Las voces de una
juventud silenciosa: memoria y política entre los otros jóvenes durante los
años 60 (Mar del Plata - Argentina)*
Bettina
Favero[1]
CONICET – UNMdP
Reception: 06/05/2015
Evaluation: 11/06/2015
Approval: 16/11/2015
Research and Innovation
Article
Resumen
Este trabajo busca observar las
imágenes y representaciones de la política que tenía la juventud argentina en
la década de los años sesenta del siglo XX, a través de entrevistas orales y
publicaciones de la época. El universo analizado contempla a aquellos jóvenes
que no militaron en partidos políticos ni participaron en grupos armados. Estos
“otros jóvenes” se insertaron en el mercado laboral al finalizar la escuela y
no realizaron estudios universitarios, recorriendo caminos culturales y
políticos distintos. De esta forma, se intentará analizar las actitudes
sociales y comportamientos políticos de estos, en función de una realidad
marcada por los procesos políticos e institucionales que se daban en la
Argentina de los años sesenta.
Palabras claves: Jóvenes,
Argentina, Años sesenta, Memoria, Política
“The voices of silent youth: memory and politics among young people
during the 60s” (Mar del Plata – Argentina)
Abstract
This paper
examines the images and representations of the politics of the Argentinian youth
during the sixties of the 20th century, through oral interviews and
publications from the period. The analyzed archive takes into account young
people who were neither involved in a political party, nor participated in
armed groups. After finishing school, this “other youth” entered the labor
market and did not receive a college degree, taking instead other cultural and
political paths. In this way, an analysis of the social attitudes and political
behavior of these subjects will be made, based on a reality marked by the
political and institutional processes that characterized the decade of the
sixties in Argentina.
Key words: Youth, Argentina, the sixties, memory, politics.
"Les voix d’une jeunesse silencieuse : mémoire et politique des
autres jeunes pendant les années 60 (Mar del Plata, Argentine)"
Résumé
Ce travail
cherche à identifier, par le moyen d’entretiens et des publications d’époque,
les images et les représentations de la politique construites par les jeunes
argentins dans les années soixante du XXe siècle. L’univers analysé réunit des
jeunes qui n’ont pas milité dans des partis politiques ni ont pris part aux
groupes armés. Ces “autres jeunes”, qui ont eu un parcours culturel et
politique différent, une fois terminés leurs études secondaires se sont
incorporés directement dans le marché du travail sans effectuer des études
universitaires. Notre but sera donc d’analyser les attitudes sociales et les comportements
politiques de ces jeunes, en fonction d’une réalité marquée par les processus
politiques et institutionnels propres à l’Argentine des années soixante.
Mots clés: Jeunes, Argentine, Années soixante, Mémoire, Politique
1. Introduction
The sixties of
the twentieth century in Argentina have been identified in historical studies as
a long decade, the manifestations of which were pronounced from the late 1950s
to the late 1970s and have been historiographically revised as years of
cultural expansion, the artistic avant-garde, and political rebellion[2]. Much of this
research was constructed by authors who reviewed that decade and took it as
their object of study, but who were also protagonists involved or spectators
with some degree of participation in it. In addition to providing details and
promoting a variety of possibilities for future research, it also marked the
period as a time plagued by impending changes and of generations in
"states of desire for community, not blood" in the words of
Passerini[3].
Adding a
broader view to this perspective, a set of historians analyzed the dualities,
ambivalences and cross-connections that occurred within this process of
cultural and political modernization, among different social groups defined by
youth, family and gender, and how that process of transformation impacted upon
the daily life of the sixties population[4].
The present work
intends to revise the sixties once again, considering the cracks that this
modernization and cultural rebellion produced within the society in question
and to observe in an alternative way, the avatars of a political culture marked
by proscriptions, violence and dictatorships[5].
Thus, it will seek to observe through oral interviews the images and representations of the politics that was part of the youth in the sixties. In this case, I will focus on a category other than that already worked by the historiography on young people, these are "other young people" who had to enter the labor market quickly, did not have university experience and travelled different cultural and political paths[6]. We will try to analyze, through oral interviews, the social attitudes and political behaviors[7] of these young people in relation to the reality that surrounded them, which was marked by the political and institutional processes that occurred in the Argentina of the sixties. To this wealth of voices, journalistic sources of the time will be added, such as the mass circulation magazines "Siete Días", "Panorama" and "Tía Vicenta"[8], which will allow us to recover other youthful experiences related to the topics to be discussed in the article. These publications, in addition to providing "readers' letters" that filter the opinions of many young people, also provide interesting reports and opinion polls on the relationship between politics and youth in those years.
For this study, interviews were used that were
conducted with men and women born between 1935 and 1945, who in the early 1960s
were between 15 and 25 years old, and who did not complete university studies
but in some cases completed high school and in others, only finished primary
education. Most of them began working as from a very early age for different
reasons, among which are highlighted the purely economic: to help at home or to
support the family because one of the parents was deceased. As for their reading
tastes, they all admit to having a modest library in their homes, among which
could be glimpsed the collections of "Robin Hood". It was also normal
to read comics and news magazines. Likewise, a passion for radio programs
marked these people in their childhood and adolescence, with programs such as
"Los Pérez García", "Que pareja", "Peter Fox" and
"Glostora Tango Club" being common denominators. The interviewees are
not all from the city of Mar del Plata, but have decided to live there in the
last years of their life at the time of retirement. Some of them were part of
Retirement Centers located in the city who voluntarily participated in the
interviews. As for the structure of these, they focused on questions about some
events in Argentine political life as well as on the role of political parties
and the armed forces in those years. It is important to clarify that most of
the interviews were carried out in 2002 within the framework of the project
"Politics and society in the Argentina of the twentieth century. The view
of the elderly[9]” and today form part of the "Word and Image Archive",
Center for Historical Studies (CEHis, by its acronym in Spanish) Faculty of
Humanities, Universidad
Nacional de Mar del Plata. The collection of interviews used was selected for a
double reason: firstly, for the information they provided on the theme to be
developed in this work and secondly, so as to compare the ages of the
interviewees and their youthful experience during the sixties.
The interviews are influenced by the context in
which they were developed. The witnesses have left their youth behind and are
in their old age, and therefore their reflections in relation to their younger
years are mediated by their experience of life. Nevertheless, they have
illuminated certain aspects that are sought to be analyzed. Thus, the oral
testimony "presents itself as a problematic historical document that tends
to place the structure of the individual mentality in the horizon of a lived social
history"[10], allowing the knowledge of the history of the
group based on the daily life of the subject and the whole of the reference
group.
2. Oral history and youth
Much can be said of oral history and its use in
different historical themes. From its beginnings in the 1960's to the present
day, the use of oral history has been significantly changed. In its origins, it
was fundamentally used to understand the communities and groups that "had
been silenced by the official history of great events"[11], this premise has been maintained over time. The
great protagonists of oral history are the so-called "voiceless",
those sectors of society that did not feature in the written history until that
moment. Thus, pioneering and key works have been seen that marked the course of
this methodology and which put actors silenced until that moment at the center:
workers, immigrants, farmers, just to name a few. At present, the protagonists
remain the same, what has changed is the theoretical and methodological
perspective of oral history.
From different sectors, some techniques and uses of
this way of writing history have been criticized in order to improve them. The
clear relationship between memory and oral testimony has also been deepened.
Specialists on the subject, such as Alessandro Portelli, mark these advances:
"oral sources are never definitive - not only because they will always be incomplete,
but because no person can manage to relate something in its totality nor avoid
changing after their story."
[12] The oral source is incomplete, like any other source.
What is interesting is its richness, its complexity and its subjective
dimension: "they are the stories of a human practice that is reconstructed
by the person who tells or narrates it through their own memories. From that
moment, the memory that selects and models the past according to the images
that the individual has of himself as part of a group plays a transcendental
role” [13].
In this case, the role of memory plays a prominent role.
The weight of the present on the memories of the past can influence responses,
especially in relation to questions that have to do with specific political
processes. Another point to keep in mind is that the witnesses are no longer
young, they are elderly, and therefore the lived experience changes,
undoubtedly, the story of that past.
Finally, a few words about youth. In their
relationship with oral history, some authors criticize the scant attention paid
to young people as social constructs and as emerging subjects[14]. Undoubtedly, working with oral sources favors the
study of this kind of actor. The key is to be able to frame the analysis at a
time when the protagonists are no longer young because when interviewing, we
find adults or elderly people in many cases older than 60 or 70 years. Perhaps
this is one of the greatest difficulties in writing an oral history about young
people who are no longer so.
Here the office of the historian should take
precedence, by which I mean to be able to study and analyze these testimonies
as social and historical constructions. A Spanish historian who
works on young people says:
[…] “youth as a
social phenomenon depends, rather than age, on the person's position in
different social structures, such as the family, school, work and age groups,
and the actions of state institutions which with their legislation alter the
position of young people in them. The existence of youth as a defined group is
not a universal phenomenon and, like all age groups, their development, form,
content, and duration are social and therefore historical constructs, because
they depend on the economic, social, cultural and political order of each
society; that is, its historical location and the way in which
"youth" is constructed in a society[15] […]
2. Young people as an
object of historical study; between permanence and change
From the old continent, it has been sought to analyze
and understand the role played by young people throughout history. Souto
Kustrín, analyzes this group as a theoretical object of the study of history
from different perspectives and concludes that where more progress has been
made "is in the study of the emergence and development of youth as a
social group". However, the author points out that a dialogue between the
social sciences and history would be lacking, in order to obtain a theoretical
framework that addresses the social aspects of the subject of youth[16].
However, as regards the definition of this object of
study, two European historians raised a series of questions that allow us to
think about and to try to define it:
[...] Is youth a period of life or a permanent
position, is it a positive moment or years of doubt, is it a moment of decision
and self-affirmation or a lapse of subjection to the will and approval of
elders? Are they people integrated into the society or alienated from it? […].[17]
The contradiction is the core of this definition, a
situation of ambivalence that characterizes this historical group and which has
led many historians to carry out studies on a period of the 20th
century, the 60s, in which young people appear as the indisputable protagonists
of that decade and acquire a historical range of analysis.
[18]
A good characterization of the youth of those years is
that expressed by Eric Hobsbawm:
[…] young people, now became an independent social
group. The most spectacular events, especially in the sixties and seventies,
were the mobilizations of generational sectors that, in less politicized
countries, enriched the record industry [...] The political radicalization of
the sixties [...] belonged to the young, who rejected the status of children or
even adolescents (that is, people not yet adult) while denying the fully human
character of any generation that was more than thirty years old, with the
exception of some guru or other […].[19]
What is interesting about this social group is the
ambiguous relationship that unites young people with the world of adults and which
is exemplified in the conflict between order and change. In this regard,
Sorcinelli and Varni argue that the young people "contemporaneously show the face of the rebel and that of the custodian in
regard to the ideas and customs that they are presented to with[20]."
Young people set in motion
forms of protest when living conditions and integration are threatened by rapid
social change, but they also know how to guard and protect the values of the
community, as well as the cultural and social order they consider to be threatened.
On the one hand, they aspire to defend a style of life and cultural formation
of their own, but on the other, they tend to renew their inherited mental
baggage.
They are therefore historical actors that could be
defined as ambiguous, with opposing positions, a sector that would be able
"to break with class or family solidarities to become bearers of a
collective renewal" or to "fall into the arms of the seduction of a
providential leader who has come to embody the new order of which they dream[21]."
It will also be the historical context that will allow
us to understand the behavior of these young people. Norbert Elias affirmed
that society was in a "transition period in which relationships of parents
and older children, strictly authoritarian, and other more recent, more
egalitarian ones are found simultaneously, and both forms are often mixed in
families"[22]. It was the period after the great wars, the times
when young generations were not willing to accept "conventional
civilizational regulations such as the commandments of the respective older
generations. [23]" That is to say that the years that followed the
second world war were decisive for a whole generation of young people, and in
some cases led them to political radicalization and in others they were realized
in the cultural and social changes that marked an entire age group.
Argentina was not alien to these changes since it
underwent a process of social and cultural modernization that called into question
the established values and practices, which generated a series of
transformations that marked a cultural gap between two generations. In this regard,
Juan Carlos Torre states that "it was in those years, and in tune with
international trends, that the outline of a new stratum was cut: the youth.
[24]" But not all young people went "on the path
of psychological and social emancipation in the same way, but all were exposed
to it": transformations in sexual morality, changes in sociability that
evaded the control of adults, the decline of the guardianship of parents and of
the family order[25], among others, were the elements that marked a before
and after.
In short, it is important to delve deeper into this
sector of society which is ambiguous, because it sought to impose the new but
also defended the traditional, it aimed to revolutionize some customs but also
maintained others. Young people who read Rodolfo Walsh but also Julio Cortázar,
Jorge Luis Borges or Leopoldo Marechal, who listened to Elvis Presley, Bill
Haley, Osvaldo Pugliese or Astor Piazzolla, who began to wear more jeans and
use less gel, who although they maintained the culture of the bolero, also
began to listen to rock. Who, in spite of the birth of television, maintained
the habit of listening to the radio and used to go to the cinema, although the
taste for Hollywood gave way to French and Italian cinema in those years:
"the imagination of many young people was being shaped by novels such as ‘On
Heroes and Tombs’ by Ernesto
Sábato, but also by the zambos of Cuchi
Leguizamón, the latest album by The
Beatles, the comic book 'El Eternauta' and, in daily doses, strips like 'Mafalda'
by Quino or the humorous cartoons of Landrú[26]."
3. Argentinian society in the 1960s
Image 1. Image 2.
Image 1: “Who
can lead the country now?”. Revista Panorama, nº 40 June 1966, 16.
Image 2: “Do
we have freedom?”. Revista Panorama, nº 36, May 1966.
In order to understand those "other young people"
it is fundamental to define the scene where the actors personified their
position in favor of order. I show this confrontation in terms of the idea that
arises when observing some vestiges of that time. On the one hand, a survey
conducted in 1966 that Guillermo O'Donnell[27] used for his research on this period. This indicated
that 66% of the respondents approved of the coup
d'état of that year, only 6% opposed it. On the other hand, two images from
the magazine Panorama from 1966 in which there is a photograph (Image 1)
attached to the following
question: Who can lead the country now? 37% think that it is the military and
only 6% endorse politicians. The other, a cover of the same magazine[28] (Image 2), shows some people walking along a street
in Buenos Aires with posters with the following phrase: "Enough of
Illia" and at the bottom of the cover the title: “Do we have freedom?
[29]”
The climate of the period reflected by these surveys
indicated a certain unrest among some sectors of society in 1966. Both
O'Donnell's academic work and the statistics that emerged from the magazine's
research provided an image representing the Argentine society of these years:
that of broad sectors of society in favor of military governments. This will
allow us to understand the context in which the political representations of
the "other young people" of our work can be analyzed.
To understand the opinion of that society it is
necessary to analyze what happened on the political plane[30]. The decade of the sixties was inaugurated with the
government of Arturo Frondizi, installed in 1958. A time in which the dichotomy
"Peronism-anti-Peronism" was attempted to be overcome and the
political system to be reordered. Frondizi had to rule between two power
factions: the Peronist unions and the military. In this way, he created
innovative policies that allowed his presidency to achieve aspects of success.
Nonetheless, the opposition of the People's UCR (UCRP, by its acronym in
Spanish), the close relationship with the unions and the power of the armed forces,
overshadowed the achievements of the process of economic modernization and
accelerated industrialization.
With the March 1962 elections in which nine Peronist
candidates achieved victory, the lack of support from the opposition parties
and the military forces to the Frondizi government was a fact. Thus, it was
agreed with Jose Maria Guido (president of the Senate) that he assume the
presidency until the call for new elections. During this interregnum, the
"Peronist problem" remained unresolved and the possible solutions to
it came from the hand of the army, in detriment to the electoral route.
The year 1963 being an electoral year, Arturo Illia
(UCRP) was elected President of the Nation with 25% of the votes. It was very
weak electoral support that was reflected in the percentage of blank votes
(21%) corresponding to the Peronism ban. Thus, Illia began his presidency,
which would last just under three years, truncated by a new military coup led
by General Onganía (1966). The government, despite the good economic results
achieved, received very little approval, from the public opinion that was polarized between the "social
revolution" that Perón challenged from exile and the "national
revolution" led by the armed forces. The latter would be imposed based on
the idea that they were the only ones that could impose order and accelerate
development.
The 1966 coup d'état, called the "Argentine
Revolution" led General Ongania to exercise a "technical" and
"apolitical" government. Its long-term objectives indicated that
under the new order, the country would go through an economic period, then a
social period and finally a political period. Differences with other power
factions (unions, political parties) as well as within the armed forces
themselves meant that the government could not achieve its goals, especially
those related to social and political aspects.
On the strictly historiographical level there has been
no study that has focused on the social history of this period, if there have
been attempts from the political[31]. Due to this, some studies will be referred to that
have the society in those years as a protagonist and that are relevant for this
analysis.
As an overture to the period and place considered, an
essay by Guillermo O'Donnell will be taken as a theoretical reference,
reflecting on this decade and the next and may be useful given its temporal
proximity to the period dealt with. In the first place, it is interesting to
observe the author's approach to the society of that time. He thought that
"it was authoritarian and violent and that it was also, fairly egalitarian[32]."
He also stated that the country
was far from being democratic and that Argentine society, marked by its
individualism and confrontation, lacking a "vigorous" liberal
tradition and with "a certain democraticness" tended to "arouse
authoritarianism, radicals and sympathizers[33]." In this respect, and regarding the succession
of military coups in the country, "authoritarian spirals" are referred
to.
[…] the attempted emergence of a power which,
with the point of bayonets, wants to constitute a main power, from there and
with the help of its eternal allies (those of class and the innumerable
authoritarian vocations that flourish in contexts like that) , to seriously
order a society up to that moment " out of place": those above, above
and commanding; those below, below and
obeying - and in any case, thankful for the paternal concerns that those above
will provide them with when things have been "straightened out": and
those in the middle, living their eternal schizophrenia: commanding and
obeying, but knowing clearly who to command and who to obey[…][34].
The idea of "ordering" society would seem to coincide
with all social groups. Each one from his place (up, down or in the middle) was
in accordance with the order that was imposed, in that way the different parts
of a machine were connected, which sought to discipline a chaotic society.
Although large sections of the population supported the military coups, they
were never able to sustain that imposed "order" and, as a consequence,
history, as represented by the authoritarian spiral, was repeated. O'Donnell
comments that:
[…] in Argentina, the repeated-and violent-triumphs of
those who have wished to impose this order have always been transient: they did
not feel triumphant, those above - doing what they learned first and then
taught the rest of society, they began to devour themselves, those below soon
explode and the middle again do not know who to command or obey. Up until now, as
neither the above nor (ay!) the transient losers had in the way the possibility
to discover the values and
mechanisms of democracy, then, in the next turn of the spiral, when each
ratified their motives and antagonistic visions, the game has been even more
confrontational, and even more brutal has been the attempt to impose an
"order" that was also increasingly authoritarian and brutal. All this
can change now, but to change it is necessary to realize the logic of these
spirals […][35].
Daniel James emphasizes that Argentina in those years
presented a game that was "impossible to resolve, where military coups and
illegitimate civil governments alternated," a fact that favored the loss
of legitimacy of political parties as well as the " decadence of the
notion of democracy[36]. " Thus, this lack of confidence in democracy
marked the political confrontations of the period and characterized a part of the
society. Many people who belonged to different social sectors did not identify
with democracy, had no confidence in it, and probably felt more secure with
military governments[37]. Within this large social sector were young people
born between 1935 and 1945 who had not entirely lived in a democratic
government (only Perón's first presidency reached its full term), had voted
sporadically, did not know about political practices or simply it seemed much
easier to them to delegate the power to govern to a sector outside the
democracy, the armed forces. As O'Donnell reminds us, "Argentina has been
programmed to generate epileptic and mass democracies, aborted by increasingly
brutal blows[38].”
In a study carried out at the time that we are dealing
with, used by Ricardo Sidicaro, Irving Horowitz proposed the concept of the
"norm of illegitimacy". With him, the author described the
"component of the Latin American political culture that accepted military
interventions in politics as normal, in order to treat the state as an agency
of power and to consider the rulers legitimate if effective at solving economic
and social problems, a view from which the lack of constitutional legality was
relativized, not only in terms of access to the control of state power, but
also of the most diverse violations of formal procedures of the representation
of society and the use of government instruments[39]." Transferring this to the Argentine case,
Sidicaro proposed that "this political culture became evident in the way
in which broad sectors of society accepted the coups d'état or palace coups, expecting the military to replace
civil authorities or military men without any basis other than the use of force[40]."
4. Representations of the politics of the 60s: the view of the “other
youth”
In this section I will try to analyze the social
attitudes and political behaviors of these young people in accordance with the
reality that surrounded them. By this I mean a category of study that has begun
to be used by historians and sociologists in recent years, and which seeks to
analyze the consensus or social and political indifference of the so-called
"ordinary people" in relation to dictatorial situations[41]. In this regard, there are examples used of papers that
beginning from the role of the press, business or workers, attempt to study
this phenomenon in both Spain and Argentina, but have not shone enough light on
the problem because of being biased in one sector[42]. Because of this, progress has been made in studies
on daily life that allowed a "refreshing and illuminating approach to
social experiences and attitudes under dictatorships[43]" and demonstrated their diversity and
difficulties so as to reduce them to categories such as opposition or
consensus. Thus, the use of oral and written sources allowed us to recognize
the variety and complexity of possible attitudes as well as to arrive at
conclusions that demonstrate the ambiguity of the phenomenon; in this case,
starting from the memory of the "ordinary" young of the sixties that were marked by coups
and military dictatorships.
One of the publications of the time stated that
"around the military, there is a diffuse taboo: 'they constitute a caste,
they get into politics, they do not fulfill their specific mission' or the
counterpart: 'they are the only ones who save us'. What is verifiable is an old
disconnect between the military and civilians[44]." Thus, the figure of the military man was
associated with order, discipline and progress. It was thought that military
governments could order the country as a whole, and bring things back to where
they should never have left. The military man was seen as a person with a lot
of power and strength, both elements needed to redirect things, although
sometimes they did not.
In the testimonies, can be seen a group of people who
believed in the order imposed by the military, who considered that the armed
forces could rule the country for a certain time and then call for elections.
They saw the suppression of democratic institutions as normal when they did not
work properly. Thus, the figures of Lonardi, Aramburu, Rojas and Onganía,
beyond their personal and ideological differences within the armed forces, were
assimilated into characters who were in the right place and time to "save
the country." Accordingly, "Panorama" magazine published after
the so-called "Argentina Revolution" in 1966: "on June 29,
Argentina awoke with a new government. The Argentine people seemed unsurprised.
Rumors that echoed in the national and international press had already warned
them of this inexorable fact. However, there was no certain clue as to the true
popular attitude towards the new authorities[45].”
A reflection of this are the answers of some of the
interviewees, to the question, ‘what kind of "government" did they
prefer in their youth, one elected by the vote of citizens or imposed by
military force?’, many of them marked their distrust towards democracy:
I
had no confidence in democracy or in political parties. Because democracy had
never worked. The political parties were like a football team, you became a fan
of one and you were with them, then you saw that the period when they ruled was
disastrous because there was always some calamity, everything started with
inflation, then ended up throwing them out[46].
It is interesting for understanding this group, the
idea of “throwing
them out”. At no time
did they consider the possibility of a democratic replacement for that
government that they considered chaotic, but rather the departure of the
government was the replacement by a military government that would, in theory,
solve the problems and give some tranquillity and order to that previous situation.
Is it possible to speak of a disenchantment with democracy in this age group?
They were born between 1935 and 1945, that is to say during military or
pseudo-democratic governments (Justo, Ortiz, Castillo, Ramírez, Farrell). Most
of their education developed during the Peronist government. Their first
democratic practice was in the 1958 or 1963 elections. In both cases, the
governments elected by vote (Frondizi and Illia respectively) were dismissed by
military coups. That is to say, they did not have a good experience with
democracy and lived through one of the most irregular political periods in
Argentine history, although not the only one. This does not justify their
passive attitude towards democracy, but it does help to understand and
contextualize their opinions on the matter.
But not only these voices refer to this idea, it is
interesting the suggestion made by the magazine "Siete Días" about
the process of political instability that had been taking place in Argentina
since 1930. To the question: "Who are those responsible for this
institutional fragility? The army or the political parties? ", The
response points to the situation of those years:
[…] practically no one stops
accepting as an irreversible fact of contemporary reality, the emergence of the
military in the different policies of the state ... Given the circumstances,
the armed forces acted as the only party with the weight of real power in
Argentina. The meetings of generals or the speeches of military chiefs' weigh
much more heavily on public opinion than party conventions. And something else:
political decisions are no longer discussed in committees (long before their final
closure), but in the War College and in the high military bodies […][47].
This paragraph reflects the opinion of a large sector
of Argentine society that did not have confidence in the political parties to
govern as the fundamental protagonists of a democratic government, but believed
that it was the armed forces that should be assigned that role. This
"irreversible fact" of the contemporary reality marks an entire era
and a whole society that accepted and supported this type of intervention.
In line with this distrust of political parties, a
survey by "Panorama" magazine in 1966 showed that 37% of the
population surveyed felt that it was the military who were better able to take
the country forward while 6% supported politicians. The rest of the percentages
were divided among businessmen, economists, workers, university students[48].
However, in view of this need for order emanating from the armed forces, what
was their role? Eduardo considers that when they came to power, people had:
“an expectation that it seemed that they solve
the problems and made the country work and when everything that followed was
the same, it was a disappointment. There was no other way to fix things, there
were no able people to do it. They had all the strength and the command to be
able to solve things but as they did not solve them then they were not able to
either. They
were not able because they did not want to[49].”
For his part, Mirta comments that "we lived
through the military governments like the telling of a story but not with a
happy ending because in some years, the early ones, we felt protected with
order and tranquillity but then later we felt that everything went sour[50]." In both testimonies, can be observed the
initial expectation and the subsequent disillusion, elements that have been
deepened with the passage of the years due to the temporal distance from the
facts and experiences lived.
Consistent with these testimonies, a note from the
magazine "Siete Días" reflected on the power of the military 38 years
after the first coup, from a joke that circulated in the Military College:
"for the cadets, the rank immediately above that of general is that of
President of the Republic -invented in the late 1930s." The journalist immediately
associated it with sarcasm: "What the military do is to eliminate the
group of politicians they do not like, to put other politicians in the
government, but of their preference." In fact, continues the note,
"this implies an inversion of the reality. Because it was almost always
the politicians who demanded the intervention of the military[51]." Here we can observe, on the one hand, the
naturalness with which the society accepted military coups, recognized in that
the rank above that of a general in the military mandate was that of president
of the nation. This acceptance was represented in a humorous volume in one of
the magazines of political humor most read in those years (Image 3)
[52].
Image 3: back cover of the magazine Tía Vicenta
(8/7/1963)
On the other hand, there is a widespread idea that it
was the politicians (opponents of the government of the day) who "beat the
doors of the barracks" to ask the military to disrupt the democratic government
and thus consolidate a new government. Consequently, and following this logic,
politicians did not go hand in hand with democracy, that is, they did not use
democratic channels to achieve power, but they sought to destabilize the
governments elected by the people and participate in the policies carried out
by military orders.
The first coup that the interviewees lived through in
their youth was the one made on March 29, 1962, when Arturo Frondizi was
dismissed as president of the Nation. The leader of the Union Cívica Radical Intransigente (UCRI) had come to power in the
1958 elections, through an electoral and political pact with Perón and in order
to obtain the support of the decisive Peronist vote for its candidacy, since
for that moment there was a proscription of the Justicialista party. Also, this coup d’etat truncated the first democratic president who had been voted
for by these young people.
"I
experienced this coup with great joy
but also with great sorrow. Changes like this cannot bear fruit, you
realize. Why? Because the military were always called for, by politicians of
one tendency or another. They were forced to carry out the coup. So that's not practical, they are not solutions "[53]
A change
was needed right? Maybe the military business would not be right, but it was
the only way it could happen, right? [54]
Their attitude towards the coup reflects the little democratic experience these young people
had, in addition to contemporaneousness with one of the most irregular
political periods in Argentine history, although not the only one. This does
not justify their apparent passive attitude towards democracy, but it helps to
understand and contextualize their opinions on this issue. In the following
testimony, different from the previous ones, one can observe the concern for
democratic institutions and the rejection of the coups.
That
event, which was later repeated, was an act of barbarism, carried out by the army,
by the armed forces, the constitution was a blank sheet, they acted as always.
It was prepared for a long time so as to achieve all the damage that they later
did to the nation. It was not an improvised act, it was a repeated act until
the republic was undone, by them and those who followed with that same plan, we
know them all[55].
Four years later, on June 28, 1966, a new coup led by General Onganía established
a government that eventually became an "authoritarian bureaucracy",
without a time limit, with long-term intentions and adding new prohibitions to
those already proscribed by Peronism[56]. The coup ousted
President Arturo Illia (Union Civica
Radica del Pueblo - UCRP), democratically elected in the elections of 1963
and in which he had obtained 25.14% of the votes[57].
Disastrous,
that was something completely unfair because Illia was a great person, maybe he
wasn’t what they wanted him to be or as clever, but he had many ideas and did
many good things, despite the short time he was in office. He was a great person. That
was very bad. [58]
It also seemed wrong to me, even though Onganía was
out of all the military men the one I held above all the rest, I saw a man who
seemed straight to me. Although Illia was a quiet man, but good, right? A
fighter, he struggled, a little bit slowly, but well[59].”
The military coup
of 1966 meant the gradual loss of democracy. However, in the descriptions of
President Illia, the interviewees echoed the characterizations of the time
("slow", "not very smart", "quiet") that they identified
him with a tortoise and that, for many historians, was part of the trigger and
subsequent support for the military coup[60].
I
think it was a mistake, Illia was a very honest president, no one could blame
him for putting his hand in the till, right? The proof is that the people of
Cordoba where he lived gave him a house because he had no home of his own. In
Cruz del Eje it was. What I can say about Illia was that he was a very, very
honest but slow ruler. He was slow but I think it was a mistake by Onganía. Although Onganía, despite being a military man,
made a good administrative government, for me. I will not talk about anything
else but the administrative government, I think it was good[61].
The candor, "do not put your hand in the till"
is also related to the deposed president and demonstrates the climate of the
period in which the interviews were carried out (in 2002 and 2004). This figure
is opposed by the de facto president
who, even if he had used the army to remove a constitutional president, remains
remembered for good governance at the administrative level. In the memory we
could say that "the whole past is simultaneous and is next to the present.
Different times are remembered at the same time, which is now. Therefore, a
story that starts from memory can be given a chronological sequence only by
large flows, by broad phases; but must always accept some degree of
indeterminacy, leaps back and forth[62]."
To delve deeper into the idea of political
attitudes, it was possible to observe in some interviews the opinion that the
interviewees had on two facts that would mark the end of the military
government of Onganía: the "Cordobazo",
of May 29, 1969, and the abduction and execution of General Aramburu[63], a year later in May 1970 carried out by the Montoneros organization. These events
convulsed Argentine society at that time, marking, on the one hand, the fact of
a student workers’ rebellion that was accompanied by large sectors of the society
of Cordoba and, on the other hand, the protagonism of armed violence that
reached characters related to high spheres of power.
Regarding
the Cordobazo, the memories are not
very clear. For some of those young people it was "an unprecedented event
of collective hope[64].” Lots of brains prepared to do things well, they
were as always, confused and that event that should have illuminated the
territory was only a light of hope. Others see it as a pivotal event at that
time, "it changed a period, did it not? Another started. I do not remember
well the consequences it had[65]." Nevertheless, one can also observe the
characterization of the revolt as violent and the moment when the violence
became visible to many of these young people: "I think it was excessive
because that could have ended in something very serious, could it not? Maybe
because the people of Cordoba at the time were going through much worse than
the rest of the country. Here in the province of Buenos Aires, many times the
economic ups and downs of other parts of the country were not felt[66].”
As for the kidnapping and execution of General
Aramburu, his relationship with the Montoneros
and with the guerrillas of those years, what
prevails, above all, was the rejection of violence, especially the "way"
in which he was assassinated[67]: "Well it was a crime against humanity, for me,
especially in the way they executed him." To this, the idea of these
youngsters of the armed organizations and their protagonism in those years, is
added: "It caused me a lot of indignation, it seemed to me like cowardice,
it did not seem right[68].”
Notwithstanding the violence of the event, the notion
of "revenge" was similarly related to the fundaments set out by the Montoneros at the time of his abduction
and execution[69]: "he seemed to me an okay person, despite the
fact that he had carried out the revolution of 55, but, I think things are fixed
in a different way and not like that, even less with the execution that they did,
so cowardly, they killed him[70]."
The testimonies mark two memories, on the one hand,
the violent execution that was part of the climate of the time, of the day to
day and that is not approved by any of them. On the other, the justification of
the same in accordance with the action of Aramburu a few years before. Agreeing
with the proposal of Sebastian Carassai, I believe that the memory of "social"
violence is determined by the degree of closeness to the events[71].
Finally, it is interesting to note how
the parallelism of the armed
organizations with the military forces, or the consensus of "the theory of
the two demons"[72], deepens in the opinion of the common people:
"the question of the Montoneros is
so debatable given that half of them belonged to the right and had been the peers
of Aramburu, they acted like the army without peace nor justice"[73]. Much has been discussed, intellectually, about this
but I think these young people conceived of this period as one of extreme
violence, of "one side and the other." Their political attitudes regarding
these facts are neither of approval nor opposition. Support for military coups
appears as something normal. It would seem that among this sector of the
population, the coup was the exit to
everything. The different situations experienced by the country had led to a
loss of civic-democratic meaning[74], that is to say, the only possible alternative to the
crisis of democratic governments was the disruption by force of the same. Confidence
had been lost in any democratic solution.
When listening to and rereading these testimonies, it
is not possible to stop comparing them with a work done by Alejandro Horowicz
focused on the last military dictatorship. In one of the chapters of his essay,
he made a puzzle with the letters of the readers of the newspaper La Prensa
between 1976 and 1983. According to the author, he "does not reduce the
whole of Argentine society into a text but I say, Argentine society was and
still is, covered by this text[75]." When reading these letters united by the hand
of Horowicz, the interviewees can be recognized in them: "when the armed forces
took power on March 24 and I listened to the text of the proclamation, I
exulted. The country had been saved. My euphoria is not superficial. There are
those who argue that it is, because, rather, one had to be sad because they
lost an opportunity to live democratically. Democracy is a word that expresses
a system of government and citizen participation in that government. But rather
than democracy or any other form of government, I believe in honesty. Without
honesty, there is no system of government that is good[76]." For this part of Argentine society, honesty
was placed above any form of government and, at that time, it was incarnated by
those who seized power by force.
5. Giving a voice to the silent youth: some final considerations
Through this polyphony of voices, I have tried to
observe the memories of a sector of the youth of the 60s. I am referring to
these young people who did not actively participate in the political militancy
of those years but who, nevertheless, voted, criticized or supported the
different governments of the day.
The support for the armed forces and the little
importance given to the democratic governments are a constant among them.
Obviously, having been born and passing their childhood and youth in a period
of innumerable coups d'état, makes
initial confidence in the military and distrust of politicians, commonplace.
Although in many of the testimonies the disillusionment with the changes proposed
by the armed forces is present in their memories; it is interesting to recover,
for this analysis, the initial illusion that occurred at the time of the coup. One of the ideas that emerges from
this work and that I will continue to investigate in the future is suggesting
that in these youth sectors there was a tendency towards the naturalization of
the coup. By this I mean the support
and the naturalness with which these young people took the access to power of
the military sectors through the coups
d'etat and their later disappointment with them.
The idea of social attitudes and political behaviors has been
attempted to be observed from two events that marked the Argentine history of
the late '60s and early 70s and which none of the interviewees could forget:
the Cordobazo and the kidnapping and execution
of Pedro Aramburu at the hands of the armed organization the "Montoneros". As I said earlier,
attitudes to these events mark a rejection of the violence exercised from
various sectors as well as an ambiguous position, the "do not get
involved" or "they must have done something" are perceptible in
the testimonies and in some way, the passage of time, validated this position
taken in youth. There is no reflection on what might have happened if they
"got involved" in what was happening, they simply keep the memory of
being as young as those who fought, but with whom they did not share the same
interests. What mobilized them and what could be recovered from the interviews,
although it has not been worked in depth in this text, was to achieve their own
objectives in life like getting a good job, having a good life, and having a
family. Politics was considered as something alien in which they had to
participate only at the time of elections, a relationship that we could
characterize as indifference and silence. Disbelief towards the function of
partisan politics and the valuation of an orderly society as a way of solving
its daily life was a characteristic of this youth sector which I intend to
continue to analyze in the near future from other historical sources[77].
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