Dear TIME-Reader:

EVERY Wednesday morning, a motorcyclist in green uniform speeds from Rio's Catete Palace to Galeao Airport to meet the plane that brings TIME'S Latin American edition from our Havana printers. At the airport, customs officers break open a packet of the magazines, then, before clearing any other cargo, they give a copy of TIME to the palace messenger. He rushes it to President Juscelino Kubitschek's secretary, Joao Luis, who delivers it immediately to the President, even if he has to interrupt a conference.

"As a weekly reader of TIME'S Latin American edition," remarked cover-to-cover Reader Kubitschek, "I wish to say its reports give me the best general view of what goes on in the world --and, I might add, sometimes of what goes on even in my own country."

To President Kubitschek and some 200,000 other Latin American readers, who include politicos in and out of power, intellectuals, artists and industrialists, this issue of TIME will have a special significance. It marks the 15th anniversary of the founding of the airmail edition, the first of our four foreign editions.

"TIME was the first great American magazine to concede to Latin America the importance it deserves," said Alberto Lleras Camargo, former President of Colombia and ex-secretary-general of the Organization of American States. "I have been a constant reader these 15 years. We Latin Americans owe much to TIME, not only to the Latin American edition but to the HEMISPHERE section in the domestic edition, which has done more to acquaint the U.S. with Latin America than any other effort, collective or individual, governmental or private."

Not all our readers south of the border have, I must admit, been so favorable. Peru's President Manuel Odria sometimes thought TIME'S frank reporting unkind, but he never did anything worse in reprisal than to nickname our Lima correspondent, Thomas A. Loayza, "Mal Tiempo." In Argentina, Juan Peron found TIME'S views of his dictatorship so infuriating that he arrested our correspondents, banned the magazine for six years (1947-53). But that did not keep TIME out of the country. Our circulation in Uruguay, across the River Plate, trebled. Argentines crossed the river to smuggle TIME into their country; one woman regularly went from Montevideo to Buenos Aires with the magazine in her girdle.

Anti-Peronists recall that in TIME they found the assurance that their cause was not forgotten. "It gave us hope to keep on fighting," said Lt. Gen. Julio Alberto Lagos, a longtime plotter against Peron, now commander-in-chief of the Argentine Army.

Cordially yours,

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