Infidelities: Morality, Revolution, and Sexuality in Left-Wing Guerrilla Organizations in 1960s and 1970s Argentina

“He wouldn’t see me. He died thinking I was a traitor,” former Montonera guerrilla Ana Testa says as she looks into the camera. She had given her account of how she had been tortured, but now she was remembering a different kind of pain. After she was liberated from a clandestine detention center, her partner, Juan Silva—who would later be “disappeared”—could have gone to her, but he refused.¹ This is not a mere anecdote. In it are enmeshed the views on love, activism, and morality held by many of the revolutionaries. This article looks at the role played by sexuality in the construction of a revolutionary morality as a key dimension for understanding the left-wing guerrilla groups active in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s.

In Argentina, as in other Latin American countries, the liberal regime that crystallized in the nineteenth century strengthened a family type based on the indissolubility of marriage, gender inequality, and patriarchal power. Under that model, female infidelity was not tolerated, as an adulterous wife represented a serious threat to patriarchy, challenging the phallic power of the male and, with it, patrilineal descent and inheritance. In contrast, it was acceptable for men to be unfaithful, and their authority over women was firmly established under a civil code (enacted in 1869) that denied legal rights to unmarried couples and out-of-wedlock children and offered no protection to female heads-of-household.² In the 1960s, the cornerstones of this family model were called into question as never before, challenging widely accepted values such as the sanctity of marriage and long-held assumptions about gender roles that determined the inferior status of women and male authority in the family. Infidelity sparked heated debates because it was at the heart of the sexual double standard. In fact, under Argentina’s 1922 criminal code—still in force in the 1960s—a husband was only considered adulterous if he kept a mistress or was found with another woman in the bed he shared with his wife, but for a wife it was enough to have had a casual encounter with another man.³

In contrast to Europe and the United States, where sexual changes were fostered by what Jeffrey Weeks termed the “permissive moment,” in Argentina the traditional family was challenged against a backdrop of rising authoritarianism, moral crusades, and deteriorating social and economic conditions.⁴ It was in that context that armed groups emerged, encouraged by the Cuban Revolution and the labor and student struggles that were stirring the country and the world. In the years that followed, as Argentina became more and more involved in the continental war against subversion, the state launched increasingly brutal repressive actions, stepping up authoritarianism and intensifying political polarization. This eventually culminated in the 1976 military coup, which institutionalized torture, murder, and enforced disappearance as methods for combating political dissidents and social activists, claiming as many as thirty thousand disappearance victims, according to estimates by human rights organizations.⁵

In recent years, feminist historiography and gender studies have offered new approaches for rethinking this crucial era, whose echoes are still felt today in Argentine society. One line of investigation has shown the persistence of women’s inequality within guerrilla organizations, revealing that the issue took a back seat to the more important strategic goal of seizing political power.⁶ This does not mean that these groups were indifferent with respect to such matters. Far from it; members of left-wing guerrilla groups held strong views on family, sexuality, and romantic relationships, which did not deviate from traditional ideas, imposing a “compulsory heterosexuality” (as noted by Florencia Mallon in the case of Chile), exalting virility, and promoting an ideal image of the revolutionary couple, which was both heterosexual and monogamous.⁷ They also disapproved of the sexual revolution as much as conservatives did, although not for the same reasons, viewing it as an imperialist strategy that would throw the people off the revolutionary path.⁸ Guerrilla groups also sought to exert control over...