First Air Mail

The signers of the Tacna-Arica boundary agreement, which ended South America's 46-year-old sideache (TIME, May 27), were chosen last week as subjects for the first picture to be sent by direct air mail from Peru to the U. S.

Standing in the garden of the presidential palace at Lima are U. S. Ambassador Alexander Pollock Moore, widower of famed Lillian Russell; short-legged President Augusto Leguia of Peru; bland Ambassador Emiliano Figueroa-Larrain of Chile.

Six and one-half days was the flying photograph in transit, eight days faster than the fastest steamer.

The smile on Mr. Moore's face while the photograph was being taken suggested that now at last his countrymen must understand why he, after having been U. S. Ambassador to glamorous Spain, was willing to accept the little Peruvian portfolio. There was work to be done at Lima. He was needed to settle the Tacna-Arica question. Now he had attended to that matter, under President Hoover's guidance, of course. All this his smile seemed to imply --but it really meant nothing of the kind. The so-called Hoover Solution awarding Arica and its nitrates to Chile, and the twin mining province of Tacna to Peru, with a six-million-dollar payment by Chile to Peru to boot--all this had been virtually agreed upon by the two countries prior to President Hoover's interest in the problem or Ambassador Moore's arrival on the scene. The ambassadorial smile in the picture was purely ambassadorial. Why he wanted to go to little Peru after lordly Spain remained a mystery and a secret, except to a few well-informed Peruvians not yet ready to give complete details.