Mexico: Pre-Election Valedictory

Any resemblance between the Mexico of today and Mexico in its volatile, revolutionary infancy is largely sentimental. Just as old hat is thinking of Mexico as a peon in a huge sombrero, dozing against an adobe wall. Mexico’s progress is uneven, and its political system is still a tightly held, one-party regime; but Mexicans keep industrializing, and a stable middle class is more and more influential. Each year, as the economic milestones flick by, the country takes a festive day off to hear the President report on just how far it has come; last week President Adolfo Lopez Mateos rode through crowd-jammed streets to the Chamber of Deputies to deliver his fifth annual state of the union message. Since he is constitutionally barred from succeeding himself, it was also his last before the presidential elections next July, and the nationally televised speech turned out to be a long (4 hr. 25 min.) summing up.

Mexico’s economy, Lopez Mateos reported, is fully recovered from the mild recession of 1961-62 and seems as solid as the Sierra Madre. The peso is firm, gold and dollar reserves stand at a historic high of $510 million, wages climbed 17% last year, while the cost of living was held to an increase of only 1.8%. The country’s population rose 3.1%, to 38 million in 1962, but the gross national product rose even faster —4.8%. The boom, said Lopez Mateos, was reaching the people in a multitude of forms:

∙EDUCATION. In the “gigantic task” of reducing illiteracy and building schools fast enough to keep pace with population growth, the government is spending $246 million this year, the biggest single item in the budget, and well over the $205 million of 1962 and $169 million of 1961. In the past 2 years, 82 million free textbooks were distributed; another 30 million will be published next year. New classrooms are being built at a rate of 4,390 a year—twelve a day.

∙SOCIAL BENEFITS. The program of medical care, old age pensions and other benefits now covers 5,260,000 people, an increase of some 500,000 in a single year. In the past five years, intensive public health campaigns throughout the country have slashed the polio and TB rates and almost entirely eradicated malaria.

∙AGRARIAN REFORM. Since his last re port a year ago, Lopez Mateos has distributed some 5,000,000 acres of land to peasants—more than many Mexican Presidents parceled out in their entire terms. Agriculture and livestock output, still the heart of the economy, showed a 5.3% gain in 1962, though many peasants, still impoverished, remain “by far the country’s most fundamental problem.”

∙ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. Since 1958, when Lopez Mateos came into office, the government’s spending for such works as roads, irrigation and hydroelectric plants has increased an average of 15% annually, will run upwards of $1 billion this year.

The state was not the only force for progress, Lopez Mateos conceded—and quite a concession for a man who calls himself “left, within the constitution,” but who has enjoyed the benefits of a rising economy. “The government,” he declared, “gives the greatest importance to the participation of private capital in the development of the country. If private enterprise does all that is necessary, the state, far from interfering, will stimulate it. This, as everyone knows, is what is happening now.”