New Broom

Wildly cheered by flag-waving crowds, a lean, leathery man in an olive-green army uniform rode triumphantly into Buenos Aires one sunny day last week to take over as President of Argentina. The new headman was General Eduardo Lonardi (see box), leader of the rebellion that brought Juan Peron tumbling down.

After the swearing-in ceremony in the pink Government House, church bells tolled and ship sirens shrilled in celebration. Lonardi stepped onto the balcony from which Peron used to harangue his mobs. In a level tone strikingly different from Peron's superheated oratory, the new President promised his huge, joyful audience a "rule of law," freedom of assembly and of the press (see PRESS). "Argentina" General Lonardi said, "has given the world the first example of an absolute totalitarian government falling before the just and honorable reaction of the people."

Fallen Dictator Juan Peron, taking the beaten track of most toppled Latin American strongmen, had asked the Buenos Aires embassy of neighboring Paraguay for asylum. Ambassador Juan Chaves escorted him to the 636-ton river gunboat Paraguay, and in that cramped refuge Juan Peron waited, his power to make Argentine history broken and dissolved.

Happy Birthday." The strongman fell with dramatic suddenness. As the fateful week opened, the government propaganda machine was still repetitiously insisting that the rebellion was about to collapse, that loyalist troops had retaken the rebel stronghold of Cordoba. But Peron's government, not the rebellion, was about to collapse.

At the start, the rebel leaders (notified by prearranged "Happy Birthday" telegrams that the time to strike had come) commanded only a few thousand men. They seemed little more dangerous to Peron & Co. than the June 16 rebellion, snuffed out in six hours by inner-circle generals guarding their vested interests in the Peron regime. But this time rebel leaders showed spectacular dime-novel pluck and luck. While Generals Lonardi and Videla Balaguer were holding Cordoba, Vice Admiral Isaac Rojas daringly boarded the navy's flagship cruiser, locked the Peronista fleet commander in his cabin, invited the navy to join the rebellion. "I am not going to deceive anybody," messaged Rojas. "We are going to make a revolution, and they may kill us all. Anybody who does not want to sail with us may go ashore." Out of 2,300 navy men aboard the warships all but 90 chose to sail with Rojas.

In the inland city of San Luis, Rebel General Julio Lagos stalked into the headquarters of General Jose Maria Sosa Molina, who had replaced him as commander of the Second Army. "Who gives orders here, me or Sosa Molina?" thundered tough General Lagos. With that, the key Second Army, controlling three interior provinces, was on the rebel side.

First Day of Spring. By the fourth day, much of the interior was under rebel control, and a powerful fleet under Rojas was in the River Plate threatening to bombard the capital unless Peron quit. As a warning of what might come, rebel warships stood off the beach-resort city of Mar del Plata, shelled port installations and a government oil refinery.

That sample of naval power was enough for the loyalist generals still holding out in Buenos Aires. Peron and his top followers bugged out to foreign embassies, leaving in charge an interim junta made up of 14 not-so-Peronista generals. Next day members of the junta boarded a rebel cruiser in the Plate, agreed to surrender their authority to a government headed by General Lonardi. Before handing over the capital of Argentina to the rebels, the short-lived junta happily carried out a final operation: disarming the red-armband fascist bullyboys of Peron's Alianza Popular Nacionalista.

It was the first day of the Argentine spring; that morning the drenching late-winter rains ended, and the sun broke through the clouds. Cheering crowds surged through the streets of Buenos Aires in a wild outburst of joy and relief.

Lonardi & Co. lost no time undertaking a brisk spring housecleaning. Jail doors flew open to let out Peron's political prisoners. New-broomed out of office were Peron's provincial governors and city officials. Lonardi dissolved the federal Congress, ordered all Peronista members arrested pending investigation. Elections were promised within eight months.

The new government announced that the provinces of Presidente Peron and Eva Peron would resume their old names.

Chaco and La Pampa.

Civilians did some energetic, unofficial housecleaning on their own. Crowds smashed into the headquarters of Peronista organizations, scuffled for the honor of ripping down pictures of the nation's longtime master. All over Argentina, busts of the Perons crumbled under lusty hammer blows, Peronista publications went up in blazing bonfires.

Curfew in Rosario. Amid the joyous uproar it was easy to forget that some Argentines were sorry to see Juan Peron go. The grievances recited by General Lonardi--that Peron subverted the laws, violated constitutional rights, mismanaged the economy, packed the courts, burned churches and permitted vast graft--were all true enough. But Peron also gave organized labor, which the old. established parties had never bothered to court, a new sense of dignity and importance--that was the real secret of his success.

Lonardi had hardly taken the presidential oath, when riots broke out in working-class sections of Buenos Aires. In the industrial city of Rosario, a rumor that Peron had left the Paraguay to lead a counter-revolt brought on a bloody clash between gun-toting soldiers and stone-throwing Peronista workers. The new government decreed an 8 p.m. curfew, warned that demonstrators would be shot.

If Lonardi & Co. are to rule Argentina without using curfews and threats to shoot, they will have to overcome the workers' fears. Showing shrewd political sense, Lonardi announced that labor "can have as much confidence in this government as in the former . . . The conquests of the workers will be maintained and improved." Gone With the Winter. At week's end the country was mainly peaceful again.

One sign of confidence was a sharp upward spurt in the free-market value of the wobbly peso. The U.S. joined the parade of nations officially recognizing the Lonardi regime as Argentina's new government.

"Peron is the Fatherland." Peronista propaganda used to intone over and over again. But when the powder smoke cleared last week, there was Peron, holed up in a grubby foreign gunboat, and there was the Fatherland, cheering the man who overthrew him. Rebel hotspurs talked of seizing the fallen strongman and bringing him to trial. But the deep-rooted Latin American tradition of political asylum prevailed, and Juan Peron. gone with the winter, got a safe-conduct for a boat trip into Paraguayan exile.

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