ARGENTINA: Hanging from the Cliff

Twice last week Argentine President Isabel Perón went on television to tell her people how she had saved them from near disaster. In the first address, she claimed to have ended, without a single casualty, an abortive four-day coup by a faction of air force officers. Then on Christmas Eve she was on the TV screen again, praising the valor of troops who had crushed a massive guerrilla attack on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and giving the impression that she had the country well in hand.

Both speeches were little more than exercises in fantasy. In fact, it was the Argentine military that had acted in both situations, adroitly defusing the coup and smashing the terrorist assault in the bloodiest government-guerrilla engagement to date. While Juan Perón's petulant widow went through the motions of governing as if in a trance and the nation hung ever more precariously on the precipice of political and economic chaos, many Argentines wondered why the military did not simply end the charade and officially take command.

The bloodless "pocket rebellion" by the air force began during the week be fore Christmas, when Brigadier General Héctor Luis Fautario, the air force commander, arrived at one of Buenos Aires' airports to fly to Córdoba. Fautario, an unpopular general unswervingly loyal to President Perón, was detained by high-ranking fellow officers, who thereupon declared a rebellion. Military leaders, apparently sharing the general dislike of Fautario, quickly acceded to one of the rebels' demands and dismissed him. But Fautario's successor, Brigadier General Orlando Ramon Agosti, was unsympathetic to the rebels' second, more ambitious goal: that Argentina's military should remove Isabel Perón as President and replace her with General Jorge Rafael Videla, the wiry and astute commander of the army. President Perón, meanwhile, cheerfully entertained members of the Argentina legislature on the wide lawns of her residence in suburban Olivos.

Amnesty Promise. The impasse between the government and the air force rebels continued for four days. In a halfhearted show of determination, rebel planes—mostly prop trainers from Morón air force base outside Buenos Aires—attracted the curiosity of Christmas shoppers by making a few low passes over the city. Loyal air force fighter-bombers strafed some parked planes at Moron, destroying a few but taking no lives. After other commanders convinced him that the army was not ready to join the uprising, the leader of the air force coup, Brigadier General Jesus Orlando Capellini, quietly "submitted to higher air force authority "—after having won a promise of amnesty for his rebels.