A Muted "Si" for Isabel

Since she took office after the death of her husband last July, Argentina's President Isabel Peron has been bedeviled by leftist guerrillas, rightist extremists, angry farmers and restive labor unions. Lately her government has seemed on the verge of foundering. Some diplomatic observers have even predicted a military takeover. Yet last week Mrs. Peron received an unexpected vote of confidence.

Elections for a new provincial government--the first balloting of any kind since Juan Peron died--were held in the rural northeastern province of Misiones. Local issues figured too strongly to make the contest an accurate gauge of the President's nationwide support. Still, the Misiones vote was billed as a sort of referendum on her leadership. Several leftist groups banded together to form the Authentic Party. Running on a virulently anti-Isabel platform, the Authentics drew impressively large crowds to their campaign rallies and there were predictions of an electoral debacle for Mrs. Peron's right-of-center Justicialist Party. When the results were in, the Justicialists had polled 74,326 votes, the moderate Radical Civic Union 62,767 and the leftist coalition a meager 15,244.

A columnist in the Buenos Aires daily La Opinion observed: "The extreme positions and the truculent folklore of the far left serve more to attract young people who are out to frighten their aunts than to win big popular majorities." The losers saw it differently and charged the government with vote buying. Jose Lopez Rega, Mrs. Peron's private secretary and Social Welfare Minister, did visit the province shortly before the election to distribute nearly $5 million worth of housing subsidies.

Classified Ads. Bought or not, the victory fostered at least the illusion of stability for Mrs. Peron's government at a troublesome time. With almost metronomic precision, right-and left-wing extremists are assassinating their enemies at the rate of about one every 16 hours. Since July, political violence has claimed nearly 400 lives. Newspapers have begun to run classified ads asking the whereabouts of scores of people who have simply disappeared from campuses, homes or offices. There is concern in Washington that left-wing terrorists may use the occasion of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's visit this week to embarrass President Peron by kidnaping or even assassinating her guest.

Since November, Argentina has been under an official "state of siege."In February, the army ended its two-year hibernation in barracks by deploying some 3,500 soldiers to scour the northwestern jungles of Tucuman province for leftist guerrillas. The government's muscle flexing has not been limited to terrorists. Five moderately left-wing provincial governors have been removed from office by executive decree. The universities have been purged of thousands of dissident professors. Steelworkers at Villa Constitucion, the industrial center north of Buenos Aires, have been on strike for four weeks to protest the arrest of 30 left-wing union leaders.

While the government has tried to purchase political stability at the price of repression, it has been unable to do much about the country's economy. Since early 1974, the annual rate of inflation has risen from 20% to more than 60%. Foreign reserves have shrunk from an estimated $2 billion to half that amount. In the past three months, the estimated budget deficit for 1975 has already doubled to $2.4 billion. The precipitous economic decline stems largely from a crisis that has overtaken agriculture. For decades, heavy taxes and price controls on farm produce have subsidized the country's industrial growth and provided pay hikes for unionized urban workers--the descamisados or "shirtless ones" who are the backbone of the Peronist movement. But the farmers, increasingly reluctant to sell grain and cattle at artificially low prices, are beginning to curtail production.

Despite the chaos, Isabel Peron is determined to maintain her grip on the presidency. In an address to the General Confederation of Labor earlier this month, she said: "I am a fragile-looking woman, but I have a will of iron, and there is nobody and nothing that can deflect me from the course we have charted for the country."

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