Happy Talk

"One of these days," President Peron declared last week, "mankind in order to find its guiding star will set its eyes on Argentina ... I tell you that Argentina has not one single economic problem of any gravity. Economically we could be the greatest nation in the world!"

Garbed in a brigadier general's full-dress uniform, Peron opened the 84th Argentine Congress with a four-hour speech extolling the wonders of his government and of Argentina's "third position" between the Communist and the free-enterprise worlds. At the end he stood back and beamed at the applauding audience. Argentina's Number One Worker, as he likes to be called, was a happy man.

Peron had reason to be happy. His personal popularity had been dramatically demonstrated on May Day when 300,000 cheering descamisados jammed into Buenos Aires' Plaza de Mayo to see and hear their leader. And things were obviously going well in Washington, where Treasury Minister Ramon Cereijo had applied for a credit of $125 million and President Truman had spoken favorably of an Argentine loan.

Perhaps even more satisfying to the President than anything else was the hopeless state of his opposition, whittled down by harassment of the independent press, restrictions on public meetings and strict enforcement of the laws against disrespect (TIME, Oct. 10 et seq.]. At the opening of Congress two years ago there were 43 Radical deputies, 113 Peronlstas. Last week there were still 113 Peronistas, but the little band of Radicals had been reduced to 18. Of the missing deputies one, Ricardo Balbin, was in jail for disrespect. Three, expelled, were in Montevideo; one had died. Twenty had just resigned in protest against what they described as Peronista trickery in prolonging for two more years the terms of office of all deputies elected in 1946.

While the delicate credit negotiations were still going on in Washington, Peron did not want to be burdened with any unseemly discord in Congress. The Peronista steamroller went to work; the frustrated Radicals could not even get their 20 resignations accepted or rejected. Leaving all such embarrassing questions up in the air, Argentina's Senate and Chamber of Deputies voted to take a recess for the month of May.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.