ARGENTINA: Peroncito, the Brainwasher

Next to Juan Perón, the most powerful man in Argentina may well be beefy Carlos Aloé, governor of Buenos Aires province, where more than a quarter of the country’s people live. Aloé is popularly dubbed “Peroncito”—Little Perón. As Big Perón’s secretary from 1946 until 1951, he bossed the Peronista press and masterminded the closing of La Prensa. The President rewarded him by making him the official candidate for the governorship; the self-effacing onetime sergeant won without a single campaign speech.

After his inauguration last month, Governor Aloé quickly found his tongue in public. Vociferously he cried that he will not tolerate any sub-bureaucrat “who does not think as the governor thinks.” He especially concentrated his conformist zeal on the brainwashing of schoolchildren.

Aloé found that Argentine textbooks were shot through with excerpts from the works of Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Browning, Grimm, Schiller and Turgenev—all subversive influences, in the Peronista view. “A repulsive state of affairs,” declared the governor. He named a committee to scourge the foreign authors from the schoolbooks. “The schools,” he decreed, “must teach the child the mysticism, the soul and the sentiment of Peronismo.”

Minister of Education Armando Méndez San Martin, unwilling to appear less ardent than Aloé, joined in the brainwashing. Fixing on the Estrada publishing house as the worst offender, he banned its third, fourth, fifth and sixth-grade readers. Last week cops raided schools and stores to confiscate Estrada books. Congress lent a helping hand: it made Eva Perón’s The Explanation of My Life required reading for all schoolchildren.