óóARGENTINA
(See Cover]
Buenos Aires' great independent newspaper La Prensa was dead last week, its life snuffed out by Juan Perón. By act of the rubber-stamp Argentine Congress, the world-famed paper had been expropriated and, in Perón's cynical words, "handed over to the workers for whatever use they think best." La Prensa will soon appear as the mouthpiece of the Perón-dominated General Confederation of Labor (C.G.T.).
From his favorite balcony at Buenos
Aires' Government House, Pern shouted: "This newspaper, which for so many years exploited the workers and the poor, which was a refined instrument serving national and international exploiters in the crudest treason to our country—this newspaper shall make up for its crimes by serving the workers and defending their gains and rights. This has been done by the free and sovereign decision of the Argentine people."
Thus Juan Peron exhibited one of the qualities that distinguish him from most other dictators. Argentina's lawfully elected President is passionately addicted to legalising he will go to any lengths, however ludicrous, to accomplish his ends in a "legal" way. As a result, his five-year regime has been marked by surprisingly little rough stuff; his formula has been approximately 90% cloak and 10% dagger.
Though Pern operates a state essentially modeled on the classic Nazi-Fascist pattern, his regime is different in one other major respect. The handsome, strapping six-footer, whose athletic figure now sags just a bit with the weight of middle age (55), does not govern alone. Beside him rules his glittering wife Evita, a 5 ft. 2, pale-skinned, dark-eyed, dazzling blonde of 32. Their man & wife dictatorship has few precedents. Some have compared it with the dual reign of Spain's Ferdinand & Isabella. Perhaps a closer parallel in history was established by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian, who married Theodora, onetime actress and reputedly the most beautiful woman in Byzantium, and enthroned her as co-ruler at his side.
Perón himself thinks in terms of more recent history. "Mussolini," he once said, "was the greatest man of our century, but he committed certain disastrous errors. I, who have the advantage of his precedent before me, shall follow in his footsteps but also avoid his mistakes." On the record so far, Perón has done just that. His regime has the authoritarian marks—extreme nationalism, the leader principle, an all-powerful state, a militant single party, intolerance of opposition and retention of the form of democracy without any of ts substance. But the Peróns have not yet followed Mussolini all the way along the lines of violence and overconfidence. They still act at times with a jerky uncertainty that betrays both lack of skill in governing so big a country and nervousness at the forces they control.