The Unexploded Bomb

Argentines waited in fear for bloodshed on May Day. Rumors buzzed that President Juan Peron and other orators were going to seize the occasion--Argentina's Labor Day--to stir up mob violence against the Roman Catholic clergy. But Peron is a masterly politician who knows how to backstep to avoid trouble--when he wants to avoid it. In his May Day speech to the workers massed in the spacious Plaza de Mayo, he took a few routine whacks at the church, but he also said: "Be firm and alert, but quiet." And quiet the day was.

Vast Relief. Peron's admonition was a vast relief to his countrymen, who had just lived through the nation's most jittery week since the strongman began feuding with the Roman Catholic Church last October. In Buenos Aires early in the week, Padre Egidio Esparza, a Roman Catholic curate, was summarily jailed for "disrespect" to the President. Esparza's crime was to preach a sermon that was a cutting answer to Peron's press campaign for separation of church and state (the Argentine constitution declares that the federal government "supports" the Roman Catholic Church). "The press," said Esparza, "points out that in most other nations in the Americas, church and state are separated. I would add that in none of these other American nations are priests jailed because they differ with the government, or workers fired because they are Catholics. If we are going to imitate these nations in one way, we should imitate them in others."

Verbal Violence. A few days after Esparza's arrest, official newspaper outcries against the Catholic Church took on a ferocity that made the articles he referred to seem tolerant by comparison. What touched off the fresh outburst of verbal violence was a homemade bomb found on a balcony of the Buenos Aires headquarters of the Peronista university-students' federation. While police technicians were defusing the bomb, it exploded, killing Policeman Roberto Garmendi and wounding three others, one of whom died of his wounds. The puppet press hysterically blamed the Catholic clergy, hailed Garmendi, whose funeral Peron himself attended, as a martyr to "terrorists in cassocks."

At week's end the police announced the arrest of two priests and 14 other men involved in a "plot" to distribute pamphlets on May Day. Said a foreign diplomat in Buenos Aires: "The atmosphere has suddenly grown very ugly."

Peron evidently decided that it was a bit too ugly. On the eve of May Day, Interior Minister Angel Gabriel Borlenghi urged "the population in general and the workers in particular" to leave the rough stuff to the nation's "cultured, respectful and valiant police."

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