Religion: Free Air?

The Argentine Baptists and Methodists sent a joint letter last week to Admiral Alberto Tessaire, Acting Minister of the Interior. A mysterious order, they complained, had excluded non-Catholic radio programs from the air of Argentina. They had protested, they said, but they could not even discover who had issued the order, only that it came “from higher up.” Their programs (the Baptists had two half-hour programs on Sundays) were tolerant, noncontroversial. And the Argentine constitution specifically guarantees religious freedom.

There are only some 200,000 Protestants among the 14,000,000 people of Argentina. Split into 30 sects, they are hardly a threat to the dominant Catholic Church. But the only answer the Baptists and the Methodists got was a demand from Government functionaries for revenue stamps to stick on their plaintive letter.