The Press TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 1974. No peace for Peron

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33445, 29 January 1974, Page 16

The Press TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 1974. No peace for Peron

It has not taken President Peron long to discover that the face of Peronism has changed radically since his expulsion from Argentina nearly 20 years ago. In the four months that his reconstructed Government has been in office, the Left-wing extremists within the movement have acted with increasing boldness; recently they attacked an Army garrison only 170 miles from Buenos Aires, killing the commanding officer and his wife and kidnapping another officer. When he returned to Argentina, General Peron decided to rebuild his party politically by basing it on the Armed Forces and the more moderate trade unions. The reaction of the Marxist guerrillas was to assassinate Jose Rucci, a Right-wing Peronist who directed the most powerful labour organisation in the country. The guerrillas were not deterred by threats of a purge. They seem to have mastered the techniques of swift attack and equally swift disappearance, indicating that organised cover was available. The President has warned so-called Leftwing governors, appointed from his Justicialist Movement, that they must show no tolerance of extremist tactics if they wished to remain in office. He charged that the province of Buenos Aires, which contains the attacked garrison town of Azul, was being incompetently administered, appearing to indicate that the Governor, regarded as a party Left-winger, might be one of the first to disappear in a new Peronist purge.

The President’s dilemma, shared probably by the Army leaders, is that the strength of the Marxists, of which there are several groups, is hard to determine. The Azul operation is believed to have been carried out by a faction calling itself the Marxist Peoples Revolutionary Army (E.R.P.), which was responsible for an earlier raid on a communications battalion in Cordoba City, in which they captured weapons. The ageing President, finding that the best police assistance he can muster is incapable of rooting out the terrorists, may yet have to ask the Army—as he has threatened to do—to deal with the problem as it sees fit. The outcome could be revolution on a widespread scale—action as the guerrillas move from one hiding-place to another, after the pattern of the action against the Marxists in Chile. It will be a hard decision for General Peron to take, since he cannot know what the reaction of the peasant classes will be. But there seems little prospect of peaceful government in Argentina until the basic problem of insurgency is resolved.