Next Victims?

Juan Peron extended his war against the free press to the big U.S. news agencies serving Argentine newspapers. Last week Associated Press came under heavy fire for picking up a Rio report that Peron had arrested his atomic energy expert, Dr. Ronald Richter (TIME, May 28). One Peronista newspaper raged at A.P. as "anti-Argentine." Another, in a curious echo of Pravda's familiar vocabulary, blasted the agency as a practitioner of "gangster journalism" and an agent in a "persistent and infamous plan to attack the Argentine republic."

Though A.P. was the target of last week's shooting, there were indications that the rival United Press might be in more immediate danger of being squeezed out of Argentina. U.P. had long supplied an elaborate overseas news report (under a fat $8,000-a-week contract) to Peron's mortal foe, La Prensa. The very charge on which Peron expropriated La Prensa was that it relied on U.P.'s service and was therefore a foreign-bossed enterprise. In a recent chat with Reuters' Buenos Aires chief, Peron reportedly accused the U.S. agencies of "spying" and sending out false reports, then added darkly that "the people and the publishers" would react against them.

That was a plain hint of an economic freeze-out that would hit U.P. hardest. Even without La Prensa, the service still sells news to more than 30 newspapers and radio stations in Argentina.

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