Recently our latest request for a permit to admit TIME to Argentina, where TIME has been banned for the last 21 months, was refused. The occasion of this refusal seems to me to be as good a time as any to review the events leading up to it. They fit a pattern that has become familiar to TIME-LIFE International, publishers of our overseas editions, in its business of distributing TIME to anyone who wants to read it anywhere in the world.

TIME'S difficulties with the Government of President Juan Domingo Peron began when the Aug. 18, 1947 issue of TIME was banned from Argentine newsstands and the mails without official explanation. We think that this was a delayed result of TIME'S July 14, 1947 cover story on Evita Peron, the President's wife.

At any rate, our Argentine distributor saw the Director General of Customs, who said that his orders to ban TIME had come down from the Ministry of Finance. Our Buenos Aires Correspondent (at that time, William Johnson) talked to the Subsecretariat of Information and Press, which denied all responsibility for the ban or even knowing about it. Johnson then saw James Bruce, U.S. Ambassador to Argentina, who promised to help, and Diego Luis Molinari, president of the Argentine Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, who got him an appointment with Foreign Minister Juan Atilio Bramuglia. The Foreign Minister agreed that "some solution on a legal basis was desirable," and agreed to talk to the President.

On Oct. 2 Ambassador Bruce and U.S. Counselor Guy Ray met with Peron and discussed the banning of TIME. No decision was reached. A week later Johnson and Peron had a long talk about "attacks" on Senora Peron, etc., and the President promised to take up the ban with his minister in charge of customs. He said that it would take some time to straighten things out.

Two months later it was announced that the ban was lifted. Each issue of TIME, however, would have to be reviewed by the Customs for "objection able material" before being released. For a while newsstand copies were admitted, but subscriber copies met a postal censorship which developed into an outright, though unannounced, embargo. No matter how hard he tried, Correspondent Johnson was never able to see the Postmaster General.

On Feb. 19, 1948, Roy Larsen, President of TIME Inc., in Buenos Aires on a trip, talked to President Peron and asked when we could expect the ban on TIME to be lifted. The Chief of State expressed his sympathetic understanding of TIME'S problems in Argentina and hoped "that bureaucratic blocks might soon be removed."

Then, on April 18, the Argentine Post Office Department announced officially that TIME henceforth was banned from the mails. Soon we learned that Foreign Minister Bramuglia thought the action of the Post Office was "outrageous," obviously the work of "a low-bracket bureaucrat."

He said that he would investigate immediately.

On May 31 our import license for newsstand copies was cancelled.

At that juncture we stopped sending newsstand copies of TIME to Argentina and wrote to our subscribers there, offering to refund their money. On June 14 we were advised by Ambassador Bruce that Foreign Minister Bramuglia had asked him to say that "the entire matter of TIME was fixed up satisfactorily and that TIME could move freely through the mails." We sent along some token shipments. No copies got through. We tried again in November. The result was the same. Meanwhile, all of our applications for an import license were consistently refused.

Although TIME'S circulation in Argentina was not large, two publishing principles are involved in this case:

1) our obligation to go to all lengths to see that our contract to deliver TIME to our subscribers is fulfilled;

2) our belief that people everywhere should have access to whatever publications they want to read.

Cordially yours,

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