Latin America: Blood on the Pampas

Argentines showed some spunk last week. Strong Man Perón’s renewed “state of siege” (TIME, Oct. 8), the retaliating strike by 30,000 students and police counterblows made Argentina look for a while like a country on the eve of a civil war.

At the University of La Plata, students turned 20 blocks in the center of town into a battlefield. They blacked out the area by breaking street lights, then tripped up mounted policemen with low-strung wires. Over an improvised radio station, engineering students broadcast denunciations of the military regime.

Then Perón hit back. Police and firemen came up with reinforcements. Slowly they drove the students from classroom to class room with high-pressure fire hoses and tear gas. In the central hall the students surrendered. At least 50 had been injured. In a Buenos Aires demonstration that night, student Aaron José Salmon Feijot had been killed.

Next day the police smashed into the strike-bound University of Buenos Aires, carted some 1,600 students off to jail. Girl students were lodged in the filthy and ill-famed Asilo San Miguel, which normally houses prostitutes and degenerates.

Before Government House on the historic Plaza de Mayo, over 500 mothers and sisters of arrested university students gathered to protest. Mounted police rode into the crowd, bowled women over, swung sabers at recalcitrant heads. At a signal, the horsemen wheeled and repeated the performance. From the windows of Government House, Argentine officialdom looked on with approval.

At week’s end two universities in the interior were still on unbroken strike. Colonel Perón’s communiqués showed no sign of worry. But the Colonel’s lady was a little nervous. In her handbag, Eva Duarte reportedly carried an Argentine Army hand grenade.