Depopulation, Fascism, And Eugenics in 1930s Argentina

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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 Étudesen Sciences Sociales, the Iberoamerikanisches-Institut, the Lateinamerika-Institut (FreieUniversität–Berlin), the Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas (CONICET), andthe Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. The author wishes to thank Paul-André Rosental, LucBerlivet, 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 R 97898,

“Refugees, Evacuation of Children to North America,” Memo of Winterton to the ForeignOffice, 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

Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics

in 1930s Argentina

Andrés H. Reggiani

In August 1941 Lord Winterton asked the Argentine ambassador to Great

Britain, Tomás Le Breton, whether his country was willing to accept a smallgroup of German Jewish children with relatives living in Argentina. Earliergovernment-to-government negotiations had failed, and the British ForeignOffice hoped that Winterton’s friendship with Le Breton might bring betterresults (both men had participated in the 1938 Evian Conference on refugees).However, Le Breton rejected Winterton’s request on the grounds that “the Jew-ish 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 toincrease the Jewish population by propagation.” The ambassador nevertheless

left open the possibility of issuing visas for the 20 children if the British govern-ment “were prepared to have them sterilized before they went there [Argen-tina],” a task, Winterton told his friend, that “was quite beyond our powers toeffect.”1 Le Breton was neither a fanatical right-winger nor particularly racist. Alawyer by training, he was a leading figure of the Radical Party, which won thefirst national democratic elections in 1916 with the support of the middle classes

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Published by Duke University Press


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284 HAHR / May / Reggiani

and the descendants of immigrants. His attitude in the refugee children affairillustrates not only the rampant anti-Semitism that pervaded most of the diplo-

matic corps, but also the enduring appeal of radical eugenics within Argentineelite 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 cul-tural studies of disease.2 Following Stepan’s work, Eduardo Zimmermann pub-lished one of the most influential studies of the relationship between eugenicsand social reform in turn-of-the-century Argentina.3 Although it took anotherdecade 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 genderissues, and Foucauldian analyses of eugenics as “biopower.”4

A general consensus over the nature of Latin American eugenics hasemerged, 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 Historyof 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 laraza fuerte . . .’ Relaciones de género en la propaganda sanitaria de la Secretaría de SaludPública 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 yeugamia en Argentina, 1930–1970,” Asclepio 55, no. 2 (2003): 231–55; Marcela Nari, “Laeugenesia en Argentina, 1890–1940,” Quipu 12, no. 3 (1999): 343–69.




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Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics in 1930s Argentina 285

neo-Lamarckian approach to population improvement, despite the discreditingof 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 culturaland intellectual frame provided by the Catholic Church, scientific child care or

puericultura, and the biological and statistical classificatory schemes espousedby Italian fascist demography, notably those developed by Nicola Pende andCorrado Gini in the 1920s and 1930s. In turn, negative proposals based onthe rediscovery of Mendelian hereditary theory aimed at improving the racialstock by preventing the reproduction of groups deemed biologically weak; theseremained marginal within the emerging medico-legal complex. To put it in bold

terms, Latin America was immune to the radical eugenics adopted in the Pro-gressive Era United States, Nazi Germany, and social democratic Scandinavia.

While generically congruent with most of the policies of race improve-ment implemented in the 1930s and 1940s, this explanation neglects significantfacts. The issue of compulsory sterilization is a case in point. This controver-sial measure was the subject of debate among medical and legal experts in theearly twentieth century and again in the 1930s, when Nazi racial policy forcedexperts to address it disingenuously. Few Argentine medical and legal scientists

rejected eugenic sterilization on moral grounds, but those who openly praisedit were not a majority within the profession. As this essay will show, eugeni-cists either addressed sterilization in depoliticized terms as a highly complexmatter whose actual implications required a detached and dispassionate expertassessment, or carried it out discreetly on allegedly therapeutic grounds. As thedebates of the Second Pan-American Conference on Eugenics show, the Argen-tine delegates believed that compulsory sterilization should be considered andthoroughly studied, though not carried out before conclusive evidence of racialbenefits was gathered. Such evidence could only come from Germany. Records

of the Prussian state archives shed new light on the nature of the rapportbetween German and Latin American medical science in the 1930s. Primaryevidence on the activities of the Deustch-Iberoamerikanische-Ärzteakademie(German-Iberoamerican Medical Academy) reveals significant details regardingthe reception and circulation of Nazi eugenics among Latin American physi-cians. Experts traveling to Germany to attend summer courses and visit medicalfacilities played an instrumental role in separating the debate on compulsorysterilization from other more atavistic and “unscientific” manifestations of Naziracism, thus indirectly contributing to the legitimization of this policy in theirhome 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 operatedin the 1930s and 1940s, I do not wish to reverse the above-mentioned neo-

Lamarckian consensus. Rather, I propose to acknowledge the intrinsic insta-bility of biomedical discourses of population improvement. Nancy P. Appel-baum, 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 andheredity were construed as “cultural artifacts,” so were culture and environ-ment “biologized” through essentialist narratives of race improvement.6 Thesenuanced approaches to the classic opposition between nature and culture helpus make sense of those cases in which eugenicists perceived sterilization as an

acceptable measure to eradicate undesirable hereditary traits, while remaininganchored to a neo-Lamarckian worldview. As Sarah W. Tracy has shown, the“slippage” between environmental and hereditarian explanations was made con-ceptually possible by constitutional medical theory, especially by one of its mostpopular versions in Latin America, biotypology.7

This essay also builds upon previous analyses of the relationship betweeneugenics, 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 eradi-cate disease and improve the health of future generations.” As such, eugenics was closely linked to the attempt to move beyond the divisive arena of partypolitics through science and medicine, a process which “presented a novel rolefor the professional expert.”8 More specifically, the article places itself amongrecent studies by Kristin Ruggiero, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Jerry Dávilaon the role of science in shaping state policy on social and racial issues by wayof 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 NorthCarolina 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 Demiseof American Constitutional Medicine, 1920–1950,” in Greater than the Parts: Holism inBiomedicine, 1920–1950,” ed. Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (New York: OxfordUniv. 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 casesfor the interconnection between nationalism, technocracy, and eugenics. On

some specific points, such as the authoritarian context in which European ideastook root and the technologies devised to identify and measure “abnormal” psy-chophysical traits, the paths followed by eugenicists in all three countries wereremarkably 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 partof a broader process by which medical, legal, and economic experts and socialreformers came to view successful social modernization in terms of rational

and efficient administration of human resources. Second, this process entailedthe consolidation of the technical elites and the legitimization of their specificknowledge alone as valid for government purposes. As a result, professions likemedicine set themselves to “colonize” other areas deemed vital for the state,such as child rearing, education, physical training, job performance, and nutri-tion. Both trends led to a gradual proliferation of bureaucratic institutions, tech-nical 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 ofthe time, to “revalorize” the nation’s “human capital.” Another common feature was the import of European intellectual and scientific paradigms with which tomake 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 measuredemographic trends and classify individuals according to their psychophysicalconstitution. Eugenicists in all three countries borrowed from Italian fascistdemography, 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-the-Century 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, 2nded. (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2006).

10. For a critical appraisal of the relationship between state bureaucracy and medical-legal expertise in Argentina see Ricardo Salvatore, “Sobre el surgimiento del Estadomédico-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 theexistence of a large nonwhite population and accompanying ethnic tensions.

In Argentina perhaps more than anywhere else in Latin America, eugenicsreflected the elites’ enduring attraction to European models. This was evidentin the open preference for overseas immigration — a decision that resulted inthe emergence of large and socially influential foreign communities — and inthe conspicuous receptiveness to European nationalistic ideas and authoritar-ian models of demographic renewal in the 1930s, as domestic and internationaldevelopments converged to feed apocalyptic fears of a looming “desertifica-tion” of the prosperous nation. Let us examine in more detail these distinctivefeatures.

Demographic Change and Dysgenic Utopias

In the 1930s, Argentine demographers — holders of university degrees in sta-tistics, economy, medicine, and law who acquired an expertise in populationtopics — discovered that the country’s population growth was declining morerapidly than any other Latin American or Western nation. Despite the problemsthat made the collection of vital statistics in Argentina somewhat unreliable, thegeneral 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 perthousand by the end of the 1930s. These figures gave Argentina, together withUruguay, the lowest rate of births in Latin America and the fourth lowest rate inthe 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 inany other country of Western Europe and the Americas, with the exception ofUruguay and Spain.11

These statist ics concealed a more complex demographic reality, one in

which the lowest rates of birth corresponded to the urban areas and the prosper-ous agricultural districts of the center-east (the humid pampa), home of most ofthe four million immigrants that settled the country since the 1870s. Between1890 and 1936, the birthrate in the city of Buenos Aires diminished from 44 to17 per thousand, while in the suburban and rural districts around the capital

11. Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, “The Population of Latin America, 1850–1930,” inThe Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 4, Latin America c. 1870–1930, ed. Leslie Bethell(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 121–53. Contemporary statistics publishedby 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. Altogetherdifferent was the situation in the poorer rural provinces of the northwest (Jujuy,Salta, San Juan, Santiago del Estero, Tucumán), largely inhabited by an eth-nically mixed population of Indian and Spanish ancestry. There, the rates ofbirths oscillated between 37 and 44 per thousand; similar contrasts were foundin the rates of infant mortality of each region.

Unlike most European countries, where the gap between the fall of thebirthrate and the reduction of mortality allowed for a significant increase ofthe population, Argentina’s abrupt and short demographic transition was not

preceded by a demographic explosion. As in most of Western Europe, but at amuch faster pace, these demographic changes were connected to the more wide-spread use of contraceptive devices and the participation of women in the jobmarket — both of which called into question traditional gender roles and familystructures. 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 Airesthese figures were 3.4 and 1.5 respectively. Although there were significant dif-ferences between social classes, all groups experienced a reduction of family

size. Between 1936 and 1947 the average size of a middle-income householddeclined from 3.9 to 3.2 members; working-class families experienced an evensteeper decrease from 4.3 to 3.5. Despite the steady increase of the marriagerate, an indicator of social progress, which in Buenos Aires was higher than inthe 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 expertsbegan circulating gloomy forecasts of impending depopulation based on newstatistical methods to measure’s women’s fertility. Statisticians and economists

in particular relied on Robert R. Kuczynski’s methodological innovations to cal-culate the net rate of reproduction. As developed by the German demographer,this index estimated the female population that would live long enough to reachthe age of conception. First presented in 1931 at the International Congress forthe 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 phe-nomenon 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 demographicdecline of the white population.13

Kuczynski’s measurements were introduced in Argentina by AlejandroBunge (1880–1943). Trained in the German empire as an engineer, Bungebecame the country’s most authoritative voice in statistics and demographictopics, 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 somerepute and an influential sociological commentator. Bunge introduced the netreproduction rate at the moment when the country’s natural population was

slowing down and overseas immigration plummeted to its lowest historicallevel. Toward the end of the decade he applied Kuczynski’s index to the vitalstatistics gathered by the Buenos Aires city census of 1936, predicting that thecity 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 yearsthe overall population of the country would start to decrease. With Bunge, thefalling birthrate “moved from the editorials and letters to the editor of majornewspapers to theater stages and well-attended conferences.”14 While there

was nothing inherently “eugenic” in Bunge’s analyses, his work furnished theempirical evidence that lent credibility to the doomsday scenarios that becamefertile soil for eugenics. By the end of the decade his warnings became increas-ingly infused with a moralistic rhetoric that lamented the “decline of the whiterace,” vindicated the “patriotism of superior men,” and praised the “abnegationof the Christian spirit.”15 This was the language often spoken in pronatalistmilieus, and it became the dominant voice among population experts, especiallystatisticians 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, suchas 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 (numberof 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 lugaresdel 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, militaryand economic grandeur.”16

Bunge deemed unrealistic the expectations held by many of his compa-triots, who continued to make Argentina’s demographic growth dependent onoverseas immigration. Argentine economic conditions, he observed, were nolonger as attractive as they had been before World War I, in particular withregard to access to land. He favored encouraging the factors of internal growththrough an expansionist policy aimed at consolidating large rural householdsthrough the redistribution of land and other financial incentives.17 His emphasison the quantitative improvement of the population was akin to the positions ofthe International Union for the Study of Population, headed by Corrado Gini,

chief editor of the statistics journal Metron, of whose advisory board Bunge wasa member. As a public intellectual, Bunge professed a special admiration forthe Alliance Nationale contre la Dépopulation, which by the mid-1930s hademerged as the most active pronatalist group in France.18

The world crisis had far deeper implications for Argentina than for anyother nation in the hemisphere, given its historic dependence on overseas man-power reserves. Between 1880 and 1930, immigration contributed 44 percentof the country’s annual overall population growth and roughly 80 percent of its

domestic growth. Compared to other countries of the Southern Cone, Argen-tina’s share of newcomers was far higher. Thus, while Brazil received roughlythe same number of immigrants as Argentina, in Brazil foreigners made up only15 percent of the total growth — a third of Argentina’s share. Similar contrastsappear when one compares Argentina with the United States. According tothe 1910 census, 14.7 percent of the population living in the United States hadbeen 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 movimientosde población, cited in González Bollo, “Recepción argentina de una obsesión demográficaoccidental,” 254.

17. On Bunge’s pronatalist ideas see Carolina Biernat, “Inmigración, natalidad yurbanización: El natalismo argentino y sus contradicciones frente a las preguntas deldesarrollo económico (1914–1955),” in El mosaico argentino: Modelos y representaciones delespacio 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 Politicsof 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 find-

ing, 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, whichin 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 fluc-tuated between 56,333 (1931) and 24,345 (1933), the highest and lowest marks forthe decade.20

The depression was not the only factor at play. In the early 1920s the UnitedStates and the British Commonwealth enforced a quota system to restrict theentry of groups from southern and eastern Europe. As a result of these mea-

sures the nationalities of the former Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottomanempires 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 thequota system were aggravated by the ban on emigration adopted by Mussolini’sregime. In 1927 the fascist dictatorship passed a law invalidating all passportsheld by Italians; thereafter, new ones were to be granted “with utmost severityand frugality.” These initiatives were followed by a campaign of internal colo-

nization and a prohibition against settling in large cities, as well as initiatives toencourage a higher birthrate — loans for young households, special taxes for theunmarried, and hiring priorities for heads of large families.21

Soon warnings grew louder that Italian and Spanish nationals, whichtogether had made up 70 percent of all overseas migrants before 1914, were los-ing ground to “exotic” nationalities. Although Italians and Spaniards remaineddominant, their share shrank year after year, never again to attain or even comecloser to its peak of 323,043 (1912). The opinion polls carried out by the MuseoSocial Argentino in 1919 and 1939 reflected the extent to which this concern was

widely shared. The overwhelming majority of the respondents — a broad sampleof civil servants, academics, and scientists covering almost the entire ideologicalspectrum — 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 ofPopulation 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 labor-ers. 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 liberal1876 Immigration and Colonization Law was never repealed, anti-immigrantsentiment was a familiar feature of Argentine political culture after the turn ofthe century. This was clearly manifested in the decade prior to the Centena-rio through the “anti-positivist and idealist” rebellion of journalists and liter-ary writers (Lucio V. Mansilla, Miguel Cané, Manuel Gálvez, Roberto Payró,and Leopoldo Lugones) who blamed foreigners for the loss of traditions andthe 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 SocialDefense laws (1902, 1910), both of which granted the executive broad powersto deny entry to or expel from the country any foreigner accused of subvertingpublic order. The explosive combination of literary “nativism” and nationalistmobilization became evident during the infamous Semana Trágica — the xeno-phobic and anti-leftist manhunt unleashed in January 1919 by the aristocraticparamilitary group Liga Patriótica. Four years later, Radical president Hipólito

Yrigoyen enforced two decrees that made a photo-carrying passport and cer-tificates of good behavior and sound mental health mandatory requirements forobtaining a visa. In the years that followed, notably under the administrationsof Marcelo T. de Alvear (1922–28) and Roberto M. Ortiz (1938–42), furthermeasures were adopted to discourage the arrival of “undesirable” aliens, eitherby granting discretionary powers to consuls and immigration officers or byincreasing the intricate web of bureaucratic procedures.

Sociobiological arguments reinforced literary and cultural xenophobiaand 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 CongresoNacional 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; CharlesHale, “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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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: UniversidadNacional de Quilmes, 1999), chap. 1; Zimmermann, “Racial Ideas and Social Reform,” 28–38.25. Hale, “Political and Social Ideas in Latin America,” 396–414.

behavior. After the turn of the century, Argentine medical and legal expertsdrew on Cesare Lombroso’s anthropological and deterministic theories of

criminal behavior, which allowed for substituting considerations of socialdefense for the principle of free will as criteria for punishment. As Lombrosoacknowledged, his ideas were more enthusiastically received in Argentina thanin his own homeland. This was evident in the intellectual migration of promi-nent Italian legal experts to South America and the emergence of an “Argentineschool” of criminology, which earned an international reputation for its influen-tial journals and scientific societies as well as novel techniques of anthropomet-ric measurement.24 The criminalization of immigration was accompanied bysociological arguments that blamed the political instability and social anarchy

of the former Spanish colonies on the inferiority of the Latin races, borrow-ing from pessimistic European theories of race and social evolution, such asthose espoused by Hippolyte Taine, Arthur de Gobineau, Herbert Spencer,Ernst Haeckel, and Gustave Le Bon. This “self-deprecation” of the Spaniardsin America as “mestizo-ized, indian-ized, and mulato-ized Europeans” was bestrepresented 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 Revolu-tion intensified the racial anxieties and fears of biological degeneration associ-ated with immigration and nationalist politics. In February 1919, when the firesof the Semana Trágica had barely been put out, the Radical Carlos F. Melosubmitted to the House of Representatives a bill calling for the adoption ofstiffer measures to discourage the arrival of “social waste” and “leftovers fromthe war.” The fear that Argentina would be flooded by the “war cripples andscum 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-livedSociedad Argentina de Eugenesia. Delfino’s preoccupations with the menacesposed by unchecked immigration were compounded by the disturbing findingshe made while researching the records of the Dirección General de Sanidad(Army Health Service). After World War I, as the Argentine military drew up




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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 deBiotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social (hereafter Anales ), no. 3 (1933): 9.

plans for hypothetical conflicts with Brazil and Chile, the War Ministry begancompiling health and mortality statistics of the male population of draft age.

These data revealed that more than 30 percent of the 1896 class examined in1917 was unfit for combat duties.26

By the 1930s, the connection between national defense and physical fit-ness acquired clear eugenic undertones. This became evident in the addressby the Chilean delegate to the First Pan-American Conference on Eugenicsand Homiculture (Havana, 1927), which called for the armed forces of Latin

America to become an “effective ally of the government in the goal of improv-ing the race,” as well as for the increasing visibility of military authors in medi-cal and eugenic forums.27 The world depression, combined with the negative

demographic trends, gave new political relevance to the link between biologyand nationalistic worldviews. In the illiberal mood that characterized the politi-cal and intellectual culture of the 1930s and 1940s, eugenics lost its progressivetraits 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. Urib-uru put an end to 14 years of democratic government under the Radical Party.Eventually, Uriburu’s project of establishing a corporatist state failed, and themilitary regime, which in 1932 passed to the more moderate General AgustínP. Justo (1932–38), gradually transformed itself into a coalition of conservativesand dissident Radicals. Based alternatively on the proscription of the Yrigoyen

wing of the Radical Party and the systematic recourse to electoral fraud, thegovernments of Justo and Ortiz would eventually go down into the historybooks as the década infame or Infamous Decade. Recently, however, this nega-tive 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 problemsposed by the world crisis, as well as a precedent for the social and economicpolicies later implemented by Juan Perón’s regime (1946–55). The long decadeof crisis (1930–43) surely epitomized the growing appeal among the elites and




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the middle classes of European indigenous forms of authoritarian national-ism.28 It was also the period when state agencies expanded significantly and

the first import-substitution policies were designed, and when concern aboutimproving the nation’s human resources laid down the basis for demographicand sanitary planning that accorded technocratic experts a leading role as socialengineers.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 amongthe 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 for-

mer head of the Academia Nacional de Medicina, Mariano Castex, whose namecommanded enormous respect in Argentina and resonated abroad. The mostimportant instrument for popularizing eugenics was the association’s journal

Anales de Biotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social (hereafter Anales ). Headedalternatively by Arturo Rossi, Octavio López, and Gonzalo Bosch, the edito-rial 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 andinternational networks of eugenics experts. Articles by foreign authors, often

published in the original languages, were a regular feature in its pages, whichalso included reports on foreign medical institutions and sanitary legislation. In1934 the School of Biotypology was created to train middle-level technicians inpsychophysical profiling and advising on school performance and job (re)train-ing and placement. The following year an Institute of Biotypology was set up asa provider of free, weekly counseling in almost all medical specialties.

The creation of the ABEMS was a significant turning point in the historyof eugenics in Argentina. As recent work on Brazil and Mexico has shown, bio-typology 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 enel 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, Crisiseconómica, 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 laciudadanía,” Estudios Sociales 7, no. 12 (1997): 41–58.




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which Latin American eugenics has operated since the 1930s. Drawing uponanthropology, physiology, psychology, and statistics, biotypology differed from

earlier classificatory schemes in that it sought to categorize individuals not interms 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 Bio-typology offered medical and scientific professionals two major advantages. Asa special branch of constitutional medicine, which privileged heredity withoutrelinquishing external factors, it allowed scientists to work within the para-digms of Mendelism while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of biologicaldeterminism. Second, it provided a conceptual repertoire of ostensibly trans-

parent measurements that seemed more neutral than the biased categories ofnineteenth-century evolutionism and Victorian anthropology. In sum, the sci-ence of biotypes promised to reconcile two opposite evolutionary theories with-out sacrificing scientific rigor.

In Argentina, biotypology was intimately associated with the work of Ital-ian endocrinologist Nicola Pende (1880–1970). Of all the national varieties ofholistic medicine that flourished in Europe and the Americas during the 1920sand 1930s, it was Pende’s brand, itself a revision of earlier versions of Italian con-

stitutional medicine, that became the dominant current within the establishedeugenics movement in Argentina, and to a lesser extent in Brazil and Mexico.Pende acquired an international reputation after the fascists came to power. Inthe 1920s, he revised Italian constitutional theory as it was originally formulatedin the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Achille De Giovanni andGiacinto Viola. He made the endocrine system the center of a new explanatorymodel that he called “constitutional hormonology.” He believed that hormonesheld the key to understanding the interrelations between internal bodily func-tions and their outer manifestation. Making a proper medical diagnosis and

determining the most adequate treatment depended on finding the “endocrineformula” that regulated the individual’s life. The new emphasis on endocrinol-ogy was accompanied by an endless multiplication of taxonomical categories ofconstitutional types, from De Giovanni’s original one based on the structureof the human torso — “brevilineal” (short and fat), “longuineal” (tall and slim),and “normotype” (in between the two) — to a panoply of variegated and oftencryptic 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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types based on the combination of biological and behavioral traits. The hypertonic

tonic referred to “physiological gigantism,” that is the exaggerated development offemale 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 andtheir use see Eraso, “Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization,” 806–7.

32. Nicola Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale con applicazionialla 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.

More importantly, Pende reframed the old constitutional theory as anapplied sociobiology for remaking society along scientific lines.32 This scheme

rested on an organicist view which, based on the concept of “cellular altru-ism,” likened the society with the body and social classes with cells, all work-ing harmoniously toward a single purpose: the “vital unity of the State andthe individual.”33 To give the “science of orthogenesis” (as he also referred tobiotypology) a practical use, he conceived an ambitious project for the medi-cal, anthropological, and sociological screening of what he considered to be thefour essential biological components of the fascist state: the child, the woman,the worker, and the race. Pende’s notions of biosocial vigor and demographicoptimization 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 educationminister, Pietro Fedele, took concrete steps to put Pende’s ideas into practice byinaugurating the Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico in Genoa. Twelve yearslater another institute of this type was inaugurated in Rome.34 These institu-tions 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 thepossibility of putting into practice a small part of his “biological totalitarian”scheme. Most of its work, especially in the years immediately following its cre-ation, focused on children (health, social adaptation, school performance) and

workers. The much-publicized centerpiece of this system was the biotypologicalorthogenetic file (cartella biotipologica ortogenetica) adopted later by eugenicists in

Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.35




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Italy’s ascendancy as a model of population management in Argentina ben-efitted 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 mil-lion). A plethora of institutions set up to promote political, economic, social, andcultural goals among Italian immigrants illustrates the vitality and diversity ofan associational life second to none. A second venue of Italian scientific influ-ence, especially in medico-legal milieus, was Lombroso’s criminal anthropology(see above). Formal cultural exchanges, especially after World War I, also playedan important role in the diffusion of Italian medical science. One of the mostimportant 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 phy-sicians. Throughout the 1920s, these and other institutions were subjected toincreasing pressure to conform to fascist goals. In addition, Mussolini’s regimecreated a wide range of party-controlled organizations to win over the heartsand minds of Italian expatriates.36

Italy’s demographic situation appeared comparable to Argentina’s ownproblems. Experts stressed the similarities in the slowdown of populationgrowth of both countries as well as a shared political climate favorable to state

interventionism. Although in Italy the decline of the birthrate was less steepthan in Argentina, regional disparities seemed to follow a pattern that beggedcomparisons. This was the argument developed by Gino Arias, former deanof Florence’s School of Law, in a conference given at the Círculo de CulturaCatólica de Buenos Aires. The Italian scholar contrasted the demographic reali-ties that separated Buenos Aires from the northwestern provinces with a simi-lar situation in the Italian Peninsula, divided between the backward southernregions, with a high birthrate, and prosperous northern districts, with a low rateof births.37

Pende contributed a great deal to Mussolini’s cultural diplomacy, mainly bybringing to Italian science the international radiance of earlier days. Personalconnections were a crucial factor for broadening his audience in Argentina. InNovember 1930, two months after the coup, he traveled to Argentina followinga 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 ofan official mission sent by the Uriburu government to study Europe’s healthsystems. 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 Uni-

versity of Genoa, Rossi was a direct witness of the close cooperation betweenPende and the fascist regime. In Rossi’s view, Pende provided a working modelof sociobiological engineering that could be transplanted to Argentina, nowthat the military coup had created more favorable conditions for emulating

some of Mussolini’s policies. He was given an opportunity to put these theoriesinto practice after the Dirección General de Escuelas (School Board) of Bue-nos Aires Province, ruled by the pro-fascist governor Manuel Fresco, adoptedRossi’s biotypological school file. It was implemented on an experimental basisin only a few schools.39

Under Rossi the ABEMS often acted as a means of informal propagandafor the fascist dictatorship. After 1935 the articles on medical topics and com-mentaries 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 ofthe influential Revista de Ciencias Políticas , Rodolfo Rivarola, set up the Comité

Argentino Pro-Italia to gather support against the sanctions imposed by theLeague of Nations, which the Argentine government had endorsed. Two yearslater, when the tightening of the ties between Mussolini and Hitler intensi-fied the action of antifascist groups, Rossi renewed his efforts to rally publicopinion 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 demedicina 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 andtechnologies 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 Somalianear the Ethiopian border. The same issue reproduced an article by the director of theInstitute 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 intellectualspectrum.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 ambi-tious project entailed forging an international front based on the notion of acommon spiritual tradition of “Latinity” (latinità) — expressed in shared eth-nic makeup, linguistic roots, and religion (Catholicism) — and the prestige ofItalian culture and science. Pende sought to place himself at the center of theDuce’s cultural diplomacy, using his participation in international forums andtrips abroad to gather support for this project. In a speech on “The Latin Medi-cal Genius” given at a conference organized by the Presse Médicale Latine inParis 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 thesick person” than those with a “phlegmatic and rationalistic mentality and acold heart.” The former, he claimed, were endowed with an “ethnic virtue” thatallowed the physician, just as it did the artist and the politician, to understandthe moral needs of his fellow men. Citing Leonardo da Vinci, he claimed thatLatins were “gifted with intuition” and the “ability to embrace the entire field ofthought in a powerful creative unity.” In sharp contrast to them, the “analytic

and patient mind of the Nordic races” produced “bacteriologists who want toexplain 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 Musso-lini, “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 shapebetween 1933 and 1935 as Rossi and the ABEMS began planning a meeting totake place in Buenos Aires on October 12, 1936, to coincide with the celebrationof the Día de la Raza (Columbus Day). The ABEMS established contacts with

medical organizations in Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay and secured the participa-tion of 29 countries as well as the commitment of the Argentine government tosponsor the event.44 The project, however, fell apart as a result of the interna-

41. 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 hadbeen somewhat compromised by the racial policies implemented in the Africancolonies, where the fascist regime used his ideas to justify segregation; it wasfurther tainted in 1938 by his endorsement of the anti-Semitic “Manifesto degliScienziati Razzisti” (Manifesto on Race).

The ABEMS was also active in Corrado Gini’s efforts to build an interna-tional bloc of Latin eugenics, another project that converged with the foreignagenda of Italian fascism. Gini was a leading authority in the field of statisticaldemography; he was president of the Istituto Centrale di Statistica, the Società

Italiana per gli Studi di Genetica ed Eugenica, and the Comitato Italiano perlo Studio dei Problemi della Populazione. By the 1930s he became one of themost 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 biotypologi-cal constitutionalism shared a concern for women’s fertility. However, unlikePende’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 whilehis ideas were not free from current racial prejudices — he rejected breedingbetween whites and blacks — his arguments were based on cultural as much ason biological considerations. A neo-Lamarckian, he shared with Pende the con-

viction that eugenics should establish a partnership with the church in orderto promote a family-based, Catholic sexual morality that encouraged a higherbirthrate, a position which was also upheld by the Vatican’s expert on eugen-ics and head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Franciscan physician

Agostino Gemelli.45

Gini believed that the hegemonic influence of Anglo-Saxon and Nordicrace science had led astray the International Federation of Eugenics Organiza-tions (hereafter IFEO). This situation was most evident in the distribution ofnational delegates to the three international eugenics conferences held in Lon-don (1912) and New York (1921, 1932). Of the papers published in the proceed-ings, 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 fascismorazionale: Corrado Gini fra scienza e politica (Roma: Carocci, 2006). Succinct discussions inEnglish 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 popula-tion conferences held in the summer and fall of 1931 foreshadowed the comingsplit between those nations that favored birth control and those that opposedcompulsory interventionist measures. The first position dominated the Con-gress of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (hereafterIUSSP) convened in London in July. Two months later, the pronatalists met atthe International Conference for the Study of Population in Rome. Gini’s deci-sion to leave the IFEO was precipitated by the radicalization of positions at thenext 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 onthe Child, held in Mexico City in October 1935. Having received the mandatefrom all the participants and the eugenics societies of Belgium, Brazil, France,Italy, and Switzerland, a group of Argentine, Mexican, and Peruvian delegatesmade plans for an inaugural meeting in Paris.46 In a letter sent to the delegatesgathered in Mexico, Gini laid out the principles of his “reform eugenics,” with

special attention to the Latin American setting. His views appeared later in anarticle published in Anales in which he stressed the two main themes that sin-gled out the Latin approach to eugenics: consideration for the ethnic diversityof the countries represented in the federation, and the commitment to restraintin applying principles.47 The International Latin Federation of Eugenics heldits first and only meeting in Paris in August 1937. Although Argentina, Brazil,and Mexico were among its founding members, the federation turned out notto be the most adequate forum for addressing Latin America’s demographicproblems; 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 delNiño,” 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 theonly non-European participant. See Kehl, “Valeur comparée de l’accroissement quantitatifet qualitatif d’une population (Résultats d’une enquête faite avec 500 couples),” in

1er

Congrèslatin d’eugénique, ed. Fédération internationale latine des sociétés d’eugénique (Paris: Massonet 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 Federationof Eugenics was offset by the region’s efforts to put into place its own eugen-ics forums. By the mid-1930s, the western hemisphere had held two regionalconferences — in Havana (1927) and Buenos Aires (1934) — to discuss immigra-tion selection, interracial breeding, the prenuptial exam, compulsory steriliza-tion, and the creation of a Pan-American eugenics archive and code. The Sec-ond Pan-American Conference on Homiculture and Eugenics took place whenalmost all of Latin America, badly hit by the depression, slid down the authori-

tarian path. The timing of the Buenos Aires conference was significant, for bythe mid-1930s eugenic legislation had already been passed and enforced or wassoon to be adopted in several countries. In different forms, the mandatory pre-nuptial 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 invali-date marriage whenever one of the spouses was diagnosed with a transmissibledisease.50 Only compulsory sterilization had failed so far to make inroads inLatin America. By the time the delegates convened in Argentina’s capital, thismeasure had passed or was about to pass into law in only 9 countries.51

Compulsory sterilization was the most divisive issue at the Buenos Airesconference. Initially it seemed as if the Cuban Domingo Ramos, the most out-spoken supporter of negative eugenics fashioned on the U.S. model, would bealone 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 passedlaws 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 hinderingmarriage, or (when there was nothing of the above required) punishing severely those whogot married knowing that they were affected by a contagious or “hereditary” disease. Auseful comparative list of the different laws, diseases, penalties, and other considerations canbe 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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(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.

one, was the one adopted by the Chilean Waldemar Coutts in favor of voluntarysterilization. “Given the present constitution of society,” he stated,

the State must encourage the artificial selection of its members, yet it mustnot do so through mutilating (sterilization) or murderous laws (abortion),but by way of measures that ensure the integrity and the conservation ofthe species. . . . Eugenic laws of compulsory sterilization which are toogeneral, without being based on strict scientific procedures, will end upcreating a mediocre humanity. A broadly conceived plan of voluntarysterilization, instead, should be accepted, yet only if it is carried out underthe monitoring of honorable persons that authorize each request.53

The head of the Argentine delegation, Gregorio Aráoz Alfaro, agreed withCoutts, stating that under the present conditions, when much about the work-ings of heredity was still unknown or in dispute, scientists should refrain frommaking hasty decisions. Suspecting that his co-delegates’ reservations vis-à-vissterilization stemmed from its association with Nazi racism, Ramos assuredthem,

When I speak of [eugenic sterilization] it is not Europe, but America [theUnited States] that I have in mind. . . . some say that it is a mutilatingmeasure, yet I dare ask, is sterilization of tuberculous patients not carriedout with the purpose of protecting them? Are not mothers sterilized dueto the so-called “tuberculous heredity,” which is not so? How shall weproceed, when the hereditary criminal bears criminal children, or whenthe feebleminded and the hereditary psychopath produce like offspring?How are they to be avoided if not through sterilization? It has beenargued that this system runs against principles of individual freedom, yetif 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 awayfrom their original stance as they raised primarily the same pragmatic consid-erations used against other compulsory measures, such as the prenuptial exam.




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Underlying these justifications surfaced less explicit views that betrayed a deepinterest in negative eugenics, even among those who harbored strong doubts.

This ambivalence was well expressed by Aráoz Alfaro and his co-delegate JosuéBeruti, head of the Eliseo Cantón maternity clinic (Buenos Aires). After reject-ing the amalgamation of therapeutic and eugenic sterilization made by hisCuban colleague, Aráoz Alfaro stated,

I do not oppose in any way that we continue studying this matter in orderto gain further experience. . . . I do not shut myself off to experimentation,but I would rather have others do the experiments . Dr. Ramos has said thatthere 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 untilthe quality of the offspring thus obtained can be assessed.55

Adopting a similar line of reasoning, Beruti acknowledged that “we, in fact, donot have experience in this matter, and I believe that the most convenient andappropriate thing to do is to wait for the result of the experiments that othersare carrying out, especially in Europe, where the investigations under way areso interesting.”56

Aráoz Alfaro’s and Beruti’s statements obscured two facts. First, steriliza-

tion on allegedly therapeutic grounds was becoming a fairly extended practiceamong Argentine gynecologists in the 1930s — less among those with strongCatholic 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 special-ists like Beruti, together with his co-delegate at the conference Alberto PeraltaRamos, director of the prestigious Instituto de Maternidad, took advantage ofthe prenatal consultations to discourage what they considered to be dysgenic

women from having children. At the same time, they used endocrinologicalmethods to terminate pregnancies where their concern for risks to maternalhealth often thinly disguised eugenic considerations. Gynecologists and obste-tricians acted within the legal framework, or at least in a way that it did notopenly 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 permissivedomain,” thus exploiting the ambiguity created by the legal ban on definitivesterilization 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 couldperform a therapeutic sterilization on the same grounds that legally authorized

him to carry out a therapeutic abortion.57Second, Aráoz Alfaro’s and Beruti’s comments on the “very interestingexperiments done by others in Europe” referred obliquely to Germany, for atthat time very few experts knew about the Scandinavian countries, the onlyothers in Europe to have legally enforced compulsory sterilization on eugenicgrounds.58 The U.S. case, which most Argentine physicians probably first heardof through Delfino’s reports in La Semana Médica, did not make a visible impactuntil the Buenos Aires conference, where the superintendent of the U.S. Eugen-ics 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 enforcedin some states, and the idiosyncratic “anti-Americanism” of Argentina’s eliteshindered serious consideration of the U.S. model.

By the time the delegates addressed eugenic sterilization, the Nazi Lawfor the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (Gesetz zur Verhü-tung erbkranken Nachwuchses) had been in effect for almost a year. Severalaspects 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 anabsolute state imperative to create a racially homogeneous society through thephysical elimination of “alien” groups and citizens affected with “hereditary”diseases. The July 1933 law substituted compulsory for voluntary sterilizationand extended the range of sicknesses regarded as “hereditarily determined.” Itnot only defined as “hereditary” some diseases that many physicians claimed

were not; it also made certain categories so elastic as to render them meaning-less. In June 1935 the law was amended to enable the Hereditary Health Courtsto sanction abortions for women who had been categorized as “hereditarily ill.”

In October the regime modified the Weimar Republic’s soft version of the pre-nuptial 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 Roll-

Hansen, 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 quarterof 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, theimport of German pedagogues to train Argentine high school teachers, and theappointment of German academics to the science departments of the Universityof 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 admira-tion and respect throughout the world for German science and higher educa-tion, while German products, especially precision objects such as surgical and

optical instruments, were known for quality and reliability.60In the 1920s Beruti became one of the most vocal spokespersons for Ger-

man culture and science. He was one of the very few Argentines to have com-pleted medical studies at a German university (Freiburg) and a fierce critic ofthe Francophile elite.61 In 1922 he set up the Instituto Cultural Argentino-Germano and appointed Aráoz Alfaro as director. Beruti’s proselytism wasfollowed by similar undertakings, such as the journal La Medicina Germano-

Hispanoamericana, published by a group of physicians for the purpose of mak-

ing German medical research and health policy known to Spanish-speakingreaders at a time when Britain, France, and the United States were trying toexclude Germany from international scientific forums.62 These local initiativesgrew after the Nazis came to power. In 1936 the German ambassador, Edmund

von Thermann, sponsored the German-Argentine Committee for IntellectualCooperation, made up of cultural and scientific personalities such as Aráoz

Alfaro, Castex, and Bernardo Houssay, the future winner of the Nobel Prize formedicine and chair of the Asociación para el Progreso de la Ciencia; historiansCarlos Ibarguren, Ricardo Levene, and Roberto Levillier; anti-Semitic propa-

60. On the influence of German science in Argentina see Sandra Carreras andGünther 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: PeterLang, 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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63. 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 218 A (hereafter GStAPK 218 A), “Vortrag Professor Benthin in den Räumen des Deutschen Wirtschaftsverbandesfür Süd- und Mittelamerika e.V. auf Einladung der Deutch-Iberoamerikanishen

Ärzteakademie,” Berlin, 5 Nov. 1935. For a discussion of French and German medicineas cultural diplomacy, see Andrés Reggiani, “Rastacueros y expertos: Modernización,diplomacia cultural y circuitos académicos transnacionales, 1870–1940,” in Salvatore, Loslugares del saber , 158–87.

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.63Similar efforts were made in Germany’s capital to foster cultural-scientificcooperation. After 1933 the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, created in 1929 byconservative milieus, came under the control of the Nazis.64 In 1935 its newdirector, General Wilhelm Faupel, established the Deutsch-Iberoamerikanische

Ärzteakademie (German-Iberoamerican Medical Academy, hereafter DIAA) with the goal of “promoting medical cooperation between Germany and theIberoamerican nations.” From its inception the DIAA became a tool of Nazicultural 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 buttressingGerman interests abroad was evoked in unambiguous terms by the head of theKönigsberg maternity clinic, Walther Benthin. At the foundational meeting ofthe DIAA held in Berlin in late 1935, the gynecologist called on his fellow physi-cians to become “scientific warriors for Germandom” (wissenschaftliche Kämpfer

für das Deutschtum) and lead an “all-out offensive” to popularize German sci-ence 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 levelsof government.” This was something not to be overlooked, for, as he assured hisaudience, “the struggle for supremacy in Latin American will be fought in thefield of scientific education, and particularly in medicine.”66

Between 1936 and 1939, the number of Latin American physicians travel-




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67. Candidates were selected by a committee affiliated with the Instituto Cultural Argentino-Germano made up, among others, of Aráoz Alfaro, Castex, Beruti, PeraltaRamos, and Houssay.

68. GStA PK 218 A, Memorandum of Miguel S. Mosqueira to Manuel Fresco,17 Dec. 1937.

69. GStA PK 218 A, correspondence between the DIAA, C. Velasco Suárez, Knoll-AGChemische Fabrik, and the Reichärztekammer (Reich Chamber of Physicians), 28 Jan. and15 Feb. 1937. On the sterilization program see GStA PK 218 A, letter of Edmundo Murrayto the Hauptgesundheitsamt (Ministry of Public Health), 22 June 1936. Murray was agynecologist at the Hospital Alvarez in Buenos Aires. In 1936–38 he worked as assistantdoctor in the maternity clinic of La Charité Hospital (Berlin) under Gerhard Wagner; in1937 he participated in the activities organized by the DIAA.

ing to Germany skyrocketed. Brazilians, Argentines, Chileans, and Mexicansbecame the groups most heavily represented, making up almost three-fourths

of the approximately one thousand physicians who visited Germany throughthe activities organized by the DIAA. This scientific migration took variousforms, the most popular of which were summer courses offered in various spe-cialized fields and visits to university hospitals, spas, and pharmaceutical labo-ratories.67 The classes carried a small nominal fee and were offered in Spanishor Portuguese, a privilege that Latin Americans had rarely enjoyed in more tra-ditional academic settings. The DIAA also provided contacts between Germanpharmaceutical firms and manufacturers of medical equipment and prospectiveLatin American customers. Likewise, it acted as an institutional reference for

foreigners seeking information on German medical studies and health policyand supplied letters of reference and arranged appointments for guest physi-cians wishing to visit medical facilities in the Reich.

The DIAA was particularly active in organizing official missions of Argen-tine governmental, educational, and medical representatives to study differentaspects of German medicine and public health. The most important of them

was the one headed by Miguel Sixto Mosqueira, a physician commissioned byGovernor 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 prohi-bition against Jewish doctors treating non-Jewish patients to technical aspectsof the sterilization program.69 Most important of all, it helped guest physiciansto visit institutions at which patients were being subjected to compulsory ster-ilization. One such place, the Würzburg maternity clinic, was visited in 1938 by Alberto García and Ignacio Garacotche, two urologists who traveled to theReich in that year with a large delegation of Argentine physicians. None of themhad sympathies for the Nazis; however, when commenting on the “serv

Depopulation, Fascism, And Eugenics in 1930s Argentina

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