Toll in Argentina

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33675, 26 October 1974, Page 17

Toll in Argentina

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) BUENOS AIRES, October 25. Left - wing Peronist guerrillas have claimed responsibility for murdering two more Rightwing Peronists, and have threatened to continue killing party Rightists, including the Minister of Labour (Mr Ricardo Otero). The Montoneros guerrilla organisation says in a communique that its members shot a local Peronist leader, Mr Juan Carlos Mariani, aged 34, in the suburb of San Martin last night, because he was involved in the so-called Ezeiza massacre. (This was a

gun-battle between Right ) and Left-wing Peronists near Ezeiza Airport during a mass rally to welcome back the late President Juan Peron from exile last year. More than 100 people were killed, and Left-wingers blamed Mr Otero and other prominent Peronist leaders and Government officials for the shooting). In yesterday’s incidents, another Right-wing Peronist, Juan Domingo Vera, aged 19, was also killed, a woman passer-by was seriously wounded, and, in a separate incident, Lieutenant-Colonel Jose Gradon, aged 52, an army doctor, was shot dead as he left a hospital in the suburb of San Miguel. There killings brought the death toll in the wave of violence to at least 122 since General Peron died on July 1. The Montoneros went underground last month to organise armed warfare against the Government of General Peron’s widow and successor, President Maria Estela Peron, which, it maintains, is too Right-wing.

A newspaper editor in Concordia, 220 miles north of Buenos Aires, has become the first journalist to be arrested under Argentina’s new anti-subversion law banning press reports of subversive activities, and faces a prison sentence of up to five years. Juan Jose Durantini, editor .of “La Voz del Pueblo,” was arrested by the police four days ago, for publishing a communique issued by the Rightist Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance death squad, in which it threatened 44 Leftwingers with death. The A.A.A. has claimed responsibility for killing more than 20 Argentine Left-wingers since President Peron’s death, and for forcing others to flee from the country. The president of an Argentine students’ union and a former university official, both well-known Leftwingers, were kidnapped in Buenos Aires today by two men posing as police.