URUGUAY: Hands Across the River

The President-elect of Uruguay’s National Council and the acting Foreign Minister of Argentina held a secret meeting on the last day of 1954 aboard a yacht anchored in the broad River Plate, which separates the two countries. Purpose: to discuss ways and means of lifting, or at least puncturing, the so-called “tin curtain” between democratic Uruguay and the Argentina of Strongman Juan Perón.

In pre-Perón days, the Plate was more a thoroughfare than a barrier; some 300,000 Argentines and Uruguayans traveled back and forth across the river each year. After Perón took power, Uruguay became a haven for Argentine exiles, and from the exiles issued a stream of manifestos and periodicals denouncing the strongman. In 1951 Perón & Co. retaliated by requiring a special police permit for travel to Uruguay. Traffic across the Plate dwindled almost to the zero point.

Both governments stood to gain by making the Plate a thoroughfare again, and after the election last November of Luis Batlle Berres (TIME, Dec. 13) as Uruguay’s new Council President, both sides agreed to a midriver meeting between Batlle Berres and Argentina’s Interior Minister (and acting Foreign Minister) Angel Gabriel Borlenghi. Last week, as a result of that meeting, Argentina abolished the police permit for travel across the Plate, and on both sides of the river ferryboats promptly took aboard crowds of passengers.