Progress of the Siege

Last December handsome, dictatorial Ramon S. (for Nothing) Castillo imposed on neutral Argentina a "state of siege7' forbidding the public discussion of international affairs. Last week Argentine free speech both lost and found a champion.

Champion Lost was the nation's outstanding liberal. Roberto M. Ortiz, who last month, after two politically impotent years of diabetic near-blindness, resigned the presidency to Acting President Castillo (TIME, July 6). Twenty days later, struck also with influenza and bronchopneumonia. Ortiz died. Thus passed the man who had been elected in 1938 by the largest popular vote in the nation's history.

Kindly, double-chinned Roberto Ortiz would have been a rarity anywhere, especially in Latin America: a man who inherited and made wealth (he increased the importing fortune of his Basque father to $4,000,000), yet steered steadily toward democracy. As Argentina's Minister of Public Works and Finance Minister, he showed himself a thoroughgoing, determined people's statesman. But for his sickness, he would undoubtedly have been able to lead Argentina on a Pan-American and anti-Axis course.

When, last week, his body was borne to the grave, thousands stood in the rain shouting: "Ortiz! We loved him! Long live democracy!" and demanding that the Castillo regime break with the Axis over the torpedoing of Argentine freighters.

Champion Found. As the sick, tired voice of Ortiz was stilled, another liberal spoke out. In defiance of the state of siege thousands of copies were privately circulated of a book called Campo Minado (Minefield) by Adolfo Lanus, editorialist of Argentina's great democratic daily La Prensa. Onetime Deputy and member of the Chamber's committee investigating anti-Argentine activities, Editor Lanus knows his country behind-the-scenes.

He charged that, although the Castillo regime knows the Gestapo still operates in Argentina, it has obstructed investigation, that it has refused to assign regular detectives to the committee, threatened to dissolve Congress if the committee used special agents. He showed that President Castillo has been constantly closeted with General Juan Bautista Molina, head of the totalitarian Alliance of Nationalist Youth.

Editor Lanus confirmed the rumor that before last year's Rio conference Foreign Minister Enrique Ruiz Guinazu tried to seduce Chile, Paraguay and Peru into a bloc to refuse cooperation with the U.S. Argentina waited this week to see whether Campo Minado would be suppressed when it was put on public sale.

Ramon Castillo was not likely to lift his state of siege or change his ways unless the strongest pressures were put upon him. But already pressures were rising. Since his regime has chosen to renounce hemisphere cooperation, Argentina has faced fuel shortages, a mounting cost of living, labor unrest, an alarming budgetary outlook. Argentina's financial well-being today depends largely on the availability of foreign capital, which, with changing world conditions, might quickly flow elsewhere.

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