The Murders Continue

One morning last week. General Juan Jose Torres, 56, who served as a leftist President of Bolivia for ten months before being ousted by a military coup in August 1971, left his apartment in Buenos Aires to visit his barber. After getting a haircut, he told his wife, he planned to call on a friend whose mother had died recently. Torres never had a chance to offer his condolences. Roughly 38 hours after he left home, his body was found beside a bridge on a highway 60 miles from the Argentine capital. The former President had been shot three times in the head.

Torres' murder was the third in a grisly series of spectacular political killings that have tainted the nation-saving image won by Argentina's military junta in their virtually bloodless ouster of the incompetent Isabel Peron last March. Three weeks ago, two former Uruguayan legislators, Zelmar Michelini and Hector Gutierrez Ruiz, were seized in separate commando-style raids. Their bodies were found four days later in an abandoned car, together with the corpses of two other Uruguayans who had earlier been involved with the Tupamaro guerrillas.

The new military authorities have found it both embarrassing and difficult to account for the killings--and not only because the murderers have not been found. In the case of Gutierrez Ruiz, for example, the police did not intervene even though the kidnapers remained in his apartment--located just blocks from three heavily guarded embassies--for more than an hour. Even after the case made headlines, no one bothered to visit the apartment for fingerprints. When Gutierrez Ruiz's wife tried to file a kidnaping complaint with the police, she was not allowed to file for anything more serious than the loss of her identity document, which the kidnapers had stolen.

False Charges. The murders of these prominent exiles are dramatic evidence that the political violence that has beset Argentina for six years has not stopped under the generals; at least 350 people have died since they took over. Most observers agree that the guerrillas have been hit hard by the security forces, but they can still hit back. Last week guerrillas kidnaped Colonel Juan Alberto Pita, a friend of President Jorge Rafael Videla and the recently appointed government referee in the powerful General Confederation of Labor.

After Torres' assassination, Argentine Interior Minister General Albano Harguindeguy denounced a "well-directed campaign from abroad aimed at undermining the prestige of the new authorities and hindering the process of national reorganization." Harguindeguy was referring to what he called "false" charges--mainly in the European press --that Argentina has failed to protect political refugees; many of his fellow officers suspect that the murders are the work of right-wing Peronist death squads trying to discredit the Videla government.

Worries about the refugees are indeed widespread. United Nations High Commissioner Sadruddin Aga Khan expressed his concern for the safety of the estimated 25,000 political refugees in Argentina following the murder of the Uruguayans. Last week Bolivian President Hugo Banzar Suarez, who overthrew Torres in 1971, proclaimed a day of national mourning for his murdered foe and promised him a military funeral befitting his rank. He also invited back to Bolivia all of the some 1,000 exiles who feel themselves "persecuted by any form of extremism."

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