Ambassador Ortiz: Lessons from a Life of Service

10: Uruguay: Living with Terror

My posting in Montevideo, Uruguay in  was a really rough experience . Uruguay is one of the most admirable countries in the world, with some of the most educated and ethical people I know. Uruguay effected comprehensive state welfare programs in the nineteen-teens, just shortly after Sweden established a groundbreaking system of general social welfare. Uruguay also is one of the most democratic countries in the world, with a very high literacy rate and average level of education. In Uruguay you could go from kindergarten to a Ph.D. free of cost. Medical services were very good and very cheap. A new mother was given a couple of years off of work to take care of her newborn. One could be eligible for retirement at a young age. Music, art, and a creative cultural life flourished. My family and I would have been extremely happy in Uruguay, except for the fact that about four years before we arrived, the economic system collapsed. The price of wool and meat dropped precipitously , causing the welfare state to buckle. There was no money to run the hospitals. The universities, although also broke, continued turning out thousands of professionals each year, even though there was almost no demand for them. Young engineers were out of work, new doctors driving taxis. This was fertile ground for a populist  10 Uruguay: Living with Terror reaction. A Marxist group called the Tupamaros, who despised everything American, began violent terrorist activities against the existing democratic power structure. The Tupamaros were the most cunning, most dangerous terrorist group that I had encountered. They employed a truly effective strategy : every Friday they would strike, killing or kidnapping, blowing up power lines—all manner of destructive attacks. Throughout the week, everyone would absorb the previous week’s damage and wonder what the Tupamaros would do the next Friday. Our immersion into this chaotic and violent situation was immediate . My first duty, on my first day in Montevideo, was to attend a memorial service for Dan Mitrioni, a former state chief of police from New Mexico who headed a U.S. mission to train the Uruguayan police to combat terrorism. Just four days before we arrived, the Tupamaros had kidnapped Mitrioni during a carefully organized operation against American Embassy officials. They also captured the head of the commercial section of the embassy by hitting him on the head, wrapping him in a rug, and tying him down in the back of a pickup. Fortunately, he worked his ties loose and jumped out of the pickup while it was speeding down the road. The terrorists also tried to take the cultural attaché. They jumped him in the garage of his apartment building, but he honked his car horn, attracting attention and scaring off his wouldbe captors. But poor Mitrioni—they tied him up, tortured him, and finally killed him. Such was the state of affairs when I arrived to assume my job as Deputy Chief of Mission, the number two position in the embassy. I knew that things were terribly bad in Uruguay, but wasn’t at all prepared for the situation on the ground. “Why doesn’t the Department give me a nice, peaceful post?” I wondered. The State Department’s rationale was that I had the skills and abilities required to protect American interests in Uruguay. The unspoken reason, though, was that nobody wanted to be assigned there and I hadn’t refused the assignment —an action I would never consider taking. We endured three years of constant, extreme tension in Montevideo. As Deputy Chief, I was assigned a very nice house with  CHAPTER TEN a swimming pool, but we couldn’t go outside and enjoy the grounds because of fear of snipers or kidnappers. For security, the embassy soon moved us into an apartment on the fourth floor near downtown. The apartment house was surrounded by open parks, which made it easier to watch for suspicious activity. We felt threatened nonetheless, and once a nearby bomb explosion knocked us out of bed. We sent our children out of the country, except for the littlest one, and Dolores made sure she was seldom photographed so the terrorists couldn’t identify her and make her a target. She took buses to get around to avoid being associated with an embassy car. A couple of years into my posting, Ambassador Adair and his wife decided to take home leave. They...