ARGENTINA: Firm Hand

Again last week the unions dominated by former Dictator Juan Perón jousted with President Pedro Aramburu by staging a nation-wide general strike. Again Aramburu won the test by virtue of sound planning and unruffled firmness. To keep fhe threatened 48-hour walkout within bounds, he alerted 50,000 troops and policemen, more than were called out for last month’s 24-hour stoppage (TIME, Oct. 7). He warned workers in advance that strikers could legally be fired, enlisted the support of 40 non-Peronista unions to denounce the strike as nothing more than a political maneuver.

Even before the strike began, the government’s plans went into effect. Municipal bus and streetcar drivers who had planned to cripple their vehicles by removing vital parts were frustrated by marines who began riding with them hours before the deadline. During the strike, most offices and stores stayed open, restaurants and movie houses operated, newspapers appeared on schedule.

The industrial belt around Buenos Aires was closed down tight. But instead of demonstrating in the streets or sabotaging still-operating plants, the workers good-naturedly sipped maté in the spring sunshine or played sand-lot soccer. As the strike dragged on, soldiers took over buses, and society women, made change in subway booths. Tacks thrown into streets halted 90 buses and a fire engine on its way to answer a fire alarm; a Molotov cocktail was tossed against a bus. But at strike’s end most workers went quietly back to work.

Aramburu thereupon turned back to fighting the painful inflation that makes politically inspired strikes so easy to call. For the past year labor has been caught with wages frozen while prices spiraled up 34%. Aramburu has stoutly refused to grant a wage boost that would redouble inflation. Instead, he has tried to persuade manufacturers and wholesalers to cut prices by cutting profits. After last week’s strike he got strong and unexpected help when the influential Roman Catholic Church issued a pastoral letter that declared “business concerns, have a greater duty to reduce their profits than workers to forego an increase in wages that barely meet family needs.” Other signs of economic hope:

¶ The Central Bank, converted by Perón into a tool for direct control of the economy, reverted by an Aramburu decree to its normal function of regulating credit; deposits of private banks, taken over in 1946 by the Central Bank, will be returned.

¶ Deere & Co., a U.S. farm-machine manufacturer, announced plans to build a $5,000,000 tractor factory in Argentina, the biggest cash and equipment investment in Argentina since Perón’s downfall.