Ghost from the Past
(See Cover)
For hours on end, a solitary figure sat stiffly in an ornate office in Buenos Aires' presidential Casa Rosada. A few lifelong personal friends kept an uncomfortable vigil in an ivory and green anteroom. Outside the door, a pair of knee-booted grenadiers of the palace guard stood, like life-sized toys, with ceremonial sabers bared. A stream of messengers came and went, bearing bulletins. Arturo Frondizi, 53, President of Argentina and currently his country's most unpopular man, was waiting to see whether he would be allowed to remain as elected Chief Executive of South America's second big gest nation. Frondizi swore he would remain: "Only my person stands between order and chaos." The decision was not his to make. It lay in the uncertain outcome of events he himself had set in motion across Argentina -- a crucial congressional election whose terms he had set in expectation of victory and in defeat had been unable to honor. In protest, 2,000,000 workers, whose ballots had been summarily invalidated, were called out on strike across the land. Banks were closed, stock exchanges locked. In Buenos Aires, the country's dominant, deeply conservative military men held a series of nonstop meetings trying to decide what to do about the chaos and Frondizi -- whether to keep him on or depose him in favor of a flat mili tary rule.
Unlikely Leader. Upheavals are not rare in Latin America, but the time and place of this one caught almost everyone by surprise. It took place in what is perhaps the most economically advanced nation on the continent--a rich land of spreading pampas, beef and grain, in which no Gaucho or laborer needs to go hungry. It is a land whose 20 million people, mostly of European immigrant descent, consider themselves infinitely superior to the citizens of neighboring Latin countries. It is urban and modern: one-third of the nation live within the capital city of Buenos Aires, a Parisian city whose aristocracy is the most sophisticated in Latin America. More than half of the nation live either in the capital or in surrounding Buenos Aires province.
Argentina is one of the nations President Kennedy has chosen as a showcase for his Alliance for Progress, and only three weeks ago he committed $150 million to it. Argentina had once recklessly squandered its patrimony under Dictator Juan Per&243;n. But now, unlike Brazil--its chief rival for attention in Latin America --Argentina was showing many of the elements of sensible development. And in Arturo Frondizi it seemed to have found a leader who was willing to do the hard things to make his country economically sound.
A more unlikely political leader would be difficult to imagine. Tall, spare, bespectacled, Frondizi lacks the charisma of power; he has none of Fidel Castro's flamboyant oratory, transmits none of Ja-nio Quadros' messianic zeal. Yet in office he was a superb politician of maneuver--good at the back-room deal, the clever compromise that resolved disputes but settled no issues. In his four years as President, he had miraculously survived 35 major and innumerable minor crises. Against his countrymen's express wishes, he imposed austerity on Argentina as the only way to right the foundering economy, and seemed to be making it stick. He also knew how to play, to the final moment of drama, the risky game of defying Argentina's military leaders, who have not fought a war since 1870 (against tiny Paraguay) but who control Argentina. Gradually, Frondizi came to mistake this adroitness at survival for a genius for leadership, and to confuse the widespread admiration for his cleverness with genuine popularity. Congressional elections were coming up that could continue his legislative majority during the final two years of his six-year term. Frondizi decided to challenge the ghost that walks through Argentine politics.
False Prosperity. Underlying all politics in Argentina is the memory of Juan Per&243;n and of the restless underclasses who followed him faithfully for ten years. Until his overthrow in 1955, Per&243;n masked his dictatorial misrule by spreading Argentina's wealth before the public.
It was a false prosperity that inevitably ended in bankruptcy, but the masses gave him their devotion and have accepted no leader since. After his downfall, Per&243;n's name was forbidden on the ballot. Four years ago, to get elected, Frondizi in his usual adroit way courted the support of the outlawed Per&243;nistas. In power, he tried to assimilate the Per&243;nistas into the normal political life of the nation in a way that made Argentina's military leaders nervous. This year Frondizi managed to convince the military that the Per&243;nistas would be no threat in the elections, and that now was the time to destroy the Per&243;n myth once and for all by allowing his followers a place on the ballot.
How wrong Frondizi was became clear last week with the first election returns. With 86 congressional seats and 14 provincial governorships at stake, the Per&243;nistas won 44 seats and 9 provinces, plus Jujuy, where they ran in alliance with the Christian Democratic Party (see map). Actually, Per&243;nistas got only 35% of the vote, but their opponents were split. In the balloting, Frondizi's own Intransigent Radical Party polled 540,000 more votes than during the last national election in 1960. Yet so great was the Per&243;nista landslide that Frondizi's party lost 21 previously held seats, its majority in Congress, and control of five provinces. A second anti-Per&243;n party, the People's Radicals (once a single party with the Intransigents but now split away), lost 15 seats. The vote: Per&243;nista, 2,528,000; Frondizi, 2,038,000; People's Radicals, 1,659,000.
Cooler Heads. When the votes were counted, Argentina's bitterly anti-Per&243;n military went into a state of shock. Having once ousted Old Soldier Per&243;n, and now deeply fearful of their ex-commander's vengeance and his irresponsibility, they were determined to forestall any Per&243;nista comeback. Through Navy Secretary Admiral Gaston Clement, some of the officers demanded the immediate resignation of Frondizi and his replacement with a military junta. But cooler heads, mostly in the army and air force, proposed a compromise: Frondizi could stay, but with his power sharply curtailed.
At the height of the crisis, the U.S. clearly showed its support of Frondizi. Ambassador Robert McClintock, who has been in similar hot spots before, and was ambassador in Lebanon in 1958 when the embattled government of President Camille Chamoun called on U.S. Marines, made a pointed visit to Frondizi. As the wires hummed between Buenos Aires and Washington, McClintock let it be known that Argentina could expect no aid from the U.S. if the military imposed a new dictatorship on Argentina. "The objective," as one State Department officer put it, "is to preserve even the thinnest skin over this skeleton of legalism rather than see it destroyed and the military rule."
On one thing, the generals and admirals were adamant. The Per&243;nistas, though democratically elected in one of the freest elections in Argentine history, must never take office. In no position to resist, Frondizi agreed, and found the powers in the constitution to make it legal.* He then appointed "interventors" to govern five Argentine provinces, including populous, highly industrialized Buenos Aires, fired his civilian Cabinet and proposed a new coalition government, half of whose members would be military men. When Frondizi took this enforced solution to the People's Radicals, whose support he would need in the fractured Congress, they refused to go along.
Back from the Barricades. It was a crucial moment of decision for Argentina. The nation was dismayed at events, and tense, yet on all sides there was a curious unwillingness to push to the barricades. Frondizi made no emotional appeals to the people; the army kept most of its troops safely inside their barracks. Even the Per&243;nista leaders, not wanting a full test of strength that would result in their forceful suppression, behaved themselves. Per&243;nistas trumpeted their "triumph of the people" but the mobs were ordered to stay home, and they obeyed.
In Madrid, where he lives in luxurious exile with his two poodles and 27-year-old Isabel, whom he introduces as his third wife, Juan Per&243;n greeted the events with satisfaction but also with an oddly detached manner. Anti-U.S. as always, the 66-year-old ex-dictator accused the U.S. of "siphoning off" Latin America's wealth. He bragged that his followers could have polled 6,000,000 votes in the election. But he remained politely ambiguous about any plans for a return to Argentina. "I have done nothing," he said. "Our people have done everything. That is why it is not my victory but the victory of the Argentine people."
There was something to what he said. The 2,528,000 Argentines who voted Per&243;nista cast their ballots more for a neo-Per&243;nism represented by their own angry young labor leaders and politicians than for the aging ex-dictator himself. What Per&243;n represented in the 1940s and 1950s --and what the neo-Per&243;nistas copy in 1962--is the vision of a dynamic leader able to fulfill the Argentine little man's rising expectations today, and not in some far distant tomorrow.
Not Like Mussolini. The extravagant despotism of Juan Per&243;n's reign brought Argentina close to ruination, but his dynamism also brought the drowsing, pastoral land violently into the industrial 20th century. Tall, athletic and dashing. Per&243;n was a champion army swordsman, a crack shot, a headlong skier. In Rome just before World War II. he listened eagerly to Dictator Benito Mussolini's jut-jawed harangues on Italy's destiny. "Mussolini."he said later,"was the greatest man of our century, but he committed certain disastrous errors. I, who have the advantage of his precedent before me, shall follow in his footsteps but also avoid his mistakes."
In Buenos Aires officers' clubs, Per&243;n exuded the Argentine vivo's beef-fed vitality: in public, he had a crowd-warming, million-candlepower smile. As leader of a secret organization of officers, he burst into power in 1943. The next year his followers marched into the President's study and. with guns leveled, threw the President out. The successor made Peron Vice President and Secretary of War. Peron quickly consolidated his power by putting his men in control of the upsurging industrial trade unions, long suppressed by the country's ruling clique of landowners.
Sneer to Slogan. The strongman soon took up with a small-time radio actress named Maria Eva Duarte. Ambitious, shrewd and sleek, she proved a perfect dictator's helpmate. When a postwar wave of democratic fervor temporarily detoured Per&243;n and he was jailed, Evita rallied his trade unionists to march--50,000 strong, some of them shirtless--into the center of Buenos Aires to take over the city. The afternoon paper La Critica scoffed at the "shirtless ones" ("descamisados"); Per&243;n turned the sneer to a slogan. "I want to clasp the descamisados to my bosom!" he shouted before crowds of chanting workers. "You're dirty, and I'm dirty. We're both dirty together." In 1946 he rode into the presidency with 55% of the vote. Evita took over the Secretariat of Labor, and started pushing out money. When railway workers asked for 40% higher wages, she said: "I think they should get 50%." Telephone workers asked for 70%, hoping for 35%. They got 70%. As a way of getting back at snooty Buenos Aires society women who froze her out of their charities, she founded her own Social Aid Foundation. It built costly homes for the aged, for working girls, for indigent mothers. Her blonde hair drawn back, her dark eyes flashing, Evita showed up at workers' rallies in jewels and Paris gowns that cost the foundation some $40,000 a year.
All the while, Per&243;n built his dream of world power for Argentina. With war-built exchange reserves of $1.6 billion, he bought the telephone system, the decrepit British railways, plus endless equipment for such enterprises as a battery factory, a merchant marine, airlines, petrolieum refineries, motorcycle factories. He subsidized wheat and meat for workers' tables, de-emphasized them as exports unbefitting a modern industrial nation. Everyone, high and low, sizzled steak for lunch.
Solace in Teen-Agers. Per&243;n turned Congressmen into quivering yes men, crushed the judiciary, seized the press, took over universities, tortured political prisoners. But only rarely did he touch the workingman or his union.
A coming together of catastrophic events brought Per&243;n's downfall. Evita died of cancer.* In his bereavement, Per&243;n found solace in teen-age girls. The wheat, meat and money gave out. Per&243;n had made it so unprofitable to raise cattle and grain that bread and beef were in short supply. He dickered desperately for a $125 million loan from the U.S., violated the nationalism that he himself had urged by trying to swing a deal with Standard Oil of California to exploit Argentine oil.
His iron rule grew tighter. Resistance among Roman Catholics, among middle-class professional people, among the military stiffened against him. Per&243;n sent mobs of his descamisados to burn the high-toned Jockey Club, the Radical and Socialist Party headquarters, nine Roman Catholic churches. Fed up at last, the military rose against him in September 1955. When it seemed that a navy cruiser might fire on Buenos Aires, he fled aboard a Paraguayan gunboat.*
The full extent of the nation's economic ruin was never fully understood by the descamisados Peron left behind; all they knew was that their heroic Caudillo had been driven out. It was left to the interim military government of General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu to assess the damage--and to Arturo Frondizi, elected in 1958, to attempt some permanent repairs.
Flash of Rebellion. After Per&243;n the vivo, Frondizi--the austere, finger-wagging intellectual--was an emotional frustration. The next-to-youngest of 14 children born to an immigrant Italian bridge builder, Frondizi was a shy, unexceptional youth, who showed his first flash of spirit in 1930 against then Dictator Jose Uri-buru. Frondizi completed a six-year law course in three, with honors. But on graduation day he stood on the platform, and refused to accept his honors certificate "from a government put in power and maintained by military force."
Through the Peron years, Frondizi was in open opposition, addressing furtive knots of anti-Peronistas in Buenos Aires streets. But his strength lay in mastery of political maneuver within the Radical Party. In 1956, after Pern fell, Frondizi split the party into two nearly equal segments--Intransigents and People's Radicals--and became the Intransigents' candidate for President. That he eventually won was largely owing to a shadowy political adviser named Rogelio Frigerio, a successful businessman (he owns a nationwide chain of dry-goods stores) who was once a Communist sympathizer, later cooperated with Per&243;nism. and now presumably stood somewhere in between.
Frigerio clearly saw that victory would go to whichever Radical faction won the most Peronista votes; he went off to visit Per&243;n. In other elections, the ex-dictator had commanded his supporters to cast blank protest ballots; after Frigerio's visit, he ordered them to vote for Frondizi.
Once in the presidency, Frondizi cast off all pre-election commitments to adopt economic determinism, heart and soul. "I have always dreamed of building a modern, well-developed nation of my country," he said. "No consideration of personal welfare or convenience--no family, political party or friend can stop me." Austere by Comparison. The post-Per&243;n economic problems were immense.
Power, fuel and steel were in short supply. The foreign-trade deficit was running close to $300 million-a year. Tens of thousands of featherbedded employees jammed deficit-ridden state enterprises.
The cost of living had soared; the peso had tumbled in value from 4.2 to the dollar when Per&243;n took over, to 40.
Frondizi's prescription of austerity 'was austere only by comparison with Per&243;nista days. Subsidies were lifted from food, the peso was freed to seek a realistic level, wage increases were tied to productivity.
Two "meatless" days a week, imposed during the declining days of the Peron era, were reimposed--though "meat" in this case meant beef, and Argentines were free to put away as much lamb and mutton as they could hold. But prices did climb (steak went from 8-c- to 19-c- per lb., bread from 2-c- to 4-c- per lb.), and the memory of high living in the days of Per&243;n died hard. Frondizi next outraged the nationalists by allowing foreign private companies to develop Argentine petroleum reserves.. He launched campaigns to denationalize steel and to increase electric power, cut 200,000 functionless functionaries from the government payroll. He set about putting the railways on a paying basis by firing and retiring featherbedders, eliminating useless stretches of track, modernizing equipment.
Argentina achieved self-sufficiency in oil in a startlingly brief three years. Foreign investors found Argentine prospects bright enough to pump in $387.4 million.
But other reforms were only partially successful. The quickening economic pace caused a sharply increased demand for industrial machinery; in the past two years, imports climbed from $990 million a year to $1.45 billion. Agriculture, which accounts for 80% of Argentine exports was still stuck fast in Per&243;nista depression. Argentina finished 1961 with a foreign-trade deficit of $450 million, and foreign currency reserves fell from $750 million last year to $420 million last month.
Classic Pattern. Hoping to win Per&243;nista support for his program, Frondizi pushed through a law designed to give amnesty to Per&243;nistas for all but common crimes, then returned their control of Argentina's powerful labor unions. The reaction of the bitterly anti-Per&243;n military men was instantaneous. What followed became the classic pattern of the Frondizi administration: a military ultimatum, followed by a Frondizi maneuver, a brief truce, and then more military complaints.
The complaints were always loudest when Presidential Adviser Frigerio was involved. It was he who drew up Frondizi's plan for "reintegration" of Per&243;nistas into Argentine national life. To the military, Frigerio was a Per&243;nista in democrat's clothing. In April 1959, in an unofficial status, Frigerio flew to the U.S. and returned boasting of loan pledges he had obtained. Just the same, War Secretary General Hector Solanas Pacheco warned Frondizi that the troops were "dangerously restless" over Frigerio.
Frondizi seemed to take the hint: Frigerio disappeared from the presidential secretariat, though Frondizi continued to see him. Frigerio became the center of more trouble, when Per&243;n, in exile, accused Frondizi of welshing on a signed deal, arranged by the adviser, promising legality for the Per&243;nista Party. In a preelection "fireside chat" a few weeks ago, Frondizi compared Frigerio's role to that of Harry Hopkins in Franklin D. Roosevelt's Administration. Frigerio was preADVISER FRIGERIO The Brass said, "Out." sumably behind some of the odd Frondizi gyrations in foreign policy--including the invitation to Cuba's Che Guevara, and Argentina's reluctance to condemn Castro at the recent Punta del Este conference.
That led to another of the frequent Frondizi clashes with the military; he survived by agreeing to break diplomatic relations with Castro's Cuba (Frigerio was one of the casualties of last week's crisis: Frondizi agreed to send him abroad).
As his tightrope act continued to work, Frondizi got more confidence in himself and in his ability to survive any hazards.
He became more and more determined to let the Per&243;nistas compete in the congressional elections. So long as the Per&243;nistas were kept outside normal political activity, he argued, they formed a dangerous, unassimilated mass that might one day turn toward Communism. Allowed to run, they might win a few seats in Congress. Politicians in both political parties assured the military men that Per&243;nista voting strength was dispersed.
Hearing the good news, Per&243;n summoned to Madrid one of his most powerful lieutenants: Andres Framini, 47, boss of the 146,000-member textile workers' union, who was jailed on general charges of Per&243;nista activities after Per&243;n fell.
When Framini returned home, he filed as a candidate for the governorship of Buenos Aires province, a job second in power only to that of the President. Fra-mini's candidate for vice governor: Per&243;n himself. But when Framini proposed the ticket in Buenos Aires, it was rejected on grounds that no person wanted for a common crime could run for public office--and Per&243;n is still wanted for, among other things, statutory rape of his teen-aged girl friend, Nelly Rivas.
Che's Red Mom. Per&243;n ordered his supporters in Argentina to cast blank ballots again, then agreed to let candidates run. In the confusion, the Per&243;nista campaign got off to a slow start. Frondizi's party won by-elections in five provinces.
"The people in these provinces had every opportunity to repudiate us,'' Frondizi said, "but they did not." Despite the hopeful signs, Per&243;nista rallies grew to impressive size. "Per&243;n or death!" slogans appeared on streetcar islands and walls. Framini, although an anti-Communist and a practicing Roman Catholic, began campaigning against Frondizi for selling out to "Yankee imperialism." Che Guevara's Red mother Celia showed up at Per&243;nista rallies, asking that"the voice of Cuba, sister of Per&243;nism, be heard." The Per&243;nistas had no need to ask what little support Argentina's tiny (estimated membership: 100,000) Communist Party could offer. In the end, it was given just the same.
A week before the election, the worried government canceled the Per&243;nistas' right to campaign on radio and TV.
Forty-eight hours before polling time, Frondizi held a final press conference to insist that all was going well for his Intransigents and that the results of the balloting would stand, come what may.
Frondizi's massive miscalculation not only jeopardized his own future, it jeopardized democracy in Argentina. It was bad enough for him to deny office to men legally elected; it was worse still for a President to revoke an election on the orders of the military. Throughout the hemisphere, people were shocked at the turn of events in a nation as presumably stable as Argentina. In Washington, the first reaction was that the Alliance for Progress had been dealt a severe blow. Had it not backed the wrong man? The Kennedy Administration's second reaction was not so alarmist: the news from Buenos Aires only underlined the fact that trouble can break out anywhere in Latin America, thereby justifying continued U.S. concern; furthermore, the fact that suppressed elections, general strikes and military interference had not led to more turmoil suggested that there was much in Argentina--beyond one possibly expendable politician and one ghost from the past--to build on.
As the week of crisis went on, the Argentine public--though both ashamed and apprehensive--went its way. Thousands jammed the soccer stadiums and the race tracks. All the while the military argued to exhaustion, divided over two propositions, one side arguing: "Let's get Frondizi out first, then talk," the other, "Frondizi had better stay, but he will have to take orders." Above the battle ex-President Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, a respected old soldier, requested eight to ten days to mediate the differences be tween Frondizi and the military. Frondizi himself labored to assemble an uncontroversial Cabinet of technicians agreeable to the military. It was by no means certain that this would be enough to save his skin.
Britain's touring Prince Philip arrived in town and was given a state dinner by Frondizi as if nothing untoward were happening. But the irrepressible Duke of Edinburgh saw an opportunity to read Argentina's War Secretary, General Rosendo Fraga, a little lecture.
Philip (turning to the general at a social function): Have you been minister for a long time? Fraga (standing at attention): For al most one year.
Philip: Tell me something. Do you en joy it?
Fraga (darkening visibly): Yes, Your Highness.
Philip: Another thing. Have you been in a war?
Fraga (gloweringly) : No, we haven't had wars recently in Argentina.
Philip (wagging his finger and grinning) : Well, don't go and start one now.
The military seemed in no hurry to; nor did the populace. As the Per&243;nista 24-hour "general strike" went on without incident or bloodshed, about 75% of all workers showed up at the factory and nearly all at their offices. Argentines seem to share a common letdown feeling that a promising convalescence from dictator ship had been harshly interrupted. But there was also a feeling, among contentious and proud rivals, that a nation's continuity must be preserved, and that this took precedence over individual ambitions and disagreements. The situation in Argentina could still get out of hand, though at week's end, many were resolved that it must not. Almost everyone seemed to understand that the operation they were trying to perform was very close to the heart.
*Justifying emergency rule when subversion threatens to overthrow a regime. A similar clause was used by Jawaharlal Nehru to impose President's Rule from Delhi on the state of Kerala after it voted Communist in 1957. -- And her body, well embalmed, was kept in a hushed room in the C.G.T. Building. After Per&243;n fell, it disappeared. *First stop on a long trail leading to Madrid. Other stops: Paraguay, Panama, followed by residences in lands then ruled by fellow dictators --Perez Jimenez' Venezuela, Trujillo's Dominican Republic, Franco's Spain.
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