The Hemisphere: Innocent Abroad

U.S. correspondents in Buenos Aires filed a startling news item last week: a U.S. citizen named Saul Shephard Saulson was a prisoner in the federal penitentiary, and rumors were flying about that he was suspected of involvement in one of those anti-Argentine Wall Street plots that Juan Perón likes to talk about.

Saulson, on further investigation, turned out to be a 23-year-old Detroit tourist with about as much knowledge of Wall Street plots as Juan Perón. Invited to Argentina by a distant cousin, a native Argentine named Jaime Weisburd, Saulson had arrived in December. Early in February, the cousin, a member of Juan Perón's political opposition, suddenly disappeared. When Saulson went to the cousin's bachelor apartment to recover clothing, papers and traveler's checks he had left there, he found two policemen waiting in the living room. They packed him off to the frame building that houses Commissariat Seven, the Argentine political police.

U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker tried by every polite means to get Saulson released, or at least find out why he was being held. Finally, after Saulson had been a prisoner nearly a fortnight, Bunker discarded diplomatic niceties and in plain, unvarnished language demanded Saulson's release. At week's end the judge in charge of the case pronounced him "a good boy" and released him into the ambassador's custody. Saulson had still to find out what charge was laid against him—if there was one.