Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

La actualidad del pasado: Usos de la historia en la política de partidos del Uruguay (1942–1972)

2010; Duke University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-168

1527-1900

David Parker,

Brazilian cultural history and politics

Perhaps the highest accolade a book can receive is that it renders intelligible things that had not made sense previously. José Rilla has written such a book, decoding a number of mysteries of Uruguayan history, politics, and historiography. In part this achievement owes to Rilla’s thesis that history, politics, and historiography are inseparable, that writing history in Uruguay is always a partisan act, and that Uruguayan politicians have forever been obsessed with creating historical narratives, myths, and traditions in which to insert themselves. While none of these insights is entirely original (indeed, Rilla spends 60 pages tracing methodological antecedents in the recent historiographies of France, Italy, Zapatista Mexico, and post-Communist Rumania, among other places), it is his balanced and profound command of Uruguayan political history that makes Rilla such a sure-footed guide.The book operates on two levels. At one level, Rilla examines the 30 years from 1942 to 1972, starting with the restoration of democracy after the Gabriel Terra dictatorship and ending in the demise of the “Uruguay clásico” of Batllista/Colorado reformism (“the Switzerland of Latin America”) and Blanco/Nationalist coparticipation. To account for the slow death of Uruguayan democracy, Rilla eschews economic or cold war explanations to focus instead on how Uruguayans came to doubt the guiding historical mythologies that had underpinned the democratic restoration and the hegemony of the two traditional parties. As the Tupamaros and Frente Amplio attacked from the left and the ruralist movement of Benito Nardone attacked from the populist right, intellectuals across the spectrum lost faith in the Uruguayan experiment and its vision of the past. In the end democracy fell or was brought down, in Rilla’s words, “porque (casi) nadie creía en ella” (p. 487).But it is at the other level, in its exegesis of the countless opposing renderings of Uruguayan history, that the book makes a truly invaluable contribution. Because Rilla analyzes political uses of the past, his gaze extends all the way back through the nineteenth century to José Gervasio Artigas (honored by all sides, if for different reasons), Fructuoso Rivera and Manuel Oribe (founders of the two traditional parties), the Guerra Grande, Oribe’s alliance with Juan Manuel de Rosas and Rivera’s with France and Brazil, the never-forgotten executions at Quinteros in 1858, Aparicio Saravia’s guerrillas of 1904, and just about every other key moment of contention in partisan memory. Again and again, Rilla explains things that politically aware Uruguayans know from childhood but are opaque to the outsider. He reconstructs the creation of official histories by and for the two traditional parties, each with its own set of heroes and villains, unspeakable outrages by the other, and betrayals from within. Colorados, for example, propagated an official public narrative of civilization versus (Blanco) barbarism that drew a direct line from the Defense of Montevideo in the 1840s to the reforms of José Batlle y Ordóñez (the collegial executive, the 8-hour day), to the statist developmentalism of Luis Batlle Berres in the 1950s. Blanco narratives, written at a greater distance from state power, were more fragmented and self-consciously revisionist, emphasizing the party’s long struggle for fair elections and minority representation, against Colorado pretensions to permanent rule.But Rilla is equally deft in laying out the critiques of those official histories, whether from various generations of principled independents (principistas), critical of caudillo parties without ideas, or from opposing ideological factions within each party. Those who want to get a handle on the schisms between Herreristas and Independent Nationalists, Batllistas, and Riveristas, or to understand the political thought of José Pedro Varela, Carlos María Ramírez, or Lorenzo Carnelli (to name only a few) may find in this book their Rosetta stone. Just make sure not to skip the explanatory footnotes.Finally, Rilla provides a comprehensive guide to twentieth-century Uruguayan historiography. A major chapter is devoted to Eduardo Acevedo and Juan E. Pivel Devoto, one Colorado and the other Blanco, both recognized as giants and as key contributors to Uruguay’s competing national narratives. But Rilla goes on to discuss a long list of other historians, both those who helped create the classic Colorado and Blanco histories and those who called those stories into question. People who seek to understand the ideas of Francisco Bauzá, Angel Floro Costa, Roberto Giudice and Efraín González Conzi, Antonio Grompone, Luis Alberto de Herrera, Martín C. Martínez, Mateo Magariños, Eduardo V. Haedo, Alberto Methol Ferré, Carlos Quijano, Vivián Trías, Carlos Real de Azúa, Roberto Ares Pons, or Germán Rama may begin here.Students with little knowledge of Uruguay will find the book inaccessible, and scholars enmeshed in the historiographical debates that Rilla chronicles may well take issue with some (or many) of his conclusions and characterizations. But to those who know Uruguay well enough to find its political history utterly baffling, this book brings wonderful clarity.