Behind the Bastards - Part One: Christmas non-Bastard: The Tupamaros of Uruguay
Aired: 2021-12-21
Duration: 01:35:48


=== Math and Magic Kickoff (03:06) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  Today's Financial Literacy Month.
[00:00:06]  We are talking about the one investment most people ignore: building a business around the life you actually want.
[00:00:11]  It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
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[00:00:24]  At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
[00:00:26]  And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
[00:00:30]  Listen to those amigos on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:00:35]  I actually drop better when I'm high.
[00:00:37]  It heightens my senses, calms me down.
[00:00:40]  If anything, I'm more careful.
[00:00:43]  Honestly, it just helps me focus.
[00:00:46]  That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself.
[00:00:49]  And now he's in prison.
[00:00:51]  You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.
[00:00:58]  So if you're high, just don't drive.
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[00:01:34]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
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[00:02:16]  Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas.
[00:02:20]  This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast about Robert trying to do a festive introduction and then losing steam because he didn't really have a plan.
[00:02:30]  Hey, Chris, can you insert in a sound of me murdering Santa Claus here?
[00:02:35]  And some jingle bells.
[00:02:38]  Jingle bells and stabbing.
[00:02:40]  Put it all in right here over us talking.
[00:02:44]  And now I'm going to introduce our guest today, Margaret Killjoy.
[00:02:47]  Margaret.
[00:02:49]  You are the host of a podcast called Live Like the World is Dying.
[00:02:53]  You just published a book through AK Press called A Country of Ghosts, which is fucking awesome.
[00:02:59]  I read it last weekend in a single long day of obsessive reading.
[00:03:04]  How are you doing today, Margaret?

=== A Country of Ghosts Review (15:29) ===

[00:03:06]  I'm doing good.
[00:03:07]  Good.
[00:03:09]  Well, Margaret, how do you feel about Christmas?
[00:03:13]  Very complicated.
[00:03:14]  I feel like I think most people have complicated feelings about Christmas.
[00:03:19]  How do you feel about heroes?
[00:03:24]  You know, actually, also complicated.
[00:03:26]  Also complicated, right?
[00:03:28]  Fundamentally problematic idea.
[00:03:30]  Well, our subject of today, I don't know that I would call heroes, but I do, I think they do the most heroic thing that you can do, which is change with the times rather than repeatedly doing the same thing and hoping for different results.
[00:03:48]  Which there's an element of heroism.
[00:03:51]  They're also terrorists, kind of.
[00:03:53]  So this is going to be a complicated episode, Margaret.
[00:03:56]  Have you heard of the Tupa Maros of Uruguay?
[00:04:00]  I have not.
[00:04:01]  Okay, well, this is good.
[00:04:02]  And by the way, if you look up Tupa Maros, there's also a Venezuelan Marxist-Leninist political party called the Tupamaros.
[00:04:07]  This is a very different thing.
[00:04:10]  If you've heard much about Uruguayan politics in recent years, it's probably that they were the first nation on earth to legalize marijuana.
[00:04:16]  This is back in 2013.
[00:04:19]  They also legalized gay marriage the same year, which was about two years faster than the US of A. Both of these reforms were signed into law under the presidency of a dude named Jose Mujica.
[00:04:30]  Now, if you know a single Uruguayan politician, he's probably the guy.
[00:04:34]  The most prominent piece of international press relating to him is an article from The Guardian in 2014 titled, Is This the World's Most Radical President?
[00:04:43]  And this is the Guardian article, is very much like radical from like a centrist liberal standpoint.
[00:04:49]  But it refers, he's referred to a lot as Uruguay's anarchist president, again, in a lot of like not anarchist media, because he's not an anarchist.
[00:04:57]  Although it is fair to say he's got there's anarchist influences in his in his politics and his attitude.
[00:05:03]  You might have guessed that he's not an anarchist by the fact that he's a president.
[00:05:07]  Right.
[00:05:07]  But he is pretty rad.
[00:05:11]  It's hard not to love this guy when you read about like aspects of his personality.
[00:05:15]  The thing he's most famous for is his humility.
[00:05:18]  He's the guy who drives his own car.
[00:05:19]  Like he drives like a car.
[00:05:20]  Well, usually he rides a bicycle, the same bicycle he's maintained for 60 years, but he has a small Volkswagen.
[00:05:26]  He refuses to have like a limo or a driver.
[00:05:29]  He usually wears sandals and like worn oil.
[00:05:32]  He would just usually used to wear like stained jumpers, was like the only thing he would wear.
[00:05:36]  And they finally got him to like at least wear a clean shirt.
[00:05:38]  So there's like photos of him with like Hugo Chavez and Obama.
[00:05:41]  And he's just like dressed like a dude who lives in Latin America.
[00:05:45]  He's just like going to work.
[00:05:47]  He's like a farmer a lot of the time.
[00:05:49]  Like he runs a farm and has for most of his life.
[00:05:53]  He's just like not a guy who looks like other world leaders.
[00:05:59]  And one of the reasons he's become so popular, again, is like every liberal's favorite quote-unquote radical politician was this moment in 2014 when he gave a speech to the United Nations that included this bit, which Sophie's going to play for us now.
[00:06:16]  And this is a UN speech.
[00:06:18]  So he's speaking in Spanish, but the UN is doing, they've got like a guy reading in English.
[00:06:25]  So that's not actually Jose's voice, but yeah.
[00:06:32]  And that allows us to contemplate the beauty of nature.
[00:06:42]  We have destroyed the jungles, the green jungles, the true jungles, and we've created anonymous cement jungles.
[00:06:51]  We have tackled sedentarianism with walkers, insomnia with pills, solitude with electronics.
[00:07:03]  Are we happy when we are so far from the human essence?
[00:07:08]  We have to ask ourselves this question.
[00:07:11]  Stunned.
[00:07:13]  We have fled from our biology, which defends life for life itself as a superior cause in itself.
[00:07:23]  And we've replaced it by functional consumerism and accumulation politics.
[00:07:34]  Yeah, so that's pretty rad for a world leader.
[00:07:42]  That's the most I've ever agreed with anything a president said in a long time.
[00:07:46]  Especially in the UN.
[00:07:48]  I think you'll feel that way about this next segment here, too.
[00:07:51]  But today, today, it's time to begin to fight to prepare a world without borders.
[00:08:01]  The globalized economy has no other inclination but private interest, the private interest of very few.
[00:08:09]  And every nation-state looks at its own stability.
[00:08:16]  Yeah, so getting up there talking about how we shouldn't have borders.
[00:08:21]  I don't know.
[00:08:22]  That's to me pretty rad to hear a president saying at the United Nations.
[00:08:28]  Yeah, and you can see why people went gaga for this guy, right?
[00:08:33]  And why they call him an anarchist.
[00:08:34]  Because there's anarchisty elements of what he's saying, especially the whole we should be moving towards a world without borders.
[00:08:42]  But, you know, he's also a president.
[00:08:46]  And it's like, we'll talk a little bit more about Jose later.
[00:08:50]  But one of the things I do think is interesting about him, because you can find other world leaders like saying good shit, talking a good game about all this stuff, and then like going back home to their mansions and taking private jets' places.
[00:09:03]  And like Jose does, one of the things that kind of separates him is he wears, not only does he like not live in a mansion or anything, but like he flies coach.
[00:09:12]  Like he's not, he's not living the sort of like, yeah.
[00:09:16]  But what if he has like a secret mansion bunker underneath his tiny house?
[00:09:21]  Well, I mean, it's not impossible.
[00:09:23]  Although most of the time when like journalists come to visit him at his home, like there's a couple of different stories.
[00:09:28]  Like some Japanese or Korean film crew will come and he'll like meet them at his front door and they'll go drink Jim Bean under a tree, which is how I would greet a film crew.
[00:09:40]  That's good because people always talked about how George Bush was like the president you'd drink a beer with.
[00:09:45]  That was like his whole thing was like, he's the one you'd want to drink a beer with.
[00:09:49]  But I think that the president that you drink, Jim Beam under a tree, I don't know.
[00:09:54]  Yeah.
[00:09:54]  Yeah.
[00:09:56]  I think that would be, I would prefer that to like having a staged photo op beer with a president at the White House, which seems horrible.
[00:10:04]  Again, we'll cover later.
[00:10:05]  There's a lot of criticisms of Jose from the left primarily.
[00:10:09]  Like most of the people who have issues with him are like leftists.
[00:10:14]  But what I find more interesting than his presidency is where he came from and the kind of intellectual and moral journey he represents, not just from himself, but for the political organization that he came from.
[00:10:29]  Because Jose, because Jose Mujica got his start in politics through what you might call non-traditional means, he was a terrorist as a young man.
[00:10:39]  And not like a, well, not like, not like in a light way, like in a got shot repeatedly in gunfights with the cops way.
[00:10:46]  Like he went as hard as he possibly could have without dying.
[00:10:50]  And the group that he was a member of is one of the most fascinating insurgent organizations I've ever heard about, the Tupa Moros.
[00:10:58]  So in order to explain the Tupa Moros, we're going to have to get into a little bit of what Uruguay is.
[00:11:05]  It's the second smallest country in South America.
[00:11:08]  It's like middling sized as countries go.
[00:11:10]  It's about the size of Washington state, which is bigger than a lot of European countries.
[00:11:14]  So it's not a tiny country, but tiny for South America.
[00:11:19]  Before white folks showed up and started doing what white folks do, the indigenous inhabitants of Uruguay were the Charua.
[00:11:28]  They had been pushed into the area by another tribe up in Paraguay in the generations before European conquest.
[00:11:34]  And when the Spanish showed up on their shores in 1516, their overall response could be best characterized as, fuck this shit.
[00:11:42]  They did the fight thing, and they were really good at fighting.
[00:11:45]  They fought like hell, and that synergized well with the fact that Uruguay didn't have anything colonizers wanted at that time.
[00:11:51]  There was no like gold or silver there.
[00:11:53]  So the locals were pretty good guerrilla fighters, and there wasn't anything valuable.
[00:11:59]  So it didn't really get settled when all it didn't get colonized when like all of the areas around it were getting colonized.
[00:12:05]  It took longer.
[00:12:07]  So there were some light attempts by the Europeans to settle there in the 1500s.
[00:12:11]  But the first permanent Spanish settlement there wasn't founded until 1624 at a place called Soriano.
[00:12:18]  About 50 years later, the Portuguese came and built a fort, and this sparked an Uruguay rush between Spain and Portugal, who started gobbling up chunks of land as fast as they could.
[00:12:27]  And again, the reasoning seemed to be less, there's stuff here we want, and more the other guys are starting to take stuff here, so we should do that.
[00:12:37]  It's great.
[00:12:39]  So that went really well for everyone, right?
[00:12:42]  Yeah, I mean, it goes the way it goes in all of what's now Latin America.
[00:12:47]  Absolutely.
[00:12:48]  Yeah, terribly.
[00:12:48]  Yeah, terribly.
[00:12:49]  Although, I mean, I guess less bad.
[00:12:51]  Uruguay kind of gets off better than, well, no, not really.
[00:12:55]  Yeah.
[00:12:56]  So today the capital of Uruguay is Montevideo, which was founded by the Spanish in the early 1700s as like a fortress city and trading port.
[00:13:04]  And it was specifically founded because the Portuguese had Buenos Aires, and so the Spanish needed a port near there that could be their port, right?
[00:13:12]  Like that's again, it's all part of this like Cold War kind of kind of shit going on between Spain and Portugal.
[00:13:20]  And so for the next century or so, Uruguay wound up in the crosshairs of a bunch of different spats between colonizing powers.
[00:13:26]  And it wasn't just the Spanish and the Portuguese.
[00:13:28]  The British occupy Montevideo at one point.
[00:13:32]  Like everybody's going through here now, like, right?
[00:13:35]  They get kind of 100 years off compared to everybody else.
[00:13:38]  But once colonizing comes for Uruguay, it comes hard, you know?
[00:13:44]  So people don't often like being battled over by foreign powers.
[00:13:48]  And by 1811, a guy named José Artigas launched a revolution against the Spanish crown, which Uruguay won.
[00:13:54]  Artigas was adamant that the new government should be a federal system with high levels of political autonomy for each region.
[00:14:01]  This led to a civil war between the people in Buenos Aires and the people in Montevideo.
[00:14:06]  And there's all of this fighting between forces, most of which is like less, it's not quite like states fighting as much as it is.
[00:14:13]  It's these codillos, these warlords, right, who have like, are kind of aligned with one side or the other and control regions, and they're all kind of murdering each other.
[00:14:22]  It is civil war, but it's between Buenos Aires.
[00:14:25]  Buenos Aires and Montevideo are kind of broadly speaking, it seems to be like the main sides here.
[00:14:32]  And there's a bunch of murdering and all of the fighting in this period effectively wipes out most of the remaining indigenous people in the region.
[00:14:39]  And so I think a lot of people in Uruguay have some like, like a lot of Latin America, have some indigenous ancestry down the line, but like the communities are just wiped out.
[00:14:48]  And most Uruguayans are actually Spanish and Italian heritage, kind of as a result of this.
[00:14:55]  Like, again, we're talking in really broad terms.
[00:14:58]  So when Uruguay fought for its independence, sorry, when it fought for its independence, it wasn't indigenous folks.
[00:15:02]  It was instead kind of like a-I mean, I'm sure they considered themselves that, but it was like the children of children of children of people who had come to colonize.
[00:15:10]  And there was, again, some like intermarrying and stuff between communities.
[00:15:15]  But yeah, it was the people who, I'm sure at that point, considered themselves the indigenous people of Uruguay fighting against the colonial power, but who were also the descendants of, yeah, you know, this is like all a lot of Latin American history, you know?
[00:15:28]  Yeah.
[00:15:29]  Yeah.
[00:15:30]  So things started to settle down by the turn of the next century.
[00:15:34]  And in 1903, the fairly new state of Uruguay elected a president named Jose Bazay.
[00:15:42]  Baset, he's generally just known as Bazay, was a socialist, or at least close enough.
[00:15:49]  And the New Republic credits him for building, quote, perhaps the most perfectly rendered socialist society the world has ever seen.
[00:15:56]  Now, that's how the writer from the New Republic describes it.
[00:15:59]  I have found actual academic theses on Uruguayan politics, none of whom say anything close to that.
[00:16:07]  So, I don't know.
[00:16:08]  Like, the writer from the New Republic actually went there, did a lot of work.
[00:16:12]  I'm sure knows more about Uruguay than me, but I'm sure these scholars know more than that person.
[00:16:17]  So, I think it's probably fair to say that it's a little overstated to call it the most perfectly rendered socialist society the world's ever seen.
[00:16:26]  But Bizet did do a lot of rad shit.
[00:16:28]  He taxed landowners and he put the money into pensions for working people.
[00:16:31]  He was an advocate of unions.
[00:16:33]  Healthcare in Uruguay was ruled to be a universal right, and this is like in 1911 or something like that.
[00:16:39]  Higher education was made free, and under him, the literacy rate hit 95%.
[00:16:45]  And I'm going to quote from the New Republic here, quoting a historian.
[00:16:49]  His idea, Gerardo Catano, Uruguay's foremost historian of the Bizet era, explained to me, was that you can't have liberty without equality.
[00:16:56]  There is no psychic liberty, in other words, for the poor unless they can imagine themselves equal to the privileged.
[00:17:02]  One of the many new laws Bizet implemented was to correct perceived imbalances and gave women greater rights to request divorce than their husbands.
[00:17:09]  The logic was that men are more powerful, Catano said.
[00:17:12]  So to treat men and women equally would result in an outcome that still favored men.
[00:17:16]  So this is like, again, 1903 to 1901.
[00:17:18]  Like, this guy's pretty, you keep running into this in Uruguayan history.
[00:17:22]  These dudes were like, well, I didn't expect that from somebody saying this in like 1905.
[00:17:27]  Yeah, people are still struggling with that basic cause.
[00:17:29]  Yeah, like that's incredibly controversial today.
[00:17:32]  And this guy is like, yeah, we're all rubbing dirt into our wounds.
[00:17:36]  And also, you can't just treat men and women equally because structural inequality means that men will still have more power, which is like, it's pretty dope.
[00:17:45]  I would say pretty dope.
[00:17:47]  And it's fair to say, like, it is the New Republic overstates things, but it is, I think, fair to say that, like, most recently colonized nations and most recently colonized nations in Latin America, because like the 1800s is kind of the period where a lot of them, you know, have their revolutions and get free from the Europeans who had dominated them.
[00:18:05]  Uruguay winds up better off than a lot of places.
[00:18:10]  But the New Republic does give an incomplete idea of Baset's time and power.
[00:18:14]  I found a master's thesis from Thomas More of Texas Tech, which goes into a lot more detail and cites a lot of other scholars and notes that Baset's socialist reforms weren't just incomplete.
[00:18:25]  They also carried with them the seeds that would sprout rather violently in a few generations.
[00:18:30]  Quote, no matter how democratic the government appeared to be, there were some serious drawbacks and flaws.

=== Uruguay's Hidden Gridlock (06:55) ===

[00:18:35]  The main problem, which plagued the government for years, was that executive responsibility was divided between a president and a national council.
[00:18:42]  This division of responsibility created no serious problems so long as things ran smoothly and all the council members were in agreement.
[00:18:49]  This was apparent during the prosperous 1920s.
[00:18:52]  Presidents and councils could toss problems back and forth with no damaging effect because of the evidence of economic affluence during that period.
[00:18:59]  It was during the Depression years, 1929 to 1933, that the Collegiado, the National Council, demonstrated its incapacity for coping with the rising inflation and employment.
[00:19:09]  And basically, when there's not factionalism and strong political party disputes, this works okay.
[00:19:15]  When there is, everything grinds off, grinds down to gridlock.
[00:19:19]  And in Uruguay, you have kind of two broad parties, and the history of these parties goes back to the Civil War period.
[00:19:25]  We don't need to get into a lot, but it's the Colorado Party and the Blanco Party.
[00:19:28]  And I think the Colorado Party is kind of broadly liberal-ish, and the Blanco Party is a little more conservative.
[00:19:37]  Not that they, not to like, they don't like graft onto the Republican and Democratic parties, obviously, right?
[00:19:43]  Like, but that's probably broadly right.
[00:19:46]  Um, so the president at the time, when the Great Depression hits and like shit gets fucked up, is a dude named Gabriel Terra.
[00:19:53]  And he gets pissed off at the fact that council members couldn't come to any solid ideas about how to deal with the economic collapse, right?
[00:19:59]  Like nobody can agree on anything.
[00:20:01]  And so this system that had worked when everyone was rich stops working when the money stops flowing, which happens a lot in world history.
[00:20:09]  All of his attempts to remedy the situation got shut down by the council because of political divisions.
[00:20:14]  So in 1933, he bypasses the political gridlock in the council by doing a coup d'état against his own government.
[00:20:21]  He dissolves the National Council and Congress.
[00:20:23]  He censors newspapers and he basically makes himself a dictator for a while there, right?
[00:20:30]  But not quite because he also calls for a new constitution, which is written in 1934 and establishes a new one-man presidency with a Senate, which would be permanently divided in half between the two major parties.
[00:20:43]  I don't know that this, I'd say this helped, but like also by 34, things are starting to get better economically.
[00:20:50]  So it may be that this reduced gridlock somewhat.
[00:20:53]  It may just be that like money starts coming in again.
[00:20:55]  And so all of the problems are lessened because there's money.
[00:20:59]  I don't know.
[00:21:00]  Politics are kind of like a relationship in that regard.
[00:21:04]  Things can work great until you're broke.
[00:21:07]  Yeah.
[00:21:10]  So the problem, though, with this new constitution is that it completely enshrines a two-party system into law because you have to have the Senate split between the two parties.
[00:21:20]  It's a very immovable two-party system.
[00:21:24]  But still, even though this is going to create problems later, kind of during the late 30s, Uruguay starts doing a lot better.
[00:21:31]  They are in the 30s and up through like the 40s.
[00:21:35]  They're the most urbanized and prosperous nation in Latin America.
[00:21:38]  And this is a very urban country.
[00:21:40]  Most of the population lives in cities, like the vast majority.
[00:21:44]  So it's not like a lot of Latin America where you have like this really geographically spread out populations and a lot of them are in the mountains or something like that.
[00:21:52]  Kind of everybody lives in the cities in Uruguay.
[00:21:55]  And it has the lowest level of social inequality in Latin America and one of the lowest levels of social inequality in the world.
[00:22:01]  Some of this is due to government policy because Bizet does do a lot of like good socialist-y stuff.
[00:22:06]  But it's also a lot of it has to do with Uruguayan culture, which I'm not an expert on, but sounds fascinating.
[00:22:12]  One of the cool things about it, it's considered to be like the classic car capital of the world, not because everybody's like collecting old cars, but because it's considered shameful to not keep a car working.
[00:22:23]  Like to buy an, if you're buying a new car, it should be because your old vehicle cannot be fixed under any circumstances.
[00:22:30]  Or at least this was the old version of the Cuba thing.
[00:22:33]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:22:33]  Where it's just like, well, no, you keep fixing the car.
[00:22:36]  You don't buy a new car, like unless your car is just like shattered, you know?
[00:22:41]  But in this case, it's more like chosen instead of just because of embargoes.
[00:22:44]  Yes.
[00:22:45]  And there's, you know, there's rich people and there's poor people, but they often, especially throughout most of the 20th century, you couldn't necessarily tell the difference apart from on them based on how they travel or how they dress because there's this distaste culturally for displaying your wealth.
[00:23:01]  So even if you're super rich, you kind of dress like a working class person because that should, again, it's there's there's just kind of like cultural mores against showing off when you have money.
[00:23:11]  And that contributes to the lessened levels of social inequality in the country.
[00:23:17]  So when World War II comes a knock and Uruguay winds up producing meat, leather, and a handful of other goods for the Allies.
[00:23:22]  And this is one of the things Bizet gets, like the scholars I've been reading criticized Bizet for.
[00:23:27]  Kind of started this attitude of like, we have this socialist welfare state, and it's going to be entirely supported by providing these products to Western countries.
[00:23:37]  And in fact, Jose Mujica, the president of Uruguay, or former president of Uruguay, says that basically the big mistake Uruguay made was turning itself into a lackey of the British Empire and supplying all of their needs and kind of tying its welfare state and its prosperity to the British Empire continuing to need these supplies, right?
[00:23:59]  But during World War II, it's great to be selling shit to the British and the Americans, right?
[00:24:04]  It's a good time to be selling them shit.
[00:24:06]  They're buying up everything.
[00:24:07]  There's this big economic boom, and it again kind of hides the gridlock that has been put under this like second constitution with a permanent two-party state.
[00:24:18]  So again, as long as there's cash to blow and cash to keep the welfare stuff going, everything's all right.
[00:24:23]  And in fact, Europeans in the 40s and 50s call Uruguay the Switzerland of South America, which is not accurate and based on Eurocentrism and shit.
[00:24:35]  But because they're very much doing their own thing and they're not neutral, not neutral, not primarily a place for rich people to store their money.
[00:24:46]  There's a lot of reasons why that's not a good way to describe them.
[00:24:49]  Not surrounded by mountains that they've turned into hollowed out fortresses.
[00:24:53]  Yeah.
[00:24:54]  It's just because it's nice there compared to like a lot of places they're having wars and like difficulty, like fighting between the government and Uruguay.
[00:25:03]  There's a lot less conflict socially in this period.
[00:25:06]  So they're just like, oh, basically they're saying we didn't fuck up Uruguay as much as we fucked up a lot of places around it.
[00:25:12]  So it's the Switzerland of South America.
[00:25:15]  Yeah.
[00:25:16]  You know who else didn't fuck up Uruguay?
[00:25:20]  And definitely isn't neutral.
[00:25:23]  Yeah.
[00:25:24]  Well, I mean, yeah.
[00:25:27]  Yep.

=== Taking Control of Money (03:06) ===

[00:25:30]  On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:25:41]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:25:47]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:25:57]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:26:01]  That's great.
[00:26:02]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:26:12]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:26:18]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the IDHART radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:26:29]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:26:33]  Hi, Dad.
[00:26:34]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:26:41]  This is badass convict.
[00:26:44]  Right.
[00:26:44]  Just finished five years.
[00:26:46]  I'm going to have cookies and milk tomorrow.
[00:26:50]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:26:58]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:27:06]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with the guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:27:15]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:27:17]  And without this program, I'm going to die.
[00:27:21]  Open your free iHeart radio app.
[00:27:23]  It's your Casino show.
[00:27:24]  And listen now.
[00:27:29]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:27:34]  It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:27:42]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:27:51]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:27:56]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:28:00]  They believe everything.
[00:28:00]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:28:04]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:28:07]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:28:11]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:28:14]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:28:15]  They do not have homes.
[00:28:16]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:28:19]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:28:28]  When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.

=== Socialist Policies and People (14:43) ===

[00:28:37]  Here, the Nick Dick and Pole show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:28:41]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
[00:28:46]  Who do you think he is?
[00:28:47]  I don't know.
[00:28:49]  You meet the like the president?
[00:28:51]  You think he goes to president?
[00:28:52]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:28:53]  You think China has a president?
[00:28:54]  Leslie cruzette.
[00:28:58]  God, I love that thing.
[00:28:59]  I use it all the time.
[00:29:01]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
[00:29:04]  It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:29:08]  Yep.
[00:29:09]  It was a good one.
[00:29:09]  I like that saying.
[00:29:10]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[00:29:13]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[00:29:14]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[00:29:16]  Yes.
[00:29:17]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:29:20]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:29:21]  I got that wrong.
[00:29:22]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:29:32]  All right, we're back and we're talking about Uruguay.
[00:29:40]  So things are going great in Uruguay through the 40s.
[00:29:44]  World War II is great for them.
[00:29:45]  And they keep making bank.
[00:29:47]  They kind of transitioned from servicing the British Empire to servicing the American Empire through the Korean War.
[00:29:52]  So we keep buying a shitload of stuff from Uruguay through the Korean War.
[00:29:55]  And then the United States enters a permanent era of peace that was completely unbroken for the next 70 years, which is, you know, everybody knows about that period, the Pax Americana, where we weren't involved in any wars.
[00:30:10]  But the Uruguay movement to try and get us to be involved in wars.
[00:30:13]  Yeah.
[00:30:14]  Yeah.
[00:30:14]  All those people who wanted us to get into Vietnam.
[00:30:16]  Yeah.
[00:30:17]  John Lennon had a big song about that.
[00:30:19]  Yeah.
[00:30:20]  War is starting, I think, if you want to.
[00:30:22]  Yeah.
[00:30:22]  Merry Christmas.
[00:30:23]  Let's get into a war.
[00:30:29]  So Uruguay stops getting big fat government paychecks after the Korean War and the economy contracts heavily.
[00:30:35]  Like it kind of goes into free fall.
[00:30:37]  The government's short on money.
[00:30:39]  It can't pay for these social programs they've built and they don't want to do austerity.
[00:30:43]  So they spend, they like burn through the country's currency reserves and they start taking on debt from international lenders at kind of ruinous rates.
[00:30:50]  This happens to a lot of other places in this period of time.
[00:30:52]  This is kind of like the birth of the kind of global debt system that exists to this day because a lot of countries get quote unquote like liberated from the colonial powers and then take on loans from those powers to like anyway.
[00:31:06]  It's a fucked up period.
[00:31:08]  A bunch of fucked up shit's happening in this period.
[00:31:10]  And it's happening to Uruguay too.
[00:31:12]  So this is this is kind of disastrous and it leads to a massive political reorganization.
[00:31:19]  Members of Congress push a plebiscite that the country votes on, and this plebiscite reinstitutes the National Council and uses it to replace the presidency.
[00:31:28]  So they get now they don't have a president anymore, and they have this national council and the Senate who are trying to do everything.
[00:31:36]  And even though this is a plebiscite, because kind of the social stability is starting to crumble in this period of time, the mid to late 50s, most Uruguayans don't vote for the plebiscite.
[00:31:45]  So it passes narrowly and it completely changes the political situation.
[00:31:50]  Okay, I'm sorry.
[00:31:52]  I was trying to do that.
[00:31:53]  That's when the government says, hey, we got to make a big change.
[00:31:56]  And instead of doing normal political things, everyone in the country gets to vote yay or nay on this thing that we're going to do.
[00:32:02]  It would actually be rad if we could do some stuff that way because things might, we might be able to do some good stuff that everybody agrees on, but we can't seem to pass.
[00:32:11]  But we'll never, we don't, it's, there's a bunch of reasons why it's not really possible in the U.S. right now.
[00:32:17]  Yeah.
[00:32:17]  And it wasn't great there because like this is a plebiscite, but most Uruguayans don't vote.
[00:32:22]  And it's, it's a bet.
[00:32:24]  Anyway, all it does is kind of reinforce the factionalism that's been getting worse and worse and worse throughout the 20th century in Uruguayan politics.
[00:32:31]  And in the late 1950s, there's just massive unemployment.
[00:32:35]  And there's these huge labor protests, hundreds and hundreds of them, as a result of the fact that this welfare state and this kind of very pro-union environment has broken down.
[00:32:44]  A lot of workers aren't unionized at this point, and a lot of them are like starving basically.
[00:32:49]  And the national council, this new government with a national council, proves that they can be as vicious as a government with the president.
[00:32:55]  And they crack down horribly on these protesters.
[00:32:58]  Like they, Uruguay doesn't have a lot of police or a big military, but they throw them out there to just beat the absolute piss out of people who are protesting.
[00:33:06]  Like that's kind of where the government immediately goes once Uruguay has its first like mass civil disobedience campaigns.
[00:33:14]  What they could do.
[00:33:15]  The more they outnumber people.
[00:33:17]  Yeah.
[00:33:17]  The more they outnumber people, the less violent they have to be.
[00:33:19]  Like some of the most violent police are the ones who that's the way that they can take control.
[00:33:26]  Yeah, there's not a lot of police in Portland, but they're pretty fucking violent.
[00:33:30]  Yeah.
[00:33:31]  So they can, what's interesting to me is that this national council government, despite being like very split by the two-party system, all agree, well, yeah, we have to have the police brutalize protesters.
[00:33:41]  But they can't agree on anything, any ways to fix the economy.
[00:33:44]  Like they can't, they can't get that together.
[00:33:46]  They're just like, well, the poor people are getting organized, so we should like fuck them up.
[00:33:51]  This doesn't map to Republicans and Democrats because it's not.
[00:33:53]  It does a bit.
[00:33:55]  Only just in this one way.
[00:33:57]  And that everyone agrees.
[00:33:59]  Like, I think I've got this right.
[00:34:00]  I've read scholars who are smarter than me, and this seems to be what they're saying.
[00:34:04]  And I'm just sort of rephrasing it.
[00:34:05]  I never want to be saying too directly, it's just like here, even though there's patterns throughout different countries in history that are similar because people are all basically the same.
[00:34:14]  So people in power agree that you should beat up the people who are trying to stop them from being in power.
[00:34:20]  That is the thing that maps onto every country ever.
[00:34:22]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:34:25]  It's everything from, yeah, it's everything.
[00:34:28]  It's every country.
[00:34:29]  It's every government, socialist or capitalist.
[00:34:32]  Oh, people are angry.
[00:34:33]  Send the cops in to fuck them up.
[00:34:36]  So they do that.
[00:34:37]  Yeah, it's the people's stick in this case.
[00:34:39]  So in 1950, well, kind of, because this is also like, this is, it's not really the people's stick.
[00:34:44]  It's way too much to call this.
[00:34:46]  It is a country with a lot of socialist policies.
[00:34:48]  It's certainly not like a socialized socialist nation.
[00:34:52]  In 1958, there's another election.
[00:34:54]  And the party that wins is the party who had kind of been slightly in the minority before and had never been the party in power.
[00:35:01]  And they win election by promising and like take control over all of the government by promising to fix a bunch of shit that they'd been.
[00:35:09]  So they'd been the minority party for years and had thus gained power by saying, look at how much the people in power suck.
[00:35:14]  We'll do it differently.
[00:35:15]  Now they're in power and they have to like reform everything.
[00:35:18]  So they try to fix the welfare system, which was going broke, but nothing they do works.
[00:35:23]  And nothing they do stops the protests and the labor marches.
[00:35:26]  Now, all of this comes to pass in the late 50s as the first generation to truly benefit from Uruguay's massive educational reforms grows into adulthood.
[00:35:34]  Because remember, Bazet had made college free and like people after him too.
[00:35:38]  There had been like repeated, they built up a pretty good, a really good educational system in the country and widespread literacy and whatnot.
[00:35:47]  And in like the late 50s, the people who were like 18 to 30 or so are like the first generation who had really taken full advantage of this.
[00:35:55]  And Uruguay in this period has like one of the highest percentages of individual print publications per capita of anywhere in the world.
[00:36:05]  And they had like for an idea of like how big this educational boom was, between the 50s and the 70s, the number of students receiving college degrees in Uruguay increased by 117%.
[00:36:14]  So you've got the economy collapsing, inequality growing, protests in the streets, increasing government crackdowns, and the largest, most educated generation in the country's history comes of age, right?
[00:36:27]  Historically, what happens when all those things go down at the same time?
[00:36:32]  Awesome shit.
[00:36:33]  Awesome shit.
[00:36:34]  Yeah.
[00:36:36]  Oh, Margaret, you're going to like some of the graffiti we're about to talk about.
[00:36:40]  So by the late 1960s, you've got this situation where Uruguay is a decade into the, well, mid-1960s.
[00:36:47]  You've got the early to mid-1960s.
[00:36:48]  You've got a situation where Uruguay is a decade into economic contraction.
[00:36:52]  Globally, not just in Uruguay, but like the left all over the world in the early and mid-60s is engaged in an increasing series of protests and revolts.
[00:37:00]  Domestically, Uruguay has this huge population of educated people who've all spent a lot of time reading Marx and Mao and Guevara and Bakunin.
[00:37:08]  And they're watching this two-party system tilt rightwards and get more violent and militarize the police for it.
[00:37:14]  And everything keeps getting worse, right?
[00:37:17]  A situation no one else in the world can identify with.
[00:37:21]  And all of these trends kind of coalesced as they sometimes do into a single person, or at least they kind of washed through this person.
[00:37:28]  And because of unique things about him, it kind of colored the way that they flooded over the rest of the population.
[00:37:34]  And this guy's name was Raul Sindik.
[00:37:38]  He was an agricultural law student from Montevideo.
[00:37:41]  And in 1963, he decided to do something about the fact that all the sugarcane and beet cutters, like sugar cane, cutting sugarcane and sugar beet is like this horrible, really unpleasant job that is necessary to process a cash crop, right?
[00:37:55]  And these people are, despite, you know, how socialized Uruguay is supposed to be, they're not unionized.
[00:38:00]  They're barely getting by on poverty wages.
[00:38:03]  And they're attempting to unionize and protesting against unfair working conditions.
[00:38:07]  And Raul Sindic is kind of like a middle class, upper class like law student.
[00:38:12]  And with a bunch of other law students, he tries to help organize these workers.
[00:38:16]  And they gather a bunch of these people together into a march.
[00:38:18]  And they have a 350-mile protest march into Montevideo that ends in a huge fight with the cops.
[00:38:25]  And stuff like this is happening all over the place.
[00:38:28]  Raul is just like one of the organizers who's part of this massive labor protest surge at the time.
[00:38:35]  The fact that the government had used such violence to stop a union drive leads Raul to kind of reconsider.
[00:38:41]  Again, he'd been a law student.
[00:38:43]  He was planning to work within the system to change it.
[00:38:46]  And seeing the police beat the shit out of all these people makes him decide that the two-party system is hopeless.
[00:38:52]  He's like, well, they're both willing to beat us when we try to organize for better conditions.
[00:38:57]  So why would I try to work within that system?
[00:39:00]  Is kind of what Raul thinks.
[00:39:03]  I know, wild, right?
[00:39:04]  That you would come to a reasonable conclusion, basically.
[00:39:07]  Come to a very reasonable conclusion.
[00:39:10]  So he's not the only guy thinking this way.
[00:39:12]  He's kind of, I think, the most charismatic guy to think this way and the best, probably the best organizer of them.
[00:39:18]  And he starts getting together small numbers of like-minded men and women.
[00:39:22]  This is a very gender equality group that he starts to build, but they're all kind of agreed about the fact that they should affiliate together and find ways to execute their desire to overthrow the government, right?
[00:39:34]  That's the conversations these people are having.
[00:39:37]  And their numbers start to grow.
[00:39:38]  Protests overtook Uruguayan streets in the early 1960s.
[00:39:44]  And yeah, all of this state violence keeps bringing more and more people to Raul's way of thinking.
[00:39:50]  And they start to kind of formalize their attitudes towards like, we should be organizing to overthrow this system.
[00:39:55]  Now, one of the positives about Raul is that he fucking hated explosives.
[00:39:59]  He was like, did not like bombing things.
[00:40:03]  And the group, like, they would eventually use some explosives, but they kind of landed on firearms as the natural tool to seek to execute some of the things that they wanted to do in order to overthrow the government.
[00:40:14]  Guns would enable them to carry out a variety of actions and do it in a way that would target people rather than killing like random civilians as much.
[00:40:21]  Yeah.
[00:40:22]  It's slightly more discriminate forms of violence.
[00:40:26]  It always goes well.
[00:40:27]  It always goes well.
[00:40:29]  Yeah.
[00:40:30]  And he was also very committed to the idea that you don't target people, you target institutions, like banks, the police, and the impotent government that had been squandering their future.
[00:40:41]  So as they increasingly talk and increasing things get more and more formalized, they eventually decide to like form an organization, which they call the Tupamaros.
[00:40:51]  Now, this was actually an acknowledgement of the history of indigenous resistance in Latin America.
[00:40:56]  Tupac Amaru was the last living member of the Incan royal family, and he led an insurrection against Spanish rule and was murdered in 1571.
[00:41:04]  So they kind of, as they are starting to form what becomes this insurgent organization, they're kind of looking back to specifically to get, even though most of these people are like primarily Spanish and Italian descended Uruguayans, they're very much identifying with the history of indigenous resistance to colonialism.
[00:41:21]  Like that's it's not a it's not for nothing that they name their group that.
[00:41:27]  Which is real blurry.
[00:41:29]  Yeah, you know, it's like there's a lot that could be said about that that I don't quite know how to say.
[00:41:36]  And I'm certainly not nearly enough of an expert on like indigenous struggles in Uruguay to like try to make more of, I just think it's worth noting that's who that's what they're trying to signal.
[00:41:47]  Like that's important for understanding how they conceive of themselves.
[00:41:50]  Yeah.
[00:41:51]  The first Tupamaros were largely middle-class young white-collar workers and students.
[00:41:57]  Since more than half of the Uruguayan population lived in Montevideo, most successful insurgent groups and the groups that they're looking at, because they're directly looking at like Cuba and Che Guevara and stuff, and like a lot of the successful insurgent groups in Mao that they're they're they're um modeling themselves after are mountain fighters, right?
[00:42:16]  Like because it's the best place to be if you're an insurgent is the mountains, right?
[00:42:20]  That's Switzerland.
[00:42:21]  So it's why there's Kurds, right?
[00:42:23]  It's because mountains are a good place to fight in.
[00:42:27]  But Uruguay, the places where people live at least, there's not really mountains.
[00:42:31]  Everybody lives in the city.
[00:42:33]  Like more than half the population, like 60, 70%, live in Montevideo.
[00:42:36]  So these are urban guerrillas.
[00:42:38]  And in fact, in Latin America, if I'm not mistaken, they are the very first urban guerrilla organization.
[00:42:44]  And so they have to carry out and plan and organize themselves very differently as a result.
[00:42:50]  They carry out their first attack in 1963 against the Swiss Gun Club in Montevideo, which is like a rich person gun club in the capital.
[00:42:59]  Nobody gets harmed in this attack, but they steal dozens of guns, which they're always the first move.
[00:43:04]  Yeah, of course.
[00:43:04]  You've got to get guns.
[00:43:06]  You find the place with the guns and you rob it with the one gun you happen to have or a pointy stick.
[00:43:11]  I think in this case, they just kind of burgle it because like none of these people were expecting anyone to break in and steal their mousers.
[00:43:18]  So they get a shitload of guns from the Swiss gun club.

=== The Pan-Left Insurgency (15:31) ===

[00:43:21]  They get handed out to people, yada, yada.
[00:43:23]  And from the start, Raul and other early members of the group knew that it was going to be, there was going to be state repression at some point.
[00:43:30]  And so there's the way it's organized is there's a bunch of independent cells that are like five to, I think the biggest ones were like a couple of dozen people, but usually like five to 15 people.
[00:43:40]  And each cell is supposed to be have its own, find its own sources of funding, usually robbing stuff, find its own weapons and be able to completely replicate the entire organization from within itself and also be unaware of the other cells.
[00:43:54]  Although there is like a nine-person coordinating council that's responsible for organizing stuff.
[00:44:01]  So they, you know, they set this up in, and again, they're, they're very consciously patterning themselves off of other insurgent groups at the time.
[00:44:08]  They are not, while a lot of their inspirations are Marxist-Leninists, they're not really Marxist-Leninists.
[00:44:13]  A lot of their inspirations are anarchists.
[00:44:15]  They're not really anarchists.
[00:44:17]  They're very much not, while there's a lot of theory and ideology in their reading all of these guys.
[00:44:22]  It's very kind of like a pan-left insurgent movement.
[00:44:26]  Oh, interesting.
[00:44:27]  Yeah, which is interesting to me.
[00:44:29]  So from 1963 to 1968, their attacks gradually escalate.
[00:44:34]  Again, their first actions get them guns, which they then use to carry out what they call armed propaganda.
[00:44:40]  Now, this is a local idea in Uruguayan radicalism that is influenced by the old anarchist idea of propaganda of the deed, right?
[00:44:47]  In the late 1800s and early 1900s, anarchists are murdering presidents and kings in the hope of inspiring other people to do more of that so that eventually there's no presidents and kings.
[00:44:57]  I think that's like a fair broad strokes description of the idea.
[00:45:01]  The idea was like, these people don't know how to read texts.
[00:45:05]  Let's show them what we mean.
[00:45:07]  Which actually didn't start out as, didn't actually start out as assassinations.
[00:45:11]  It started out as like burning property records.
[00:45:15]  And what's interesting to me about the two Pomaro, as you said, the propaganda of the deed didn't start out as being based around murdering people.
[00:45:21]  Tupamaro, armed propaganda, is never focused primarily around killing people.
[00:45:27]  That's aspects of it later on.
[00:45:30]  But from the beginning, they have a very different attitude for what armed propaganda should be.
[00:45:34]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up by a War is Boring article about their first action, one of their first actions.
[00:45:39]  Quote, one of the group's first actions involved hijacking a truck filled with chickens and turkeys that was headed to a Christmas banquet.
[00:45:46]  202 Pomaros holding revolvers and knives attacked the truck.
[00:45:49]  They called themselves Junior Jose Artigas Unit, a reference to Uruguayan independence fighter Jose Gervasio Artiguis.
[00:45:56]  The two Pomaros left a note that read, Revolutionaries share in the Christmas of the poor and call upon them to form committees in each district to fight against rising prices.
[00:46:04]  They handed out the turkeys and chickens in poor neighborhoods of the capital.
[00:46:08]  Yeah, so like that's the armed propaganda.
[00:46:10]  Like we are going to use our guns to rob a banquet for rich people and redistribute the food to the poor, which is great.
[00:46:17]  That's awesome.
[00:46:18]  Like hard to have an issue with that, right?
[00:46:21]  Yeah.
[00:46:22]  Yeah.
[00:46:23]  So over the next couple of years, the two Pomaros engage in ever grander acts of armed propaganda.
[00:46:28]  They would rob banks and take piles of cash and redistribute it immediately to the poor.
[00:46:32]  They would also rob banks to like fund their operations, but a lot of the time they're taking cash and then immediately handing it out to poor people.
[00:46:38]  And it's like they're robbing specifically off an investment banks and saying like, these people have been robbing you, so let's rob them and give it back to you.
[00:46:46]  At one point, they heisted a popular casino for foreigners in the resort town of Puente del Este, and they realized after they get away with the bag that they'd also stolen the employee pool of tips, which they return because they're like, we're not here to fuck with working people.
[00:47:00]  Like your tips are yours.
[00:47:02]  Like we're not taking your fucking tips.
[00:47:03]  Don't worry, guys.
[00:47:05]  That's how to be classy.
[00:47:06]  That is classy as hell, where they're like, well, we wanted to steal from this casino, but we didn't like, we understand you guys working there.
[00:47:13]  You're like, you didn't do nothing wrong.
[00:47:14]  Here's your tip money back.
[00:47:17]  And the fundamentally pro-social ends of most tupamaro crimes endear them to people, right?
[00:47:23]  Like, they're extremely popular, obviously.
[00:47:26]  Their antics make them famous the world over.
[00:47:29]  One time they robbed a fancy nightclub and spray, so like they go into this rich person nightclub in a nice part of Montevideo and like rob it at gunpoint, and then they spray paint on the wall.
[00:47:38]  Everybody dances or nobody dances.
[00:47:41]  Yeah, which I fucking love.
[00:47:48]  Yeah, that's just incredibly, incredibly cool.
[00:47:51]  Time magazine declares them the Robin Hood gorillas.
[00:47:55]  And their motto evinced, they also had a motto that kind of, I was saying they're very pan-leftist and open-minded towards questions of tendency and political theory.
[00:48:03]  And their motto is: words divide us, action unites us.
[00:48:08]  Okay.
[00:48:10]  Liking these guys so far.
[00:48:12]  Yeah, yeah, they're pretty dope.
[00:48:15]  So one of these gorillas is a young Jose Mujica, you know, the future president of Uruguay.
[00:48:23]  Pepe, as he's most commonly known, was born on May 20th, 1935, to a poor farming family outside of Montevideo.
[00:48:30]  He was the firstborn of several brothers.
[00:48:32]  His family was Basque on one side and Italian on the other.
[00:48:35]  His dad was the foreman for a small farm, which went belly up when Jose was five.
[00:48:39]  When he was in third grade, at I think age eight, his dad dies, which throws the family into total poverty.
[00:48:45]  It forces young Pepe to take to the streets selling flowers and working as a bakery to support his siblings and his mom.
[00:48:51]  He was from an early age a generous person.
[00:48:54]  Walter Pernas, Mujica's biographer, notes that as a child, Jose offered all of his toys to other kids in the neighborhood because he wanted to share everything that he had.
[00:49:04]  He was born about six years after the death of Bazet, that president who had made all those lovely policies.
[00:49:11]  And even though he grew up during what is generally seen as Uruguay's golden years, his family is dirt poor and he is mired in poverty.
[00:49:17]  So he never doesn't have like a rosy lens towards the past.
[00:49:21]  He's very progressive in part because he comes up during Uruguay's golden age and like, yeah, life's fucking hard for poor people.
[00:49:28]  Yeah.
[00:49:29]  One of the most influential moments in his young life is there's a butchery near his house and the union for it is an anarcho-syndicalist union.
[00:49:38]  And the workers there go on strike and during a negotiation, they get angry at their employer.
[00:49:43]  So they hold up his trucks at gunpoint and redistribute all the meat in them to the poor.
[00:49:48]  So this is like one of the defining moments of Jose's childhood is being like, oh, that's pretty.
[00:49:54]  You see why this guy becomes a tupa maro because he's like, oh, yeah, that fucking rules.
[00:49:58]  Yeah.
[00:49:59]  That's how I ate one day.
[00:50:00]  Yeah, that's how I ate one day.
[00:50:03]  I know what makes people appreciate an organization is when they help you eat.
[00:50:07]  Yeah.
[00:50:09]  Yeah, it's pretty, pretty rad.
[00:50:11]  The action stirred something in him.
[00:50:12]  And given the similarities between this and a lot of tupamaro actions, again, it's easy to see why he winds up where he is.
[00:50:17]  He's also political in kind of the legal sense from an early age.
[00:50:21]  His uncle is a nationalist and part of the National Party, and he becomes a general secretary for the youth of that party.
[00:50:28]  There's a passage from The Guardian that gives good insight into how his initial foray into legitimate politics led to his radicalization.
[00:50:35]  Quote: As a young man, Mujica went to work for Enrique Aero, a popular left-wing politician, but had a political epiphany when he met Shea Guevara in post-revolutionary Cuba.
[00:50:45]  As much of Latin America fell victim to crises and decline, it was an Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, who pinned a new Bible for the continent's left wing, The Open Veins of Latin America.
[00:50:55]  The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret, Galeano wrote in 1971.
[00:51:00]  Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clinched teeth.
[00:51:09]  Which is a good way to phrase the devastation that poverty wreaks in a population.
[00:51:14]  Like, the West is nuking us every year, you know, as a result of, and our leaders are nuking us every year as a result of like starvation.
[00:51:24]  By 1964, after a year of escalating Robin Hood raids by the Tupamaros and several years of escalating police violence, Jose II decided that his country's political system had left him with no peaceful options.
[00:51:35]  So he tries to get into legitimate politics, but he's very influenced by Che Guevara in particular.
[00:51:41]  And in 1964, he decides, like, fuck it.
[00:51:44]  I'm going to join the guerrilla.
[00:51:45]  And he joins the guerrilla.
[00:51:47]  He receives training, and he's soon living a split life.
[00:51:50]  By day, he's a humble farmer, and by night, he's a revolutionary, robbing banks and shit.
[00:51:55]  He joined at a period when the Tupamaros were rapidly expanding and growing more comfortable with increasingly extreme acts of armed propaganda.
[00:52:03]  In 1965, the Tupamaros bombed a local Bayer factory.
[00:52:08]  And their justification for this, so they blow up this factory because Bayer internationally is making gases used by the U.S. military in Vietnam.
[00:52:16]  So it's very much an attack.
[00:52:18]  And I think it's their first attack where it's not like we're doing this to protest local things.
[00:52:22]  We're doing this to assert ourselves as part of the international struggle.
[00:52:27]  Yeah.
[00:52:28]  And yeah, pretty interesting.
[00:52:31]  And things escalate from there.
[00:52:33]  I want to quote now from a graduate thesis by Thomas Moore of Texas Tech University.
[00:52:37]  Quote, The Tupamaros suffered their first fatality in December 1966.
[00:52:42]  Two weeks after a robbery at an armory, police located a vehicle that was suspected to have been involved.
[00:52:48]  While in pursuit, a fierce gun battle erupted between the police and the occupants of the vehicle.
[00:52:52]  During the battle, the vehicle ran into a tree and the occupants fled on foot.
[00:52:56]  One of the occupants, later identified as Carlos Flores Alvarez, remained behind and covered his comrades' retreat with machine gun fire.
[00:53:03]  The police returned fire and Flores Alvarez was killed.
[00:53:06]  Inside the vehicle were two more machine guns and two pistols.
[00:53:09]  Less than a week later, another shootout with police cost the lives of Mario Robiana Mendez, another Tupamaro.
[00:53:16]  So the first couple of years they've got going on, nobody gets killed.
[00:53:21]  Everything's pretty, I mean, like violent in that they're using weapons and stuff, but like they avoid things escalating to that level.
[00:53:30]  66 is when like, now we're getting into gun battles and the cops and people are with and people are dying.
[00:53:35]  And occasionally it's like people who are bystanders who are shot by either the tupomaros or the or the cops, not intentionally, but because they're firing machine guns at each other wildly in a city, you know?
[00:53:46]  Yeah.
[00:53:46]  Like car chases are not exactly safe for it.
[00:53:51]  And again, they avoid as much as possible direct gunfights with the police.
[00:53:56]  Like this is never something they seek out.
[00:53:58]  They are never like, oh, let's ambush a bunch of cops and kill them kind of group.
[00:54:02]  Like when they ambush police, it's generally to let's take their guns and like then rob this place and tie them up and stuff.
[00:54:10]  And this is largely just like, it's not smart to get into a bunch of gunfights with the cops because your guys get killed.
[00:54:16]  Yeah, it's usually, yeah, not the most strategic choice that one could make.
[00:54:21]  Yeah.
[00:54:21]  You guys and your ladies, because kind of like the PKK, but much earlier, the Tupamaros are like very gender equal.
[00:54:29]  And like one of the decisions they come to early in is like, there's no reason women shouldn't be fighting too.
[00:54:35]  So a lot of the people, some of the people who die are like women who are getting into machine gun fights with the cops in this group.
[00:54:42]  It's a very like egalitarian insurgent organization.
[00:54:45]  We can all get murdered by the police.
[00:54:47]  We can all get murdered by the state.
[00:54:49]  Everyone's able to do that.
[00:54:50]  Hooray.
[00:54:52]  Now, the Tupamaro organizational structure, the fact that there's all these independent cells, allows for a tremendous amount of group autonomy and experimentation.
[00:55:00]  I haven't found much about this, but one of the cells is led by a priest, and I'm really interested in how that went down.
[00:55:06]  Yeah.
[00:55:06]  Yeah.
[00:55:08]  I mean, you got the whole liberation theology thing going on.
[00:55:10]  And that's big in Uruguay.
[00:55:12]  Yeah.
[00:55:12]  Yeah.
[00:55:13]  In 1966, a Montevideo theater was putting on a production of a play that necessitated military uniforms and rifles for some of the actors.
[00:55:22]  Because it's good PR, the military's like, yeah, we'll loan you guys outfits and we'll give you some Mauser rifles.
[00:55:26]  And so they're just being like stored at this theater.
[00:55:28]  And so one day before the play, a group of pistol-armed tupa moros like busts in and steals all the guns in the uniforms.
[00:55:35]  Then they dress up as soldiers and they rob a bank, making off 301,000 pesos, which is fucking very funny.
[00:55:42]  Yeah.
[00:55:44]  I hope it was someone who worked at the theater, tipped him off.
[00:55:46]  I think it was.
[00:55:47]  Like, I believe it was an employee at the theater who was like a tupa moro or sympathetic who like tells them there's this stuff here.
[00:55:54]  Yeah.
[00:55:54]  It was probably like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:55:56]  Give us some Mausers.
[00:55:57]  You know, the show will be more authentic if you use real Mausers, yeah, and some big machine guns, real, a lot of ammunition for set dressing.
[00:56:08]  Yeah.
[00:56:08]  In 1967, the government struck back, rounding up several dozen tupa morrows and building what they thought was an accurate picture of the group's membership.
[00:56:17]  So this big bank raid, like inspired, like the government does a huge crackdown.
[00:56:23]  They actually catch and arrest a bunch of tupa morrows and they feel like, oh, we know everyone, we know everything now.
[00:56:30]  We've got like this whole organization dead to rights.
[00:56:32]  Let's roll them up.
[00:56:33]  And they arrest a bunch of people and think that they've destroyed the organization.
[00:56:38]  And so they announce in the press that they've dealt a mortal blow to the Tupa Morrows.
[00:56:42]  Now, this was a mistake for the state because they actually had not.
[00:56:48]  And the Tupa Maro proved that with the launch of their next major operation, the incredibly named Plan Satan.
[00:56:57]  Wow.
[00:56:59]  I hope it was the priest who came up with it.
[00:57:01]  Yeah, I hope it's the fucking priest.
[00:57:03]  Yeah.
[00:57:05]  So as their war had escalated, a number of guerrillas had suggested they start assassinating government officials in the street.
[00:57:12]  A decision was made.
[00:57:13]  Satan, well, that's not what Plan Satan is because they don't, they do eventually do that.
[00:57:18]  They don't start doing that because they're like, well, that might backfire.
[00:57:21]  Maybe like that operation it just starts to escalate towards.
[00:57:26]  It does because they decide instead of assassinating people, they're going to carry out a campaign of kidnapping prominent business leaders and politicians and then ransoming them back to fund the revolution.
[00:57:38]  And also this will show that the state is ineffective, right?
[00:57:42]  Like you can't even stop us from kidnapping government ministers.
[00:57:45]  Like clearly, you're not capable of running this country, right?
[00:57:48]  That's like the big idea behind this: we will show the people that the state is not capable of governing them by proving how impotent it is.
[00:57:58]  That's kind of their like the propaganda justification of this.
[00:58:02]  I mean, that could also backfire really easily.
[00:58:04]  It does.
[00:58:06]  Oh, we need the state because these people are running around kidnapping people.
[00:58:10]  Yeah, it doesn't quite.
[00:58:11]  I mean, we'll talk about, there's a lot of debate over the degree to which this backfires.
[00:58:17]  But our Pepe, our future Uruguayan president, is intimately involved in Plan Satan.
[00:58:22]  And I'm going to quote from The Guardian here.
[00:58:24]  I love that someone managed to get elected after being part of Plan Satan.
[00:58:27]  Yeah.
[00:58:28]  Yeah.
[00:58:28]  A guy who was part of Plan Satan gets elected president.
[00:58:34]  It's pretty dope.
[00:58:36]  It's extremely dope.
[00:58:37]  Yeah.
[00:58:40]  So from The Guardian, quote, on a spring day in 1969, Manus was at home with his sister, Beatrice, when the future president burst out of the lift outside of their penthouse in Montevideo with a pistol in his hand.

=== Escalating to Assassination (02:39) ===

[00:58:52]  Turn around, shut your mouth, and keep your hands above your head, he barked.
[00:58:56]  Manis immediately recognized the pinched eyes and thick, wavy brown hair of one of the most notorious members of the daring, violent Tupamaro guerrillas.
[00:59:03]  After his initial sits of panic subsided, he recalled, he felt strangely calm.
[00:59:07]  I remember telling the young gunman who was with him not to worry, that I wasn't going to do anything.
[00:59:12]  The 62-year-old travel agent told me when we met in his favorite Montevideo bookshop, a short distance from the murky waters of the immense river Plate.
[00:59:19]  His sister, who suffered from polio and used a wheelchair, was taken off to another room.
[00:59:24]  Don't worry, Muzika told her.
[00:59:27]  You'll be fine.
[00:59:27]  This has nothing to do with you.
[00:59:30]  And yeah, Manis's stepfather, Jose Pedro Purpura, was a notorious judge with ties to Uruguay's far right and a stock of pistols.
[00:59:38]  After the gang had left, taking documents and weapons, Maniz told his relatives that he was only upset that the Tupamaros had stolen a typewriter he used for his schoolwork.
[00:59:46]  The following day, the phone rang.
[00:59:48]  It is us, the same people from yesterday, a voice said.
[00:59:51]  He suddenly felt scared again.
[00:59:53]  Somehow they knew about the typewriter.
[00:59:54]  If he wanted it back, the voice told him, he could find it in the lobby of a nearby building.
[00:59:59]  Sure enough, it was there, he said.
[01:00:00]  They had left a typed message in it for my stepfather.
[01:00:04]  Careful, doctor, it read.
[01:00:05]  We are watching you.
[01:00:09]  Yeah.
[01:00:12]  Like, hey, kids, we know this isn't your fault, but we got to take your stepdad's guns.
[01:00:17]  Oh, we stole your typewriter.
[01:00:18]  We'll give it to you back, but we're also going to send a threat for your stepdad.
[01:00:25]  It's pretty, it's pretty neat, pretty fun.
[01:00:29]  Yeah, I'm glad they kept it classy longer.
[01:00:31]  It's very classy.
[01:00:32]  Because most groups start a little classy and then get real bad real quick.
[01:00:39]  We can debate.
[01:00:39]  I don't think they ever get real bad.
[01:00:41]  They do get much more violent, and they do get comfortable assassinating people.
[01:00:44]  And you can feel about that the way that you want.
[01:00:46]  They are never like the IRA where they're setting off bombs in bars filled with just random people.
[01:00:51]  They do not do that kind of shit.
[01:00:54]  There are civilians who get killed as a result of their actions, never intentionally more.
[01:00:59]  It's like, yeah, it's not that we're not going to set off a bomb and it kills people and we're fine with that.
[01:01:05]  But we are going to get into gunfights with the cops sometimes and people will die as a result of that.
[01:01:10]  Right, but they don't plan the people's death.
[01:01:12]  They do not want to make an ethical.
[01:01:16]  There's an ethical line somewhere, and I don't know where to draw that kind of line.
[01:01:22]  My ethical line, I guess, is they do not, as far as I've read, they do not target groups of civilians for murder in order to create fear.
[01:01:29]  Yeah.
[01:01:30]  That's not a thing that they do.

=== Gunfights with the Police (15:26) ===

[01:01:32]  Which is good.
[01:01:32]  People should be able to do it.
[01:01:33]  Which is good.
[01:01:34]  I think that's a bad thing to do.
[01:01:36]  I think it is worth stopping people who do that.
[01:01:38]  Yeah, for all of my enjoyment of IRA music, I think bombing random bars is bad behavior.
[01:01:45]  No, sir.
[01:01:46]  Some other people have done similar.
[01:01:47]  Anyway.
[01:01:48]  A lot of people have done similar things.
[01:01:50]  Yeah.
[01:01:51]  And it's never a good thing.
[01:01:53]  I don't like, you know, I call them terrorists because they are, but there's a spectrum of things that you can do as terrorists.
[01:02:03]  Yeah.
[01:02:03]  And they are not like, let's set off a suicide bomb in the middle of a packed market.
[01:02:08]  That's not these dudes and ladies.
[01:02:10]  Oh, yeah.
[01:02:11]  You know who does set off bombs and white white?
[01:02:14]  Robert.
[01:02:15]  No.
[01:02:15]  No.
[01:02:16]  Okay.
[01:02:17]  Savings bombs.
[01:02:18]  Yeah, savings bombs.
[01:02:20]  Bombs of financial with the line.
[01:02:24]  Responsibility.
[01:02:25]  Those kind of bombs.
[01:02:27]  The best kind of bombs.
[01:02:29]  Are products.
[01:02:32]  No, you got outpunned on that one, my friend.
[01:02:35]  Yeah, no, that was much better.
[01:02:40]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[01:02:51]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[01:02:57]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[01:03:07]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[01:03:11]  That's great.
[01:03:12]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[01:03:21]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[01:03:27]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:03:39]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[01:03:42]  I was, hi, dad.
[01:03:43]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[01:03:51]  This is badass convict.
[01:03:53]  Right.
[01:03:54]  Just finished five years.
[01:03:56]  I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
[01:04:00]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[01:04:08]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[01:04:16]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[01:04:24]  I'm an alcoholic.
[01:04:26]  And without this project.
[01:04:31]  Open your free iHeartRadio app.
[01:04:32]  Search the Ceno Show.
[01:04:34]  And listen now.
[01:04:39]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[01:04:44]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[01:04:52]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[01:05:01]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[01:05:06]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[01:05:09]  They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[01:05:14]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[01:05:17]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[01:05:21]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[01:05:24]  They cannot feed their kids.
[01:05:25]  They do not have homes.
[01:05:26]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[01:05:29]  Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:05:38]  When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
[01:05:47]  Here at the Nick Dick and Paul Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[01:05:51]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
[01:05:56]  Who do you think he is?
[01:05:57]  I don't know.
[01:05:59]  You meet the like the president?
[01:06:01]  You think it was the president?
[01:06:02]  You think Canada has a president?
[01:06:03]  You think China has a president?
[01:06:04]  Leslov Cruzette.
[01:06:08]  God, I love that thing.
[01:06:09]  I use it all the time.
[01:06:10]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
[01:06:14]  It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
[01:06:18]  Yep.
[01:06:18]  It was a good one.
[01:06:19]  I like that saying.
[01:06:20]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[01:06:22]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[01:06:23]  Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
[01:06:26]  Yes.
[01:06:27]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[01:06:30]  I actually, I thought it was.
[01:06:31]  I got that wrong.
[01:06:32]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:06:42]  All right, we're back.
[01:06:43]  And I'm going to continue to try to pronounce Jose Mujica's name right.
[01:06:46]  I keep needing to listen to the pronunciation because it might, I keep drifting as I read it.
[01:06:52]  But Jose Mujica was part of some of the more creative acts of armed propaganda that the Tupa Maros breached out into.
[01:06:59]  And I'm going to quote from that same article, The Guardian article.
[01:07:02]  Quote: In the summer of 1969, a police officer knocked on the door of a small Montevideo investment bank, which was partially owned by a government minister.
[01:07:09]  The employees let him in, only to discover he was a tupa maro.
[01:07:12]  Several other guerrillas followed.
[01:07:14]  They took the equivalent of $100,000 in today's money, but also demanded the bank's account ledgers.
[01:07:19]  One of the employees, Lucia Topolansky, had tipped off the Tupa Maros that the bank was doing illegal currency deals.
[01:07:26]  Her twin sister, Maria Elia, was one of the guerrillas who conducted the raid.
[01:07:30]  The Tupa Maros dropped off the ledgers at the home of a public prosecutor, and some of those involved in the illegal trading were subsequently jailed.
[01:07:37]  That's fucking awesome.
[01:07:40]  We're going to rob this bank to get evidence of corruption in government, and then we will hand that over to a prosecutor.
[01:07:47]  Right?
[01:07:47]  And again, you see, like, this is there, they are such a creative and flexible group that they're like, we are trying to overthrow the state.
[01:07:54]  We're also not against recognizing, oh, this prosecutor's an honest man.
[01:07:58]  We'll give him information that will reduce corruption and stuff, because that's also good.
[01:08:03]  Like, they're very pragmatic and willing to embrace a real diversity of tactics.
[01:08:10]  Like, they're doing a lot of different shit.
[01:08:12]  And also, very, like, I think that shows the sort of non-ideological nature because I have a hard time coming up with someone with almost any isms, including like my own.
[01:08:21]  Who would do that?
[01:08:22]  Yeah.
[01:08:22]  Do that.
[01:08:23]  Yeah.
[01:08:23]  Yeah.
[01:08:23]  But they're very much, yeah, they're very, they're very good at pivoting.
[01:08:28]  And this is the thing throughout their up to the modern point.
[01:08:30]  They're really good at just like kind of flowing, which I think is why they have the impact that they do.
[01:08:36]  That said, 1969 was what you might call the last good year for the Tupa Maros, because after this point, things get a lot less fun and creative and a lot more violent and fucked up and scary, which is inevitable when you are trying to overthrow a government using force, right?
[01:08:51]  Like that is every single one of these stories.
[01:08:55]  Things come to a head first near the end of 1969 when the Tupa Maros execute a raid on a town called Pondo, which is like a part, I think it's like, it's kind of a neighborhood of, it's called a town.
[01:09:05]  It's kind of like, I think it's more of a town at this point.
[01:09:07]  It's now, I often hear it referred to as just like a part of Montevideo, but it's like a, it's, it's high income, right?
[01:09:13]  It's, it's an area in this urban sprawl where people with a lot more money live.
[01:09:18]  And on October 8th, the Tupa Maros carry out their largest action ever.
[01:09:21]  More than 100 guerrillas assemble inside Pondo.
[01:09:26]  And in order to all get together and into position without being noticed, a lot of them dress in costume as members of a funeral entourage in order to elude suspicion.
[01:09:33]  Once the signal was, or once they're in Pondo, groups of five to ten guerrillas assemble outside a series of targets.
[01:09:40]  And at one o'clock, a signal is given.
[01:09:42]  Commandos put on white armbands to identify themselves in the event of a gunfight.
[01:09:46]  And they carry out simultaneous attacks on the police commissary, the police station, the fire department, and two local banks.
[01:09:52]  And again, their goal is never to get into gunfights.
[01:09:56]  So these are not, they're not just like coming and shooting to murder people.
[01:09:58]  There's almost no resistance.
[01:10:00]  And so nobody gets killed initially.
[01:10:01]  Like they're just taking guns, tying up people, you know, like they're there to raid and rob and take shit.
[01:10:07]  They're not attempting to murder everybody.
[01:10:10]  And another group, one of the groups, raids the bank armed with machine guns and pistols.
[01:10:14]  And while two Tupa Maros remove money from the bank, a third hands out leaflets to civilians at the bank explaining why they're taking the money and what they're going to do with it.
[01:10:24]  Which is, again, awesome.
[01:10:26]  So everything works out.
[01:10:27]  The initial stage of this raid goes great.
[01:10:29]  They steal millions of pesos, but as they're exfiltrating, they've got like a caravan of vehicles leaving.
[01:10:35]  The police catch up, basically.
[01:10:37]  And there's a series of gunfights.
[01:10:38]  There's a car chase and a roadblock.
[01:10:40]  And like the founder of the Raul gets away with the money, but like a group of Tupamaros get their vehicle stopped and like have a big gunfight with the cops.
[01:10:50]  Three Tupamaros get killed and 20 get captured.
[01:10:54]  So it's a very like Pyrrh victory, right?
[01:11:00]  Yeah.
[01:11:00]  Yeah.
[01:11:01]  And things get a lot uglier for the Tupamaros after this point.
[01:11:05]  For their part.
[01:11:06]  Okay, but if they're panning out the flyer, I mean, someone designed it.
[01:11:09]  And so somewhere there's someone who went to school for graphic design who's like, this is my contribution.
[01:11:14]  I'm going to make the flyers.
[01:11:16]  I mean, that person.
[01:11:18]  I hope that person made it through the entire thing totally unscathed.
[01:11:23]  Her grandkids are like, you wouldn't believe what grandma used to do.
[01:11:26]  Yeah.
[01:11:27]  She was in that gunfight with the cops.
[01:11:29]  Yeah.
[01:11:30]  She made the flyers.
[01:11:31]  Yeah.
[01:11:32]  So everything gets uglier, though, after this point.
[01:11:35]  Now, for their part, in terms of things getting uglier, the tupamaro start carrying out target assassinations of some government officials and police officials at this point.
[01:11:45]  And for its part, the government cracks down by going ultra-authoritarian.
[01:11:48]  And I think the tupamaros would argue we started assassinating people when the government started torturing our people, right?
[01:11:55]  I think the police would say that like the tupamaros were so violent that like we had to use these these radical measures.
[01:12:01]  I think the torture comes first.
[01:12:04]  From what I can read, tupomaros are being tortured by the time they start carrying out assassinations.
[01:12:10]  And the government also cracks down by restricting freedom of speech.
[01:12:14]  So the news media is forbidden to refer to the tupamaros by name.
[01:12:18]  And in order to get around this, the tupamaros set up a radio transmitter in Montevideo to hijack government-run radio channels and broadcast propaganda about their actions.
[01:12:29]  How popular are they during all this?
[01:12:31]  Quite.
[01:12:32]  We'll talk about that in a bit.
[01:12:33]  But that's part of why they get away with it is most of the people seem to be pretty supportive of this.
[01:12:38]  They're extremely popular.
[01:12:41]  In July 1970, the Tupamaros made what would prove to be one of their worst strategic decisions.
[01:12:46]  They kidnapped Dan Mitrion, an American citizen, which is always a dicey thing to do, especially for a leftist movement in 1970s Latin America.
[01:12:58]  Yeah.
[01:12:58]  Now, one source I found described Dan Mitrion as, quote, an American policeman on loan to the Uruguayan security forces.
[01:13:06]  I've also heard him described as an FBI agent working with him.
[01:13:09]  When you hear an American policeman on loan to the Uruguayan security forces, what do you assume was his actual employer?
[01:13:16]  The CIA.
[01:13:17]  Yeah!
[01:13:18]  It's the CIA.
[01:13:20]  And Dan Mitrion's job is to teach people how to do torture.
[01:13:24]  He had previously consulted for the Brazilian government, and his specialties were electrocution and slow strangulation.
[01:13:31]  I feel really good about them having chosen.
[01:13:33]  I'm embarrassed.
[01:13:34]  I like how it wasn't a strategic plan.
[01:13:36]  It's not a good strategic move.
[01:13:37]  Morally, if your job is to travel to different countries and teach them how to strangle people, I don't think you getting kidnapped is bad.
[01:13:45]  No, that is my moral line.
[01:13:48]  Yeah.
[01:13:50]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up by War is Boring here.
[01:13:54]  While torture was part of the government's unofficial policy privilege to Mitrion's arrival, he is often credited with making it widespread among the Uruguayan police force and extolling the value of applying, quote, and this is Dan, the precise pain and the precise place and the precise amount for the desired effect.
[01:14:09]  He was known in particular for his expertise in applying as much electrical shock as possible to the genitals without causing death and for pioneering the use of thin wire that could be placed between the teeth to intensify pain during electrocution.
[01:14:22]  So a cool dude, Dan.
[01:14:23]  Yeah.
[01:14:24]  Definitely not just the fodder of like every trashy spy movie ever.
[01:14:29]  Yeah.
[01:14:29]  You know that this guy has like black gloves that are very tight and some weird sexual hangups, probably a serial killer back in the U.S.
[01:14:38]  Yeah, and like very particular about where everything in the apartment goes.
[01:14:44]  So the Tupamaros responded to the escalation of violence in kind and specifically targeted Mitrion.
[01:14:50]  They kidnapped the CIA agent in July of 1970.
[01:14:53]  The Tupamaros rarely killed anyone and did not have a reputation for killing those they kidnapped.
[01:14:57]  Instead, they would exchange them for cash ransoms or release of imprisoned tupamaros.
[01:15:03]  However, with the government assault on them proving more effective, several leaders of the movement were killed or arrested while Mitrion was being held in the Tupamaros underground people's prison.
[01:15:12]  When the deadline for Mitrion's ransom came and went, the new Tupamaro leadership was uncertain of how to respond.
[01:15:18]  They executed him.
[01:15:20]  And I should note, there are allegations at least.
[01:15:22]  I don't know how credit, I haven't found a lot of detail on this.
[01:15:24]  There are allegations that the people's prison tortures folks as well.
[01:15:29]  Probably.
[01:15:29]  I don't probably.
[01:15:30]  I don't know.
[01:15:31]  Again, there are also allegations from, in a lot of cases, guys doing torture.
[01:15:35]  So I don't know, but probably, right, they're probably doing some of that themselves.
[01:15:42]  Which, you know, nobody's a good guy when it comes time to be a war.
[01:15:48]  There's a better guy, and I think the people who are not being helped by the traveling torture, electrocute your testicles, dude, are probably the better people in this situation.
[01:15:58]  People who kidnap the strangler are often better than the strangler.
[01:16:02]  Yeah, I would say better than the strangler, even though as things get brutal, perhaps they do some strangling themselves, or at least like holding people in solitary confinement and shit.
[01:16:12]  Look, I'm sure the people's prison isn't nice either.
[01:16:15]  No.
[01:16:17]  So they execute Dan, which again, I don't have a moral problem with that.
[01:16:24]  If your job is to hook up electrodes to people's testicles and like her you torturing, like kill you.
[01:16:31]  I don't have a moral issue with that, but it's not a great idea.
[01:16:35]  I don't think it's a good idea for them for a couple of reasons.
[01:16:37]  Like it doesn't work.
[01:16:38]  It didn't go well, I guess.
[01:16:40]  It doesn't go well.
[01:16:41]  A lot of the sources you'll find, especially like the Guardian, kind of more liberal sources, will say that this is what leads to a loss of public support.
[01:16:47]  And they often are kind of sources that leave out the fact that Dan tortured people for the CIA, the ones that are like, this was like a bad move for them.
[01:16:54]  I don't know how badly this hurts them locally.

=== Resistance Fuels Dictatorship (13:58) ===

[01:16:59]  I don't know how much this is actually an unpopular move.
[01:17:01]  We get one hint in that in 1972, there's an Uruguayan Gallup poll.
[01:17:06]  And this is two years or so after they kill Dan.
[01:17:09]  And after two more years of, because the violence escalates after they kill Dan.
[01:17:13]  And this 1972 poll finds that there's still widespread support for the guerrillas, even though the majority of Uruguayans want non-violent resolution to their political ills.
[01:17:22]  So most Uruguayans do not support violent revolution, but they also broadly feel fondly towards the Tupamaros, right?
[01:17:30]  In a lot of cases, because the government is increasingly militarizing, they're like carrying out these huge dragnets that impact people's lives.
[01:17:38]  So like the Tupamaros rob a bank, and that doesn't really fuck with people living in the area, but then the police set up a huge dragnet and that fucks up things for everybody.
[01:17:46]  And so like they're angry at the cops more so than the Tupamaros.
[01:17:50]  I don't know that killing Dan hurt the Tupamaros with Uruguayans, but it's not good for another reason, which is that now a CIA agent has been killed.
[01:18:02]  And so the United States is like, well, that's all the justification we needed to get way more involved in this shit.
[01:18:09]  So the U.S. accelerates their support of the increasingly right-wing Uruguayan government.
[01:18:14]  The CIA funnels money and equipment in, and they funnel all of their money and equipment and manpower through one of their favorite vehicles, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S.AID.
[01:18:25]  Like, that is how all of their, like, here's how to torture people guys get like ledgered out as like, this is part of an aid package.
[01:18:32]  You know?
[01:18:34]  I want to quote from a paper called Tracking the Tupamaros by Lucas Hall of Union College.
[01:18:39]  Quote: The United States began to offer its assistance in the form of military aid to the Uruguayan government throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s throughout the civic military dictatorship.
[01:18:49]  Although the United States initially provided military aid in order to squash the Tupamaros, eventually it provided aid in order to suppress the left in general.
[01:18:56]  For example, the Uruguayan government first declared a state of siege, government limitation on personal freedom, in 1963 following a worker strike at an electric company in Montevideo and thereafter in 1965, 67, 68, and 69 in response to various protests organized by laborers or insurgent activities perpetrated by the Tupamaros.
[01:19:16]  Such governmental decrees intensified conflicts among laborers, guerrilla movements like the Tupamaros, and the increasingly authoritarian government.
[01:19:23]  Moreover, following the 1966 elections, Uruguay reabandoned the National Council and reinstituted the presidential system, which reinforced executive power.
[01:19:32]  Following the death of the newly elected Colorado president and military general Oscar Diego Gestido Pose a year later, Gestido's vice president, George Pacheco Areco, assumed the presidency and used his executive power to pursue and defeat the Tupamaros.
[01:19:47]  In 1971, he decreed that the armed forces would intervene in the battle against the military movement, against the guerrilla movements.
[01:19:55]  So that's kind of like the political, and this is one of the points a lot of people will say that the Tupamaros brought on the dictatorship that is coming because of their resistance.
[01:20:05]  And as kind of that passage points out, they were a part of the process by which the state became increasingly dictatorial.
[01:20:12]  But a lot of the state's dictatorial decrees are in response to just workers' protests that are not organized by the Tupamaros because other stuff is happening in the left here.
[01:20:22]  And I think that like when primarily Western sources, but although not entirely, there are some Uruguayans who will blame them for it too.
[01:20:29]  But when I think primarily when like Western sources say, well, Uruguay got the dictatorship because of the Tupamaros, they're ignoring the fact that the dictatorship came in and was backed by the U.S. as part of a broad attempt to stop all left-wing organizing in the country, including all of these like workers' movements.
[01:20:48]  And the Tupamaros, because they were the guerrilla movement, are a really convenient group to blame because kind of liberals always like to blame the people who are accepting violence, even though like, well, they also instituted states of emergency because they were fucking protests.
[01:21:01]  Like, don't put this all on the Tupamaros.
[01:21:05]  Right.
[01:21:06]  Yeah.
[01:21:07]  It's a very, very classic means by which to try and get the left to eat itself.
[01:21:12]  Yes.
[01:21:13]  And it doesn't really work in Uruguay, which is interesting, but we're getting to that.
[01:21:17]  So Areco, the president who like brings the military in to fight the Tupamaros, isn't quite a dictator, although Uruguayans may quibble with that.
[01:21:26]  Like, I don't think he does, he's not quite as far as the next guy, is what I'll say.
[01:21:31]  How did the guy die in the rest of the world?
[01:21:34]  I don't know.
[01:21:34]  I think it was natural causes, though.
[01:21:35]  Oh, okay.
[01:21:36]  It was not off.
[01:21:38]  I don't think so.
[01:21:40]  Yeah, so Areco is a strangler.
[01:21:46]  He preps the path for dictatorship and he kind of ushers Uruguay into the dictatorship that's coming.
[01:21:52]  I've mentioned a few times that the Tupamaros escalated their violence in response to state violence.
[01:21:56]  And Hall credits this less with desperation than to, again, the fact that this is a very pragmatic group.
[01:22:01]  So the Tupa Maros are like, let's try not killing people.
[01:22:05]  And then when it escalates to a more violent, more gunfighty thing, they're like, well, let's become a straight-up insurgent group.
[01:22:11]  You know, like they're very willing to kind of like weave with things.
[01:22:15]  And so they pivot because they don't have a hard and fast ideology.
[01:22:18]  They're kind of happy to be mostly nonviolent or happy to be mostly violent, depending on like what the situation calls for.
[01:22:26]  And in the early 70s, when the military gets in, they're like, well, now it's time to kill more people.
[01:22:31]  And not a lot of people.
[01:22:32]  I think about 300 tupamaros get killed and they kill about 50 people.
[01:22:37]  So as insurgent movements go, again, these guys are not like, we're not bombing military convoys and stuff, you know?
[01:22:46]  That's if they wanted.
[01:22:47]  They could have had a more closer parody.
[01:22:51]  If they'd wanted to, yes.
[01:22:53]  But this doesn't work in any case.
[01:22:56]  Violence escalates and the government's much better at doing violence, right?
[01:22:59]  The Tupamaros, yeah, like...
[01:23:02]  If you're going, I think it is this situation where like, if you're going to do that, they will probably be better than you at it.
[01:23:09]  It's very rarely that a guerrilla movement takes on the entire apparatus of the state and wins.
[01:23:16]  It happens, and usually they have to do some very ugly shit in order to make that work and have some other things break their way and have a lot of foreign aid and all this stuff.
[01:23:26]  Anyway, whatever.
[01:23:27]  It does not work here.
[01:23:28]  President Pacheco grows increasingly dictatorial.
[01:23:30]  Everybody knows shit is bad.
[01:23:32]  And again, there's a lot of left-wing organizing outside of the Tupamaros, critical of the Tupamaros.
[01:23:37]  There's what a lot of scholars I read will call the legal left in Uruguay, who has this kind of mixed relationship where they appreciate them.
[01:23:45]  They may agree with overall goals, but not the means.
[01:23:48]  And kind of as Uruguay hits this point where like the military has been brought in.
[01:23:55]  We can all see that a dictatorship is coming.
[01:23:58]  The whole left kind of unifies behind this idea of like, well, let's try one last legal push to stop this.
[01:24:04]  Let's see if there is a way within the democratic system to avoid this before it becomes a straight-up dictatorship.
[01:24:14]  And so all these folks on the legal left form an organization called the Frente Amplio, which means broad front.
[01:24:20]  And it's a popular front coalition, right?
[01:24:22]  We've talked about this in the behind the insurrections episodes and like happens in Spain, happens in France, happens in a bunch of places.
[01:24:28]  So they build a popular front coalition of left parties and groups aimed at resisting the authoritarian creep under Pacheco Areco.
[01:24:35]  By 1971, dozens of tupomaros have been killed, hundreds tortured, and the guerrilla organization agrees to sit down with the frinte amplio, with the legal left, and work together in this effort to try and legally stop a dictatorship.
[01:24:50]  The tupomaros announce a sort of ceasefire for the 1971 elections.
[01:24:54]  Like, we're not going to do insurgent shit.
[01:24:58]  We're going to try to do electoral shit.
[01:25:01]  Again, they're good at pivoting, right?
[01:25:03]  And they form a political wing, the March 26th Movement or 26M, which declares support for the Frinte Amplio.
[01:25:10]  So the Tupamaros are like, hey, we're not going to do any attacks right now.
[01:25:15]  We formed a political organization and we have joined this broad front coalition of left-wing political parties.
[01:25:22]  This was a really difficult thing to pull off because again, Uruguay has a two-party system at least as fucked up as ours is currently.
[01:25:30]  It is hard.
[01:25:30]  And they're trying to make a third party, right?
[01:25:32]  Like they're not unified with kind of the vaguely liberal party.
[01:25:35]  They are trying to do their own thing.
[01:25:39]  And it's a significant attempt, right?
[01:25:42]  Like it is not an easy thing to pull off.
[01:25:45]  Quote from Lucas Hall's article.
[01:25:47]  The Tupamaros, beyond expressing their support for the party through the formation of the 26M, humbled themselves in order to further strengthen the Frente's electoral position.
[01:25:55]  Amid rumors of a military coup, for example, the Tupamaros participated with former members of the armed forces and other members of the security apparatus in Plan Contra Golpe, a movement intended to prevent the onset of authoritarian dictatorship.
[01:26:10]  However, despite such efforts, the Frente Amplio failed to gain the support needed to topple the traditional parties.
[01:26:17]  However credible its written program and general principles might have been for a large sector of the citizenry, the support of the Tupamaro party positioned the Frente Amplio as an extremist option.
[01:26:28]  As a result, it was especially difficult for the Frente to win the support of voters on the countryside, even that of voters outside Montevideo.
[01:26:35]  Nonetheless, the results of the elections were surprising.
[01:26:38]  First, although he received the most votes, the Constitution prevented President Pacheco from serving a second term, and the electoral effort to amend that law was disapproved.
[01:26:46]  As a result, Pacheco's handpicked suppressor, Juan Maria Bordaberi Arosina, won the presidency.
[01:26:53]  Second, although it only won 18% of the vote, the Frente Amplio won 30% of the vote in Montevideo.
[01:26:59]  In other words, nearly a fifth of the total population and a third of the population of Montevideo was disaffected with the current political system.
[01:27:06]  Although the other four-fifths of the population voted for the traditional parties, this figure represents the first time in Uruguay's electoral history that a non-traditional party garnered considerable support from a significant portion of the population, suggesting that, at least in the city, the Tupamaros armed propaganda campaign had been successful in influencing all sides of the left to challenge the established order.
[01:27:29]  And this is interesting to me because, again, a lot of the non-scholarly sources who are kind of like journalists summarizing the history will say that like they led to the failure of the left electorally.
[01:27:42]  And Lucas wasn't going to win anyway.
[01:27:44]  Yeah, left wasn't going to win anyway, but this actually some academics at least, I'm not trying to claim that what's in this Lucas Hall article, although he does cite a number of Uruguayan academics.
[01:27:52]  I'm not trying to say that this is the absolute consensus, but there is a substantial academic argument that actually the Tupamaros armed propaganda campaign is why for the first time ever, the left as a third party gains a really significant chunk of the vote.
[01:28:09]  That's an argument you can make.
[01:28:11]  That said, time had run out.
[01:28:14]  The 1971 election was sadly their last attempt to for their last chance to forestall a dictatorship.
[01:28:20]  The Frente Amplio did succeed in destroying the two-party system in Uruguay, but the election of 1971 destroyed democracy.
[01:28:28]  President Bordaberi seized total power after taking office, although he himself was more or less just a stand-in for the military.
[01:28:35]  This is not really like a fascist thing where like he's taking power.
[01:28:40]  He is the guy the military has being the face of the military dictatorship, right?
[01:28:45]  That's kind of how it works in Uruguay.
[01:28:46]  It's less like about the individual and more that like, and not that like he's not part of the decision-making apparatus, but he's like one of a bunch of guys making this military dictatorship be a thing.
[01:28:59]  From what I can tell, the military's attitude is like, well, we let you civilians try to get things under control.
[01:29:03]  It's time for like the military to fuck shit up for everybody because that'll be spoilers, it's not.
[01:29:09]  It's a real bad dictatorship.
[01:29:13]  A lot of kind of casual sources, again, like the, yeah, we'll blame the two Pomaros for the onset of dictatorship.
[01:29:19]  I'm not going to say they didn't have any, like, obviously they are a major part of Uruguayan politics as the country descends into a dictatorship.
[01:29:25]  Of course, they had a role in what happened, right?
[01:29:28]  I think saying that because of the two Pomaros, Uruguay gets a dictatorship.
[01:29:32]  Number one, it ignores that Uruguay falls to dictatorship alongside Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, like a bunch of other countries, all of whom the U.S. is doing the same shit they're doing to Uruguay and none of whom have two Pomaros themselves.
[01:29:48]  When you knock everyone off the fence, when you polarize society, you're like lining up for a fight and you're either going to win or lose.
[01:29:55]  It's not inherently like it's not necessarily the fault of the people who knock everyone off the fence, you know?
[01:30:01]  No, they are, again, part of this process.
[01:30:03]  It certainly would be unreasonable to say they had nothing to do with the dictatorship, right?
[01:30:07]  Like they're a huge factor in Uruguayan politics.
[01:30:10]  But also, the dictatorship comes into power in part because the government's trying to crack down on like unions and labor organizing and stuff.
[01:30:18]  That's not people pulling guns.
[01:30:21]  That's a big chunk of what happens.
[01:30:23]  And yeah, that is where we're going to end part one.
[01:30:25]  Because thankfully, Margaret, unlike a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of Latin American history, we're not talking about like, and then they get crushed and right-wing governments take power for the next 60 years and the U.S. trains their security forces over and over again.
[01:30:39]  And now they're burning down the like, whatever.
[01:30:42]  Like, this is not that story.
[01:30:43]  It does not have that ending.
[01:30:45]  But we'll get to that end.
[01:30:46]  It's a Christmas part two.
[01:30:47]  It is a Christmas miracle, Margaret.
[01:30:49]  That's what everybody says.
[01:30:52]  I'm going to go get my Uruguay tree tomorrow.

=== No Right-Wing Ending (02:51) ===

[01:30:57]  You got any pluggables to plug?
[01:31:00]  Yes, I do.
[01:31:01]  I have a new book out.
[01:31:02]  It was actually a book that's been out for a while, but it's been re-released with a new publisher.
[01:31:06]  It's called A Country of Ghosts.
[01:31:07]  And it's my attempt to answer the question of people always ask, well, we know what you anarchists are against.
[01:31:14]  What are you for?
[01:31:15]  And so I tried to write a book that's fiction because I don't read a lot of theory.
[01:31:21]  And yeah.
[01:31:23]  And that's, it just came out a couple weeks ago, I think.
[01:31:28]  That's my main pluggable.
[01:31:29]  I'm also on the internet.
[01:31:30]  It's good as hell and very relevant to the story we're telling here, although more mountains, less urban.
[01:31:39]  Yeah, no, it's the Switzerland comparison.
[01:31:42]  Yeah, it is kind of a Switzerland sort of deal, but yeah.
[01:31:46]  I reckon I tore through it in a long weekend day last weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it.
[01:31:55]  And it's also, I mean, kudos to AAK on this, one of the books that has like the little flaps on the inside of the cover so that you can march your page without folding the pages over, which I really appreciate.
[01:32:06]  I was really excited.
[01:32:07]  It's my first book with French flaps, and it's my first book with a painted fantasy cover on the cover.
[01:32:13]  Oh, you have such a good cover.
[01:32:15]  Yeah.
[01:32:15]  I'm so excited about it.
[01:32:17]  And then, so now I need to write a book with a dragon because I need to write a sequel to this book with a drag, but oh, that's actually okay, anyway.
[01:32:27]  All right.
[01:32:28]  Well, you can find me nowhere because I'm a gray ghost, baby.
[01:32:33]  That's the end of the episode, Sophie.
[01:32:35]  Okay.
[01:32:37]  Hello, world.
[01:32:38]  I'm Robert, and I'm doing a live stream with my good friend Prop.
[01:32:42]  If you want to listen to that, Sophie won't let me curse, so this ad isn't very entertaining, but it's going to be February 17th at 6 p.m. PST.
[01:32:50]  And you can find it at momenthouse.com/slash behind the bastards.
[01:32:55]  Allegedly.
[01:32:56]  Yeah, this is a good holiday gift or a or not a holiday gift or a allegedly.
[01:33:03]  But we'll be doing a behind the bastards and a little QA.
[01:33:08]  Allegedly.
[01:33:09]  Be there if you want to.
[01:33:10]  Where can people find that again, Robert?
[01:33:12]  Momenthouse.com slash behind the bastards.
[01:33:18]  Today's Financial Literacy Month.
[01:33:20]  We are talking about the one investment most people ignore: building a business around the life you actually want.
[01:33:25]  It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
[01:33:30]  On those amigos, entrepreneurs like Amira Kasam and Joe Hoff get real about money, taking risk, and while you're doing might be the smartest move.
[01:33:38]  At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
[01:33:40]  And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
[01:33:44]  Listen to those amigos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== Growing Older Without Losing Heart (01:59) ===

[01:33:49]  I actually drop better when I'm high.
[01:33:51]  It heightens my senses, calms me down.
[01:33:54]  If anything, I'm more careful.
[01:33:57]  Honestly, it just helps me focus.
[01:34:00]  That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself.
[01:34:04]  And now he's in prison.
[01:34:05]  You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.
[01:34:12]  So if you're high, just don't drive.
[01:34:15]  Brought to you by Nitza and the Ad Council.
[01:34:18]  Now, everybody over here, oh, it's one of my other favorite places.
[01:34:22]  The Twilight Gazebo.
[01:34:24]  Sunset Gardens.
[01:34:26]  Twilight Gazebo.
[01:34:28]  What's next?
[01:34:29]  Dead Man's Grove?
[01:34:31]  Mom, could you please try to be a little bit positive about this?
[01:34:36]  From Kenya Barris, the visionary creator of Blackish, comes Big Age, an Audible original about finding your way in life's next chapter.
[01:34:45]  This audio comedy series follows a retired couple's reluctant relocation to Sunset Gardens, a flirting senior community that is anything but relaxing.
[01:34:54]  Starring comedy legends Jennifer Lewis, Cedric the Entertainer, and Nici Nash Betz.
[01:34:59]  Through its blend of outrageous comedy, Key Party Anyone, and touching revelations, Big Age explores what it means to grow older without growing old at heart.
[01:35:08]  Go to audible.com slash big age series to start listening today.
[01:35:14]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[01:35:21]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[01:35:28]  The entire season two is now available at the bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[01:35:35]  I'm an alcoholic.
[01:35:36]  And without this probe, I'm a guide.
[01:35:39]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:35:44]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:35:47]  Guaranteed human.