Student Victim Hits Peronist Torture

A graduate student from Argentina who says he was tied to a table and tortured with live electric wires by Peronist police, is sending a letter today to the Washington assembly of American foreign ministers charging that Peron sides with Russia in the world struggle against communism.

The student, Walter M. Beveraggi-Aliende 4G, lodged a protest last October with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights charging the Argentine government with unjustly imprisoning and torturing him. He called on the U.N. to take action against the Peron regime, because the U.N.'s Declaration of Human Rights was "ineffectual without implementation."

The letter to the foreign ministers points to the earlier protest and charges that in crushing democratic forces, Peron is furthering the aims of communism and aiding Russia.

Beveraggi-Allende said he was arrested with 19 others in September, 1948, without being told why, subjected to "blows and insults," and taken to a "small, dirty cell" in the National Penitentiary in Buenos Aires. Then, he said, he was taken to a long table and tied down so he couldn't move.

"For more than an hour," Beveraggi-Allende continued, "they applied one or more electric wires to different parts of my body, especially to the more sensitive organs. In order that there might not be any visible traces of this torture, I was covered with a blanket, and, while they were torturing me, music was played over a high powered loud-speaker to drown my screams of pain and despair."

He said they kept demanding he confess to an alleged complicity with American citizens he never knew in an imaginary plot aimed at the assassination of Peron. "I told them I would rather die than admit to such a falsehood," he said.

Beveraggi-Allende was kept in prison until April, 1949, when he was released on parole and the charge against him was reduced. But his parole was soon revoked and the previous charge against him restored. Before the police could jail him again, however, Beveraggi-Allende escaped with his wife and daughter through Uruguay to the United States.