ARGENTINA: Blood Will Flow

Juan Perón last week announced forthrightly that he plans a big and bloody comeback in Argentina. "My agents are everywhere, and they are preparing for the day," said he. "It may come any time. There will be a violent uprising. Blood will flow in the streets of Argentina. Perhaps as many as a million will be killed."

Perón blamed himself for "one great mistake before: I avoided bloodshed when I was in power, and treated my opponents lightly." His promise: "I shall not make the same mistake again. Many heads will roll when I return to Buenos Aires. It will be terrible, but it can't be helped."

Discredited & Hated? By way of a warning to them, Perón listed his enemies for Joseph Newman, New York Herald Tribune correspondent who touched off the exile's comeback threat by dropping in for an interview at the former dictator's modest suite in the U.S.-owned Hotel Washington in Colón, Panama. The marked men: Argentine navy and air force officers; such big industrialists as the Bembergs (beer) and Raúl Lamuraglia (textiles); La Prensa Publisher Alberto Gainza Paz and that paper's longtime news service, the United Press; the rulers of Uruguay, where Perón's exiles plotted; and the Roman Catholic clergy.

Perón's church opponents seemed particularly to rankle him still. He released for quotation a passage from his unpublished book, Might Is the Right of Beasts, saying that his late wife Eva "performed more Christian works in one day than all the priests of my country in their entire lives." As for Argentina's new military rulers, Peron scorned them as "men incapable of governing because their custom is to command . . . They end in chaos and . . . fall later, discredited and hated."

Wrote Interviewer Newman: "His enemies would regard this as a description of what happened to Perón."

Seeing Nelly Home. In Buenos Aires, the newspaper Critica dismissed Perón's threats with a question: "Hasn't Panama measured him for a strait jacket yet?" President Pedro Aramburu and his advisers seemed to sense that madman talk by Perón, who is still revered by millions of diehard Peronistas, provided a tailor-made chance to draw a contrast between the erratic ex-dictator and the sober new regime. The government made three moves that sharpened the impression.

¶ To undercut Perón's pretensions to righteousness, an official investigating committee reported that during his twelve years in power, Peronista Congressmen raised their combined personal assets from 6,650,000 pesos to a fat 206,000,000 pesos —among the biggest gainers being the pair who offered the greatest number of congressional resolutions of homage to Perón.

¶ Aramburu made a nationwide radio speech that opened the door for disgusted Peronistas to throw in with the new regime: "Many pinned their hopes to [Peronista] banners full of vain promises. They did not make a mistake; they were led into it. The guilty were not the simple folk, but those who raised the fraudulent banners."