50 years after “El Abuso”

Since the confinement, behind bars which in 1971 separated more than 100 guerrillas of the National Liberation Movement-Tupamaros (MLN-T) from their freedom, a tunnel made by dint of calculations and rods transformed into drills allowed a historic breakthrough in a key year in Uruguay’s recent history. Among them was former President José “Pepe” Mujica.

“The important thing was the decision we all made, the realization that we have to get out somehow because the fight had to continue, that was the message of the escape, we lived in prison thinking about what was happening outside, about the comrades who were fighting ”, this is how Jorge ‘Tambero’ Zabalza sums up what ‘was the feeling of schematizing what they called Operation “Abuse”.

In complex times, with several years of economic stagnation, a democratic government but with highly repressive management The MLN-T arose, a “political movement in arms”, as the “Russian” writer Mauricio Rosencof defined it in Efe.

Creativity to offer plans and tools, bribes to guards, and a tightly kept secret between more than 100 people, were among the keys that allowed, five decades ago, the Tupamaros – along with a few ordinary prisoners who helped – to escape through a tunnel that crossed three floors of the prison and a street so that they could exit into the house of a lady with whom some even shared tea.

Through various operations – some of them with great impact – including bank robberies, kidnappings, executions, this group developed an urban guerrilla war in the 1960s. who faced him hard with the government of then president Jorge Pacheco Areco, of the Colorado party (PC-center-right).

The context

“Within the framework of the repression of 68, political violence and the crisis, will have more armed propaganda actions, certain events such as the kidnappings of political leaders, businessmen and the MLN push to position itself as an urban guerrilla, ”explains history professor Gabriel Quirici to Efe.

The escape was in a key year because it was the presidential election. Pacheco Areco wanted to be re-elected – which was not in the Uruguayan Constitution and needed a special majority that he did not obtain – while opposite was the leader of the National Party (PN, center- right), Wilson Ferreira, and they were also the first Front Wide (FA-left) elections.

Quirici points out that the Tupamaros had assured Ferreira and the FA that they were not going to carry out high impact operations, a kind of “truce”, to allow the elections to take place naturally. However, if the CP won – as José María Bordaberry ultimately did, who in 1973 would deliver the coup – they would come back to arms.

With all the leaders imprisoned in the Punta Carretas prison – now transformed into a shopping center -, the adventures began to seek an escape. A few months earlier, they had dealt a first blow when 38 women of the movement had also escaped from another prison.

But the goal was not the freedom to go to another country or to remain in hiding, but to escape had “a combat message”, like Zabalza stamp.

Him, with Servando ‘Pocho’ Arbelo, Jorge ‘Inge’ Manera and Julio ‘Viejo’ Marenales were in charge of the realization the Aspirin Commission to assess what would be the best way to escape the prison grounds.

From the book “Aspirin Commission: stories of free men in captivity” by Uruguayan journalist Samuel Blixen, ideas of escape were dozens, the craziest ones like blowing up a truck loaded with TNT on one of the prison walls to allow escape, scaling the walls and placing mattresses in the street where they could jump.

“We considered it a right to fight for freedom”, says Zabalza and remembers several of his colleagues who collaborated in this escape, including the one who would be president of Uruguay between 2010 and 2015, José Mujica.

The anarchist air

The task was not easy and it seemed an almost impossible mission. Inge’s calculations and the creativity of those who made tools remove limestone with which the large concrete bricks of the prison were founded were fundamental.

Rosencof, who considers “the triumph of ingenuity” What his colleagues did inside the prison explains that the only antecedent of an escape of this magnitude was that of a group of anarchists who escaped through a tunnel in the 1930s.

Air was lacking throughout the excavation but these anarchists who escaped long ago were ultimately their salvation because while oxygen barely penetrated them, their tunnel intersected with that of previous escapees and a gust of air burst open and saved them.

The claustrophobia of that tight hole, anxiety or fear of being discovered was present all this time but basically in the early morning of September 6, 1971.

As it was time to leave, after calming the hostess with discussions and tea – which Zabalza himself did when he left the tunnel – a new stage began for MLN-T, returning to action. that, finally, a year later, they would be defeated by the armed forces and locked up long before the start of the dictatorship civic-military (1973-1985).

EFE Agency

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