Bid to oust Mrs Peron

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34031, 20 December 1975, Page 15

Bid to oust Mrs Peron

'"e Z P A.-Reuter—Copyright) f BUENOS AIRES. . December 18. Rebel Argentine Air Force troops tonight seized at least three commercial radio stations in Buenos Aires, and began broadcasting demands for the overthrow of President Maria Peron. The rebels took over the suburban transmitters of Radio Belgrand, Radio Splended, and Radio Rivadavia at nightfall, cutting them off from their studios in the city centre, and then began to broadcast a stream of communiques and proclamations against Mrs Peron A few hours earlier, the officers and men at three air force garrisons had rebelled in an attempt to begin a coup d’etat, and the Government had issued a stern warning to the news media, not to publish anything butj the most cautious bulletins about the revolt. The captured radio stations announced the intention of the rebels to replace Mrs Peron with an army commander, General Jorge Videla, and codenamed the revolt “Blue Condor”. The rebels’ leader. Brigadier Jesus Orlando Capellini, the air force’s representative

on the Armed Forces Joint General Staff, told reporters by telephone from the Moron air base that a fourth air force garrison, at Villa

' Reynolds, in the central province of San Luis, had joined the rebellion. In a brief speech early to!day, the Minister of the Interior (Mr Angelo Robledo), said that the Government had survived “a day of uncertainty,” and had defused the revolt by replacing General Fautario.

A few minutes later, however, the radio transmitters seized by the rebels came back on the air with bulletins denouncing “the ineptitude and immorality of the elected national authorities” and other “adventurers and criminals.”

A four-point proclamation broadcast by the rebels said that they were “exercising the natural right to rebellion” because the situation in Argentina had reached the limit. “Our conscience can no longer tolerate the humiliation and shame of using our arms to defend this festival of corruption and of public cheating, and the degradation of the Constitution.” This appeared to be a reference to the war the armed forces are waging against Left-wing guerrillas while

.the Government led by Mrs Peron is enmeshed in a string of corruption scandals, one of them directly involving her.

The proclamation declared that the rebels had decided “to operate until the overthrow of the political authorities and the installation of a new order to rebuild the nation in a nationalist and Christian spirit.”