Alfonsin Urges Rebel Major, Holed Up at Base, to Surrender

Argentine President Raul Alfonsin on Thursday urged a renegade army major and his backers, holed up for a second night in a military camp near Cordoba, to surrender rather than fight.

The confrontation represented the worst crisis of Alfonsin’s 40-month-old administration.

The major, Ernesto Barreiro, took refuge late Wednesday in the 14th Infantry Regiment base outside Cordoba, about 400 miles northwest of the capital, in defiance of federal judges seeking his testimony in connection with the abductions, tortures and disappearances of suspected leftists during Argentina’s 1976-83 military rule.

“There is nothing to negotiate,” Alfonsin said in a nationwide radio and television address before a cheering Congress. “The Argentine democracy is not negotiable. Obey the orders of your superiors (and give up).”

Barreiro and his supporters issued a communique demanding the resignation of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Hector Rios Erenu and a replacement meeting their approval; amnesty for all military officers accused of human rights abuses, and an end to the hostility they said the administration had displayed toward the military in the media.

Alfonsin cut short his Easter vacation Thursday in Chascomus and flew to Buenos Aires to chair a three-hour emergency Cabinet meeting in a bid to end the rebellion without violence.

The Cabinet, including Defense Minister Horacio Juanarena, reconvened a second time in emergency session late Thursday as the downtown crowd, many yelling “Democracy or dictatorship!” waved flags and shook their fists in Plaza Congreso.

Federico Storani, a House of Deputies member from the ruling Radical Civic Union party, said Thursday afternoon that among the measures being considered by the government was to declare a state of siege.

The government, Storani said, has “not discarded the possibility of mobilizing troops in other parts of the country because this rebellion cannot be prolonged for much longer.”

There were unconfirmed reports from local news agencies that Barreiro, 40, was armed, and that he had been joined in rebellion by Lt. Col. Luis Polo, commander of the 500-man regiment at Cordoba, Argentina’s second-largest city.

Juan Carlos Pugliese, president of the House of Deputies, described the rebellion by Barreiro as “a clownish act.”

A government investigatory commission has concluded that 9,000 people vanished without a trace during the government’s campaign--dubbed “the dirty war”--to rid the country of suspected subversives.