Riding High

With the approach of autumn, Buenos Aires' good airs cleared perceptibly. The distant thunder that had muttered ominously through Argentina's hot political summer rumbled no more. Businessmen who called on cabinet ministers last week noted a new air of confidence.

Life returned to the Congressional Palace, where President Juan Peron's constitutional convention had sat idle for three weeks. Briskly, on orders from the Casa Rosada, the convention approved a final, edited copy of the new constitution--almost exactly as the President himself had read it to the Peronista caucus two months before (TIME, Jan. 24).*

Walkout. Canny Moises Lebensohn, Radical Party leader, sniffed the heady, Peronista atmosphere and waited his chance for a dramatic move. It came when Peronista Arturo Sampay admitted in an unguarded moment that Article 77, revised to allow Peron to succeed himself, might be restored to its original form after the 1952 elections. Lebensohn leaped.

"Since the majority leader has now so brazenly admitted that this convention was called only for the purpose of re-electing General Peron," he shouted, "we can no longer take part in this farcical debate." As one man, the 48 Radicals tore up their copies of the new constitution, flung the pieces in the Peronistas' faces and marched out. "We shall return," declaimed Lebensohn over his shoulder. "We shall yet return to write another constitution."

But next day, Peronistas were cockier than ever. At the army's vast Campo de Mayo base, the President and his blonde wife were ostentatiously received by their recent critic, Defense Secretary Jose Humberto Sosa Molina. In a speech dripping with consideration for Senora Peron, Sosa Molina said: "The significance of her presence among us as a special guest of honor is nothing but a stout denial of rumors that picture the army as opposing her . . ."

Lockout. What, Argentines wondered, had become of la Senora's reported vendetta with the Defense Secretary? What about the army's warnings to the President? The Perons had obviously come to terms with the military brass. But what were the terms? Even the best-informed portenos did not know. But there were some guesses. Among the best: 1) Evita would gradually retire from public life; and 2) Peron would follow a more hard-boiled attitude toward labor.

The tough labor policy showed itself last week in the northwestern Province of Tucuman, where the government set out to break a strike of sugar workers as it had previously broken strikes by printers and bakers. But if Evita was being retired, the process was so gradual as to defy detection. This week, she and her husband were to be co-starred in another of their super-colossal productions with a cast of thousands--descamisados and the army--celebrating the new constitution.

*There was one change: a requirement that a cabinet minister or presidential secretary must be a native Argentine. Curiously enough, the new provision hit straight at the constitution's chief draftsman, Spanish-born Presidential Secretary Jose Figuerola, who resigned.

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