MEXICO: Private Citizen

After six years as President of Mexico, Miguel Alemán was still much too active at 50 to retire to the somnolent dignity of elder-statesmanship. As a private citizen jealous of his privacy, Alemán left the capital to live on his ranches in northern Mexico. An office was set up in his name in Mexico City, but it had the hushed calm of a mortuary. His real business affairs were apparently being conducted in seemly privacy by close associates whom he had raised to wealth and power. Except for an occasional speech, the ex-President dropped out of the news.

But last week Private Citizen Alemán was unwillingly back in the news. Using the name Miguel A. Valdés (his mother’s family name) he took off from New York on a Pan-American Stratocruiser for Paris. He was accompanied by five companions, of whom Mexico City papers named only such notables as Carlos Serrano, ex-president of the Senate, and Antonio Díaz Lombardo, former director of social security and one of the new millionaires of the Alemán administration. Within a few hours the capital buzzed with another name. According to the passenger manifest, it was that of Alemán’s great and enduring friend, Brazilian Actress Leonora Amar, whom he had raised to stardom in Mexican films (TIME, Feb. 11, 1946). Handsome Miguel’s friendship with the sultry Leonora was well known in Mexico, but previously both the President and the gossip had been discreet.

As the fun-loving former President and his gay companions settled down in Paris’ Hotel Plaza-Athéne, near the Champs Elysées, his friends in Mexico found a neat explanation for the trip: he had gone abroad to prepare the way for a family vacation next month.