Tricontinentality in Época, Uruguayan radical left newspaper (1962-1967).

Marina Cardozo

16.00-17.00 (BST)

Between 1962 and 1967, Época, morning newspaper of the new Uruguayan radical left, was a key experience of nucleation, exchange, debate and sociability of the socialist and anarchist left militancy, but also of the new option for armed struggle that emerged in those years in Uruguay, and was destined to become one of the most important Latin American guerrillas of the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century: the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros (National Liberation Movement-Tupamaros).

This paper explores the way in which the materiality of Época, as an artefact (drawings, photography, design) and its discourse, as a radical left narrative (news, interviews, opinion columns and editorials), observed, transmitted and circulated ideas and practices of revolution in the Global South among local militants and Latin American exiles from diverse political backgrounds, refugees in the 1960s in Uruguay, Since its appearance in the public arena in 1962, Época participated in activities denouncing the first national security dictatorships in the Latin American Southern Cone, namely those of Paraguay and Brazil. The activities were organized by Paraguayan exiles, in the first place (exiles in Uruguay after the coup d'état in their country in 1954) and Brazilians, in the second place (and with a more poignant impact due to the contemporaneity of the traumatic experiences linked to the beginning of the dictatorship in Brazil in 1964). Thus, Andrés Cultelli, administrator of Época, and later leader of Tupamaros, maintained that Época constituted a sort of "ministry of foreign relations" of the left, a place for meetings and contacts at local, regional and transnational levels.

Through the analysis of the publication, it is particularly interesting to examine how the experiences of liberation, struggle and resistance in Asia, África and Latin America were visualized, narrated and graphically represented and how they circulated among the local radical left militancy: in particular, the battle for Algerian liberation, the Vietnam War, the armed struggle in various parts of the Latin American region (Venezuela, Argentina, Perú), and especially, the development of the revolution in Cuba and its sustainability through a strong local activism. This paper is therefore related to the thematic axis proposed in the event, as it analyzes a press organ of the sixties whose starting point was transnational solidarity in the framework of the Cold War, constituting in short and above all, a tool for the revolution, putting in dialogue experiences of failure and exile, of revolution and hope, at the service of the objective of the liberation of the oppressed.

Marina Cardozo Prieto is an Associate Professor in Contemporary History at the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Republic, Uruguay. She holds a Master’s in Human Rights, which he obtained from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy, and is a PhD candidate in Social Sciences at the Institute of Economic and Social Development and the National University of General Sarmiento, Argentina. Marina has developed her research work in the field of Contemporary European and Latin American Political History. Her expertise lie in the contemporary left in Uruguay, Latin America, and Europe between the 1960s and 1980s, and her research focuses on Latin American political exiles in Europe during the National Security dictatorships of the twentieth century.