Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  The critical biennium of 1978–79 was transformative for rockers—musicians, poets, and fans—and for the status of rock culture in the broader cultural and political framework. In this respect, the representative of the navy in the first junta, Admiral Eduardo Massera (whose force ran the deadliest clandestine detention center, the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada), set the tone for rock culture’s rising persecution. In late 1977, he stated that young people “create a private universe,” endowed with its own “rites, as shown in their clothes and the music.” While at first rock culture led youth towards “supine pacifism,” Massera thought that it could turn them to the “terrorist faith, a predictable deviation of the sensorial spiral.”75 Once the military leaders located rock culture within these coordinates, they required its surveillance and repression, which translated into the resumption of police raids in concerts, ideological and political monitoring of musicians, and the disbanding of most existing formations. In terms of Vila, rock culture became privatized: it “hibernated” in small groups of friends who, through practices such as exchanging records and listening to music together in private homes, kept alive a sense of solidarity and the antiauthoritarian ethos linked to the “we” that they reconfigured.76 For analysts and members of rock culture alike, those practices epitomized how rock served as a culture for “resisting,” on the margins, authoritarianism and cultural repression. As Eduardo, one former working-class young man, recalls, “purchasing a cassette was more than that.” The extra value of the purchase implied, in his memory, the “discussions I had with friends over the details of rock music . . . the practice of discussing things.”77 In his memories, rock favored not only the ability to discuss and criticize (which neither the school nor the public culture endorsed) but also a sense of community.

  As had happened since rock’s debut in Argentina, the rockers’ “community” did not preclude aesthetic and cultural differences. Rock fans and artists in the late 1970s built up a sense of community through appealing to a common past. Exchanging records was an occasion for sharing stories about rock nacional, which allowed for the creation of intercohort bonds that surfaced, for example, in 1980, when youths in their twenties and others in their teens crowded stadiums to attend reunion concerts of two legendary bands, Almendra and Manal (both disbanded in 1970). Secret police agents monitored Spinetta’s former quartet prior to authorizing them to perform. While Córdoba province police evaluated that “the damage that Almendra can create for youth through the promotion of drugs and sensuality” was too serious to allow them to play, officers with the Buenos Aires police disagreed and the quartet performed in La Plata and Mar del Plata, to the joy of thirty thousand people.78 Many of them then attended the concerts of Almendra’s former archrival, namely, the trio Manal. The organizer of the event, Pedro Pujó, recalls that they took advantage of the “little window opened in late 1979” to infuse “rock nacional with new force.” In the attempts to reinvigorate rock culture, then, rockers looked back to create a sense of community, postponing “old and silly disputes.”79 Yet the “little window” also allowed new bands to form, and spots to play proliferated in 1978 and 1979. These marginal experiences paved the way for the emergence of would-be major bands (such as Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota) and for the chance to appreciate novelties: punk, ska, and reggae. Equally important, these experiences incited discussions of the “commercial” versus the “alternative” so central to the countercultural practices articulated in relation to rock.80

  Overtly countercultural practices related to rock culture had a major forum: the monthly Expreso Imaginario. First appearing in August of 1976, Expreso Imaginario played a key role in the making of a countercultural “we.” As other scholars have noted, the profusely illustrated and well-edited monthly led by poet Pipo Lernoud and journalist Jorge Pistocchi could intelligently sidestep censorship because it avoided references to politics and sexuality. When assuming a critical stance, it did so in tacit ways: for example, there is no reference whatsoever to the 1978 Soccer World Championship when many Argentines went crazy about the event.81 Political in its own terms, Expreso Imaginario reached in 1978 a readership of fifteen thousand people attracted, perhaps, not only to the rock section of the monthly but also to its “Practical Guide to Living on this Earth,” which included macrobiotics and yoga as venues for creating alternatives to a “system” deemed physically and psychically oppressive. “Alternative” was also the qualifier for all other practices the magazine endorsed, ranging from communal living and independent journalism to ecological tourism.82 The dichotomy “alternative” versus “system” pervaded the readers’ pages as well. As Vila has superbly analyzed, those pages motivated the desire of youth to develop a community—however virtual it was. As happened with Eduardo’s friends, who talked endlessly about music and exercised their abilities to discuss and criticize, the readers’ pages were forums to define the ideal world for the “we” they helped create. The letter writers wanted an “authentic” world, rid of hierarchies and inequalities. Unlike previous eras in rock culture, for example, young women did not only participate as members in their own right but some of them openly criticized their male peers for being machistas.83 Young women and men, most fundamentally, delineated the parameters of belonging to an “authentic” world by rejecting the authoritarianism of the “system” embedded in the figure of the careta (masked).

  In the late 1970s, the term careta entered the lexicon of youths involved in rock culture to pejoratively refer to most of their generational peers, whom they dubbed as conformist, submissive to the “system,” and superficial. In 1978, after the release of Saturday Night Fever (dir. John Badham, 1977), careta was the term used to describe the qualities of the movie’s main character, John Travolta’s Tony Manero: a responsible and submissive worker on weekdays, whose identity was played out in how he dressed up, danced, and consumed during the weekends. Writing the movie’s critical comment, Pipo Lernoud depicted the “Saturday-Night-Fever” mood as “a contagious temperature of cerebral drowsiness dancing to the rhythm of modern consumption.” A quintessential counter-figure to Expreso Imaginario’s culture, Lernoud understood that the fictional Manero embodied an entire generation that “is totally sold out.”84 Drawing on metaphors resonating in rock cultures worldwide, Lernoud—and, surely, many of the magazine’s readers—believed that there was not a “we” sweeping across a generation, since one segment was “sold out” to a system that, in Argentina, inevitably evoked political overtones. In that respect, the figure of the superficial youth, the caretas, acquired new meanings. In the memories of a former student at the Law School of the UBA, it was “packed with caretas.” When I asked what she understood by the term, she said: “the caretas were guys interested in the little things and who would never, but never, question anything: they did not care.” In Marcela’s memories, “they did not care” about “the content of the classes, the arbitrariness of the school, politics: they were the product of the no te metás [don’t get involved] ideology.”85 The careta represented submission to “the system,” which in late 1970s Argentina involved some degree of tolerance or tacit complicity with the military and the repression it embodied.

  While the careta epitomized cultural superficiality, the figure also invoked the obstacles that politicized young people faced in organizing their generational peers. In mid-1980, some university and secondary school students in Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Córdoba might have had a chance to read the mimeographed periodical Jotapé (an acronym for Juventud Peronista or Peronist Youth). While during the early 1970s Peronist Youth did not explicitly discuss what “youth” meant—imagined as a homogeneous category—now Jotapé did so. Like Expreso Imaginario’s writers, those for Jotapé also viewed “youth” as divided into two halves, which they identified as the “revolutionary” and the “Pitman youth”—made of “thousands of caretas.” Pitman was a chain of schools that offered one- or two-year degrees to prepare students for jobs as office clerks. As
the recipient of a bad-quality education that promised material success, Jotapé noted, the Pitman youth had interiorized “what the military want from us: submission and individualism.”86 Although Jotapé was confident in the “revolutionary youth,” who would help others overcome their own “passivity and conformity,” former youth militants recall how difficult it was. Marcelo, for example, participated in the group that made Jotapé upon his return from exile in Mexico. A former member of the UES, he could barely believe how, “with such short notice, the regime had created a lobotomized youth.” He recalls especially the political work that young Peronists did to “resuscitate the youth movement” in the context of openness initiated under General Roberto Viola’s presidency (March to December, 1981), overlooking that other political forces had continued activating for most of the dictatorship.87

  However successful they were in their efforts, some political forces took advantage of their semi-legal status to try to organize youth. While the Peronist Youth was almost dismantled (and, tragically, its militants were the bulk of the “disappeared”), the pro-Radical Franja Morada and the Federación Juvenil Comunista (FJC, Communist Youth Federation) kept working. The FJC went a step further. Since the Communist Party initially understood that the coup d’état had been carried out by the “most democratic sectors of the military,” it attempted to promote a dialogue between young military officers and Communists via the weekly Vamos. Looking back from today’s vantage point, one historian of the FJC deems the project as “embarrassing,” and surely it was. At the same time that the army led state terrorism, for example, Vamos published a five-page interview with an adviser to President Videla, who argued that the government favored youth and was setting the stage for “a truly democratic new generation.”88 Regardless of their efforts in courting the military, the Communist rank-and-file was also persecuted. In a climate of generalized fear, the leader of the Communist secondary school students noted, the FJC had ceased to incorporate new members in August of 1976, a situation that began to change only by early 1978. In that year, in some schools in Buenos Aires and Rosario, the FJC started to create school committees to discuss with the authorities the selection of textbooks that were “too expensive” and to organize inter-school sport championships.89 Full-fledged by the early 1980s, the school committees and the sort of activities they endorsed represented the only possibilities of gathering that the interested students had. One former secondary school student from the Greater Buenos Aires area recalls that soccer championships “were occasions to meet and address other things as well,” including “information on more closed political meetings.”90

  Politicized youth, rockers, caretas: all coalesced in the mobilization ignited by the Malvinas War, from April to June of 1982. Scholars and observers alike have largely discussed the reasons why the regime, and chiefly the third junta led by General Leopoldo Galtieri (1981–82), decided to wage a war to claim Argentina’s sovereignty over the islands. Most scholars agree that the military, cornered by human rights denunciations abroad and facing rising economic and political dilemmas at home that corroded its legitimacy, tried to regain momentum in proving itself capable of doing what the military always does (waging wars) and had a chance of gathering popular support for a cause that had long incited patriotic fervor. As soon as the invasion made the news, the regime collected demonstrations of support from the entire political spectrum and, perhaps for the first and only time, a majority of the population showed its willingness to participate in such an endeavor.91 Youth, and chiefly young men, came to occupy the center stage. At the same time that a human rights organization publicized that at least 120 young men had been “disappeared” while fulfilling conscription in the period 1976–81, in mid-April of 1982 the military drafted 9,500 conscripts to go to the battlefront. Many of these eighteen-year olds, regardless of their political and cultural backgrounds, in a spirit of patriotism proudly accepted the mission assigned—at least until they reached the islands and found that the scarce food and clothing went to the officers, and that the chances of winning were almost nil.92

  In the public culture of those intense months, the conscripts represented just the forerunners of a youth willing to defend the fatherland. The regime and the dominant media revamped the representations of youth, a category associated with traditional notions of self-sacrifice, idealism, and patriotism. Those actors projected onto the youth of the 1980s their own apparent success in instilling national values and respect for hierarchies and authority in the new generations, which appeared to be confirmed in other initiatives as well. During the war, rock impresarios and artists convened to assemble a mega festival titled “of Latin American solidarity.” Carefully avoiding any direct association with the regime, rockers nevertheless collaborated with the “war effort,” showing their solidarity with the conscripts. Like most of Argentina’s citizenry, rockers onstage and off chanted against the British and, ironically, called for peace. When the news began to report the successive blows and the pro-regime media could not hide the disaster anymore, that pacifism turned into antidictatorship positions. The same conjuncture when the regime endowed youth with the task of “saving” the nation was the one that ended with the military’s dreams of eternity. The military could not demonstrate any prowess on the battlefront, and their attempts at renewing their popularity failed badly. The military leaders did not pay the price of the attempts either: 650 out of the 800 dead in the battlefronts were eighteen-year-old conscripts.93

  In one of his most intuitive essays, the political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell claims that the last military dictatorship worked alongside a society that “patrolled itself.” The authoritarian conception of authority, O’Donnell posits, was not exclusive of the state: dispersed in “micro-contexts,” those who occupied positions of command at all levels of social life (family, schools, hospitals) were called on to enlist their efforts in reconstituting hierarchies and discipline. Produced in the wake of the dictatorship, O’Donnell’s piece was meant to invite a reflection on the role of myriad social actors who welcomed and eventually benefited from a “macro” context, or framework, that allowed for unleashing the crudest forms of authoritarianism.94 As provocative as it is, however, this piece leaves one key interpretative dimension intact: that project was neither initiated in 1976 nor acted out within a historical vacuum.

  By focusing on the role that, both discursively and politically, youth had in the “authority-reconstitution” project, this chapter proposes that, strictly speaking, it started before the imposition of the military coup d’état. Already in 1974, leading conservative actors related to the Catholic Church and right-wing Peronism came to occupy prominent positions in decision-making bodies and “legally” set limits to the political activism, sociability, and sexuality associated with youth milieus. In their initiatives, these actors did not only have the blessing of broad segments of the media but also, seemingly, of increasingly larger portions of Argentina’s citizenry who clamored for “order” in all spheres of social life. As it happened with the groups of neighbors from Buenos Aires and Comodoro Rivadavia, most identified youth as the carrier of multiple disorders. They projected onto youth their condemnation of the dynamics of sociocultural modernization that unfolded throughout the 1960s, blamed as responsible for the relaxation of mores, values, and hierarchies. The military represented their project as the most suitable to put an end to those chaos-generating dynamics. In this respect, they and the people that joined their “authority-reconstitution” endeavor were producing a dialogue with their immediate past and building a bridge with a romanticized era temporarily located in the first half of the twentieth century when, they imagined, “things were not out of place.”

  The enforcement of that past-oriented, reactionary project was based upon the pax of the clandestine detention centers, which permeated society at large and the ranks of young people in particular. Fear, political demobilization, and cultural restrictions configured the coordinates for the socializati
on of a new generation, allegedly free from the “subversive” ideas and practices of the past. Yet neither were historical breaks easily implemented nor the “authority-reconstitution” project completely imposed—however dispersed and accepted it was across “micro” and “macro” levels. While political groups kept acting in student milieus according to their limited possibilities, rockers and young people attracted to countercultural practices strove to create a sense of community based on the appeal of a common past that did not register in the post-1976 divide. The past associated with the libertarian and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and early 1970s was simply too close to produce a definitive break. The military tried hard, though, and in some respects, they achieved major success. Education, for example, would never recover the socially democratizing sheen that it had had up until the 1960s. Political activism and its connection with youth and change, moreover, would lose its utopian meanings, gone with the (youthful) bodies of thousands of people.