Teasing President

For almost three months Jose Melgar, who fired a bullet into the midriff of President Luis Sanchez Cerro (TIME, March 14), has sat in his cell under sentence of death, fear gnawing at his heart.

Time & again Peru's Congress has hinted to the President that, since he was not killed, he ought to commute the death sentence. But President Sanchez Cerro is as mentally relentless as he is physically robust and tough. Congress, knowing this, has tried to wheedle him by the flattery of promoting him in military rank. President Sanchez Cerro was unmoved. Lounging at home in a $150 silk bathrobe he let Jose Melgar sit in jail.

But even to Sanchez Cerro, enough is enough. Last week he commuted the death sentence to imprisonment for 25 years.

Just now President Sanchez Cerro's government is attempting to line up South American states in a defensive tariff union against the U. S. Strongly urging this policy, the daily El Comercio declared last week: "We must watch closely the coming British Empire conference at Ottawa. . . . We must again look to England and Europe for markets for our products. . . . The United States should never again speak to us about 'Pan-Americanism,' as that word from now on is without soul and without force. We have seen what happened in Nicaragua and Haiti."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.