TUPAMARO

member of National Liberation Movement, Spanish Movimiento de Liberacin Nacional an Uruguayan leftist urban guerrilla organization founded in about 1963. The group was named for Tupac Amaru II, the leader of an 18th-century revolt against Spanish rule in Peru. The chief founder was Ral Sendic, a labour organizer; and the earliest Tupamaro efforts were a mixture of idealism, public relations, and theftrobbing banks and businesses and then, in Robin Hood fashion, distributing food and goods to the poor. About 1968 the Tupamaros began more earnestly to undermine the established order, raiding arsenals, engaging in arson, and mounting a wave of violence, chiefly through political kidnappings and assassinations of police and officials. Their success was brief, however; in the early 1970s they had reached the zenith of their power. Thereafter, a military government (brought to power in a coup in 1973), using hard-line tactics and a disciplined army, managed to kill some 300 Tupamaros and imprison 3,000 others. After democratic rule returned to Uruguay in 1985, most of those jailed, including Sendic, were released, and the Tupamaros were reorganized as a legal political party.