CHILE: Bienvenida

Bright-painted vivas flecked the white walls of Santiago. Banners shouted bienvenida (welcome). From Santiago’s Los Cerrillos airport to the Plaza Constitution, palm fronds and the hammer-&-sickle festooned the streets. All day and far into the torchlit night, 8,000 cheering Chilean Communists gave the first Soviet diplomat in Chilean history a pointedly ideological welcome.

Blond, 200-lb. Russian Ambassador Dmitri Alexandrovich Zhukov, who had chartered a DC-4 in Newark last week and had flown down with his wife and two children, seemed more embarrassed than pleased by the flamboyant reception. He hastily denied a local Communist boast that he was Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s nephew, said he merely shared the same name—”just as Fernandez is the name of your Foreign Minister and also that of a prize fighter, Antonio Fernández.”

But Chile’s noisy Communists, whose strike tactics have split the Popular Front and lost them prestige recently within the trade union movement, were not to be put off by that sort of modesty. The Communist El Siglo exclaimed over the new Ambassador for 14 columns, compared him favorably with Henry Wallace, and noted proudly that he had mastered two words of Spanish —”Viva Chile”—”in a very few minutes.”