ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the new revolutionary organizations in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s, with a special focus in its main actor, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros. MLN-T, created in 1966 as the result of the protracted debates of the previous years among small radicalized groups hailing from different sectors of the non-communist Left, was the major urban guerrilla in Latin America. I provide an explanation of what was behind the emergence, development, consolidation and impact of an underground organization in a country that had enjoyed political and social stability for decades. In this chapter I also explore the reasons for the development of a revolutionary project that was quite successful in a democratic society without any recent tradition of the use of violence as a political instrument. This chapter addresses the issue of how and why an organization of those characteristics emerged, but moreover how and why it became a relevant political actor and how it managed to transform itself from a small conspiratorial group into a full-blown revolutionary organization. Finally, the chapter traces the organization’s history from the coup d’état in 1973 until the presidency of José Mujica Cordano, one of its historic militants, in 2010.
