1.
CU Newspapers showing headlines "7 dead Communists"
0.05

2.
MV & SV Families stand beside
0.11

3.
SCU Uruguayan flag TILT DOWN TO families
0.19

4.
CU Communist arm-band
0.22

5.
SV Workers file past coffin PAN TO families round coffins
0.30

6.
MV Workers past coffins
0.34

7.
TVs Procession out of church surrounded by crowds, mourners and coffin-bearers (5 shots)
0.53



Initials BB/1510 GR/DW/BB/1545



Script is copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved

Background: Thousand of workers on Tuesday (18 April) filed past the coffins f seven civilians killed in a gun-battle with security forces during the evacuation of the Communist Party Headquarters in Montevideo the previous day.

The security forces were acting with increased powers given them when President Juan Maria Bordaberry's six-week-old government voted in parliament on Saturday to wage a thirty-day 'Internal War' against the Tupamaros urban guerrillas.

President Bordaberry-voted in with promises to take a firm stand against the guerrillas--decided to act after the Tupamaros had assassinated a former Interior Ministry Under-Secretary, two police officers and a naval officer in separate incidents on Friday 14 April.

The assassinations brought to a peak the current wave of violence--worse than anything experienced in contemporary history in this tiny Latin American Republic. Uruguay had once enjoyed the reputation of being a model democracy and welfare state.

In 1970 the Tupamaros killed United States Adviser Dan Mitrone. Last year they kidnapped and held for eight months British Ambassador Sir Geoffrey Jackson.