Battling Against Subversion

An American woman visiting relatives in Buenos Aires was awakened recently by screams in the night. "I thought I was dreaming," she recalled afterward. "I imagined that I was in New York and it was only a rape or murder, and I wasn't going to get up. But then I looked out my window and saw a car without license plates, with all four doors open. A man was pushing a woman into the front. Then all the doors closed at once. The car drove off, followed by another. Next day, a doorman explained that such things often happened. Drunks got disorderly in the area's posh nightclubs, he said, and had to be taken away by police."

Chances are, though, that the woman was a suspected subversive--possibly another victim in a bitter war between right-wing death squads and leftist guerrillas that the ostensibly moderate military rulers of Argentina seem unable to control. The regime that ousted the incompetent former President Isabel Peron last March is being tarnished badly by the bloodletting--especially since right-wing extremists seem to operate with impunity and have on occasion even told their victims that they are members of legitimate security forces.

Last month, for example, 40 heavily armed men, clad in a variety of makeshift uniforms, staged a commando-style raid on two hotels run by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Buenos Aires. They herded 26 captives --24 Chileans, a Uruguayan and the Paraguayan manager of one of the hotels --into waiting cars. All 26 turned up the next day, many testifying to beatings and electrical torture in what they believed to be a military barracks. The refugees--most of whom left Chile following the overthrow of Salvador Allende--had been warned to leave the country within 48 hours, and they did, with U.N. help. The Argentine government's disclaimers of responsibility sounded somewhat hollow. The lengthy caravan had passed through downtown Buenos Aires and one of the U.N. hotels was less than a block from a police station.

Such freelance vigilantism is an index of how sorely provoked the armed forces have been by leftist terrorists over the past six years. Only a week after the U.N. kidnaping, the guerrillas staged one of their most cold-blooded coups to date: the assassination of Federal Police Chief Cesareo Cardozo, 50, an army general. Using a teen-age girl. Ana Maria Gonzalez, to make friends with Cardozo's daughter, they managed to plant a bomb under the general's bed.

Cardozo was killed instantly; his wife was deafened and critically injured by the explosion.

Last Friday another bomb exploded, this one in the dining room of the security branch of the federal police. At least 18 people were killed and many more were reported missing in the rubble; 66 were wounded, eleven of them critically. The following day, eight bullet-riddled bodies were found in a parking lot a few blocks from the blast site. The deaths pushed the tally of fatalities resulting from political violence to nearly 450 in the three months since the junta took over. Of those, more than 70 have been policemen. An unknown number of other people have either been kidnaped by terrorists or arrested by security forces and held incommunicado.

Many Argentines feel that the response to guerrilla terror has been too visceral, but they also see it as a necessary evil. Says one former Argentine Ambassador to Washington: "Show me a formula for fighting guerrillas without acting like one. I haven't found it, you haven't got it, and the army hasn't either." One ex-Senator feels that "the government hasn't centralized security operations. Every commander has his own independent force, and every service branch has its own plans." What he fears is that the police could become an even greater nightmare to ordinary Argentines than the guerrillas. Agrees one of the country's most prominent scientists: "The only legitimacy of a government of force is its ability to control force. If it doesn't have that, its illegitimacy grows every moment."

Well Aware. At a tune when the government finally has some grip on the country's economic problems, that could be disastrous. Financial managers, led by Finance Minister Jose Martinez de Hoz, have renegotiated loans covering much of Argentina's stifling foreign debt, amounting to roughly $13.5 billion. The most accurate measure of confidence, the black market value of the Argentine peso, has risen from 380 per U.S. dollar at the time of the coup to roughly 240 now. But the price Argentina has paid is a deepening recession, as a result of government austerity.

To his credit, President Jorge Rafael Videla seems well aware that the war against subversion must be waged legally if confidence in the regime--both at home and abroad--is to be maintained. To replace Police Chief Cardozo, the government named Brigadier General Arturo Corbetta, a hard-liner when it comes to dealing with terrorism, but also the holder of a law degree, who seems to feel there is a place for law. Anti-terrorist action, says Corbetta, must be a "legitimate and high concentration of centralized violence, applied with the prudence of men who know their duty." Fulfilling that prescription in the wake of Friday's bloody bombing is likely to prove as difficult as it is important.

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