After Five Years

In the Colonels' Revolution that overturned the corrupt, dictatorial regime of President Ramon Castillo, General Arturo Rawson had been one of the few devotees of democracy. For three days, five years ago, he had been President of Argentina. Rawson had passed quickly into history, a black-suited figure destined to spend his days amid the Jockey Club's splendors, while one of the obscure figures of the revolution, a man named Juan Domingo Peron, made the country over.

Last week, on the fifth anniversary of the Colonels' Revolution, General Rawson wrote: "The objectives were very simple; first, to restore administrative morality; second, to re-establish the country in the community of American nations; and third, to return the country to [political] normality." From Buenos Aires, TIME Correspondent Bill Johnson cabled his estimate of what the revolution has accomplished:

The New Order. "In some respects Argentina has changed little since the revolution. The same charges of graft and corruption that had been leveled at Castillo's government are now directed by the opposition toward the Peron administration. Electoral processes, while superficially normal, still give little chance to any but the party in power. But the hitherto neglected working classes have been forged into a political weapon that relieves the President of his sole reliance on the army as a means of staying in office. Higher wages have been showered on them (up 150% since 1943); massed descamisados are drafted for "spontaneous" demonstrations, and have gained a sense of participation in government they never had before. If they have lost what independence they had, it doesn't seem to bother them. Most serious hitch ahead: whether Peron can hold them despite zooming living costs.

"For Castillo's almost continuous state of siege Argentines have exchanged a pseudo-legal and semi-respectable repression that is, if anything, more severe. University students and professors with political ideas are no longer pushed around by police; all troublesome ones have been removed, and a new law permits political opinion and activity--so long as it is in favor of the regime. Newspapers which thundered against Castillo's decrees have with but one exception been silenced by Peron's subsidies and newsprint restrictions ; and even great La Prensa is visibly weakening. Recently the government decreed that either Argentines or foreigners may be jailed for such general crimes as 'promoting discords or antagonisms dangerous to the public tranquillity.'

"A law which was secretly submitted to Congress at the start of the current session is even stronger: it permits the Executive to declare a state of emergency and to draft every individual and every enterprise into service and make them subject to military law. In a nation that hasn't fought a war for 70 years, this law can only be interpreted as a device for maintaining civil order."

The New Leader. "The most remarkable change of all has been the emergence from the group of little-known militarists of a President-General who could be confused with no one else in history. With a superb sense of showmanship and a keen perception of the old Hitlerian formula that nonsense begins to make sense if repeated often enough, the President has been molding the public mind to consider him as the economic emancipator of Argentina, even as San Martin was its political emancipator. The fact that Argentina is undergoing one of the worst financial crises of its history has not yet detracted from his luster.

"Last week, in the Chamber of Deputies, Peronistas moved a resolution of homage to the June 4th revolution. As the resolution carried and the session closed, one of the few deputies on the opposition benches shouted across the chamber: "This is a homage of fear.' "

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