Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics in 1930s Argentina

Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics in 1930s Argentina

Andrés H. Reggiani

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n August 1941 Lord Winterton asked the Argentine ambassador to Great Britain, Tomás Le Breton, whether his country was willing to accept a small group of German Jewish children with relatives living in Argentina. Earlier government-to-government negotiations had failed, and the British Foreign Office hoped that Winterton’s friendship with Le Breton might bring better results (both men had participated in the 1938 Evian Conference on refugees). However, Le Breton rejected Winterton’s request on the grounds that “the Jewish children were exactly the people whom the Argentine government did not want to have in the country as they would eventually grow up and would help to increase the Jewish population by propagation.” The ambassador nevertheless left open the possibility of issuing visas for the 20 children if the British government “were prepared to have them sterilized before they went there [Argentina],” a task, Winterton told his friend, that “was quite beyond our powers to effect.”1 Le Breton was neither a fanatical right-winger nor particularly racist. A lawyer by training, he was a leading figure of the Radical Party, which won the first national democratic elections in 1916 with the support of the middle classes Research for this article was made possible by the Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica (Argentina). Various drafts were presented at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the Iberoamerikanisches-Institut, the Lateinamerika-Institut (Freie Universität–Berlin), the Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas (CONICET), and the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. The author wishes to thank Paul-André Rosental, Luc Berlivet, Reinhard Liehr, Sandra Carreras, Ricardo Salvatore, Hernán González Bollo, Gustavo Vallejo, Marisa Miranda, Carolina Biernat, and the anonymous readers of the Hispanic American Historical Review for their insightful criticism and suggestions. 1. National Archives (Public Record Office), London, FO 371/29210 R97898, “Refugees, Evacuation of Children to North America,” Memo of Winterton to the Foreign Office, 5 Aug. 1941. I would like to express my gratitude to Uki Goñi for sharing this source with me. Hispanic American Historical Review 90:2 doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-135 Copyright 2010 by Duke University Press

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and the descendants of immigrants. His attitude in the refugee children affair illustrates not only the rampant anti-Semitism that pervaded most of the diplomatic corps, but also the enduring appeal of radical eugenics within Argentine elite circles. Since Nancy L. Stepan’s pioneering study published almost two decades ago, scholarly interest in Latin American and Argentine eugenics has flourished, accompanying growth in the fields of history of medicine and the social and cultural studies of disease.2 Following Stepan’s work, Eduardo Zimmermann published one of the most influential studies of the relationship between eugenics and social reform in turn-of-the-century Argentina.3 Although it took another decade for historians to pick up the thread of Stepan’s and Zimmermann’s work, today scholarly production on Argentine eugenics has made up for this delay with a rich variety of studies of ideas and institutions, perspectives on gender issues, and Foucauldian analyses of eugenics as “biopower.”4 A general consensus over the nature of Latin American eugenics has emerged, which assumes the hegemonic prevalence among social reformers of a 2. Nancy L. Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991); Diego Armus, “Disease in the Historiography of Modern Latin,” in Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS, ed. Diego Armus (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 1–24. 3. Eduardo A. Zimmermann, “Racial Ideas and Social Reform: Argentina, 1890–1916,” Hispanic American Historical Review 72, no. 1 (1992): 23–46. 4. Yolanda Eraso, “Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization: The Practice of Eugenics in the Treatment of Argentine Women in the 1930s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, no. 81 (2007): 793–822; Natalia Milanesio, “Redefining Men’s Sexuality, Resignifying Male Bodies: The Argentine Law of Anti-Venereal Prophylaxis, 1936,” Gender & History 17, no. 2 (2005): 463–91; Marisa Miranda and Gustavo Vallejo, eds., Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2005); Pedro Zarini, “La utopía eugenista en la Argentina (1900–1950),” in El mosaico argentino: Modelos y representaciones del espacio y de la población, siglos XIX–XX, ed. Hernán Otero (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2004), 425–69; Eugenia Scarzanella, “Los intelectuales ítalo-argentinos, ¿un posible liderazgo étnico? La Asociación Argentina de Biotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social (1930–1943),” in De Europa a las Américas: Dirigentes y liderazgos (1880–1960), ed. Alicia Bernasconi and Carina Frid (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2004), 99–112; Gustavo Vallejo, “El ojo del poder en el espacio del saber: Los institutos de biotipología,” Asclepio 56, no.1 (2004): 219–44; Karina Ramacciotti and Adriana Valobra, “ ‘Plasmar la raza fuerte . . .’ Relaciones de género en la propaganda sanitaria de la Secretaría de Salud Pública de la Argentina: 1947–1949,” in Generando el peronismo: Estudios de cultura, política y género (1946–1955), ed. Karina Ramacciotti and Adriana Valobra (Buenos Aires: Proyecto Editorial, 2004); Marisa Miranda, “La antorcha de cupido: Eugenesia, biotipología y eugamia en Argentina, 1930–1970,” Asclepio 55, no. 2 (2003): 231–55; Marcela Nari, “La eugenesia en Argentina, 1890–1940,” Quipu 12, no. 3 (1999): 343–69.


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neo-Lamarckian approach to population improvement, despite the discrediting of the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. Examples of this are eugenics education and public health campaigns, and laws restricting marriage. According to this view, eugenics took root and expanded within the cultural and intellectual frame provided by the Catholic Church, scientific child care or puericultura, and the biological and statistical classificatory schemes espoused by Italian fascist demography, notably those developed by Nicola Pende and Corrado Gini in the 1920s and 1930s. In turn, negative proposals based on the rediscovery of Mendelian hereditary theory aimed at improving the racial stock by preventing the reproduction of groups deemed biologically weak; these remained marginal within the emerging medico-legal complex. To put it in bold terms, Latin America was immune to the radical eugenics adopted in the Progressive Era United States, Nazi Germany, and social democratic Scandinavia. While generically congruent with most of the policies of race improvement implemented in the 1930s and 1940s, this explanation neglects significant facts. The issue of compulsory sterilization is a case in point. This controversial measure was the subject of debate among medical and legal experts in the early twentieth century and again in the 1930s, when Nazi racial policy forced experts to address it disingenuously. Few Argentine medical and legal scientists rejected eugenic sterilization on moral grounds, but those who openly praised it were not a majority within the profession. As this essay will show, eugenicists either addressed sterilization in depoliticized terms as a highly complex matter whose actual implications required a detached and dispassionate expert assessment, or carried it out discreetly on allegedly therapeutic grounds. As the debates of the Second Pan-American Conference on Eugenics show, the Argentine delegates believed that compulsory sterilization should be considered and thoroughly studied, though not carried out before conclusive evidence of racial benefits was gathered. Such evidence could only come from Germany. Records of the Prussian state archives shed new light on the nature of the rapport between German and Latin American medical science in the 1930s. Primary evidence on the activities of the Deustch-Iberoamerikanische-Ärzteakademie (German-Iberoamerican Medical Academy) reveals significant details regarding the reception and circulation of Nazi eugenics among Latin American physicians. Experts traveling to Germany to attend summer courses and visit medical facilities played an instrumental role in separating the debate on compulsory sterilization from other more atavistic and “unscientific” manifestations of Nazi racism, thus indirectly contributing to the legitimization of this policy in their home countries. By arguing that closer attention should be paid to sterilization to bet-

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ter understand the parameters within which Argentine eugenics operated in the 1930s and 1940s, I do not wish to reverse the above-mentioned neoLamarckian consensus. Rather, I propose to acknowledge the intrinsic instability of biomedical discourses of population improvement. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin A. Rosemblatt have claimed that Latin American eugenics often functioned within incompatible definitions of race.5 Peter Wade has gone further along this path and argued that just as biology and heredity were construed as “cultural artifacts,” so were culture and environment “biologized” through essentialist narratives of race improvement.6 These nuanced approaches to the classic opposition between nature and culture help us make sense of those cases in which eugenicists perceived sterilization as an acceptable measure to eradicate undesirable hereditary traits, while remaining anchored to a neo-Lamarckian worldview. As Sarah W. Tracy has shown, the “slippage” between environmental and hereditarian explanations was made conceptually possible by constitutional medical theory, especially by one of its most popular versions in Latin America, biotypology.7 This essay also builds upon previous analyses of the relationship between eugenics, authoritarian politics, and technocratic expertise. It follows Paul Weindling’s characterization of eugenics as a technocratic and authoritarian ideology that “offered the state and the professions unlimited powers to eradicate disease and improve the health of future generations.” As such, eugenics was closely linked to the attempt to move beyond the divisive arena of party politics through science and medicine, a process which “presented a novel role for the professional expert.”8 More specifically, the article places itself among recent studies by Kristin Ruggiero, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Jerry Dávila on the role of science in shaping state policy on social and racial issues by way of public health and elementary education campaigns and legal practices in 5. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, “Racial Nations,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003), 1–31. 6. Peter Wade, “Race and Nation in Latin America: An Anthropological View,” in Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, 263–81. 7. Sarah W. Tracy, “An Evolving Science of Man: The Transformation and Demise of American Constitutional Medicine, 1920–1950,” in Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920–1950,” ed. Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 161–88. 8. Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 7.


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Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. Stern and Dávila in particular make strong cases for the interconnection between nationalism, technocracy, and eugenics. On some specific points, such as the authoritarian context in which European ideas took root and the technologies devised to identify and measure “abnormal” psychophysical traits, the paths followed by eugenicists in all three countries were remarkably similar.9 Before we proceed it may be useful to summarize the main features that Argentine eugenics shared with similar movements elsewhere in Latin America. First, calls to adopt a science-based policy to improve the population was part of a broader process by which medical, legal, and economic experts and social reformers came to view successful social modernization in terms of rational and efficient administration of human resources. Second, this process entailed the consolidation of the technical elites and the legitimization of their specific knowledge alone as valid for government purposes. As a result, professions like medicine set themselves to “colonize” other areas deemed vital for the state, such as child rearing, education, physical training, job performance, and nutrition. Both trends led to a gradual proliferation of bureaucratic institutions, technical agencies, and regulations aimed at surveying specific population groups (Indians, Afro-Americans, peasants, children, women, workers) and devising methods to improve their psychophysical makeup — or, to use the language of the time, to “revalorize” the nation’s “human capital.” Another common feature was the import of European intellectual and scientific paradigms with which to make sense of Latin America’s demographic specificities and ensure that they would not endanger the modernizing plans. In the 1920s and 1930s, Argentine, Brazilian, and Mexican eugenics adopted the latest statistical devices to measure demographic trends and classify individuals according to their psychophysical constitution. Eugenicists in all three countries borrowed from Italian fascist demography, devising local versions of Nicola Pende’s biotypological file.10 However, Argentine racial thought in general, and eugenics in particular, presented important differences. Unlike in the other countries with significant 9. Kristin Ruggiero, Modernity in the Flesh: Medicine, Law, and Society in Turn-of-theCentury Argentina (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004); Alexandra Minna Stern, “From Mestizophilia to Biotypology: Racialization and Science in Mexico, 1920–1960,” in Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, 187–210; Jerry Dávila, Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2006). 10. For a critical appraisal of the relationship between state bureaucracy and medicallegal expertise in Argentina see Ricardo Salvatore, “Sobre el surgimiento del Estado médico-legal en la Argentina (1890–1940),” Estudios Sociales 20, no. 11 (2001): 81–114.

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Indian and Afro-American communities, race science was not connected to the existence of a large nonwhite population and accompanying ethnic tensions. In Argentina perhaps more than anywhere else in Latin America, eugenics reflected the elites’ enduring attraction to European models. This was evident in the open preference for overseas immigration — a decision that resulted in the emergence of large and socially influential foreign communities — and in the conspicuous receptiveness to European nationalistic ideas and authoritarian models of demographic renewal in the 1930s, as domestic and international developments converged to feed apocalyptic fears of a looming “desertification” of the prosperous nation. Let us examine in more detail these distinctive features. Demographic Change and Dysgenic Utopias

In the 1930s, Argentine demographers — holders of university degrees in statistics, economy, medicine, and law who acquired an expertise in population topics — discovered that the country’s population growth was declining more rapidly than any other Latin American or Western nation. Despite the problems that made the collection of vital statistics in Argentina somewhat unreliable, the general trend was remarkable for its speed and intensity. The net rate of births, which had been 44 per thousand at the turn of the century, shrank to 26 per thousand by the end of the 1930s. These figures gave Argentina, together with Uruguay, the lowest rate of births in Latin America and the fourth lowest rate in the hemisphere, after the United States and Canada. Moreover, in only a decade (1928–38) the birthrate decreased in Argentina by 9 per thousand, more than in any other country of Western Europe and the Americas, with the exception of Uruguay and Spain.11 These statistics concealed a more complex demographic reality, one in which the lowest rates of birth corresponded to the urban areas and the prosperous agricultural districts of the center-east (the humid pampa), home of most of the four million immigrants that settled the country since the 1870s. Between 1890 and 1936, the birthrate in the city of Buenos Aires diminished from 44 to 17 per thousand, while in the suburban and rural districts around the capital

11. Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, “The Population of Latin America, 1850–1930,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 4, Latin America c. 1870–1930, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 121–53. Contemporary statistics published by the League of Nations put Argentina’s birthrate at a slightly lower level: 1911–13: 37.4, 1921–25: 32.4, 1926–30: 30.1, 1931–35: 26.4, 1936–39: 24.2.


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(Buenos Aires Province) the rate fell from 42 to 21 per thousand. In Rosario, the second largest town and immigrant center, the number of births for every one thousand inhabitants shrank in the same period from 40 to 17. Altogether different was the situation in the poorer rural provinces of the northwest (Jujuy, Salta, San Juan, Santiago del Estero, Tucumán), largely inhabited by an ethnically mixed population of Indian and Spanish ancestry. There, the rates of births oscillated between 37 and 44 per thousand; similar contrasts were found in the rates of infant mortality of each region. Unlike most European countries, where the gap between the fall of the birthrate and the reduction of mortality allowed for a significant increase of the population, Argentina’s abrupt and short demographic transition was not preceded by a demographic explosion. As in most of Western Europe, but at a much faster pace, these demographic changes were connected to the more widespread use of contraceptive devices and the participation of women in the job market — both of which called into question traditional gender roles and family structures. While in 1914 Argentine women had an average of 5.5 children, three decades later the number had fallen to 3.2; in the city of Buenos Aires these figures were 3.4 and 1.5 respectively. Although there were significant differences between social classes, all groups experienced a reduction of family size. Between 1936 and 1947 the average size of a middle-income household declined from 3.9 to 3.2 members; working-class families experienced an even steeper decrease from 4.3 to 3.5. Despite the steady increase of the marriage rate, an indicator of social progress, which in Buenos Aires was higher than in the rest of the country, the number of illegitimate births also went up from 25 to 28 percent.12 These findings acquired an even more troubling dimension once experts began circulating gloomy forecasts of impending depopulation based on new statistical methods to measure’s women’s fertility. Statisticians and economists in particular relied on Robert R. Kuczynski’s methodological innovations to calculate the net rate of reproduction. As developed by the German demographer, this index estimated the female population that would live long enough to reach the age of conception. First presented in 1931 at the International Congress for the Study of Population in Rome, and soon thereafter adopted by the League of 12. Isabella Cosse, Estigmas de nacimiento: Peronismo y orden familiar (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007). On contraception see Marcela Nari, “Las prácticas anticonceptivas, la disminución de la natalidad y el debate médico, 1890–1940,” in Política, médicos y enfermedades: Lecturas de historia de la salud en la Argentina, ed. Mirta Z. Lobato (Buenos Aires: Biblos / Mar del Plata: Universidad Nacional del Mar del Plata, 1996), 152–89.

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Nations, Kuczynski’s measurement placed in a transnational perspective a phenomenon that was becoming the rule in most of the urban societies of the West: low female fertility, a growing number of elderly people, and the demographic decline of the white population.13 Kuczynski’s measurements were introduced in Argentina by Alejandro Bunge (1880–1943). Trained in the German empire as an engineer, Bunge became the country’s most authoritative voice in statistics and demographic topics, serving as head of the Dirección General de Estadística de la Nación (Bureau of Statistics) in 1915–21 and 1923–25. He was also an economist of some repute and an influential sociological commentator. Bunge introduced the net reproduction rate at the moment when the country’s natural population was slowing down and overseas immigration plummeted to its lowest historical level. Toward the end of the decade he applied Kuczynski’s index to the vital statistics gathered by the Buenos Aires city census of 1936, predicting that the city would enter a phase of negative growth in 10 years if trends continued. Worse, if the birthrate of the provinces fell to the level of the capital, in 20 years the overall population of the country would start to decrease. With Bunge, the falling birthrate “moved from the editorials and letters to the editor of major newspapers to theater stages and well-attended conferences.”14 While there was nothing inherently “eugenic” in Bunge’s analyses, his work furnished the empirical evidence that lent credibility to the doomsday scenarios that became fertile soil for eugenics. By the end of the decade his warnings became increasingly infused with a moralistic rhetoric that lamented the “decline of the white race,” vindicated the “patriotism of superior men,” and praised the “abnegation of the Christian spirit.”15 This was the language often spoken in pronatalist milieus, and it became the dominant voice among population experts, especially statisticians and medical doctors. In 1926, the head of the Bureau of Statistics, Raúl Prebisch, stated that “when the individual limits his family he follows his selfish interest. . . . he only takes into account the personal advantages that come 13. The net rate of reproduction was more precise than other statistical methods, such as the rate of births (annual number of births per thousand people), the global fertility rate (number of children born to each woman aged 15–50), and global reproduction rate (number of girls born to each woman of childbearing age). 14. González Bollo, “Recepción argentina de una obsesión demográfica occidental: Baja la natalidad, declina la población, se agranda el desierto, 1926–1943,” in Los lugares del saber: Contextos locales y redes transnacionales en la formación del conocimiento moderno, ed. Ricardo D. Salvatore (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2007), 235–63. 15. Alejandro E. Bunge, “Esplendor y decadencia de la raza blanca,” Revista de Economía Argentina 22, no. 259 (1940): 9–23.


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from having a small family, ignoring his duties to the nation, to its civil, military and economic grandeur.”16 Bunge deemed unrealistic the expectations held by many of his compatriots, who continued to make Argentina’s demographic growth dependent on overseas immigration. Argentine economic conditions, he observed, were no longer as attractive as they had been before World War I, in particular with regard to access to land. He favored encouraging the factors of internal growth through an expansionist policy aimed at consolidating large rural households through the redistribution of land and other financial incentives.17 His emphasis on the quantitative improvement of the population was akin to the positions of the International Union for the Study of Population, headed by Corrado Gini, chief editor of the statistics journal Metron, of whose advisory board Bunge was a member. As a public intellectual, Bunge professed a special admiration for the Alliance Nationale contre la Dépopulation, which by the mid-1930s had emerged as the most active pronatalist group in France.18 The world crisis had far deeper implications for Argentina than for any other nation in the hemisphere, given its historic dependence on overseas manpower reserves. Between 1880 and 1930, immigration contributed 44 percent of the country’s annual overall population growth and roughly 80 percent of its domestic growth. Compared to other countries of the Southern Cone, Argentina’s share of newcomers was far higher. Thus, while Brazil received roughly the same number of immigrants as Argentina, in Brazil foreigners made up only 15 percent of the total growth — a third of Argentina’s share. Similar contrasts appear when one compares Argentina with the United States. According to the 1910 census, 14.7 percent of the population living in the United States had been born abroad, while the 1914 census showed twice that figure for the South American country.19 In the first half of the 1930s in Argentina, the number of 16. Raúl Prebisch, Anotaciones demográficas: A propósito de la teoría de los movimientos de población, cited in González Bollo, “Recepción argentina de una obsesión demográfica occidental,” 254. 17. On Bunge’s pronatalist ideas see Carolina Biernat, “Inmigración, natalidad y urbanización: El natalismo argentino y sus contradicciones frente a las preguntas del desarrollo económico (1914–1955),” in El mosaico argentino: Modelos y representaciones del espacio y la población, siglos XIX–XX, ed. Hernán Otero (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2004), 471–506. 18. See for example Bunge, “El descenso de la inmigración y la natalidad en Argentina: El descenso de la natalidad en Francia,” Revista de Ciencias Económicas 12, no. 57 (1934): 668–69. On French pronatalism see Andrés H. Reggiani, “Procreating France: The Politics of Demography, 1919–1945,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 3 (1996): 725–51. 19. Sánchez Albornoz, “The Population of Latin America,” 136.

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foreign-born residents who returned to their home countries exceeded those who stayed by an annual average of six thousand. This was an unsettling finding, considering that in the 1920s roughly one million had ended up staying in Argentina. By the end of the 1930s, the immigration flow from Europe, which in the decades before World War I had brought an annual average of 117,000 newcomers, shrank to less than half of that figure. The number of arrivals fluctuated between 56,333 (1931) and 24,345 (1933), the highest and lowest marks for the decade.20 The depression was not the only factor at play. In the early 1920s the United States and the British Commonwealth enforced a quota system to restrict the entry of groups from southern and eastern Europe. As a result of these measures the nationalities of the former Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires sought alternative destinies in the countries of the Southern Cone. Between 1921 and 1927, immigrants from these regions increased fivefold, from 3 percent (3,240) to 16 percent (25,000) of total arrivals. The effects of the quota system were aggravated by the ban on emigration adopted by Mussolini’s regime. In 1927 the fascist dictatorship passed a law invalidating all passports held by Italians; thereafter, new ones were to be granted “with utmost severity and frugality.” These initiatives were followed by a campaign of internal colonization and a prohibition against settling in large cities, as well as initiatives to encourage a higher birthrate — loans for young households, special taxes for the unmarried, and hiring priorities for heads of large families.21 Soon warnings grew louder that Italian and Spanish nationals, which together had made up 70 percent of all overseas migrants before 1914, were losing ground to “exotic” nationalities. Although Italians and Spaniards remained dominant, their share shrank year after year, never again to attain or even come closer to its peak of 323,043 (1912). The opinion polls carried out by the Museo Social Argentino in 1919 and 1939 reflected the extent to which this concern was widely shared. The overwhelming majority of the respondents — a broad sample of civil servants, academics, and scientists covering almost the entire ideological spectrum — agreed that priority should be given to Latin and Catholic groups

20. Fernando Devoto, Historia de la inmigración en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2003), 363. 21. On fascist population policy see Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), and David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994).


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with significant presence in the country, and among them, to agricultural laborers. Similar views dominated the debates at the conference on population, held in Buenos Aires in 1940.22 Domestic xenophobia also played a role. Although the relatively liberal 1876 Immigration and Colonization Law was never repealed, anti-immigrant sentiment was a familiar feature of Argentine political culture after the turn of the century. This was clearly manifested in the decade prior to the Centenario through the “anti-positivist and idealist” rebellion of journalists and literary writers (Lucio V. Mansilla, Miguel Cané, Manuel Gálvez, Roberto Payró, and Leopoldo Lugones) who blamed foreigners for the loss of traditions and the erosion of spiritual values.23 Politically, xenophobia was connected to the conflict between anarchism and the government led by General Julio A. Roca. It reached a first climactic point with the passing of the Residence and Social Defense laws (1902, 1910), both of which granted the executive broad powers to deny entry to or expel from the country any foreigner accused of subverting public order. The explosive combination of literary “nativism” and nationalist mobilization became evident during the infamous Semana Trágica — the xenophobic and anti-leftist manhunt unleashed in January 1919 by the aristocratic paramilitary group Liga Patriótica. Four years later, Radical president Hipólito Yrigoyen enforced two decrees that made a photo-carrying passport and certificates of good behavior and sound mental health mandatory requirements for obtaining a visa. In the years that followed, notably under the administrations of Marcelo T. de Alvear (1922–28) and Roberto M. Ortiz (1938–42), further measures were adopted to discourage the arrival of “undesirable” aliens, either by granting discretionary powers to consuls and immigration officers or by increasing the intricate web of bureaucratic procedures. Sociobiological arguments reinforced literary and cultural xenophobia and contributed to legitimize it by way of scientific explanations that showed the inborn proclivity of foreigners, especially Italians and Spaniards, to asocial 22. Museo Social Argentino, “La inmigración después de la guerra,” Boletín del Museo Social Argentino (hereafter BMSA) 8, no. 85–90 (1919): 1–186; “Primer Congreso Nacional de la Población,” BMSA 28, no. 219–220 (1940): 337–92, and BMSA 29, no. 223–224 (1941): 2–288. 23. On the “antimodern reaction” see Oscar Terán, “El pensamiento finisecular (1880–1916),” in Nueva Historia Argentina, vol. 5, El progreso, la modernización y sus límites (1880–1916), ed. Mirta Z. Lobato (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2000), 329–63; Charles Hale, “Political and Social Ideas in Latin America, 1870–1930,” in Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 4, c. 1870–1930, 367–441.

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behavior. After the turn of the century, Argentine medical and legal experts drew on Cesare Lombroso’s anthropological and deterministic theories of criminal behavior, which allowed for substituting considerations of social defense for the principle of free will as criteria for punishment. As Lombroso acknowledged, his ideas were more enthusiastically received in Argentina than in his own homeland. This was evident in the intellectual migration of prominent Italian legal experts to South America and the emergence of an “Argentine school” of criminology, which earned an international reputation for its influential journals and scientific societies as well as novel techniques of anthropometric measurement.24 The criminalization of immigration was accompanied by sociological arguments that blamed the political instability and social anarchy of the former Spanish colonies on the inferiority of the Latin races, borrowing from pessimistic European theories of race and social evolution, such as those espoused by Hippolyte Taine, Arthur de Gobineau, Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, and Gustave Le Bon. This “self-deprecation” of the Spaniards in America as “mestizo-ized, indian-ized, and mulato-ized Europeans” was best represented in Argentina by Carlos Octavio Bunge and José M. Ramos Mejía, two of the authors most influenced by Le Bon’s crowd psychology, as well as by José Ingenieros’s mixed brand of Spencerian social Darwinism and economic determinism.25 The dislocations brought about by World War I and the Russian Revolution intensified the racial anxieties and fears of biological degeneration associated with immigration and nationalist politics. In February 1919, when the fires of the Semana Trágica had barely been put out, the Radical Carlos F. Melo submitted to the House of Representatives a bill calling for the adoption of stiffer measures to discourage the arrival of “social waste” and “leftovers from the war.” The fear that Argentina would be flooded by the “war cripples and scum that Europe and Asia dump every year on our soil” was the theme of an article published in the influential journal La Semana Médica by Víctor Delfino, tireless proselytizer of the temperance cause and founder of the short-lived Sociedad Argentina de Eugenesia. Delfino’s preoccupations with the menaces posed by unchecked immigration were compounded by the disturbing findings he made while researching the records of the Dirección General de Sanidad (Army Health Service). After World War I, as the Argentine military drew up 24. On the reception of Lombroso’s ideas see Eugenia Scarzanella, Ni gringos ni indios: Inmigración, criminalidad y racismo en Argentina, 1890–1940 (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1999), chap. 1; Zimmermann, “Racial Ideas and Social Reform,” 28–38. 25. Hale, “Political and Social Ideas in Latin America,” 396–414.


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plans for hypothetical conflicts with Brazil and Chile, the War Ministry began compiling health and mortality statistics of the male population of draft age. These data revealed that more than 30 percent of the 1896 class examined in 1917 was unfit for combat duties.26 By the 1930s, the connection between national defense and physical fitness acquired clear eugenic undertones. This became evident in the address by the Chilean delegate to the First Pan-American Conference on Eugenics and Homiculture (Havana, 1927), which called for the armed forces of Latin America to become an “effective ally of the government in the goal of improving the race,” as well as for the increasing visibility of military authors in medical and eugenic forums.27 The world depression, combined with the negative demographic trends, gave new political relevance to the link between biology and nationalistic worldviews. In the illiberal mood that characterized the political and intellectual culture of the 1930s and 1940s, eugenics lost its progressive traits to become a state project with deeply authoritarian undertones. Italian Biotypology and the Quest for a “Latin” Eugenics

On September 6, 1930, a military coup led by pro-fascist General José F. Uriburu put an end to 14 years of democratic government under the Radical Party. Eventually, Uriburu’s project of establishing a corporatist state failed, and the military regime, which in 1932 passed to the more moderate General Agustín P. Justo (1932–38), gradually transformed itself into a coalition of conservatives and dissident Radicals. Based alternatively on the proscription of the Yrigoyen wing of the Radical Party and the systematic recourse to electoral fraud, the governments of Justo and Ortiz would eventually go down into the history books as the década infame or Infamous Decade. Recently, however, this negative view has been challenged by another one that stresses the singularity of the period as one of experimentation and quests for novel solutions to the problems posed by the world crisis, as well as a precedent for the social and economic policies later implemented by Juan Perón’s regime (1946–55). The long decade of crisis (1930–43) surely epitomized the growing appeal among the elites and 26. Víctor Delfino, “El problema de la raza,” La Semana Médica, 18 Sep. 1924, pp. 674–76. 27. See Manuel Bianchi’s intervention in I Conferencia Panamericana de Eugenesia y Homicultura de las Repúblicas Americanas (Havana: Gobierno de la República de Cuba, 1928), 109–17; Jorge Orgaz, “El Ejército Nacional como centro de investigación eugenésica,” La Prensa Médica Argentina, no. 29 (1932); Eugenio Galli, “Ejército y eugenesia,” Anales de Biotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social (hereafter Anales), no. 3 (1933): 9.

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the middle classes of European indigenous forms of authoritarian nationalism.28 It was also the period when state agencies expanded significantly and the first import-substitution policies were designed, and when concern about improving the nation’s human resources laid down the basis for demographic and sanitary planning that accorded technocratic experts a leading role as social engineers.29 In late 1932, a group of physicians with links to the Justo government, Delfino among them, set up the Asociación Argentina de Biotipología, Euge nesia y Medicina Social (hereafter ABEMS) to popularize eugenics among the public and lobby the state to emulate the path followed by other nations. It was presided over by the dean of the Universidad de Buenos Aires and former head of the Academia Nacional de Medicina, Mariano Castex, whose name commanded enormous respect in Argentina and resonated abroad. The most important instrument for popularizing eugenics was the association’s journal Anales de Biotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social (hereafter Anales). Headed alternatively by Arturo Rossi, Octavio López, and Gonzalo Bosch, the editorial and advisory boards were a veritable “Who’s Who” of Argentine medicine. Anales was conceived from the outset as an effort to bring together local and international networks of eugenics experts. Articles by foreign authors, often published in the original languages, were a regular feature in its pages, which also included reports on foreign medical institutions and sanitary legislation. In 1934 the School of Biotypology was created to train middle-level technicians in psychophysical profiling and advising on school performance and job (re)training and placement. The following year an Institute of Biotypology was set up as a provider of free, weekly counseling in almost all medical specialties. The creation of the ABEMS was a significant turning point in the history of eugenics in Argentina. As recent work on Brazil and Mexico has shown, biotypology furnished the basic conceptual tools and methodological frame within 28. David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History and Its Impact (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 87–124; Sandra McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, 1890–1939 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), 193–247. 29. See for example, Daniel Campione, Prolegómenos del peronismo: Los cambios en el Estado Nacional, 1943–1946 (Buenos Aires: FISyP, 2003); Ricardo Sidicaro, Los tres peronismos: Estado y poder económico, 1946–55/1973–76/1989–99 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2002), 25–54; Alejandro Cattaruzza, ed., Nueva historia argentina, vol. 7, Crisis económica, avance de estado e incertidumbre política (1930–1943) (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2001); Mirta Z. Lobato, “El Estado en los treinta y el avance desigual de los derechos y la ciudadanía,” Estudios Sociales 7, no. 12 (1997): 41–58.


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which Latin American eugenics has operated since the 1930s. Drawing upon anthropology, physiology, psychology, and statistics, biotypology differed from earlier classificatory schemes in that it sought to categorize individuals not in terms of “race” — considered to be unscientific — but as “biotypes,” which, by virtue of interrelated physiological, anthropometric, and cognitive variables, transcended “the superficial and inflexible logic of racial differentiation.”30 Biotypology offered medical and scientific professionals two major advantages. As a special branch of constitutional medicine, which privileged heredity without relinquishing external factors, it allowed scientists to work within the paradigms of Mendelism while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of biological determinism. Second, it provided a conceptual repertoire of ostensibly transparent measurements that seemed more neutral than the biased categories of nineteenth-century evolutionism and Victorian anthropology. In sum, the science of biotypes promised to reconcile two opposite evolutionary theories without sacrificing scientific rigor. In Argentina, biotypology was intimately associated with the work of Italian endocrinologist Nicola Pende (1880–1970). Of all the national varieties of holistic medicine that flourished in Europe and the Americas during the 1920s and 1930s, it was Pende’s brand, itself a revision of earlier versions of Italian constitutional medicine, that became the dominant current within the established eugenics movement in Argentina, and to a lesser extent in Brazil and Mexico. Pende acquired an international reputation after the fascists came to power. In the 1920s, he revised Italian constitutional theory as it was originally formulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Achille De Giovanni and Giacinto Viola. He made the endocrine system the center of a new explanatory model that he called “constitutional hormonology.” He believed that hormones held the key to understanding the interrelations between internal bodily functions and their outer manifestation. Making a proper medical diagnosis and determining the most adequate treatment depended on finding the “endocrine formula” that regulated the individual’s life. The new emphasis on endocrinology was accompanied by an endless multiplication of taxonomical categories of constitutional types, from De Giovanni’s original one based on the structure of the human torso — “brevilineal” (short and fat), “longuineal” (tall and slim), and “normotype” (in between the two) — to a panoply of variegated and often cryptic labels.31 30. Stern, “From Mestizophilia to Biotypology,” 200. 31. For example, to account for deviations from the harmonious and proportional Pende drew up taxonomies of “deficient” (hypotonic) and “excessive” (hypertonic) female

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More importantly, Pende reframed the old constitutional theory as an applied sociobiology for remaking society along scientific lines.32 This scheme rested on an organicist view which, based on the concept of “cellular altruism,” likened the society with the body and social classes with cells, all working harmoniously toward a single purpose: the “vital unity of the State and the individual.”33 To give the “science of orthogenesis” (as he also referred to biotypology) a practical use, he conceived an ambitious project for the medical, anthropological, and sociological screening of what he considered to be the four essential biological components of the fascist state: the child, the woman, the worker, and the race. Pende’s notions of biosocial vigor and demographic optimization fit well with Mussolini’s plans for national cohesion and societal fortification. The regime acknowledged this coincidence of views when in 1925 Pende was appointed dean of the recently created Università Adriatica Benito Mussolini (today’s University of Bari). The following year, Italy’s education minister, Pietro Fedele, took concrete steps to put Pende’s ideas into practice by inaugurating the Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico in Genoa. Twelve years later another institute of this type was inaugurated in Rome.34 These institutions sought to classify individuals according to their biotypical constitution with the aim of identifying the actual or potential problems that could hinder the achievement of their full capacities. The Genoa institute gave Pende the possibility of putting into practice a small part of his “biological totalitarian” scheme. Most of its work, especially in the years immediately following its creation, focused on children (health, social adaptation, school performance) and workers. The much-publicized centerpiece of this system was the biotypological orthogenetic file (cartella biotipologica ortogenetica) adopted later by eugenicists in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.35 types based on the combination of biological and behavioral traits. The hypertonic tonic referred to “physiological gigantism,” that is the exaggerated development of female features. The hypotonic woman comprised the “asthenic,” “infantile,” and “intersexual” types. Pende and his followers considered most Argentine women to fit the “microsplanchnic” type, a subcategory of the asthenic group, which was defined as the “type of girl who wants to be slim at all costs.” For a discussion of these categories and their use see Eraso, “Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization,” 806–7. 32. Nicola Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale con applicazioni alla medicina preventiva, alla clinica, alla politica biologica, alla sociologia (Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1939). 33. Nicola Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica (Bologna: Cappelli, 1933), 38. 34. Gustavo Vallejo, “Las formas del organicismo social en la eugenesia latina,” in Miranda and Vallejo, Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino, 233–72. 35. Francesco Cassata, Molti, sani et forti: L’eugenetica in Italia (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006), 196.


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Italy’s ascendancy as a model of population management in Argentina benefitted from the cultural ties bolstered by mass-scale immigration: in the 1930s Italians made up over 16.6 percent (2 million) of the total population (12 million). A plethora of institutions set up to promote political, economic, social, and cultural goals among Italian immigrants illustrates the vitality and diversity of an associational life second to none. A second venue of Italian scientific influence, especially in medico-legal milieus, was Lombroso’s criminal anthropology (see above). Formal cultural exchanges, especially after World War I, also played an important role in the diffusion of Italian medical science. One of the most important of these initiatives was the Instituto Argentino de Cultura Itálica (IACI) established in 1924, which under the directorship of the medical doctor Alberto Marotta sponsored the visit of Italian personalities, many of them physicians. Throughout the 1920s, these and other institutions were subjected to increasing pressure to conform to fascist goals. In addition, Mussolini’s regime created a wide range of party-controlled organizations to win over the hearts and minds of Italian expatriates.36 Italy’s demographic situation appeared comparable to Argentina’s own problems. Experts stressed the similarities in the slowdown of population growth of both countries as well as a shared political climate favorable to state interventionism. Although in Italy the decline of the birthrate was less steep than in Argentina, regional disparities seemed to follow a pattern that begged comparisons. This was the argument developed by Gino Arias, former dean of Florence’s School of Law, in a conference given at the Círculo de Cultura Católica de Buenos Aires. The Italian scholar contrasted the demographic realities that separated Buenos Aires from the northwestern provinces with a similar situation in the Italian Peninsula, divided between the backward southern regions, with a high birthrate, and prosperous northern districts, with a low rate of births.37 Pende contributed a great deal to Mussolini’s cultural diplomacy, mainly by bringing to Italian science the international radiance of earlier days. Personal connections were a crucial factor for broadening his audience in Argentina. In November 1930, two months after the coup, he traveled to Argentina following a joint invitation of the IACI and the Buenos Aires Medical School. During his 36. See Leticia Prislei, Los orígenes del fascismo argentino (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2008); Scarzanella, “Los intelectuales ítalo-argentinos,” 105–7; Lore Terracini, “Una emigración muy particular: 1938, los universitarios italianos en la Argentina,” Anuario IEHS (1989): 337–39. 37. Gino Arias, “El problema de la natalidad: Su aspecto mundial, su importancia en la Argentina,” Anales, no. 88 (1939): 7–9.

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visit, Pende acquainted himself with a group of physicians interested in bio typology and eugenics: Donatto Boccia, Octavio López, and his former student in Genoa Arturo Rossi. The following year they visited Pende as members of an official mission sent by the Uriburu government to study Europe’s health systems. All three took an active role in setting up the ABEMS a year later. No one worked harder to promote Pende’s ideas in Argentina than Rossi.38 Having first met his Italian mentor when specializing in diabetes at the University of Genoa, Rossi was a direct witness of the close cooperation between Pende and the fascist regime. In Rossi’s view, Pende provided a working model of sociobiological engineering that could be transplanted to Argentina, now that the military coup had created more favorable conditions for emulating some of Mussolini’s policies. He was given an opportunity to put these theories into practice after the Dirección General de Escuelas (School Board) of Buenos Aires Province, ruled by the pro-fascist governor Manuel Fresco, adopted Rossi’s biotypological school file. It was implemented on an experimental basis in only a few schools.39 Under Rossi the ABEMS often acted as a means of informal propaganda for the fascist dictatorship. After 1935 the articles on medical topics and commentaries on fascist public health and demographic policy were accompanied by the more or less open endorsement of Italian military actions in East Africa.40 In October 1935, Rossi and the “Lombrosian” legal scholar and director of the influential Revista de Ciencias Políticas, Rodolfo Rivarola, set up the Comité Argentino Pro-Italia to gather support against the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations, which the Argentine government had endorsed. Two years later, when the tightening of the ties between Mussolini and Hitler intensified the action of antifascist groups, Rossi renewed his efforts to rally public opinion to the fascist cause, setting up the Agrupación Argentina Amigos de 38. On his efforts to popularize Pende’s ideas see Arturo Rossi, “Curso sintético de medicina constitucional y biotipología,” Anales, no. 1 (1933): 11–13; no. 2 (1933): 12–15; no. 3 (1933): 12–18; no. 4 (1933): 12–14; no. 5 (1933): 12–15. 39. Arturo Rossi, “La ficha biotipológica escolar,” Anales, no. 1 (1933): 14; no. 8 (1933): 12–14; no. 60 (1936): 3–4. On the implementation of similar classificatory surveys and technologies in Brazil and Mexico see Dávila, Diploma of Whiteness, 36, 151; and Stern, “From Mestizophilia to Biotypology,” 188–89, 201–2. 40. The cover of Anales of 15 Sept. 1935 carried a photo of Italian troops in Somalia near the Ethiopian border. The same issue reproduced an article by the director of the Institute of Tropical Medicine of the University of Modena. See Giuseppe Frandini, “Las colonias italianas de Africa Oriental desde el punto de vista sanitario e higiénico,” Anales, no. 52 (1935): 2.


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Italia and attracting support from a broad sample of the country’s intellectual spectrum.41 He also helped Pende’s efforts to set up an organization of “Latin” nations to buttress the international prestige of the fascist regime. This ambitious project entailed forging an international front based on the notion of a common spiritual tradition of “Latinity” (latinità) — expressed in shared ethnic makeup, linguistic roots, and religion (Catholicism) — and the prestige of Italian culture and science. Pende sought to place himself at the center of the Duce’s cultural diplomacy, using his participation in international forums and trips abroad to gather support for this project. In a speech on “The Latin Medical Genius” given at a conference organized by the Presse Médicale Latine in Paris in 1935, he presented biotypology as the continuation of the intellectual and scientific traditions of classical antiquity, the Renaissance, and modernity. He hailed “people of Latin blood” as better suited to “conquer the soul of the sick person” than those with a “phlegmatic and rationalistic mentality and a cold heart.” The former, he claimed, were endowed with an “ethnic virtue” that allowed the physician, just as it did the artist and the politician, to understand the moral needs of his fellow men. Citing Leonardo da Vinci, he claimed that Latins were “gifted with intuition” and the “ability to embrace the entire field of thought in a powerful creative unity.” In sharp contrast to them, the “analytic and patient mind of the Nordic races” produced “bacteriologists who want to explain everything by way of the microbe.”42 Pende’s intellectual speculations prepared the ground for the organization of an international conference on Latin culture, which, as he wrote to Mussolini, “should serve to acknowledge the preponderance that from now on Rome will exert in the cultural leadership of the Latin nations.”43 The idea took shape between 1933 and 1935 as Rossi and the ABEMS began planning a meeting to take place in Buenos Aires on October 12, 1936, to coincide with the celebration of the Día de la Raza (Columbus Day). The ABEMS established contacts with medical organizations in Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay and secured the participation of 29 countries as well as the commitment of the Argentine government to sponsor the event.44 The project, however, fell apart as a result of the interna41. Prislei, Los orígenes del fascismo argentino, 61, 63, 94–97. 42. Nicola Pende, “El genio médico latino en el pensamiento médico contemporáneo,” Anales, no. 38 (1935): 11–14. 43. Cited in Scarzanella, “Los intelectuales ítalo-argentinos,” 103. 44. “El Ateneo y el Primer Congreso Internacional de Cultura Latina en América, a realizarse en Buenos Aires por la Asociación Argentina de Biotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social,” Anales, no. 26 (1934): 2.

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tional tensions produced by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (September 1935) and the outbreak the Spanish Civil War (July 1936), both of which split the yet-to-be-accomplished community of Latin nations. Pende’s reputation had been somewhat compromised by the racial policies implemented in the African colonies, where the fascist regime used his ideas to justify segregation; it was further tainted in 1938 by his endorsement of the anti-Semitic “Manifesto degli Scienziati Razzisti” (Manifesto on Race). The ABEMS was also active in Corrado Gini’s efforts to build an international bloc of Latin eugenics, another project that converged with the foreign agenda of Italian fascism. Gini was a leading authority in the field of statistical demography; he was president of the Istituto Centrale di Statistica, the Società Italiana per gli Studi di Genetica ed Eugenica, and the Comitato Italiano per lo Studio dei Problemi della Populazione. By the 1930s he became one of the most outspoken critics of Anglo-Saxon eugenics, with its emphasis on heredity, ambivalence toward interracial breeding, and preference for radical measures. Gini’s statistical-biometrical approach to demography and Pende’s biotypological constitutionalism shared a concern for women’s fertility. However, unlike Pende’s “spiritual racism,” Gini’s “reform eugenics” (eugenetica rinnovatrice) proclaimed ethnic mixture as a reinvigorating process that contributed to a nation’s renewal, not its decline. He strongly opposed sterilization, and while his ideas were not free from current racial prejudices — he rejected breeding between whites and blacks — his arguments were based on cultural as much as on biological considerations. A neo-Lamarckian, he shared with Pende the conviction that eugenics should establish a partnership with the church in order to promote a family-based, Catholic sexual morality that encouraged a higher birthrate, a position which was also upheld by the Vatican’s expert on eugenics and head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Franciscan physician Agostino Gemelli.45 Gini believed that the hegemonic influence of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic race science had led astray the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations (hereafter IFEO). This situation was most evident in the distribution of national delegates to the three international eugenics conferences held in London (1912) and New York (1921, 1932). Of the papers published in the proceedings, 77 percent belonged to U.S., British, German, and Scandinavian authors. Within this group the United States dominated, contributing 87 percent of all 45. For a detailed analysis on Gini’s links with fascism see Francesco Cassata, Il fascismo razionale: Corrado Gini fra scienza e politica (Roma: Carocci, 2006). Succinct discussions in English can be found in Ipsen, Dictating Demography, and Horn, Social Bodies.


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the papers, followed by Britain, Netherlands, Germany, Norway, and Denmark. In contrast, “Latin” countries like France, Italy, Cuba, and Spain contributed fewer than 20 percent of all the papers given at the three meetings. Two population conferences held in the summer and fall of 1931 foreshadowed the coming split between those nations that favored birth control and those that opposed compulsory interventionist measures. The first position dominated the Congress of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (hereafter IUSSP) convened in London in July. Two months later, the pronatalists met at the International Conference for the Study of Population in Rome. Gini’s decision to leave the IFEO was precipitated by the radicalization of positions at the next meeting of the IUSSP, held in Berlin in August 1935, which made evident the coincidences between international eugenics networks and Nazi racism. The initial plans for what became the International Latin Federation of Eugenics societies were laid down at the Seventh Pan-American Conference on the Child, held in Mexico City in October 1935. Having received the mandate from all the participants and the eugenics societies of Belgium, Brazil, France, Italy, and Switzerland, a group of Argentine, Mexican, and Peruvian delegates made plans for an inaugural meeting in Paris.46 In a letter sent to the delegates gathered in Mexico, Gini laid out the principles of his “reform eugenics,” with special attention to the Latin American setting. His views appeared later in an article published in Anales in which he stressed the two main themes that singled out the Latin approach to eugenics: consideration for the ethnic diversity of the countries represented in the federation, and the commitment to restraint in applying principles.47 The International Latin Federation of Eugenics held its first and only meeting in Paris in August 1937. Although Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico were among its founding members, the federation turned out not to be the most adequate forum for addressing Latin America’s demographic problems; with the exception of Brazil, only representatives from France, Italy, and Romania participated actively in the debates.48

46. “Congreso Internacional Latino de Eugenesia y Congreso Panamericano del Niño,” Anales, no. 56 (1935): 23. 47. Corrado Gini, “Vecchi problemi e nouvi indirizzi nel campo dell’eugenesia,” Anales, no. 62 (1936): 5–6. 48. Renato Kehl, president of the Comissão Central Brasileira de Eugenia, was the only non-European participant. See Kehl, “Valeur comparée de l’accroissement quantitatif et qualitatif d’une population (Résultats d’une enquête faite avec 500 couples),” in 1er Congrès latin d’eugénique, ed. Fédération internationale latine des sociétés d’eugénique (Paris: Masson et Cie., 1937), 73–78.

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Sterilization, Nazi Racial Policy, and the Ambiguities of Expert Knowledge

Latin America’s underrepresentation in the International Latin Federation of Eugenics was offset by the region’s efforts to put into place its own eugenics forums. By the mid-1930s, the western hemisphere had held two regional conferences — in Havana (1927) and Buenos Aires (1934) — to discuss immigration selection, interracial breeding, the prenuptial exam, compulsory sterilization, and the creation of a Pan-American eugenics archive and code. The Second Pan-American Conference on Homiculture and Eugenics took place when almost all of Latin America, badly hit by the depression, slid down the authoritarian path. The timing of the Buenos Aires conference was significant, for by the mid-1930s eugenic legislation had already been passed and enforced or was soon to be adopted in several countries. In different forms, the mandatory prenuptial exam was effective in 27 states, 5 of them in Latin America.49 Likewise, 7 Latin American countries and 11 others elsewhere had adopted laws to invalidate marriage whenever one of the spouses was diagnosed with a transmissible disease.50 Only compulsory sterilization had failed so far to make inroads in Latin America. By the time the delegates convened in Argentina’s capital, this measure had passed or was about to pass into law in only 9 countries.51 Compulsory sterilization was the most divisive issue at the Buenos Aires conference. Initially it seemed as if the Cuban Domingo Ramos, the most outspoken supporter of negative eugenics fashioned on the U.S. model, would be alone in his defense of sterilization.52 The closest position, but still a minority

49. Fourteen states of the United States as well as Brazil, Croatia, Cuba, Denmark, Germany, Island, Mexico (Cohahuila), Norway, Panama, Peru, Turkey, and Sweden passed laws requiring either a prenuptial medical exam (for the man only or for both spouses) or an affidavit stating that the bearer was not affected by any of the diseases listed as hindering marriage, or (when there was nothing of the above required) punishing severely those who got married knowing that they were affected by a contagious or “hereditary” disease. A useful comparative list of the different laws, diseases, penalties, and other considerations can be found in Enrique Díaz de Guijarro, La reforma del matrimonio civil por las leyes eugenésicas (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, 1938). 50. Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, Finland, Mexico, Monaco, Panama, Peru, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States (Illinois, Kentucky). 51. Canada (2 provinces), Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland (Vaud), and the United States (31 states). 52. On Ramos’s relationship with U.S. eugenics see Raquel Alvarez Peláez and Armando García González, “Eugenesia e imperialismo: las relaciones Cuba-Estados Unidos


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one, was the one adopted by the Chilean Waldemar Coutts in favor of voluntary sterilization. “Given the present constitution of society,” he stated, the State must encourage the artificial selection of its members, yet it must not do so through mutilating (sterilization) or murderous laws (abortion), but by way of measures that ensure the integrity and the conservation of the species. . . . Eugenic laws of compulsory sterilization which are too general, without being based on strict scientific procedures, will end up creating a mediocre humanity. A broadly conceived plan of voluntary sterilization, instead, should be accepted, yet only if it is carried out under the monitoring of honorable persons that authorize each request.53 The head of the Argentine delegation, Gregorio Aráoz Alfaro, agreed with Coutts, stating that under the present conditions, when much about the workings of heredity was still unknown or in dispute, scientists should refrain from making hasty decisions. Suspecting that his co-delegates’ reservations vis-à-vis sterilization stemmed from its association with Nazi racism, Ramos assured them, When I speak of [eugenic sterilization] it is not Europe, but America [the United States] that I have in mind. . . . some say that it is a mutilating measure, yet I dare ask, is sterilization of tuberculous patients not carried out with the purpose of protecting them? Are not mothers sterilized due to the so-called “tuberculous heredity,” which is not so? How shall we proceed, when the hereditary criminal bears criminal children, or when the feebleminded and the hereditary psychopath produce like offspring? How are they to be avoided if not through sterilization? It has been argued that this system runs against principles of individual freedom, yet if we accept such view in a sanitary conference, poor us! There would not even be compulsory vaccination, I would dare say.54 Near the end of the debate, the Argentine delegates moved subtly away from their original stance as they raised primarily the same pragmatic considerations used against other compulsory measures, such as the prenuptial exam.

(1921–1940),” in Miranda and Vallejo, Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino, 193–230. 53. Actas de la segunda Conferencia Panamericana de Eugenesia y Homicultura de las Repúblicas Americanas (Buenos Aires: Frascoli & Bindi, 1934), 252, 255. 54. Ibid., 256, 258.

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Underlying these justifications surfaced less explicit views that betrayed a deep interest in negative eugenics, even among those who harbored strong doubts. This ambivalence was well expressed by Aráoz Alfaro and his co-delegate Josué Beruti, head of the Eliseo Cantón maternity clinic (Buenos Aires). After rejecting the amalgamation of therapeutic and eugenic sterilization made by his Cuban colleague, Aráoz Alfaro stated, I do not oppose in any way that we continue studying this matter in order to gain further experience. . . . I do not shut myself off to experimentation, but I would rather have others do the experiments. Dr. Ramos has said that there are other experiments which have not been objected to; yet in order to ascertain that they were carried out properly, we shall have to wait until the quality of the offspring thus obtained can be assessed.55 Adopting a similar line of reasoning, Beruti acknowledged that “we, in fact, do not have experience in this matter, and I believe that the most convenient and appropriate thing to do is to wait for the result of the experiments that others are carrying out, especially in Europe, where the investigations under way are so interesting.”56 Aráoz Alfaro’s and Beruti’s statements obscured two facts. First, sterilization on allegedly therapeutic grounds was becoming a fairly extended practice among Argentine gynecologists in the 1930s — less among those with strong Catholic convictions. As Yolanda Eraso has recently argued, the line between “therapeutic” and “eugenic” sterilization often became blurred by the doctors’ own values and personal perceptions of a patient’s psychobiological condition. Equipped with biotypological taxonomies, eugenics-minded medical specialists like Beruti, together with his co-delegate at the conference Alberto Peralta Ramos, director of the prestigious Instituto de Maternidad, took advantage of the prenatal consultations to discourage what they considered to be dysgenic women from having children. At the same time, they used endocrinological methods to terminate pregnancies where their concern for risks to maternal health often thinly disguised eugenic considerations. Gynecologists and obstetricians acted within the legal framework, or at least in a way that it did not openly infringe it. As Eraso puts it, in the absence of a sterilization law, they “managed to place this practice in a secular, more flexible, and more permissive domain,” thus exploiting the ambiguity created by the legal ban on definitive sterilization and by the willingness of jurisprudence to trust such decisions to 55. Ibid., 259. Emphasis added. 56. Ibid., 256.


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“the knowledge, discretion, and prudence of the specialist,” who in theory could perform a therapeutic sterilization on the same grounds that legally authorized him to carry out a therapeutic abortion.57 Second, Aráoz Alfaro’s and Beruti’s comments on the “very interesting experiments done by others in Europe” referred obliquely to Germany, for at that time very few experts knew about the Scandinavian countries, the only others in Europe to have legally enforced compulsory sterilization on eugenic grounds.58 The U.S. case, which most Argentine physicians probably first heard of through Delfino’s reports in La Semana Médica, did not make a visible impact until the Buenos Aires conference, where the superintendent of the U.S. Eugenics Record Office, Harry Laughlin, presented a detailed report. Even so, the gradual and decentralized character of sterilization policy in the United States, the intricate legal aspects that prevented these laws from being actually enforced in some states, and the idiosyncratic “anti-Americanism” of Argentina’s elites hindered serious consideration of the U.S. model. By the time the delegates addressed eugenic sterilization, the Nazi Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) had been in effect for almost a year. Several aspects of Nazi eugenics set it apart from other national experiences: it was implemented on a national scale, it was compulsory, and it was carried out as an absolute state imperative to create a racially homogeneous society through the physical elimination of “alien” groups and citizens affected with “hereditary” diseases. The July 1933 law substituted compulsory for voluntary sterilization and extended the range of sicknesses regarded as “hereditarily determined.” It not only defined as “hereditary” some diseases that many physicians claimed were not; it also made certain categories so elastic as to render them meaningless. In June 1935 the law was amended to enable the Hereditary Health Courts to sanction abortions for women who had been categorized as “hereditarily ill.” In October the regime modified the Weimar Republic’s soft version of the prenuptial exam, making it mandatory for both spouses.59 As with fascist biotypology, well-established cultural and scientific networks facilitated the reception of Nazi racial policy. While politically split and

57. Eraso, “Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization,” 813. 58. For a critical view on Scandinavian eugenics see Gunnar Broberg and Nils RollHansen, eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1996). 59. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933– 1945 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).

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less numerous than their Italian and Spanish counterparts, Argentina’s quarter of a million German-speaking citizens were among the most prosperous and influential in the country. This demographic component was strengthened by a web of German-owned economic interests, especially in the banking, chemical, and pharmaceutical sectors, as well as by more than 150 German schools, the import of German pedagogues to train Argentine high school teachers, and the appointment of German academics to the science departments of the University of La Plata. Medicine played an important role in this process as well. Ger many’s share of Nobel Prizes, especially in the natural sciences, earned admiration and respect throughout the world for German science and higher education, while German products, especially precision objects such as surgical and optical instruments, were known for quality and reliability.60 In the 1920s Beruti became one of the most vocal spokespersons for German culture and science. He was one of the very few Argentines to have completed medical studies at a German university (Freiburg) and a fierce critic of the Francophile elite.61 In 1922 he set up the Instituto Cultural ArgentinoGermano and appointed Aráoz Alfaro as director. Beruti’s proselytism was followed by similar undertakings, such as the journal La Medicina GermanoHispanoamericana, published by a group of physicians for the purpose of making German medical research and health policy known to Spanish-speaking readers at a time when Britain, France, and the United States were trying to exclude Germany from international scientific forums.62 These local initiatives grew after the Nazis came to power. In 1936 the German ambassador, Edmund von Thermann, sponsored the German-Argentine Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, made up of cultural and scientific personalities such as Aráoz Alfaro, Castex, and Bernardo Houssay, the future winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine and chair of the Asociación para el Progreso de la Ciencia; historians Carlos Ibarguren, Ricardo Levene, and Roberto Levillier; anti-Semitic propa60. On the influence of German science in Argentina see Sandra Carreras and Günther Maihold, eds., Preußen und Lateinamerika: Im Spannungsfeld von Kommerz, Macht und Kultur (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2004); Irina Podgorny, “Los científicos alemanes y la política argentina,” Todo Es Historia, no. 413 (2001): 32–38; Lewis Pyenson, Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences: German Expansion Overseas, 1900–1930 (New York: Peter Lang, 1985). 61. Josué Beruti, Beligerancia científica: La medicina alemana (Buenos Aires: Preusche y Eggeling, 1920). 62. La Medicina Germano Hispano-Americana: Revista mensual de medicina, cirugía y especialidades 1, no. 1 (Sept. 1923); 4, no. 10 (July 1927). The journal was edited by J. Schwalbe (Berlin), Francisco Arrillaga, and Carlos Waldorp (both from Buenos Aires).


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gandist and director of the National Library Gustavo Martínez Zuviría, who went by the pen name of Hugo Wast; and Juan P. Ramos, fascist ideologue and dean of the Buenos Aires Law School.63 Similar efforts were made in Germany’s capital to foster cultural-scientific cooperation. After 1933 the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, created in 1929 by conservative milieus, came under the control of the Nazis.64 In 1935 its new director, General Wilhelm Faupel, established the Deutsch-Iberoamerikanische Ärzteakademie (German-Iberoamerican Medical Academy, hereafter DIAA) with the goal of “promoting medical cooperation between Germany and the Iberoamerican nations.” From its inception the DIAA became a tool of Nazi cultural diplomacy. It was directed by the Germans Serge Breuer and Klaus Sohering, together with an all-Argentine advisory board made up of Aráoz Alfaro, Castex, and Houssay.65 The role that medicine was to play in buttressing German interests abroad was evoked in unambiguous terms by the head of the Königsberg maternity clinic, Walther Benthin. At the foundational meeting of the DIAA held in Berlin in late 1935, the gynecologist called on his fellow physicians to become “scientific warriors for Germandom” (wissenschaftliche Kämpfer für das Deutschtum) and lead an “all-out offensive” to popularize German science abroad. “In South America,” he stated, “the physician is involved in politics more often than the jurist, and his influence makes itself felt in the highest levels of government.” This was something not to be overlooked, for, as he assured his audience, “the struggle for supremacy in Latin American will be fought in the field of scientific education, and particularly in medicine.”66 Between 1936 and 1939, the number of Latin American physicians travel63. Ronald C. Newton, The “Nazi Menace” in Argentina, 1931–1947 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992). 64. Reinhard Liehr, Günther Maihold, and Günter Vollmer, eds., Ein Institut und sein General: Wilhelm Faupel und das Ibero-Amerikanische Institut in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2003). 65. Revista Médica Germano Ibero-Americana: Organo oficial de la Academia Médica Germano Ibero-Americana, no. 1–2 (1937). The editorial board comprised the Argentines Arrillaga, Castex, and Waldorp, and the Germans G. von Bergmann (Berlin), L. Brauer (Wiesbaden), P. Mühlens (Hamburg), and B. Nocht (Hamburg). 66. Geheimes Staatsarchiv preußischen Kulturbesitz, Repositur 218A (hereafter GStA PK 218A), “Vortrag Professor Benthin in den Räumen des Deutschen Wirtschaftsverbandes für Süd- und Mittelamerika e.V. auf Einladung der Deutch-Iberoamerikanishen Ärzteakademie,” Berlin, 5 Nov. 1935. For a discussion of French and German medicine as cultural diplomacy, see Andrés Reggiani, “Rastacueros y expertos: Modernización, diplomacia cultural y circuitos académicos transnacionales, 1870–1940,” in Salvatore, Los lugares del saber, 158–87.

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ing to Germany skyrocketed. Brazilians, Argentines, Chileans, and Mexicans became the groups most heavily represented, making up almost three-fourths of the approximately one thousand physicians who visited Germany through the activities organized by the DIAA. This scientific migration took various forms, the most popular of which were summer courses offered in various specialized fields and visits to university hospitals, spas, and pharmaceutical laboratories.67 The classes carried a small nominal fee and were offered in Spanish or Portuguese, a privilege that Latin Americans had rarely enjoyed in more traditional academic settings. The DIAA also provided contacts between German pharmaceutical firms and manufacturers of medical equipment and prospective Latin American customers. Likewise, it acted as an institutional reference for foreigners seeking information on German medical studies and health policy and supplied letters of reference and arranged appointments for guest physicians wishing to visit medical facilities in the Reich. The DIAA was particularly active in organizing official missions of Argentine governmental, educational, and medical representatives to study different aspects of German medicine and public health. The most important of them was the one headed by Miguel Sixto Mosqueira, a physician commissioned by Governor Fresco to carry out a study of German hospitals.68 The DIAA also provided information upon request on a wide variety of topics, from the prohibition against Jewish doctors treating non-Jewish patients to technical aspects of the sterilization program.69 Most important of all, it helped guest physicians to visit institutions at which patients were being subjected to compulsory sterilization. One such place, the Würzburg maternity clinic, was visited in 1938 by Alberto García and Ignacio Garacotche, two urologists who traveled to the Reich in that year with a large delegation of Argentine physicians. None of them had sympathies for the Nazis; however, when commenting on the “services for 67. Candidates were selected by a committee affiliated with the Instituto Cultural Argentino-Germano made up, among others, of Aráoz Alfaro, Castex, Beruti, Peralta Ramos, and Houssay. 68. GStA PK 218A, Memorandum of Miguel S. Mosqueira to Manuel Fresco, 17 Dec. 1937. 69. GStA PK 218A, correspondence between the DIAA, C. Velasco Suárez, Knoll-AG Chemische Fabrik, and the Reichärztekammer (Reich Chamber of Physicians), 28 Jan. and 15 Feb. 1937. On the sterilization program see GStA PK 218A, letter of Edmundo Murray to the Hauptgesundheitsamt (Ministry of Public Health), 22 June 1936. Murray was a gynecologist at the Hospital Alvarez in Buenos Aires. In 1936–38 he worked as assistant doctor in the maternity clinic of La Charité Hospital (Berlin) under Gerhard Wagner; in 1937 he participated in the activities organized by the DIAA.


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the compulsory sterilization of women” they praised the “rigorous organization” and “strict surveillance” which ensured that no error tarnished the “higher biological meaning” which inspired that measure.70 This same attitude was clear in the travel notes of José de Filippi. In 1934 he was sent on an official mission to Berlin, Heidelberg, and Vienna to update his knowledge of the latest techniques of lung surgery. In the next three years he worked at La Charité and Frankfurt’s city hospital; in 1938 he returned to Germany to participate in the DIAA’s activities. Back in Argentina he drew up a report in which he praised various aspects of German medicine, such as a general preference for “conservative and fairly simple treatments” to save costs and time, and a “social conception of disease” that allowed “for the reinsertion of the individual as a producer.” Commenting on the lack of professionals created by the prohibition against Jewish physicians treating non-Jewish patients, de Filippi observed that “the authorities were thus forced to increase the number of physicians. . . . Among other measures, they decided to shorten the number of years required to obtain the degree. Yet what concerns us here is to know whether or not the population would be negatively affected as a consequence of being treated by physicians trained in fewer years.”71 It was, of course, a rhetorical question, for de Filippi was quick to assure that in a system in which students worked “under the surveillance of highly trained professionals” the reduction of the academic curricula did not affect the quality of the education. The controversy triggered in early 1935 by the publication in the Anales of a speech by Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick illustrates well the ideology underlying technocratic discourses of expert detachment. Published, as the editors stated it, “without committing any opinion on the matter,” the document was an anti-Semitic pamphlet conceived to refute the international criticism aroused by the laws of April 7 and June 30, 1933, which excluded Jewish citizens from the civil service. Translated by Justus Brinckman, president of the Deutsch-Argentinische Ärztevereinigung (German-Argentine Medical Asso70. Alberto García and Ignacio Garacotche, “La cirugía general y la urología a través de Europa: Impresiones de viaje,” Revista Médica del Hospital Español, no. 9 (1938–39): 267, 273, 308; Alberto García, “La urología a través de Europa: Alemania,” Revista Argentina de Urología, no. 8 (1939): 145–69. See also GStA PK 218A. 71. José de Filippi, “Dos aspectos de la medicina actual en Alemania,” Revista de la Franco, no. 22 (1939): 78–79. See also his articles “Algunos aspectos de la vida científica en Alemania,” La Nación, 16 June 1938, and “Aspectos de la medicina actual en Alemania,” Noticioso Médico Mundial, no. 22 (1939). For other similar views see Luis Irigoyen, Importancia de la anatomía patológica y estado actual de los conocimientos tisiológicos en Alemania (Buenos Aires: Comisión Nacional de Cultura, 1939).

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Figure 1. Selection of “Aryan prototypes” at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Anales de Biotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social 31 (1934): 12.

ciation) and the ABEMS’s expert on German affairs, the text was accompanied by two large photographs: the first showed a man dressed in a white apron examining passport-size photos with the caption “A selection detail identifying the Aryan prototype, according to the plan for the cleansing of the German race.” The second image featured the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, Otmar von Verschuer, looking at X-rays of “offspring of tuberculous parents.”72 Scholars reacted immediately. Franz Boas, head of Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology and a leading figure of the international campaign against fascism, wrote a long note to the Anales attacking the pseudoscientific claims of Nazi racism. Shortly afterwards, David Efron, an Argentine experimental psychologist working with Boas at Columbia, accused the Anales of spreading ideas that poisoned “readers 72. “La legislacion racista del Tercer Reich: Un documento de actualidad,” Anales, no. 31 (1934): 12–14.


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with a false medicine of foreign import” and instilled “in the minds of teachers and students, under the misleading label of scientific vulgarization, the virus of anti-Semitism.”73 Annoyed by the “passionate impressions” that the Nazi document had aroused “in the minds of Aryans and non-Aryans,” Rossi refrained from lending the journal’s pages to further opinions, stating that the topic demanded “serious and thorough investigations,” not “judgments formulated with singular passion.” Rossi’s racial prejudices surfaced in less ambiguous terms in his work on constitutional theory. In his digressions on the “psychic temperaments of the white European race,” he portrayed “Israelites” as “executioners of Christ” damned by God and “quintessential racists who never mixed their blood with other racial types,” their typical feature being a “prominent and curved nose.”74 He rejected the union of white Europeans and black Africans on the grounds that the biological and social inferiority of the latter would only produce “sickly types” like the mulatto. Although he rejected sterilization as alien to the character and traditions of the Latin people, he had no qualms in praising Nazi Germany for being “the only nation in the world” where the theory and practice of eugenics worked toward the integral perfection of the race by way of the “coercive selection” of spouses and the “elimination of the unfit.”75 Hector Stocker, one of the several Argentine physicians working with internist Gustav von Bergmann at La Charité, was even more explicit in his endorsement of Nazi eugenics. In a commentary published in La Semana Médica he hailed the sterilization law as “the fulfillment of the old medical ideal of preventing before curing.” Citing Hitler’s admonition to prevent the unfit from procreating, he welcomed the law as an overdue response to the “alarming” increase of “feebleminded, idiots, and morons.” Thanks to the law, he observed, the “healthy and hard-working taxpayer” would be relieved from the asphyxiating financial burden imposed on him by the upkeep of “thousands of morons.” He was confident that the numerous physicians holding seats in Congress would realize the benefits that the “wise legislative step” taken by the German government would bring to their country.76

73. “Arios y no arios,” Anales, no. 38 (1935): 3. 74. Arturo Rossi, “Herencia, constitución, eugenesia y ortogénesis,” Anales, no. 96 (1941): 9. 75. Arturo Rossi, Tratado teórico-práctico de Biotipología y Ortogénesis, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Ideas, 1944), 11. 76. Héctor Stocker, “La ley alemana de esterilización,” La Semana Médica, 8 Aug. 1935, pp. 438–40.

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Although Stocker’s position was rather exceptional in its unqualified endorsement of sterilization, it was not out of line with the general approval of other aspects of fascist population policy. At the Second Pan-American Conference on Eugenics, Beruti and Peralta Ramos often quoted Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in praise of the measures adopted by the Italian and German dictatorships to affirm the “indestructibility of the unity of mother and the child.” The Argentine gynecologists were particularly impressed by the institutional status given to maternal and child policy through initiatives such as the Opera Nazionale per la Protezione della Maternità e Infanzia. What also appealed to them was the capacity of these measures to limit women’s work outside the home and constrain them to their domestic and maternal duties. In welcoming these goals, Beruti gave way to an unrestrained misogyny, attacking “pseudo-feminism” as an “antiphysiological, deformed, and insane movement of suffragettes and manly women.”77 Even a moderate voice such as Aráoz Alfaro acknowledged the alleged superiority of the dictatorships in addressing these issues. Speaking on the declining birthrate before a Catholic audience after the outbreak of World War II, he stated that When we compare the success of the so-called “totalitarian” countries with the relative failure of like measures in France we are forced to acknowledge that the main reasons for their achievements lie elsewhere. [Those reasons are of a] moral nature, the sentiment of hot-headed nationalism, the warrior-like and burning patriotism that their leaders have awakened in most of the population. In Italy, more than the laws, more than the Opera [Nazionale per la Protezione della] Maternità e Infanzia, whose excellent work I have just praised, what is at work is the new imperialistic spirit, the real nation and the heart-felt duty toward the fatherland. . . . we have not yet fully understood the true implications of Mussolini’s admonition, which has taken deep roots in the majority of the Italian people: “the easy life is over.”78 Aráoz Alfaro did not hesitate to call for harsher meaures when it came to dealing with the “irresponsible and criminal behavior” of physicians who agreed to perform “mortal abortions.” Citing a report of the Alliance Nationale contre la Dépopulation, he extolled the “efficient political persecution of professo77. Josué Beruti, “Maternidad y educación femenina,” Anales, no. 33 (1934): 2; Josué Beruti and Alberto Peralta Ramos, “Eugenesia y maternidad,” Anales, no. 36 (1935): 2. 78. Gregorio Aráoz Alfaro, “El complejo problema de la baja natalidad,” Revista de Pediología 2 (1941): 15.


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nal abortionists” in Austria after the annexation to Germany (Anschluss) and demanded the enforcement of an “analogous campaign” in Argentina.79 By the late 1930s eugenicists had accomplished some moderate triumphs. In the second half of the decade the Justo and Ortiz governments laid the institutional foundations for a maternalist policy through a set of measures designed to raise the birthrate, control the spread of transmissible diseases, and bring under stricter medical surveillance the pre- and postnatal care of the mother and the child. On December 17, 1936, Congress passed the Law for the Prophylaxis of Venereal Diseases, which made the medical exam before marriage obligatory for men. Those infected with a venereal disease were denied permission to marry and compelled to undergo treatment, which in some cases could lead to their commitment to a medical institution. The law was conceived partly as a means to deal with prostitution; it made preventive treatment obligatory for all firms employing over 50 workers and introduced harsh punishments for those who willfully spread the disease. Although eugenics was not explicitly mentioned, the eugenics implications of the law were obvious; so argued the medical-legal expert Luis Jiménez de Asúa in his extensive commentary on the background and implications of the law. Four days later, a second law created the Dirección de Maternidad e Infancia (Bureau of the Mother and the Child). Unlike the previous law, this one made explicit references to eugenics. The bureau was placed under the jurisdiction of the Departamento Nacional de Higiene and was charged with compiling demographic and health statistics; popularizing eugenics through education and propaganda; organizing and monitoring all maternal and childcare facilities and services (maternity wards, prenuptial and prenatal consultations, wet nursing, milk depots, crèches, foster homes); overseeing the implementation of the maternal insurance law ( passed in 1934); and fighting illegal practice of obstetrics and healing.80 By the early 1940s, the decline of infant mortality throughout the country began to offset the negative trends of the previous decade. This was most evident in the fourth school census (April 1943), which showed that the actual increase of women’s fertility (2.8) was higher than the estimates made in 1939 (2.2). Local population surveys conducted in Buenos Aires and Santa Fé confirmed the rising tendency of the birthrate as well as the decline of mortality.81 79. Aráoz Alfaro, “El complejo problema de la baja natalidad,” 16. 80. For a discussion of the gender implications of these two laws see Milanesio, “Redefining Men’s Sexuality, Resignifying Male Bodies.” 81. Bunge, “La composición numérica de la población argentina,” Revista de Economía Argentina 26, no. 309 (1944): 74–75; Bunge, “Tasas demográficas argentinas,” Revista de Economía Argentina 26, no. 311 (1944): 130–34.

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Interestingly enough, pessimistic views continued to hold out in government and expert milieus. Shortly after the philo-fascist coup of June 1943, the newly created Comisión de Denatalidad, a technical agency staffed by Catholic experts attached to the Ministry of Interior, released a document that placed the blame for the low birthrate on the “desire for an easy life, without sacrifices and preoccupations (and) the lack of true spiritual values.” To overcome the present situation, the bureaucrats called to “awaken the consciences . . . and instill the necessary spiritual strength so that all can fulfill their duty toward the family, the society and the state.”82 Conclusion

The defeat of the fascist dictatorships and the revelations of the crimes committed in the name of the German race certainly reduced the appeal of eugenics after 1945. The ABEMS did not survive the double pressures of the war and the social and political changes brought about by Peronism. The results of the fourth national census (1947) discredited the pessimistic diagnoses of the earlier decade, showing that in the previous three decades the country had doubled its population from 7,904,000 to 15,894,000. This growth entailed a dramatic reduction of the share of overseas immigration, from 30 percent to 15 percent of the total population, and the migration of one million provincianos to Argentina’s industrial belt. This manpower reserve, which became essential for Perón’s industrializing plans, explains the regime’s decision to rely on the domestic factors of population growth once it became clear that the end of the war in Europe would not lead to the resumption of immigration at the levels of the golden years. However, the language and metaphors of eugenics continued to surface intermittently, something not entirely unexpected in a nationalist regime controlled by military factions that had been sympathetic to fascism and had ambitious plans of social and economic transformation. Calls for implementing a selective policy of immigration that favored nationals from Latin countries became intertwined with discourses of racial pessimism and ambivalent attitudes toward negative eugenics.83 A case in point was the alleged social Darwinism of Ramón Carrillo, Perón’s minister of public health (1946–54). In 1947 his ministry published a report which, under the innocuous title of “Notes on 82. “Sugestivos aspectos muestra el informe de la Comisión de Denatalidad,” Mundo Médico, no. 10 (1945): 13, 34. 83. On Peronist immigration policy see Carolina Biernat ¿Buenos o útiles? La política inmigratoria del peronismo (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2007).


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Hygiene,” offered a detailed account of the sterilizations practiced in the United States and Germany. The timing of the document, presented without any comment on the subject or reference to context, was especially relevant for it coincided with the Nuremberg trials against the physicians involved in the Nazi euthanasia program.84 In the same publication, using language that seemed at odds with the regime’s anti-elitist outlook, Carrillo lamented the proliferation of human beings of an inferior social value and the suicide of men of a higher intellectual and moral hierarchy who have refrained, as members of the middle class, from fulfilling the heroic destiny that civilization has put in their hands. . . . It is to this minority of chosen men . . . that the white race owes the superior level which it has achieved worldwide. This minority is the first one that refused to reproduce itself, while the fertility of the amorphous mass increases to the point of keeping for 20 centuries the population of a country like China in a state of speaking bipeds [bípedos parlantes], with no consequences whatsoever for its people or humanity. Should the white race persist in the suicide of its “elites,” then Europe and America would all but become another Asiatic humanity.85 Carrillo is said to often have laughed at himself, telling others that he was “black,” that is, not fair-skinned. He served in a government publicly identified with the cause of the poor, most of whom were likely to be dark-skinned, and with reducing infant mortality and contagious diseases to the levels of advanced societies. These facts do not fit well with the passage cited above, but they do not necessarily contradict it either.86 Frank Dikötter has suggested that eugenics may be better understood less as a clear set of scientific principles than as a “modern way of talking about social problems in biologizing terms.”87 This line 84. “Notas de higiene,” Archivos de la Secretaría de Salud Pública (Buenos Aires: Secretaría de Salud Pública, 1947). 85. Ramón Carrillo, “El magno problema: La desnatalidad,” Archivos de la Secretaría de Salud Pública, no. 5 (1947): 1–5. 86. Recently Carrillo became the subject of a controversy over his alleged sympathies for the Nazis. The “revisionist” view can be found in Rodolfo Barros, “Poblar y purificar: El otro Ramón Carrillo,” La Nación, 26 Aug. 2007, and Karina Ramacciotti, “Las huellas eugénicas en la política sanitaria argentina,” in Miranda and Vallejo, Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino, 311–47. For reactions against the “witch hunt” methods of his detractors, see the letters of Ginés González García and Pedro M. Borio in La Nación, 1 Sept. and 21 Nov. 2007. 87. Frank Dikötter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 467–78. A useful discussion can be also found

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of reasoning allows us to acknowledge the instability and fluidity of biological discourses about social change. In a country where modernization brought economic growth and urbanization as well as labor unrest, unconventional reproductive behavior, and new family structures, eugenics provided a convenient framework for making sense of the crisis of traditional society, whether by emphasizing hereditary traits or external factors. Faced with the prospect of a declining white population due to the falling birthrate of families of European descent and the closing of overseas immigration, Argentine eugenicists turned to the European dictatorships in their search for alternative means for demographic renewal. As a result, the hitherto private realms of family and maternity became a concern of the state and a new area colonized by medical experts. From a more general perspective, the history of eugenics in Argentina further sheds light on the role of science in state-formation processes and the ways in which medical professionals shaped the relationship between knowledge, politics, and society.

in Robert A. Nye, “The Rise and Fall of the Eugenics Empire: Recent Perspectives on the Impact of Biomedical Thought in Modern Society,” The Historical Journal 36, no. 3 (1993): 687–700. For a recent update see Marius Turda, “New Perspectives on Race and Eugenics,” The Historical Journal 51, no. 4 (2008): 1115–24.