MEXICO: Enough Rope

In sandy, sun-scorched Yucatán, men had no eyes for the hurricane that last week swept the Gulf of Mexico’s other shore. They watched, instead, a storm gathering over the markets of New York. The future price of henequen, basic barometric reading in the peninsula, was uncertain. The men who grow the cactuslike plant that supplies much of the world’s rope and cordage might soon have to dive for the storm cellar.

Already, henequeneros had heard that the U.S. Government would discontinue its wartime practice of buying their entire exportable surplus. Now from New York came news that Rogers International Corp. had sold the Russian fishing industry 8,000,000 lbs. of war-surplus cordage at 9¼¢ a Ib.—half the price the U.S. Government paid last year in Yucatán.

Hard Times. Some of the worried aristocrats in Merida’s little country club might well have concluded that this was where they came in. In twelve years after World War I, International Harvester Co. and other U.S. makers of binder twine used war surpluses to force henequen prices down from 20¢ to 2¢ a Ib. The millionaires of Mérida, whose fortunes kept castles in Spain and France as well as along Mérida’s broad Paseo de Montejo, went broke. The Cámaras turned their mansion at Mérida into a hotel. One of the Gutierrez scions ran a gas station, the other a bakery. Pepe Castro shined shoes in the Plaza de Armas.

At that time, a poor market for cord was just one of Yucatán’s troubles. Philippine abaca made stronger rope. India’s jute made better bags. On top of everything else, President Cárdenas enforced Mexico’s agrarian laws, and the largest land owners found their plantations cut to 300 acres apiece. By 1938, Yucatán, which once held all the world’s binder twine market, was down to a 20% share.

Happy Days. World War II gave henequeneros a new chance. The U.S., through crop purchases, pumped over $50 million into the area. A smart Syrian merchant named Cabalan Macari set up twine and rope factories and made a killing. The old families woke up to the fact that they still had their machinery, and could charge as much for disfibering agave spikes as they could get. By war’s end, the number of factories had grown from 11 to 100. In the mansions on the Paseo de Montejo it was like old times.

Did last week’s storm warnings foreshadow another economic hurricane like 1920’s? If so, Macari and other forward-looking henequeneros thought they could weather it. There are new uses for Yucatán fibers in the U.S. to make up for the decreasing use of binder twine. With a little help from the industrial-minded Mexican Government, in subsidies and export-tax concessions, Yucatán’s factories might get a share of such business. The serried rows of agave would still stretch green across the Yucatán flatland.