"Blood Will Flow"

Juan Peron last week announced forthrightly that he plans a big and bloody comeback in Argentina. "My agents are everywhere, and they are preparing for the day," said he. "It may come any time. There will be a violent uprising. Blood will flow in the streets of Argentina. Perhaps as many as a million will be killed."

Peron blamed himself for "one great mistake before: I avoided bloodshed when I was in power, and treated my opponents lightly." His promise: "I shall not make the same mistake again. Many heads will roll when I return to Buenos Aires. It will be terrible, but it can't be helped."

Discredited & Hated? By way of a warning to them, Peron listed his enemies for Joseph Newman, New York Herald Tribune correspondent who touched off the exile's comeback threat by dropping in for an interview at the former dictator's modest suite in the U.S.-owned Hotel Washington in Colon, Panama. The marked men: Argentine navy and air force officers; such big industrialists as the Bembergs (beer) and Raul Lamuraglia (textiles); La Prensa Publisher Alberto Gainza Paz and that paper's longtime news service, the United Press; the rulers of Uruguay, where Peron's exiles plotted; and the Roman Catholic clergy.

Peron's church opponents seemed particularly to rankle him still. He released for quotation a passage from his unpublished book, Might Is the Right of Beasts, saying that his late wife Eva "performed more Christian works in one day than all the priests of my country in their entire lives." As for Argentina's new military rulers, Peron scorned them as "men incapable of governing because their custom is to command . . . They end in chaos and . . . fall later, discredited and hated."

Wrote Interviewer Newman: "His enemies would regard this as a description of what happened to Peron."

Seeing Nelly Home. In Buenos Aires, the newspaper Critica dismissed Peron's threats with a question: "Hasn't Panama measured him for a strait jacket yet?" President Pedro Aramburu and his advisers seemed to sense that madman talk by Peron, who is still revered by millions of diehard Peronistas, provided a tailor-made chance to draw a contrast between the erratic ex-dictator and the sober new regime. The government made three moves that sharpened the impression.

P: To undercut Peron's pretensions to righteousness, an official investigating committee reported that during his twelve years in power, Peronista Congressmen raised their combined personal assets from 6,650,000 pesos to a fat 206,000,000 pesos --among the biggest gainers being the pair who offered the greatest number of congressional resolutions of homage to Peron.

P: Aramburu made a nationwide radio speech that opened the door for disgusted Peronistas to throw in with the new regime: "Many pinned their hopes to [Peronista] banners full of vain promises. They did not make a mistake; they were led into it. The guilty were not the simple folk, but those who raised the fraudulent banners."

P: The government let reporters talk to Vittorio Felice Radeglia, who served as Peron's secretary in Panama in November, but recently turned up mysteriously as the Aramburu government's prisoner. Apparently confident and at ease despite official auspices, Radeglia told reporters he thought Peron was suffering from a "nervous imbalance." He confirmed that Peron wanted to bring to Panama Nelly Rivas, his 16-year-old mistress during his last days as President (TIME, Oct. 10), who was turned back a fortnight ago as she tried to leave Argentina via Paraguay. Picturing himself as thoroughly disillusioned, Radeglia said that he, too, was writing a book, a biography of Peron. The tentative title:The Beast Who Had Might.

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