Uruguayan section of the Fourth International, to ask for his assessment of the events: ALTHOUGH the green vote prevailed in Montevideo and the yellow vote in the interior of the country, the worst results were in Montevideo. Here a massive green vote was expected, but in fact it only prevailed by about 100,000 votes. If we refer back to the number of signatures obtained during the referendum campaign, we find that in Montevideo there were about 1.15 votes for each signature, but in the interior there were 1.5 votes per signature. The green vote would have won if the ratio of votes to signatures had been the same in Montevideo as it was in the interior.
The result confirms the type of transition which is underway and will reinforce the traditional two-party system, especially if we take account of the split in the Frente Amplio.'
There were big hopes for a victory for the green vote, and its defeat is obviously discouraging. There is some demoralization, particularly among the independent forces which were heavily involved in the campaign.
The campaign for the green vote was unified, militant and involved a lot of people, despite the fact that, in our opinion, there were some political problems. There was, for example, an attempt to avoid drawing out the political content of a green vote as an anti-government vote. Instead all the stress was put on the immorality of the Statute of Limitations and on the ethical reasons in favour of its abolition. Above all, the opposition did not succeed in explaining to the public what would happen if they won. The government launched a very powerful campaign with the aim both of frightening people with the possibility of a military coup and of underlining the futility of a green vote, given that the military would refuse to appear before civilian courts. Meanwhile, some opposition spokespersons were ambivalent, for example arguing that it was necessary to try the military before pardoning them. But these mistakes were not responsible for the defeat.
Government blackmail and the fear of what might follow a green vote without doubt played an important role in the victory of the yellow vote. But in our view the majority of those who cast a yellow vote were voting in favour of the stability of the existing system, which, despite everything, is perceived as being "democratic".
In the conditions in which the referendum took place, it is necessary to give the more than 800,000 green votes the weight that they deserve, even if they were not sufficient for victory. Nonetheless the immediate future will be very difficult and the outlook for the forthcoming elections in November is negative. * 1. Frente Amplio (Broad Front), a united left-wing electoral front formed in 1971 as an attempt to break-out of 19 the bourgeois two-party system of the Blancos and Colorados.
URUGUAY R AUL SENDIC had a background as a trade union leader and long experience of peasant struggles. His first experiences of union work in the countryside dated from the 1950s, before the victory of the Cuban revolution. In 1954 he took part in land occupations, in 1955 he was involved with a march by rice-workers, in 1957 he organized beet producers, and in 1958 he threw himself into mobilizing sugarcane cutters and founded the UTAA, a militant class-struggle union in the heart of the big sugarcane estates, which opposed the company unions and initiated the first hunger march, which took place in Montevideo in 1962. He took up the fight to make the big landowners respect the eight-hour day and labour legislation for agricultural labourers. From then on the sugar workers' hunger marches resounded to the cry of "For the land, with Sendic".
Founding of the Tupamaros
It was this tradition of mass working class-style union struggles amongst the peasants that produced Sendic. He started out as a member of the Uruguayan Socialist Party, but, along with other militants from Communist, anarchist or Christian backgrounds, the reformist ossification of the traditional organizations convinced him that a new revolutionary organization was needed. The result was the MLNTupamaros, the "Tupas". The Cuban revolution was a decisive influence in this process, while the Vietnam war and the Sino-Soviet polemics also affected the Tupamaros' thinking.
Sendic's long-time companion, Eleuterio Huidobro, has described the hesitations, disappointments and weariness that the divisions in the traditional organizations created in many young people, and their final break. A photo of Che in the Sierra Maestra was torn off the wall of a local office with the cry "We are leaving with you!" The Tupamaros always retained a large measure of independence from the official Communist movement, even from official Communist movement, even trom Castroism, to which they never subordinated themselves. Their armed propaganda actions and exemplary actions in the towns were aimed mainly at urban workers, in contradiction with the dominant credo of the time of rural guerilla warfare. Founded in 1962, the MLN-Tupamaros was for ten years, until its defeat in 1972, one of the most prestigious and experienced urban guerilla movements in Latin America, confronting an army with a growing input of hardware and advice from the American secret services, the CIA.
Although they were able to mount spectacular actions, and regardless of the sympathy they won from the workers, the form of struggle that they had adopted did not 20 2 organization of the masses in the struggle. allow for the integration or independent International Viewpoint #164 • May 29, 1989