Argentina: Ghost from the Past

(5 of 9)

All the while, Per&243;n built his dream of world power for Argentina. With war-built exchange reserves of $1.6 billion, he bought the telephone system, the decrepit British railways, plus endless equipment for such enterprises as a battery factory, a merchant marine, airlines, petrolieum refineries, motorcycle factories. He subsidized wheat and meat for workers' tables, de-emphasized them as exports unbefitting a modern industrial nation. Everyone, high and low, sizzled steak for lunch.

Solace in Teen-Agers. Per&243;n turned Congressmen into quivering yes men, crushed the judiciary, seized the press, took over universities, tortured political prisoners. But only rarely did he touch the workingman or his union.

A coming together of catastrophic events brought Per&243;n's downfall. Evita died of cancer.* In his bereavement, Per&243;n found solace in teen-age girls. The wheat, meat and money gave out. Per&243;n had made it so unprofitable to raise cattle and grain that bread and beef were in short supply. He dickered desperately for a $125 million loan from the U.S., violated the nationalism that he himself had urged by trying to swing a deal with Standard Oil of California to exploit Argentine oil.

His iron rule grew tighter. Resistance among Roman Catholics, among middle-class professional people, among the military stiffened against him. Per&243;n sent mobs of his descamisados to burn the high-toned Jockey Club, the Radical and Socialist Party headquarters, nine Roman Catholic churches. Fed up at last, the military rose against him in September 1955. When it seemed that a navy cruiser might fire on Buenos Aires, he fled aboard a Paraguayan gunboat.*

The full extent of the nation's economic ruin was never fully understood by the descamisados Perón left behind; all they knew was that their heroic Caudillo had been driven out. It was left to the interim military government of General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu to assess the damage—and to Arturo Frondizi, elected in 1958, to attempt some permanent repairs.

Flash of Rebellion. After Per&243;n the vivo, Frondizi—the austere, finger-wagging intellectual—was an emotional frustration. The next-to-youngest of 14 children born to an immigrant Italian bridge builder, Frondizi was a shy, unexceptional youth, who showed his first flash of spirit in 1930 against then Dictator Jose Uri-buru. Frondizi completed a six-year law course in three, with honors. But on graduation day he stood on the platform, and refused to accept his honors certificate "from a government put in power and maintained by military force."

Through the Perón years, Frondizi was in open opposition, addressing furtive knots of anti-Perónistas in Buenos Aires streets. But his strength lay in mastery of political maneuver within the Radical Party. In 1956, after Pern fell, Frondizi split the party into two nearly equal segments—Intransigents and People's Radicals—and became the Intransigents' candidate for President. That he eventually won was largely owing to a shadowy political adviser named Rogelio Frigerio, a successful businessman (he owns a nationwide chain of dry-goods stores) who was once a Communist sympathizer, later cooperated with Per&243;nism. and now presumably stood somewhere in between.