Advice for Housewives

Into the Casa Rosada marched a well-briefed delegation of 300 Buenos Aires housewives. They had come to ask President Peron for "collective action and boycott" against the city's chiseling food merchants who had doubled their grocery bills in the past year. With a courteous bow, the President stepped forward on cue and launched another in the series of government campaigns against Argentina's five-year-old inflation.

He was well aware of the problem, said Peron, and could appreciate the housewives' concern. But he wanted to point out that the housewives themselves were not entirely blameless. On his way to work every morning, he noticed with dismay the amount of garbage piled up on city doorsteps. "Argentines," he said, "throw one and a half million head of cattle into the garbage can every year . . . It is easy to see that the bread and meat thrown away daily in Buenos Aires would easily feed any European city for a week."

Peron's first advice to the women was to stop wasting meat and to use leftovers. When he and Evita first moved into the presidential residence, the President added, "the monthly food bill was 12,000 pesos. Now I barely spend 1,200--including the servants' food." They had done it, he said, by planting a vegetable garden and acquiring some chickens and cows.

But he agreed that the profiteering food sellers should be rooted out and recommended a stern course of direct action. All the buyer had to do was call a policeman and the profiteer would be jailed in the Villa Devoto. Said Peron: "We shall close down for good all shops of all profiteers so that in the future only honest traders will be in business."

Peron had hardly finished speaking when Buenos Aires' attentive police whooped into action. Five fishmongers were fined 5,000 pesos ($352) apiece and whisked off to Villa Devoto for 30 days. Next day, 20 butchers followed them, after shelling out 30,000 pesos each in fines. Miguel Gamboa, director general of prices and supplies, called to his office 800 other butchers and warned that new lists of ceiling prices would be enforced.

Few portenos really thought that the new price-control campaign would be any more successful in the long run than its predecessors. Years of cumbersome and inefficient state trade manipulation and Peronista economics had put strains on the old prewar price structure which no amount of makeshift shoring up could relieve. But for the time being this week, Buenos Aires merchants were dutifully keeping their eyes on the new price lists and waiting for the heat to die down.

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