Conquering Hero

Radios blared it, headlines screamed it, and the buses and trucks that carried jubilant Chileans into Santiago bore it as a legend: "The Antarctic Is Ours." Wind-bronzed President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla was home from his flag-planting expedition to Graham Land (O'Higgins Land to Chileans) where he had defied the British lion (TIME, March 1). He had set off an explosion of Chilean patriotism, and made himself the most popular man in the country. In Santiago last week, 200,000 Chileans cheered him when he landed at the airport, shouted vivas as ponchoed huasos (cowboys) escorted him to the presidential palace, La Moneda.

From La Moneda's balcony, Gonzalez Videla spoke to his countrymen massed in the Plaza Constitucion below. Cried he: "Chile is obliged to denounce to its brothers of the Americas the threats of aggression by Great Britain, since this aggression is not only against Chile but against all American nations." Moreover, he said, there was one American brother who was not standing, four-square with the hemisphere. Gonzalez Videla meant the U.S., whose Secretary of State George Marshall had recently announced a "hands off" attitude toward both the antarctic and British Honduras (see col. 2).

Although Chile will demand a hearing on Antarctica at the Bogota conference this spring, Gonzalez Videla intended to handle things in his own direct-action way . for the time being. With Bogota-bound Pascual la Rosa, Argentine Foreign Office big shot, he signed an accord for a common front against Britain and negotiation of disputed Argentine-Chilean claims in the polar regions.

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