Through blending overt prescriptions and practical mandates, thus, militants delineated the male, heterosexual, young body as the most suitable for carrying out a revolutionary process. That was not a given body but one that had to be carved out, which entailed regulating corporeal practices. A portrayal of two militants with the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas (FAP, Peronist Armed Forces) who were killed by the police in 1971 illustrates how some of these regulations were imagined. A friend of Manuel Belloni, age twenty-three, and Diego Ruy Frondizi, age twenty-two, wrote a public letter to his friends to pay them homage. He commented on how Diego, especially, used to enjoy “plentiful meals” and “beautiful women,” and on how hard it was for him to learn to shoot a gun properly. Diego had overcome his “weaknesses”: he had not only learned how to shoot but also how to “control his appetites”—referring to both the eating and sexual aspects—when preparing “for action.” Diego and Manuel represented the triumph of revolutionary will: their youthful male bodies were a surface over which they had worked hard. “I try to adopt your discipline of young and courageous men,” their friend said to them and concluded, “revolutionary militants: what else could a guy like me ask for?”100
This letter may help reframe what Schmucler intuitively posited regarding the splintering of the revolutionaries between a “political” (ideal) and a “desiring” (concrete, corporeal) man. First, even though in this portrayal it is possible to view that desire or “appetite” was regulated, it is also possible to infer that it was directed to an ideal: “young and courageous men, revolutionary militants,” the letter writer asked, “what else could a guy like me ask for?” Second, there was a particular type of body that served as the conduit for reaching that ideal. Mutually conditioning, the revolutionary militancy in the early 1970s required and produced resilient bodies, and young men, such as Diego and Manuel, were culturally better prepared to shape them. Third, the styles of militancy and the parameters for political promotions that the revolutionary militants endorsed revolved around the praise of action and were shaped according to the potentials and possibilities of young men. An eminently practical creation that took elements from mass culture—such as the celebration of the young, slender, and healthy body—the shaping of the resilient bodies also helped materialize the feeling of imminence that swept across the revolutionary political culture of the early 1970s, with all its celebration of action and its rejection of intellectualism. In this culture, the ideal combatant was one that had surpassed daily proofs of activism, which were also the markers to assess his consciousness. The body was made the carrier of consciousness.
Both as a surface and as lived experience, the youthful body was at the center of Argentina’s culture and politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The unprecedented explosion of the youthful body in the public sphere (from magazine covers to fashion catalogues to street demonstrations and plazas) went hand in hand with the further renewal of the mores and options ruling the “when” and “how” of its display and interaction in the most intimate spheres. Both movements, in fact, brought significant transformations to the ways in which eroticism, sexuality, and politics were “embodied” through poner el cuerpo. To begin with, the young woman was the one who became the protagonist of new patterns of eroticism as they related, for example, to the ubiquitous interplay between dress and nudity. I tried to consistently avoid that word “liberation” to define this dynamic inasmuch as, among other things, the ideals and notions of beauty and desirability that many young women upheld (and advertisers and fashion designers decisively reinforced) implied a new kind of bodily exposure and a new ideal body, which required and shaped the techniques of self-management necessary to produce it. In many ways, thus, the expansion of female bodily exposure brought about incipient mandates for internalizing capillary forms of self-control. As the local feminists and gay rights groups as well as left-wing intellectuals soon pointed out, the eroticization based upon the rising display of the young female body to a large degree implied its reification. Doubtlessly, this is the major reason why the word “liberation” is not the most suitable. Although further study is needed, it is possible to argue that this dynamics of eroticism did not necessarily have “disempowering effects” for young women either: it did not make women more subjected to male power, as one radical feminist has argued when analyzing this process for England—partially because assuming that entails overlooking the ways through which eroticism was connected with other transformations of sexuality.101
Less visible yet perhaps more lasting than the exposure of the youthful body in the public scene, that body was at the center of changing sexual mores and practices. In this respect, the normalization of premarital sex that had occurred in the 1960s paved the way to an incipient new understanding: the disengagement of (hetero)sexuality from marriage or its impending marriage. This implied a relocation of the legitimate site for heterosexuality, and set in motion a (sometimes surfacing) debate about sexual equality between men and women, about the persistent double standard. While these new arrangements about heterosexuality seemed to have cut across young people at large, sex did attain different meanings among the revolutionary militants, especially since it was moved from the intimate to the party or group milieu. In some cases, the individual’s political moral (his or her commitment to a revolutionary project) could be measured against the backdrop of his or her sexual mores and behaviors. In the most Puritan models, the “normal” excluded behaviors accepted in segments of the broader sexual culture (for example, sex outside the established, heterosexual couple). In any case, revolutionary groups endowed their militants with formal and informal mandates for regulating sex as well as other bodily practices.
Revolutionary militants produced a resilient body, conceived of as young and, largely, masculine. The youths who engaged in revolutionary politics were hardly alone in “disciplining” their bodies to fit into an ideal: they shared the “disciplining drive” with their generational female peers who pursued, for example, dieting practices to fit into their tight blue jeans. The particularities of the resilient body consisted in that it crystallized a series of practices and incarnated values related to commitment and will. The resilient body was nothing if not gender-based: amid deep-seated cultural understandings about the “role” of women in the public and political spheres, young women—especially—found it hard to comply with the requirements of producing that sort of body. In a political culture that validated, above all, activism—vis-à-vis “intellectualism,” for example—most women were steadily excluded from leading positions, from escalating to the “sublime” way of poner el cuerpo among revolutionary militants, that is, of becoming a guerrilla combatant. As the 1970s went on, the state repression over revolutionaries did not discriminate between “guerrillas,” “militants,” or “activists”: they all put their bodies on the line, they were all targets of parapolice, police, and military repression.
8 Youth and the “Authority-Reconstitution” Project
In late 1975, when the civilian government of Isabel Martínez de Perón had already authorized the military to repress social and political activities, groups of neighbors from Buenos Aires and from the distant city of Comodoro Rivadavia wrote to the minister of the interior asking for more security in their communities, which they viewed as threatened by youths engaged either in “subversive actions,” “drug consumption,” “sexual orgies,” or all of the above.1 They created a link between youth, sexually and culturally deviant practices, and subversion—the main characteristics of the “enemy within” that jeopardized the fabric of the national body that the military, in March of 1976, was supposed to restore. This chapter looks at the unfolding of a project destined to “reconstitute authority,” which promised to reverse the cultural, political, and sexual changes that Argentines had lived through as part of the modernizing dynamics that, since the 1950s, privileged youth as its key embodiment.
Beginning in 1974, a broad arc of conservative actors pushed for a hiera
rchical restructuring of Argentina’s society, thus reversing what they envisioned as the lost authority of parents, teachers, and politicians at the hands of their children, students, or “unprofessional” militants. In their view, that reconstitution was pressing, and it was the only guarantee for preventing what they hyperbolically depicted as the final dissolution of Argentina’s society. Deeply embedded in the Cold War imagery surrounding national security were actors who made youth the “enemy within.” Not all young people conformed to the emerging image, but the face of that “enemy” was young: the guerrilla woman or man, the “drug addict,” the so-called sexual deviant. In this respect, new legislation regarding the distribution of contraception, political participation in schools and universities, and drug consumption, all passed throughout 1974, led toward the shaping and containment of that figure, whereby also setting limits to the sociability, sexuality, and political organizing of flesh-and-blood young women and men. That legislation served to create and amplify the trope of deviancy surrounding youth and helped create consensus for increasingly authoritarian projects that promised to restore “order” to every sphere of social life.
Although the “authority-reconstitution” project started before March of 1976, the military junta that imposed Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–83) added new, dramatically refocused, overtones. The military imposed its authoritarian order through enforcement of the basic mechanism of state terror: the systematic kidnapping, torture, and “disappearance” of their so-called enemies. The victims of state terror were overwhelmingly young: the young men and women that had made the ranks of the student, party, and guerrilla groups that renewed Argentina’s politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Less because of their young age, they became the targets of the military’s deadly project because they had belonged to revolutionary movements. This does not preclude the fact that the military set the stage to discipline youth at large, which in their view was the key to preventing another “subversive generation” from spreading. The responses of young women and men to these disciplining attempts varied greatly. Although further study is needed, the last segment of the chapter begins to tackle some of these responses.
Neither Sex nor Drugs . . . nor Politics
The “authority-reconstitution” project started as soon as Juan Perón came back to the country in June of 1973 and was forcefully crystallized throughout 1974, first with Perón and then after his death on July 1 with his wife Isabel as president. That project involved the revamping of Argentina’s society, culture, and politics in ways that touched upon the experiences and expectations that young people had carved out throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1974, legislative developments restricted the distribution of the birth control pill and prohibited the dissemination of information regarding contraception; increased penalties for the trafficking and consumption of so-called illegal drugs; and stopped schools and universities from being legitimate sites for political activism. By the end of that year, an imposed state of siege (that would last until 1983) closed the possibilities of legal political activism and restricted youth sociability. Although it did not preclude the broadening of extralegal repression, a façade of legality allowed the state and a broad range of political actors to delineate the figure of the “enemy within,” as historian Marina Franco has recently studied.2 That façade covered the “authority-reconstitution” project during the biennium 1974–75: its scope and pitfalls in those years forecast and shaped what came next.
The “authority-reconstitution” project crafted a sexual politics that repositioned conservative Catholic groups at the forefront of decision-making bodies. In January of 1974, the League of Mothers asked the police to interrupt the circulation of novels such as Manuel Puig’s The Buenos Aires Affair, because they “violated the sense of morals.” While it is likely that one year earlier the league’s claim would have gone unheard, now, as in the “old days with [Gen. Juan Carlos] Onganía,” one report indicated, the police entered bookstores, threw the novels away, and imprisoned booksellers and editors.3 The police deployed similar raids vis-à-vis gay sociability and fads, to the extent that the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH, Homosexual Liberation Front) distributed a pamphlet cautioning readers on the “police efforts to reimpose a Cary Grant image” by cutting young men’s hair and obligating them to change shoes and colored clothes for more sober and “manly” items. The FLH rightly understood that this campaign was part of a broader backlash geared to prevent “social and political revolution from spreading.”4 Along the same lines of the campaigns and the censorship of books, in mid-1974 the never-dismantled Board of Film Qualification appointed a new president, the film critic Miguel Paulino Tato, who in only six months prohibited the release of sixty-one movies, “whose sexual or political content,” he argued, “would damage the already weakened ‘internal front.’”5 Explicitly, sex and politics intermingled in his mind, as they did in the rationale informing other major public decisions.
Framed by a larger concern about “Argentina’s secular depopulation,” Perón and his minister of social welfare, José López Rega, passed a decree that made it more difficult to acquire contraception, notably the “Pill,” and prohibited public hospitals from promoting any birth-control methods as of March 1974. As historian Karina Felitti has shown, evidence suggests the decree was unevenly enforced, and it is likely that it affected chiefly poor women, who relied on the public health system—in contrast to middle- and upper-class women, who relied on the less supervised private system.6 In any case, the rationale for that policy is significant since it allowed for the rearticulation and broader dissemination of a discourse permeated by gender and sexual concerns in the public milieu of the mid-1970s. Utilizing a common argument among conservative Catholic groups, the decree stated that birth control had “distracted young people from their natural duties as protagonists of the future of the fatherland, and denaturalized women’s maternal role.”7 Birth control represented the pernicious effects of “liberalizing” trends, which were embodied in young people’s sexual mores and ended up by subverting the gender order tout court. Right-wing Peronists and conservative Catholics did not cast doubts: young people potentially “subverted” the sexual, gendered, and political terrain. In their view, that dynamic corroded the “future of the fatherland” and could only be countered by returning sex to its “legitimate” role and site: procreation and marriage within a stable family.
The appeal to “family values” helped create consensus over repressive solutions. In late 1974, the Ministry of Social Welfare organized a large conference titled “First Encounter of the Family.” In his inaugural address, Minister López Rega pointed out that “guns, drugs, and pornography are annihilating our nationhood,” which could be recovered, he said, only through the “reconstitution of the family.” Rather than being a policy-making forum, the event set the scene for staging a conservative discourse that touched on politics, culture, and sexuality as they related to youth.8 Most directly, the meeting was the background for the launch of an Episcopal pastoral for the years 1975 and 1976 on “Marriage and Family,” an endeavor that came about when the Catholic hierarchy unleashed a campaign to silence the voices of the radicalized laypeople and the Third World Priests.9 For the depurated Catholic community, the defense of “society’s basic cell” seemed all the more urgent since, as the archbishop of Rosario argued in a well-publicized letter—replicating the ministry’s tropes—“our families are losing their youth to political violence, promiscuity, and drug addiction.”10 Like all conservative Catholics and right-wing Peronists, he believed that the family was defenseless and in need of the state as a key agent for activating an “authority-reconstitution” project on three fronts: politics, sex, and drugs.
The “drug problem” was linked to national security through the passing of Law 20771 on narcotics, also in 1974. Up to that year, that “problem” had grown slowly. In contrast to the rising interest it garnered in the United States and Western Europ
e, by the mid-1960s, the media in Argentina only focused on an experiment that a group of psychoanalysts had developed with lysergic acid, one of the components of LSD. This practice was legendary, in part because actors, filmmakers, and some left-wing intellectuals underwent it, although, as one report noted, the group comprised “no more than three hundred people.” By 1967 it was hard to obtain the drug from laboratories, and the experience was discontinued.11 Also in 1967, some reports began to refer to “marijuana.” Besides explaining the characteristics of cannabis and the fact that Argentines imported it from Brazil and Paraguay, the weekly Primera Plana organized a “smoking session” and concluded that “it does not create addiction” and reminded readers that it was neither “an alkaloid (it does not produce secondary effects)” nor “a narcotic (it does not produce habit).” That last note was significant: technically, marijuana did not match the two kinds of substances that the Penal Code considered illegal. Further, a would-be controversial reform of that code in 1968, which augmented the penalties for drug trafficking, stipulated that the possession of one dose of any drug for personal consumption was not to be penalized.12
Age of Youth in Argentina Page 31
