A new Book by Víctor Hugo Morales
Reflections on the book Un ciudadano común en dictadura, An Ordinary Citizen Under Dictatorship, by Víctor Hugo Morales and other documents.
by Jorge Majfud
Víctor Hugo Morales and Prof. Jorge Majfud, Caras y Caretas Theater, Buenos Aires, 2023. (Picture: Página12)
A hypothesis
In Un ciudadano común, the author reconstructs his memories of the dictatorships of the Río de la Plata based on fragments of documents partially declassified in Uruguay in 2012 and, to a greater extent, ten years later. If we make an effort to distill the chaotic mass of information available to identify and understand the gravitational center of what we might call “The Víctor Hugo Case,” I understand that it lies in the communicational phenomenon centered on his person. Not in his ideas. Not in theories. Not in his militancy. Not in the power of some political position in the Senate, in some ministry, or as director of some powerful state agency, such as the National Communications Agency.
Víctor Hugo Morales is not Noam Chomsky. He is not Rodolfo Walsh. He is not Maradona. Much less is he the Montonera Patricia Bullrich, today a champion of neoliberal repression and a perennial hindrance to the powers that be. He is not one of the thousands of workers, journalists, teachers, and trade unionists tortured and disappeared during the dictatorships of the Rio de la Plata, now sunk into strategic and convenient oblivion.
The Uruguayan dictatorship was convinced that Víctor Hugo had political aspirations, despite not being a militant. For years they tried to solve a riddle and failed. Then, in democracy, Morales rejected offers from Presidents Tabaré Vázquez of Uruguay and Néstor Kirchner of Argentina.
So why this obsession at different times in history with someone who was neither a politician, nor a militant, nor a philosopher dangerous to the national and international system? I understand that there is something, an unstudied phenomenon in his personality that, for reasons or mysteries, lies in the concern of power (real power, not just political power) for a magnetic personality who, with his voice and talent alone, turned everything he touched into popular success. Worse still: someone without the promotional power of big capital, which not only dominates and controls the narrative cosmos, but also has an easy explanation: the money of the local oligarchy and the financial centers of the northwest. In other words, something, someone out of control, shielded by repeated success that, to make matters worse, could not be explained in a simple way—what could be simpler than the power of unlimited and uncontrolled money?
Famous from an ideological standpoint means dangerous. Hence the repeated recommendation that all critics should go live on an island in the Pacific or sink into poverty so as “not to fall into contradiction with their ideology.” That classic barometric narrative that feeds the fungi in the dark and failed corners of history.
No one better than those who design the map of the world from their position of hegemonic power has understood that symbolic reality (from myths to dogmas) is much more powerful than material reality, which is their ultimate goal. Symbolic is money and its ideologies; symbolic are the ideas of freedom of the slave owners. Symbolic are the examples of other ways of being, which imperial power has always taken care to destroy through liberating interventions (invasions, wars, coups d'état, parasitic debts, media harassment) before they become “bad examples.” The crucifixion, execution, or demoralization of the troublesome individual (without success there is no trouble) has always been another and the same strategy applied to non-aligned countries and “regimes.”
For a socioeconomic system and for the culture of monopoly of the dominant narrative in the post-Cold War era (the Single Model: “there is only one model of social success,” in the words of Condoleezza Rice, among others) and, more recently, in the crisis of post-capitalist Western hegemony, it is highly significant that an individual without political power or official positions should be the repeated target of discrediting by the system's squires.
The peculiarity and irony of the title of this book, An Ordinary Citizen in a Dictatorship, lies in the fact that the author's problems with the dictatorship consisted in the fact that, judging by his own reports, the military at the time did not consider him an ordinary citizen. Some probably did not even consider him a citizen. As was the case with many victims of the brutality of the “Savior of Western Judeo-Christian Civilization” (as the generals preferred to call it, repeating the manual written in Virginia; fascism has always suffered from historical megalomania), such as the Chilean Orlando Letelier or the Uruguayan Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, he could well have been considered for the deprivation of that civil right.
For thousands in exile, the substitute for losing citizenship was exile. Forced exile or “voluntary exile”—an existential oxymoron, if ever there was one.
The border of the Rio de la Plata
Like millions of Uruguayans and Argentines, I have stories in common with the author. These are not minor stories. Like perhaps few others, after publishing multiple articles and several books related to those dark times, I too read my name, dates, and personal information in the same archives of the dictatorship when they were declassified in 2023. So far, no new official revelations have contradicted our personal and family memories, quite the contrary.
A generation separated us. In the Libertad political prison in San José, Uruguay, I smuggled forbidden messages from the age of seven to nine. In Colonia, just a stone's throw away, I spent the summer months with my older brother at my grandparents' farm. There, around a lantern, we listened to visitors' stories about the death flights, more than a decade before Captain Adolfo Scilingo's confessions. Back then, I thought that people do good out of necessity and evil for pleasure. Since then, I've tried to disprove this observation, with relative failure.
As we herded cows, planted potatoes, or picked tomatoes, we listened to radio stations from Montevideo and Buenos Aires on a Spika radio. Although my grandparents had a small black-and-white television that only picked up channels from Buenos Aires and ran on a battery charged by the wind during the day, radio was usually freer than television. One example was Radio Colonia, “the radio station furthest to the left on the dial,” as it advertised itself while broadcasting more to Argentina than to Uruguay. Buenos Aires was so close that on clear days you could see the tall silhouettes of the buildings.
We don't come from soccer-loving families, but the voice of Víctor Hugo was always a mysterious mark on the dial. If you ever came across it while scanning the dial, that's where you stayed.
The facts
In his book Un ciudadano común... (An Ordinary Citizen), the author recalls that in 1980 he was imprisoned for 27 days for a minor and otherwise common incident: a skirmish on a neighborhood soccer field in Montevideo. The facts and the evidence that followed leave little room for doubt: to conclude that it was not a provocation to criminalize him is to stretch the logic of the facts and bet everything on a cosmic coincidence, on an alignment of the planets.
This seemingly trivial event would ultimately prove to be one of the pivots of the story. More than that, it reveals the workings of a Uruguayan-style dictatorship: the number of disappeared persons does not rival those in Argentina, Chile, or the dictatorships in Central America, but its devastating effects on the survivors are no less significant. The Uruguayan dictatorship was an omnipresent terror, like all others, but with that Onetti-esque touch of vain and persistent gray drizzle.
The biggest problem with the dictatorship was not so much that the journalist was involved with the militant left of the time, beyond a few friends, such as the communist politician Germán Araujo (whom he dressed when he was on hunger strike in Montevideo and later interviewed in Buenos Aires), but rather that he practiced an art that became known in various disciplines: saying with symbols and metaphors what would otherwise would be punished by direct censorship.
In 1973, at the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil composed Cálice (“Pai, afasta de mim esse cálice / de vinho tinto de sangue” (“Father, take this cup away from me / of red wine, of blood” or “of wine stained with blood”) with a chorus that repeated the noun cálice, which in Portuguese has the same phonetics as the imperative cale-se (be quiet). Our friend Eduardo Galeano once recalled that drawings of birds were forbidden in the Libertad Prison, so a girl drew her father a tree full of eyes—the eyes of hidden birds. For the 1980 referendum, advertising in favor of the “No” vote was prohibited, so people drove with their windshield wipers on sunny days, signifying two fingers in a sign of negation. Or, as Morales himself mentions, the ‘no’ was emphasized in phrases such as “No... Rampla will not play.” Or, when he broadcast the match between Bolivia and Venezuela (in Venezuela, exiles asked him to leave the microphone open, which annoyed the military) and the result left Uruguay out of “the World Cup it couldn't miss” (1978), Víctor Hugo closed with “Good afternoon... Country of pain.”
In Víctor Hugo's case, there was a paradox that can be explained by the paranoia typical of fascists. Journalist Jorge Crossa recalls that the military recorded each of his programs, looking for phrases with hidden content, which led to what Umberto Eco would call “overinterpretations.” According to Crossa, “the phrases that occurred to VH, in the middle of his commentary, which had nothing to do with repression” were interpreted as hidden messages. A clear example is mentioned during the Mundialito organized in 1980 between the world champion teams, which Uruguay won with the unofficial music promoted by Víctor Hugo and his colleagues at Radio Oriental. I am referring to the popular (especially rural) expression “no tiene gollete” (it makes no sense), which the military interpreted as an allusion to the dictator Goyo Álvarez (in the Río de la Plata region, the ll and the y have the same fricative sound /ʃ/). The paradox was twofold, and explains that art of political and poetic camouflage that Crossa himself mentions on another page: “but when [Víctor Hugo] said something strong, like a message, they didn't notice.”
It is an art that dates back to the time of Nero, when the writers of the Gospels used the number 666 to name the emperor's beast. In Uruguay at that time, a politician and academic who practiced this discipline was Enrique Tarigo. Morales recalls reading one of his articles in El Dia, where Tarigo coined the expression “first- and second-class citizens.” Morales used that same expression in his account of one of the matches of the 1979 World Youth Championship in Tokyo. In the only televised debate on the 1980 plebiscite that would define the perpetuity of the military dictatorship, alongside Enrique Tarigo of the Colorado Party in favor of “No,” was Eduardo Pons Etcheverry of the Blanco Party, who planted the metaphor “there are always rhinos” (conformists or collaborators for convenience), alluding to the work of Romanian Eugene Ionesco—a Uruguayan subtlety that today, due to the collapse of enlightened education, would have gone unnoticed.
In 1976, for the first time in the history of Uruguayan soccer, a small team, Defensor, won the national league championship. The coach was Professor José Ricardo de León, a politicized coach, as was later the case with Dr. Sócrates in Brazil, the player of the best Brazilian team in history (1982) and leader of the “Corinthian Democracy” experiment (the players voted on the coach's most important decisions), who faced the military dictatorship and the improbability of becoming champion without the traditional political structure.
According to soccer player Julio Filippini, Morales was the only journalist to follow and broadcast Defensor's matches until the end. To make matters worse, in 1976, instead of censoring a greeting from Filippini to his brother and fellow prisoners in the Libertad Penitentiary, Morales thanked him. He was arrested and, in a barracks in Prado, made to listen to his own recording as an “incorrigible communist,” as he was known among the uniformed officers. After more than three hours of interrogation, he was classified, as the dictatorship often did, in this case with irony: “he has a yellow card.” The investigators at La Estanzuela were classified according to their level of loyalty to the regime with A, B, and C, which forced imminent figures such as engineer José Lavalleja Castro to leave the country.
In 1980, on his return from Holland, he was arrested on the plane that had just landed in Montevideo. The charge, the famous neighborhood party brawl, was completely disproportionate to the arrest procedure. Three decades later, some journalists would engage in what is known as “cherry picking,” the selective use of facts and data convenient for proving a thesis without considering the context of the moment. That cherry was Víctor Hugo Morales' relationship with Major Grosso.
When his brother José Pedro Morales disappeared for three days, Víctor Hugo searched for him in barracks and hospitals. Major Juan Carlos Grosso, who was sent to India shortly afterwards, collaborated in this search. Finally, Víctor Hugo found his brother in a cell at the Central Headquarters and was himself imprisoned there for a month. Once released, the military dictatorship banned him from entering any soccer stadium.
The fact that he considered himself “a man of the left” even though (or precisely because of this?) he had no political aspirations; the fact that he was a young voice with growing popularity, made him fit the equation of dangerous individuals.
Something similar happened years later when the coach of the Argentine national team, César Luis Menotti, who had won the World Cup in 1978, denounced his country's dictatorship on Radio Colonia. Apart from this moment, which was heard and discussed on my grandparents' farm in Colonia in the 1980s, I have not found any recording of it. I could never forget my grandfather, who had been tortured by the dictatorship and detested soccer because of the 1978 World Cup, applauding Menotti with thoughtful slowness in the solitude of the kitchen. Later, quite a few media writers accused Menotti of being contradictory and of collaborating with the dictatorship, always from a position of personal safety.
The same was true of Jorge Bergoglio. When he was elected Pope in 2013, I received an email from good friends, Argentine academics, asking me to sign a letter of protest against the new Pope's role in the dictatorship. I asked them to give me a couple of days to study the available documents. I knew I had a negative predisposition against the church hierarchy in Spain, Africa, and Latin America, which was complicit with military dictatorships and partners with the oligarchy in each country, for reasons of class consciousness—dominant class consciousness. For the same reasons, I had a negative predisposition against the Vatican, after Pope John Paul II and his star cardinal in the 1980s, Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope himself, had persecuted liberation theologians for bringing politics into the church and thus distracting the poor from their true goal, the salvation of their souls, while they themselves, the Pope and his cardinal squire, made no secret of their anti-communist activism in Europe and condoned fascist and colonialist dictatorships in the Global South. Many of those “red priests” were murdered, and there were no tears or sanctifications to vindicate them.
Aware of my personal bias, I took some time to rummage through the available documents. Yes, there were some transcripts where the priests seemed to have a friendly dialogue with some military personnel, but my final answer was no. “I will not sign, and I recommend that you do not publish that letter.” Why? It was enough to put the documents in their context and remember what we ourselves experienced as children, who had to lie at school to protect our families. If you read between the lines of those documents, you could understand the same tension concealed behind friendly smiles (something I translated in some of my novels, such as El mismo fuego). Not only the tension, but also the need for those religious figures to keep a door open to demand the return of some of the disappeared.
Collaborating is something else: it is benefiting from the pain of others, not getting your hands dirty with the mud of reality in order to alleviate your own suffering and that of others. Even as a young man, I always held in high esteem those who suffered torture and did not say a single word, but later I reflected that the others who did break down under torment (I knew and heard many of these testimonies from men and women) could not be judged in any way. Much less by those who did not have to go through similar situations of terror, even thousands of miles away. Nor do I judge those who have no power and even today must remain silent in order to survive, but if I have to be harsh in my judgment, I prefer to be so with those who, after the end of state terrorism, continue to justify it today. Those like my dear father, who justified the dictatorship as “a necessary evil” when it was still going on, but who years later acknowledged that, “yes, it was state terrorism.” To those I reserve a hug and my solidarity—not to those who, having all the information and knowledge of the facts, continue today to justify death, the oppression of others, and collaborationism, the mother of all misfortunes in the Global South, such as the sepoyism functional to imperialism that continues alive and has not lost its criminal practices.
Not without another magnificent irony, to paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges, César Luis Menotti, the coach of the team that won the 1978 World Cup, was against the dictatorship. For his part, upon the return of the rule of law, Carlos Bilardo, the coach of the 1986 World Cup champions, maintained a rather absent position regarding the past and after the trial of human rights violators. So much so that libertarian president Javier Milei declares himself a “proud Bilardista.” Not without irony, too, Menotti left Maradona out of the 1978 World Cup, which he later regretted, and Bilardo was probably champion because he had the best version of the best soccer player—the only magical soccer player in history recorded by television cameras.
Decades later, criticism would come against Víctor Hugo Morales for celebrating Argentina's victory in the World Cup. In a letter to Clarisa, Estela de Carloto's assistant, with a moral humility that is sorely lacking in his young critics, Morales acknowledged: "When I hear the stories of how the victims of the military celebrated the victorious passage of the Argentine national team, I feel some relief.
With regard to that closed-mindedness in the midst of which we followed the events of that time... I would have liked to have been better, and that is what I am working on now." But we must crucify those who, persecuted and disoriented in the new context, turned to their acquaintances to locate their brother or to prevent them from being banned from continuing to work. As if working to survive in a dictatorship were an act of collaboration.
All of us who suffered the dictatorship firsthand know what this means. Those who did not can afford to pose as Mother Teresa and the Discalced Carmelites. I will explain with another personal example—we generally know our own lives a little better than the lives of others.
One night in 1977 or 1978, my mother came home and started crying. She cried frequently at that time. Beyond her depression, she had plenty of reasons that even today would have made an accurate diagnosis impossible. The harassment and punishment by the military was both subtle and brutal. Despite having uncles in the military, soldiers destroyed the bedroom I shared with my brother as a child and played soccer with the head of one of my mother's sculptures. This was so that they would not continue torturing her father and brother, events she has recounted elsewhere. But the moment that illustrates my earlier observations about the vice of judging others without seeing the speck in their eye refers to one of her projects for public schools. She had finished a bust of Artigas and had to unveil it surrounded by soldiers. She could not refuse. In a surviving photo, she can be seen looking at the ground, with a thoughtful expression that contrasts with the smiling faces of the officers. At that moment, she had a brother hundreds of miles away, imprisoned in the Libertad Penitentiary. Almost her entire family had suffered torture, imprisonment, or exile without having fired a single shot. She deeply hated her father's and brother's torturers who, apart from the notorious psychopath Captain Nino Gavazzo, were our neighbors. I myself had to practice the art of civil lying when, in elementary school, our teachers took us out into the street to applaud the dictator Gregorio Álvarez, who was visiting the town and honoring us with his presence on that poor, dusty avenue. Although I was nine years old, my applause was not innocent. After passing several forbidden messages to the Libertad Prison, I knew perfectly well that the idea of “the country of peace and freedom” was a painful farce and, above all, that the official version of reality was not reliable. The only time I let slip “that's what the newspapers say” (ironically, I was the only child who received and read a newspaper every day, the dictatorship's newspaper El País; the rest of my classmates were, by far, poorer than me, the carpenter's son), the teacher punished me by making me stare at the whitewashed wall for the rest of the day. I never held a grudge against Teacher Griselda. In fact, I respected her. I always imagined that she too was another victim of the same terrorism.
When someone shouted that the president was about to pass by, I applauded out of obligation. Shortly before, a man had tried to throw himself in front of the train that passed by every morning. He was stopped by the police who were waiting for the president, and the children celebrated because they had saved the madman from committing suicide. I still remember his resigned face, somewhat similar to my mother's, with a lost look, saying nothing more than acknowledging defeat.
Then, in a country where half the population showed their cowardice by ratifying the refusal to prosecute military torturers in the 1989 referendum, jumping on top of those who had to navigate and survive the storm of the dictatorship seems to me to be double cowardice or a demonstration that they never understood anything—nor do they care.
It is in this context that I read the story of Víctor Hugo and the most recent attack by his critics. One of the most debated episodes consists of what the tabloid press in Uruguay titled a decade ago as “Víctor Hugo Morales' speech at the Florida Battalion.” Since 2009, there has been a persistent effort to deny that “the uncomfortable figure” was persecuted by the Uruguayan dictatorship. This was the beginning of the current denialism in the Southern Cone.
Documents declassified years later prove that there was persecution and, as was common at the time, harassment, several arrests, and even a month in prison. The attempt to unmask a colleague ended up exposing the base instincts of journalists backed or promoted by interest groups such as Grupo Clarín. However, far from acknowledging any error or, at least, maintaining a therapeutic silence, they doubled down.
The accusation of ideological ambiguity also ignores the contingency of the time and even the insistent political ambiguity that surrounded a large part of the population: Wilson Ferreira Aldunate was the figurehead of the Partido Blanco (traditionally the conservative party, the CIA's party in the 1950s) and was persecuted and exiled by the dictatorship. Many left-wing militants in Uruguay doubted for a long time whether the Uruguayan military who removed the architect of the final blow to democracy, President Juan María Bordaberry, were fascists or a version of the pro-independence left of the Peruvian dictator and reformist Juan Velasco Alvarado.
After the lame, crooked, and one-eyed return to democracy in 1985, with limited elections months earlier and the National Security Council (COSENA) remaining within the “democratic government,” the military continued to use the dictatorship's intelligence apparatus to spy on any citizens whose ideologies did not coincide with “national security,” written and donated by the CIA and the School of the Americas in the late 1950s and shortly before planting their candidate, Benito Nardone, in the Uruguayan presidency.
In all the reports and files of the Uruguayan dictatorship, Morales continued to appear as a “dangerous leftist,” something that even he himself did not deny, but quite the contrary. Something that still bothers people today—not that he was and is, like any of us, a human being surviving in a world of contradictions, both his own and those of others.
When well-known figures from Argentine journalism went to look for him in Montevideo, not only Uruguayan intelligence, but also Argentine intelligence, took note. His identification with both communism and the Tupamaros (now on opposite sides in Uruguay) did not even come close to describing the journalist who was born under a lucky star and whom everyone, for different reasons and in different generations, wanted to bring down.
Several of his colleagues who weathered the storm of the 1970s, such as Jorge Crossa, stated in their memoirs that the military “considered him a dangerous guy.” Why? Recognizing the political and militant importance of others who paid a higher price than he did, Morales acknowledges: “I was just a guy who was annoying because he was well known.” I understand that the same annoyance he caused because of his fame during the dictatorship inspired books and articles by some colleagues, decades after the fascist storm. I am referring to those who took a great deal of time and effort to write about Morales' supposed lukewarmness and contradictions, from a position of civic and personal security, when it was time not to crucify actors who were trying to survive in a state of permanent terrorism, but to target those who continued and continue today to passionately defend fascism, the cruelty of the masters, the functionality of sepoy and colonialists, and the exploitation of the dispossessed.
On October 5, 1984, he participated in a meeting at the Conquistador Hotel where Uruguay's conservative party, the National Party, welcomed one of its most charismatic leaders in its history and, at the same time, one most associated with the progressive movements of exile. Shortly thereafter, the Uruguayan dictatorship arrested him in the port of Montevideo. In 2024, I published 1976. El exilio del terror (1976: Exile from Terror) about terrorism in Miami and Latin American dictatorships. In it, I attempted to reconstruct the car bomb attack that killed Orlando Letelier in Washington. Wilson Ferreira Aldunate's son, Juan Raúl, sent me his memoirs about that period. At the time, his father was being targeted by Operation Condor, and he was working at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C., with Letelier and other social policy researchers of the time.
Like the Uruguayan and Argentine dictatorships, now in democracy (or whatever you want to call it), the Clarín group, known for its legal communications mafia in Argentina, led by godfather Héctor Magneto, took it upon itself to seduce historical figures, by then converts, such as Jorge Lanata (one of the founders of Página12) and other mercenaries to target and attack Víctor Hugo Morales, to discredit him at any cost and for any irrelevant statement or speech, in the promise of some saving ratings or some best seller destined to be forgotten, seven-day butterflies. A new campaign against the dangerous leftist who does not understand the neutrality of servile journalism—to denigrate him, that is, to blacken him, in slave language.
To conclude, back to the beginning. Víctor Hugo Morales was always a man of the left (with all the ambiguities, contradictions, discussions, criticisms, denials, and passions of his own and others that any political definition applied to any individual and even any political group or party entails), but he was never a theorist of any ideology, nor an armed or unarmed militant of any revolutionary group. Those in power, their squires, jesters, and figureheads were always uncomfortable with this very thing: his inexplicable talent as a communicator (that is, as a translator of the feelings of half the population) that turned everything he touched into success. For some reason that is not worth trying to explain, his voice alone attracted and continues to attract the attention of millions of people.
I don't think there is any other explanation for the political and ideological obsession, and even professional jealousy, that he has aroused at different moments in history and in different people, from politicians to journalists.
One question remains that will never be answered with any sincerity. Were they never even a little bit embarrassed to pit an entire country's dictatorial apparatus, all the commercial power of media conglomerates, and all the enthusiasm of aspiring shooting stars against a single man—and fail with a resounding, albeit concealed, thud?
Jorge Majfud, Nov. 2025
