Neighbor Accused

One evening this week, the chiefs of the South American missions in Washington stamped the snow from their feet and filed into Blair House, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Only one nation was absent --Argentina. A few minutes later that absent neighbor stood accused of virtually every crime in the book against democracy.

The stern indictment was a 13O-page booklet written in language no nation ordinarily uses unless it is prepared to go to war. The booklets were presented to the South American diplomats by the State Department's urbane Dean Acheson and burly Spruille Braden, onetime ambassador in Buenos Aires and outspoken enemy of Juan Domingo Peron's military regime. Their plain-spoken Blue Book charged that two successive totalitarian Governments of Neighbor Argentina had:

P: "Collaborated with enemy agents for important espionage and other purposes damaging to the war effort of the United Nations."

P: Combined with Nazis to create a Nazi-Fascist state.

P: Conspired "to undermine . . . neighboring countries in order to destroy their collaboration with the Allies" and to bring them into a pro-Axis bloc.

P: Tried to preserve Axis industrial and commercial power in Argentina.

"Solemn pledges to cooperate with the other American republics were completely breached. . . . The policies and actions of the present regime were aimed at undermining the inter-American system."

Nor was the U.S. deceived by the "strategy of camouflage" to which the regime had turned after the failure of Germany in the Ardennes. It was still the same old spotted cat. "By its brutal use of force and terrorist methods to strike down all opposition from the Argentine people* the military regime has made a mockery of its pledge to the United Nations 'to reaffirm faith in human rights' in the dignity and worth of the human person."

A year and a half ago the U.S. State Department had angrily exposed the activities of Argentina-based Axis agents. Now it added a few more.

"So Seriously Compromised." The notorious Major Elias Belmonte Pabon, former Bolivian attache at the legation in Berlin, was an intimate collaborator with the Sicherheitsdienst (a combination intelligence, espionage and sabotage service) officials and received an annual greasing of 20,000 Reichsmarks from the German Foreign Office. The conspiracy, in which Peron & Co. took active parts, was aimed at the overthrow of the Bolivian government, where a pro-axis Putsch was indeed brought off in December 1943.

Peron & Co. had plotted in the same fashion against the government of Brazil, working through Dr. Raimundo Padilha, Fascist leader in hiding there. The objects: to undermine Brazil's pro-Allied Vargas; gradually to build an anti-U.S. bloc which would include not just a few nations but a whole hemisphere.

These were some of the damning facts, long known, never before publicly set down. Said the State Department in conclusion: ". . . The present Argentine government were so seriously compromised in their relations with the enemy that trust and confidence could not be reposed in that government." In politer language, the State Department asked the other American republics for "their views."

But it was the views of the Argentine people the U.S. was really interested in. The angry document was shrewdly timed. In Argentina Juan Peron was up to his belligerent chin in a wild political campaign to get himself legitimized as an elected President. His triumph was by no means as certain as he had thought when his regime rashly promised the people they could go to the polls on Feb. 24. His democratic rival Dr. Jose P. Tamborini had become threateningly strong. There was even a chance that the election might be fair (see LATIN AMERICA).

It was into that situation that the State Department dropped its charge. There was more than one way to make war.

* The paper scrupulously differentiated between the Argentine people and Argentina regime.

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