Wildly cheered by flag-waving crowds, a lean, leathery man in an olive-green army uniform rode triumphantly into Buenos Aires one sunny day last week to take over as President of Argentina. The new headman was General Eduardo Lonardi (see box), leader of the rebellion that brought Juan Perón tumbling down.
After the swearing-in ceremony in the pink Government House, church bells tolled and ship sirens shrilled in celebration. Lonardi stepped onto the balcony from which Perón used to harangue his mobs. In a level tone strikingly different from Perón's superheated oratory, the new President promised his huge, joyful audience a "rule of law," freedom of assembly and of the press (see PRESS). "Argentina" General Lonardi said, "has given the world the first example of an absolute totalitarian government falling before the just and honorable reaction of the people."
Fallen Dictator Juan Perón, taking the beaten track of most toppled Latin American strongmen, had asked the Buenos Aires embassy of neighboring Paraguay for asylum. Ambassador Juan Chaves escorted him to the 636-ton river gunboat Paraguay, and in that cramped refuge Juan Peron waited, his power to make Argentine history broken and dissolved.
Happy Birthday." The strongman fell with dramatic suddenness. As the fateful week opened, the government propaganda machine was still repetitiously insisting that the rebellion was about to collapse, that loyalist troops had retaken the rebel stronghold of Córdoba. But Peron's government, not the rebellion, was about to collapse.
At the start, the rebel leaders (notified by prearranged "Happy Birthday" telegrams that the time to strike had come) commanded only a few thousand men. They seemed little more dangerous to Perón & Co. than the June 16 rebellion, snuffed out in six hours by inner-circle generals guarding their vested interests in the Perón regime. But this time rebel leaders showed spectacular dime-novel pluck and luck. While Generals Lonardi and Videla Balaguer were holding Córdoba, Vice Admiral Isaac Rojas daringly boarded the navy's flagship cruiser, locked the Peronista fleet commander in his cabin, invited the navy to join the rebellion. "I am not going to deceive anybody," messaged Rojas. "We are going to make a revolution, and they may kill us all. Anybody who does not want to sail with us may go ashore." Out of 2,300 navy men aboard the warships all but 90 chose to sail with Rojas.
In the inland city of San Luis, Rebel General Julio Lagos stalked into the headquarters of General Jose Maria Sosa Molina, who had replaced him as commander of the Second Army. "Who gives orders here, me or Sosa Molina?" thundered tough General Lagos. With that, the key Second Army, controlling three interior provinces, was on the rebel side.
First Day of Spring. By the fourth day, much of the interior was under rebel control, and a powerful fleet under Rojas was in the River Plate threatening to bombard the capital unless Perón quit. As a warning of what might come, rebel warships stood off the beach-resort city of Mar del Plata, shelled port installations and a government oil refinery.