Age of Youth in Argentina
Page 25
Third World music, and especially that of Latin America, pervaded the musical consumption of many youths as well. As in other Latin American countries, the “New Song” movement gained a certain prominence. The precursors of the movement, Atahualpa Yupanqui and the Chilean Violeta Parra, shared a willingness to represent “the people,” usually in their lyrics and in their use of certain instruments of indigenous origins that recovered the styles of folkloric projection.58 Leading that renewal, the singer Mercedes Sosa embodied the link of “the interior”—chiefly her hometown, Tucumán—with the “true” Argentina, imagined as tied by history and will to its neighboring Latin American countries. In the making of her persona and repertoire, Sosa celebrated the “America morena” (darker America) and its presumed common destiny of liberation. Although she captivated the mass market in the early 1970s, Sosa’s association with the Communist Party was detrimental to her appeal to groups of youth attracted to revolutionary Peronism, who used to criticize her for an alleged “reformism.”59 They had plenty of other options, though. In 1971, one business report showed that the records by the Chileans Inti Illymani and Quilapayún and the Uruguayan Daniel Viglietti had become popular among college students. That constituency might have been the one crowding Buenos Aires’ Luna Park stadium in August of 1972 to listen to Viglietti and the Venezuelan Soledad Bravo—another important “New Song” artist—while chanting slogans about “Cuba and the Socialist fatherland.”60 Some youths mingled their taste for the aesthetics and politics of the “New Song” with their taste for rock music and culture.61 In contrast, other youths, mostly women—who had been excluded from rock culture—favored the New Song. As Mabel, a student who joined the JP recalled, the New Song was “the soundtrack” of her life: she was attracted to “songs about the landless peasants, the Latin American revolution.”62
The dissemination of cultural practices associated with the identification of Argentina with the Third World was only one part of the story. In fact, for those in the process of committing themselves to revolutionary militancy, the making of a Third World Argentina implied also the emergence of a new political sensibility dominated by a sense of urgency. For the young women and men who traveled to see the country’s Third World nature for themselves, the experience of finding that “hidden truth” helped shape indignation. The military, for many of these youths, represented the transient incarnation of powerful enemies—the “oligarchy,” for example—who, since the nineteenth century, had been responsible for creating a neocolonial society whose result was that Argentina. Masked in “bourgeois” parties, or “unmasked” as military, the enemies controlled the state and repressed or outlawed “popular forces.”63 A new cohort of political activists had no confidence that change was possible within the limits of the “system” and thought that only a radical change would be sufficient to overcome the conditions making that Argentina possible. Change was imminent: the Argentine May and the struggles in other “Third World” countries showed that the time was ripe and that there was only one method for change: armed struggle.64
At the time that the first guerrilla groups became visible they attracted broad support among young people. In late 1969, a sociologist conducted a survey on the political socialization of secondary school boys in Buenos Aires. He crafted the category of “nominal revolutionaries” to define the 18 percent of boys who thought that “a revolution was the only solution for creating a socially just country.”65 This survey was conducted before the most important guerrillas surfaced: the Montoneros, FAP, FAR, and PRT-led ERP. In this respect, the survey conveys insight into the positive expectations that some middle- and working-class boys projected onto the role of violence for “changing the country.” In late 1971, once guerrilla groups had begun to act widely, an oft-quoted survey conducted by Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales de la Argentina (IPSA, Argentina’s Social and Political Research) showed that 45 percent of those consulted in the Greater Buenos Aires area, 51 percent in Rosario, and 53 percent in Córdoba thought their actions were “justified.” As historians have suggested, these favorable views were determined by the actions that guerrilla groups carried out from 1970 to 1973, mostly in the form of armed attacks. The guerrilla groups targeted property rather than people, selected their targets carefully, and cultivated their ties with “the masses” by distributing food and toys, for example.66 But the heroic figure of the guerrilla and armed struggle as a method continued attracting youth sympathy after the 1973 elections had already passed. A survey of secondary school boys and girls showed that 30 percent had a “positive view” and 22 percent had a “tolerant view” of the guerrillas, who were perceived as the only “guarantee for change to happen.”67
Supporting armed struggle represented, for many youths, supporting the “revolution” tout court. That new cohort of activists and militants set the tone for a conjuncture of the claims for radical change and the backing of radical means to achieve it that marked indelibly the Argentine political scenario. That shift in beliefs and practices had, if anything, a generational component. Although it is likely that, as one essayist recently put it, they represented a statistical minority of those aged eighteen to twenty-five, rising numbers of young people in the early 1970s were confident that “the revolution” was pending.68 That certainty meant many wanted to be a part of an irreversible process. In a roundtable with the winners of the essay contest on youth and politics, Antonio Brailovsky, age twenty-two, briefly argued that “Youths have two options: either following the caminito [little road] that an unjust system has traced for us, or following the camino [road] toward a different, new society.”69 The belittled caminito implied, perhaps, the possibility of upward mobility and the integration into a “bourgeois” life, which modernizing thinkers thought possible throughout the 1960s and which many youths opted for. The camino, in contrast, was the promise of a “different,” better society: “I feel confused,” wrote Viviana, age sixteen, “but I learned that the Revolution is the only possible camino.”70 Many youths joined the camino by involving themselves in political activism in the student, party, or guerrilla groups they helped create in what seemed to be their hour.
The Hour of Youth
When recalling his political experiences, a former schoolboy noted that he circulated among different groups, including Marxist groups, before settling on the Peronist UES. “The other groups were alien to the people and, if the revolution was to happen, it would happen through Peronism: it was natural,” he said.71 Rather than natural, the engagement of young people with revolutionary Peronist trends was at the junction of at least three interrelated phenomena. In the first place, Peronism represented itself as the most suitable venue to connect with and mobilize “the people,” a claim that student and youth groups (not only in Argentina) increasingly valued throughout the 1960s. Second, Perón and his younger followers learned to situate that movement into new ideological and cultural coordinates, notably within a Third World framework. Finally, Peronism was in fact the major beneficiary of a larger youth participation in the entire political spectrum. The fragmented Radical Party witnessed the growth of its two youth branches, and youth also flooded into left-wing parties that did not endorse armed struggle, such as the Socialist Workers’ Party. Even the pro-Soviet Communist Party started to slowly recover young militants after having lost 50 percent of its youth constituency in 1967, chiefly to pro-Chinese groups.72 Meanwhile, the most important non-Peronist force endorsing armed struggle, the PRT-ERP, created its youth branch (the Guevarista Youth) in 1973, but the calls for reorganizing it as late as 1975 suggest that the initiative was not successful. While the PRT-ERP’s constituency was indeed young, it was not organized by using a generational interpellation.73 On the contrary, in Peronism “youth” was a category that reflected the young people who embraced that movement while identifying with the Montoneros, indicating a generational and ideological positioning.
Although youth groups did exist at the end of the first Peronist government, th
eir political importance grew after the 1955 coup d’état and especially by the mid 1960s, when Perón spoke of trasvasamiento generacional (generational transference).74 As it happened with the “Peronist left” at large, Perón vindicated the actions of youth groups when the “bureaucratic” Peronist trends threatened his authority. In one of these contexts, in 1965, he called for a trasvasamiento generacional through which youth should prepare to infuse new blood into the movement. Endorsing deeply rooted tropes within the left-wing sectors, he insisted that youth should develop an “anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, antioligarchic attitude” and realize that the “coexistence between the exploiters and the exploited” was impossible. From his perspective, youth should fight against the exploiters “even if they infiltrate our movement.”75 It is not surprising that Perón manipulated a rhetoric based on presumed anticapitalist stances. What is surprising is that he chose youth as the addressee for his rhetoric, which located youth as the harbinger of an ideological, if also generational, renovation. It was not accidental, then, that radicalized young people who engaged with Peronism in the late 1960s referred to this letter as their foundational text: it showed a leader willing to make of Peronism a “national liberation movement” akin to others in the Third World.76
Perón’s messages helped shape the new young addressees, many of whom, by the early 1970s, supported guerrilla groups. In the context of negotiations with the military regime to call elections, Perón doubled his efforts to court youth. Significantly, his recognition of the role of the “special formations”—his euphemism for the guerrillas—came in a cassette to be played in a meeting of university students in 1971. After thanking “the wonderful youth who know how to fight,” he reiterated his plea for trasvasamiento generacional without delay: “this is the hour of youth,” he said.77 Responding to Perón’s order, youth groups coming from different ideological backgrounds coalesced in 1972. The unified JP tried to keep shared positions regarding what youth stood for. In practical matters, they all agreed that the members of JP should be under thirty years old. Moreover, they all rejected the “bourgeois” definition of youth as a “golden age”; instead they viewed youth as a “political fact” meant to infuse Peronism with “ideological vitality.”78 Yet they disagreed about what kind of political fact and ideology youth embodied. The discrepancies were apparent in the JP foundational event, when only one leader supported the “special formations.” By embodying the allure of armed struggle among youth, however, Montoneros rapidly rose as the dominant force. In fact, the JP organizational structure mirrored the Montoneros’: it was divided into seven regional units, and its cadres were appointed directly by the Montoneros’ leadership.79
The radicalized JP channeled and reflected the rapid Peronization of youth. Leader of street rallies, the JP was also the first group to side with Perón when he chose his delegate in Argentina, Héctor Cámpora, to run for the presidency in the elections to be held in March of 1973. While all candidates courted the three million youth who had never cast their vote, a survey showed that “four out of six will elect Cámpora.”80 The Peronist ticket received 49.5 percent of the vote, including most of the youth vote. Cámpora’s government did partially recognize the importance of the JP and Montoneros in the process leading to the elections. In fact, his cabinet was composed of all the factions converging in Peronism, ranging from Perón’s private secretary, the rightist José López Rega (appointed minister of social welfare and soon-to-be-founder of the parapolice group Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, or the Triple A) to three JP allies in the Ministries of Education, the Interior, and Foreign Relations. The JP only had eight representatives but gained influence in Córdoba, Salta, Mendoza, Buenos Aires, and Santa Cruz. On May 25, when Cámpora was sworn in, the JP had reasons to celebrate. In his inaugural address, Cámpora thanked the “wonderful youth” and asked, “How could this triumph not belong to the youth who gave everything—family, friends, life—for a Peronist fatherland?”81
Under the slogan “to support, defend, and control the popular government,” the Montoneros and the JP embarked upon an organization of mass fronts soon to be known as the Revolutionary Tendency, in which a youth interpellation prevailed. Supporting the government, a communiqué explained, meant also defending it against “external and internal enemies” and controlling how it fulfilled “the popular will.” As scholars Silvia Sigal and Eliseo Verón have argued while analyzing this document—as well as the editorials in JP’s weekly El Descamisado—the youth groups, like other “vanguards,” positioned themselves as spokespersons of “the people” and claimed the right to indicate who the traitors and the loyalists were, two prerogatives thus far reserved for the “primary word” of the Peronist discursive space: that of Perón himself. The Tendency strove in vain not to lose ground within a movement that was conceived of as a venue for accessing “the people” they aimed to speak for and organize.82 Notably, it strove to organize the “people” by appropriating a youthful framework, perhaps because they viewed their place within Peronism as coded generationally. Aside from the JP, the most important fronts were the Juventud Trabajadora Peronista (JTP, Working Peronist Youth), the UES, and the Juventud Universitaria Peronista (JUP, Peronist University Youth). Their actions were determined by their willingness to belong to a movement that soon after the elections turned to the right. They were, though, the largest youth organizations ever in Argentina, both affirming and neglecting “youth” as political actor.
Launched in April of 1973, the JUP helped amplify the Peronization of university students initiated in the late 1960s. Unlike previous Peronist student groups, the JUP valued the university as a legitimate site to battle “cultural and economic dependency” following overarching tenets. First, the JUP suggested that all students, no matter their majors, should conduct both manual and intellectual work in an effort to acclimatize themselves to a future society in which the divide would no longer exist. Second, the JUP proposed to reinforce the funding for “priority schools or careers” like engineering and veterinary medicine that would ideally help overcome “economic dependency.”83 Third, the JUP did not evaluate university autonomy positively: inasmuch as the universities were not to be “islands” but dependent on the broader political situation, they agreed that the government might rule them, beginning with the appointment of their authorities.84 Although as early as February of 1974 that position vis-à-vis university autonomy would help to pass a law that would be used against the politicized students, during Cámpora’s term the JUP was influential enough to lobby the government over the appointment of rectors, notably the UBA’s, historian and “national thinker” Rodolfo Puiggrós.
The UBA was one of the strongholds of the Tendency, a site to enact imagined and material battles and to build a “liberated fatherland.” The first enemy that the JUP sought to battle was continuismo, that is, the continuity of practices and personnel from the military regime. While continuismo was battled in all schools, it was perceived as intolerable at the law school, since many professors had collaborated, as advisers and judges, with the creation of a legal system to repress militants. As soon as Puiggrós was appointed rector, students took over the law school and other school buildings—as a part of a tide of “takeovers”—to prevent “antipopular” professors and staff from entering.85 In those days, both the educational authorities and the UBA’s rector passed a series of political-administrative changes to fulfill the motto of “opening the university to the people.” The minister of education—an “ally” of the JUP, Dr. Jorge Taiana—resolved to shelve all restrictions on admissions to the universities. As a result, enrollment increased from a total of 280,000 in 1972 to 390,000 in 1974, when, at the UBA alone, 80,000 new students registered.86 Puiggrós was rector for only four months, but made the decision to support classes teaching “national liberation,” including mandatory classes on popular movements. He also discontinued the subsidies granted by “yanqui foundations,” and enacted the ban on holding professorial positions
along with jobs in “multinational companies.”87
Juventud Universitaria Peronista rally, Buenos Aires, September 1973. Archivo Fotográfico, Archivo General de la Nación, Box 883, File 15.
For the students attracted to the JUP, these actions and measures seemed to pave the way for recrafting the role of the university and the students in the “liberation process.” In 1973 and early 1974, the endeavors for “connecting the university to the people” were the ones which both generated further student engagement and allowed for larger recruitment for the JUP. In the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the UBA, for example, the Peronist professors, authorities, and students negotiated an agenda to relate each discipline to the “people and the popular government.” While at the School courses on “Latin American Revolutionary Thought” and “History of the Popular Struggles” prevailed, the sociology students worked in government agencies and as consultants for unions; the anthropology students helped create a Third World Museum; the educational science students conducted literacy campaigns and contributed materials to adult schooling; and the psychology students did practical outreach in the Greater Buenos Aires area.88 Many of them alternated their student- and university-based militancy with political work at the locales the JP opened in working-class neighborhoods. In Lanús, medical students staffed first-aid clinics and psychology students gave psychological advising and family counseling. The students at the University of Córdoba pursued analogous initiatives, with a focus on vaccinations and literacy campaigns as well.89