The Incredible

Out of her Rolls Royce popped a peppery dowager. She crossed the sidewalk to the sedate five:story pile, a block from Government House in Buenos Aires. Two policemen, instead of the usual two liveried flunkeys, stood in the high-arched doorway. Head high, shoulders back, Dona Zelmira Paz de Anchorena turned, walked stiffly back to her limousine. She had come to see with her own eyes what she and many another Argentine had believed impossible: La Prensa, one of the world's great newspapers, had been forced to close for the first time in its 74 years.

The incredible happened last week by personally signed decree of President Edelmiro Farrell. His high-handed Government, had long sought an excuse to suppress Dona Zelmira's paper,* had found a flimsy one: that an editorial criticizing proposed economies of Government-run municipal hospitals had failed to confine itself to "constructive criticism" (a decreed requirement of the press).

Five days later La Prensa's Director Alberto Gainza Paz, handsome nephew of Don Ezequiel and Dona Zelmira, met the Government's price for lifting the suspension: it printed the Farrell regime's defense of its economies (one item: rats had been exterminated, thus saving the cost of feeding them to prevent their nibbling at hospital records).

Meanwhile the Army-ruled Federal Commissioner in Entre Rios, taking his cue from the Big Boss in B.A., forbade provincial newspapers--at cost of permanent suppression--to make any mention whatsoever of such dangerous subjects as the Constitution, freedom or religion.

* Few Argentines know that she is co-owner, with her ailing, 73-year-old brother, Don Ezequiel Pedro Paz.

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