Garden on the Gulf

In the sunny valley of the Fuerte River, along Mexico's Gulf of California coast, not enough rain has fallen in the past six years to settle the dust. Yet last week 123,550 acres of the valley's virgin soil lay plowed and planted for the first time in history. Crisscrossing the land was a symmetrical pattern of brand-new concrete canals and irrigation ditches filled with fresh water. Higher up, in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains that parallel the coast, lay the source of the life-giving moisture: the new, stone-faced $16 million Miguel Hidalgo Dam, finished last year.

Only ten years ago the entire gulf coast was a useless, dusty plain. Only a few farmers eked out a skimpy existence along the riverbanks. In 1947 the government of President Miguel Aleman began construction of the $12 million Alvaro Obregon Dam on the Yaqui River, in Sonora state. Finished in 1952, it soaked more than 543,000 acres in the valley below, created a treasure house of cotton, wheat and California-sized vegetables. In 1955 the $8,000,000 Mocuzari Dam was completed near Alamos, also in Sonora state. With its irrigation system finished, 197,000 acres have grown lushly green under a first planting of cotton and wheat.

In transforming the land, the dams have also transformed the people, who are largely of Spanish stock, and their cities. Ciudad Obregon, in the heart of the Yaqui valley, has grown from a barren crossroads to a booming city of 70,000, with modern architecture, an up-to-date airport (with cotton planted between the runways) and a home-grown crop of millionaires. The small farmer-owners, grown suddenly prosperous, make good customers for the show windows filled with gleaming new appliances and U.S.-made farm machines. Los Mochis, the sugar-mill center of the Fuerte valley, is just beginning to awaken. A new hotel is going up, and the streets are due for a coat of asphalt as soon as sewer lines are laid.

The development plan is not yet finished. North of the area fed by the Alvaro Obregon Dam stretches 300 miles of riverless desert. Beneath the parched earth lies a supply of fresh underground water. Engineers are already at work, drilling experimental wells, and surveying. It will not be long, they say, before the whole coast line from the U.S. border to Culiacan. in Sinaloa state, will be one big garden. The project can hardly help paying. Last year the crops grown in the Yaqui valley were worth more than the construction cost of the dam and irrigation system.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.