MEXICO: End of An Empire

With all the power of his vast fortune, his 16 newspapers and his granite will, the late William Randolph Hearst fought to the end to hold on to his fabulous 1,625,000-acre Mexican ranch, Babicora. His father, Senator George Hearst, had founded the property, picking up land for peanuts in the last days of the 19th century, and his mother, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, expanded the ranch.

Their son cherished the place for both sentimental and business reasons, for it made substantial profits over the years, mainly in blooded Shorthorns and Herefords pastured in scores of thousands on the Sierra Madre’s green slopes and herded finally to El Paso and the U.S. market. When revolution rolled across Mexico, Hearst’s private armies of vaqueros fought bloody battles with Pancho Villa to save Babicora’s herds and buildings. When President Cárdenas’ land reforms later broke up other great U.S.-owned land holdings, Hearst’s battalions of lawyers and editors staved off expropriation.

Finally, in 1951, the old man died. Mexico soon found that his heirs lacked his heart for such battles. Last week, 67 years after Senator George Hearst made his coup, legal title to the great ranch passed from the Hearst estate to the Mexican government. The government had been prepared for expropriation, but the transaction finally agreed on was an outright sale. The price: $2,500,000 cash. Thus passed the last of the great cattle empires of Mexico’s north. Though Babicora will not, like other big ranches, be parceled out to peasants in small lots, it will be broken up and sold to private owners in tracts up to 375 acres.

* As a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, the elder Hearst received advance word of the surrender of Geronimo, the Apache chief whose periodic raids into the Babicora region had caused havoc among the ranchers. Before the news got out, he was able to buy several hundred thousand acres at 20¢ an acre.