Miguel's Travels

After retiring from office last December, ex-President Miguel Aleman wound up some of his more pressing personal affairs in Mexico City and went off to relax under the pleasure domes of Paris. As General Leon Osorio began shooting off charges back home that his administration had siphoned off about 7 billion pesos ($800 million) of public funds, some observers in Mexico City suggested that Aleman had retired to Europe for substantially the same reason his good friend Bill O'Dwyer had settled down in Mexico.

But at 50, the dashing former President was not quite ready to settle down. Last month, abandoning his sumptuous quarters in Paris, he took off on a grand tour behind the Iron Curtain. The Mexican embassy called it a nonpolitical, fact-finding trip. In company with a Mexican friend, he flew to Vienna, Prague and on to Warsaw. There he met assorted Polish bigwigs and took in a Communist exhibition, "This Is America," featuring a display of the toy bazookas, flamethrowers and junior space suits which war-crazed, blood-thirsty American parents buy their kids. At week's end, the former President flew on back, in high spirits, to Paris, announced that he hoped later to visit Moscow. Perplexed Mexicans, reading of his travels, recalled that it was Aleman's government that first put out the idea last year of ending the Korean war by turning over prisoners to neutral countries. They guessed that Aleman had taken his trip to line up support for a peacemaking formula which, if it worked, might win him the Nobel peace prize he dearly covets as a respectable crown for his political career.

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