THE HEMISPHERE: Panama by 1950

Men who build the inter-American Highway are heroes in the villages of Mexico and Central America. Engineers are given free meals, free rides on buses, are often made guests of honor at special fiestas. Villagers, unconcerned with the highway’s long-distance aspects, as a link in inter-American unity, see it in its local character, as an immediately useful road. The road ends age-old isolation, makes it possible to get bananas to market, to exchange them for huaraches and cooking pots, to trade Honduran lumber for Salvadoran sugar and corn.

Willing Workers. Villagers have not always waited for the road to come to them. They have gone out to meet it. When the people of Las Casas, in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas, were told that no money had been appropriated for their section of the highway, they offered to work free if they had an engineer to show them how. Mexico City sent down Engineer Fernando Zurita. Under his direction the people tackled the job without modern machinery, using picks and shovels like Chinese coolies on the Burma Road.

The highway has been 18 years abuilding, has cost the U.S. so far $115 million including grants and loans, the countries through which it passes $74 million more. Some sections have been built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Public Roads Administration. Others, like the highway in Mexico, are a tribute to local effort. Of the 3,260 miles from the U.S. border to the Panama Canal, 425 miles are usable only in dry weather, 245 miles through jungle and mountain country are still impassable. Three years and $65,000,000 will finish the job, said white-haired E. W. James, chief of the Inter-American Regional Office of the Public Roads Administration, last week.

A massive roadblock stands in the way of getting that money from Congress. Last fortnight the U.S. Senate Special War Investigating committee had some tough words to say about the highway. The committee concerned itself little with the road’s prewar history, much with the wartime chapters, when German submarines threatened sea lanes in the Caribbean and a rush job sought to drive the highway through to Panama.

Wanton Waste. The politics-minded committee called the wartime work a “wanton waste of the taxpayers’ money.” It cited “flagrant” overpayments to contractors, and a wasteful detour in Nicaragua so that the highway might pass property owned by Dictator Anastasio Somoza. It condemned the poor coordination between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Public Roads Administration. In some places in Guatemala, a junketing subcommittee had found, the road was so rough that pigs wore shoes to protect their trotters.

To many a U.S. citizen, as to many a Latino, an inglorious chapter in the highway’s past seemed less important than the highway’s future. Mexico was going ahead, would have the road completed by 1949 from border to border. Said Salvadoran President Castaneda: “The Government and people of El Salvador want to see the highway finished through Central America. It will strengthen the economic unity and friendship of our countries.”