GAVIN SCOTT, our Buenos Aires bureau chief, was sipping a pisco sour in Santiago and planning to attend the inauguration of Chile's new President when the news of trouble began to come in from Bolivia. That country's Vice President was in open rebellion against the government, and other military men were siding with him. With his knowledge of Bolivia, which is part of his over-trie-mountains territory, Scott knew that the government there needed support of the military to continue in power, and recognized the situation as a symptom of serious difficulty.

After asking a friend to call his wife in Buenos Aires to tell her that he would not be home for the weekend after all, Scott caught the next jet to Lima, Peru, which promised the best connection into Bolivia's capital of La Paz. While he was in the air, the Bolivian situation was indeed coming apart, and TIME'S stringer there, Walter Montenegro, who had gone back to his native country in the past year after twelve years on the staff of LIFE EN ESPANOL in New York, was dodging rifle fire to keep New York informed of the coup in progress.

On the ground in Lima, Scott learned that President Victor Paz Estenssoro had fled Bolivia, and he immediately began to speculate on where Paz might go. Before long one of his sources tipped him off to exactly where. Scott rushed back to the Lima airport and there saw Paz dashing away from the terminal in a Cadillac. He traced Paz to a suburban Lima hotel, and was soon getting a whimsical greeting from the exiled President, who wanted to know why Scott hadn't made it to Bolivia before the coup began. "Where were you?" he joshed. "What happened? Did you miss a plane?"

After he got the exiled President's side of the story, Scott's next aim was to get to La Paz to join forces with Montenegro. Following a considerable delay because all flights had been canceled, Scott finally touched down at the 13,358-ft.-high airport in La Paz, his 18th landing there in the last 18 months. Before long he was talking with the new head of the government, General Rene Barrientos, who had once jokingly told Scott: "If you come here much more often, we're going to nationalize you." Scott found Barrientos uncertain about the specifics of the new government's course, but quick to take the position that "we are going to concentrate on economic plans, and this is the point of the U.S. program here."

In New York, using the cabled reports from Scott and Montenegro, Hemisphere Editor George Daniels and Writers Philip Osborne and David B. Tinnin sandwiched the Bolivia story in between analyses of recent coups in Latin America and the changing role of the military. While the biggest news of the week was made in Moscow, where our cover story in THE WORLD originated, Gavin Scott and the boys in THE HEMISPHERE section felt that it had been quite a week on the Andes beat too.

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