The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla

8. Youth and the “Authority-Reconstitution” Project

221 8 ► Youth and the “Authority-Reconstitution” Project In late 1975, when the civilian government of Isabel Martínez de Perón had already authorized the military to repress social and political activities , groups of neighbors from Buenos Aires and from the distant city of Comodoro Rivadavia wrote to the minister of the interior asking for more security in their communities, which they viewed as threatened by youths engaged either in “subversive actions,” “drug consumption,” “sexual orgies ,” or all of the above.¹ They created a link between youth, sexually and culturally deviant practices, and subversion—the main characteristics of the “enemy within” that jeopardized the fabric of the national body that the military, in March of 1976, was supposed to restore. This chapter looks at the unfolding of a project destined to “reconstitute authority,” which promised to reverse the cultural, political, and sexual changes that Argentines had lived through as part of the modernizing dynamics that, since the 1950s, privileged youth as its key embodiment. Beginning in 1974, a broad arc of conservative actors pushed for a hierarchical restructuring of Argentina’s society, thus reversing what they envisioned as the lost authority of parents, teachers, and politicians at the hands of their children, students, or “unprofessional” militants. In their view, that reconstitution was pressing, and it was the only guarantee for preventing what they hyperbolically depicted as the final dissolution of Argentina’s society. Deeply embedded in the Cold War imagery surrounding national security were actors who made youth the “enemy within.” Not all young people conformed to the emerging image, but the face of that “enemy” was young: the guerrilla woman or man, the “drug addict,” the so-called sexual deviant. In this respect, new legislation regarding the distribution of contraception, political participation in schools and universities , and drug consumption, all passed throughout 1974, led toward the shaping and containment of that figure, whereby also setting limits to 222 The “Authority-Reconstitution” Project the sociability, sexuality, and political organizing of flesh-and-blood young women and men. That legislation served to create and amplify the trope of deviancy surrounding youth and helped create consensus for increasingly authoritarian projects that promised to restore “order” to every sphere of social life. Although the “authority-reconstitution” project started before March of 1976, the military junta that imposed Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–83) added new, dramatically refocused, overtones. The military imposed its authoritarian order through enforcement of the basic mechanism of state terror: the systematic kidnapping, torture, and “disappearance ” of their so-called enemies. The victims of state terror were overwhelmingly young: the young men and women that had made the ranks of the student, party, and guerrilla groups that renewed Argentina’s politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Less because of their young age, they became the targets of the military’s deadly project because they had belonged to revolutionary movements. This does not preclude the fact that the military set the stage to discipline youth at large, which in their view was the key to preventing another “subversive generation” from spreading. The responses of young women and men to these disciplining attempts varied greatly. Although further study is needed, the last segment of the chapter begins to tackle some of these responses. Neither Sex nor Drugs . . . nor Politics The “authority-reconstitution” project started as soon as Juan Perón came back to the country in June of 1973 and was forcefully crystallized throughout 1974, first with Perón and then after his death on July 1 with his wife Isabel as president. That project involved the revamping of Argentina’s society , culture, and politics in ways that touched upon the experiences and expectations that young people had carved out throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1974, legislative developments restricted the distribution of the birth control pill and prohibited the dissemination of information regarding contraception; increased penalties for the trafficking and consumption of so-called illegal drugs; and stopped schools and universities from being legitimate sites for political activism. By the end of that year, an imposed state of siege (that would last until 1983) closed the possibilities of legal political activism and restricted youth sociability. Although it did not preclude the broadening of extralegal repression, a façade of legality allowed the state and a broad range of political actors to delineate The “Authority-Reconstitution” Project 223 the figure of the “enemy within,” as...