Shadows in the Half-Light

The news from Argentina continued to show that Juan Peron was in trouble.

By all the rules, the strike of Buenos Aires' newspaper typographers should have been a cinch to settle. Their demand--a 25% wage boost to meet the soaring cost of living--seemed mild enough by recent Argentine standards. But before the week was out, the printers had defied both their officers and the government, and shut down all newspapers in Buenos Aires. In the weird half-light of the resulting news blackout, Argentines watched as shadowy figures pulled & hauled, and Juan Peron's government teetered.

In the approved Argentine fashion, the union's officers had taken their demands to the Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare, the preserve of Maria Eva Duarte de Peron. The secretariat, acting on hold-the-line advice from the nation's new economic council, met the union's demands only halfway. When their Peronista officers failed to protest, the union's rank & file revolted.

Special Treatment. They called a "progressive" strike (an hour's work stoppage the first night, 1 1/2 hours the second, etc.). Eva Peron's Democracia got special treatment: a stoppage plus a slowdown. For strikebreakers, Eva called in convicts from Buenos Aires' federal penitentiary. The convicts refused to work. Democracia was among the first papers to suspend publication.

The 3,000,000 inhabitants of Buenos Aires soon found out what a newspaper-less city is like. Business was hard hit. Rumors (including one that President Peron had resigned his office) replaced legitimate news.

Among the rumors there was one that had some substance. According to it, the army, which in the long run calls the tune in Argentina, had handed Peron a list of demands. Among them: 1) make Evita drop all political activity; 2) form a new cabinet retaining only War Minister Humberto Sosa Molina, Foreign Minister Juan Atilio Bramuglia and Interior Minister Angel C. Borlenghi; 3) forget the foreign policy hokum of a "third position"--between the capitalist U.S. and Communist Russia--and patch up relations with the U.S. and Britain; 4) take immediate steps to stop inflation.

New Tenant. What lent some authority to the story was the fact that the army had already installed its watchdog in the Casa Rosada. Just down the hall from Peron's office, in the space recently vacated by the fallen Economic Czar Miguel Miranda, sat trim, cheerful Colonel Enrique P. Gonzalez. A bitter and outspoken foe of Evita, he had been presidential secretary in the regime of Pedro Ramirez, who was overthrown by Peron in 1944 for planning to break relations with the Axis. Gonzalez bore the brand-new title of Immigration Director, but few Argentines had to be told that his real job was to keep an eye on the President's office.

The President and la Senora had gone to their country place at nearby San Vicente, but the President got little rest. Official callers, high among them War Minister Sosa Molina, kept him so busy that he failed to make his scheduled address of welcome to the Inter-American Travel Congress, and sent no regrets for his absence. Without newspapers to give the reason for this strange behavior, rumor-fed Argentines began to talk ominously of political change.

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