Back to the Bordello

After a police roundup jailed 300 homosexuals in one night last week, Buenos Aires' well-coached press promptly drew the moral the government wanted: sex-deviation was on the increase in Argentina, and the obvious answer to the problem was legalized prostitution. One newspaper also blamed the country's 1936 ban on licensed bordellos for "the recrudescence of shameful attacks on women." A few days later, Strongman Juan Peron cracked open the 1936 law with a decree authorizing provincial and local authorities to permit brothels "in suitable places."* Whether or not Peron was sincere in billing the decree as a remedy for Argentina's worsening sex-offense problem, most Argentines looked upon the measure as a new attack in his running feud with the Roman Catholic Church (TIME, Jan. 3 et ante). The Peronista paper Critica went out of its way to allege that 80% of the homosexuals arrested last week "had been educated in religious schools." Feuding & Fussing. Impatient of even mild opposition, Strongman Peron has been feuding with the church since last summer, when he became worried about clerical influence in labor unions and the possibility of a Roman Catholic political party. Since then, the cops have banned numerous Roman Catholic gatherings and jailed several priests. Scores of priests have lost government jobs as teachers or chaplains.

The most serious blow of all was the law of a fortnight ago making divorce legal for the first time in Argentina's history. Last week the Argentine episcopate issued a letter deploring the divorce law, ordered it read from every Roman Catholic pulpit in the country. A newly formed underground association distributed pamphlets urging Catholics to display their loyalty to the faith by wearing badges of Roman Catholic organizations and bowing to priests "proudly and ostentatiously." In Buenos Aires and Cordoba, gangs of Roman Catholic youths beat up several bogus priests--apparently government agents in clerical garb--who were roaming the streets creating disturbances and yelling insults at women.

Chipping & Sniping. Despite the flare-up of resistance--or perhaps because of it--Peron & Co. kept right on with the sniping. In the province of Cordoba, the legislature voted to withdraw all subsidies from Roman Catholic schools. In Buenos Aires, the Peronista newspaper Democracia called for the removal of Roman Catholic "idols" (i.e., religious statues) from schools. Interior Minister Angel Borlenghi signed a decree authorizing non-Catholic religious organizations to provide "material and spiritual help" in hospitals and prisons and charitable institutions--a privilege previously reserved to the Roman Catholic Church. And persistent rumors had it that Peron was even getting ready to put an end to the special constitutional status of the Roman Catholic Church as the nation's official religion.

*Before 1936, Buenos Aires was notorious as a main terminal in the international white-slave trade, and bordellos flourished in every Argentine city. One of the most lavish was Madam Safe's spacious chalet in the city of Rosario. The staircases were marble, the curtains red velvet, the bedclothes silk, the girls mainly French or Polish, and the going rate about the equivalent of an average white-collar worker's weekly wage.

The law of 1936 closed Madam Safo's and other plush establishments, but less conspicuous brothels continued to operate, and free-lance pickups, of course, kept hard at work.

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