'This Is Only a Little Goodbye'

Tears seem to be the hallmark of Isabel Peron's troubled presidency. Fourteen months ago, she led Argentina in an emotional period of mourning for her husband and political mentor, Juan Domingo Peron. More recently, her publicly shed tears have become both a sign of her own increasingly fragile physical and emotional condition and an apt acknowledgment of the problems that her erratic rule has brought to her country. A week ago, when she handed over temporary executive power to Italo Luder, Provisional President of the Argentine Senate, she was choking back tears once again. "This is only a little goodbye," she said on a television broadcast from La Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in Buenos Aires. "This has been a very tough year, and I need to rest."

Long Walks. The next day a worn, anemically thin Isabel Peron, 44, boarded a plane and was flown to an air force recreation camp in the hills of Cordoba province 560 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. She was accompanied by the wives of the three armed forces commanders, whose evident role was to demonstrate that she still had the support of the military establishment. Inside the heavily guarded camp, where she is expected to stay for at least 45 days, she began a routine of long walks in the Argentine spring sunshine, playing golf and watching what one Buenos Aires daily described as a "discreet number" of old TV cartoons that had been sent to the camp at her request.

Evidently, her doctors hope these diversions will help the overwrought Mrs. Peron take her mind off Argentina's deepening problems, which include an astonishing 234% annual inflation rate. The level of political violence is rising too. Since Mrs. Peron took office, right-and left-wing terrorism has claimed more than 900 lives. Last week's toll was four dead, among them the Defense Ministry's chief of intelligence, who was shot to death as he stood in a check-out line in a Buenos Aires grocery store.

As the official accounts have it, Mrs. Peron is due back in La Casa Rosada in late October or early November. But there are signs that Isabel's "little goodbye" could turn into a long farewell. Less than 24 hours after her departure, Interim President Luder began shuffling her Cabinet; he forced resignations from Defense Minister Jorge Garrido and Interior Minister Vicente Damasco, Mrs. Peron's closest adviser in recent weeks.

Her flight from Buenos Aires to a golf and cartoon holiday was the latest chapter in a singularly improbable career. Born Maria Estela Martinez in 1931, the sixth child of a middle-class family from the impoverished Argentine province of La Rioja, Isabel owes her tenuous hold on power to a chance encounter with Juan Peron in 1956. Then 25, she was a petite dancer touring Central America with a troupe called Joe and his Ballets. Peron, then 60, had just been overthrown by a military coup following nine years as President. After catching her act at the Happyland Cabaret in Panama City, he invited the young brunette to become his companion and secretary in luxurious exile.

In 1961, reportedly at the urging of their staunchly Catholic friend and host Francisco Franco, Peron took Isabel as his third wife. "I'm his companion, colleague, adviser, wife and sometimes sister and mother," Isabel said happily. In Peron's last years, she also became, as a foreign diplomat once put it, "the son he never had"--a political heir to carry on his name.

By the time Peron returned to power in 1973, the ex-cabaret girl had become a poised politician who seemed equally comfortable as the General's wife and as his vice president. Yet she was never at ease in another role: as a reincarnation of Peron's second wife Evita, who continued to be literally worshiped as Argentina's "little Madonna," even after she died of cancer at age 33 in 1952. Isabel went so far as to lighten her hair in order to increase her resemblance to Evita. Angered by what they considered her attempts to "usurp" Evita's place, left-wing Peronists scratched the eyes out of her posters.

Gradually, as the unions, the Justicialist Party and finally the military began challenging her authority, Isabel's formidable personal reserve hardened even further. A high brick wall was put up around her official residence outside Buenos Aires. In her increasingly rare public appearances, two Isabels began to emerge--one a nervous, taut-faced woman who would wave and smile stiffly as she arrived at a cathedral for yet another official Mass, the other a shrill, fist-shaking demagogue who would strain her soft voice into a shriek and warn a TV audience that "if I have to apply five turns of the screw each day for the happiness of Argentina, I will do it."

Little Rest. Attempting to soften her aloof public image, Isabel's press secretary took to talking about how "she likes flowers ... and plays a lot of canasta." In fact, she spent many hours alone or with a few acquaintances--she has no close friends in Buenos Aires--in her walled residence watching TV or listening to classical music (her favorite: the ballet Swan Lake). She rarely sees her family and has no children of her own; the steward assigned to her presidential plane sometimes sends his children to the palace to play with her.

Late in July her doctors sent her to bed for almost two weeks to recover from what was officially described as a touch of flu, but many Argentines assumed it was nervous exhaustion. Despite a fondness for marrons glaces (chestnut candies) and other sweets, her weight had fallen to about 95 lbs. when she decided to go off on her rest. One sympathetic observer of the third Mrs. Peron's political and physical difficulties is an old friend from her Madrid days: Pilar Franco, younger sister of the Caudillo. She concedes that "I was concerned when I heard what happened to her--but not surprised." Isabel, she recalls, was "content and serene" when she and Peron were together in Madrid, but "had fragile health even then. And she worked too hard for the General--writing all his letters and helping him with every aspect of his work. It was her life, but it gave her little rest, and she was sometimes ill."

A good many Argentines speculate that Mrs. Peron may need more than a short rest in the mountains, some golf and TV if she is to regain her strength--and her presidency.

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