CHILE: Now, Voyager

LATIN AMERICA

President Gabriel González Videla is an energetic man who likes to go places and do things, usually decides to go and do them on the spur of the moment. In a little more than a year in office, he has flown to Rio and Buenos Aires, swum ashore from a capsized rowboat on a south Chilean lake, and crash-dived aboard a U.S. submarine off Valparaiso. In his fancy presidential DC-3, he has visited so many local fairs that Chileans are sure his travels already exceed those of all his predecessors put together. Their nickname for their traveling President: "Don Gavion" (Mr. Airplane).

Last week, Don Gavion was off for the antarctic on his most venturesome voyage yet. He got the idea when his antarctic expert and army chief, General Ramón Cañas Montalva, returned from the south. "The way to enforce our claims to the antarctic," he told the President, "is to take possession."

That was all González needed. With his family, aides and two newspapermen, he sailed for Punta Arenas, 1,400 miles south of Santiago. Once at sea, the reporters were permitted to radio that "the President was steaming south to take personal possession of the Chilean antarctic." González sailed right past Punta Arenas. At Fortescue, near Chile's southern tip, his party boarded the Chilean navy transport President Pinto.

From Cape Horn, where González ran into stormy weekend weather, it is just three days' sail to the Graham Land outpost that the Chileans belligerently call Port Sovereignty. There this week, properly furred and parkaed, González is scheduled to go ashore, inspect the little garrison, and rechristen the base Camp Bernardo O'Higgins (after the hero of Chile's War of Independence). That would be his answer to the British, who this week sent the cruiser Nigeria steaming toward the disputed waters.