MEXICO: Dance of the Millions

MEXICO Dance of the Millions

Mexicans saw the best show since Paracutin.* In the steel-blue air above the lofty capital, a group of 27 U.S. Superfortresses glinted in the bright, winter sun. Jet fighters streaked by. Inside Mexico City’s brilliant, white marble Palacio de Bellas Artes, outgoing chief executive Manuel Avila Camacho gave over the red, white and green band that was his symbol of office, and an aide quickly adjusted it diagonally across the chest of angular Miguel Alemán.

Twenty million Mexicans had a new President. The 2,500 Mexican big shots and distinguished foreign guests inside the auditorium—General Jonathan Wainwright and U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snyder among others—applauded. Notably absent: ex-President Lázaro Cárdenas, symbol of the revolutionary left.

Mexico, especially the ancient capital, was abrim with activity, but not with economic health. The winter sun shone brightly on streets jammed with new automobiles, on the white stone and plate glass of tall buildings; it gave life and movement to the lavishly plumed hats of the well-dressed wives of the prosperous on their way to tea at Sanborn’s. But the scene was deceptive. The new President knew it, would have to face it.

Mexicans themselves had a phrase for it: “The dance of the millions.” Next month, for the first time in Mexican history, the National Lottery will hold a $2 million drawing. But a complete ticket costs $400, is not for the ordinary man. The bullfight, once the national sport, has also become the privilege of the few; big spenders pay from $20 to $30 for a seat each Sunday. At the jai-alai Frontōon four nights a week the betting is hysterical.

Nightclub checks at Giro’s and Sans Souci often run into three figures, and if the waiter adds a 20 for himself, few complain. Last week a shipload of Rolls-Royce limousines was en route from England to retail at $13,000. All were spoken for—including one for President Alemán.

There are less gaudy symbols of inflation: in tiny stores and markets, the price of beans, rice and sugar creeps up, day by day. (Basic food costs have gone up 441% since 1930.)

Blood & Beans. In Mexico food is more of a problem than it was 35 years ago in the time of Dictator Porfirio Diaz. Since then, farm production has risen 23%, population 60%. The bloody revolution begun by mild little Francisco Madero in 1910 cracked the feudal system and released three-quarters of a million peasants in mud-floor serfdom from the grip of a few hundred landowning families. But the revolutionaries themselves lived on and despoiled the country, which never had enough farmland (only 12% potentially arable).

In 1934 a new leader reversed the tide of reaction. Lázaro Cárdenas, a Tarascan Indian, finally made good some of the revolution’s promises of land for the landless. In six years he expropriated and apportioned to peasants 45 million acres, over twice as much as all his revolutionary predecessors. But corruption and a shortage of plows and tractors and know-how held production down.

Under Avila Camacho, the moderate, the tempo of land expropriation slowed again, and Alemán is not expected to quicken the beat. Yet like predecessor Avila Camacho, Alemán will continue to back the national farm bank which sells tractors and runs cotton gins and sugar mills. And he has his heart set on a mammoth $300 million irrigation program to up production 500%.

Industrial Boom. The war years stimulated Mexico’s effort to build up industry, to cast off the shackles of colonial agricultural economy. Steel plants, cement factories and textile mills sprang up, many of them manufacturing shoddy goods to sell at high cost. If Alemán grants the protective tariffs the new industrialists demand, these high prices may be riveted on the country for a long while.

The composition of Alemán’s new Cabinet pointed toward a hardheaded businessman’s approach to these economic stickers. Energetic Industrialist Antonio Ruiz Galindo (TIME, April 15) got the Secretariat of National Economy. A former Electric Bond & Share lawyer, Augustin Garcia López, got Communications, further emphasized the swing to the right. PEMEX, the Government oil monopoly, will be directed by Businessman Antonio Bermúdez, who has not said whether he will let foreigners operate in Mexican oilfields again, or not.

While this week’s inauguration ceremonies unwound, an alert group of self-invited foreign guests—long-shot venture capitalists—got together with the politicos in bars and smoke-filled hotel rooms. These business delegates were in Mexico to angle for shipping franchises, factory deals. Alemán was expected to welcome less spectacular entrepreneurs by i) halting the wildcat strikes of frenzied Mexican labor, 2) guaranteeing private property rights. For big project financing, Mexico might well put the touch on the biggest lender of all—the U.S. Government.

The Bite. If Miguel Alemán was serious about his campaign slogans, he had embarked upon one project more formidable than all others: the building of mor-alidad (public morality) in the Government. From traffic officer to mayor, the Government is riddled by the institution of the mordida (literally, the bite—payoff). Said a pro-Alemán businessman: “He must get the robbers out of the Government. If for a road that should cost two million pesos the Government pays ten million—with the eight million difference going to the politico—how is Mexico ever to get the tools and machines that she needs? How shall we get these things when a Cabinet member leaves office 100 million pesos richer than when he entered?” For the new President, surrounded as he was by money-hungry politicos, there was no easy solution.

*The snorting volcano that snorted up out of a farmer’s field in Michoacan in 1943.