THE POLITICAL CONTEXT IN WHICH NUEVO AMANECER HAS EVOLVED

From the account provided so far one might assume that there have been no major obstacles to the growth and success of the coop movement in Uruguay. This is not the case, however.

In the early 1970s an urban guerilla movement, led by the Tupamaros, was active in Uruguay. This movement was crushed by the military in 1972.

Meanwhile, during the 1960s, the labour movement had become more unified and had formed a central organization. A broad popular movement began to form, bringing together a number of groups that shared socialist ideals: these groups included communists, anarchists, social Christians, and Christian democrats. By 1970 the popular movement had formed an umbrella political party calling itself the Frente Amplio.

In 1973, the year after it had crushed the Tupamaros, the military took over the government of Uruguay aided by sectors of the Colorado and National (conservative) parties. The objective now was to quash the broad popular movement.

For the next 12 years a violent and oppressive civic-military regime ruled the country. Thousands of people were arrested and imprisoned without trial; many were tortured, killed, or ‘disappeared.’

That Nuevo Amanecer and other coops survived the political turmoil of this period is quite remarkable. Soon after the military had taken power, Uruguay's federation of trade unions organized a fifteen day general strike. Joining the strike, members of housing coops barricaded themselves inside their neighbourhoods for protection. The government immediately retaliated. Felix Maldonado recalls that soldiers invaded his coop; they robbed and destroyed homes and they took several coop members prisoner.

Years later, in 1984, the military government introduced legislation making communal ownership of property illegal. Not surprisingly coop members were opposed to transforming their communally held property into privately owned condominiums. In protest they took to the streets holding banners that declared "No to private property. Yes to cooperativism." ³

At one of these demonstrations Lidia Cabarcos and six other coop members were arrested. Lidia recalls that she and her fellow prisoners were taken into a room, told to sit down and lower their heads, had the chairs suddenly kicked out from under them, and were beaten. Later they were told to undress. While being interrogated the prisoners were pressured to blame FUCVAM for stirring up social unrest. They refused. They insisted that the decision to participate in demonstrations had been their own and that all they were doing was defending their coop. Furthermore, they said they considered themselves to be part of FUCVAM not separate from it.

Despite the kinds of incidents mentioned above, the coops got off relatively lightly during the twelve years of military dictatorship. According to Guillermo Font there are several reasons why.

First the military went after any activist group that was overtly left-wing and therefore suspected of promoting communism; the main targets were student organizations and labour unions. The coops, however, were not as overtly political. Rather, they were organized quite differently as part of a broad social movement to improve people's quality of life. In this regard the coops gave the appearance of mobilizing around quite innocent objectives such as street lighting. Furthermore, many of the values the coops espoused appealed to already existing values that were considered non-threatening—family values, for example.

What leaders in the military regime failed to grasp is the fact that the coops were, in reality, highly politically oriented: a birthday party was rarely just a birthday party. Thus, even though government spies infiltrated coop meetings and individual members occasionally were arrested, the coop as a collective entity managed to survive. In the end the coops became about the only means left through which student and union activists could organize.

A democratically elected government was restored to Uruguay in 1985 and housing coops continued to flourish. The more recent election of Uruguay's first socialist government in October 2004 bodes well for the future; members of the new government have close historical ties with the coop movement and are committed to the same kinds of values and social justice agenda. Furthermore, at the municipal level, the city of Montevideo has gradually been devolving power to 18 neighbourhood councils across the city in an effort to encourage bottom-up development and public participation in urban planning. Members of these neighbourhood councils include representatives from housing coops.

³ In an act of considerable courage, coops also held back mortgage repayments to the bank. They temporarily deposited these repayments in a trust fund instead.