This summer several members of the staff in charge of TIME'S overseas editions made swings through most of the countries of Latin America. Recently I talked to Jack Stephens and Jim Alberse, two members of TIME-LIFE International's circulation department who were just back from such a tour. The primary purpose of their trip was to help prepare for a new edition of LIFE in Spanish, but along the way they picked up some interesting facts about TIME in Latin America. .

TIME, they discovered, is often mealtime fare. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, Stephens walked into a hotel dining room for lunch and found about 20 people seated--four of them reading the new issue of TIME. At Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana Hotel, Alberse saw one family group chattering at the dinner table, except for the father, who was reading TIME. At another table, two men shared one copy, discussing it story by story.

At a bar in Sao Paulo, Alberse met a Canadian who said he had made a fortune speculating in wheat and cotton. A great many of his major decisions, he said, had been based on the news he read in TIME. Said the Canadian: "Every Friday morning I have a boy waiting to get the first copy that arrives, so that I can read it right away. It gives me the smell of the world."

Even those who do not read TIME seemed amazingly familiar with TIME'S stories. A possible explanation suggested by Alberse: the common practice of many newspapers which reprint something from the magazine each week, "whether it has any local importance or not." Many editors also use TIME as their own source of much background information. An executive of Colombia's El Tiempo told Alberse: "We read in TIME things that we can find nowhere else, and that we couldn't print ourselves."

Stephens was also impressed by the high regard in which TIME'S correspondents are held in most Latin American capitals. Once, when he was with Chilean Correspondent Mario Planet, who was buying stamps at a hotel desk, the clerk pointed to Planet and told Stephens: "Here is the best reporter in Santiago."

Alberse was in Peru when Correspondent Tom Loayza was getting the story on Swiss Mountain Climber Marcus Broennimann and his conquest of formidable Salcantay (TIME, July 28). Loayza, in Lima, had an assistant stationed closer to the scene at Cuzco, two hours from Lima by plane. Loayza was trying to get a picture which another mountain climber had taken of Broennimann on the mountaintop. Loayza tried to phone Cuzco. waited six hours to get a call through. Then his assistant had to travel 60 miles along mountain roads to a farm where Broennimann was resting with injuries he suffered during his climb. The mountain climber was reluctant to give up his pictures (he had only the negatives), because he wanted them as proof of his feat.

He finally let TIME have them, and the film was rushed back to Cuzco to make a plane to Lima -- one of three planes to make the trip each week.

The pilot carried the pictures himself. Loayza, waiting at the airport, first mistook another for the pilot, but managed to get the pictures just as the pilot was leaving in a taxi. He put them on another plane to New York. They arrived on time, and a picture of Broennimann on the mountain peak appeared with the story.

In Puerto Rico, Governor Munoz Marin suggested to Alberse that TIME do more stories on his country, which he described as "Latin by temperament and geography, American by orientation and mental outlook." The governor also offered to look over any such stories before publication. Alberse told him that would not be possible. Replied Munoz, reminiscing: "Yes, I know. That's even true of cover stories about the Governor of Puerto Rico" (TIME, May 2, 1949).

Cordially yours,

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