Book Review: Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay, 1956-1976.

Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay, 1956-1976. Troy Andreas Araiza Kokinis. 365 pages. 2023. £21.00

The anarchist movement in Uruguay was one of the most important in South America, and yet few works in English have appeared on the subject. There is Direct Action in Montevideo: Uruguayan Anarchism, 1927–1937 by Fernando O’Neill Cuesta, which appeared in 2020, and before that, a single 50-page pamphlet The Federacion Anarquista Uruguaya: Crisis, Armed Struggle and Dictatorship, 1967-8, written by FAU members, which appeared in 2009.

The longest existing and perhaps strongest specific anarchist organisation in Latin America is the Federacion Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU) of Uruguay.

Unlike other countries in South America, Uruguay was known as a stronghold of bourgeois democracy and social reform. Under its president Battle y Ordonez, a whole raft of legislation was introduced in the mid-1910s. He separated Church from State, banned crucifixes in hospitals, removed references to God and the Bible from public oaths, gave widespread rights to unions and political parties and organisations, brought in the eight hour day and universal suffrage, introduced unemployment benefits, legalised divorce, created more high schools, promised and practised no residency laws against exiled anarchists and other radicals, opened universities to women, and led a campaign to take away the control of industry and land from foreign capitalists (the British capitalists had huge influence in Uruguay) and nationalised private monopolies. This disoriented some elements within this fairly strong anarchist movement in Uruguay.

Between 1948 and 1954 the working class in Uruguay was comparatively well off, with good conditions and pay, in a country presided over by a ruling class with a liberal outlook. This all changed between 1955 and 1959 with an increasing cost of living.

The FAU was set up in 1956. Militants within it like Juan Carlos Mechoso began to agitate for the creation of a specific anarchist organization as opposed to the anarcho-syndicalists who thought that work in the unions was enough to bring out radical social change. At first the FAU had been an alliance of different anarchist currents, from the anarcho-syndicalists on one hand, through those who believed in setting up anarchist communities in the here and now, traditional anarchist communists, on to the group around Mechoso, Gerardo Gatti and Leon Duarte.

Kokinis deals in detail with the period of both an initial orientation by the FAU to mass agitation and the armed struggle initiatives that intermeshed with it. His book is based on many personal contacts and interviews, 27 in all, with surviving FAU militants of that period. Sometimes the huge number of acronyms for various union centrals, armed groups, and struggle fronts is overwhelming, and one finds oneself constantly referring to the list of abbreviated terms which number 36 in total!

Within the FAU itself there was intense debate over the Castro regime between 1961 and 1965 with Mechoso, Gatti and co. supporting the Cuban regime. This led to a split in the FAU in late 1962 with the Gatti/Duarte/Mechoso faction retaining the FAU name and symbols, affirming the class struggle nature of anarchism, but also giving critical support to Cuba. Kokinis deals with the controversy in the FAU over this, describing the debates between the FAU secretary, Jose Jorge Martinez, and Luce Fabbri (who he wrongly calls Lucce), daughter of the celebrated Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri. Martinez had a Third Worldist position, seeing the principal contradiction between imperialism and liberation-”one in which the global core directly benefitted from the underdevelopment of the global periphery by accessing cheap resources and labour.” Fabbri, on the other hand, had criticisms of the Castroist move towards state capitalism, totalitarianism, and growing relationship with the Soviet Union.

Kokinis rather misleadingly designates the Fabbri position as traditionalist, and fails to mention other leading militants, admittingly in a minority, like Debora Cespedes, Luis Albert Gallegos, Gomensoro, Iriondo, De Ottone, the Errandonea brothers, and Cresatti, who had left the FAU by the end of 1962. He does point out that among other anarchist groups in Latin America, the Argentine Libertarian Federation (FLA) was publicising the testimonies of Cuban anarchists talking about the repression of their movement. Despite this, The FAU continued with critical support for the Cuban regime throughout the sixties and early seventies. However, Kokinis appears to offer excuses like the “reality” of “the excitement of poor people globally for the success of the Cuban Revolution” could not be ignored by the FAU, who “grounded its anti-imperialist position firmly in the fervor surrounding Third World liberation.”

The FAU cooperated in 1963 in an armed coordination, El Coordinador, with various leftist groups. This engaged in expropriation of arms and of food, the latter which was distributed in working class neighbourhoods of Montevideo. This challenged the quietist and reformist line of the Uruguayan Communist Party (PCU), which had a majority influence within the Uruguayan working class. FAU participation was not to last long, as the majority within El Coordinador looked to Che and Mao, in preparation for a rural guerilla struggle. The FAU was not in accordance with this, their strategy being to combine armed struggle with mass action in the workplace and neighbourhood. Those who remained in El Coordinador went on to form the Tupamaros guerilla organisation. Both the FAU and the Tupamaros became major threats to Communist Party dominance. The FAU continued to dialogue with the Tupamaros and other leftist groups through the pages of the New Left journal Epoca.

FAU militants operated amongst unions autonomous from the PCU and had a major role in the establishment of the National Workers’ Convention (CNT) which federated many unions. The structure of the CNT was meant to encourage and emphasise grassroots participation, and to be without “electoral or reformist illusions.”

The Fight Plan formulated by the CNT in 1966 looked for points of unity amongst campaigns in both urban and rural areas, and building solidarity around them; coordinating simultaneous actions in whole of the CNT to confront the government, landed oligarchy and industrial class; and using coordinated action through the CNT and its Zonal Committees, to broaden participation from other social sectors. The FAU supported the Fight Plan, and emphasised the need for these unions to be independent of control by political parties and organisations.

The FAU continued with its support for Cuba, being a major influence within the Committee for Solidarity with Cuba. It even looked to sending militants to Cuba for training, rejected by the Castro regime because of the FAU’s anarchist outlook. Despite this, the FAU supported the fourteenth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in 1967 and the Latin American Solidarity Organisation (OLAS) which supported armed struggle throughout the continent. Che Guevara was seen as a moral example to be followed. In a FAU pamphlet Guevara was compared to the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin! Other FAU pamphlets contained creative writings commemorating the recently murdered Guevara.

Hugo Cores, a leading FAU militant, later admitted that the FAU “has to be the only anarchist movement in the world that was equally influenced by anticolonial and anticapitalist revolutions and that stood for another important thing… that Gerardo (Gatti), (Napoleon) Duarte, and Raul Cariboni defended the integration of the CNT alongside the Communists. You have to keep in mind that they were doing this in ’63,’64, ’65, and ’66, when the wounds of the Spanish Civil War were still fresh”.

The FAU now began to incorporate elements from different currents of Marxism, calling for a synthesis between Marxism and anarchism. The first edition of Rojo y Negro (Red and Black) a 144-page pamphlet edited by Gatti, which appeared in May 1968, argued for this synthesis, but also first developed the concept of especifismo, which outlined an approach to revolutionary organisation. It argued “Union activity alone, even with the best orientation possible, is not sufficient. The existence of an organized revolutionary political movement is a decisive factor for advancing the process of struggle.” In many ways, this was nothing new, as both Kropotkin and Malatesta had argued for the need for a specific anarchist organisation, as had the signatories of the Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, and as had some Argentinian anarchist communists. The attempt to synthesise anarchism and Marxism was something different, with references to Poulantzas and Althusser, and later Gramsci, something not mentioned by Kokinis. There was even a ludicrous attempt to equate the old red and black flag of the anarchists, with the Cuban flag, which also used red and black. The pamphlet even had a quote from Fidel Castro on its back page.

Inflation began to rise sharply and strike waves broke out. The FAU formed a Combative Tendency within the unions, alongside leftist groups hostile to the PCU. The FAU wanted to use this Tendency to win the majority of union members to more combative tactics, and thus lead them to radicalisation. Indeed, the Tendency placed itself at the forefront of struggle against US-based capital in Uruguay, where 80% of the country’s largest private firms were owned by US businesses. When a wage freeze was introduced, the FAU and the Tendency groups declared their hostility to the government’s austerity policies. There, in 1968, was heralded in a five year period of heightened struggles, with very large numbers of strikes, general strikes, and demonstrations. The Army broke strikes and emergency laws were introduced. The excuse for this was the supposed threat from the leftist guerillas of the Tupamaros, but in reality, to repress the agitation in the workplaces.

In 1969, the FAU set up the Student-Worker Resistance (ROE), which was meant to be a broad class struggle front, and alongside it its own armed wing, OPR-33. All above ground FAU militants took part in ROE, whilst a small number worked inside OPR-33. Emergent student radicalism allowed the FAU to organise in at least 16 Montevideo high schools. Though ROE had less than 500 militants, it still played a key role in the next five years of social struggle. A FAU communique of April 1969 argued : “There are many people in the neighbourhoods who are not members of labour unions but who are prepared to fight, and who have organised among themselves to do so. The Tendencia realistically cannot provide a backbone for this reality. Instead, we should develop… the coordination of activities among groups who share our tendencies within the same zone or neighbourhood, and thus open a real possibility for all those who wish to participate in the struggle to do so whether or not they are affiliated with a union: non-unionised factory or shop workers, students, unemployed, and amas de casas ( household workers) should have the chance to participate in the fight.” This appeal to the unemployed and amas de casas was unique in Uruguay, and women played an increasingly important role in prisoner solidarity work.

The ROE began to seek out alliances with the Tupamaros and other leftists. As a result, many students influenced by ‘revolutionary Marxism’ began to join the ROE, accelerating the move away from anarchism.

The OPR-33 used small scale robberies to finance prison solidarity work, and engaged in spectacular actions, like breaking into the Banco Commercial and pouring acid on their IBM computer, in solidarity with the bank workers strike of that year, 1969. The Army intervened to repress the strikers and the strike ended in defeat.

Juan Maria Bordaberry came to power in 1971 and gave increasing powers to the Army in the fight against the Tupamaros. In 1973 political parties were banned, congress was closed down, public meetings were banned and constitutional rights were suspended. The employers dropped their liberal outlook and banned the CNT when it called a general strike. Wages were driven down by 35% and inflation rose by 80%.

There was an increasing spiral of repression and counter-attack by the FAU/OPR-33, and many militants lost their lives in gun battles. By 1974 the US security forces launched Operation Condor in collaboration with the dictatorships now reigning in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Paraguay. Uruguayan and Argentinian security forces worked in tandem to kidnap FAU militants and many were imprisoned in a torture camp, where after many months of terrible agonies, they were murdered. Gatti, Duarte and Alberto Mechoso (Juan Carlos’s brother) were among those murdered.

OPR-33 was seen as to be firmly under the control of the FAU and was meant to relate its actions to the workers movement in Uruguay itself. However, in the final analysis its actions had the same effect as those armed groups influenced by Castroism. FAU/OPR-33 lost a large number of militants. At the same time Gatti had pioneered the setting up of the People’s Victory Party (PVP) whilst in exile in Buenos Aires in 1975, along with Ruben Prieto, Pablo Anzalone, and others. The PVP was a heterodox mixture of anarchism and Castroism/Guevarism. Kokinis only devotes a page or two to the PVP phenomenon, saying that some FAU militants moved to Leninist positions and joined Cores inside the PVP. Cores, who died in 2006, had moved away from anarchism whilst in exile in Europe. Kokinis describes him as being the brain behind the Marxist-anarchist synthesis. However, he provides no deep analysis as to why the tactics and strategy of the FAU could lead to the emergence of the PVP. He states, “In writing this book, I intentionally avoided extensive attention to the dynamics of the congress and the subsequent split because I do not find it relevant to understanding the FAU’s prior decade of activity in an explosive labor movement…” Thus, Kokinis washes his hands of the situation and fudges the whole issue. The FAU’s previous strategy is uncoupled from the founding of the PVP, as if it sprang from nowhere.

The deaths of Gatti and co. accelerated the move of the PVP away from anarchism. It participated in the creation of the Broad Front-Frente Amplio- a coalition of over a dozen political groupings as well as unions and community groups and in 1980 began to take part in its electoral activities and today is just another leftist parliamentarian party.

What was left of the FAU re-established its structures in 1986 after the fall of the dictatorship. It remains active in work in the unions and the neighbourhoods. As one French observer noted: “The FAU, like a number of other organisations, fell headlong into the political cracks opened up by the Cuban revolution and backed it for years, even if it had become plain that that revolution was turning into a bureaucratic dictatorship and even after Cuban anarchists had been rounded up and executed…The FAU eventually distanced itself from that betrayed revolution and withdrew its support from it, though it does not appear to mean that it is prepared to risk blunt criticism of the current Cuban regime”.

Despite certain criticisms as above, Kokinis’s book is vital to understanding the development of the FAU in a period of intense class struggle and the various strikes and other manifestations of social strife are described in details as are the politics and strategy of that organisation.

As Kokinis notes, “militants aimed to free the social and political climate of its hegemonic influences, encouraging everyday people to react to their realities as they saw fit for themselves, on their own terms.”

This resulted in a ferocious response from the market and state. Whilst FAU militants perished in large numbers, the reaction targeted the population in general, with one in thirty adults imprisoned and one in sixty two tortured, as noted during that period. 55,000 people passed through Uruguay’s prisons in the ten years after 1968. Finally, the dictatorship of 1973 dealt a severe blow to the FAU’s concept of building popular power.

We in the ACG are influenced by both Platformism and especifism. We support the need for a specific anarchist organisation, and like especifism, we look towards social insertion, that is, involvement and immersion in workplace and neighbourhood struggles, and in broad social movements, looking to help create them where they do not already exist. These are the same as some of the theses of especifismo. We recognise the huge efforts of the FAU to made social anarchism relevant again but we have a critical approach to both Platformism and especifismo, even if we bear witness to their central theoretical and practical gains. We have to ask the following questions

1) Did immersion in a broad social movement lead to a dilution of ideas?
2) How effective was cooperation and alliance with leftist groups and indeed the PCU? Did this also lead to a dilution of ideas and indeed to the PVP?
3) Was the armed struggle of the FAU an aping of Castroist/Guevarist and other leftist guerilla practice? Did it strengthen and support the social struggle or did it detract from it? Was it not disastrous that so many FAU militants were tortured and murdered and others driven into exile?
4) Have Platformism and especifismo been prone to a temptation towards the development of political parties and towards electoralism? (The PVP in Uruguay, the electoral adventure of the Federation Communiste Libertaire of France in 1956 etc)

These questions need to be looked at, examined, considered and debated in the present period. We need to learn from our mistakes, learn from them in a coherent way, and incorporate them into a theory and practice that is informed by an analysis strengthened by a satisfactory answer to these questions.

This book review appeared in Stormy Petrewl, the theoretical magazine of the Anarchist Communist Group, in issue No. 6, 2024.