ARGENTINE MINERS STAGE HUNGER MARCH

BY YEATS The small Andean mining town of Malargue in western Argentina is all but snowbound.

The sky is grey, the mountains stark. Last week with temperatures 15 degrees below freezing a straggling column formed up in the streets.

Normally the men would be at work in the Santa Cruz Manganese mine on which the town's 11,000 inhabitants are completely dependent. Last week it closed for good.

The black lines of marchers moved off across the snow. Behind them, in trucks were their wives and children, food and supplies.

In front of them was a 250mile trek to the provincial capital of Mendoza to demand jobs and food.

After about 40 miles the column reached the town of San Rafael. Meetings were held. When they moved off 1,000 more jobless miners fell in behind.

Workers all along the route came forward with food and supplies for the 'hunger march', now nearly 2,000-strong.

Back in . Malargue it was decided that mass rally should be called to discuss the situation.

Three thousand people took to the streets. The local radio station was seized and renamed 'Voice of the People'.

As news about the rally was broadcast thousands more left their homes and gathered for a meeting claimed as the biggest in the region's history.

Workers stormed the town hall and the mayor promptly resigned. Other public buildings were also brought under occupation and roads in and GET NEARER TO GOD, SAYS VICAR The religious views of President Richard Nixon have come under scrutiny La clergyman from Princeton University, the Rev Charles Henderson ... and found wanting.

Nixon is wont to justify his most reactionary and sanguinary measures with an appeal to spiritual and moral values. To pull out of South Vietnam, he says, would be 'a renunciation of our morality'.

His views on drugs, sex, law and order are all clothed in an aura of moral and even religious self-righteousness.

All this, says Henderson, is inadequate. Nixon represents the old Protestant ethic of hard work (has he ever done any?), competitive individual effort and puritanism of the Billy Graham variety. But this La religion of a fading majority'.

Henderson calls for some hotted-up religion more closely attuned to the youth ar d able to have a wider appe il. He out of the town were blocked.

A people's government was set up and a General Strike call, obeyed down to the last man and boy, turned Malargue into a ghost town in the snow.

Back in Buenos Aires President General Alejandro Lanusse sifted through reports of persistent rioting in a dozen Argentine cities.

In Buenos Aires itself troops battled with student demonstrators struggling to reach the prison ship 'Granaderos' At La Plata, Cordoba, and almost every other major city in Argentina, martial law was clamped down after students and workers demonstrated in the streets and occupied college buildings and factories.

President General Lanusse decided the people's government and the free elections Top right: Peron - running for Presidency. Above: General Lannuse brought in military control scheduled for Malargue had to be stopped and by mid-week the town too was under military control.

Meanwhile the hunger march arrived in Mendoza says: The tragedy of Mr Nixon is not that of an evil man who has abandoned the public trust, but rather that of a moral man whose most cherished ideals are not commensurate with the realities of the time' Rather should we say that Nixon's sanctimonious hypocrisy represents one aspect of capitalism in decay while Henderson's call for a new constellation of values' based on a broader morality represents another.

The declining force of the Nixon ideology actually reveals the moral bankruptcy of the class system which he represents, dominated by a competitive struggle for the Almighty Dollar. This god is now being shaken to its foundations, both by the breakdown of the monetary system of which it was the centre and by the crisis at home.

The old landmarks by which the ruling class of America traced its course are being torn up. Henderson's attempt to stake out new ones reflects the desperate crisis which it confronts. many of the miners and their families underfed and suffer-