MEXICO: The Visitor

A great grandstand rose at Mexico City’s Balbuena Airport. Along the road to town, workers paved the walks and turfed the unkempt fields. In the city, little groups of men labored past midnight, filling in every last crack in the pavement that Harry Truman would ride over. Every boulevard shrub had been freshly manured to make the capital a little greener for its first visit, this week, from a U.S. President.

A civic fiesta, a flight over the four-year-old volcano Paricutin, and lunch among the pyramids of Teotihuacán were not all the Mexicans had programmed for Harry Truman’s three-day visit. They also had some problems they wanted to discuss.

Aftosa, First of All. Last summer Mexicans were rash enough to import 320 tickproof Brazilian zebu bulls. The bulls brought the dread aftosa, or foot-&-mouth disease. By last week an epidemic had spread through ten states, and excited patrons were refusing perfectly good steak in Mexico City restaurants. Worst of all, the U.S., soundly fearing infection of its own herds, had banned the import of Mexican cattle. This was a deep hurt; 500,000 head shipped over the border each year make a big difference in northern Mexico’s prosperity. Last week, while the U.S. Congress shoved through bills for veterinary help in stamping out Mexico’s aftosa, Mexicans awaited the man who would have to take action. El Universal ran a cartoon of the President arriving in his “Sacred Cow”—”one cow that is not afraid to move around these days.”

El Chamizal. Mexico also hoped to discuss an old Rio Grande boundary question. El Chamizal (see map) lies within the city limits of El Paso—some 83 blocks, worth about $3,000,000. In 1911 a Canadian arbitrator awarded Mexico, which already held a portion of the north bank, a chunk of the disputed area. The U.S. turned down his verdict and stood on the boundary of the river’s present banks.

Because of the longstanding dispute, El Chamizal’s 600 acres are just thinly-settled river bottoms, with a shanty town, a few small packinghouses, a stockyard and a high school. But El Paso wants its title cleared so that El Chamizal can be developed. Roughhewn Texas Congressman Ewing Thomason, who wants to put a spanking new federal building there and build a new international bridge to Juarez, reportedly had President Truman’s promise last week that he would keep El Chamizal in mind in Mexico City.

President Miguel Aleman was sure to raise the subject of an Export-Import Bank loan—possibly as much as $400,000,000—to make his ambitious new program of irrigation and industrialization stick. But that would take time, and there were no experts in the Truman party of seven. Perhaps when Aleman came north to repay the call in April the two men would be more ready to talk.