Tourist Caught In Revolution

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30960, 17 January 1966, Page 3

Tourist Caught In Revolution

"The Press" Special Service AUCKLAND, Jan. 16.

Visitors to South America can expect to run into a revolution somewhere on their itinerary. If not a revolution then a street battle between rival political factions.

Mr T. E. Donnelly, a retired postmaster of Ngongotaha, has returned from a 10months’ world tour that included a brush with violence in Bolivia.

He found life comparatively peaceful in the Argentine, Brazil, Peru, Chile and Panama, but in the Bolivian city of La Paz, Mr Donnelly ran into trouble. The local tin-mlners were rioting and throughout the city mobs clashed with the police and the armed forces. The fighting was concentrated in the square in front of Mr Donnelly’s hotel and two bullets were fired through the window of his room. The New Zei.lander thought it prudent to report to the British Consul.

“I hadn’t bothered seeing consuls anywhere,” said Mr Donnelly yesterday, “but I thought I might get topped off.”

The consul told Mr Donnelly the' situation was extremely dangerous and advised him to stay off the streets.

Mr Donnelly hoped for the best. He pinned a kiwi badge to his lapel—“l don’t know what good it would have done me” —and stepped gingerly back into the streets of La Paz.

He hurried back to his hotel and as he strode through the foyer a reporter spotted the kiwi badge and called cheerfully: “Tena koe” (Good morning). The reporter was Mr E. Scott, a former Wellington journalist. Mr Scott edited a newspaper in Panama for many years and has seen more than his share of revolutions in Central and South America.

He is South American correspondent for the National Broadcasting Corporation of the United States and is based in Rio de Janeiro.

Mr Scott not only advised his fellow New Zealander to

get out of Bolivia, but arranged an airline booking and taxi to the airport. In Lima the next day, Mr Donnelly read in the newspapers that 30 people had been killed in the fighting in La Paz and more than 100 injured. Mr Donnelly had arranged

to call on Mr Scott in Rio, but when he arrived in the Brazilian city he found that the New Zealand reporter was flying off to another revolution —in the Dominican Republic. Mr Donnelly was booked to visit Venezuela, but after nearly three months in South America he could read the

political barometer as well as any native, and the reading for Venezuela was: Revolution brewing. Mr Donnelly travelled on to the United States, Britain and Europe, visiting many interesting countries—but none as exciting or as dangerous as Bolivia.