ARGENTINA: High Tension

Would Argentina declare an eleventh-hour war on the Reich? Argentina’s Acting Foreign Minister, small, wiry Cesar Ameghino, last week announced that a “state of tension” existed between Germany and Argentina. Using the pretext that the Nazis were preventing repatriation of seven Argentine diplomats caught in Europe, Señor Ameghino sent Germany a hot note of protest. He warned the Nazis that next time “the Argentine Government would consider such action as an act of hostility.”

Behind this war whoop was strong-man Juan Domingo Perón’s and his cohorts’ fear of the effects of Argentina’s hemispheric isolation. They would desperately like, even in absentia, to curry favor at the inter-American conference in Mexico City. To rig up some semblance of democratic thinking and pro-Allied feeling, Argentina has recently:

1) announced the imminence of elections; 2) reinstated previously expelled democratic professors; 3) closed the pro-Axis newspapers Cabildo and El Pampero. But the declarations of war against Germany and Japan by six American sister nations (TIME, Feb. 19) caught Argentina flatfooted, isolated her anew.

All last week Buenos Aires seethed with war rumors. By becoming an ally, Argentina might silence (as had Brazil and others) all criticism of her authoritarian regime. President Edelmiro Farrell called his Ministers to the Casa Rosada for a special Cabinet session. Ships of the Argentine state merchant fleet were ordered to scurry for the nearest safe ports. Perón himself rushed to the great Campo de Mayo barracks on Buenos Aires’ outskirts, pleaded with the pro-Nazi officer group to agree to war, at least against Japan.

Then correspondents were called to Argentina’s Foreign Ministry. They all thought: “This is it!” Ameghino’s announcement of a mere protest to Germany over seven unimportant Argentine diplomats was a letdown. Cracked one reporter, remembering that the Red Army is 31 miles from Berlin: “Ameghino will get his reply from the Russians!”

How far dared the Government go? If the purpose of its note to Germany was to prepare Argentine public opinion for war, could it sway the fractious Army, too? No one doubted that canny Vice President Perón remembered that Argentina’s diplomatic break with the Axis a year ago had caused super-nationalists to overthrow Pedro Ramirez’ Government. At week’s end the situation in Buenos Aires was still “fluid.”