The Cordobazo was the core event of the Argentine May, a synecdoche for the entire uprising. As scholar Carlos Altamirano has pointed out, it rapidly became mythic in that it encoded both the promises and drawbacks that “insurrection” represented for a revolution that to many seemed imminent.31 At the level of the regime, the month of May in general and the Cordobazo in particular, prompted the beginning of the end of the so-called Revolución Argentina. After the Cordobazo, everyone in the president’s cabinet resigned, although Onganía did not do so until June of 1970 when the Montoneros, in their baptism of fire, kidnapped and executed former resident Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. That event was significant because it succinctly represents the dynamics of Argentine politics by 1970. These new actors, the guerrilla groups, in part legitimated their raison d’être in the conditions that prevailed in May 1969, namely the popular readiness to struggle against the regime, the limits of “popular insurrection” to fight back the army, and the violence “from above” that they wanted to respond to “from below.”32 If, for the workers, May represented the endpoint of traditions of struggle and a “combative” consciousness dating back to the mid-1950s, it also inaugurated a new era. Unlike the experience of “68” in Mexico and Brazil, which ended with tragic repression (such as the Massacre of Tlatelolco) and repressive legislation (such as the infamous Acta Institucional 5, or AI-5), the Argentine May paved the way for a dynamics of societal mobilization dominated by the emergence of new political actors: the guerrillas, for sure, but in interconnection with the politicization of a new cohort of young activists.
After the Argentine May, youth came to embody a new, ideally revolutionary, political era. While in the 1960s different actors projected onto youth their hopes for the “rise of rationality” in all spheres of social life, including politics, by 1970 the imagery of a prudent youth was broken. As sociologist Juan Carlos Torre has pointed out, after the Cordobazo it became apparent that many youths no longer trusted the political institutions or the likelihood of forging individual careers. “Repeatedly frustrated and deprecating what society had to offer them,” Torre concludes, many young people—chiefly from middle-class backgrounds—began a “movement to the People.”33 In fact, the student activism that emerged after the 1966 coup d’état initiated the “movement to the people” long before the Argentine May, which perhaps helps explain its scope and intensity. The political time inaugurated by the Argentine May, in any case, generalized that movement and located youth as a critical political category and actor that actively helped amplify and shape a political culture in which Argentina became associated with the Third World—and, as a “Third World” nation, it would liberate itself by any means possible.
Feeling a Third World Argentina
In a new introduction to his Sociology of Modernization (1971), Gino Germani challenged those who identified Argentina with the Third World. He argued that, in contrast to countries in Asia and Africa—his shorthand for the Third World—Argentina was “a ‘middle-class’ nation at an international scale of development and modernization.” Forgetting this distinction, Germani cautioned his readers, “is a cause of political and ideological mistakes.”34 Founder of the so-called scientific sociology in the 1950s, Germani also popularized some of the most significant concepts through which many citizens of that “middle-class nation” grasped the sociocultural transformations that they lived through, such as “modernization.” By 1970, Germani might have felt satisfied: signs of modernization seemed to flourish in Argentina’s enduring urbanization (65 percent of the country’s population lived in cities), improving literacy rates (which reached 82 percent), and ongoing expansion of enrollment in secondary schools and universities.35 Situating Argentina within the prevailing paradigms of the Third World required effort. How and why, then, were educated youth—those who apparently benefited the most from belonging to a “middle-class” nation—so willing to identify their country as part of the Third World?
The political socialization of young people in the late 1960s and early 1970s Argentina occurred within and was shaped by a renewed political culture in which the assimilation of Argentina to the Third World constituted a key component. Scholars have tended to explain the rise of a “New Left” throughout the 1960s in terms of both the growing acceptance of armed struggle as a means for achieving national and social liberation as well as the ways in which left-wing intellectuals and militants reevaluated the Peronist movement as a potential road to Socialism.36 Although these novelties were indeed crucial, often overlooked—and perhaps naturalized—the Third World framework created commonality among politically and ideologically divergent groups, who attributed to the concept two basic meanings. First, the Third World was defined as a political geography highlighting the importance of decolonization of Asia and Africa and the need for similar transformations in “neocolonial” Latin America, which was depicted as economically and military dependent on the “imperialist centers” but, thanks to the success of the Cuban revolutionary process, ever more conscious of the opportunities of liberation. Second, the local uses of the Third World concept stressed the scope and intensity of social oppression, which required the systemic use of violence that usually came in the form of military rule. Along both lines Argentina would belong to that geography.37 A lexicon dominated by keywords such as dependency, systemic violence, and social oppression spread to Catholic, Peronist, and Marxist groups and pointed to the pervasiveness of the Third World framework in that New Left. The embrace of that approach also entailed connecting the local New Left with its counterparts in France or Italy, who were opening up their agendas to address anti-imperialism in displays of solidarity with the peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—as demonstrated in the pantheon of heroes that presided over the rallies in 1968.38 The Argentine New Left did not aim at merely expressing solidarity but also at claiming that Argentina belonged to the Third World in its own right.
Far from being an “ideological and political mistake,” the assimilation of Argentina to the Third World was a template for creating a political culture whose mobilizing ability was related to the shaping of emotions such as indignation. As some anthropologists and cultural historians have recently argued, indignation is a collectively shaped emotion that potentially fuels political action since it is tied to how groups trace the limits of “the unbearable.” Its definition involves the certainty that rights are being violated and that the unjust situation merits urgent reparation.39 Defining “the unbearable” in Argentina implied highlighting the country’s Third World status. Hence, many cultural and political actors—ranging from the CGTA to the PRT—focused on the contrasts between a supposedly cosmopolitan and modern Argentina that grew at the price of the persistence of extreme poverty and social oppression. Illuminating that “hidden” Argentina was a pressing task. Typified in numerous reports within the leftist press, the focus on the “hidden” Argentina was perhaps best exemplified in one of the most quoted documents on the dynamics of political radicalization of the late 1960s: the May Day Manifesto of the CGTA, which was authored by journalist and writer Rodolfo Walsh in 1968. While calling for the articulation of a broad anti-imperialist and anti-Onganía bloc, it pointed out that in Argentina:
The rate of infant mortality is four times that of the developed countries, twenty times in districts of Jujuy where one out of three children dies before his or her first year of life. One half of the population suffers from parasites in the northern littoral. Fifty percent of our children quit school before finishing the primary level, 83 percent [quit] in Corrientes, Santiago, and El Chaco. . . . There is no city without its belt of villas miseria, where water and electricity consumption is only comparable to the interior regions of Africa.40
Based on this panorama, how could anyone see Argentina as a modernizing country? The activists and intellectuals within the CGTA, as many others within other spaces, sought to place these contradictions at the center stage of political attention. Drawing on hyperbolic depictions and
metaphors (such as “only comparable to the interior regions of Africa”), the implicit goal was to convince skeptics about the Third World nature of the country and the need for urgent action. From CGTA’s Semanario to the PRT’s El combatiente, the leftist press was flush with reports that emphasized on the nonindustrial working class, lamenting for example the health, housing, and living conditions of the cane-, wood-, and cotton-cutters and the dwellers of the villas miseria.41 The coverage made use of disciplinary tools of the “scientific sociology” in an effort to challenge the modernizing narrative that Germani and others invoked. For example, academic and journalistic commentators used to point out the expansion of university enrollment as a sign of the sociocultural modernization of Argentina in comparison to other Latin American countries. A series of reports in the Semanario charged that enrollment had stagnated after 1966 and that the previous expansion, while real, had served to veil a deeper trend: “the 70 percent illiteracy rates in Corrientes and Santiago.”42 The statistics built up a “contrasting effect” aimed at showing the structural inequalities that resulted from the country’s “neocoloniality,” which went hand in hand with the promotion of activism beyond Buenos Aires, Rosario, or Córdoba.
The province of Tucumán became a critical marker of Argentina’s status as a Third World nation and a focal point for cultural and political activism. Tucumán was a showroom for both Onganía’s economic policies and the CGTA’s ability to articulate political discontent at a national level. In late 1966, one of the regime’s first economic initiatives was to discontinue subsidies to the sugar mills, a decision justified on the grounds of efficiency, but whose most immediate result was more unemployment among the already impoverished sugar workers. Endowed with a combative unionist tradition (the PRT dubbed them the vanguards of Argentina’s revolution), the sugar workers responded with hunger strikes and rallies—actions that were severely repressed, including the police shooting of a worker named Hilda Guerrero.43 Tucumán would also become a key symbolic space for the interplay of artistic and cultural projects. In 1968, avant-garde artists worked together with sociologists and literary critics to put together an exhibition titled Tucumán Arde (Tucumán Burns). Tucumán Arde was complete with statistical data on wages, literacy, and health as well as historical descriptions of sugar production, all visual materials that hung on the walls and from the roof or that were screened on television sets. Exhibited in the CGTA headquarters in Rosario and Buenos Aires, it instilled the “contrasting effects” in epicenters of modernizing Argentina; in doing so it illuminated its most “hidden” and allegedly “truest” reality.44
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, young people could interact with cultural and political materials showing the “hidden” Argentina and, furthermore, many attempted to encounter it literally. In 1970, the historian and journalist Félix Luna wrote about what he termed “neo-tourism” by commenting on how many youths had broken with the “family-vacation paradigm” to explore unconventional destinations. Luna believed that the drive fueling the “tide of young pilgrims” was their “willingness to know our country, assume that is theirs, and try to change it.”45 The figure of the backpacker typified that “pilgrim.” Already in 1966, journalistic reports informed readers that fifty thousand backpackers, largely young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, had overwhelmed the country’s limited camping facilities and argued for establishing a “backpacker identification card” to assist “safe hitchhiking.”46 A 1970 government study indicated that 10 percent of young women and men in the age group eighteen to twenty-five from Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Rosario, and Mendoza that traveled that year were not “in the company of family members.” The study further noted that half of them went to destinations other than the conventional ones (the Atlantic Coast and Córdoba), and contrasted those “traditional” tourism practices with the images of the backpacker jumping from trains in Bariloche and Tucumán.47 Entry points to Patagonia and the Northwest, these two cities nevertheless represented different aesthetic, cultural, and political options; to generalize, while youth attracted to countercultural movements headed to Patagonia, those in the process of involving themselves in revolutionary politics opted for the Northwest.
Already an important tourist destination, young visitors endowed Northwest Argentina with heightened cultural and political significance in the 1960s and 1970s. None other than Ernesto “Che” Guevara had traversed the Northwestern corridor (the provinces of Tucumán, Santiago del Estero, Salta, and Jujuy) in 1950, prior to his first grand continental trip, fueled by the desire to find “revelations of hidden aspects of social reality.”48 In the decades to follow, thousands of chiefly middle-class youth pursued similar encounters. Interviewed for a report on backpacking in 1968, one female history student noted that visiting the region had broadened her knowledge of the country and “its most humble people.” In 1971, a group of university students from La Plata concurred when describing their journey, which included stops in “every single village from Tucumán to Jujuy.”49 Similarly, Cacho Narzole recalls that, along with his girlfriend, he made two trips to the Northwest: “while discovering the beauty of the landscapes,” he wrote, “we were shocked by the social reality of extreme poverty and the inhuman exploitation.” Hugo Macchi experienced an analogous “shock” in a journey that also included Bolivia and Peru, when he “immersed himself in conditions of misery and suffering.”50 For Hugo and Cacho, as for many other youths, these experiences were integral to a broader process of discovery, including their rising interest in revolutionary militancy—they both became militants with the PRT.
The political dimension was evident in the second kind of travel many youths undertook. Within a climate marked by the rising commitment of Catholics to social justice, hundreds of youth—sometimes immediately following secondary school graduation—carried out social work in the most impoverished regions of the country, such as the Northwest and the Northeast. This was the case, for example, with the Camilo Torres commando (which included subsequent founders of the Montoneros) that spent the summer of 1966 in a small town in northern Santa Fe where they conducted literary campaigns, taught the gospel to children, and helped workers with their daily chores.51 In the same region, Catholic students with the Movimiento Ateneísta performed similar tasks with the hacheros (woodcutters) and, upon their return to college, reported that sharing the hacheros’ daily life constituted “an accelerated class on the nature of dependency and neocolonialism.”52 Those travel experiences, however, were not restricted to Catholic, middle-class university youth. On one side of the social spectrum, Alejandro, a former upper-class youth from Córdoba, recalls that when he was a secondary school student he used to spend the weekdays and most of his time in company of his “social equals”—playing rugby, attending parties, or simply hanging out. When he began to develop a “social consciousness” and despite being “secular,” he decided he would accompany a priest to do social work in a little town in Misiones upon graduating in the summer of 1967: “witnessing so much poverty and suffering,” he wrote, “basically drove me crazy.” At the same time that he abandoned his leisure activities, he joined the PRT.53 On the other side of the social spectrum, José, a former working-class boy who in 1970 went with his parish fellows to Santiago del Estero, recalled, “That little town did not have anything: no doctor, no potable water, no gas or power. People worked hard for not having anything to feed their children with.” As other former travelers, José depicted his as an eye-opening experience: “We took a practical class on social injustice, to say the least.”54 For them, such journeys served both as a political-pedagogical initiative and as direct evidence of Argentina’s Third World condition.
In addition to travel, these Third World perspectives were shaped and conveyed through cultural practices that altered the country’s traditionally European-oriented cultural landscape. In the overtly politicized sociology department of the University of Buenos Aires, for example, a cohort of professors taught undergr
aduate-level courses (the cátedras nacionales) and created the journal Antropología 3er Mundo with the goal of challenging the Eurocentric orientation and theories of modernization that shaped the interpretations of Argentina’s past and present endorsed by Germani and others. They taught classes on the “history of the popular struggles,” where they exposed the students to the work of Frantz Fanon and of “national thinkers” such as Juan José Hernández Arregui and Juan Perón. In 1969, one professor explained that the goal was to produce the “mental liberation” of the “ideological vanguard of the middle classes” (i.e., students), and he viewed the outcome so far in positive terms, since “they have begun to think nationally and to conceive of our country as a Third World nation.”55 In a similar vein, another professor taught a seminar in the 1971 school year on the choice between rural or urban guerrilla, for which he made required reading works by Guevara and interviews with the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas (FAP, Peronist Armed Forces) and the Uruguayan Tupamaros published in 1970 by Cristianismo y Revolución—which included a section titled “Bulletin of the Third World.”56 Yet young people other than the overtly politicized students at the most radicalized schools joined the tide of Third World perspectives through their reading options. A survey of bookstores in 1972 showed that younger readers chiefly purchased political and historical books authored by “national thinkers” and “Latin American writers” such as Paulo Freire and Eduardo Galeano as well as the year’s main bestseller, Martha Harnecker’s Conceptos elementales del materialismo histórico, a “mandatory textbook” for politicizing youth.57
Age of Youth in Argentina Page 24
