By longstanding custom, when a Latin American head of state is overthrown, he is either tossed into prison or hustled into exile, where he can live on the money that, most probably, he has stashed away while in office. But last June, when General Juan Carlos Onganía and his military supporters ousted Argentina's President Arturo Umberto Illia, they did not bother with such formalities. Judging the mild-mannered, scrupulously honest, onetime country doctor to be no threat to them, the soldiers simply told him to go home. Trouble was, Illia had no home.
He could not return to his home town of Cruz del Eje, 540 miles north of Buenos Aires, for the residents resented his having refused while President to pass out patronage to his friends there. Nor did he have the money to set up a new home. With no private income, Illia had barely managed to get by on Argentina's parsimonious presidential salary of $500 a month (plus $370 in living expenses). And out of office, he was too proud to apply for the presidential pension, which any how amounts to a mere $14 monthly.
So Illia moved into his brother's house in a Buenos Aires suburb and watched over his ailing wife, Sylvia, 46, who recently returned from the U.S., where she had been treated for cancer. Occasionally, he would break the bedside vigil to receive some of his old friends and former ministers, with whom he talked for hours about what might have been.
Last week Sylvia died, and curious crowds pushed and shoved as a saddened Illia walked slowly through the streets behind his wife's casket. At the church, and later at the cemetery, the unruly throng tried to turn the sad occasion into an anti-Ongania demonstration by shouting, "Death to dictatorship!" and "The military trash cannot govern us!" Dazed and tearful, Illia ignored the shouts. After the ceremony, he retreated once more to his brother's home. His plans: to sell some of the gifts he received while President and with the money, plus contributions from friends, rent an apartment in Buenos Aires. "He is a sober man," said a friend. "He will not need much."