Police Power

"Eight days in jail never hurt anybody," said Juan Peron last year in one of his frequent pep talks to Buenos Aires police. Under this stern dictum, made legal by the "state of internal war" decreed after the 1951 army revolt, thousands of Argentines were in & out of jail during the past year. Usually they were arrested, jailed and released without any formal charge. And, almost without exception, the real reason was that they were known or believed to oppose the regime.

The Lip Readers. Chief instrument of Peron's rough-'em-&-rule-'em policy is a branch of the police called "Political Order." Headed by ex-Detective Camilo Racana, the branch is now estimated to number some 50,000 plainclothesmen and undercover informants, including a large female contingent and a trained squad of lip readers. One day last week, an architect going home by streetcar noticed a particularly ramshackle bus that had just had a new paint job. Without thinking, he turned to the passenger beside him and asked: "Wonder why they wasted paint on that old wreck?" At the next stop the fellow passenger, a woman, showed the architect her police credentials and told him: "I'll give you some time to think about Buenos Aires buses." She bundled him off to a police station where he was questioned off & on for five hours, finally released.

Not all those arrested are that lucky. Just before Christmas, a newspaperman having a couple of quick ones in a bar told a fellow patron: "I hear the President has been on a bat for nearly a week." He finished his drink and sauntered out the door into the arms of a waiting plainclothesman. At the station, without even bothering to question him, the police sent him straight to Las Heras penitentiary where he was issued the grey pants, jacket and cap of an Argentine convict and thrown into a cell. Seventeen days later, he was suddenly freed.

La Picana. By such jostling and jailing, Peron has so far avoided setting up concentration camps. But at least 97 prisoners were held in three Buenos Aires political detention centers last week, imprisoned without charge or hearing for eight months or more. From such Argentines, suspected of having important conspiratorial knowledge, Political Order extracts information with the aid of a simple device called la picana, a hot electric wire applied to the blindfolded victim.

The result of such systematic repression of anti-Peronistas is that political conversations--except in private and out of earshot of servants or school-indoctrinated children--are unknown in the capital. In the eighth year of Peron, the atmosphere of constraint and fear that prevails in Buenos Aires is probably unequalled this side of the Iron Curtain.

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