Night of Fire

A challenge hung in the air when Juan Peron stepped to his balcony and faced a throng of 100,000 in the Plaza de Mayo one day last week. The crowd wanted to hear what Peron proposed to do about Argentina's inflation and the nation's mounting economic crisis. So did cabinet members, top army officers and labor leaders lined up behind the President. Their appearance was a gesture of support, but each must have wondered whether Peron could still hypnotize the discontented.

Peron started lamely; the crowd was tepid. Then, in a plaza-edge restaurant 500 feet from the balcony, a bomb went off with a brick-shattering blast. The crowd stirred, but did not stampede. Another bomb exploded minutes later in a subway station near the restaurant (the blasts killed six persons, wounded nearly a hundred). Peron blanched. Then he abandoned his prepared speech and began to extemporize--with increasing confidence.

"Vengeance, Companions!" He rambled, he screamed, he repeated. But his emotion, freed of any cumbersome logic, began to sway the mob: "Companions, they can throw bombs and spread rumors, but all that concerns us is that they do not get their way ... If to destroy the evil and dishonest I must go down in history as a tyrant, I shall do so with pleasure . . . And may God grant that I won't have to employ the most terrible punishments!"

The crowd began to chant "Vengeance!" "Why don't you take vengeance yourselves?" shouted Peron.

When he had finished, the mob cooled off and drifted away, showing no sign of acting on the President's advice. But after dark a band of young Peronistas, only 20 or 30 at first, set out to do El Lider's bidding armed mainly with cans of gasoline. Gaily yelling "Peron! Peron!'', they broke into the empty headquarters of the Socialist Party and set it afire. Spectators, among them Police Chief Miguel Gamboa, gathered to watch the blaze. The arsonists, now a hundred strong, moved on to Radical Party offices and set them ablaze.

Then they marched to the Jockey Club, world-famed citadel of Argentina's top society, wealth and culture. They burst into thick-carpeted clubrooms hung with Goyas, Corots and Monets. Out windows and into bonfires went books and furniture. A club member, pleading with one of the firebugs to save an irreplaceable book, urged the youth to "take it home if you wish, but in the name of the Holy Virgin, don't burn it!" "What do you think we are, thieves?" snapped the youth, and threw the volume on the fire. Outside, policemen detoured traffic around the flaming $4,500,000 building, but made no move to stop the arson.

That Dictatorial Feeling. The Radicals promptly charged that the bombing and burning were touched off by "officialdom" to divert attention from the economic crisis, in "imitation of the Reichstag fire." Certain it was that the blasts provided Peron with an assist just when he needed it badly. The immediate result of the violence was a temporary strengthening of Peron before his political opposition and before his critics in the army and the unions. Probably feeling more like a dictator than he had for many a week, he launched a campaign of repression.

Nearly a hundred men & women were jailed for "rumormongering" or "using language offensive to the person of President Juan D. Peron." Also imprisoned were 800 merchants charged with black-marketing. But hundreds of other shopkeepers closed up voluntarily to avoid trouble, and housewives found meat just as hard to buy as before. One flaming night had not licked inflation or ended grumbling. Said the New York Times this week: "In the long run, [Peron] is doomed, because he is a foolish, bungling, evil dictator."

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