Becoming the Tupamaros: Solidarity and Transnational Revolutionaries in Uruguay and the United States by Lindsey Churchill (review)

In a field that has received attention only very recently and offers promising perspectives, Churchill presents a novel and very interesting approach with insights into the transnational dimensions of political violence. Over the past two years, the field has begun linking the study of experiences of political violence occurring in the United States, Latin America, and Europe from the 1960s through the 1980s. This effort responds to an understanding of this period as a global and interconnected wave, engaging multiple actors with different ways of conceiving and exercising violence, but with shared conceptions regarding their historical moment, the dominant power structures, and the paths and ways to confront them. This imagined community, and the prevailing ethos in certain sectors of the Left (ethos in the sense used by Rapoport), is the basis for understanding this book’s approach and contribution.

The book is, as the author declares, the first in-depth analysis of the often contradictory ideologies of the Tupamaros, the transnational connections between Tupamaro revolutionaries and leftist groups in the US, and issues of gender and sexuality within the MLN-T (p. 4). These are the three main themes explored over the book’s four chapters. The work shows the conceptualizations that made, respectively, the Uruguayan left and the American left. Its goal is not to contrast the specific connections, but to present the ideas, perceptions, and constructed images that constitute crossed visions of an imagined community. Churchill investigates the conceptions that united those visions, especially around the question of revolution, the common language of social justice, demands for radical political change, and characterization of the United States as an oppressor. This common language afforded ideological connections between the activists of both countries, as well as the sharing of information through journals.

In addition, the book provides three main contributions. First, the treatment of the image of the Tupamaros in the United States, one of its most interesting elements. The book shows how the aims of the MLN-T were disseminated and conceptualized throughout the United States, by the US radical left. This is in line with very recent works on Tupamaro influence in radical European organizations, and thus opens up a very interesting area for comparative research on both dissemination and adaptation of ideologies and action repertoires. To what extent did this happen in the BPP? This examination could have been completed with an analysis of possible direct connections between organizations, which were not addressed here, in particular the repercussions of conceptualizations forged in the actions of each group, especially among US radicals. The second main contribution is the chapter on solidarity and human rights struggles during the Uruguayan dictatorship. The examination of selected solidarity practices and the construction of an associated image in (not necessarily radical) sectors of the US left is the most valuable contribution in this regard.

The author’s greatest contributions are probably in her analysis of gender matters, providing the best interpretation of this issue in the MLN-T that I have seen. She succeeds in refuting certain prevailing ideas concerning the Tupamaro revolutionary agenda, demonstrating that it did not include gender equality as a goal, and that the organization’s approach to homosexuality was not progressive. Tupamaro female guerrillas suffered prison conditions more acutely because of gender issues and were targeted for having challenged traditional male conceptions through their participation in clandestine armed struggle.