Everybody Happy

The setting was the same as for the telephone company purchase a few weeks earlier (TIME, Sept. 16). The same Argentine officials crowded the Salon Blanco at Government House, the same newsreel cameras ground away. Juan Peron was present, smart in a grey lounge suit. Then British Ambassador Sir Reginald Leeper stepped forward to sign his Government's new trade agreement with Argentina.

The agreement had been reached, after weeks of bluff and haggle, when Peron sent his negotiators to intercept the British experts just as they were packing their bags to leave Buenos Aires. It looked like great news for Britain: 1) the bulk of Argentina's meat would continue to go to England, at a price 7 1/2% higher than now; 2) Britain would pay just 1/2 of 1% interest on Argentina's war-accumulated sterling credit in London; 3) a new Argentine company, with mixed Argentine and British capital, would buy out the $1,000,000,000 British railways in Argentina.

President Peron was as pleased as the British, particularly over the third point. In an exuberant speech following the ceremonies he promised that he himself would nail the first Argentine shield on a railway coach. Said he: "Interested critics may say what they like, but the fact remains that the [U.S.-owned] telephone network is now Argentine property, and the same is true of the railways." By the end of his six-year term, he boasted, "not an inch of soil, not a breath of air" in Argentina would be alien-owned. And in fact little more than the packing houses and a few power plants still remained in foreign hands.

Though Juan Pueblo--the Argentine-in-the-street--might goggle at the cost of these deals, he could hardly hide his pride at such proof of what Peron called "coming of age," and he was inclined to agree that now was the time to buy, when there was cash in the Argentine till.

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