The Commuters

Some notable commuters to & from Latin America and eternity were beset by notable vicissitudes last week.

In Panama, there were low mutterings of "Que horror!" (Outrageous!). From Havana, Trygve Lie cabled apologies. On his whirl through the Antilles and Central America, he had missed a banquet tossed for him by the Lions Club in Panama City's swank Union Club. Some 133 guests, including the entire diplomatic corps, the entire Panamanian Cabinet, the presidents of the National Assembly and Supreme Court, waited more than an hour before deciding that the U.N. Secretary-General had stood them up. Lie, reportedly annoyed when his official chauffeur got lost or mislaid, proceeded to Cuba. Panamanians were most piqued because they had ransacked the neighborhood for a Norwegian flag for the occasion.

In Manhattan, Brazil's magnetic, dyspeptic Oswaldo Aranha breathed easier and ate better. After scrutinizing 50 X-ray plates, specialists had found no trace of the ailment which has been troubling the former Ambassador to Washington. Aranha got the news in the nick of time. This week he is taking on a strenuous job: Brazilian delegate to the U.N. Security Council. During March, he will be the council's president.

In Paris, Senora Lucienne Benitez Rexach, wife of a Puerto Rican millionaire, drowned her sorrows in champagne. From her hotel suite outside Paris, thieves had stolen $435,000 of her jewels and pocket money. But the victim, who before her recent marriage was a cafe singer known to Montmartre as Mome Moineau (Kid Sparrow), considers the burglars outrageously inefficient: in the same suite they overlooked another cache of jewels (value: $500,000).

In Mexico City, Cinemactor Jorge Veeez and his wife (by civil law marriage), Margarita Richardi de Avila Camacho, missed the plane that was to whisk them (via Manhattan) to Rome for a Catholic Church wedding. Senora Velez is the widow of Maximino Avila Camacho, fabulously wealthy brother of Mexico's wartime president. As the car with its police escort left for the airport, another car drew abreast, poured in a fusillade of 22 Tommy-gun slugs. Velez and his wife were wounded; her sister-in-law was killed. Jailed for questioning, Luis Avila Binder, Maximino's son by another wife, charged that Senora Velez had grabbed most of Maximino's $25 million fortune. Said Cinemactor Velez, recovering from his second shooting in 60 days (the first in the back as he was leaving his office in downtown Mexico City): "I don't even know how much money my wife has because I have my dignity." Asked if he would continue his trip to Rome, he replied ruefully: "Only if President Truman will lend me the protection of the atomic bomb." Nevertheless, at week's end, the Velezes zoomed off to the U.S.

Out of the Shadow of eternity, where they have rested for some 300 years, some strange figures were exposed to 20th Century stares in the Mexican village of Tepepan last week. Workmen, removing the floor of an ancient church, disclosed 20 bodies, most of them dressed in priestly garb or nun's habit. All were mummified and remarkably preserved. But nobody was quite sure how they came to be there or what to do with them next.

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