Enough for Mexico Too

With appropriate fanfare the State Department last week announced a six-point agreement with Mexico to aid in rehabilitating her dilapidated railroad system. Consisting of some 15,000 miles of mostly lightweight rails, and largely built in the 19th Century, this system has long looked like a joke to U.S. railroaders. It can no longer be so regarded.

The U.S. now counts upon Mexico for 45% of its requirements of graphite, 33% of its antimony, 40% of its sisal and henequen, 19% of its lead, a growing portion of its lumber (particularly mahogany, for plywood planes), plus important fractions of its needs for molybdenum, mercury, cobalt, manganese, mica, tungsten, tin, vanadium. This year Mexico will ship the U.S. some 400,000 tons of these metals alone; next year the figure should rise to nearly 2,000,000 tons.

Moreover, the opening this month of a new railroad bridge across the Suchiate River between Mexico and Guatemala makes it possible to move freight between the two countries without benefit of tiny barges poled by leisurely boatmen. By next May, when the Central American links of the Inter-American Highway are scheduled to be completed, there will at last be a continuous overland route from the U.S. to the Canal Zone. Mexico's spindly transportation system will then funnel a vastly greater flow of traffic.

But there was one important omission in the State Department's agreement to prepare Mexico's rails for that strategic job: its terms were almost exclusively financial. Mexico needs equipment, not money, at this stage in her war boom. The really good news for Mexican railroads last week was that the hard-pressed railroads of the U.S. had wangled something like adequate promises of new equipment from WPB. Once U.S. roads get enough to keep going, the railroads of Mexico can begin to hope for more than empty promises too.

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