Liberal Summer : On the Beach a New Latin Life Style

At the height of the Southern Hemisphere summer, the hard-packed sand of Solana Beach here is jammed with bronzed young couples and middle-age men gawking at other people’s daughters.

The new look at the beach is called colaless , and it leaves virtually nothing to the imagination. It is a mini-bikini, carried to the extreme, and it is a summer sensation along the beaches that stretch from Argentina north to Brazil.

The appearance of the colaless-- cola means tail in Spanish--takes place during the first summer in two decades without military rule in any of the South American nations that border on the Atlantic. And that is not just coincidence.

Liberal Life Style By the middle of March, there will be elected civilian presidents in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil--the first time this has occurred since 1965. In all three countries, the departure, actual or imminent, of military rulers has triggered a remarkable liberalization in attitude and life style.

In Brazil, where military rule has been institutionalized since an armed forces takeover in 1964 but where it has been relatively relaxed in recent years, the changes have come by degree. In Uruguay and Argentina, they have come with a rush, and the summer days are suddenly, improbably, intoxicatingly tailless.

It is not so long since Argentine policemen arrested couples necking in public. Seven months ago, the censored Uruguayan press was forbidden even to mention that a prominent politician had returned from exile.

Massage-Parlor Ads Today in Argentina, young lovers must set out early for the park to be sure of finding an empty bench. Pornography, while soft by American or European standards, is flourishing at newsstands and in movie houses.

Argentina’s most important financial newspaper publishes every day, among the charts and tables reflecting inflation of 700% a year, nearly a full page of ads for massage parlors.

Sex is only the tip of what amounts to a spontaneous cultural revolution in this part of the world. In all three countries, books, plays, songs, movies, magazines, commentaries, analyses and anti-Establishment ideas, all of which used to be throttled by the generals’ right-thinking censors, now float freely in the summer breeze.

In Uruguay, where until recently the press was thoroughly muzzled, new political journals and trenchant political criticism have appeared. The capital, Montevideo, is alive again with a fresh crop of movies and plays and audiences to enjoy them.

In Brazil, home-grown movies that had been suppressed for their political content are finding their way to the screen and to critical and popular acclaim. Not long ago, opposition presidential candidate Tancredo Neves assured reporters that rock music “is democratic because it is a popular movement.”

Neves is expected to be the shoo-in winner in today’s presidential election by Brazil’s Electoral College. Assuming that he takes office on March 15 as Brazil’s first civilian president since 1964, he can only further stimulate a cultural liberalization born in 1978 with abolition of direct press censorship.

In Argentina, the reawakening--it is being called a destape , or uncapping--followed the December, 1983, election of a center-left civilian government under President Raul Alfonsin after eight years of military rule. Since then, the arts--including a lot of schlock--have flourished. Nobody worries about the safety of a television comic who mimics President Alfonsin in low satire.

The latest example of the new mood in the South Atlantic is found here in Uruguay, where nearly 12 years of repressive military rule will end on March 1. Like Neves and Alfonsin, Uruguayan President-elect Julio Sanguinetti is a live-and-let-live democrat.

He is more concerned with releasing Uruguay’s remaining political prisoners than he is with beach frolics. And Sanguinetti is clearly no threat to the colaless craze here in Punta del Este, which at this time of year becomes a swinging suburb of Buenos Aires, 200 miles to the west.

Although the cultural revolution appears to have overwhelming popular support, from bookstores to beaches, it is still a relative thing. Divorce is legal in Uruguay and Brazil these days, but not yet in Argentina. Still, as a measure of the changing times, it is now possible for an Argentine to publicly support divorce without risk of scandal.

Predictably, liberalization has aroused opponents. Argentine generals sometimes sneer at the “pornographic democracy” that has replaced their discipline. In a broadside against the mass media, Argentine bishops recently complained, in a document entitled “Virtue as Defense for Intimacy,” about a decline in morality. They charged that Argentines were being exposed to salacious material by publications pandering to the quick buck.

If Argentine entrepreneurs are worried about the clergy’s ire, they don’t show it. Photos of the colaless appear daily in newspapers and on magazine covers and the evening news. Gyms advertise special exercise classes to prepare posteriors for the colaless.

According to local folklore--what they say in France or Brazil to the contrary notwithstanding--the colaless is the invention of a 22-year-old Argentine model named Papina Fabbri.

Last year at Punta del Este, it is said, she had the idea of scrunching the bottom half of her Brazilian mini-suit into an even less bulky garment.

Back again this year at Montoya Beach, with her English setter, Flash, her flowing blonde tresses and a diminutive gray colaless, Fabbri waxed philosophic for an Argentine interviewer. “Now that everybody has the look, maybe I can be something more than just ‘that colaless gal,’ ” she said.