La paradoja uruguaya: Intelectuales, latinoamericanismo y nación a mediados de siglo XX
2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-8178545
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)International Relations in Latin America
ResumoThis monograph explores a key period in Uruguayan history, the decade from the victory of the National Party (also known as the Blancos) over the ruling Colorado Party in 1958 (after almost a century in opposition) to the state's clampdown on the Left in 1968, which culminated in the 1973 coup. During that time, public intellectuals diagnosed the reasons for what they perceived as a “structural crisis” with economic, political, cultural, and moral dimensions and suggested a therapy that seemed to be paradoxical, as Ximena Espeche argues: “The country had to be Latin American in order to not be Latin American” (p. 13). In other words, Uruguay had to critically engage with the long-standing myth of its own exceptionalism, which had as its referent President José Batlle y Ordóñez's remarkable transformation of a notorious nineteenth-century trouble spot into Latin America's first welfare state between 1903 and 1915. Batllista Uruguay depicted itself as being different from the rest of the region: democratic, modern, prosperous, meritocratic, urban, and cosmopolitan—in short, a model country, the Switzerland of South America, a nation like no other. However, by the late 1950s such self-styled paradise had lost credibility, and, as these critical intellectuals claimed, it was necessary to question some of the foundations of Batllismo, search for broader societal consensus, recognize the commonalities with neighbors, and integrate the nation into Latin America. Otherwise Uruguay's survival might not be guaranteed, a severe warning in a country that had seen its statehood contested and nation building delayed for many decades after independence.In the first four chapters of her study, Espeche looks at the writers, essayists, journalists, and historians who shaped these debates, as a group. All of them, gathered around the political and cultural weekly Marcha, displayed acute crisis awareness, shared the wish to raise public consciousness, and blamed Batllistas, with their stronghold in Montevideo, for having turned their back on not only the wider region but also the countryside. This, Espeche shows, made these intellectuals revert to Blanco traditions, though in a selective way and as a cultural, rather than merely party-political, phenomenon. Most notably, José Gervasio Artigas, the champion of an autonomous Banda Oriental as part of the Federal League of River Plate provinces who was later stylized as forefather of Uruguay's independence, was revived once again as an agrarian revolutionary and popular tribune to provide a bridge between nationalism and Latin Americanism as well as urban and rural masses. Thereby he became “the epitome of the exceptional,” of a true, Latin Americanized Uruguay (p. 370). Yet Espeche also critically scrutinizes the then-rival constructs (still today widely used) of the “Generation of 1945” and the “Critical Generation,” created by Emír Rodríguez Monegal and Ángel Rama, respectively, and points to the “consensus within the dissent” that characterized these individuals with very different trajectories, interests, and positions (p. 137). Most of these individuals linked the solution to Uruguay and the region's travails with social democracy, anti-imperialism, and tercerismo.The second part of Espeche's monograph is dedicated to three protagonists in these debates: Carlos Quijano, the founder and editor in chief of Marcha; Alberto Methol Ferré; and Carlos Real de Azúa. The study uncovers how each of them engaged with broader economic and geopolitical paradigms, with Quijano criticizing US-dominated Pan-Americanism and the technocratic approaches by Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe desarrollistas, Methol Ferré taking inspiration from Peronism's focus on the formation of a nonaligned ABC bloc (consisting of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) and on the ignored masses, and Real de Azúa wanting to recover and safeguard for the future the “ethos” and useful popular-spiritual traditions of Latin America, disregarded by modernization theorists (p. 345). Though sympathetic to Fidel Castro's revolution, these critics warned against frenetic anticapitalism, alignment with another imperialist power (the Soviet Union), and Régis Debray's foquismo. Regional integration had to precede revolution, for which, Quijano concluded, Uruguay was not yet prepared. Methol Ferré pleaded for gradualism: first the country would have to be converted from an isolated buffer between Argentina and Brazil into an active nexus and motor of full integration in the River Plate basin.These critical voices remained in the tradition of Latin America's pensadores. Stringent social science analyses are absent, clearly a consequence of the late institutionalization of these disciplines in Uruguay, as analyzed by Aldo Marchesi and Vania Markarian. Espeche goes into considerable detail in analyzing the editorials, essays, and books of her protagonists, but at times the writing is a little dry and repetitive, and readers will miss a good index. Also, while Espeche gives profound insight into evolving approaches, concepts, and terms that affected Uruguay's later debates on development and regional integration, she does not elucidate to whom precisely this group of intellectuals talked at the time and how their interlocutors and adversaries within and outside Uruguay responded.Espeche's original, significant, and well-argued study, which is based on an extensive bibliography of newspaper articles, interviews, printed primary sources, and secondary literature, is of interest to intellectual, cultural, and political historians working not only on Uruguay but on Latin America more generally.
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