Sex and political scandal in Argentina 1942
The cadet scandal (), also known as the Ballvé Case (), was a sex and political scandal that broke out in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in September 1942, regarding the involvement of young cadets from the Colegio Militar de la Nación in alleged sex parties held by gay men of the upper classes. The main defendant was amateur photographer Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero, who held small gatherings in his Recoleta apartment and took erotic pictures of the attendees, which became the main evidence used against him. In 1942, Ballvé Piñero and his group of friends, including Adolfo José Goodwin, Ernesto Brilla, Romeo Spinetto and Sonia—the only woman—among others, started to pick up cadets off the streets for their private parties, with some even developing romantic relationships.
An internal investigation in the Colegio Militar de la Nación uncovered the incidents, which resulted in the expulsion, discharge and punishment of 29 cadets. Ballvé Piñero served as a scapegoat for the scandal and was sentenced to twelve years in prison for the charge of "corruption of minors", as he had recently reached the age of majority of 22 years and his lover was only 20 years old. The news of the incident made a great impact on the society and yellow press of Buenos Aires, to the extent that lists of prominent alleged homosexuals were disseminated anonymously among the population, and cadets were regularly ridiculed in the streets.
The scandal led to the most violent persecution against gay men in Argentine history up to that point, with a series of police raids and defamations that managed to imprison many homosexuals, led others into exile and resulted in two suicides. Several historians point out that the scandal was used as an excuse for the 1943 coup d'état that put an end to the so-called "Infamous Decade" and had the self-proclaimed objective of "moral sanitation". Under the new regime, the persecution of homosexuals increased, and one of its first policies was the deportation of the Spanish singer Miguel de Molina, an event that was commented on throughout the country. The repression of homosexuality deepened with the rise of Peronism in 1946, although some authors suggest that their relationship was rather ambivalent.
The legacy of the scandal has been compared to that of Oscar Wilde's trial in the United Kingdom, the Dance of the Forty-One in Mexico and the Eulenburg affair in Germany, and is considered a turning point in the country's history of homophobia. Nevertheless, the cadet scandal and its ensuing persecution have been historically ignored by historians, and was not reclaimed by the local LGBT culture as the Mexican LGBT community did with the Dance of the Forty-One. In 2019, playwright Gonzalo Demaría became the first person to have access to the case files—the contents of which had been a great source of speculation for Argentine LGBT historians such as Juan José Sebreli, Jorge Salessi and Osvaldo Bazán—and published his research in the first book focused on the scandal the following year.
Background.
Political and military context.
The cadet scandal occurred during a complex transitional period of Argentine history, between the end of the so-called "Infamous Decade" and the rise of Peronism, in the context of the Second World War. In 1930, the first coup d'état in Argentine 20th century history established the military regime of nationalist General José Félix Uriburu, which ended the democratic rule of President Hipólito Yrigoyen.
Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the so-called "agro-export" economic model of Argentina was strongly impacted, since core countries reduced their purchases of raw materials. Uriburu was a conservative who disbelieved in liberal democracy and the party system, representing an authoritarian elitism that sought to replace democracy with a corporatist regime similar to Italian fascism. Under Uriburu's coup, the cadets from the Colegio Militar de la Nación reached the peak of their prestige, as they marched with Uriburu that day; in fact, the event is sometimes referred to as the "Golpe de los Cadetes" (English: "Cadet Coup"). The recognition of the cadets was given in the construction of a larger and more opulent headquarters in the neighboring town of El Palomar, in Buenos Aires Province.
Uriburu called for presidential elections in 1931, in which officer Agustín Pedro Justo was declared the winner through electoral fraud. Justo was part of the "Concordancia" (Spanish for "concordance"), a political alliance that included his own National Democratic Party, the Anti-Personalist Radical Civic Union (an anti-Yrigoyen offshoot of the Radical Civic Union) and the Independent Socialist Party. The "Concordancia" ruled the country until 1943, avoiding the coming to power of the Radical Civic Union through continuous electoral fraud. The Infamous Decade saw the development of a policy of import substitution industrialization, which caused a new wave of immigrants from the interior of the country to Buenos Aires in search of work opportunities. Justo was succeeded as President of Argentina by Roberto María Ortiz in 1938, who died four years later, resulting in the assumption of Ramón Castillo on June 27, 1942.
The first documentary evidence regarding accusations of homosexuality in the Argentine Army date back to 1880, when two sixteen-year-old cadets, Felipe Goulou and César Carri, abused several peers. Homosexuality became a main interest for the Argentine Army in 1905, when more than a hundred homosexuals belonging to the German Army were discovered, during the time in which German officers were advisers at the Escuela Superior de Guerra and Argentine soldiers studied in Germany. The following year, there was a homosexuality scandal in the Argentine Army itself, when Captain Arturo Macedo was killed by a gunshot perpetrated by Major Juan Comas, who later tried to commit suicide in an episode regarded at the time as a "crime of passion" that was little concealed by the press. While Uriburu was the "de facto" president of the country, he "turned a blind eye" to another scandal that this time involved his family, when the Prince George, Duke of Kent, spent a night with his cousin, José Evaristo Uriburu Roca, during an official visit to Buenos Aires alongside his brother, future king Edward VIII.
Gay culture in Buenos Aires.
At the turn of the 20th century, Buenos Aires was the site of a Great European immigration wave, becoming a great cosmopolitan city and changing the customs of both the working and upper classes. There was also internal immigration of peasants to the margins of the city, where workers and the underclass coexisted. The criminals of these areas developed their own language, "lunfardo", a name which also came to describe its speakers. During this time, the lower-class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires became the place of origin of tango music and dance, which was initially danced between men. The emergence of tango was accompanied by a new male youth subculture, known as "compadritos" (lit. 'little buddies'), who were criticized as "effeminate" and "amoral" for dancing with other men and for their meticulousness with personal grooming and fashion.
In the early 20th century, the main area for gay cruising in Buenos Aires (locally known as "yire" or "yiro") were the gardens of Paseo de Julio street, a wooded area that separated the now demolished Recova building from what is now Alem avenue and the Río de la Plata. This southern neighborhood, known as "el Bajo", became a partying place for bohemians, sailors, delinquents and prostitutes. The "yire" area ran from the Casa Rosada—where the monument "Las Nereidas" by Lola Mora was inaugurated in 1903—to Temple street, where the Central Station of railways was located. Within "el Bajo", the main meeting point for gay men was the white marble statue of Giuseppe Mazzini in the square that, at that time, bore his name. Medical and police documents of the time speak of the presence of homosexuals in the brothels of "el Bajo", coexisting peacefully with all kinds of "lunfardos". Another popular gay cruising spot in the early 20th century was the Avenida de Mayo avenue—inaugurated in 1894—which was very close to the main "yire" area of Paseo 9 de Julio's gardens. The "yire" was organized under the dynamic of categories "loca" (or "marica") and "chongo". In the argot developed by Argentine gay male culture—the so-called "language of the "locas" (Spanish: "habla de las locas"")—the still popular word "chongo" was used to denote masculine, straight passing men that played the active role. In opposition, "loca" was the term with which openly effeminate homosexuals called each other.
While Buenos Aires was turning into a "melting pot" of immigrants during the late 19th century, the governing elite known as the Generation of '80 sought to modernize the country, taking France as a model. Seeking to control the huge influx of lower-class European immigrants, they implemented a wide-scale state apparatus based on the social hygiene movement, led by doctors José María Ramos Mejía, Francisco de Veyga and José Ingenieros. These hygienists typified the new classes of criminals emerging in Buenos Aires, and were particularly interested in homosexuality. In 1908, criminalist Eusebio Gómez wrote: "The group of homosexuals in Buenos Aires is numerous. They have come to form their own branch of prostitution, because the exercise of their traffic obeys, in an immense majority, not only the desire to satisfy the impositions of their nature, but, very especially, to obtain a profit." The journal "Archivos de Psiquiatría, Criminología y Ciencias Afines" (English: "Archives of Psychiatry, Criminology and Related Sciences")—edited by de Veyga and Ingenieros—contains the best historical sources on Argentine homosexual life of the beginning of the century. At that time, a group of crossdressing burglars became known, and their biographies and medical profiles written by hygienists constitute one of the first records of gay life in Buenos Aires. The only individuals at the disposal of de Veyga and Ingenieros were prisoners of "lunfardo" origin (i.e. the underclass), thus creating a cliché that linked homosexuality to criminal life and parodic imitations of women. Although most historical sources focus on homosexuality in the lower classes, the phenomenon was also known to exist in the upper classes, so hygienists proposed the theory that in the former it was congenital, while on the latter it was acquired, mainly by the "perverse" influence of the lower classes. The so-called "aristocrat homosexuality" remained hidden and discreet, being part of a broader decadent-inspired dandy subculture. Between the "Belle Époque" and the 1940s, Argentine upper-class gay men frequented closed circles of homosexuals in European high society, while at the same time Buenos Aires became a place of refuge for many prominent homosexuals such as Jean-Michel Frank, Federico García Lorca, Witold Gombrowicz and Virgilio Piñera.
The middle- and upper-class gay men of Buenos Aires lived with relative ease until 1943. The two most popular areas for "yire" at that time were the surroundings of Plaza Italia in Palermo and "el Bajo", the area of the city that bordered the Río de la Plata, which stretched from Retiro to behind the Casa Rosada, and many English sailors spent their time at the bar Mission to Seamen on Paseo Colón street, where at night they mingled with the "locas". By 1941, the lively homosexual nightlife of Buenos Aires included train stations, the port and cabarets frequented by drag queens (known as "transformistas") and young male prostitutes. The police only dealt with underclass homosexuals and there even existed some "procureurs", older gay men who organized dates in clandestine brothels with poor young men. Up until the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the men of Buenos Aires were homosocial and the city's nightlife was male-exclusive, which gave it the "suspicious air of a city of single men", making it easier for homosexuals to go unnoticed. In the 1930s, the repression of "deviant sexualities" was increased, although homosexuality as such was not criminally prosecuted. Following the 1930 coup d'état, the new authorities started a series of "moralizing" reforms due to their proximity with the Catholic Church, which put an end to the buoyant nightlife of Buenos Aires. In 1932, the first police edict alluding to homosexuality appeared, punishing "finding a subject known to be a pervert in the company of a minor." In this trend, brothels were closed in 1936—as part of the so-called Social Prophylaxis Law (Spanish: "Ley de Profilaxis Social")— and censorship began to be implemented with respect to sexual issues in journalism, radio, cinema, theater and literature. This anti-homosexual trend was crowned with the cadet scandal in 1942,