ONE of TIME'S biggest beats is Latin-America, a reach of 6,000 miles from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego. Reporters fan out from four TIME bureaus; experienced part-time correspondents cover every major city. Copies of the Latin American edition are flown to most of the area the same day that TIME goes on sale in the U.S.

The reception to TIME'S reports of Latin America--whether ardent endorsement or furious disagreement--is always emphatic. TIME is apt to be denounced for printing a scandal of the reader's own country and praised by the same reader for exposing the unlovely truth in a neighboring land. TIME is eagerly sought as a window on the world, and denounced as an unwanted interventionist in foreign affairs. A story of impressive accomplishment in Brazil recently inspired President Juscelino Kubitschek to pull out his Portuguese-English dictionary and translate it personally for the local press. Another story of the drought that is starving thousands in northeast Brazil moved Rio's Diario Carioca to comment: "How sad! How true! How bitter that our national disaster and disgrace, which we all knew about and tried to forget, should be reported to the whole world in TIME !"

The intense reaction comes partly from the different perspective on events as seen by Latin Americans. What to a U.S. citizen might seem a quixotic, comic, futile or irrelevant revolution can be brave, idealistic, tragic or admirable to its courageous participants. The army that is a means of national defense in the U.S. and Europe can be policeman and intermittent government in much of Latin America. To the U.S. reporter, born to a heritage of liberty and democracy, the Latin American, in his political fight for liberty, democracy and economic sufficiency, can seem mercurial, sometimes misguided. To the Latin American, with his rich Latin culture, the North American can seem peremptory, didactic, impatient.

TIME'S reporters and writers strive mightily, within the framework of their U.S. upbringing, to understand and report accurately on the newsmaking Latin Americans. This week, for an exhaustively reported story on a major Latin American country and its new President, illustrated with eight pages of color photographs, see THE HEMISPHERE, The Paycheck Revolution.

For the portrait of Mexico's President Adolfo Lopez Mateos, TIME turned to one of Mexico's leading artists, Rufino Tamayo. A stout antiCommunist, Tamayo has long been frozen out of the bread-and-butter work of decorating the public buildings of his native land by the Communist clique of muralists headed by David Siqueiros and the late Diego Rivera. As a result, he leads the life of a wandering expatriate, painted this week's cover in Paris. He recently finished another Paris commission--a mural depicting Prometheus bringing heavenly fire to men, in the newly opened UNESCO headquarters--and reproduced this week in color in ART.

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