Are You With It?

A routine story went out on the A.P. wire from Buenos Aires, where Peronistas are out to get rid of Argentina's two biggest dailies by annoying them to death (TIME, March 31). The sum of A.P.'s dispatch was that the Government had sued to collect multimillion-dollar duties on newsprint that oppositionist La Prensa and La Nacion had imported over the last nine years. (By law, newsprint for "cultural publications" is duty-free.) In Bogota, Colombia, El Tiempo picked up the dispatch and ran a thundering editorial calling on the press of the hemisphere to lay Juan Peron's press-badgering before the Rio Conference.

Peron's information office, which regards newsmen and newspapers as being either with the Government, or against it, reacted promptly and typically. It blasted A.P. as "an agency which upsets continental harmony," and the Peronist press took it up from there.

The Government had been pouty about A.P. for some time, especially since a June dispatch had relayed the uncomplimentary comment of a London daily on Eva Peron's proposed British visit. * Foreign Minister Juan A. Bramuglia discreetly let it be known that it might be a nice idea for slight, 39-year-old Rafael Ordorica, head of the A.P. bureau, to leave. Last week A.P. Boss Kent Cooper called Ordorica home "for consultation," because, said he, the correspondent had been in Argentina for six years, and it was time they had a chat.

* Last week's shipment of TIME'S Latin American edition was held up by the customs office in Buenos Aires, apparently in a delayed reaction to the recent cover story on Senora Peron.

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