Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  In 1971–72, however, the public perception of the “drug problem” began to change significantly, and this included the emergence of new actors and regulations as well as an increased media focus. Although the press quoted police officers who asserted that it was necessary to “prevent [drug consumption] rather than alarm” the population, the reports that insistently popped up in lifestyle magazines helped build persistent and dramatic tropes. One of them was the “spiraling model,” that is, the belief that youth who used amphetamines and marijuana initiated a process that would lead to their use of “hard drugs.” Cases of dubious authenticity were cited to show how “miscommunication” and “breakdown” prevailed among families of drug users. Only “well-constituted” families could keep their youth safe by exercising a “discreet” yet permanent surveillance over them.13 Alongside the media, other actors played key roles in the “drug problem,” such as the federal police, which in 1971 publicized the birth of its Narcotics Division through several spectacular raids.14 According to police statistics, as soon as the Narcotics Division was born, drug-related detentions multiplied, notably among the labile category of “detainees in prevention” (those in the company of “traffickers”) which went from 1,410 in 1970 to 2,610 in 1971, including 619 underage boys and 405 girls. Police data showed, in addition, that the trafficking of marijuana had skyrocketed over a two-year period: while 9 kilos had been seized in raids conducted in 1969, 57 kilos were seized in the first six months of 1971.15 In this respect, the officers with the Narcotics Division insisted on including marijuana in the official list of prohibited drugs, a demand supported by editorialists and legal specialists alike.16 It was in mid-1971 when the Ministry of Social Welfare endorsed a decree prohibiting the sale of amphetamines without medical prescription and making marijuana an “illegal drug.”

  The Ministry of Social Welfare became a leading actor in the shaping of the “drug problem,” and it forged new alliances, notably with the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). In the summer of 1972, the minister of social welfare, Captain Francisco Manrique, announced the creation of the Comisión Nacional de Toxicomanía y Narcóticos (National Committee of Narcotics and Toxicology). Chaired by the minister and composed of delegates from the Narcotics Division and the School of Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), the committee’s purpose was to coordinate policies that stopped drug trade and consumption. Its creation was fueled by the arrival of representatives of President Richard Nixon’s administration.17 They were neither the first nor the last. As historian Paul Gootenberg has shown, the Nixon administration played a key role in recasting hemispheric relations in terms of a “drug problem,” promoting the creation of copious ad-hoc committees.18 Hence, having identified Argentina as a transshipment point for “hard narcotics” to the United States (substantiated by repeated seizures of heroin coming from Marseille to Argentina, with the New York City as final destination) the BNDD established in Buenos Aires its headquarters for South America. According to the report filed by U.S. officers, who visited Latin America to map governmental responses to the “narcotics problem,” Argentina ranked high. It was the only country which had thus far signed a “bilateral treaty of understanding” with the United States, under which the minister of social welfare and the U.S. ambassador presided over a bi-national committee on the “drug problem” and under which the U.S. government committed itself to providing training, equipment, and other “material and human resources.”19

  Beginning in 1973, the understanding about drugs reached between the Ministry of Social Welfare and the U.S. Embassy had powerful effects. The ultra-rightist minister López Rega signed a treaty with U.S. ambassador Robert C. Hill to gain access to resources for expanding “the intelligence aspects to stop the internal and external drug trade.” In a press conference, the minister publicized things that perhaps had to remain in the shadows: “our mutual commitment,” he said, “is to struggle against drugs and subversion alike.”20 López Rega’s direct involvement in the “drug problem” had at least two major consequences. First, the Ministry of Social Welfare began to receive funds other than those assigned in annual congressional budgets. The ministry did not have to account for these extra funds, either in Argentina or to the U.S. authorities. Rumors suggested that some of the anti-drug intelligence funds provided in the form of U.S. aid were funneled into the creation of the later notorious Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (Triple A), a parapolice group that, as I briefly discuss below, violently attacked left-wing militants and activists.21 Second, that understanding allowed López Rega to create a legal, drug-related means for repression. In this respect, the Narcotics Division, which in 1975 turned into a department, acquired an even more prominent role and most of its members received training in the United States.22 Moreover, the increased funding received by the ministry made the creation of the Centro Nacional de Reeducación Social (CENARESO, National Center of Social Reeducation) possible. Between 1973 and 1975, CENARESO functioned as a pro-ministry entity. Its director was an obscure doctor named Carlos Cagliotti, who participated in the making of Law 20771 on “narcotics.”23

  Congress passed Law 20771 in September of 1974, helping create a legal link between youth, deviancy, and subversion. Strongly influenced by CENARESO’s proposals and information, the Executive Power urged representatives to help “stop the wave of addiction” that, the bill stated, had “increased 500 percent in two years.” The representatives responded positively. Besides rising penalties for the production and distribution of all “narcotics and psychotropic drugs,” the law dubbed as “aggravated offenses” those committed by people who encourage consumption by underage youths. The law included three other novelties. First, it mandated that all drug-related offenders would be subjected to federal justice. Second, it stipulated that drug possession, “even if it is for personal use,” was to be penalized by one to six years in prison. Finally, the law specified that any offenders proven to have “physical or psychic addiction to drugs,” might be mandated to undergo obligatory rehabilitation as part of their penalties.24 In the months that followed the passage of the law, the most debated issue was the subjection of drug-related offenses to federal justice, that is, to the highest judicial system in the country. One defendant of the novelty explained that this decision was based on the fact that “drug addiction” was related to national security: in pursuing their addictions, he added, young people could fall into transnational delinquent and “extremist networks.”25

  This legal framework established links between youth, drugs, and “subversion” and materialized in new conditions for youth sociability and politics. First, in illegalizing consumption and endorsing a reinforcement of police monitoring over sites of youth interaction, Law 20771 criminalized youth leisure patterns. In the summer of 1975, for example, the chamber that joined the owners of entertainment locales—dance clubs, concert stadiums, and night clubs—wrote letters to the minister of the interior to complain about the visits of the Narcotics Division to their establishments. They pointed out that policemen deployed “large weapons” and “harassed men and women,” while they searched for drugs, an occurrence that had led the youth clientele to refrain from going out at night. Throughout 1975, numerous reports likewise spoke of police raids at schools, plazas, and concerts. In the case of rock music, police monitoring resulted in fewer performances and this created hardships for musicians. Some, like Claudio Gabis, Moris, and Pappo, went abroad to acquire professional training or create new bands. In any case, the rock scene began to evaporate.26 In addition, some of the youth harassed in those sites probably were charged as “offenders” and sent to rehabilitation. Dr. Cagliotti proudly announced that, in mid-1975, the CENARESO had received “1,425 boys between sixteen and twenty-one.”27

  The second connection between youth, drugs, and politics as framed by the “national security” ideology implied the involvement of radical political militants, notably guerrillas, in drug trafficking or consumption. As early
as 1970, for example, La Razón insisted that Montonero leader Mario Firmenich was trafficking in drugs to get money and weapons.28 Although groundless, these reports tried to endow rumors with a halo of credibility. This was the case of newspaper reports detailing “spectacular” actions that the guerrillas carried out. In January of 1974, for example, the ERP attacked an army battalion in Azul, Buenos Aires. There several members of the military and one dozen guerrillas died. In its coverage of the episodes, the press focused on the conclusions of a supposed psychiatric report of “seventy young guerrillas” that claimed the ERP had planned the attack by timing the effects of amphetamines over the fighters. Yet because of a “miscalculation,” the psychiatrists went on, the guerrillas ended up in the battlefield “depressed and feeling all the possible side effects of the drugs: they became their worst enemies.”29 Rapidly, radical political groups publicized their opposition to drug use (while they tightened rules for preventing their militants from using them) and tried to dismantle what they dubbed a “propaganda operation orchestrated by the CIA and right-wing Peronism.”30 Regardless of their efforts, the link between political and cultural “subversion” embodied in youth became commonsensical, helping pave the way for increasing repression.

  Beginning in January of 1974 and accelerating in the months to follow, the political scenario disappeared and the spaces for youth politics vanished. In fact, Perón unleashed his “counter-subversive war” right after the ERP attacked the army battalion. He ordered the resignation of the governor of Buenos Aires (an ally to left-wing Peronism) and mandated a reform of the Penal Code so as to increase penalties for a whole range of political activities now dubbed subversive. He also restituted repressive legislation discontinued in the short “democratic spring” of 1973.31 This was the context in which he expelled the pro-Montonero Revolutionary Tendency from his movement, accusing them of being “Marxist infiltrators.” Furthermore, Perón promoted the passing of a new law to regulate public universities, which was one of the last pillars of left-wing Peronism. The student movement at large, and the JUP in particular, were marginalized from the accords that Perón reached with other politicians.32 Passed in March, the law tightened governmental control over the universities as it gave the Executive Power the right to name rectors. It also diminished the power of alumni in the university government (and increased the staff’s) and, most basically, outlawed “politics from the classrooms.”33 Convinced that the new law would serve as a repressive tool, the JUP abandoned its submissive politics (they had tried not to confront Perón’s decisions) and joined the Communist and Radical students to protest. It was too late: Perón’s government not only left the law untouched but also prohibited rallies and imprisoned three hundred students.34

  In launching its “authority-reconstitution” project, the Peronist government focused on the secondary schools as well. Perón named new authorities for the 1974 school year, which set as their most pressing goal the achievement of order and discipline in schools across the country. In a widely distributed memo, the new authorities hyperbolically depicted the experience of student organizing as “chaotic” and oriented to the “subversion” of all hierarchies within and potentially outside the schools. Appealing to teachers and parents, they stated that their highest priority was to “avoid indiscipline by any means,” especially when “student political groups” carried it out. To that end, authorities asked principals to notify them and the police of any “suspicious movement,” to prevent its spread and “contagious effects,” whether those movements implied sit-ins or strikes. The memo forcefully concluded that the teachers’ and principals’ authority should be upheld “at any cost.”35 Intimidating in its tone, the memo incited reactions. While part of the press concurred with the “efforts to discipline the rioting adolescents,” others called for combining “sticks with at least one carrot”—such as curriculum changes.36 As their university counterparts, the Peronist and Communist groups in the secondary school student movement tried to mobilize against the “repressive regulations” and promised to organize rallies and a round of “school-to-school battles.” Reporting to his political superiors, a Communist student acknowledged that after “that infamous memo” there was no chance of mobilizing.37

  As 1974 went on, the education institutions became unfriendly spaces for young activists. When Isabel Martínez de Perón was sworn in, the ultra-rightist sectors of the Peronist movement gained even more positions of power within her government. One epitome of that ultra-right was the minister of education, Dr. Oscar Ivanissevich—a veteran Peronist militant, who had already occupied that position during Perón’s first presidency. In a speech transmitted on all radio stations and television channels (something unusual for a minister of education, which signaled the significance of his position at that juncture) he questioned the “youth who deprecate what their parents and the country give them.” He stated that the only goal of his administration would be to “deter the climate of subversion from the secondary schools and the university.”38 To accomplish his goal, he ordered universities to be closed until they were “normalized,” which included both intervention as well as the resumption of barriers to entry. As for the secondary level, the minister also ordered intervention in schools where the principals were not willing to “recover their authority” vis-à-vis the students, and he mandated the closure of the student centers at the beginning of the 1975 school year.39 At that point in time, though, the government had already passed a decree establishing a state of siege, which restricted most civil rights and limited the legitimacy of any political practice—let alone the illegal activity of the revolutionary groups like the ERP and Montoneros that endorsed armed struggle.

  Alongside the changes in legal frameworks, the repressive policies initiated in 1974 took on ever more violent forms. Between 1974 and 1976, parapolice groups such as the Córdoba-based Comando Libertadores de América and the Triple A, which functioned at a national level, acted broadly. In a sort of division of labor, while the regular security forces—the police and, since 1975, also the military—fought against guerrilla combatants both urban and rural, the parapolice forces focused on social and political militants, including many students. As early as March of 1974, Hugo Hanssen, a student at the University of Lomas affiliated with the JUP, was killed by an “unidentified group,” as a police report observed. He was participating in a takeover of the university building meant to oppose the appointment of a rector identified with the previous military regime and to protest against the new university law.40 In August of that same year, the Triple A took credit for the assassination of eighteen-year-old Eduardo Beckermann, a leader with the Peronist UES. They were but the first two student victims of ultra-rightist violence. Prudent estimates suggest that these parapolice organizations assassinated nine hundred people between late 1973 and early 1976: one half of the victims were members of Peronist Youth and almost two hundred were women.41

  The “guerrilla woman” epitomized the sexual, cultural, and political meanings of subversion in mid-1970s Argentina, when the armed forces were getting ready to fix what many depicted as chaotic violence coming from both left and right. Doubtless, however, when the armed forces thought of the enemy, the image was just such an irregular leftist “army” that also included young women. Brigadier General José D’Odorico, a leading counterinsurgency expert trained in France and the United States, alerted his comrades about what to know about “them.” He posited that “she” was the final product of an ideological and political task through which a ubiquitous “Communist enemy” took advantage of female traits such as “sensibility, tenacity, tolerance to pain, and passionate commitments.” In doing so, he argued, the enemy “emptied her spiritual and cultural content, creating a humanoid.” The “guerrilla woman” had lost any trace of humankind and, specially, of womanhood. Talking to an imaginary peer, D’Odorico urged him to understand that “in front of you, or more likely on your back, you will see a being that only keeps the empty body of a wo
man.” The conclusion was plain: the military might break their gender prejudices and, simply, shoot first.42 The armed forces prepared themselves for barring with all prejudices in order to struggle against such an “enemy” that, in their perception, and in that of large portions of Argentina’s society, promised to erode all sense of order.

  Youth and the Production of “Order”

  On March 24, 1976, in a climate that the media dubbed as chaotic, a long-awaited military coup d’état took place. The lifestyle magazine Gente (one of the most committed advocates of the new regime) published a half-page picture of four boys painting a wall, titled “Pongamos la casa en orden [Let’s put the house in order],” three weeks after the coup. “No, they are not members of a political group,” the caption explains to readers. “They are students from a technical school who decided to paint their school walls, which were full of graffiti of calls to meetings and rallies . . . this is a symptom, and a good one, that some youth understood that el orden empieza por casa [order begins at home].”43 In a few weeks, the caption suggests, the effects of the new regime had begun to spread even to the most “disorderly” milieu. The four boys had engaged (of their own accord, the caption clarified) in the making of the order that Gente and thousands of anonymous people claimed. While many civilian institutions (the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, the dominant media, and business boards) actively endorsed the new regime, broad segments of Argentines deployed what scholars call “reactive consensus”: a silent but real carte blanche for the military to “restore order.”44 That restoration implied reversing the modernizing sociocultural dynamics unfolding in the 1960s and early 1970s, which had helped shape youth experiences. Janus-faced, youth came to epitomize disorder and the potential for producing a new, “counter-subversive” order.