Last Boundary

Cartographers last week were busy inking the last boundary on the map of South America. The Rio de Janeiro Conference had accomplished what 113 years of fighting and attempted arbitration had not--a settlement of the old border dispute between Ecuador and Peru.

With full ceremony, mediators from Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the U.S. took over control of El Oro Province on the coast, which had been in Peruvian hands since last summer's fighting (TIME, Sept. 1), and turned it over to representatives of Ecuador.

In Ecuador, as in Peru, there has been some dissatisfaction over the settlement, since neither country got all it claimed. Ecuadorians charged that Peruvian soldiers pillaged El Oro before they evacuated, but observers noted that the Ecuadorian Army had also followed a scorched-earth policy when it retreated last year. The only losers seemed to be the inhabitants of El Oro.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.