Materializing Magnate

Bolivia's missing tin baron suddenly reappeared in La Paz last week. Massive, enormously wealthy Mauricio Hochschild, who vanished on his way to the Chilean Embassy 17 days before, finally turned up there. With him was his general manager, who had also disappeared.

They said that they had spent the entire 17 days together in a room ten feet square. They had slept on mats thrown on the floor. It had been a harrowing experience. Said the tin baron: "There's no mystery." That was all either would say.

A reporter in La Paz tried to telephone the news to his office in Buenos Aires. Bolivian military censors cut him off.

But a little news did leak out. Hochschild, jailed twice as a political conspirator, had vanished during the Bolivian national elections. The story was that he had been kidnapped by a group of Army officers pledged to remove all active opponents of Bolivia's new regime. One of the regime's professed aims is to whittle down the power of the three mining magnates (Simon I. Patino, Carlos Victor Aramayo, Hochschild) who have long dominated Bolivian politics.

Patino was last reported to be riding out the Bolivian blow in Montreal. Hochschild was rumored to be about to fly to Chile. His promise to leave Bolivia may have been the condition of his release. Only Aramayo would be left in Bolivia. Last week Senora Aramayo, her lips shut tight, arrived by plane in Buenos Aires.

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