure. But it's the Belgian anarchists who fought in the Spanish Civil War and then went into exile in South America. But the way he writes about the revolutionary moment is one of the most perfect and beautiful encapsulations I've ever read, So like, it was nice to be able to share that.
You should send that to me. What is it called.
It's called rejecting or refuting the legend by a guy called Louis Merci A Vega was the name he went by. Sometimes he also called himself Charles Riddle. That neither of those were his real names, but there's the names he lived most of his life under. I've been reading a lot of translations, if to Ruti column memoirs. Another wonderful one is called Sons of the Night, which is by an Italian anarchist who fought in Spain and they lived
the rest of his life in France. And then it's a beautiful book because he was a groundskeeper at the Libertarian Club in Marseille, and the young people of the Libertarian Club were so influenced by his life and his experiences and the way he talked about the world that after his passing they translated his diary and then wrote this huge historical sort of The footnotes are four times long as a book because the footnote explain that the things that he's talking about and who the characters are,
and it's it's a really kind of beautiful text. And it has the authors called themselves the she Monologues like that the followers of Antoine she Minez, So it's kind of anonymously offered. And I thin it's a really special like literary project.
Wow, that's something that always moves me, you know, when somebody is able to have such an impact on the lives of others that even in their absence, people you know, continue their life's work.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a really special thing. I'll send you a link to it when we've them, but I've diverted us a long way from Uraguai.
I'm sorry. Oh, that's fine, that's fine.
I think for this episode, there's just one other interesting moment in Uruguay's anarchists history that I want to cover, and I'll leave it at that before the next episode. But going down this rabbit hole was actually really interesting
for me. So there was an experiment in the fifties in Uruguay called the Communidad del Sur, which was an anarchist's intentional community experiment, and capolet He talks about it briefly as an effort by folks to live and work and eat and rare children together away from the injustices of capitalism on the state. Now, anarchism is not about establishing intentional communities, but many anarchists have found great reprieve and great joy in establishing those communities, in finding love
and care and connection in those spaces. So these people spent about twenty years living together, making decisions together, sharing finances, and sharing education. But the Uruguayan military dictatorship stepped in and put an end to the project in nineteen seventy six.
They spent that time afterwards living in exile. First they settled in and then they ended up in Spain, and then after that they found themselves in Sweden, of all places, where they continued their communal life and engaged in international political education, so that's all I ended up learning about them at first, But I wanted to dig a little deeper and find out what happened to them after that, and I wasn't finding that information in English language sources,
so I ended up, unfortunately having to lean upon Google Translate for the Swedish and Spanish wikipedias, but those pages went into a little bit more depth, and so I was able to find out that this group ended up taking part in the occupation of the Mulvaden neighborhood in the late seventies, and they also translated Latin American anarchist
texts into Swedish and vice versa. And then when the dictatorship in Uruguay ended, they returned to Uruguay with the money they raised with the hell of this Swedish comrades, and initially a few stayed in Stockholm, so there was a split effort between Uruguay and Sweden for a bit, but the ones in Sweden were able to send money and equipment home and so eventually they were all able to focus in Uruguay and set up a printery and established a farm in the countryside outside Montevideo on land
purchased with money collected in Sweden, where they focused on collective farm and organic agriculture. I mean, apparently there's still active today. I found what seems to be their website, but it's not accessible.
It's down.
I tried to dig fit on web archive, but I wasn't getting much information out of that. But I also found a Swedish website that was talking about the activity, and I'll drop that in the.
Show notes as well. Yeah, that'd be cool.
So that particular website they said, and this is the grual translation of what they said, but it was quote. In parallel with the other activities, the organization runs a farm which produces sweets from figs, goofer, blackberries, and such as fruits. It also pursues stables such as peppers and eggplant, and produces its own tomato sauce. This small scale industry that the organization has built up is mainly run by
a women's group, Comunidad. The Assurro also participates in the collective lapig Tanga that works for equality between women and men and against violence against women endquote. So they're doing some really important work in Uruguay. After all these years, I can't find their exact location, but it seems they're based.
Somewhere in La Palce.
If anybody wants to reach out for four the details what they're up to these days.
Their story is really fascinating to me.
So I'd love to find out just that whole idea of this group facing this dictoria repression, resettling somewhere else, catching their breath, incasion actions elsewhere, and then me are being able to return home and continue the work. I find that very inspiring.
Yeah, that's really cool. That's what we hope for, you know, when like people are forced into exile, to be able to return eventually and to be like accepted into the community where they find themselves and able to like, like you say, catch your breath and build their strength and return. That's really cool.
Yeah, I mean shout out to the Swedish anarchists who would have, you know, moved in solid arity with them and help them set up in that kind of thing if they did.
Yeah, Swedish has been really good at accepting migrants and refugees. Unfortunately, a number of people who had received assignment Sweden were killed this week, so fucking sucks rb to them.
Yes, I think it was just the moodish shifting as a lad.
Yeah, all around the world thanks to the wonder of social media.
I think, yeah, but you see the digression we had about translation and ended up connecting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, beautiful. Yeah, everyone listening, start learning Esperanto.
I think that's a great hobby. Yellow, I do question. I think it was like a really cool project and it's time. I don't know how well it can pick up today.
He like, Esperanto in the Age of Ai is an interesting I'd love to hear from Esperantis, honestly, like, if we have Esperantis who listen, I still have a great deal of admiration for the project and like for the people who participate in it, and I've had a lot of communications with them because of their relations to Spanish anarchism, and they've always been the nicest, most interesting, welcoming people. So like, yeah, if you want to be I Esperanto guest, please hit me up.
Yeah. Yeah.
Maybe eventually I will get back into Esperanto and pick it up again. I'm still still working on my Spanish, as listeners can probably tell.
But we'll get there. Yeah, So we'll leave it here.
For today, but next time we're going to venture into how anarchists stayed active throughout the twentieth century and also contributed to the development of anarchist strategy internationally. Until then, I've been Andrew Siege, I've been here with James Stout, and you can find on YouTube dot com, slash Andrew Zone, on picture dot com, slashly and Drue.
This is it could Happen here, peas to be with you.
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