Ministry of love, 1984

Daniel in the lion's den

March 1, 2005, Tabaré Vázquez has been inaugurated as president of Urugay in Montevideo, a member of the centre-left Broad Front (Frente Amplio) in which the Tupamaros, as foreseen, became a key majority in the MPP they had founded from an idea of their main, old-leader Raúl Sendic and his brand of social politics.

Uruguay in the 1960s was distinct among other South American counties for its affluence and sociopolitical stability. Economic prosperity had fostered the growth of a large middle class and a stable welfare-state government that allowed a wider degree of democratic and civil freedoms larger than any other South American government. Because Uruguayan society was so peaceful, the army and police were very small. A slump in the demand for wool and meat, Uruguay's two principal exports, after the Korean war brought mass unemployment, inflation, and a steep drop in the standard of living. The social tensions this produced, along with the corruption of the overblown state bureaucracy, gave the impulse for an urban guerrilla, to emerge.

The MLN (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional) Tupamaros, were initially a resistance-group of the left, formed against the conservative, nay repressive, regime of Uruguay in the 1960s. It was founded in between 1962 and 65 by him, then a law student studying in Montevideo. Because Uruguay was so urbanised they concentrated almost all their activity in and around the capital, Montevideo, where more than half the entire population of the country lived. They are named after Túpac Amaru, last member of the Inca royal family, murdered by the Spanish in 1571. Raúl Sendic died in 1989.

The movement began by staging the robbing of banks, gun clubs and other businesses in the early 1960s, then distributing stolen food and money among the poor in Montevideo. By the late 1960s, it was engaged in political kidnappings as an alternative to assassinations and as a way to show the government's impotence. It was a severe psychological shock and embarrassment to those in the government to have their friends and diplomatic figures snatched off the street and held in so-called people's prisons in Montevideo itself.

Meanwhile, the people did not react as they would have against assassinations because the kidnappings (often of unpopular and corrupt people anyway) did not inconvenience them, but the inept police reaction (usually a massive cordon-and-search operation) did.

The worsening state of the economy provoked a wave of student rioting and labour unrest, and a state of national emergency was declared in June 1968 (which was to last until late 1972). It was during this crisis that the Tupamaros staged their first political kidnapping of Ulises Pereyra, the president of the State Telephone Company, an unpopular figure whose abduction was acclaimed by the public. When the police began to search the campus of the National University in Montevideo, they started a student riot that ended in the death of a student. Ulises Pereyra was released unharmed five days later.

The peak of the Tupamaros was in 1970 and 1971. During this period they made liberal use of their Cárcel del Pueblo (or people's prison) where they held those that they kidnapped. In 1971 over 100 imprisoned Tupamaros escaped the Punta Carretas prison. Nonetheless, the movement was hampered by the army's counteroffensive, which included the Escuadrón de la Muerte (death squad), police officers who were granted liberal repressive powers to deal with Tupamaros. The Uruguayan military unleashed a bloody campaign of mass arrests and selected disappearances, dispersing those guerrillas who were not killed or arrested. Their usage of torture was particularly effective, and by 1972 the MLN had been severely weakened. Its principal leaders were imprisoned under terrible conditions for the next 12 years.

In 1973 a coup was declared in Uruguay by the president, Juan María Bordaberry, who closed parliament and imposed direct rule from a junta of military generals. The official reason was to crush the Tupamaros. The leftist trade union federations called a general strike and occupations of factories. The strike lasted just over two weeks. It was ended with most of the trade union leaders in jail, dead, or exiled to Argentina. As part of the coup all associations including trade unions were declared illegal and banned.

After democracy was restored to Uruguay in 1985 and they got amnesty, the Tupamaros returned to public life as a legal political party, the Movement of Popular Participation. Today the party comprises the largest single group within the left-wing Frente Amplio coalition. The MPP was the most voted list inside the Frente Amplio in the presidential elections of October 2004, that were won by the Frente Amplio, whose candidate, the socialist doctor Vázquez became the first non-traditional parties member elected as president in Uruguay.

One of the guests was Daniel Rey Piuma, Tupamaro avant la lettre against the increasingly military regime in the 1970s, evolving in the dictatorial junta, of Uruguay and Argentina, of the 70s and 80s, who had to flee his country to Brazil and went to the Netherlands, where he was naturalised as Dutch citizen, lately working as art-director for the municipality Amsterdam.

Although Uruguay officially became a democracy in 1985, it was still attended by the military. Daniel appeared before a commission of truth, and was granted an amnesty only in 1992 under the eye of two officers from behind a screen. He curiously needed protection. And he would not be safe in Uruguay with the continued right-wing, army-controlled political climate, unitil now. Old habits die hard.

In recent years his former work as a spy and infiltrator, all the way into the (US led) concentration camps, from where he collected crucial evidence, partly unforeseen and under extraordinary circumstances, of torture and massacre – not to mention rape; Wilhelem Reich has sufficiently explained the relation of sheep and wolves and the uniform they are wearing. We ought to be less dependent on women. They are not so afraid of a little blood as such or even money. It is the smell. Hate me. It is the only love I can ever find in you – sanctioned by associated the totalitarian regime of Uruguay and Argentina, which, risking his life, he smuggled from the country and channelled to the United Nations, was brought back to memory by a controversy around the intended wedding of the Dutch Crown prince Willem-Alexander with Máxima Zorreguieta.

Daniel had also once been married with a woman wo was traumatised in such a way that she could not bear children. When she eventually got a daughter, she was named Victoria.

The position of Jorge Zorreguieta, not as father of Máxima but former minister of Agriculture, representing land-lordism, of Argentina during one of the most critical and oppressive episodes of its totalitarian regime, of the notorious military junta, which had seized political power by force in 1976 during violent factional conflicts between far-left and far-right-wing supporters of recently deceased president Juan Domingo Perón, suddenly became disputed from an unusual angle, also to Daniel.

The road of civilisation moves in strange curves.

One of the unexpected survivors from the former resistance of the Tupamaros in his country of the rightist intimidation of its people, a day before and near to where the royal wedding would officially take place on February 2, 2002, Daniel held a one-man demonstration in the Dam Square in Amsterdam. He obviously had no permisssion to do this. By a deal with the national government although, Jorge Zorreguieta would not be present at the wedding of his daughter, to avoid commotion.

It was his share to defend and uphold the historical truth, which had been publicly denied, in his view, and to serve the course of objectivity in Uruguay and Argentina in the first place and the Netherlands and every other nation struggling with its history, and its destiny in this way, in the second place.

This fact caused him to be arrested by the Dutch police for insult of the monarchy. He was summoned to appear in court and defend himself in a lawsuit which can be usually never won because of constitutional immunity of the royal family in the Netherlands.

Daniel was found guilty. But he still objected. And after a trial in which he had to justify himself before the state for almost two years, he became the first in Dutch history to be relieved of all charges in such a case since the time that the constitution which apllies to this, as it forbids forbids all political utterance in exchange for immunity of members of the royal family in this respect, the basis of the monarchy, was written in this country. This immunity is compensated by the citizen of the Netherlands, who is forced to speak politically and is held responsible.

He could have passed it all off with a formal apology, getting a small, symbolic, fine, especially since the penalty for such an offence in a trial could amount to seven years in prison. But his whole house and library had been searched, books had been seized and never returned, and he insisted that he had not so much insulted anyone as had been insulted.

A nuisance to the magistracy he engaged a lawyer, patiently working on a plea, and let the trial be carried on like a Kafka.

He was frequently being spied upon by the secret service, even as we had a chat on Caronte, hell's boatman from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, the pigs in control who are more equal than all the other equal animals, in Animal Farm, or the ministry of peace (war), in 1984, of George Orwell. Or someone played the funeral march of Frédéric-François Chopin on the piano in his home while Daniel's father was dying in the Uruguay he couldn't visit one night, a concert for the agents who overheard us from their hotel across the street.

The ministry of love where political prisoners are tortured and rehabilitated under the supervision of the thought police is in charge of law and order.

Or we made variations on The Scream of Edvard Munch on his easel as his companion was already asleep. She would have to get up early, working as media-adviser for the minister of justice.

When later she illumined the new identity-card, we nearly swooned. It seemed as if the day had never dawned.

I have made up for it.

March 2005 has inaugurated the beginning of a new era now a more just society may be accepted without any further official denial of the truth and those who have defended it on behalf of its adherents or participants and their own people.

The truth is indeed a matter of past, present and future, and in that order of appearance now it has revealed a great opportunity.