President of Uruguay in the 1970s who abandoned democracy for military rule and presided over social division and ‘disappearances’
Juan María Bordaberry was the elected civilian President of Uruguay when, in 1973, he ushered in a period of harsh military rule by closing down Congress, banning political parties and ruling by decree, with the aid of a so-called national security council.
The generals soon tired of using him as a frontman, and in 1976 they dispensed with him altogether. Over the next nine years of de facto government hundreds of thousands of Uruguayans were forced to leave their country, which had once been known for its relaxed atmosphere, two-party politics and generous welfare state. Anybody suspected of left-wing sympathies was barred from employment in the public sector — Uruguay’s biggest employer — and there were also wholesale arrests and “disappearances”.
The background to this crackdown was a prolonged economic crisis and an increasingly violent urban guerrilla campaign led by a group of mainly middle-class activists calling themselves the Tupamaros — named after an indigenous rebel against Spanish imperial rule in 18th-century Peru.
Ironically, Uruguay had very few indigenous inhabitants of its own, and the Tupamaros had effectively been crushed by the security forces by the time that Bordaberry decided to do without the trappings of democratic government. Most of the Tupamaro leaders were either killed or spent years in prison, including the current President of Uruguay, José Mujica.
Bordaberry was eventually called to account for his actions, but it took a long time. In 2010 he was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment for his involvement in human rights abuses and for violating the Constitution. He was allowed to serve the sentence at home because of his advanced age, and he lasted little more than a year.
By keeping a low profile Bordaberry had managed to avoid retribution entirely until 2003, under the umbrella of an amnesty law passed by the civilian Government that finally replaced the military regime in 1985. Although the number of people killed or “disappeared” in the military repression was relatively small — probably fewer than 200 — and was dwarfed by the bloodletting in neighbouring Argentina at around the same time, the scars left on a society of fewer than four million people were deep. The politicians decided that the best way forward was to draw a line under past divisions and hope for reconciliation through the work of a peace commission.
It did not work. Demands for a settling of scores soon bubbled back to the surface again, led by relatives of victims of the military regime, and became irresistible after a left-wing coalition, known as the Broad Front, was elected in 2005. Bordaberry was eventually implicated in a number of killings that were deemed to fall outside the scope of the amnesty law. He was found guilty of complicity in the deaths of four opponents who had taken refuge in Argentina: two politicians, Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, and two Tupamaro leaders, Rosario Barredo and William Whitelaw. The politicians were seized from their homes in Buenos Aires in 1976, in what human rights campaigners said was part of Operation Condor, a secret pact between South America’s military dictatorships to eliminate political opponents of like-minded regimes who fell into their hands.
Juan María Bordaberry Arocena was born in Montevideo into a wealthy family of cattle ranchers in 1928. He joined the conservative National (also known as the Blanco or White) Party, and was elected to the Senate in 1962. He later switched to the rival Colorado (Red) Party, and was appointed Agriculture Minister in 1969, securing the party’s presidential nomination two years later. He was the handpicked successor of the outgoing President, Jorge Pacheco Areco, who in 1968 had prepared the way for future excesses on both sides by declaring a state of emergency, arresting opponents and dissolving protest demonstrations. Bordaberry’s room for manoeuvre was very limited from the outset, and by 1973 he realised that the only way he could survive politically was by putting himself at the head of the political crackdown that the generals were demanding. On June 27 he ordered the army to surround the Congress building with tanks and suspended the individual guarantees contained in the country’s liberal constitution — thereby giving the security forces carte blanche to hunt down alleged subversives.
Uruguay remains deeply divided over the legacy of the era inaugurated by Bordaberry’s “self-coup”. Earlier this year a vote in Congress to overturn the amnesty for military personnel failed by a single vote.
Juan María Bordaberry Arocena, President of Uruguay 1971-76, was born on June 17, 1928. He died on July 17, 2011, aged 83
Arms supplier of extraordinary cunning who delivered war planes to Israel just in time for the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948
Al Schwimmer smuggled planes to arm the air force in Isreal during the earliest days of the nation’s existence and later founded the country’s largest industrial complex to ensure that it would never be left short of air power in future conflicts. He also engaged in numerous acts of clandestine diplomacy on behalf of Israel.
Born to a Jewish family in 1917 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Adolph “Al” Schwimmer showed an early passion for aircraft. He became a flight engineer on cross-American services during the 1930s and joined US Air Transport during the Second World War.
Meeting concentration camp survivors ignited his dormant Jewish identity and converted him to Zionism. In late 1947 Teddy Kollek, head of illegal immigration operations for Haganah, the Jewish defence organisation that was to form the core of the country’s security forces, asked Schwimmer for help in providing munitions.
The United States owned the world’s largest war surplus arsenal yet banned all military sales to the Middle East, so Schwimmer set up a bogus company in Hollywood to bolster his claim that he needed planes for a war film. Through this ruse he bought three Constellations and 15 C46 transport planes. The FBI impounded the Constellations and Schwimmer stayed at different locations to evade capture while the C46s flew on to Palestine, taking circuitous routes to reach their destination.
Together with fellow Jewish volunteers and wartime contacts, Schwimmer created Service Airways, a charter company operating from Panama. Service “leased” planes to Lapsa, another Schwimmer creation, which in time became Panama’s national airline.
Next he tried to buy 25 surplus Mustang fighters in Mexico, but the Haganah preferred Operation Balak, a plan to airlift munitions from Czechoslovakia. Schwimmer went to Zatec airfield, outside Prague, where he disassembled and loaded armed Czech Avia 199 fighter aircraft on to his carriers. These then flew via Corsica to an Israel that five Arab national armies attacked hours after it declared independence on May 14, 1948.
Schwimmer’s transports brought sustenance to isolated communities and army units. He also recruited British, American and South African pilots for the Israeli air force, which was born on May 28.
The Haganah’s aerial division lacked warplanes, whereas the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air forces were well-stocked, mainly with Spitfires. Schwimmer brought 25 Avias to Israel and also acquired three B17 Flying Fortresses. By the autumn Israel enjoyed air superiority over its territory.
Schwimmer returned to America and in February 1950 he was fined $10,000 and deprived of his voting rights for selling arms to Israel. The FBI further accused him of stealing from US Navy ordnance dumps and giving US radar devices to the Czech Army.
In 1951 David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister, visited Schwimmer in California and asked him to launch an aerospace industry in Israel. Helped by his close friend, the director-general of the Defence Ministry, Shimon Peres, Schwimmer launched Bedek in 1953. As Israel Aerospace Industries, it became Israel’s largest employer, supplying the national carrier El Al and advancing from overhauling planes to constructing new ones.
In 1960 Schwimmer unveiled the Tzukit (Swallow) based on the French Fouga Magister light jet-fighter. After France cancelled arms sales to Israel during the 1967 war, Mossad agents persuaded a Swiss-German engineer to pass on blueprints for the coveted Mirage IIIC. Schwimmer used these to create the home-grown Nesher (Vulture) fighter in 1969 and the Kfir (Lion cub) in 1975.
He participated in numerous clandestine missions, including Israel’s controversial sale of US missiles to Iran in the 1980s, and an outlandish plan to set up a vast Saudi-funded Israeli-provisioned arms cache and mercenary base in Sudan from which to attack Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.
In his eighties Schwimmer headed a lobby to guarantee equality to all branches of Judaism. He wanted Israel to have a proper constitution and harness the skills of Russian immigrants. At a Californian fundraiser he confessed that Israeli intolerance might cause “relationships with the Diaspora to wither away”.
He is survived by his wife Rina and by their son and daughter
Al Schwimmer, arms purchaser and aerospace tycoon, was born on June 10, 1917. He died on June 10, 2011, aged 94
