Tossed Out?

In their fancy offices down the street from Argentina's Government Palace, the editors of the great La Prensa sniffed red-hot news. In a single day last week three stocks in which Economic Czar Miguel Miranda was known to have large holdings had plunged 20 to 40 points on the Buenos Aires exchange. La Prensa's best reporters were sent out to find why.

Next morning, La Prensa broke one of the biggest stories in months: Economic Czar Miguel Miranda was out of office, his National Economic Council was to be abolished, and his one-man dictatorial setup supplanted by a whole new financial team. That night decrees from Government Palace confirmed La Prensa's story in almost every detail.

New Faces. Two little-known men, Dr. Roberto Antonio Ares, 35, and Dr. Alfredo Gomez Morales, 39, were made Secretaries of Economy and Finance, respectively. Unlike Miranda, both believed that the world market was a buyers' & sellers' market, not a sellers' market only. Miranda got the formal title of "technical assessor to the chief of state."

Many an Argentine hesitated to accept La Prensa's conclusion that Miranda was a dead duck. They had not forgotten that 18 months ago, when he swapped his job as head of the Central Bank for the chairmanship of the Economic Council, he had become stronger than ever. Perhaps he could do it again. But if half the stories circulating in Buenos Aires were true, Don Miguel was really out this time. Recent cabinet meetings, according to these stories, had become very stormy every time economic matters were discussed. Even Miranda's underlings in the Central Bank and at IAPI, his state trading agency, were said to have criticized the boss.

New Policy? Foreign Minister Juan Bramuglia was known to have come back from Europe and the U.S. with the word that Argentina's economic policy, which had about wrecked the nation's foreign trade, was too inflexible. And it was a fact that the men who would henceforth manage the Bank and IAPI had served under Bramuglia the greater part of their political lives, Ares as economic chief in the Foreign Office, Morales as Bramuglia's assistant at Bogota' and Paris. If their appointments meant anything, they foreshadowed a break from Miranda's rigid selling policies.

For his part, the President went out of his way to show that he had acted without personal rancor in dispensing with Miranda's public services. On the day after the shuffle, when Peron received the Mexican decoration of the Order of the Aztec Eagle, Miguel Miranda stood at his right hand. But down the hall at Government Palace, four assistants busily cleared Miranda's belongings out of his office, and at week's end Miranda flew off to play on the beach at Uruguay's Punta del Este.

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