Uruguay Grapples With Past Evils, Future Stability

In the neoclassic splendor of its sky-lighted chamber, the Uruguayan Senate is caught in a tense deadlock. The issue is human rights, and the senators are on a divisive moral seesaw.

At issue are such questions as these:

Where is the point of balance between the demands of justice and the requirements of peace and stability that are critical to the survival of a young democratic government?

Are the children of a citizen murdered by the state best served if their killers are jailed, even if doing so risks a new dictatorship of the kind that claimed their father?

When does the past end and the future begin?

Big questions in a small country. But the impasse they have given rise to mirrors a continental theme in South America today.

In Uruguay, the last in the current cycle of Latin American nations to shed authoritarian military rule, the debate is consuming. Everybody has an opinion. Truculent generals implicitly reinforce their opinions with might. The Senate confers endlessly in articulate impotence.

So far, no one has found a bridge between moral imperative and political reality. Particularly at issue here in the continent’s smallest republic is the aftermath of a 12-year military dictatorship under which torture and murder became routine instruments of policy in an “internal war” against Marxist guerrillas.

Last month President Julio M. Sanguinetti, a center-right civilian who took office in 1985, asked Congress to endorse a book-closing amnesty. It was time to lay the past to rest and look toward tomorrow, Sanguinetti said, insisting that “we cannot lock ourselves up arguing over what happened 10 years ago.”

Crowds spilled into the streets to protest Sanguinetti’s call for amnesty. A poll showed that 70% of the people favored justice. Amnesty was rejected by the center-left National Party and the Marxist-dominated Broad Front. Between them they claim 17 of the 30 senators.

“I honestly thought our proposal offered a safe harbor, a sure means of avoiding risks,” the otherwise popular Sanguinetti said in unaccustomed defeat.

The dissenting National Party promptly countered with a bill urging trials limited to the worst offenders. That was too much for Colorados and not enough for the front, which calls for sweeping judgments. On Oct. 7 the Senate rejected the National initiative.

Uruguay’s painful quest for a consensus that would blend what is right with what is possible reflects an equally bitter human-rights struggle across the River Plate in Argentina, where the armed forces killed at least 9,000 people in the years between 1976 and 1980. Five former members of Argentine juntas, including two former presidents, were sentenced for crimes against humanity at a landmark trial. Seven army and police officers are now in court on human-rights charges.

In Argentina’s high-strung political environment, there are demands for more trials from the political left and human-rights groups, and demands for no trials at all from the political right and the armed forces. The government of Social Democratic President Raul Alfonsin, who personally ordered the trial of the junta members, writhes uncomfortably in the middle.

Echoes of the human-rights debate are heard in Brazil and Peru, where civilian presidents have also inherited power from authoritarian predecessors.

As in Argentina, here in Uruguay there is predictable, implacable and outspoken hostility from the armed forces to any human rights accounting. Like all South American military establishments that have retired from power in recent years, their hard-line view has not changed a whit back in the barracks.

Proclaiming the “irreversible solidarity” of the 38,000 men in the armed forces in a statement timed for the Senate debate, 19 retired Uruguayan generals warned that “armies cannot be tried after the fact for winning wars. . . . We are all responsible or no one is responsible.”

In the years between 1965 and 1972, fighting between the armed forces and police on the one hand and and urban Tupamaro guerrillas on the other took 99 lives--50 members of the armed forces and police and 49 guerrillas. Another 62 guerrilla suspects died in custody. The bodies of 36 of them showed evidence of torture. The other 26 prisoners are among 164 Uruguayans who are still missing.

By the time the Uruguayan repression ended, more than 8,000 people were in military prisons, including 4,500 Tupamaro suspects and virtually the entire leadership of the Communist Party and the Marxist Socialist Party, both of which had long been respectable and peaceful members of the political community. Almost without exception, the military’s prisoners were tortured as a technique of interrogation, by undisputed testimony of the survivors.

There are now 38 human-rights cases before Uruguayan courts, brought by survivors and relatives of the dead and missing. Dozens of military and police officers are implicated. The officers unanimously refuse to testify while the Supreme Court weighs plaintiffs’ demands that the cases be tried in civilian, not military, courts. There is no assurance that any action by the court would change the officers’ minds, or any indication of whom could be counted on to execute an arrest order against them.

“The threat is not of a coup, but something worse: a sector of the society that remains defiantly outside the law--a kind of permanent coup,” said Alberto Zumaran, a National Party senator and defeated presidential candidate.

Winning their war with the guerrillas triggered the military’s decision to grab power in 1973, but authoritarian rule won few lasting converts in this pastoral nation of 2.6 million people that historically has prized its democratic heritage.

In 1984 the armed forces bowed to popular revulsion and negotiated a peaceful and honorable withdrawal from power. Sanguinetti, a patient and pragmatic professional politician who was the key to the negotiations, handily won the subsequent election.

He immediately legalized banned Marxist parties and gave amnesty to Uruguay’s 250 remaining political prisoners. In 18 months of new democracy, Sanguinetti has reversed the prolonged national decline and restored economic confidence and growth. His call for amnesty is part of a strategy, at once audacious and cautious, aimed at keeping the politicians free and the generals leashed.

Without the negotiated agreement two years ago, Sanguinetti’s supporters insist, Uruguay might still have a dictatorship. Pushing too hard now could undermine all that has been won so far.

“Sometimes peace is more important than justice,” said Manuel Flores Silva, a Colorado Party senator. “The amnesty represents the last stage of a peaceful and successful albeit imperfect transition to democracy. It’s hard to reach a pact with someone only to tell him two years later he has to go to jail.”

Failing to bring human rights violators to justice, Sanguinetti’s opponents insist, leaves Uruguay with a democratic shell lacking in practical and moral authority.

Sen. Hugo Batalla, member of a non-Marxist faction within the Broad Front, said recently: “No society can strengthen democracy by closing its eyes, pretending nothing happened. Trials are a risk that must be borne.”

A rooftop sign visible from Batalla’s office window urges “No to Impunity.”

With the Senate stymied, Uruguay’s encounter with conflicting priorities is by now so knotted with peril that it is not clear whether action or inaction on human rights will bring greater long-term costs to a struggling young democracy.