Trouble, Terror and a Takeover

The three southernmost nations of Latin America were near political paralysis last week. Chile, already polarized by a conflict between left and right, was jarred by an abortive army coup. Widespread terrorism persisted in Argentina, following the return to Buenos Aires of ex-Dictator Juan Peron. In Uruguay, a successful military coup brought at least a temporary end to republican government. All in all, it was a sad and humiliating time for three countries that had seemed to embody many of the continent's best hopes for development and democracy.

CHILE: RIGHT-WING REVOLT

At 9 a.m. last Friday, four tanks and about 100 soldiers of Chile's 2nd Armored Corps surrounded the squat, gray Moneda Palace in downtown Santiago. As the troops released a hail of machine-gun, bazooka and rocket fire at the carabineros guarding the palace, pedestrians dove for cover; others scattered and ran wildly. Within minutes, seven people were dead and 22 wounded.

From his suburban home in nearby Las Condes, President Salvador Allende Gossens reacted calmly to news of the attempted coup. In the first of four nationwide radio and television addresses during the day, he declared that "the majority of the army troops support the government" and asked that his supporters remain "serene" while loyal military forces cleaned up the situation. That they did: about 12:30 p.m., the leaders of the rebellious army unit had surrendered, and the first coup attempted against the Western Hemisphere's only elected Marxist leader was over.

Among those who witnessed the uprising was TIME'S Robert Lindley. "I was banging away at my typewriter when I heard explosions," Lindley cabled. "Since they began at 9 a.m. and followed a regular pattern, I thought they were a result of more blasting for Santiago's new subway system. But then I heard the unmistakable rattle of machine-gun fire. From the twelfth-floor window of my hotel room (which directly overlooks Moneda Palace), I saw a tank parked across Constitution Square. It had crawled up to within a few feet of the palace and trained its cannon on the steel door. Then a more lightly armored weapons carrier joined it. Wearing army uniforms, the crews dismounted and stood behind their vehicles, intently scanning the buildings around the square for possible snipers. Apparently they thought they spotted one on the sixth floor of the hotel, because they sprayed a window there with bullets. From the rear of the palace, which is less heavily defended, there was the sound of cannon, bazooka and machine-gun fire.

"The shooting caused enormous flocks of pigeons to wheel in confusion over the square, which was packed with the cars of commuters who were trapped downtown by the coup attempt. The crew that usually raises the Chilean flag in front of the Moneda in the morning defiantly draped Chile's national flag out a first-floor window of the palace. Somehow that hapless scene seemed to symbolize the country's present state."

True enough. Even before the army revolt, Allende seemed to be heading for the worst crisis in his three years in office. In fact, the besieged President had charged all week long that a "right-wing coup" was imminent. The signs were certainly in the air.

For weeks crowds of pro-and anti-Allende supporters had surged through Santiago's streets. Demands had been made for Allende's impeachment; others called for civil war. Doctors, dentists and nurses went on strike, protesting Chile's uncontrollable inflation, which has soared 235% in the past year. They joined thousands of copper workers, who have shut down Chile's largest copper mines and paralyzed the nation's economy, which gets 80% of its foreign exchange from copper.

Allende, who had hitherto been fairly scrupulous in allowing freedom of the press, angered many Chileans last week when he ordered the opposition Santiago daily El Mercuric closed for six days. Reason: the paper had printed a right-wing ad that the government considered seditious. Allende then overreacted to a bizarre little incident in which Army Chief Carlos Prats fired two shots at a woman motorist who had stuck out her tongue at him. Forcing the woman's car to a halt, the general pressed his revolver against her head and demanded an apology. When angry pedestrians let the air out of the tires of his car, Prats beat a hasty retreat in a taxi. Allende used the "provocation" to wrap a "zone of emergency" around Santiago province. Some civil liberties were suspended, and the police were placed under direct military control. But by that time, a few right-wing army officers had made final their plans for the coup.

The failure of the revolt could work in Allende's favor. Now that his advance warning about a right-wing rebellion has been substantiated, he could use fears of further coups as a pretext to clamp down on his enemies, who are both numerous and powerful. Allende has already extended the state of emergency to the entire country and, as a further show of his strength, invited supporters to stage mass demonstrations to celebrate "our victory."

ARGENTINA: CHAOS AND CORPSES

"We have almost no place for passions," declared Argentine President Hector Campora in a nation-wide television address last week. That, as it turned out, was a gross overstatement.

Violence erupted only a day after the badgered President spoke, urging peace between the fractious Peronistas who had turned Juan Peron's homecoming two weeks ago into a bloodbath, leaving 34 dead and 342 wounded. In Buenos Aires and Cordoba, eleven people, including a foreign businessman, have been kidnaped, bringing the total number held by terrorists to 17. Ransom demands, meanwhile, have soared to an astronomical $17 million.

Instead of uniting the wildly disparate factions that make up the Peronist movement, el Lider's return seems only to have ignited leftist and rightist tempers within the party. Last week the rival groups were bitterly accusing each other of inciting the turmoil that accompanied the homecoming.

Left-wing Peronist youths charged that Jorge Osinde, a retired military officer who was the internal security chief in Peron's 1946 government, led an armed right-wing group that tried to disrupt a mass rally near Buenos Aires' international airport. Other Peronist groups fingered "armed bands of trade unionists," who they said had spent $25,000 in party funds for the arms used to kill fellow Peronistas.

Campora's government moved--fitfully it seemed--to try to reverse the drift toward chaos. It announced that Peronist organizers and students who had occupied government offices, institutes and hospitals last month would be immediately evicted. The announcement brought an angry blast from the Trotskyite People's Revolutionary Army, the country's most powerful guerrilla organization.

Law-and-order edicts, though a start, do not really get to the core of Argentina's problem: the country's deep political divisions. Campora's statement last week that the government "will not permit anarchy and intolerance" was scoffed at by many Argentines. The speech, said one foreign diplomat sarcastically, was a mediocre performance "by a puppet who is not getting his ventriloquist's lines." But can the ventriloquist do any better?

The problem is that Peron--undoubtedly the most powerful man in Argentina today--is not only old (77), but is also somewhat more conservative than many of his leftist followers suspect. Since his return to Buenos Aires, he has surrounded himself with cronies from the old days. He has even called for the "reintegration" of the military into the mainstream of Argentine life.

That is anathema to the Peronist left, which has demanded that the army's internal-security functions be carried out by a popular militia.

Meanwhile, reports TIME'S Buenos Aires Bureau Chief Charles Eisendrath, there is the irony of Argentine political life. It evokes, says Eisendrath, an image "despairingly similar to the landscapes of supercharged atrocity by Hieronymus Bosch. In the foreground a man accused of seducing a teen-age girl while he was President of the country has just re-entered it as a saint. Peron is flanked on one side by his third wife, Isabelita, 42, once a nightclub performer in Panama. On the other side of el Lider is Lopecito--Jose Lopez Rega--a former army corporal who was elevated to Minister of Social Welfare because of his skill in reading the stars, having selected the days of Peron's two returns to Argentina."

In the background, Eisendrath adds, is the mummified corpse of Evita, "the radio announcer who became successively the saint's mistress, his political manager, second wife and, finally, in death, his greatest spiritual asset. The compelling allure of the corpse, which is reportedly being transported to Argentina, is reflected by numerous posters of the dead woman. 'Evita returns,' they proclaim, 'dead or alive!' " In the days ahead, Peron may need all the help he can get. Unless he can move quickly to end the violence, his government's resolve to restore stability in Argentina will soon lose credibility.

Already, foreign businessmen fear to set foot inside the country, and many of those there have decided to flee rather than risk becoming targets for the guerrillas. There is an even more ominous note: the price rollbacks on consumer goods designed to control Argentina's spiraling inflation are so steep that some foreign-owned companies may be forced to follow their executives out of the country.

URUGUAY: INSTALLMENT COUP

Moments after the Uruguayan Congress wound up a midnight session last week in Montevideo, radio stations began broadcasting military marches. While the city slept, columns of troops and armored tanks moved into the capital. The next afternoon, President Juan Maria Bordaberry, backed by his military overseers, announced on television that he had dissolved Congress and replaced it with a 20-member "Council of State" headed by himself.

Thus, without a shot being fired, a tiny nation that had long prided itself as being the showplace of democracy in South America joined the growing list of military-dominated dictatorships on the continent. Uruguayans bitterly called the takeover "the last payment in our installment-plan coup." In fact, it did not come as much of a surprise. The armed forces, which ten years ago were no larger than the Montevideo fire department, were beefed up in the late '60s to cope with the daring raids of the Tupamaro guerrillas. Not long after Bordaberry, a conservative rancher, became President last year, he called in the army to wipe out the terrorists, which it did with brutal effectiveness.

The generals have been flexing their muscles ever since. Last February the military forced Bordaberry to appoint army-picked candidates to his Cabinet, create a new military-dominated "security council," and carry out a score of political and economic reforms. The final showdown came when the generals insisted that leftist Senator Enrique Erro, who was suspected of having contacts among the Tupamaros, be stripped of his congressional immunity so that he could be tried by a military court. The Congress refused to lift his immunity or impeach the Senator --which Bordaberry last week cited as justification for his action. (Erro, luckily, was in Buenos Aires on a lecture tour at the time of the coup and thereby escaped arrest.) At week's end, an uneasy calm prevailed in Uruguay. Bordaberry imposed strict censorship, ordered schools and universities closed through July 20, and banned public meetings for political purposes. There were rumors, however, of developing resistance. The powerful National Workers Federation called for a general strike, and 500,000 laborers walked off their jobs. Telephone operators accepted only emergency calls.

Several opposition Congressmen were reported to have fled the country for fear of being arrested. Others, though, vowed to fight. Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, who ran against Bordaberry for President in the last election, called him "an enemy of his people," and declared that his own National Party "will consider itself at war."

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