The Consensus

Since the late 1920s, one party alone, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, has ruled Mexico, putting up a new President every six years in a cut-and-dried election. Some people might label it dictatorship. Mexicans call it "guided democracy," and by some alchemy the system does seem to operate as a sort of national consensus. Last week Mexico's President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz marched to the rostrum of the Chamber of Deputies to make his first state-of-the-nation address after nine months in office. His speech was a remarkable definition of Mexico's sense of stability, leadership and nationhood.

For almost three hours he spoke, finding something to say to every Mexican.

For the small, noisy groups of leftists, he had a warning not to endanger the Mexican consensus by inciting strikes, disorders and sedition. For the anti-gringo nationalists, he criticized U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. For Washington, which has provided massive loans and grants, there was praise for the Alliance for Progress (something that his predecessor, Adolfo Lopez Mateos, never found it in his heart to do). For Mexico's ballooning middle class, there was a call to partnership with the public sector in building new businesses and factories. For the progress-minded, there was a rattling off of impressive statistics: in 1965 the gross national product was increasing at the yearly rate of 6%, wages were up 13.5%, the number of tourists was up 14% and heading for an alltime record.

Finally, for Mexico's rural population, 50% of the country's 41 million people, there was a promise of a new deal: 90% of this year's $1.2 billion in government public investment would be poured into provinces outside Mexico City. The purpose of the rural new deal is to bridge the gap between the two Mexicos--the cities, where average annual income is $630, and farms, where earnings still hardly exceed $125.

The root of the problem is the ejido system of land reform, enshrined in Mexico's constitution of 1917. Individual peasants are given the use of small farms on government reserves or expropriated land, which they can transfer to their children but cannot sell or mortgage to obtain desperately needed bank loans. The result is the atomization of landholdings: most Mexican farms average 15 acres in size. Grinding poverty has led to peasant invasions of private land in some states, notably Tlaxcala and Oaxaca, and the government has been forced to use soldiers to drive out the squatters. Diaz Ordaz, faithful to tradition, cannot bring himself to modify the ejido system. But he did promise loans to farmers for livestock, fertilizer and more farm implements.

Sounding remarkably like the President of the country to the north, Diaz Ordaz summed up by telling the Mexican Congress that the government has the "unavoidable obligation to watch over the people of Mexico and the destiny of the Mexican nation."

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