"Wealth Recovery"

The chief aims of President Pedro Aramburu and the officers around him--as mirrored by their own words and deeds--took firm shape last week. They intend to wipe out the cult of Juan Peron, free the economy from strangling Peronist controls and then run off fair elections. The week saw dramatic steps toward all three ends.

Deperonizatlon. "To recover stolen wealth," a government decree confiscated the property of 263 persons and 68 corporations alleged to have grown fat under Peron. A National Wealth Recovery Board was empowered to administer the seized property as it saw fit. Most conspicuous on the list, except for Peron himself* and his late wife Eva, was Tycoon Jorge Antonio, 38, who rose in the last decade from a hospital orderly to the possessor of a fortune reported to total $215 million (rolled up in Mercedes-Benz cars, Capehart radios and phonographs, grains, publishing, radio and TV).

The Buenos Aires press, reveling in its new-found freedom, backed Revolutionary General Aramburu with a unanimity such as Peron, for all his powers and pressures, never quite commanded. Democracia, a paper that Peron used to favor with his own editorial comments, coyly signed "Descartes," commented approvingly, "This is not vengeance but justice." Asked El Laborista, "Is it not proof of wrongdoing to have a billion pesos when one started with nothing ten years ago?" So bitter was the feeling against the Peronista fat cats that no one even asked whether confiscation was constitutional, or a safe precedent.

Toward its other main aims, the government:

¶ Resisted panic over a dollar flight through the now-legalized black market that drove the peso from 30 per dollar to 37, and doggedly insisted instead that it intends to remove remaining controls, thus freeing the peso completely.

¶ Announced that no member of the present government would seek office in the promised elections, and renounced the military's "right" to stage revolutions.

An Issue Deferred. Significantly, the new government's announced aims did not include any basic overhaul of church-state relations. An attempt to disestablish the Roman Catholic Church was one of the main causes of Peron's fall, and Aramburu apparently prefers to leave the church's future status to his elected successor.

But last week the issue crowded in anyway, when ardent Catholics planned to turn the Feast of the Immaculate Conception into a political demonstration for the immediate return of all church privileges.

The government sternly banned politicking--but cooperated wholeheartedly in staging a public holiday Mass in Buenos Aires' Plaza de Mayo, facing Government House. Result: one of the biggest throngs in the plaza's history--150,000--calmly gathered and calmly went away, leaving the church-state issue just where Aramburu wanted it: deftly deferred.

* Who last week applied for a visa to go to Mexico where, according to his Mexican friend Lawyer Hector Ponce Sanchez, he was considering investing "part of his savings" in a Chihuahua cattle ranch.

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