Uruguay Deeply Split Over Amnesty for Rights Abuses by Armed Forces

Placards demanding justice vie with street vendors for attention on the dowdy streets of a divided city. Hand-sewn leather slippers, plump sausages and glittering chunks of amethyst crystal compete with calls for a referendum.

“Simply to declare people free of guilt cannot remove guilt,” law student Karlina Batthytany said, leaning on a scarred old school desk to sign a petition that would defy Uruguay’s government and its elected Congress. Retired bank worker Carlos Maria Lopez concurred as he signed amid the wheeze of passing traffic: “There must be justice.”

Once again, emotions run high in a small pastoral country that is the smallest of the South American republics and among the most politically sophisticated.

Official Uruguay has decided to bury the past, to close the books on bygone horror in what the government calls the interests of a better tomorrow.

President Backs Amnesty

“What is more just? To consolidate the peace of a country where human rights are guaranteed today, or to seek retroactive justice that could compromise that peace?” President Julio M. Sanguinetti asked during an interview. “It is a choice of values. I believe human rights trials would have been incompatible with peace and institutional stability.”

In December, after five months of sulfurous debate punctuated by fistfights, the national Congress approved an amnesty for abuses committed by the armed forces in a 12-year dictatorship that was uncommon for Uruguay but familiar in Latin America for its trammeling of human rights.

Tens of thousands of everyday Uruguayans queuing patiently before referendum tables scattered across the country say that the blanket forgiveness is a mistake. Seeking a vote that would overturn the amnesty, they say they want soldiers and policemen in the dock. They believe that the political cost must be borne if Uruguay is to truly restore its democratic heritage.

Their conviction is stoked by leftist political parties and unions and supported by the Roman Catholic Church.

In a dispute involving politics, morality and conflicting priorities, opponents joust with articulate intensity.

Sees Political Question

Said Foreign Minister Enrique Iglesias, a member of the opposition National Party, which reluctantly supported the amnesty: “It is not an ethical question, but a political question: the rights of the individual versus the rights of society. No country can live permanently facing the past, in conflict with its army. Amnesty is an act of faith. We are betting the future on the army’s historic tradition of noninterventionism and professionalism.”

Said Alberto Perez, a former law school dean and U.S.-educated specialist in constitutional law who is a member of the executive committee for the referendum drive: “After dictatorship, people want to see justice work. Instead, there is a law that stops the judiciary from exercising its responsibilities and threatens another dictatorship by accepting the imposition of military will. We cannot forget the people who were killed, the women raped, prisoners tortured, children kidnaped; the crimes still being committed against children who have still not been restored to their families.”

Chile is watching. Civilians and the armed forces alike in Chile know that the issue of accountability for the past must be resolved before there can be any realistic hope of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s negotiated departure.

Argentina Also Watching

Argentina is watching. The government of President Raul Alfonsin has walked part way along the Uruguayan path; just far enough to have enraged both the armed forces, which says there should be no accounting, and human rights activists, who demand that it be total.

At the center of the Uruguayan storm is Sanguinetti, an earthy pragmatist. The human rights furor apart, Sanguinetti has won the reputation among Uruguayans as a lucky and likeable president. Good government aided by declining oil prices and interest rates and booming exports have restored economic growth and investor confidence to a country that languished for more than a decade with none of either. Employment is up, inflation is down and a renegotiated foreign debt is under control.

The campaign to overturn his amnesty policy comes as Sanguinetti, 51, begins the third year of a five-year term made possible by the military’s withdrawal from power after negotiations in which he was the key civilian.

He declared: “The question of amnesty for the military was not discussed in the negotiations, just as no one said that jailed guerrillas and political prisoners would be turned loose the day after an elected government took office. It was an intelligent omission. We were seeking ways to remove obstacles, not to create them. You can’t make a peace treaty discussing the origins of war.”

Tupamaros Brought Violence

After Marxist Tupamaro guerrillas brought political violence to a country that had been a Latin American standard of democratic stability, the armed forces seized power in 1973, abandoning their barracks for the first time in nearly a century.

Suppression of the guerrillas was less brutal than in neighboring Argentina, where the armed forces and police were accused of kidnaping and murdering at least 9,000 people, but cataclysmic nevertheless in the context of a country known for its tolerance.

In all, 99 people died in actual fighting between security forces and the urban terrorists between 1965 and 1972. Sixty-two guerrillas died in custody; the bodies of 36 of them showed evidence of torture. Another 164 are missing, 130 of them last seen in Argentina.

By the time the repression ended, about 8,000 Uruguayans were in military prisons, including 4,500 Tupamaros and virtually the entire leadership of the Communist and Marxist Uruguayan Socialist parties. Thousands more had been held at least briefly in detention centers where torture was reported to have been a routine instrument of interrogation.

Rights Cases Shelved

The amnesty has short-circuited about three dozen human rights cases in which military and police officers were accused by victims or their survivors.

Sanguinetti granted amnesties to Uruguay’s 250 remaining political prisoners upon taking office in March, 1985. His government, the largest employer in a nation of 2.6 million with deeply rooted social welfare programs, has since restored 9,000 people, about half of them teachers, to civil service jobs that they lost during military rule.

“Originally, I personally wanted some trials and a partial amnesty,” Sanguinetti said, “but once a general amnesty was declared for one side, it became almost indispensable to have one for the other. . . . If I reach agreement with a person to return democracy to a country, to hold elections, it is difficult to suppose that later I should try to arrest him.”

Last August, Sanguinetti’s Colorado Party submitted an amnesty bill to Congress. It was rejected by the combined weight of the center-left National Party and a Marxist-dominated coalition called the Broad Front. There followed five months of rancorous debate that paralyzed the Congress and polarized the public. Polls showed that a majority of Uruguayans opposed amnesty.

In the tumult, court dates neared for the first of the accused military officers amid indications that they would refuse to appear and that government lacked the strength to compel them to do so.

Compromise Emerged

In December, Sanguinetti hosted a showdown meeting between party leaders and armed forces chiefs. From it emerged a compromise: The armed forces publicly admitted that excesses had occurred, leaving the National Party, intransigent until then, to note that “a public act of contrition unprecedented in Latin America” had been made.

The Nationals in turn sponsored an amnesty bill of their own. Supported by Sanguinetti’s Colorados, it won congressional approval a few days before Christmas even as rock-throwing protesters rioted outside the Congress.

“If the military disobeyed the court orders we would have witnessed an extremely dangerous process of institutional degradation which in the mid-term could have led to a breakdown of institutional authority,” Sanguinetti mused in retrospect. “If, on the other hand, the officers had gone to court, we would have suffered great military turbulence. It would have produced among the military a sensation of frustration and fraud so strong that it might have led in even the short term to violence.”

Notes Signs of Success

Sanguinetti points to a free press, a free-swinging Congress, outspoken political diversity and the peaceful nationwide collection of referendum signatures as evidence of the success of the Uruguayan transition.

Opponents say that democratic forms acted out under military shadow are only a shell. They have the rest of this year to assemble about 550,000 signatures--one-quarter of the electorate--to force a referendum.

Sanguinetti says he believes the referendum campaign will fail.

Times Buenos Aires Bureau Chief Montalbano recently visited Uruguay on assignment.