In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

248 Conclusion Soon after the imposition of the military junta in 1976, diverse organizations domestically and abroad started campaigning to denounce the massive , state-led violation of human rights. These organizations publicized the implementation of the mechanisms of kidnapping, torturing, and “disappearing ” thousands of people. Amnesty International and the Argentine Commission on Human Rights abroad, the Argentine League for Human Rights and the incipient Mothers of Plaza de Mayo at home, all produced rosters listing “disappeared” people. They organized the rosters by occupational criteria (like disappeared lawyers or university students) and demographic data, including one of “disappeared adolescents.” Both during the dictatorship and immediately after the resumption of democratic rule in 1983, human rights organizations downplayed the political commitments of the victims of state terrorism to focus on other aspects of their biographies .¹ Their appealing to age markers, notably of youth and adolescence, symbolically mobilized notions of innocence, idealism, and virtue. In the aftermath of the dictatorship, the imagery surrounding the “young victim” galvanized public attention. A key example was the sweeping impact of the movie La noche de los lápices (The Night of the Pencils, dir. Héctor Olivera, 1985), which depicts the “true story” of ten secondary school boys and girls from La Plata, most of them affiliated with a Peronist youth group, all kidnapped from their homes on September 16, 1976. The movie and the two pieces on which it is based (a chapter of the Report of the National Committee on Disappeared People titled Never Again and María Seoane and Héctor Ruiz Núñez’s journalistic essay of the same name) blurred the political dimension of their young lives and deaths, perhaps aiming at inciting a particular sort of public indignation. Since La noche de los lápices represented a lethal regime coming from nowhere to murder idealist adolescents, viewers could feel horror but rest in peace: Conclusion 249 they had not had “anything to do” with what they saw. But the military regime did not come from nowhere and both built upon and heightened a widespread demand for “order” perhaps shared in 1976 by many of the viewers of the movie.² While it continued to permeate memory writings in the 1990s (through the romanticization of the “idealistic youth”), the building of the “young victim” as a strategic trope was fundamentally a product of the 1980s in both public culture and human rights activism.³ That may have sensitized the population to dictatorial crimes, but it did little to captivate the historical dimensions of state terrorism whose main victims were defined less by their—certainly young—age than by their involvement in revolutionary militancy. The last military regime, however, did mark an end to an age in which youth, as a category evoking change, and young people as actors had come to occupy the center stage. I would like to come back to the first moment when youth began to rise in the public arena as a device that helped shape the discussion of the scope, limits, and characteristics of the dynamics of sociocultural modernization in Argentina. Youth as a category gained ascendancy along with the collective perception that post-Peronist Argentina underwent a critical juncture marked by rapid political, social, and cultural change, a time of sweeping instability of institutions, values, and norms, which sociologists and the media, among others, encapsulated in the phrase “crisis of our time.” In that context, myriad actors (Catholic leagues, psychological professionals, the media, and educators) maneuvered with the category of youth they were helping craft. Intensified in the voices of the Catholic leagues, one position conceived of youth as the epitome of the disorders that the “crisis” entailed in terms of the erosion of patriarchal authority; other voices, dominant in the public sphere, believed that youth had the potential to expunge authoritarianism from the familial, cultural, and eventually political milieus. As the psychological professionals repeatedly stated, through living their individual, “biologically based crisis” at a critical social and cultural time, young people would help erase the harsher forms of patriarchy and other “atavisms” and taboos. The category of youth was a key to discuss the future, an argument dominated by a paradoxical attitude toward change, both feared and, seemingly, longed for. How did young people interact with the “change” that they, or the category they inhabited, symbolized in the public imagination? In reconstructing the daily experiences of young men and, chiefly, young women by looking at different milieus where they took place (families...

Share