Mexico: A Pinch of Salt

Mexico’s Adolfo Lopez Mateos looked up at President Johnson — all 6 ft. 3 in. of him. Then he grinned and said: “If I had remembered you were so tall, I would have brought my high heels.” The easygoing joke set a relaxed tone for Johnson’s first official meeting with a Latin American chief of state.

At U.C.L.A. both Presidents donned cap and gown to receive honorary doctorof laws degrees. Later they flew to Palm Springs, called on Dwight Eisenhower (it was, said Ike, “just an evening with old friends”) and settled down to private talks. The agenda inevitably included disarmament, the lagging Alliance for Progress, what to do about Panama and Cuba, but no treaties were signed, no formal decisions taken. Now that the Chamizal dispute on the Rio Grande has been settled, Mexico and the U.S. have few major outstanding disagreements. There is one issue — a minor one as international flaps go — that continuesto bother the Mexicans, and Lopez Mateos gently prodded Johnson to devise a speedy solution. It concerns the Colorado River, which rolls through the arid U.S. Southwest and down across the line into Mexico.

In Arizona, the Colorado has made the desert bloom. But by the time the river crosses the border, the Mexicans complain, the water has been used and re-used so often for irrigation of high-alkaline land that it is “poisoned with U.S. salt.” Under a 1944 treaty, the U.S. promised to share the Colorado for irrigation purposes, and guaranteed Mexico 1,500,000 acre-feet of water each year. Mexico built a dam, dug irrigation canals and before long brought the once-desolate Mexicali region to life. But in 1961 the water became too salty to drink, and cotton died in the fields. Under the new Wellton-Mohawk reclamation project, U.S. farmers were using irrigation water to leach out excess salt from their desert soil—and were flushing the residue back into the Colorado, whose salt content rose alarmingly from 800 parts per million to more than 2,500.

By international law, Mexico could make a case against the U.S., charging stream pollution. As a temporary measure to dilute the brine, U.S. engineers pump fresh water into the Colorado.

Under consideration are several more expensive ways out, including a 65-mile canal to divert Wellton-Mohawk’s salty waters to the Gulf of California.