Argentine Mystery

When a news service fires an able correspondent the boss usually knows why. Last week the bosses of United Press were burning cables to Buenos Aires, trying to learn why they had fired Terrence Patrick Farrell. Correspondent Farrell was London-bound aboard the S. S. Highland Patriot, on which he had been firmly planted by Argentine detectives fortnight ago. President Augustin Justo had deported him.

Correspondent Farrell, it appeared, had been summarily ousted from Argentina for sending out "exaggerated and untrue" accounts of the Eucharistic Congress at Buenos Aires (TIME, Oct. 22). Specific charge: Farrell had written "that Gauchos and Indians participated in a procession on the night nearly 200,000 men attended a midnight mass in the Plaza de Mayo." No less mystified than United Press editors were Catholic clerics in Manhattan. None believed that their Church could take offense at such an innocent statement. The general coverage of the Congress by Terrence Patrick Farrell, an Irishman and a Catholic, had been well received in the U. S.

Awaiting mail reports from UP's Vice President James Irvin Miller and General News Manager Robert Jacob Bender, both in Buenos Aires, newsmen at home ventured two guesses:

1) Jealous of the fact that 96% of their population is of white European descent, Argentines resent the notion abroad that they include large numbers of Indians and half-breeds.

2) Beneath the whole fuss is a nationalistic movement against foreign newspapermen in Argentina. The Farrell case prompted the Argentine Press Club to issue a surprising manifesto urging that only Argentine citizens be permitted to act as correspondents of foreign newspapers and press associations within the country.

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