Category Archives: Book Reviews 2025

It is a paradox that repressive penal systems try to break an individual in two opposed ways. Either they quash the individual through impossible labour in a mass dehumanizing project (I’m thinking here of the long-ago-read The Gulag Archipelago or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) or they annihilate prisoners’ identity through enforced idleness and solitary confinement. University of Melbourne academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert was arrested in September 2018 on charges of espionage, and spent over a year in solitary confinement during her 804 days in the Iranian Evin and Qarchak prisons.

By its very nature, it’s hard to write about solitary confinement, because just like the space and the endless nothingness, there’s only so many words in which to express it. When the stream of days is broken by Ramadan for a second time, she is struck by the waste of her life:

Thinking about Ramadan a year later meant the unbearable realisation that I had wasted another twelve months of my life in 2A. Twelve months in a world whose total inhabitants could be counted on both hands. Twelve months in a world which had to be navigated in darkness, via touch and sound and slivers of light through the edges of a blindfold. Twelve months in which time did not exist, in which each day was both a minute and a decade, in which each week was both a second and a hundred years. Last Ramadan felt like it was only yesterday, because so little had happened in the interim. But then again, everything had happened. Everything and nothing. (p. 249-50)

I seem to have read or watched a couple of accounts of imprisonment lately (the film The Correspondent – review here– and books and articles about Jose Mujica). What comes over strongly with both Peter Greste and Kylie Moore-Gilbert is their utter bewilderment as the framing of charges seems to change over time and comes long after the initial arrest. Both Australians feel poorly served by many of the embassy officials dealing with them at first (although this seems to shift with time) and both feel that nothing is being done at an inter-government level to seek their release. The advice given to families at home to keep quiet and leave it to the government flies in the face of what both Greste and Moore-Gilbert felt they needed in the situation, and in both cases hunger striking and intransigence attracted more attention – not always welcome- than compliance and silence.

For Moore-Gilbert, the experience of solitary confinement, and having to return to it for a promised 96 hours that stretched into months, was almost intolerable. At times she urged that her behaviour, which at times was unwise, be considered as a symptom of mental illness and she was certainly dosed up with anti-depressants and sleeping tablets.

The most unnerving and treacherous aspect of her imprisonment was the complex relationship she had with her main interrogator Qazi Zadeh from the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Saturnine and powerful, she claims that he began flirting with her, while incredibly having his wife appointed to supervise her. She needed to walk the tightrope of resisting his advances, while trying to leverage them to her advantage. Just as freedom was within her grasp, she found herself blocked by him, in a bizarre attempt to keep her in jail so that he could continue to contact her. It must have been a lonely, high-stakes situation where she could trust no-one, and in a mis-step she told his wife that the relationship was not of her volition. It only made it worse for her.

What made it possible to continue with the book was the knowledge that she did, eventually, gain release in exchange for three Iranian prisoners held by the Thai government. Was everything possible done by the Australian government for her? At the end of the book she is grateful to Nick Warner and the Australian ambassador Lyndall Sachs, although she has raised questions about the softly-softly approach.

She notes that 43 years of Islamic Republic rule has plunged Iran into a “crisis of human rights of unfathomable proportions” with the country becoming an open-air prison of 84 million people (p. 403). As occurred with Peter Greste, and with other political prisoners, she finishes the book with a plea for other political prisoners who have not been released.

I can’t help but be profoundly affected by what I witnessed inside some of Iran’s worst prisons. I feel it is my duty to speak up for my friends, as it is to tell the truth about what happened to me. If the events I have recounted in this book have similarly touched you, dear reader, I ask you, too, to use your voice. When you are a prisoner, knowing that there are people on the outside who support you and care about your plight truly can be the difference between giving up or continuing the fight. (p. 403)

We can only take her word for it.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: I had been aware of her imprisonment and wanted to learn about the experience from her perspective as an academic.

This is a dialogue between the ex-president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, and Kintto Lucas, a journalist, writer and Vice-Chancellor and Ambassador for Uruguay under Mujica’s government. As Lucas explains in the introduction, he first met Mujica in the Punta Carretas prison in 1971, when Lucas was just eight years old. He visited his older brother, who like Mujica was a member of the National Liberation Movement – Tupamaros (MLN-T) every Saturday. This was the prison from which 106 Tupamaros escaped in 1971 by tunnelling out of the prison, but Lucas’ brother was not among them. His cell had been changed at the last minute, and he no longer had access to the tunnel. However, by 1972 he was released and exiled to Chile. Kintto left Uruguay in 1980 and lived in Brazil until he returned after the withdrawal of the military in 1985. On his return he joined the MLN as a militant and worked as a journalist on a Mate Amargo bi-weekly Tupumaro newspaper, which became the best-selling newspaper in Uruguay.

Why am I talking so much about the author, and not Mujica himself? That’s because Lucas himself is front and centre in this book, with a 54 page introduction and he certainly doesn’t take a backward step in the interview, either. I didn’t bother counting the words, but I suspect that Lucas talks as much as Mujica does, and at times I just wanted him to shut up.

There’s lots of internal Uruguayan politics in here, which went right over my head. Still, it was good to get beyond the aphorisms and homespun wisdom that Mujica repeated over and over in his many interviews with Western journalists. I’m not sure whether this book was written in English or Spanish- an editor is credited, but not a translator- but it is rather strangled English and not particularly pleasant to read. As Mujica rarely spoke English, I think that this is a transcript of a Spanish conversation translated by the author, but it does not read particularly well.

Apparently when the Tupamaros held up a bank or a cinema, they would harangue the literally captive audience about politics and justice, before letting most of them leave. Reading this, you go away feeling rather ear-bashed by both of them too.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: Kindle e-book.

2014, 402 p.

I’ve been dipping into books about Uruguay- a place I’ve never been- and about Jose (‘Pepe’) Mujica, the ex-President of Uruguay who died recently. I haven’t been able to find many English-language books about the Tupamaros, especially recent ones, and this book, written in 2014, seemed to be as recent as I was going to find. I know little about the historiography of Latin America, and Uruguay in particular, or the author (who was/is an American international security analyst – whatever that is) so I can only take the book on its own terms. To my admittedly untrained eye, the book seemed to be fairly even-handed, and easily read by a newcomer to the area, although an index for the huge range of characters would have been useful.

So the Tupamaros- what a strange name. This Marxist-Leninist urban guerilla group took its name from Tupac Amaru II, the leader of a failed Andean rebellion against the Spanish in Peru, who was executed in 1781. The group, more properly known as Movimiento de Liberación Nacional – Tupamaros, MLN-T formed in the early 1960s, and one of their first acts was to steal weapons and ammunition from the Tiro Suizo, a shooting range in Colonia, Uruguay. The weapons, supplemented by stolen police uniforms, enabled them to conduct a range of audacious hold-ups and kidnappings which earned them the sobriquet ‘The Robin Hood Guerillas’. Their mode was ‘armed propaganda’ which combined the mostly harmless brandishing of weapons with a healthy (if somewhat tedious) dose of ideology and propaganda to which they subjected their victims. At first there was, indeed, a Robin Hood element, when they combined social justice and retribution against corruption in their criminal activities, often undertaken both as a form of armed propaganda and in order to procure more weapons, ammunition and money to conduct further raids.

Despite admiration of both the Cuban and Chinese revolutions, and the sympathy the leaders had for the agricultural workers (particularly by Raul Sendic and Jose Mujica) it was decided that they would eschew the examples of other peasant-based revolutions and instead undertaken urban guerilla action. This was largely a result of geography: as a small, flat country there were none of the mountain hideaways that guerillas could melt into, and at times when both Brazil and Argentina had right-wing governments, they could not count on fleeing over the border.

At first, they seemed to have widespread, if often tacit support. They could call on doctors to repair their injuries, and lawyers, bank officials, government employees and others enabled them to infiltrate and provide intelligence about their targets. Brum reveals a grudging admiration for the audacity of their raids, and their sheer ingenuity and logistical planning of escapes when the police rounded them up. Their escapes- especially when 100 prisoners tunnelled out of the Punta Carretas – made them seem invincible (in much the same way, unfortunately, as the drug cartels in South America have seemed inthe past).

Brum spends some time on Alejandro Otero, the police commissioner with formidable MLN-hunting skills, who in a Javier/Jean Valjean type of struggle with the Tupumaros, exhibited a mixture of fixation and grudging admiration, as did the Tupumaros with him.

But over time, as more of the original Tupamaros were arrested or fled into exile, the movement became more violent. They lost support when their kidnap hostages were murdered, rather than set free after a few months, and in many ways their actions prompted the takeover of the military, albeit with the acquiescence of the civil authorities. The murder of rural labourer, Pascasio Baez, by lethal injection of penothal also cost them support.

Once popular support leached away from them, and the grip of the military hardened, the Tupumaros disappeared from the headlines. But Brum follows them into their imprisonment, divided into groups of three, held in prisons with varying degrees of cruelty.

I gather that Brum makes some contested points in this book. He argues that it was not certain-indeed, he leans towards refuting- that U.S. government official Dan Mitrione, who was murdered in 1970, actually trained the police in torture methods. He suggests that during 1972 and 1985, when the nine most prominent Tupamaros were imprisoned, and moved from one military base to another, the Tupamaros themselves sent out feelers to the very military that was imprisoning them, to see if they could work together.

He finishes his book with a ‘where-are-they-now’ survey, current as of 2014. Raul Sendic, the icon of the Tupamaros, suffered appalling facial injuries in a shoot-out, and died in 1989. Some, like Jorge Zabalaz and Mauricio Rosencof retained their radicalism. Brum is bemused, and amused, by the popularity of Jose Mujica that saw him become no less than President. As he points out, a surprising number of the players in the 1970s still had sons involved in politics fifty years later.

Brum criticizes the barbarity on both sides- on the part of the Tupamaros who drifted away from the somewhat romantic (and romanticized) view of the Robin Hood guerilla, and on the part of the military who honed their cruelty on the nine Tupamaros leaders under their control. Despite the audacity and logistic brilliance of their early exploits, Brum’s linking of them with their ideological descendants like the Californian Symbionese Liberation Army who kidnapped Patty Hearst, or the Weather Underground, or the urban guerilla Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany, or the Italian Brigate Rosse is rather chilling. He closes his book with the observation that, despite Mujica’s proclamation that he “fought for a fatherland for all”

…many individuals were left behind in shootings, executions, and torture chambers: civilians, insurgents, policemen, and soldiers. For them there really was no more fatherland.

I enjoyed this book, although I was mystified by the curious insertions of #### and ++++++ to denote endnotes, as well as nearly 600 footnotes throughout the text. It was supportive of a reader with little knowledge, and he established the major characters sufficiently clearly that you could trace them throughout the narrative, although they threatened to be swamped by so many minor characters mentioned in person. Jose Mujica, whom I admire, once said

I am still a Tupumaro. I never stopped being one. A Tupumaro is someone who rebels against injustice.

After reading this book, I think I understand a little better what he meant.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: purchased Kindle book