The Tapes:
Sabotage to the Truth

In 1976, Uruguayan Senator Zelmar Michelini, MP Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz and activists Rosario Barredo and William Whitelaw were murdered in Buenos Aires, where they had sought refuge from Uruguay’s dictatorship. Two of the country’s most prominent political figures, their assassination became one of the emblematic political crimes of Latin America’s dictatorships. It sent a chilling message: no one was safe, not even in exile.

Ten years later, as Uruguay returned to democracy, a parliamentary investigative commission attempted to uncover what had happened. But the 1986 investigation itself became part of the story. Information was withheld, filtered and politically distorted, raising another question: who was preventing the truth from emerging, and why?

In 2006, I investigated that question in my book Sabotage to the Truth, interviewing members of the parliamentary commission, political figures and key participants, including the President of Uruguay at the time of the parliamentary inquiry.

Twenty years later, I rediscovered the original recordings.

The tapes contain voices captured much closer to the events: interviews conducted for the book with people directly involved in the political and parliamentary history of the case, many of whom can no longer be interviewed today. Listening to them again, two decades later —and fifty years after the murders— creates an extraordinary opportunity to revisit not only what happened, but what people said, remembered, denied and explained at the time.

The timing is particularly significant. The judicial case was reopened in 2025, and 2026 marks fifty years since the murders. 

As I develop an updated edition of the book alongside a companion podcast that will bring these archival interviews back into the investigation and examine them against what is known today.

The podcast moves across four moments in the search for truth: the assassinations in 1976; the parliamentary investigation in 1986; my investigation and book in 2006; and the reopened case and rediscovered tapes in 2025–26.

Why has the truth been so difficult to establish, and what can voices from the past tell us now?