Debbie Sharnak

Most of the world knows Uruguay only for its soccer team, or its vaunted title as the "Switzerland of South America," an enduring moniker given to the country for its earlier social welfare policies and relative stability. Even many scholarly narratives of Latin America fail to integrate the country into historical accounts, reducing the country to, as one historian has explained, "a periphery within the periphery that is Latin America."

This volume challenges that characterization, taking one of the most innovative small states in the region and analyzing its transnational influence on the world. Uruguay in Transnational Perspective takes a broad look at the country’s three-hundred-year history, connecting imperial practices and resistance, Afro-Latin movements, and feminist firebrands, among others to understand how the country and its citizens have influenced and shaped regional and global historical narratives in a way that has thus far been overlooked.

With a true collaboration between scholars of the Global North and Global South, the volume is both transnational in its scholarly focus and its production. Its interdisciplinary nature offers a broad range of perspectives from leading scholars in the field to re-evaluate Uruguay’s impact on the global stage.

During the country’s dictatorship from 1973 to 1985, Uruguayans suffered under crushing repression, which included the highest rate of political incarceration in the world. In Of Light and Struggle, Debbie Sharnak explores how activists, transnational social movements, and international policymakers collaborated and clashed in response to this era and during the country’s transition back to democratic rule.

At the heart of the book is an examination of how the language and politics of human rights shifted over time as a result of conflict and convergence between local, national, and global dynamics. Sharnak examines the utility and limits of human rights language used by international NGOs, such as Amnesty International, and foreign governments, such as the Carter administration. She does so by exploring tensions between their responses to the dictatorship’s violations and the grassroots struggle for socioeconomic rights as well as new social movements around issues of race, gender, religion, and sexuality in Uruguay. Sharnak exposes how international activists used human rights language to combat repression in foreign countries, how local politicians, unionists, and students articulated more expansive social justice visions, how the military attempted to coopt human rights language for its own purposes, and how broader debates about human rights transformed the fight over citizenship in renewed democratic societies. By exploring the interplay between debates taking place in activists’ living rooms, presidential administrations, and international halls of power, Sharnak uncovers the messy and contingent process through which human rights became a powerful discourse for social change, and thus contributes to a new method for exploring the history of human rights.

By looking at this pivotal period in international history, Of Light and Struggle suggests that discussions around the small country on the Río de la Plata had global implications for the possibilities and constraints of human rights well beyond Uruguay’s shores.

This study focuses on the International Olympic Committee’s Rule 50 – a policy prohibiting athlete protest at the Games – as its site of analysis to examine how sport policy becomes contested terrain when being utilized by those in power to reinforce an unjust status quo. Specifically, we drew from critical discourse analysis and Ray’s Theory of Racialized Organizations to better understand how discourses of the neutrality of sport allow for the rule to be utilized to perpetuate hegemonic norms that silence activism among athletes and disguise unequal power relations in global sport governance. Through analysis of the contemporary discourses surrounding the IOC’s recent Rule 50 consultation, we found that those calling for keeping the rule intact framed the issue as an organizational integrity issue, whereas those calling for abolishment and amendments framed the rule as a human rights issue. As such, we critique the continuing effect of the neutrality myth in global sport governance – a harmful racist myth perpetuated by those governing Olympic sport that rests on the false claim of Olympic idealism being free from politics and social ills.

This chapter examines Uruguay’s radical shift from an almost complete denial of its Afro-Uruguayan population to official state recognition. While Uruguay follows a larger Latin American movement for multiculturalism that began in the late twentieth century, Uruguay is unique in the specific path it took to overcome the invisibility of its black population, a change critically tied to the military government’s treatment of Afro-Uruguayans from 1973-1985. This chapter argues that the push for legal visibility occurred as a result of the twin pressures of Afro-Uruguayan mobilization in the aftermath of the dictatorship, combined with a larger global shift towards support for state-sponsored ethnoracial recognition. Using interviews and sources from Uruguayan and international archives, it locates the importance of official recognition in the context of building a powerful civil rights movement that has had tangible policy outcomes, such as inclusion in the census and an affirmative action law.

Uruguay passed the Ley de Caducidad de la Pretensión Punitiva del Estado (Law on the Expiration of the Punitive Claims of the States or Law of Expiry) in December 1986, which provided amnesty for all members of the military and security personnel involved in crimes during the nation’s military rule (1973–1985). A referendum in 1989 democratically affirmed the law, producing a silencing about accountability efforts in Uruguay in subsequent years.
As such, much of the literature that emerged in the 1990s about the field of transitional justice excluded Uruguay, considering it a failure to engage with justice initiatives. Since 2000, however, Uruguay has followed a winding path toward employing accountability measures. This has included a difficult process of overturning its amnesty law,
some selected domestic court cases, as well as some truth-telling initiatives, reparations, and memorialization.
Overall, Uruguay’s experience and evolution toward engaging transitional justice initiatives represent a nonlinear progress of accountability that depended on a combination of domestic political will, friendly courts or judges, international legal and norm shifts, and sustained civil society activism. Both Uruguay’s eventual engagement with justice initiatives and expanding ideas about what constitutes transitional justice have driven the country’s reemergence in scholarship within the field of transitional justice. Uruguay’s thirty-five-year battle Offers an example of a non-teleological path of transitional justice. Additionally, the case of Uruguay urges consideration of understanding the longer timeframes that justice might take to achieve, even in stable democracies.

This chapter explores the transnational dynamics that led to this pioneering trial and its subsequent reverberations in Uruguay. After outlining a brief history of legal impunity within the country, it argues that the trial was undertaken, at least in part, because Uruguay proved unwilling to prosecute many of these crimes domestically. With 109 victims’ relatives and lawyers filing cases on behalf of the disappeared victims in the Operation Condor portion of the trial, the largest number – 48 – actually came from Uruguay (Lessa 2019a, 427).  Many of these claimants used another nation’s federal court system to seek justice because it was the only available avenue. However, they also hoped that after the trial, the successful prosecution of an Uruguayan national abroad would perhaps provide an incentive for Uruguay to take up more cases at the domestic level (T13 2016). What this chapter claims, however, is that in the years since the conviction, the opposite has actually occurred – more delays, stonewalling, and attacks on human rights defenders transpired and perhaps even intensified.
As such, this chapter will investigate the domestic implications of these transnational prosecutorial efforts for Uruguay. By analyzing archival documents from the US and Latin America, reports on the trial, and conducting interviews in Uruguay, it contends that even when accountability has been successfully pursued at an international or transnational level, domestic successes are in large part dependent on the political will of judges in local and federal courts, an element still seemingly missing from the Uruguayan political scene. Lastly, this chapter will briefly explore the continued failure to pursue retributive justice since the Condor trial sentence from the perspective of an “unleashing” theory – a phenomenon that legal scholar Cass Sunstein describes as the effects of norm subversion (2017). In this article, Sunstein explains that often the pressures of social norms lead people to hide their true beliefs; yet, once norms are weakened through social action or the revision of laws, it is then possible to uncover preexisting preferences and spur action – either positive or negative. Although Sunstein explores this concept from a domestic US perspective, this paper puts the theory into an Uruguayan context, where the continued intransigence of domestic courts, even in light of international progress on justice issues, has resulted in a backlash against human rights defenders. This has meant the further closing of doors and elimination of opportunities for pursuing legal justice in the aftermath of the trial – the opposite of what many Uruguayans and international observers had hoped with the convictions in the groundbreaking Operation Condor trial. In this sense, even as norms for international justice strengthen abroad, Uruguay’s current political and judicial climate means that domestic trials are unlikely.

This article examines the nature and type of women’s activism before, during, and after Uruguay’s dictatorship, arguing that advocacy during the latter part of the country’s military rule paved the way for an increased role for women in society after democracy was restored. Focusing on the female-led movement to place the 1986 Ley de Caducidad (Law of Expiry or amnesty law) before a national referendum, it analyzes how women marshaled a gendered identity that had been effective in campaigning against the military. Through examining connections between earlier women’s movements and the 1980s, the article explores how challenging a key piece of legislation in the recently restored democratic environment ultimately forged a new era of activism for women in post-authoritarian Uruguay. The article ultimately rethinks the process of Uruguay’s transition, the continual negotiations over what is included in human rights discourse, and the importance of gendered activism in transitional societies.