Unbreakable Grip

President Juan Peron last week sent Congress a bill ostensibly aimed at curbing spies and saboteurs. As a drastic state security measure, it reminded some observers of the Soviet Union's 1947 "state secrets" decree.*

The bill provided up to eight years' imprisonment for anybody who "by whatever means provokes public alarm or depresses the public spirit, thereby causing damage to the nation." Another clause, Article 6, set jail terms of one month to four years for anyone who "without authority hands over, remits, communicates, publishes or divulges economic, political, financial, military or industrial data which even though not secret are not yet intended for publication." Said an editor of a Buenos Aires financial paper: "From now on I won't even be able to estimate the wool we have on the backs of our unshorn sheep."

The President had asked that his bill be "studied, discussed and made into law before the end of the present congressional period"--i.e., before Oct. 1. Good Peronistas, the deputies did better than that. In a single 17-hour night session, the bill was steamrollered through the House and sent along to the Senate. The deputies' only change was to add a vague clause in Article 6 that seemed to limit the article's application to civil servants, thus possibly excusing newsmen from its restrictions. In the rush, few heard the tiny Radical minority's shout that the bill was designed not to protect the nation against spies and saboteurs but to protect Peron against opposition. Peron already had the 1948 General Organization Law, giving him unlimited powers the moment he declares that a national emergency exists. With the new bill, his regime would hold an unbreakable legal grip on the lives of Argentina's 16 million citizens.

*Which provided sentences up to twelve years for Soviet citizens spilling such state secrets as statistics on foreign trade, foreign currency holdings, mining production and any unreleased agricultural or commercial data.

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