ARGENTINA: Juan Pueblo Smells Trouble

With her foreign trade almost half gone, with unemployment growing, with an election-fraud scandal stewing and with no 1941 budget voted, Argentina last week drifted perilously close to the rocks of political chaos. Only two men seemed to have any idea of what to do about it, and Juan Pueblo, as Argentinos call the man-in-the-street, did not trust either.

One was brilliant, impatient Finance Minister Federico Pinedo, who has a plan for the long-term refinancing of Argentine industry by the Central Bank of Argentina and the Government. Most Conservatives are against the Pinedo Plan because they fear its provision empowering the Government to mobilize private bank funds. Radicals are against it because they believe that Pinedo, an ambitious Conservative politician, wants to use it to ride into the Presidency in 1944. Nevertheless, with some difficulty and some pruning, Finance Minister Pinedo pushed his plan through the Conservative-dominated Senate. To get it through the Chamber of Deputies, which has a small Radical majority, he proposed a deal.

Fortnight ago he flew to Mar del Plata and offered to Radical Leader Marcelo T. de Alvear, who was vacationing there, a political truce. Under this new Pinedo plan the chiefs of the two political camps, Radicales and Conservadores, would choose common candidates for the principal offices to be filled in provincial elections this year. For minor offices each camp would run its own candidates. While wily Marcelo de Alvear kept mum, Pinedo let the deal out of the bag and the press and Juan Pueblo waxed indignant.

To Juan and the press it seemed that the Conservatives’ answer to the Radicals’ accusation of election frauds (TIME, Jan. 6) was to invite the Radicals in on the fraud. Some said that Pinedo was impelled by an ultimatum from Washington: no political stability, no more loans. Buenos Aires’ great La Prensa boomed that the fraud was directed from the President’s Pink House. The English-language Standard and the evening Noticias Gráficas called for Pinedo’s resignation.

The Finance Minister obliged by tendering his resignation last week. He made it stick in spite of Acting President Ramón S. Castillo’s refusal to accept it. Juan Pueblo was not sure whether the resignation was a confession of defeat or a maneuver to pose as a martyred patriot. Castillo blamed the Radicals for refusing to make peace, threatened to dissolve Congress and rule by duodécimo.* The Radical Chamber of Deputies cracked back by refusing to vote on the budget, the Pinedo Plan or anything else until the election frauds were investigated. Angry shouts of “Buffoon!,” “Coward!,” “Show-off!” filled the Chamber.

At week’s end, Acting President Castillo offered to put discussion of the frauds on the Congressional agenda, a step which would produce nothing but more wind. From his sickbed half-blind President Roberto Marcelino Ortiz advised the Radicals to collaborate with the Government and a Radical Deputy resigned his seat in protest. As the Ship of State veered sharply toward the shallows Juan Pueblo thought he saw on the tiller the crafty hand of onetime President General Agustín P. Justo, the only other man in Argentina with a plan.

Juan Pueblo suspects that the Justo plan is to wait until Argentina is practically on the rocks, then to jettison the crew and take command. Juan did not like the looks of this at all, but for the moment he did not see what could be done about it.

* If Congress fails to pass a budget, one-twelfth of the previous year’s budget is automatically appropriated each month.