Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  Although without framing it into the “proletarian morals” that the PRT-ERP aimed to carve out, the revolutionary Peronist groups also promoted an activist style militancy. That became apparent, for example, in the portrayals they made out of their particular heroic figure, Eva Perón. Along with highlighting her identification with a “perennial” revolutionary Peronist ethos and her unconditional loyalty to Perón, most memories pointed out the intensity of her will to “give herself to the People.”71 The portrayals of her life were flush with descriptions of superhuman activity and illustrated with pictures of either a smiling young Eva with untied hair (“Evita Montonera”) or, by other images that showed her working with tied hair, usually at dusk, and with bags under her eyes.72 The reports depict the side effects of Eva’s “giving everything to the people,” namely illness and death. Further, the Peronist press did point out certain side effects in portrayals of less famous militants as well, as happened with Manuel. In 1972, the Montonero leadership sent Manuel to politically organize a district thus far overlooked, Rosario: “Manuel did the work of ten people,” the portrayal read, “he was desperate to undertake everything: pamphleteering, military training, street rallies.” Yet the portrayal shows that he suffered from the consequences: “his health and his marriage deteriorated, since Manuel viewed them as secondary.” Ironically, however, at the same time that the portrayal recognized the side effects of Manuel’s activist style of militancy, it suggested that Manuel (as everyone else) could only overcome the situation by “doubling his efforts.”73

  Coupled with the lure of these heroic figures, the eagerness to speed up the political times helped condition a style of militancy that required a resilient, youthful body. In their memories, former militants convey the corporality of their engagement. For example, one militant with the Peronist Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios (UES, Secondary School Student Union) narrates her involvement in terms of a passage from laziness to the complete use of her body. She portrays herself as a “neighborhood girl” who, after joining the UES, became “a machine of doing,” which included political agitation at schools, social work in slums, and eventually military training. Like other militants in revolutionary organizations, she also recalled that climbing the ladder at the UES (being “promoted”) was the result of the evaluation of her performance doing many activities which, in turn, strengthened her daily commitments.74 Looking from the vantage point of adulthood, another former Peronist militant recalled that her activities began at 7:00 A.M. and ended at 11:00 P.M. By combining nostalgia with estrangement, she noted that such devotion was only possible for a “young, healthy body.”75 In fact, physical resistance and health accounted for two attributes linked to young bodies.

  The association of resilience with the young body was also unbridled among older militants that engaged with revolutionary politics. While the key innovation in Argentine (and worldwide) politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s was indeed the involvement of young people, this has often erased the fact that adults also participated and sometimes “followed” their children. That was the case with Coty and Ramona, who engaged with the PRT while in their fifties. Mothers of two known guerrillas, they first volunteered to fix food and help the families of those who were imprisoned. As the 1970s went on, both committed to a more intense militancy: “for their strength and vitality,” one memoir recalls, “they looked twenty-something.”76 The links among resilience, youth, and action were also prominent in the case of the poet Francisco Urondo, who joined the FAR after his daughter, when he was in his forties. Commenting on his commitments, he stated that he had abandoned his “sedentary life” to assume “a gymnastic” routine that rejuvenated him.77 This entailed the attainment of the slenderness and fitness that the youthful body signified in consumer culture. Idealized in ads, that body was also at the center of the requirements of elder but “new” revolutionary militants, like Urondo.

  Urondo’s engagement with revolutionary politics and with armed struggle is paradigmatic of how the mandate poner el cuerpo created a dichotomy between “action” and “intellectualism.” In the late 1960s, the always-incomplete autonomy of the cultural and intellectual fields had vanished. The validation of artists and writers in those fields depended on extrinsic rules, such as their positioning in debates including, for example, the self-reflexive “role of the intellectual in politics.”78 Intellectuals like Urondo understood that their “role” involved abiding by corporeal requirements. Although by no means all of them made Urondo’s radical decision, in 1968 about fifty of the most renowned writers and artists wrote a letter to pay homage to Che Guevara. Besides praising his anti-imperialism and internationalism, they argued that Guevara was a hero because he had left “intellectualism” aside and had showed that Latin America was “ripe for what counts: action.”79 Although it had been part of the Peronist tradition from the 1940s onwards, this anti-intellectualism pervaded the entire “New Left” in the early 1970s and was key to the socialization of a new cohort of militants, who differentiated their involvement in politics from the one of previous leftists—“café militants,” as Eduardo’s parents were dubbed. At times critically, former militants recall the scarce attention they gave to ideological and political formation vis-à-vis their literal praise of action. Luis Salinas, a former Peronist militant, for example, recalls that “there was not much interest in political formation, neither when [you] entered nor afterwards, in fact.” He continues that “not even our own periodicals were important in our militancy: the real thing was action.”80 Action was a polysemous term, although “armed action” resounded as its most sublime meaning.

  In a militant culture that hyper-valorized action, political preparation was at times conceived as feminine. One former militant with the PRT-ERP, for example, recalls that the (all male) leadership made her responsible for teaching strategy in a school for cadres. Instead of viewing this as a “promotion,” she experienced it as an exclusion from other, more pressing political and military-oriented activities. In fact, Moral y proletarización helped set the feminization, and essentially the demeaning of political preparation, when it prescribed that pregnant women or recent mothers should “study to compensate” for their inability to perform other activities.81 Hence, a reversal of the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy occurred among revolutionary militants. The “activities of the mind,” which had long been associated with the masculine and became the dominant in a dichotomist relation with the body, were practically transferred to the feminine. While some intellectuals predicted that in a looming revolutionary society the divide mind/body would disappear altogether, it had neither vanished nor lost its capability of evoking and setting gendered hierarchies in the early 1970s.82 In the same movement in which the “activities of the mind” were linked to the feminine, they lost preeminence in favor of the resilient body, the marker of activity and action tout court, which was supposed to be masculine.

  The emphasis on an activist style of militancy and its attendant type of body helped produce and reinforce gendered hierarchies among revolutionaries, an occurrence that should not obscure a crucial novelty of the 1970s: the substantial involvement of young women in politics. Although exact figures are missing, the most prudent estimates state that, in 1973, women represented 25 percent of all the groups embracing armed struggle, yet one scholar argued that in that year they made 30 percent in the Montoneros-oriented groups and another scholar indicated that, in 1975, women accounted for 40 percent of the PRT-ERP members.83 These figures are relatively high if compared with other groups in revolutionary political cultures in 1960s and 1970s Latin America. For example, women made up no more than 5 percent of Fidel Castro’s forces in the late 1950s, and, ten years later, in the context of the radicalized Brazilian Left, they made up 20 percent. The percentages for Argentina, hence, are closer to the 30 percent of female militants and combatants who fought with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in 1979. As it happened in late 1960s Brazil and late 1970s Nicaragua, the young women joining th
e Argentine leftist groups were also more educated than the “average” young woman and than many of their male counterparts.84 The PRT leaders recognized that young women attracted to the party did not come from working-class origins and needed “reeducation” in “proletarian morals.” As one former militant recalls, the PRT (as other political forces, she claims) undervalued the fact that so many women “broke with the middle-class dreams in which we had been raised” to participate in an uncertain political dynamics.85 Their massive engagement in revolutionary politics configured a crucial indicator of the changing experiences and expectations that young women underwent throughout the 1960s and 1970s, which however did not significantly modify the organization of gender hierarchies.

  Even when most 1970s revolutionary groups upheld equalizing rhetoric, in practice women and men enforced standards of militancy associated with male, youthful bodies, which resulted in the perpetuation of men’s leadership. Just a few women, in fact, held leadership positions: only two had seats within the PRT-ERP’s Central Committee and none in the national Montoneros leadership. Some women did hold middle-range positions in both groups, and the Montoneros went a step further in creating the Agrupación Evita, which focused on organizing women at a neighborhood level, at the same time reinforcing “traditional” female roles as homemakers and providing them with a space for speaking of problems linked, for example, to domestic violence. But this experience was short-lived and limited in terms of membership.86 As the failed attempts of the PRT-ERP to create “a woman’s front” suggest, the Agrupación Evita was also an unappealing front for most male and female militants: it was devoid of the appeal of the factory and student fronts, not to mention the military one. Only a few women, however, made it to the military fronts in both groups. In late 1975, when embarked upon a rural guerrilla experience, the PRT-ERP announced it received women “in the forest.” While depicting that women and men shared the same responsibilities and daily activities, reports in the ERP press evaluated that the experience was positive because “women have helped ameliorate the living conditions, mainly issues of order and hygiene . . . and they also improved the language men use and all became more affectionate.”87 Women’s contributions, then, were associated with their most “traditional,” home-like roles and with their so-called natural tendencies to be emotional. Yet promoting the experience in itself signaled the rarity of the occurrence. Women comprised a minority of those performing the most vaulted form of action among 1970s revolutionary militants, that is, armed action. This happened partly because those receiving guerrilla training were chosen among those who proved themselves by being tireless activists. As a practical standard, it worked more effectively than any overt sexist statement to exclude women.

  At a basic, quotidian level, the requirement to be a tireless activist proved harder to sustain for women than for men, reverberating deeply rooted cultural dynamics. Although over the 1960s middle- and working-class young women had achieved greater autonomy, most were still monitored. In contrast to countries where a campus culture existed, in early 1970s Argentina the experience of living alone or with roommates was just beginning to make inroads among single youth.88 Most young women engaging in political activism lived with their parents, and that was definitively the case with secondary school students. In 1973, the all-male leaders of the principal groups active in secondary schools concurred that girls faced “many problems” in becoming activists. The UES’s leader, for example, stated that parents set tight controls over the girls’ schedules, making it hard for them to “assume commitments.”89 However, many women in their twenties, single or engaged, also faced troubles within their families. Mabel S., for example, recalls that her involvement with the JUP generated several conflicts with her parents, both workers at a textile factory in the Greater Buenos Aires area. Her parents opposed less her “revolutionary ideas” than the fact that her militancy led her to spend “all day, every day, out of the home.”90 She moved from her family home after much effort and negotiation, but it is likely that other young women could not afford such an alternative. Therefore many young women were less active than they wanted to be. That was the situation with women, young or not, who were principal caregivers. As recalled in widespread testimony, while the explicit mandates within the revolutionary groups emphasized the ideal that men and women share the domestic chores and childrearing practices, women continued to be in charge of both.91 In this way, the equalizing rhetoric clashed with the day-to-day militant practices, centered on the production and display of resilient bodies.

  In the production of those resilient bodies, suitable for revolutionary militancy, the attempts at codifying sexual behaviors and attitudes figured prominently—showing both the limit and the scope of formal mandates. With significant particularities, the ideal resembled the one upheld by most youth in the early 1970s. The PRT and the Montoneros-oriented groups endorsed the monogamous, heterosexual couple as the best antidote against sexual “liberalism.” According to a letter written by a highly admired Brazilian guerrilla (and published in a pan-leftist magazine), that couple was “in touch with the moral standards of the day” from which revolutionaries could not deviate since it prevented them from “forgetting politics for sex.”92 The leaders of Peronist and Marxist groups alike were called on to comply with that ideal by sticking to the monogamous couple and, if possible, the stable family. A portrayal of a Montonero leader, hence, highlighted the fact that he had been married for twenty years and “never even looked at another woman,” while reportedly the PRT’s maximum leader, Roberto Santucho, had to submit to a Party’s tribunal and discontinue an extramarital affair.93 The existence of that tribunal signals one particularity of the ways in which revolutionary groups handled sexuality, namely, the moving of “intimate” affairs to the party level. Former PRT-ERP militants recall, for example, that adultery or casual sex (outside of a “formal” couple) were serious issues. Understood as individualistic deviations, they could entail grave results, such as political degradation. They could be also used as ammunition against competing factions or individuals. As expected, stories of arbitrariness and hypocritical attitudes run rampant in today’s memoirs, as one case that occurred in a Montonero cell acting in a working-class neighborhood. A former militant recalls that her “political superior,” who had been involved in a “secret adulterous affair” for years, was especially harsh with others’ adultery, and never submitted himself to his subordinate fellows’ “justice.”94

  Alongside the pragmatic use of “sex as ammunition” and the ideologically based downplay of sex and eroticism as sites of liberation, the revolutionary groups may have tightened their preoccupations and regulations to adapt to the life conditions of most of their members by 1974, when they went clandestine. Some former militants recalled with surprise, for example, how they could occupy the same house, even the same bed, with fellow militants and “nothing happened.” As a former young woman concluded when commenting on one of those situations, “perhaps we had internalized the rules, or we were too afraid to be erotically moved.”95 Nonetheless, tenser situations took place as well. In his memoir, a former PRT-ERP militant narrates that he shared a so-called “operative house” with his wife and a younger female, with whom he fell in love. When the “triangle exploded,” his political superiors sent him to a “reeducation program”: they removed him from the most cherished front, the military front, and sent him to work at a meatpacking plant, with the hope that he would learn from the idealized proletariat.96

  For his part, in a telling autobiographical novel Martín Caparrós depicts the relations of the members of a Montonero “triangle” composed of an adult male, a former university-student woman, and a boy coming of age. The novel is set in 1975, after the Montoneros had passed their second normative code for disciplining members, which prohibited sexual relations outside the “constituted couple.” This was allegedly to prevent the leaking of information in what the Montoneros viewed as wartime and also, perhaps, to stren
gthen morale. In any case, the knot of the novel revolves around how the trio, living in an “operative house,” prepares to kill a “union bureaucrat.” The underlying narrative thread centers on sexual anxieties, capturing the tension between self-control and desire.97 The novel sets its characters against a backdrop of imminent death and suggests coding this tension as one between Thanatos and Eros—represented as a drive to life not confined to hetero- or homosexual desire.

  It was not coincidental that homosexual desire was represented in fiction—as in Manuel Puig’s memorable El beso de la mujer araña (1976)—yet went unmentioned in party literature. The revolutionary groups did not escape from the homophobia pervading Argentina’s culture. Rather the opposite was true. Homophobia was a venue to regulate their own members’ sexuality, and sometimes acted as way to offset any “blackmail” to which the right-wing sectors subjected the Left. Recalling their experiences as revolutionary militants, three gay activists depicted their strategies to cope with their respective groups’ mandates. One of them, a psychology student affiliated with the PRT-ERP, recalls that he never “got out of the closet.” Daniel, another PRT-ERP militant, did communicate to his superiors that he was homosexual and he was referred to a party psychologist who insisted that it was an “individualistic deviation.” Luis, a former student with the Peronist Youth, recalls having a better reception among his fellows, who pretended not to notice his sexuality.98 Luis, however, may have been fortunate: while unverified rumors spread that the PRT-ERP leaders “only” expelled homosexual militants, a journalist assures that the Montonero leaders executed two because they were not “trustworthy.”99 The Montoneros leaders’ actions would have been informed by the myth regarding the vulnerability of gays, that is, that gays were targets of blackmail and/or unable to tolerate the hardships of clandestine life, perhaps because of their “uncontrolled” sexuality. Without “moral” and physical resistance, the men whose sexual practices did not meet the heterosexual mandates were deemed unfit to bear the resilient bodies that the activist style of militancy required as proof of consciousness.