Looking for Water

In many ways, the Mexican economy appears as hardy as a flowering desert cactus, a bright contrast to its hemisphere neighbors. For 1962, according to the Bank of Mexico. Latin America's thirdbiggest nation pushed its gross national product 4.2% higher than 1961; manufacturing output rose 5.2%, total investment was up 6%, and merchandise exports climbed 12.1%. Thus nourished, Mexico is fast developing a middle class.

But Mexico, for all its real advances, is still largely an agricultural nation; farming provides work for nearly half its 37 million population. In recent years, the farmers have not been able to match the country's industrial boom.

Too Little Land. One reason is Mexico's overenthusiastic land reform, whereby most of the big haciendas have been atomized into thousands of tiny, four-to twelve-acre ejidos and given to peasants. The bite-sized plots often prove so uneconomical that the peasant can barely eke out a living, let alone buy modern farm equipment. Nature, too, seems to be working against the farmer. Less than 75 million acres, or about one-sixth of Mexico's generally dry, mountainous terrain, are arable, and on those cultivated acres water is in steadily diminishing supply.

Nowhere is the problem more pressing than in La Laguna. a 2,000-sq.-mi. farm belt in north central Mexico that is a sort of microcosm of the ills afflicting the Mexican farmer. For years, La Laguna was rich and productive, watered by late summer showers and the Nazas and Aguanaval rivers. More than half of the country's cotton came from the area. Then 15 years ago, the rains tailed off, the rivers began drying up, and the crops dwindled to half their former size. Now, over a year's time, ten times more water evaporates than falls in rain.

"It Rains Dust." At the Lazaro Cardenas irrigation dam, the waters barely touch the base of the wall. The dam holds only one-eighth of its 3.2-billion-cu.-meter capacity. For the first time since the dam was completed in the 1940s, no water will be available this year to irrigate the newly seeded cotton fields below. It has not rained at all this year, and in 1962 only six inches of rain fell, the lowest record in memory. "In La Laguna," goes the expression, "it doesn't rain water, it rains dust." Last month, 30 blue-painted trucks with the federal government's CONASUPO relief agency emblem arrived to start distributing food. CONASUPO used to operate only in Mexico City. But now, says La Laguna operations director Gilberto Martinez, "there's more suffering here than in Mexico City. There are cases of children getting no meals a day."

The government is preparing a bold experiment for La Laguna: it hopes to resettle some 3,000 families in the verdant coastal areas near the Guatemalan border.

This week the government is chartering 15 buses to carry 500 ejidatarios to Campeche for a look at some of the new lands. Campeche is an undeveloped land of savannah and jungle. But it has plenty of water--an average rainfall of 46 in. annually--and perhaps the northern farmers can make a go of it there.

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