AN ANNIVERSARY LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

Ten years — 522 issues — ago our Latin American Edition was founded. Then called TIME Air Express, it was the world’s first plane-delivered magazine.

After our south-of-the-border readers approved the experiment, it became the forefather of the various international editions which made The Weekly Newsmagazine as much of a weekly habit in Rangoon as it is in Chicago.

The idea of a magazine light enough to be carried economically by airplane was a natural for TIME. We had always worked on the principle that the quality of reporting and editing — not the amount of paper covered by words — is the proper standard of good journalism.

Therefore, it seemed sensible that we should be the first to put our editorial material into a magazine that would ride the world’s airlines in bulk.

Some readers had beaten us to the draw. One fabulous but informed Maharaja had been receiving TIME by air to India, at an annual subscription rate of $585.60. But most subscribers outside continental North America — a staunch little group of 26,000 — waited for their magazines to arrive by ship.

The first “for keeps” test of air delivery began with the May 5 issue in 1941 when the spread of World War II was making hemispheric trade and defense more important than ever before. In fact, the editors had already picked for the cover story Argentina’s President Ramón S. Castillo, then tackling the problem of his country’s blocked trade to Europe. Twenty thousand copies of this issue, printed on special light paper, were flown by Pan American Clippers to Latin American cities.

Snow in July. These copies reached subscribers ahead of the last three boat-shipped issues. Response was tremendous, the heartening kind that kept us at the job during the hectic war years to follow. High on the new list of readers was Manuel Bianchi, a Chilean who had taken the first Air Express subscription ever sold. Now Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and one of London’s senior diplomats, Bianchi recently looked back over the decade of cover-to-cover reading and called TIME’S Latin American Edition “a major instrument for understanding.” Added the ambassador: “It helps our countries understand the United States and gives us a fresh look at ourselves.” Air Express brought us a hatful of unexpected headaches. We were victimized from distant places by the foibles of nature and of man. Our Buenos Aires subscribers complained enough to make us realize that a July snow over high Andean peaks can ground TIME-carrying planes. Elsewhere, similar protests led us to the certain knowledge that some postmen liked to “collect” American stamps and magazines. Then there were customs, censorship and currency, all subject to violent and sudden change.

Ponies. & Pix. In South America, we gained the experience that helped us fill the wartime need for fast delivery of news all over the world. The next job was a limited edition that we flew over the Nazi submarine blockade to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Dr. Wellington Koo and 1,097 other allied leaders in Britain.

When wartime priorities strained the world’s air transport to the limit, we took another tack. Photographs of the pages in a whole issue of TIME took up less plane space than a paperbacked detective story. So we flew to distant points film positives of our pages, from which local presses could print copies for quick delivery to civilians and to allied forces on nearby fronts. At war’s peak, we were printing some 834,000 overseas copies at 19 places for distribution to 180 countries and possessions. Among the 19: Bogotá, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Teheran and Sydney. Where transport problems were worst, as in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Burma and the Pacific, we sent out pocket-sized “Pony” editions. Smallest of all was the Navy V-Mail Edition (4¼ in. by 5¼ in.). At war’s end, all these editions were consolidated into the present four international editions now serving 1,419,000 readers outside the U.S. In addition to the Latin American Edition, grandfather of them all, there are the

Canadian, Atlantic and Pacific Editions.

Decade of Progress. The Latin American experiment also demonstrated a basic journalistic principle: most men & women the world over want to read honestly reported news, not propaganda.

Many have disagreed with this belief.

Within a year after the air edition began in 1941, when “Good Neighbor” was more of a catch phrase than a policy, a few well-meaning people in the U.S. took us to task for publishing in South America the same news stories we distributed at home. They felt that in the interest of hemispheric unity TIME Air Express should sugar-coat its stories about the U.S. and print only “diplomatic” (i.e., bland and friendly) news about the republics to the south.

We would have dropped the whole export project rather than hoodwink readers in any such fashion, but we passed the complaint along to more than 400 business and political leaders in this hemisphere. Ninety percent of them came back with firm support for our decision.

Our policy of telling the news as we see it gets us into trouble with authoritarian governments anywhere — Latin America not excepted. But the censor’s scissors and the dictator’s edicts only heighten the educated reader’s determination to get the news. Over the past decade, even the “strong men” have tried to govern by more & more democratic methods and have become less & less prone to interfere with what people read. Though single issues are sometimes confiscated, only Perón’s Argentina still bans TIME. In all countries, of course, TIME-readers make full and open criticism of any story they do not like. This includes the 16 (out of 20) Presidents of Latin American republics who read the magazine each week. In short, public discussion is replacing censorship’s primitive way.

Self-Portrait. Our editors recognized Latin America’s proper place in world news well before Air Express began. Because of their awareness, TIME was the second U.S. publication (after the New York Times) to operate permanent news bureaus in South America. Over the years, this network of correspondents has expanded. It has supplied important stories for most sections of the magazine and is responsible, of course, for our regular Hemisphere section. Latin American stories have ranged all the way from the Business section’s reports on spreading air routes to the Music section’s reviews of compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos.

One of the best stories was the Art section’s cover on Diego Rivera, the only man ever to paint his own cover portrait on commission from TIME. Some of the other cover stories along the way: Puerto Rico’s Governor Muñoz Marín, Nicaragua’s Boss Somoza, Mexico’s President Alemán, Brazil’s President Vargas.

Citizen Journalists. Today an alltime high of 31 correspondents keep TIME editors posted on news events between the Rio Grande and Cape Horn. Five are staff correspondents based in our four Latin American news bureaus. They are assisted by five “legmen,” each a citizen of the country where his bureau is located. The other 21 are string correspondents. These journalists, many of whom are pictured on the map below, cable some 19,000 words of news research to us each week. Eleanor Welch, Assistant Chief of Foreign Correspondents and a veteran reporter herself, keeps in constant touch with them by letters and cables and drops by to see them on an annual working visit. Miss Welch also coordinates their assignments with the work done by Bill White, former Rio Bureau Chief who now covers the Washington end of TIME’S Latin American Stories.

Both correspondents and editors are constantly aware of the many different social and economic patterns found throughout the vast and changing areas south of the U.S. Each week they try to give TIME-readers news stories which tell the ways in which people with different cultural heritages think, act and live. Much help in this effort comes from the stringers, who are usually citizens and top journalists of the countries they cover for TIME. Among them are Bolivian Columnist Walter Montenegro, Chilean Radio Commentator Mario Planet and Peruvian Correspondent Thomas A. Loayza, a veteran of such varied assignments as the Spanish Civil War and the eighth Pan-American Conference of 1938.

Big & Booming. The five staff correspondents in Latin America are mostly veterans of the world’s other news centers. Buenos Aires Bureau Chief Frank Shea has at one time or another worked out of Rome, Paris, Bucharest and Athens, later was TIME’S State Department correspondent in Washington. Mexico City Chief Martin O’Neil once was head of our San Francisco bureau, later covered assignments for us in Germany.

Fast travel over South America’s great distances is the toughest part of the staff correspondent’s job. Said Rio Bureau Chief Frank White a fortnight ago : “We often hold our story conferences in the back of our Jeepster. Everybody sleeps with a map of Brazil, plus assorted airlines timetables, on his night table.” Just back from a 7,000-mile trip up the Amazon Valley, White sometimes covers points in northern Brazil that are closer to the United States than to his home in Rio.

White recently had this to say about his assignment: “With its huge untapped frontiers, its booming, get-rich-quick economy, Brazil sometimes gives me the impression I’m reviewing great chapters in U.S. history. It’s big, it’s challenging, and it’s fun.”

The same can be said for all of our last decade’s work and friendship in Latin America.

Cordially,