MEXICO: Flirting With Fluor Spar

President General Lázaro Cárdenas made some nice gestures toward continental defense last week. He slapped an embargo on shipments of Mexican mercury to Japan. A Japanese bid for 18,000 tons of scrap iron was rejected, a cargo of war materials ticketed for Tokyo frozen. A Government spokesman announced that Cardenas would declare unconstitutional a contract signed fortnight ago, granting Japan oil concessions in the State of Veracruz. This, said the Mexican Good Neighbor, was to “demonstrate Mexico’s adherence to the hemisphere policy of solidarity.” Few days later President General Cárdenas changed his mind.

For Japan the stake was well worth the play. Though the oil fields had been considered worthless by U. S. and British geologists, they gave Japan a foothold on the Gulf of Mexico, a base from which to route supplies across the Mexican Isthmus bypassing the Canal. The embargo involved 700 flasks of mercury (for making explosives), 14 sacks of molybdenum (for making steel alloys), 2,000 tons of fluor spar (for making aluminum), such oddments as 1,700 tons of flour, 5,000 drums of gasoline and oil. But the scrap and certain petroleum products which were “practically Government monopolies” were held up.

President Cárdenas had several reasons for changing his mind. In the folds of Mexico’s hills lie great deposits of antimony, manganese, mercury, tungsten, fluor spar, molybdenum. But big producers have never worked them, have concentrated on gold, silver, zinc, copper. The other metals have been left to the Indians, who grub them out of the ground, trot down to the market centres with a pat of tungsten, a tin of mercury whenever they need money for tortillas or pulque. The sales to Japan helped prime small native industry.

The condition for reviving the oil-concession contract was the additional payment by Japan of 3,400,000 pesos ($680,000). In general, Cardenas’ flirting with the Japs was a hint for higher bids from the U. S. for Mexican products.

Flirtation, he knew, had its limits. President-reject General Juan Andreu Almazán was still insisting last week that he would take office Dec. 1, still declaring, “I will have the unanimous support of all the people.”