Revolt in the Dark

Civil war broke out while most Argentines were asleep in their beds. In the early morning darkness, generals considered loyal to President Juan Peron were summoned posthaste to the Army Ministry in Buenos Aires for an urgent conference. Police squads swooped down on a band of armed civilians trying to break into a naval armory at the Buenos Aires waterfront. At half a dozen places outside the nation's capital, a rebellion by army, navy, marine and air-force units was already under way.

It was three months to the day after the navy-led uprising of June 16 that shook Peron but failed to knock him out.

In that revolt, doomed from the start because no major army units joined in, the rebels struck directly at the seat of power: the pink Government House on Buenos Aires' Plaza de Mayo. In last week's much more formidable revolt, the rebel plan was to take over cities and military bases outside Buenos Aires before attempting to attack the capital.

Battle on the Pampas. Deep in the heart of the pampas, insurgent army units led by Brigadier General Dalmiro Felix Videla Balaguer--until recently a well-regarded Peronista--swept into the rail center of Cordoba, Argentina's third biggest city (pop. 350,000). Two Gloster Meteor jet fighters flown by air-force pilots rained down leaflets declaring that the city "has been conquered again for God and the fatherland." Rebel sailors took over the naval bases at Rio Santiago and Puerto Belgrano (see map). Army garrisons seized control of the inland barracks towns of Arroyo Seco and Curuzu-Cuatia.

At 8:21 a.m., the first government communique boasted that "the subversive movement is under control," and rebel units "are being dominated." Such claims were absurdly premature. In Cordoba the besieged police headquarters fell to rebel attackers after a half-hour artillery bombardment. From the Puerto Belgrano naval base, 400 miles southwest of Buenos Aires, naval units marched into the neighboring grain port of Bahia

Blanca. Said a rebel radio announcement from Puerto Belgrano: "This is not a revolt of two or four hours. We will carry on as long as is necessary. We ask the Argentine people to join us in our struggle for truth, morality and liberty."

State of Siege. Under the command of General Franklin Lucero, Peron's trusted Army Minister, the government fought back. Lucero & Co. put the entire country under a state of siege, clamped an 8 p.m. curfew on the capital. Loyalist forces besieged the Rio Santiago naval base. Pounded by planes and outnumbered at least two to one on the ground, the defending navymen surrendered late that night. The next morning the government announced that its troops had wrested Arroyo Seco and Curuzu-Cuatia from the rebels.

But the rebels still controlled Cordoba in the interior and Puerto Belgrano-Bahia Blanca on the coast. The immediate danger to the government was not that the rebels might march on the capital, but that, if they held on, wavering unit commanders might switch over to the rebel side. To each of the revolt's two strongholds, Lucero dispatched some 15,000 troops. In Cordoba, Rebel General Videla Balaguer sent out planes to strafe the attackers, recruited civilians to help defend the city. There were plenty of volunteers. Staunchly Roman Catholic Cordoba, which a visitor once described as "a city of monks and churches," has been a hotbed of opposition to Juan Peron ever since he began feuding with the church last year. Hundreds of civilians with white handkerchiefs knotted around their arms for combat identification fought on the rebel side in a clash at the resort town of La Calera, ten miles outside Cordoba.

Duel of the Air Waves. While the battle for Cordoba was raging, the government and the rebels took to the air for a propaganda duel of wildly contradictory claims. The Buenos Aires radio triumphantly announced toward nightfall that loyalist troops had "liberated" Cordoba and "sent the enemy retreating in disorder." But a later broadcast from Cordoba insisted that the city was still under rebel control. An announcer who said he was speaking from Cordoba read a proclamation by Rebel Leader Eduardo Leonardi, a general fired by Peron in 1952 for allegedly plotting against him. "In my capacity as chief of the liberation movement," said Leonardi's message, "I ask the nation to collaborate. [Argentina] cannot submit itself meekly to the whims of a dictator."

Buenos Aires broadcasts on the second day of the revolt insisted that "absolute tranquillity reigns throughout the country" except at Cordoba and Puerto Belgrano-Bahia Blanca. But the rebels reported that Second Army units stationed in western Argentina had joined the revolt and taken over the provincial capitals of San Luis and Mendoza. A rebel general, broadcasting from San Luis, declared that the city was in the hands of the insurgents, and that "all troops of the Second Army have rebelled against the unworthy government that pretends to rule Argentina."

Blackout in the Capital. Because Argentina's capital is a seaport, lying on the broad, deep estuary called the Rio de la Plata, a lot depended on what the navy did. The River Plate fleet, apparently on the rebel side from the start, gathered near the Uruguayan shore of the estuary. Admiral Isaac Rojas, commander of the rebel fleet, proclaimed a blockade of the capital. "The entire navy is heading for Buenos Aires," he said, contradicting repeated government assertions that the high-seas fleet was peaceably anchored at a port in southern Argentina. The rebels threatened to bombard the capital unless Peron gave up the office of President. That night, roving wardens enforced a panicky blackout in downtown Buenos Aires, cutting wires and ripping out connections where they found lights on. At daybreak, observers in Uruguay counted 21 rebel warships in the Plate, including two elderly battleships with 12-in. guns and two modern 6-in.-gun cruisers (formerly the U.S. Navy's Boise and Phoenix).

Rebels rejected a loyalist plea to consider Buenos Aires an open city. The government showed its shakiness by cutting off telephone communications between Buenos Aires and the outside world and restricting press dispatches to official statements. In that shadowy dimout, a government bulletin announced that General Lucero had invited rebel leaders to the Army Ministry in Buenos Aires to negotiate a ceasefire.

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