Stage Trick

The slatternly Mexican border town of Tapachula had spruced up for the occasion. At the airport, under a brassy sun, Mexico's President Manuel Avila Camacho and Guatemalan President Juan Jose Arevalo slapped each other's broad backs in warm Latin embrace. Their wives embraced also (see cut). Never before had Mexico's relations with its southern neighbor been so cordial.

Amidst the flowery courtesies bandied over the luncheon table at the Hotel Continental, Arevalo hailed Mexico's 1938 expropriation of foreign oil companies as a "continental guide" for the assertion of national sovereignty. To some Mexicans Arevalo's brave words may have sounded like mention of rope in the house of the hanged; Mexico today is pondering how to attract foreign capital to help reorganize her hopelessly inefficient oil industry. But Arevalo had a purpose. He was talking at the United Fruit Co., whose north coast plantations had been paralyzed for four weeks by the largest strike in Guatemalan history. .

Nobody in his senses believed that Guatemala seriously contemplated expropriating the United Fruit's immense, highly mechanized plantations. With a bark fiercer than his bite, Arevalo in his 20 months of rule had not even got around to using his constitutional power to revise the company's 50-year exemption from new taxation. But his bold speechifying had an immediate effect: next day the strike was suspended; United Fruit agreed to rehire hundreds of discharged workers and ordered its ships to resume their calls at the Caribbean port of Puerto Barrios.

Economically Guatemala can expect scant enough assistance from its northern neighbor. But the Mexican revolution, long since gone paunchy, serves Guatemala as a neat talking point to scare foreign business interests into a reasonable mood.

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