MEXICO: The Domino Player

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Mexico, the old, picturesque land of the eagle and the serpent, of barefoot peasants drowsing in the plazas and well-shod politicians browsing in the treasury, is passing through a new kind of revolution. After the pistol-packing generals and the gay-grafting statesmen, the republic has a new and different President who has embarked on nothing less than a wholesale program for cleaning up Mexico. This revolutionary President is a slight, grey, austere man named Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, who took office last December at 61, the oldest man to become Mexican President since Porfirio Díaz fell in 1911.

In the Mexico of the past, graft and corruption in high and low places was accounted part of the very system of government. Drawing salaries too low to support their families, petty bureaucrats, cops and inspectors took their “bite” as a legitimate and necessary part of their living. In the highest ranks, public office was private opportunity, and during the recently completed six-year regime of handsome, youthful-looking President Miguel Alemán, the carefree cynicism of the grabbing reached its highest, or lowest, point. It was more than Mexicans could take, and when the time came, the Party of Revolutionary Institutions—Mexico’s only real political party—read the popular mood and nominated its most conspicuously honest man. Don Adolfo, as he is known in deference to his years and dignified bearing, is the very opposite of his spectacular predecessor. He dislikes personal publicity, and his idea of a good time is to play dominoes or gofor a long walk. A new type of Mexican hero, he seems to be pleasing the people with his cleanup. And the way he is going about it shows a shrewd aptitude for the Mexican style of strong presidential rule.

Building & Boodling. In the last years before Ruiz Cortines took office, Mexican public morality was alarmingly on the skids. After World War II, the beguiling Alemán, a breezy, magnetic type with a flair for the big and splashy, led the way into an unexampled period of economic expansion. He preached industrialization, and he spent lavishly. Among his dams were grandiose, TVA-type projects, among his schools was a $25 million University City (TIME, Feb. 23). For Alemán and his friends, the biggest was best for Mexico—and for themselves. They remembered well the maxim of President Manuel Avila Camacho’s brother: “If you build a road for 75,000 pesos and pocket 1,000, everybody will howl. But if you build a road for 75 million pesos and knock Dack a million, nobody will notice.”

The building and boodling that went on during Alemán’s six years broke all records in a land accustomed to high, wide & handsome ways in government. Mexico’s press had been too close to the game to chronicle much of it, and every journalist knew about one rash editor who had been hurled, along with his typewriter, from his fourth-floor office window for daring to question the sudden wealth of a leading Alemán crony.

Dishing the Dirt. Not until after the former President and his friends ducked off to Europe for a long holiday, and Ruiz Cortines swung into action, did anybody in Mexico talk publicly about the deals of the Alemán regime. Then the dirt began to be dished out, and tales that had been repeated for years in guarded whispers around the political cafes were trumpeted across the capital from public rostrums. With a Ruiz Cortines adviser sitting beside him, General Francisco Aguilar of the government party, speaking at a Mexico City meeting, charged that Alemán and his friends had drained the country of some $800 million, and laid away about $450 million of it in banks in the U.S., Canada, Switzerland and Cuba. In an action that would have been unthinkable a few years before, General Leon Ossorio plastered the walls of Mexico City with a broadside blasting the Alemánistas and professing to list their misdeeds in detail.

The general alleged that:

¶ One Alemán cabinet minister owned part of a bank, a sugar mill, several Mexico City skyscrapers and four mansions (one containing a $58,000 Italian marble fountain, the gift of a favored contractor).

¶ Another resourceful minister set up his own companies to contract with his department, and was soon able to set his mistress up in an Insurgentes Avenue lingerie business.

¶ Letting building and equipment contracts to the highest briber, a third minister made an $8,000,000 fortune.

¶ Another Alemán crony took $40 million out of the treasury through his manipulation of the Foreign Trade Bank.

¶ An official of the federal district—”the man of a hundred mistresses”—contrived by such devices as landscaping streets with flowers, at 1,000 pesos a blossom, to acquire mansions, yachts, $200,000 airplanes, and “dresses to cover the sinful bodies of his lady friends.”

The Good Earth. Like many other Latin American politicos, the Alemánistas had a deep fondness for real estate, especially when it was improved with an air-conditioned ranch house, watered by government irrigation pipes, and bounded on two or three sides by newly paved roads. It got to be a standing joke in Mexico City that when the President was out on one of his frequent tours, no matter in what part of the country he happened to be, the newspaper accounts always concluded with the phrase, ”the President then retired to his nearby ranch.” Some of these country seats came to Alemán as gifts. His Lower California ranch is a 3,000-acre affair with 40,000 almond, olive and prune trees, air-conditioned house, bar, and the kidney-shaped swimming pool common to castles in those latitudes. The ranch was paid for by a number of 50,000-peso contributions from local ranchers and merchants who hoped that a presidential residence in their midst might bring irrigation works to the area. The hope, as matters turned out, was fully justified. In the development of the rich Pacific resort of Acapulco, Alemán’s fondness for the land made him partner in several properties along the route of the new Alemán-planned superhighway to the capital.

The Good Times. Toward the end of the Alemán regime, the government’s gay caballeros seemed to abandon all restraint. The smiling President, who loved the companionship of happy people and prided himself on his conviviality, went from one party to another. Sometimes the cronies would repair to an Acapulco yacht or to one of the ranches, and certain members of the inner circle would invite a planeload of high-spirited girls to join the party. At one time or another, the name of almost every well-known Mexican movie actress was whispered as a presidential party guest. When the blowouts were staged at the Lower California ranch, pretty Hollywood companions were also near at hand. In the end, the pace grew so dizzy that the President became involved in a notable indiscretion. Just after his retirement from office, he took off from his Lower California hideaway with a party including Leonora Amar, his Brazilian actress friend, for a week in Paris that was fully reported in Mexico, and, some Mexicans say, grievously dented his political influence.

Mexicans are tolerant of amor, and few higher compliments can be paid a gentleman than to call him “very manly.” But Alemán and his pals got going so fast in their dizzy ride that the elder statesmen of the party decided things were getting out of hand. In Mexican politics, such former Presidents as Manuel Avila Camacho, and the enigmatic Lázaro Cárdenas, holed up in his western mountains, exercise great power in the background. When the time came to choose Alemán’s successor, the party leaders did not interfere with Alemán’s right to pick him. But they warned him that he had better not name any of his cronies.

Ruiz Cortines was no crony. His relationship with the President was a formal one based on mutual respect; they never used the intimate Spanish tu with each other. He was one Cabinet member who had stayed out of the big deals, had no bad name with the public and no private enemies. But in years of loyal service, Ruiz Cortines had never given Alemán trouble, and there was no reason to believe he would. On his record, Ruiz Cortines was honest enough to satisfy public opinion, and “safe” enough to satisfy the men around Alemán. So Alemán himself chose the cleanup man.

Everything about Ruiz Cortines’ past career indicated that he was a follower rather than a leader. Because of the early death of his father, a customs official in the old port city of Veracruz, he never got more than elementary schooling, and went to work at 16 as a bookkeeper’s apprentice. When revolution swept Mexico, he joined the army and served eight years as a paymaster and paperwork man for generals. After the revolution, he served 13 years as a government clerk, rising finally to the job of chief of the government’s vital statistics department. Even in those low-paid years he lived on his salary. Once, when the offer of a bribe came his way, he said: “I think you have made a mistake. You have tried the wrong man.”

Up from Obscurity. In 1936 he formed a friendship with young Miguel Alemán (who was twelve years his junior) that lifted him from bureaucratic obscurity to high office. Alemán saw use for the older man’s efficiency and administrative know-how ; Ruiz Cortines admired Alemán’s energy and imagination. As Alemán rose from governor of Veracruz to Interior Minister, he took Ruiz Cortines along as administrative assistant. Then, when the governorship of Veracruz became vacant in 1943, Alemán helped get the job for his faithful friend.

As governor, Ruiz Cortines made a sound, unsensational record. He appointed commissions to check all state bureaus for graft, and he doubled the state’s meager funds by cajoling laggard taxpayers into paying up. At Jalapa, the state capital, he lived in a small cottage outside town and walked to work. Once, when he stopped at a resort hotel in Fortin, he was given a suite. He asked the rate and was told it was 100 pesos. “Don’t you think I can solve my problems just as well for 25 pesos?” he asked, and moved to a single room. His happiest days were spent on visits to his native Veracruz. There he would stroll about exchanging greetings with boyhood friends, or sit under the arcades at the old whitewashed Diligencias Hotel, playing dominoes.

Called to Mexico City by President Alemán to become Interior Minister in 1948, Ruiz Cortines filled the top Mexican Cabinet post with his usual unobtrusive efficiency. He bought a modest house in a conservative middle-class district, where he lived quietly and decorously with his second wife and his son and daughter by his first marriage (which ended in divorce in 1933). He drove his own car and often walked to work, stopping at a street stand along the way for a drink of tamarind juice. Surrounded by flashy ministers deep in all sorts of deals, Ruiz Cortines held his peace. But once, after hearing of one official’s latest coup, he remarked: “I can’t understand it. He has so much money. Why does he go after more?”

Down to Business. Inaugural day, Dec. i, was a great day in Ruiz Cortines’ life. That was the day that he became boss; the man who had always been in second place moved into first. As the red, green and white sash of the presidency was draped across his chest, observers noted that his hand moved gently across the silk and his deep-set brown eyes lit up. Then he stepped confidently to the rostrum and spoke words that soon wiped the big smile off the face of Miguel Alemán. “Government-protected monopolies must end,” said the new President. “I will demand strict honesty from all. I will be inflexible with public officials who are not honest.”

That day he announced a Cabinet that included not one of Alemán’s cronies. A few days later he published a complete list of his assets—his Mexico City house, a small Veracruz ranch, his savings, his 1948 Lincoln and his furniture. The total valuation was $34,000. Then he directed that all 250,000 government employees follow his example, with a warning that the lists would be checked for accuracy and checked again when the men left government service. When the treasury sent him the President’s customary $4,000 monthly check for “special expenses,” hf turned it back and said he would get along on his salary as he always had. He refused to accept five 1953 cars presented by Mexico City auto dealers. When a policeman stopped his chauffeur from making an illegal U turn, the President had the cop publicly commended.

Such actions might have been laughed off by the Alemánistas as mere grandstand plays or as signs of the new President’s personal eccentricities. But Ruiz Cortines soon showed that he was out to clean up government from top to bottom. He abruptly ordered all treasury payments stopped while government contracts were reexamined. His Communications Minister reported getting a bill for one 75-mile highway that had been registered as completed and even marked on some maps. Yet, on a flight over the area, he could find no trace of the road. Ruiz Cortines called in the contractor and fined him three times the amount of his claim for nonfulfillment of contract. For the big job of federal district governor, the Presi-‘dent picked a veteran Alemánista, but built such a fire under him that the old wheelhorse leaped like an apocalyptic charger against price-gouging movie exhibitors, police-protected brothels and unsightly sidewalk peddlers, then went frantically to work repairing street drains in flood-plagued working-class districts.

Out with Monopolies. To Mexicans’ amazement, awe and admiration, Ruiz Cortines sailed into the “monopolists,” i.e., Alemán pals who got strangleholds on many business activities. In March he struck hard to smash the monopoly of Mexico City oil distribution, held by pistol-packing Multimillionaire Jorge Pas-quel of Mexican-baseball-league fame. Then, in succession, he expertly dethroned Transport King Antonio Díaz Lombardo, who had made $40 million as boss of the bus lines and head of Alemán’s lucrative Social Security Department, and loosened the grip of Multimillionaire Aaron Saenz on Mexico’s sugar industry. Pledged to lower food prices, the President also smashed the monopolistic plays of middlemen in corn, rice and beans by authorizing a government agency to buy and sell such commodities on an emergency basis. With food prices down 10%, Ruiz Cortines proclaimed last week that the first “batjl tie against the hungermongers” had been won.

As startling as his cleanup was the skill and authority with which Ruiz Cortines carried it out. Mild and unassuming personally, the new President nevertheless grasped his great powers firmly. His methods reminded one subordinate of the story of Abraham Lincoln polling his Cabinet, finding all eight opposed to his view, then announcing: “Eight nays, one aye; the ayes have it.” Though he has held only two Cabinet meetings since taking office,

Ruiz Cortines meets his ministers in special committees, summons them to fortnightly briefing sessions to which they trot like schoolboys with their homework, and follows through on their day-to-day work by frequent telephone calls.

His passion for bureaucratic detail keeps him at his desk long hours. Rising punctually at 7, he breakfasts on lime juice,* soft-boiled eggs, rolls, cheese and coffee. After secretaries and officials bring him the most urgent business, he climbs into his Lincoln at 9:30 a.m. and rides, without escort, to the palace. On the way he reads the papers, often spotting items for which subordinates are called on the carpet later in the day. From 10 until 4 he works at his huge palace desk. After a two-hour break for a light lunch, he returns to his papers at Los Pinos, the presidential residence in Mexico City’s west end, working from 6 until as late as n. He dines late, in the Spanish-American manner.

Despite such exhaustive attention to routine, the President appears to be thriving on the job. He has even gained a few pounds lately, and has pretty well lost the cadaverous, hollow-cheeked look that won him the campaign nickname of Cara de Calavera—Skullface. He drinks little, and just before taking office he stopped smoking. So far, he has managed to visit Veracruz once or twice, and one holiday weekend surf bathers at the Veracruz public beach were startled to see the presidential countenance emerge from a breaking wave. Of his old domino partners, he has kept closest contact with Veracruz Senator Jose Rodriguez Claveria. When Ruiz Cortines became President, he insisted that the Senator, as his intimate friend and closest adviser, dispose of his own shares in several profitable enterprises. The President demands similar self-denial in his family. On her first birthday after she became First Lady, Señora de Ruiz received 300 presents. The President had her write out a list of the donors, permitted her to keep 50 gifts from established friends, and sent the rest back.

Broadening the Base. Wholly preoccupied with his cleanup at home, Ruiz Cortines has so far taken only a perfunctory interest in foreign affairs, though he is a good friend and frequent visitor to the U.S., and will meet President Eisenhower on the border next month to inaugurate the joint U.S.-Mexican Falcon Dam on the Rio Grande. In domestic matters, his approach seems somewhat narrow after Alemán and his well-publicized program of industrial expansion. Last week, promising in his annual message to Congress to continue his fight for “honesty, decency, morality,” he stressed that his administration’s job is “consolidating” the work of the Alemán years. Ruiz Cortines has found that it is up to his regime to put furniture in the unfinished schools, to raise funds to bring professors to the still empty University City, to lay water pipes to fields so that the showy dams can start producing some food. Luckily, such mopping-up tasks can be done for relatively little money. One of the distressing things the new President discovered on taking office was that the Alemán regime had committed some 300 million pesos ($35 million) of this year’s income last year.

“We are a poor people,” says Ruiz Cortines. He likes to compare his country with a pyramid whose base must be broadened by spreading the wealth more widely. The statistics-minded President reminded his people last week that 42% of all Mexicans are illiterate, that Mexico must still bring 19 million peasants into full participation in its fast-growing economy. In ten years, he said, the population had jumped 6,000,000, loosing new armies of wetbacks—illegal migratory workers—to cross the U.S. border seeking jobs. To absorb these people, said the President, Mexico must produce more food.

New Men in a New Land. Out of the Mexican revolution has come both a vigorous new middle class, where nothing like it existed before, and a new rich to take the place of the oldtime aristocracy. Domestic tranquillity, world war and the Alemán era of growth and expansion gave great impetus to the process. The very country has changed and matured, a fact that helps account for the rise of such a leader as Adolfo Ruiz Cortines.

Even on the scarred grey face of the Mexican countryside, tilled for more than a thousand years by pointed sticks, changes are visible. South of the Rio Grande near Matamoros grow great fields of cotton, where only mesquite flourished 15 years ago. In booming Lower California, Mexico’s newest state, ranchers have sown the republic’s biggest wheat fields in reclaimed desert land, and set out hundreds of thousands of fruit and nut trees beside newly driven artesian wells. Among the volcano-ringed Puebla valleys, water led 7 miles through new mountain tunnels has brought record crops of corn and beans. Since World War II, Mexico has switched the emphasis from the revolution-blessed ejido (communal farm) to the privately owned farm, and with men on tractors tilling their own land there has been a healthy rise in food output.

Slicing through the cloud-mantled mountains and the coastal rain forests, through cactus-fenced pastures and corn-clad canyons, four major paved highways now march from the U.S. border to Mexico City. New roads, rebuilt railroads and oil pipelines now crisscross the countryside. Some sleepy towns of yesterday have become buzzing 20th century cities. Colonial Salamanca, seat of the government’s big new oil refinery, looks like a Texas oil town by night, with its orange flares glowing over pipes and vents.

Mexico City, now the continent’s No. 3 city, with well over 3,000,000 inhabitants, is as jammed with new buildings as Houston. Skyscrapers, one of them 43 stories high, soar above its Spanish church towers. Along its principal avenues flow rivers of cars, most of them assembled in Mexico (in U.S.-owned branch plants). From hundreds of sleek factories on the outskirts come office furniture, cosmetics and toilet articles, trucks and buses, cortisone and refrigerators. Along broad Insurgentes Avenue, one of the hemisphere’s brightest shopping centers, Mexicans can buy a Jaguar, a cabin cruiser, a Paris gown, a set of tubular-steel garden furniture.

The people who buy and sell in this new Mexico bear about as much resemblance to the old-fashioned U.S. caricature of a barefoot peon on burro-back as Ruiz Cortines does to Pancho Villa. They are a people who have moved out of the adobe huts into the main stream of urban life. They include professional men trained in modern universities. They eat bread instead of tortillas (thereby creating a brand-new demand for wheat that threatens to shake the country’s immemorial corn monoculture). They give their children a good education; they live in houses with hot water and plumbing; they own cars. And they have taken to spending their vacations at resort hotels that until recently had lived almost entirely on U.S. tourist trade.

Besides these solid citizens commuting from their solid jobs to their solid neighborhoods, Mexico proliferates with the new rich, those who make money fast and like to spend it freely. In Mexico City’s luxurious Pedregal and Lomas, in Guadalajara’s fashionable lakeside Chapalita, on the suave green slopes of Cuernavaca, they inhabit glittering glass villas that are the last word in international-style architecture. They drive bright-colored Cadillacs and set a fast pace at the country clubs. Bedecked with diamonds and keen to be seen, they jam the opera for performances at which tickets cost more than at New York’s Met. They bet heavily at the races, and they have done a far better job than either the Reds or the Rockefellers in taming that old radical, Diego Rivera, by keeping him busy painting the portraits of their daughters.

Caught up in their careers like middle-class people the world over, these Mexicans are obviously not revolutionaries in the old Latin American sense. With their stake in society, they are rather a new bulwark against the succession of rebellions that kept Mexico on edge through much of its history. They are nevertheless the products of the great social upheaval that took the lives of some 1,500,000 Mexicans a generation or so ago. Until the Mexican revolution, the nation suffered from a form of split personality, oppressed or angered by the ever-present reminders of a high Indian civilization that had been smashed by the white invaders.

Old Heritages Resurgent. The sons of the revolution appear to have learned to cherish equally their Indian and Spanish Christian heritages. Having accepted their past, they are ceasing to brood over it. Today it is fashionable in Mexico to collect pre-Columbian art, to dabble in archaeology, to wear Indian costumes and to study Indian customs. At the same time the Roman Catholic Church, long suppressed and persecuted by anticlerical revolutionists, is resurgent in Mexico. All over the country new modern churches are rising to replace those wrecked in the revolution. Nuns and priests wear their habits and cassocks in public; more and more parents send their children to Catholic schools. Under Ruiz Cortines, whose wife goes to church (though he does not), this trend is likely to continue.

Porfirio Díaz, the great dictator who imposed ironhanded stability on the country in the last century, once bitterly said: “Poor Mexico: so far from God, so near the U.S.” Yet it is Mexico, in part because it is so closely subject to U.S. influence, that has pioneered the way to mature independence and independent nationality in Latin America. Proud of its mestizo origins, without need either to brag or apologize for them, the country is visibly experiencing some of the creative results of having found itself. Ruiz Cortines, with the backing of the rising middle class, has already changed the republic’s standards of public morality. Last week, after his frank survey of Mexico’s unsolved food and literacy problems, the magazine Siempre proclaimed it: THE ERA or TRUTH. As such revolutionary ideas as honesty and truth spread through the government, the new President and the new Mexico can look ahead toward an even more fully developed democratic life.

* Ruiz Cortines considers the morning lime juice indispensable for good digestion. Once, when he was in New York, he ordered it for breakfast. The waiter was dumfounded. “He looked at me,” says Ruiz Cortines, “as if I were ordering a dose of dynamite.”