Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ were too recurrent, and their pattern of identity too identical, even though their apparent normality was such that I could not possibly denounce them.’ At the golf course, even on the remotest fairways, a small gaggle of young spectators would congregate to study his technique.

      This subtle change of mood – ‘the intensified whiff of invigilation’ – coincided with an upsurge of urban-guerrilla violence by the Tupamaros, a self-styled Movement of National Liberation, and a spate of diplomatic kidnappings elsewhere in Latin America. Count Karl von Spreti, the German ambassador to Guatemala, was abducted and murdered in April 1970. Similar attacks closer to Uruguay – the successive kidnappings in Brazil of the American, German and Swiss ambassadors – heightened Jackson’s foreboding, as the unseen menace seemed to draw ever nearer. There was a narrow escape by the American consul in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, not far from the Uruguayan border; and then a daylight hold-up of the Swiss Embassy offices in Montevideo itself. In July, the Tupamaros abducted a Uruguayan judge, a Brazilian diplomat and an American security expert, Dan Mitrione, whose bullet-riddled body was found in the boot of a car a few days later.

      Until the late 1960s, Uruguay was for many decades the calmest and most democratic state in the region, often cited by Fidel Castro in his speeches as the one Latin American country that could never experience a violent revolution on the Cuban model. That all changed in 1968 after the installation of a new president, Jorge Pacheco Areco, who ordered a freeze on wage and price rises to halt Uruguay’s rampant inflation and economic decline. When trade unions threatened a general strike, the President imposed martial law. The Tupamaros had been around for a while, mostly organising sugar workers in the north of the country, but now they emerged as a fully-fledged political movement, announcing their presence by kidnapping the President of the State Electricity and Telephones Service, who was forced to read books by Che Guevara for a few days before being released unharmed. Suspecting that students must have been responsible, Pacheco sent the army into Montevideo University to root out subversives, thus beginning a long cycle of action and reaction in which every kidnapping or murder prompted the suspension of yet more civil liberties – which was just what the Tupamaros wanted, believing as they did that official brutality would incite popular discontent and, ultimately, revolution.^* It was an article of faith among urban guerrillas in the 1970s, from West Berlin to San Francisco, that intensified repression worked in their favour by exposing the true and hideous face of the state and winning new converts to their thesis that official violence could only be defeated by force. Although they called themselves Marxists they owed at least as much to Marx’s old enemy Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, who held that ‘the urge to destroy is really a creative urge’.

      On the morning of 8 January 1971 the main road into Montevideo was unusually quiet: the President had just left for a seaside holiday, taking many of the usual security forces with him. Geoffrey Jackson felt relieved once his driver left the open highway for the bustling side streets that led to his office. Surely no sane person would organise a hold-up here, with hundreds of shoppers and hawkers as witnesses. Reaching a point where his driver often had to wait for delivery trucks to finish unloading, he paid little attention to a large red van until it edged out from the kerb and bored into his car’s left wing. Even this was not unusual amid the jostling chaos of Montevideo’s streets. With a weary shrug, the Embassy chauffeur opened his door to inspect the damage. A young man suddenly appeared from nowhere and smashed him over the head. There was a simultaneous rattle from a sub-machine gun, hidden in a basket of fruit carried by a bystander. Moments later, four Tupamaros were driving the ambassador away.

      Jackson never discovered why he had been taken: no ransom was demanded, no execution threatened. Two months later the Tupamaros issued a photo of their prisoner in his ‘people’s jail’, heavily bearded, reading Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. In an accompanying letter to his wife, he urged her to ‘have faith and confidence’, and to remember that their car insurance needed renewing.

      His release, in September, was as sudden and unexplained as his capture. During his eight months locked in a tiny cage in a Montevideo basement he studied his jailers closely, trying to fathom their aspirations. For all the Marxist slogans, he concluded that their motivating force was as much psychological as political. ‘Could it be,’ he wondered, ‘that the violence, the ferocity of clandestinity have no intellectual let alone ethical component, but instead are just another symptom of a deranged body-chemistry, just another mechanistic function of mankind’s alienation from a world and a society with which he is ever more incompatible?’ He noticed that they preferred music and books which ‘tended to the sad, the negative, the empty, the melancholic, the frustrated’. A burly guard known as ‘El Elefante’ often listened to John Lennon singing ‘Across the Universe’, though he understood none of the words. One day he asked his English prisoner to translate an insistent phrase from the chorus. In Spanish, Jackson replied: ‘Nothing’s going to change my world.’ After a short pause for reflection, the guard barked with laughter. ‘That’s what he thinks!’

      For the Elephant and his comrades were now the vanguard of the revolution, and not only in Latin America. ‘The Tupamaro solution’ was the phrase used by members of the far-Left Weatherman group in the United States when, at the end of 1969, they elected to go underground and take up arms, having decided that confronting the police at street protests was wimpishly ineffective. ‘We understood that to say we dug the Viet Cong or the Tupamaros or the Black Panthers and yet not be willing to take similar risks would make us bullshitters,’ a Weatherman explained. A former soldier in the Symbionese Liberation Army, another gang of American guerrillas, recalls that they also took their inspiration from Latin America: ‘One of the groups that I really liked – and I guess it’s back to the old Robin Hood and Zorro thing – was the Tupamaros down in Uruguay.’ In West Germany, the anarcho-terrorists who formed the 2 June Movement – bombing police stations and US army bases, murdering public officials – originally called themselves the West Berlin Tupamaros.

      In January 1971, the month of Geoffrey Jackson’s capture, the Tupamaros were the subject of a reverential twenty-page article in International, the journal of Britain’s International Marxist Group. A year after Jackson’s release Penguin Books published an English translation of Alain Labrousse’s The Tupamaros, which included the full text of their proclamations and revolutionary songs, with an introduction by the British journalist Richard Gott. ‘The Tupamaros are unquestionably a very special kind of revolutionary,’ Gott raved. ‘In spite of a fierce counter-attack, their staying power seems inexhaustible.’ One reason for their huge impact, out of all proportion to their numerical strength, was that they had ‘tried to adapt the “foco” theory of Guevara and Debray to urban conditions’.

      As Gott’s awestruck tone suggests, this theoretical breakthrough was exciting news for impatient insurrectionists. Traditional revolutionaries believed that the necessary prerequisite was a mass movement of urban workers, painstakingly nurtured through organisation and education. The French Marxist Régis Debray, animated by the example of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba, had proposed a short-cut in his book Revolution in the Revolution: in Latin America, the revolution could be made by small groups of guerrillas in rural areas, recruiting peasants to their cause and fighting bush warfare against the army, without the tiresome preliminary chore of building a political party and raising the consciousness of the urban proletariat. Alas for Debray and Guevara, their attempt to put this into practice during the 1967 Bolivian guerrilla uprising ended in the death of Che (it was Richard Gott who identified the body) and the detention of Debray in a Bolivian military jail. By the time he was freed, three years later, he’d had ample time to reconsider. From his new base in Chile, where he had taken a job as press officer to Salvador Allende, he announced in January 1970 that there could be ‘various ways for Marxist movements to take power in Latin American countries, depending on varying national circumstances’. Through standing for election, for instance, like his friend Allende; or through ‘direct action’ in cities, as practised by the Tupamaros and advocated by the Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella in his influential Minimanual СКАЧАТЬ