End to Tranquillity

Whatever other failings his regime might have, Argentine Dictator Juan Carlos Ongania could fairly claim that he had given his country "a climate of work, of tranquillity, of peace" since he took over 35 months ago. Last week Argentina's placid surface was shattered, as riots spread through the nation's largest cities. The demonstrations pitted an alliance of students and workers against the army--posing the severest test yet for Ongania's rule.

As sometimes happens in protest movements, the trouble began three weeks ago over a triviality: a 9-c- increase in the price of meals in a student cafeteria at the National University of the Northeast in Corrientes. Students were already angered by a campus peace often enforced by policemen in the classrooms. Now, they took to the streets. The police met them with gunfire, killing a 21-year-old medical student. The riots soon spread to half a dozen other cities. Last week, demonstrators protesting two more student deaths took over a 50-block area in Rosario, Argentina's second largest city, and held it for several hours, until they were routed by troops acting under martial law.

Far from stilling the demonstrations, the government's response only roused Argentine workers to sympathy for the students. The workers had their own grievances: the regime had frozen wages for more than two years, while the cost of living has risen more than 20%. When the unions declared a general strike last week, the regime responded with more repression. It declared "siege law," a modified form of martial law that empowered special military courts to try civilians for a host of offenses, from sedition to threats against the army --and to order summary execution for more serious crimes.

Once again, repression served only to inflame. In Cordoba, Argentina's chief manufacturing city, some 10,000 demonstrators swept through a 40-block area of the city, battled police from behind barricades, and burned at least 100 cars.

When a pall of tear gas failed to budge the rioters, the army flew in troops and additional ammunition, while jets fired off warning bursts of machine-gun fire overhead. Finally, the army ordered soldiers to shoot anyone appearing on the streets without permission during a dusk-to-dawn curfew. But neither curfew nor martial law nor dire warnings could halt the general strike next day. In Cordoba, riots broke out anew, and police opened fire on a crowd of 2,000 marchers. In the rest of the country, the strike brought all commerce, industry and transportation to a halt. The toll so far: 12 dead, 300 injured; 230 have been arrested. Ongania showed no sign of backing down, but neither was there any indication that the demonstrations had run their course.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.