Masculinity in the police procedural under dictatorship: Palito Ortega’s Brigada en acción

An area of Latin American film studies that has been little explored is the relationship between the last Argentine military dictatorship and the production of films made in ideological alignment with it. This essay explores the case of one such film, Brigada en acción [Brigade in Action] (1977), starring, produced, and directed by the popular singer Ramón “Palito” Ortega. In it, Ortega breaks with his previous roles as a fun-loving but responsible young man on a trajectory toward marriage, to instead play an ascetic policeman who, in addition to not singing, refuses to partake in diversion of any sort, remaining resolutely chaste, politely but firmly distanced from female characters. This essay intends to understand this transformation of Ortega’s star persona by contextualising Brigada en acción within the internal power dynamics of the dictatorship. Since the dictatorship was not at all a monolithic enterprise, the essay examines the political and economic priorities of its diverse sectors in order to establish criteria with which to then consider the film itself. These, along with features of the film itself, suggest affinities with the nationalist, “Neo-Peronist” sector led by Admiral Emilio Massera, in internal opposition to the more economically liberal, internationalist sector led by General Jorge Videla.