ARGENTINA: Putsch on the Pampas

Out of a prison cell on the outskirts of Buenos Aires last week marched Enrique P. Oses, editor of the swaggering, German-financed, openly Nazi El Pampero, enjoying a temporary freedom on bail. For months he had trumpeted rabid denunciations of the U. S., of President Roosevelt, of the Havana Conference, of Great Britain with noisy immunity. But last month he offended the Argentine sense of good taste, was whisked off to jail.

Under the heading “Dithyrambic With Key” El Pampero had printed a harmless lampoon of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. But the first letter of each line, joined in descending order, spelled out the less harmless acrostic: Hay que ser inglés para ser hijo de puta (One must be English to be a son of a whore). Within 72 hours Osés was indicted for obscenity and the trial date set. That night, on the fashionable Calle Florida, youthful mem bers of the newly formed, patriotic Action Argentina patrolled the sidewalks, seized and burned copies of El Pampero with shouts of “Viva la Patria! Viva Argentina!”

El Pampero’s blatant propaganda was merely annoying to most Argentines. They were more worried by reports seeping back from Misiones Territory in the north. For half a century Germans have talked intermittently of political and military as well as economic penetration in South America. And last week Argentines remembered that Adolf Hitler said: “We shall create a new Germany there. We shall find everything we need there.”

Nazi Alarm. In Buenos Aires on May 25, Reserve Lieutenant Guillermo Eduardo Nelson Horrocks pronounced a eulogistic defense of totalitarian governments and of Nazi war methods at the annual banquet of the Reserve Officers of the Argentine Armed Forces. Investigation ordered by War Minister Brigadier General Carlos D. Marquez connected Horrocks with an abortive Rightist revolution, touched off a nationwide roundup of Nazi sympathizers, started a systematic examination of German schools.

Last month this anti-Nazi drive began to centralize in the Misiones Territory. Although the German population of Misiones is less than 24% of the total and a majority of the Germans are not Nazis, a wealthy Hitler-minded minority controls most of the region’s power plants, dominates its economy by a strangle hold on the mate trade. For these Nazis, Misiones is strategically perfect. It curves up in a thin tongue of land between Paraguay and Brazil; its hills and rivers afford a series of natural defenses in case of civil war. Bounded on the north, east and south by heavily German-populated districts of Brazil, on the west by German nuclei in Paraguay, it is also a place from which Nazis can easily skip if Argentine police get after them.

To forestall such escapes, Commandant Manuel Barres and hand-picked members of Argentina’s crack motorized “Mounties of the Pampas” worked in secret for weeks, visiting ranches, hobnobbing with strangers in cafes and on street corners. When leaders of the movement had thus been discovered, he asked his superior, grim-lipped General Manuel Calderon, Commander in Chief of the National Gendarmes for uniformed reinforcements, swooped down on the Nazi suspects.

From the evidence seized, the Gendarmes claimed proof of an armed, thoroughly organized Nazi militia, planning “liquidation” of local Government officials, destruction of food and fuel deposits, armed resistance in case of attack. General Calderon published photographs of arms caches; Commandant Barres told of radio transmitters, a card file containing names, personal characteristics, technical aptitudes of all Germans in the district. Significant was “an official German map” of Europe and South America, marked with a red band extending from Germany downward through Brazil, covering all Misiones Territory.

Biggest Catch of all were copies of a Nazi manifesto, so inflammatory that authorities no longer described the suspects vaguely as fifth columnists (as such liable only to deportation) but as outright traitors involved in un caso de pis tola (a case for summary execution).

Boomed the manifesto: “Alert! Germans who have their country at heart! Argentines who would see their country as powerful as ours, instead of being weak and crumbling! You have sworn to keep a solemn oath! Hear our song of victory: ‘Today Germany is ours and tomorrow the whole world will be ours.’ . . . We expect you to imitate the example of your brothers in Holland and Belgium. . . .”

German Ambassador Dr. Edmund Baron von Thermann hastily announced the dispatch of two confidential aides to Misiones “for the purpose of conducting an investigation” into “alleged Nazi activities and highhanded police methods against peaceful German residents.” On arrival, the Germans stirred up jurisdictional disputes between national and local police.

But General Marquez and Minister of Interior Diogenes Taboada sent their own men to the scene. Nazi suspects began accusing each other, naming similar organizations throughout Argentina, all under the direction of the German Embassy. More rifles and machine guns were found by following directions of the suspects and most of the guns were identified as contraband, smuggled from Brazil after President Getulio Vargas put down an Integralistas (fascist) revolt there in 1938. Complete storm-troop kits were discovered, each containing two revolvers, a supply of hand grenades, a Nazi dagger, a steel helmet, an identification tag and iron rations.

Last week the Argentine National Congress awaited the completion of the investigation before examining the evidence. But already Argentina had allowed to lapse its contracts with German Army instructors. Colonization of all border territory was restricted to Argentine citizens. The House of Deputies passed a war-preparedness bill authorizing the expenditure of 1,115,000,000 pesos ($254,220,000). And awaiting trial last week, in addition to Editor Enrique Osés, were Arnulf Fuhrmann, leader of an attempted Nazi military uprising in Uruguay; Nazi Propagandist Edmund Muckein; local Führers Arnold Hoffman, owner of the Misiones electric-light plant, and Dr. Robert Suntheim, director of a Government sanitary station.

All this was more than another fifth-column scare. It was a serious matter in a continent where Nazis have already made deep penetrations. But so long as Argentina could see its danger and act swiftly against it, Argentina’s democratic stability seemed firm enough to handle it.