ARGENTINA: Peron Purrs

Argentine optimists dreamed last week of adding another monument to the overdecorated parks of Buenos Aires. The hero: their Vice President and flexible strong man, Juan Domingo Perón. If he stepped aside and gave the nation a fair and free election, no statue would be too good for him.

Others feared that Peron was scheming to step, not aside, but into the Presidency. To sound out U.S. and Hemisphere reactions to his candidacy, he gave a carefully worded interview to the Associated Press. In phrases dripping with democracy, he promised elections soon. He buttered labor, slammed "the interests": "Never again will oligarchs buy or coerce the vote of a single Argentine worker."

Soaring higher, he smiled benignly on the obvious winners of World War II. Argentina would not, he said, go to war with Germany. That would be undignified (with Germany nearly licked). But he wanted "to demonstrate our desire for friendly relations with all the nations of the Americas, the U.S. included." Franklin D. Roosevelt, he cooed, had "faced titanic problems bravely." He even tossed rosebuds toward Moscow: "We as a nation cannot ignore Russia as a great factor in the world. . . . We should initiate steps toward formal relations with Moscow."

Gone was the original Perón, the swaggering soldier-politician who had defied the U.S., while Argentine militarists were trying to fasten on their reluctant nation a modified version of European Fascism. Candidate Perón, with the Nazis gasping on the ropes, was the smoothest of democrats. Obviously, he realized that his best chance to stay in power was to attach himself to the winning side, get himself elected as a "democratic" President.

Argentine dopesters figured his chances, quickly decided that Perón, in trying to leap from bandwagon to bandwagon, might very well land in the gutter. Few believed he could win more than 10% of the votes in a fair election. But Argentine democrats were uneasy, suspecting a booby trap. From the provinces came reports that pamphlets praising Perón were flying thick as snowflakes. Handkerchiefs, buttons and mate gourds displayed his manly portrait. The Strong Man's "democratic" campaign was already under way.