Mexico: Record of Success

In his student days, Adolfo Lopez Mateos was a tireless hiker who thought nothing of tramping 35 miles between school and home to visit his mother on weekends. Once he even walked all the way to Guatemala—700 miles—in 36 days. He went on to cover a lot of ground as Mexico’s 59th President. Last week, in his sixth—and final—state-of-the-nation address before surrendering his sash of office to Gustavo Díaz Ordaz in December. López Mateos trotted through the impressive record. It took almost three hours, and most of the speech dealt with Mexico’s booming prosperity which has become the marvel of other envious Latin American governments.

The country’s economy is growing at the rate of 6.3% annually, almost twice as fast as its exploding population. Its prospering industry has diversified into everything from petrochemicals to textiles and electronics, has made Mexico self-sufficient in steel and oil, and this year is expected to turn out 80,000 cars and trucks. Tourism, which brought in $463 million in 1963, is up more than 10% so far this year. LÓpez Mateos predicted that the year to come will be better still—and no one was prepared to doubt him.

A Mellowed Fervor. One priceless product of the economic boom is a new confidence on the part of both Mexicans and foreigners. Born of the 1910 revolution, Mexico’s one-party regime has often frightened investors with land seizures, expropriation and talk of leftward drift. But time has mellowed revolutionary fervor. Though the government still controls such basic industries as oil, railroads and electric power, Mexico’s present political leaders have created a healthy climate in which private enterprise is actively encouraged. As a result, Mexicans have taken their money from Swiss and U.S. banks and invested it at home; savings accounts have doubled in three years; and last year foreign investment soared at the rate of $2,275,000 a week. No wonder: profits on investment range from 15% to 20%.

With its prosperity, the Mexican government has been able to accomplish many of the things other countries only talk about:

∙FEDERAL SPENDING. The national budget during López Mateos’ term has risen 132% over the previous six years to a record $5.2 billion. Education now gets $362 million annually, three times as much as in 1958. Teacher salaries have gone up as much as 160%, 30,200 new classrooms have been built, and more than 100 million free textbooks have been distributed. Result: Mexico’s illiteracy rate has dropped from 50% to 28.9%.

∙AGRARIAN REFORM. Since 1958, López Mateos has deeded peasants nearly 40 million acres of land—fully one-fourth of all the acreage thus far doled out under the country’s 50-year-old agrarian reform law.

∙WORKER BENEFITS. General salaries have gone up 97%, and last December the government approved an industrial profit-sharing plan, adding another $72 million thus far to fattening worker pay envelopes.

∙ELECTORAL REFORMS. To encourage a little more political opposition within Mexico’s one-party “guided democracy,” López Mateos last year signed a new law guaranteeing any political party five congressional seats for every 2½% of the popular vote it gets, whether its candidates win or not. Last week the new 210-member Congress which López Mateos addressed included 35 opposition members elected under the new law. “Order without freedom is dictatorship,” said López Mateos, “just as freedom without order is anarchy.”

Too Small to Upset. On the important matter of relations with the U.S., López Mateos feels that mutual respect and genuine friendship have rarely been higher. One of the “happy results” of the friendship was the settlement of the century-old El Chamizal border dispute, centering on a 600-acre patch of land between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez (TIME, July 26, 1963).

There is, however, the touchy issue of Mexican-U.S. disagreement over what to do about Communist Cuba. Mexico has defied the recent OAS vote requiring all hemisphere nations to break diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba. It stands virtually alone (Uruguay was the only other country holding off by last week). But in his speech to his fiercely proud and independent countrymen, López Mateos said that Mexico intended to maintain its contacts and handle Castro in its own fashion. The U.S. doesn’t really like that much but with López’ Mexico doing so well, it seems too small to get very upset about.