Crime Does Pay

As Kodak Executive Anthony da Cruz drove down the highway on the way to his plant near Buenos Aires, a green Ford truck suddenly swerved in front of him near a point where four workers were installing a traffic sign. Da Cruz slammed on the brakes and was rammed from behind by a Fiat pickup. The four "workmen" and four men in the Fiat all rushed forward and hustled Da Cruz away. Five days later, just before releasing the 38-year-old Portuguese American near the spot where they had seized him, the kidnapers gave local newspapers a photograph that showed Da Cruz, who is Kodak's No. 2 man in Argentina, standing dejectedly in front of a sign: $1,500,000 RECOVERED FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE FOR SOCIALISM.

By now the kidnaping of officials and executives by various ill-defined political guerrilla groups has become almost epidemic. Two hundred cases have occurred in the past two years. So far this year, there has been an average of one reported kidnaping every three days, and many more go unreported.

Several of these victims have cost their employers small fortunes. The "Vestey interests," a British conglomerate, paid a reported $1,000,000 in December to free the kidnaped head of its Argentine operations. The Argentine manager of Boston's First National Bank was released after the bank paid a $750,000 ransom. Another $1.5 million ransom was reportedly paid for the British president of Argentina's largest cigarette company, who was released last week. His wife, convinced from the start that his company would pay whatever ransom was demanded, went on television to admonish the kidnapers to "give him a comfortable bed and a little whisky now and then to keep his spirits up."

Killings. The kidnapers get their money because they are in deadly earnest, as they proved last week, when a group called the People's Revolutionary Army announced that it had "executed" Rear Admiral Francisco Aleman, a former chief of naval intelligence who disappeared on April 2. Last month, too, kidnapers crashed their truck into the car of Colonel Hector Iribarren, chief of intelligence for the Third Army Corps, and, when the dazed officer grappled with them, they killed him with a point-blank burst of automatic weapon fire.

The foreign business community provides the kidnapers with lots of targets -the American Chamber of Commerce in Argentina counts 400 U.S. companies and hundreds of executives among its members. Some of these executives now carry guns, others follow complicated routes to and from work; some even change residences weekly.

The kidnapers are little better than bandits, but many of them claim to be acting either for socialism or for Peronism. President-elect Hector Campora, who was voted into power last month as the representative of the exiled Juan Peron, has asked the guerrillas to "grant us a truce" until after his government is installed May 25. There is little sign of that happening.

Last week Argentina's present military government struck back, sending out some 100,000 troops to sweep Buenos Aires in a search for guerrillas. Campora's promise to release jailed guerrillas who will work for "national liberation" brought a stinging rebuke from General Elbio Anaya, the Second Army Corps commander whose predecessor was gunned down by guerrillas. The army, said Anaya, will not permit amnesty for "vulgar, unscrupulous assassins" under any circumstances.

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