Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE CAMPAIGN TO
REFORM THE YOUTH
I
in the midst of the economic crisis in 1966, the military mounted
another
golpe de estado
(coup d'état). General Juan Carlos Onganía
vowed to fix the nation's economic stagnation once and for all. Yet he
held back on his economic reforms and first launched a government
campaign against immorality. Kissing on the street became suspect, and
pornographic magazines disappeared from newsstands. Police harassed
young women in miniskirts and young men with long hair. As General
Onganía's son-in-law, Colonel Enrique Green, announced on assuming
leadership of the campaign, “Many inhabitants of the country are ill with
a contagious disease . . . immorality.” Colonel Green hinted that it may
be necessary “to eliminate undesirable people” (25).
Onganía soon extended his efforts to eliminate leftist ideology in the
universities.
“[I]t is the intellectuals who are the protagonists of subver-
sion, not the masses,” one Catholic theologian informed the military,
“. . . the national universities are today the central headquarters of
the communist ruling class within our country” (41). The new military
government intervened in the universities in Buenos Aires, La Plata,
Rosario, Córdoba, Tucumán, and Mendoza. The generals appointed
right-wing rectors to administer the universities, fire leftist profes-
sors, disband student political groups, and call in the police against
student protests. By the time the military regime took up the eco-
nomic reforms it had promised at the outset, General Onganía had
already alienated middle-class university students. His repression
eventually drove them to rebellion and, for the first time, support of
Juan Perón.
Source:
Quotation from Cousins, Cyrus Steven. “General Onganía and
the Argentine [Military] Revolution of the Right: Anti-Communism,
Morality, Economic Growth, and Student Militancy, 1966-1970”
(master's thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2008).
corner altars complete with photos of Juan and Evita surrounded by
burning candles.
First-generation workers in Córdoba also had been developing a
strong Peronist identity. As many as 8,000 rural residents per year were
moving from farms and rural villages to this expanding industrial city.
Córdoba's population nearly doubled in just one generation. The unions
