Strike in Argentina

For the first time last week the authoritarian Argentine Government of President Pedro Ramirez faced some active opposition. It came from the group which has traditionally spearheaded popular discontent: the university students.

Three weeks ago, at the Inter-American Students Conference in Santiago, Chile, the Argentine students had repudiated the Ramirez regime, called for a break with Germany. Last week they went on strike against the Government's dismissal of university professors who had signed a Pan-American solidarity manifesto. The movement rapidly spread to all but one of Argentina's six universities, included 80% of the nation's students. They ran Ramirez' policemen ragged:

> In Buenos Aires' National University, striking students broke up classes attended by the pro-Ramirez minority, fought them and the police with such bitterness that 13 were wounded, 35 arrested.

> Police attacked strikers at the College of Economic Sciences. The students threw rocks at the police. The police threw rocks at the students.

> In Cordoba, the provincial Minister of the Interior resigned after receiving an order from the Ministry of Education to get tough with strikers.

> In La Plata, where practically the entire (8,500) student body of the National University walked out, swashbuckling, militantly liberal University President Alfredo Lorenzo Palacios refused to dismiss six professors. When he received a second order, he resigned. The Vice President refused to accept the post, resigned likewise. So did the next two Councilmen in line. The mantle fell finally on the willing shoulders of nationalistic Dr. Ricardo Labougle. When he tried to speak to striking students, he was received with rotten eggs and firecrackers.

The Government countered the students' rebellion by banning their Federation Universitaria Argentina. But such repressive measures only served to bring the strikers more popular support. To Argentina's masses the issue with the Ramirez Government had gone beyond the external question of a break with Germany: now it was the internal question of civil liberty in Argentina. Around that question opposition was fast crystallizing.

Death in Mexico

Since the days of the Conquistadors Mexicans had heard cries in the night from that haunted spot near Taxco. They called the 20-ft.-wide hole in the ground the Devil's Nostril, knew it as a pit of death. How many skeletons were mouldering on the bottom, how deep it was, no man could say. Geologists had once probed 380 ft. straight down; one man had once descended part way, and lived to tell about it. He found two Aztec daggers.

Three weeks ago a citizen of Taxco went down the Nostril all the way, and did not come back. With him he dragged a Taxco policeman. Two others confessed that they had been hired to do in the man of Taxco. Taxco's mayor, a citizens' committee and the officials of American Smelting Co., which has twelve mines in the vicinity, decided at long last that the pit had its fill. Workmen were sent to seal the Devil's Nostril. When they are finished, 20 ft. of logs, concrete and boulders will cover its secrets.

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