Pressure in Peru

Pedro Beltran is one of Peru's few enlightened aristocrats. As Prime Minister from 1959 to 1961, he brought the country back from the brink of economic collapse with a hard-nosed policy of "austerity within the framework of a free economy." For the past 22 years, Beltran, now 75, has also used his sober, middle-of-the-road La Prensa in Lima to protest both social injustice from the far right and suppression of freedoms from the left. His targets have included the leftist military regime that came to power in 1968. Though Beltran's criticism has been relatively mild, the government of President Juan Velasco Alvarado is forcing him to give up his paper.

Last year Beltran accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Virginia and was away from Peru precisely six months and eleven days. Whereupon the government invoked a recent "freedom of the press" regulation that requires newspaper owners to live in the country continuously for at least six months a year. Technically a lawbreaker, Beltran was ordered to sell his controlling interest in the paper.

As expected, his appeal of the decision was rejected, though he got some support. The Inter-American Press Association protested and dailies in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and the U.S. joined in with editorial condemnation. Even Lima's independent El Comercio risked the regime's wrath by siding with Beltran. But the government has obviously been gunning for him; it has already hounded one of his editors into exile and ordered Beltran's gracious, 300-year-old Lima town house razed in the name of urban renewal.

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