Men Who Came to Dinner

Next to the Paraguayan embassy's main entrance on bustling Calle Via-monte in downtown Buenos Aires, a small, dark doorway ducks down into a forbidding, grottolike cellar. A bored cop stands guard outside, and some times passers-by stop to stare. For seven years, nine months, two weeks and a few odd days, the cellar has been home to Brothers Juan Carlos Cardoso, 46, and Luis Amadeo Cardoso, 41, making them easily the current champions in that treasured Latin American institution known as political asylum. Only Peru's Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, who fled to the Colombian embassy in Lima in 1949 -- holed up for five years, three months, four days -- ever approached their record.

Electric Needle. "We have had many chances to escape," says Juan Cardoso, "but if we were to leave now, it might be an admission of guilt." For Argentines, an admission is hardly necessary.

When Dictator Juan Peron was in power, the Cardosos were notorious for winning "confessions" from the regime's prisoners. Their prize persuader was the picana electrica, an "electric needle" that delivered a 12,000-volt jolt. Applied to the lips, soles of the feet or genitals, the picana made the victim convulse with shrieking pain, while leaving no marks. "With the picana" Juan Cardoso once boasted, "you can extract in one session confessions that would have taken four days of sissified questioning."

For four years the brothers plied their trade. In 1952 Eva Peron gave Juan Cardoso a gold cup as "best detective of the year." Then when Peron was finally ousted in 1955, the boys hopped on a motorcycle, raced to the Paraguayan embassy and requested political asylum. The new Argentine government angrily demanded their return as common criminals. But the Paraguayans insisted that the Cardosos were political refugees.

All the Comforts. Meantime, the boys settled down in the embassy's dank cellar. To keep from getting on each other's nerves, they have partitioned it into two separate living quarters, installed a makeshift bathroom and two kitchenettes with refrigerators, rewired the lighting, painted the walls, added furniture, even acquired television sets. They do calisthenics to keep in shape, and to while away the days, they paint, write letters and read (translations of Sherwood Anderson, Rousseau, Hemingway). The Paraguayan ambassador gives them money for food and clothes; Juan picks up a little extra from a flower shop investment down the street; Luis has a small appliance-repair business. In the evenings their families come by for dinner; several nights a week their wives sleep in.

How long will their asylum last? The two countries still argue over the brothers. Argentina refuses them safe conduct to Paraguay's capital of Asuncion. Tiny Paraguay, eager to stand up to its big neighbor, is determined not to turn them over. The Cardosos grimly look forward to 1967, when the statute of limitations should run out. Then, after twelve years in asylum, they hope to be free, having set a record that is likely to stand a while.

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