The Perils of Peron

Rumbling down the dark pavement near midnight, four olive drab trucks pulled up to the headquarters gate of Argentina's 10th Armored Cavalry Regiment of Azul, 170 miles southwest of Buenos Aires. A guard routinely challenged the lead truck--and was cut down by a hail of bullets. By the time government troops could counterattack, 60 to 70 "soldiers," all in army fatigues and full battle gear, had stormed into the officers' quarters. They held their position for seven hours, long enough to kill Base Commander Colonel Camilo Gay and his wife. Then they took Lieut. Colonel Jorge Roberto Ibarzabal, the second in command, as a hostage and shot their way out of the camp, vanishing into the pampas flatlands.

Responsibility for the attack was claimed last week by the People's Revolutionary Army, or E.R.P., a Marxist terrorist group that numbers about 2,000 guerrillas. The attack came on the eve of parliamentary debates on a new penal code that would clamp down on terrorist activities; for example, it would more than double the maximum sentence for extortion (to ten years). The code, which was approved at week's end, is an emotional issue among the already divided supporters of aging President Juan Peron, 78; they are torn between a concern for protecting civil rights and a recognition that terrorism is getting out of hand and must be stopped. The debates have already produced the first open rupture in Peron's coalition with the expulsion from the Justicialist Party of eight leftist Deputies for refusing to support the penal code's tough new anti-terrorist measures.

The attack finally stirred Peron to act against Argentina's increasingly audacious terrorists, who in the past year have been responsible for many of a score of political murders and 200 kidnapings. Donning his general's uniform, a stern-faced el Lider appeared on nationwide television last week, vowing a readiness to take "all pertinent measures" to crush terrorist groups. He warned that "if we don't have the law [to combat terrorists], we'll do it outside the law and we'll do it violently, because you can't oppose violence with anything but violence."

Either way, Peron is treading a perilous path. By mobilizing the federal police for mass action and calling on the military for support, Peron faces two additional problems: the possibility that he might be unleashing the military to topple him as it did in 1955, and the chance that the police and rightist parapolice might see his call to arms as a declaration of war on the leftists. At the moment, he is being careful not to spell out exactly how he will proceed.

Peron stressed, however, that he had "accepted the government as a patriotic sacrifice. If one day I am persuaded that the Argentine people are not with me in this sacrifice," he said, "I will not stay a day longer. The time for shouting 'Peron!' has passed. The time has come for defending him."

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