Onganía, the Argentine dictator who in 1966 banned kisses, ballet, long hair, and miniskirts
Argentina culminated in 1976, 50 years ago, a descent into hell. The dictatorship of the “disappeared,” self-styled National Reorganization Process and headed by General Jorge Videla, was not the beginning of anything, but the culmination of a grotesque chain of coups d’état.
Shortly before that, Argentina had suffered a dictator who, besides being cruel, was the most anachronistic and ridiculous of his time. General Juan Carlos Onganía declared war on long hair, short skirts, and public displays of affection. Precisely between 1966 and 1970, the years when the rest of the world was letting its hair down.
Javier Milei may seem grotesque. But he is, after all, a constitutional president, legitimized by votes. Considering the tormented history of a country as young as Argentina, with coups d’état in 1930, 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, and 1976, Milei (with all his far-rightism, his chainsaw, and his talks with a dead dog) embodies, in a way, a relative democratic normality.
My barber in Buenos Aires used to tell me about his youth. And his youth was Onganía. When my barber was not yet 20 years old, the police took him several times to another barber to get his hair cut. The police questioned him for sitting on a public bench, after dusk, next to a girl. Once they took him to the police station for wearing bell-bottom pants: they wouldn't let him leave until his brother brought him “decent clothes.”
Juan Carlos Onganía (1914-1995) belonged to the “civilized” sector of the army. Facing the “colored” military, supporters of killing or imprisoning Peronists, he belonged to the “blue” faction, inclined to keep them alive, although, of course, outlawed.
On June 28, 1966, a group of officers entered the Casa Rosada and kicked President Arturo Illia out onto the street, a civilian tutored by the army who tried to implement social democratic policies. Illia took a taxi and went home. The generals appointed Onganía as president.
Note the date: 1966. Mary Quant had just made the miniskirt fashionable in London. In the United States, the “summer of love” of 1967 was brewing. In 1968, May ’68 erupted in France. Onganía could not stand it. No long hair, no miniskirt, no student protests. Weeks after taking power, on July 29, 1966, he ordered the police to beat professors and students at the University of Buenos Aires. It was the “night of the long sticks.”
And he launched a delirious moral crusade. His model was Francisco Franco (he expected to have 40 years to "purge" Argentina), but not even Franco, with all his prudishness, managed to ban ballets like "The Rite of Spring". Onganía did. The tutu was obscene.
Kissing in public was also obscene. And, of course, extramarital sex was. He set up a brigade that would burst into hotel rooms and ask for the identification of those in bed. If they were not spouses, they were arrested and their families were called. If they were homosexual, they were sent to prison.
In the crusade against bad customs, Onganía's right-hand man was named Luis Margaride. Commissioner Margaride was chief of municipal inspectors and, according to his official title, "Moral Custodian of the City of Buenos Aires." Margaride saw sins everywhere. He claimed that rock music was diabolical. It was he who ordered the multiple arrests of my barber.
It is advisable to be wary of people of this type. The Junta of Commanders removed Onganía in 1970. But Margaride continued to thrive. In 1973, the returned president Juan Domingo Perón appointed him deputy chief of the Federal Police, on the recommendation of his secretary, José López Rega, "the Sorcerer".
In reality, what Margaride secretly assumed was operational command of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, known as the Triple A and initiator of the "dirty war" that led from 1976 onwards to the more than dirty war, that of Videla, that of the 30,000 "disappeared".
Considering all this, Milei is almost normal.