Cadet scandal

The cadet scandal (Spanish: escándalo de los cadetes), also known as the Ballvé Case (Spanish: Caso Ballvé), was a sex and political scandal that broke out in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in September 1942, regarding the involvement of young cadets from the Colegio Militar de la Nación in alleged sex parties held by gay men of the upper classes. The main defendant was amateur photographer Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero, who held small gatherings in his Recoleta apartment and took erotic pictures of the attendees, which became the main evidence used against him. In 1942, Ballvé Piñero and his group of friends, including Adolfo José Goodwin, Ernesto Brilla, Romeo Spinetto and Sonia—the only woman—among others, started to pick up cadets off the streets for their private parties, with some even developing romantic relationships.

An internal investigation in the Colegio Militar de la Nación uncovered the incidents, which resulted in the expulsion, discharge and punishment of 29 cadets. Ballvé Piñero served as a scapegoat for the scandal and was sentenced to twelve years in prison for the charge of "corruption of minors", as he had recently reached the age of majority of 22 years and his lover was only 20 years old. The news of the incident made a great impact on the society and yellow press of Buenos Aires, to the extent that lists of prominent alleged homosexuals were disseminated anonymously among the population, and cadets were regularly ridiculed in the streets.

The scandal led to the most violent persecution against gay men in Argentine history up to that point, with a series of police raids and defamations that managed to imprison many homosexuals, led others into exile and resulted in two suicides. Several historians point out that the scandal was used as an excuse for the 1943 coup d'état that put an end to the so-called "Infamous Decade" and had the self-proclaimed objective of "moral sanitation". Under the new regime, the persecution of homosexuals increased, and one of its first policies was the deportation of the Spanish singer Miguel de Molina, an event that was commented on throughout the country. The repression of homosexuality deepened with the rise of Peronism in 1946, although some authors suggest that their relationship was rather ambivalent.

The legacy of the scandal has been compared to that of Oscar Wilde's trial in the United Kingdom, the Dance of the Forty-One in Mexico and the Eulenburg affair in Germany, and is considered a turning point in the country's history of homophobia. Nevertheless, the cadet scandal and its ensuing persecution have been historically ignored by historians, and was not reclaimed by the local LGBT culture as the Mexican LGBT community did with the Dance of the Forty-One. In 2019, playwright Gonzalo Demaría became the first person to have access to the case files—the contents of which had been a great source of speculation for Argentine LGBT historians such as Juan José Sebreli, Jorge Salessi and Osvaldo Bazán—and published his research in the first book focused on the scandal the following year.