"To Defend the President"

President Juan Peron last week staged the most remarkable public circus of his spectacular career. His show had a little of everything. In the early hours of Thursday morning radio bulletins began shrilling news of a conspiracy to murder Peron. The assassination, broadcasters cried, was to have occurred on the "Day of the Race," Oct. 12, at an opera gala in the gilt-and-plush Teatro Colon. His wife, blonde Eva Duarte Peron, was to have been killed with him.

Thirteen conspirators, it was soon announced, had been rounded up. Also accused as a plotter was 50-year-old John F. Griffiths, businessman, ex-college instructor (University of Southern California), and onetime cultural attache at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, the state-owned radio called for a one-day general strike of protest.

Ropes & Gallows. By noon factories and shops had closed, trains stopped running. With an eye to a good turnout, someone had mobilized government trucks to haul workers to downtown B.A. from the outlying industrial districts. Many a worker, by the time he reached the Plaza de Mayo, had also been equipped with a sign bearing a Peronista slogan. Others carried loops of rope, or miniature gallows--a meaningful reminder of the bitter speech at Santa Fe in which Peron talked of hanging his enemies (TIME, Sept. 20).

In the bright spring sunlight the crowds milled about the plaza cheering Peron, who finally appeared on a balcony of the Casa Rosada in company with wife Eva and Minister of Interior Angel C. Borlenghi. Peron plunged into a half-screaming account of the "conspiracy." "Traitors to the country" had plotted his death, he shouted, because "international capitalists desire it."

Savagely attacking John Griffiths, who has been living in Montevideo, as "an international spy," Peron said that the plot itself was hatched outside Argentina. (The scurrilous afternoon paper La Epoca promptly headlined ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT ORDERED FROM U.S.)

Dominate or Liquidate. In the end, Peron abruptly put the brakes on his own oratory, told the crowd to be calm. He had the patience, he said, "to dominate the agitators, or liquidate them if necessary." Before the crowd went home it had one more treat: Evita announced that she would willingly die "a thousand times" for the cause of the people.

Many an Argentine scoffed--discreetly. Only fanatic Peronistas took the plot seriously. John Griffiths seemed to be both amused and bewildered at his new prominence across the Plata. Five months ago, he had been jailed in B.A. on Peronistas' charges that he had fomented a bank strike in Argentina's capital; the new role assigned to him seemed to knowing Argentines to fit even more awkwardly. The "plotters" rounded up in Buenos Aires were an oddly assorted group: Cipriano Reyes, a former Peronista labor leader now in the opposition, three priests, a half-blind doctor, two women, a handful of complete unknowns.

If Juan Peron was seriously worried by strains within his regime, his show had given him a good chance to warn his enemies that he could still produce a potent mob of the faithful on short notice. Thus, the plot might be worth whatever it might cost in bad relations with the U.S. In any case, Juan Peron proved that he still knows how to polish off a general strike: he declared next day a general holiday, so everybody could rest up.

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