Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  “Let’s put the house in order.” Gente No. 560, April 15, 1976, 17.

  Like most Latin American military groups, the junta in Argentina deployed and was informed by a strategically vague notion of subversion. Taking root among the security forces trained in the national security doctrines, the notion of “subversion,” or “subversive Communist action,” was embedded in an enemy that from the early 1960s was regarded as already “within” the geopolitical space of the West. Under those doctrines, the security forces had the right and the duty of waging an irregular war against an enemy who, as they imagined, acted on manifold battlefronts.45 Attuned to the most conservative Catholic ideas as well, the military leaders in Argentina proposed to unleash a “missionary war” that was to be played out in the bodies and minds of those who were already, and those who potentially could become, enemies. One week after the coup, President Jorge R. Videla (1976–81), defined what the junta took for subversion: “it is not only planting bombs in the streets” but also “all social conflict, the struggle between parents and children.”46 The restoration of the principles of hierarchy and discipline was deemed crucial to winning over such a ubiquitous enemy and it required enlisting all those who held positions of authority: parents, teachers, employers. Besides framing the enterprise, the junta assigned the security forces the tasks of carrying out the bodily aspects of the mission.

  The Argentine version of state terrorism prioritized the mechanism of kidnapping, torturing, and finally “disappearing” people.47 That mechanism reached its highest point in the biennium 1976–78 and its main target was an “enemy” who in terms of age was young. The military justified their “war” on the grounds of a total struggle against the guerrilla. According to a plausible estimate, though, in 1975, when reaching their maximum capacity, the combatants for all the guerrilla groups numbered no more than twelve hundred. By late 1975, likewise, the guerrilla groups had been almost dismantled and a majority of combatants were dead. In any case, they constituted only a small fraction of about twenty thousand “disappeared” in the 340 clandestine detention centers that the security forces created throughout the country.48 Those thousands of disappeared victims of state terror had been part of a network of militants and activists coming of age politically in the 1960s and early 1970s. As the report by Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People noted, whether they were students, employees, or workers, 69 percent were between sixteen and thirty years old at the time they were kidnapped.49 By pointing this out, I do not claim that they were killed for being young: scant evidence supports the idea of a generational war, as one scholar has posited recently. Rather, as historian Steve Stern has argued for Chile, the term “politicide” seems appropriate for labeling also the Argentine junta’s resolution of annihilating one segment of the population defined less by their age than by their involvement in revolutionary projects.50

  The fact remains, however, that the military amplified the “authority-reconstitution”

  “For youth there is always a new path. Let’s follow it.” Advertisement for Flecha sneakers. Gente No. 578, August 19, 1976, 18.

  project, marked by an effort to reverse the modernizing dynamics that had shaped youth experiences as well as youth visibility. While in the 1960s and early 1970s youth had occupied a prominent position in Argentina’s visual culture, as soon as the military imposed the coup, youth vanished from one key visual realm: advertising. Off the record, one advertiser confessed to political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell that he did not dare to portray youth.51 Regardless of the reliability of the fears, available data do show that in the most widely read lifestyle magazines, Siete Días and Gente, ads for jeans and sneakers (which relied on representing their main target) were discontinued in the first months after the coup. The timing speaks for itself, since these advertisers used to increase their investments in the fall and winter seasons, that is, from March to August. It was only in August when the local brand of sneakers, Flecha Juventud, resumed its campaigns, though they sharply differed from previous years. In its campaign for 1975, for example, Flecha Juventud first showed shots of three young women and men in their early twenties and localized them vis-à-vis the product per se, without further slogans. In August of 1976, the ad showed a group of adolescents at a distance and carried an unusually long slogan: “For youth there is always a new path. Let’s follow it.”52 Tacitly mobilizing memories of a “rebellious” youth, the ad conveyed the idea that a supervised new youth would deserve another chance: one to follow the “correct path” the previous cohort had not pursued.

  Youth centralized the conversations over the cultural conditions that, many argued, had made “chaos” possible. Across conservative Catholic lines, military ideologues had long linked the emergence of “chaos” with the effacement of authority principles within the family. As one leading officer with the air force wrote, the family institution was being “corroded” by a list that included “young people equipped with ideas of individual and sexual liberty; and adults with a demagogic desire for cultural renewal.”53 Likewise journalists in the pro-regime media wrote that the “chaos” Argentines had lived through had not begun in the “revolutionary 1973” but in the 1960s, “when one culture replaced another” by exposing the younger generation to “badly digested psychoanalysis; ideas of a generation gap; and images of adultery mixed with cries of liberation of the oppressed.”54 By focusing on the stereotypical aspects of the 1960s, military ideologues and their spokespeople in the media imagined a future when authority at the state and family levels would reinforce one another.55 Time seemed not ripe for such an entwinement. The first minister of education, José Bruera—a civilian—in his inaugural speech of the 1977 school year argued that, since the “family has lost its educational role due to pseudo-psychological discourses that neglect the duties of the parental authority,” the state should act as a surrogate father for youth and assume extra responsibilities to lead the “authority-reconstitution” project.56

  Not surprisingly, the education system was key to the “authority-reconstitution” project. While formally the military just continued the demobilizing politics initiated in 1974, it set the stage for massive persecutions at the university and the secondary levels. Convinced that those levels had been the recruiting grounds for revolutionary militancy—something containing a kernel of truth—the educational authorities, whether they were civilian or military, took special effort in creating rules to prevent that from happening.57 A widely distributed memo delineated a step-by-step method to “detect subversive infiltration” in the classrooms. It assigned principals and deans the task of monitoring classes, readings, and conversations among educators, staff, and students. The memo explained to readers that they should be warned of how “subversive content” might infiltrate in myriad ways. As examples, it listed “any attempt to modify traditional values (religion, tradition) or to damage known notions of family and patriarchal authority,” along with the most obvious references to words such as “liberation and revolution.” In case of finding such offenses committed in the school, the principal was obligated to denounce “the subordinate” to his or her “superiors.”58 Although the memo surely reinforced a sense of fear, there is no sign that the principals made widespread denunciations. Perhaps envisioning a failure, the would-be second president of the junta, General Roberto Viola, involved himself directly in Operación Claridad in mid-1978. This was an operation orchestrated at the Ministry of Education (headed by the right-wing Catholic nationalist Juan J. Catalán). Besides systematizing lists with prohibited textbooks, the officers in charge of the operation promoted the firing of eight thousand teachers, professors, and staff members from the public education system.59

  The politically and ideologically motivated expulsion of educators went hand-in-hand with larger sociocultural and economic processes that, crystallizing in the late 1970s, produced the overall shrinking of the education system. Generations of Argentines had viewed the system as a legitimate and a
ffordable ladder of social mobility. Key to the imagining of an inclusive, modernizing nation, the secondary and university levels of education had greatly expanded in the 1950s and 1960s, opening youth to new experiences and expectations. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the seemingly never-ending inclusionary movement was interrupted. At the secondary level, the total enrollment grew 27 percent from 1970 to 1975 and only 3 percent from 1976 to 1980. Meanwhile, the university level experienced a decrease in its student body from 530,000 in 1976 to 400,000 in 1980.60 As part of its project for “reordering” Argentina’s society, the junta’s neoliberal economic plan had a depressing effect on education. In an effort to cut back the state budget, in 1977 the government decided to charge tuition fees in the public universities, for the first time violating the free-of-charge (gratuidad) tenet that had been instituted during the University Reform Movement. Although fees were not as costly as in private colleges, they were imposed just as unemployment rates were growing. Coupled with the decreasing allure of the universities as spaces of sociability, these economic limitations might have prevented a youth cohort from enrolling.61 Similarly, rising levels of unemployment among the industrial working classes help explain the stagnation of the secondary level. From 1975 to 1980 commercial and technical schools, which attracted working-class children, were those that shrunk the most.62 In sociocultural and economic terms as well, the military regime put an end to the modernizing dynamics that, chiefly in the 1960s, had youth as a privileged actor and education as a pivotal territory.

  Increasingly restrictive, the education system would ideally serve to forge a disciplined new generation in the military’s project. While memos and operatives pointed to the “cleaning” of so-called subversive people and ideas from the university and secondary school levels, professors, teachers, staff, and students made up a large segment of the “disappeared.” At the same time that the government increased police surveillance and students were required to show their identification cards to gain access to the universities’ buildings, droves of students were taken to detention centers. Prudent estimates indicate that 1,500 faculty, students, and recent graduates of the UBA “disappeared” (including 105 students at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires), a staggering figure, accompanied by 750 students and professors from the University of La Plata and 170 from the National and Technological Universities of Rosario.63 As Mabel, one student formerly affiliated with the JUP recalls, “How was it possible to take classes, to enter the building when so many of your friends were not there?” Her memories invoke silence and fear: like other former militants, she quit.64 Secondary school students could not make those decisions, although probably many had wanted to. Like universities, secondary schools were sites where “task forces” searched for “subversives.” At least 600 teachers “disappeared,” along with 120 recent graduates and 130 students, a tragic figure that included 10 young women and men taken from their homes on September 16, 1976, in La Plata—the infamous “night of the pencils.”65

  In the military’s project, disciplining the new generation started by “disappearing” what they viewed as its already-lost segment and continued by imposing new rules and values on the rest. In his programmatic definitions of the goals of the education system, formulated as early as April of 1976, Minister Bruera displaced academic objectives from the junta’s priorities to focus instead on the “restoration of order and hierarchies.”66 As the education sociologist Juan Carlos Tedesco has aptly put it, that overarching goal was less translatable in a pedagogical discourse (for the most part emptied and traditionalist) than in the enforcement of “ritualistic signs” of obedience.67 At the secondary level, the main curricular change was the discontinuation of a class introduced in 1973, the Study of Argentina’s Social Reality, which was replaced with Civic and Moral Formation. This class reversed the secularist tradition of Argentina’s education: it included religious ideas as organizing principles for discussing topics such as “the nature of men” and the family. The latter was conceived of as a natural institution, based on an irrevocable pact (marriage), and endowed with procreative and “formative” roles under the “supervision of the father.”68 The content for this class was meant to act as ideological ammunition for viewing an immutable and hierarchical order that “began at home” and should continue at school. The educational authorities insisted on keeping the school buildings “clean,” especially of political and cultural graffiti. In addition, they were consistently preoccupied with the students’ dress practices. Girls were forbidden from wearing pants and make-up and should have their hair tied and their skirts below the knees. Young men were required to wear grey pants, ties, and shoes, besides having their hair cut eight centimeters above their shoulders. They could not address educators informally (for example, by using the vos or tu) and had to stand up when teachers and principals entered the classrooms.69 From the perspective of the educational authorities, these “ritualistic signs” would mold a generation respectful for hierarchies, discipline, and authority.

  The ideal of youth that the educational authorities, the dominant media, and, perhaps, broad segments of Argentina’s population wanted to enforce, would combine discipline, respect for hierarchies and authority, and also patriotism. In this respect, while the military regime made demobilization a crucial policy for society at large, there was one particular episode of programmed mobilization whose target was youth. The National Gendarmerie, endowed with the task of monitoring the national frontiers, launched the campaign Marchemos a las Fronteras (Let’s Go to the Frontier), an endeavor that involved the redeployment of five thousand boys from secondary schools in the large cities to interact with their frontier counterparts. The first campaign, carried out in late 1979, was preceded by fund-raising efforts of secondary school students to purchase the food and school supplies that they would take to the frontiers—efforts that involved more young people than actual travelers, who were apparently chosen because they had shown “leadership abilities” at their schools. Formally launched at the River Plate stadium, in a ceremony with the regime’s highest authorities (including Videla), the first Marchemos a las Fronteras represented a political success. It showed a fraction of the “new youth” willing to participate in an initiative overtly associated with the regime and framed into a patriotic and militaristic rhetoric that included a solidarity component (the students would aid their impoverished peers).70 The initiative was successful and limited, allowing us to further interrogate how young people responded to the mandates of integration into an “orderly” society.

  There Is Life in the Shadows

  In a pioneering work, sociologist Pablo Vila produced what would become a canonical interpretation of the relationships between youth and the dictatorship, as seen through the prism of the changes of rock culture. Vila argued that rock, as culture and movement, came to replace previous political affiliations by acting in itself as a form of politics associated with countercultural practices. As such, it constituted an avenue for cultural and political resistance to the dictatorship, which positioned youth as an actor at the core of new practices of solidarity and anti-authoritarianism. It is difficult to overestimate Vila’s contribution. Published in the immediate aftermath of the dictatorship, his work has provided a periodization of the relations between rock culture and the regime. It also recognized how rock culture diversified its constituency by incorporating youths coming from different cultural and political backgrounds and pointed out the emergent “tribes” and styles among rockers. Lastly, it signaled the political dimensions of countercultural practices. Not randomly, Vila’s work had influenced most essays on youth and dictatorship.71 However, Vila’s work introduces three key problems. First, it posits a clear-cut divide between political activism and rock culture in the pre-1976 era, which permits it to view the convergence between rock and politics after as a novelty. Second, his work is based on a chain that equates youth to rock and both to resistance, which obliterates other cultural and political responses that young
people might have developed vis-à-vis the authoritarian conditions reinforced after 1976. Finally, Vila’s work disregards the uneasy yet persistent efforts to politically organize youth. Although further study is needed, the relations that youth developed to the conditions set by the military were neither subsumed into the (certainly crucial) history of rock culture nor into the dichotomy resistance versus conformity.

  From the viewpoint of the military, rock music and culture occupied an ambivalent, while changing, position. The hyper-atrophied censorship apparatuses that the regime set up to control cultural production did not impose on rock artists and records as many restrictions as they did, for example, against folkloric music. In 1977, the office of the State Secretary of Intelligence created and distributed a report on how popular music had supposedly served (and continued serving, in their view) the unfolding of a “Marxist psychological war over youth’s consciousness.” The report included a list with twenty-five recordings available in record stores that were deemed potentially subversive. Only one album belonged to the rock world, duo Pedro y Pablo’s Conesa (1972), which had been part of the “protest” trend of rock music.72 Along with the scarce attention that censors paid to rock music and artists, in the biennium 1976–77 (at the height of state terrorism) the military also allowed for the organization of concerts, such as one at the Luna Park in July of 1976 whose lineup included all the “stars” that remained in the country and attracted eleven thousand youths. Luis Alberto Spinetta’s band Invisible attracted thirteen thousand people at another concert in August, in the same venue.73 Furthermore, the pro-regime media made copious room for artists such as Spinetta. Profiling this writer and musician as a “good son”—when he was already a father of two—Gente went as far as quoting him saying that his main advice for fans was to “really listen to what your parents have to tell you.”74 Yet the making of rock musicians into “role models” for youth lasted a short time. In late 1977, Spinetta had songs banned from radios and spent days in prison, while artists such as León Gieco joined the contingent of exiles. As if a symbolic exchange were taking place, when the severest time for the repression of political militants was coming to a tragic end, the most repressive time for rockers began.