ARGENTINA: Keynote for’52

Running for President five years ago, Juan Peron campaigned mainly against U.S. Ambassador Spruille Braden, who had been rash enough to criticize Peron’s dictatorial style. Last week, as the President prepared to run for a second term in 1952, Argentina’s government loosed a blast against Peron’s favorite electioneering target, the U.S. The attack was launched in the front page of Buenos Aires’ semi-official newspaper Democrada, in an editorial signed by “Descartes,” a writer generally believed to be Peron himself. Wrote Descartes:

“[U.S.] diplomacy [is] an amateurish mixture of provocation, pressure, persuasion and money. The entire continent has been flooded with anti-Argentine pamphlets which can be traced to the U.S. Now a North American organization has been set up in Montevideo to intervene in this country’s political affairs by using newspapers and radio to influence our coming elections. From all this we can see how Western policy and diplomacy are conducted.”

Readers of Descartes could also see how Peron’s re-election campaign was to be conducted.