On August 12, 1968, students at the University of the República participated in a street demonstration in front of the central university building. Two days later, the first student protester died from injuries sustained during these protests: Líber Arce. August 14 is now a day to remember the many students that lost their lives due to the repressive actions of the state in Uruguay both in the leadup and during the official period of dictatorship.
The protests where Arce was killed were part of mass mobilizations that occurred in Uruguay throughout 1968. Historian Vania Markarian notes in Uruguay, 1968 that the protests in Uruguay were “some of Latin America’s longest and most intense, rivaled only by events in Mexico and Brazil.”
The school year in Uruguay begins in March and even at that early date in 1968, the new measures imposed by President Jorge Pacheco Areco were unpopular. Over the summer recess, President Óscar Diego Gestido, who had taken the oath of office in March 1967, died of a heart attack. Pacheco had been his vice president. Prior to entering politics, he had been a newspaperman in the conservative wing of the Colorado party and was directly involved in politics for only four years before becoming vice president. Less than a week after assuming office in December 1968, Pacheco shut down the Socialist Party’s newspaper, El Sol, and the independent leftist paper Época. He also outlawed the Socialist Party and several other smaller anarchist and leftist groups for supposed subversive activity and intent to destroy the regime. These deeply unpopular measures alienated students and the general population alike, and growing protests over his attempts to control the university, which he had generally believed to be a hotbed of leftist thought, only escalated tensions.
By August, skirmishes between protesters and the police were growing more frequent. When the police raided the university on August 9, allegedly to search for the whereabouts of the director of the state power company Ulysses Pereira Reverbel, who had been kidnapped by the Tupamaros, tensions boiled over. The police did not have a warrant and no leaders of the university had any forewarning. Pacheco also sought removal of the university’s Central Governing Board, and the police imposed censorship requiring approval on all press releases by the university.
None of these measures sat well with the students or university officials and students continued to protest the actions of the government and even occupied the Schools of Medicine and Architecture. The skirmishes with police grew in frequency over the following days, and on August 12, the police shot Arce in the lower abdomen. He was taken to a hospital where, despite multiple surgeries, he died two days later. Arce had been a 28 year old student in the dentistry school and was the first student of the era was killed, but unfortunately not the last.
His funeral proved to be a massive turnout with thousands of people lining the streets for as far as the eye could see. Estimates believe that over 200,000 people accompanied his remains to the cemetery. These demonstrations during funeral processions for activists killed by the police and military became more common over the coming months and years, but in August 1968, it was a moment of profound transformation in Uruguay’s descent to dictatorship. Carlos Quijano, who founded the leftist paper Marcha in 1939 and continued to edit and write in its pages, wrote an article about the propitious moment, saying “As we bury our dead, we bury our Uruguay.” In many ways, this statement was prescient as Uruguay changed from being known as the “Switzerland of Latin America” to eventually “Torture Chamber of Latin America” during the course of the dictatorship.
August 14 continues to be an important day of commemoration in Uruguay. In 1973, just months after the official coup, it was the fifth anniversary of Arce’s death and the university organized an important act to remember his murder. Workers and students unions stood together, rallying around the idea of “Por la defensa de libertades y de la Autonomia Universitaria” (For the defense of freedoms and university autonomy). Arce’s parents attended and received a standing ovation
This year, the student unions will stage a march under the slogan, “A 50 años de la Huelga General seguimos luchando por la educación del pueblo. Las y los estudiantes no olvidamos.” (Fifty years after the General Strike, we continue to FIght for the education of the people. The students do not forget.) There will also be lectures at the University, and furthermore, this year marks an important moment in the larger commemoration activities of the state. A plaque will be installed on the university to commemorate the students killed during this period. Arce is perhaps the most well known student martyr, a street is now named after him near the veterinary school. Yet, the student union also recognizes the many other students: Hugo de los Santos, Susana Pintos, Heber Nieto, Julio Spósito, Íbero Gutiérrez, Santiago Rodríguez Muela, Joaquín Klüver, Ramón Peré, Walter Medina y Nibia Sabalsagaray as just some of the young people whose lives were cut too short by this violent period.
For more on the leadup to the dictatorship, check out chapter 1 of my new book Of Light and Struggle, which is 30% off if you buy directly from Penn Press and use the code SHARNAK30.
For more on situating Uruguay in its global context, I’d also like to point out this new volume I am the co-editor of Uruguay in Transnational Perspective which came out a few weeks ago. There is a fantastic chapter by Megan Strom on the history of the international connections of the student movement that long show its activist perspective on issues of global importance, and indeed helps understand how Uruguayan students fit in the broader 1968 moment.