Parched Earth

The sky over Mexico City, blue and cloudless since November, last week turned grey. Now & then a little rain fell, and the afternoon winds ceased to cloak the city with powdery dust from the fields outside. In many a village women got ready for the first family wash since the village brook dried up last fall. Men stuck out their tongues to taste the rain,'or stood watching it soak into the parched earth.

In regions where the rains had not yet started, Indians slipped into church to pray before the images of their favorite saints, and in the plazas they danced to the ancient Tlaloc, Aztec god of rain. They prayed that the rains might be plentiful, that the brown land might grow green and that this might be the one year in five when crops would be so good that Mexico could feed itself.

In the shiny, modernistic office building in Mexico City's Avenida Morelos, the men of the Department of Soil Conservation studied their maps, graphs and statistics, concluded that the chances were small that the Mexican land would feed its people well. Four hundred years ago Cortes had reported that the richness of Mexico was inexhaustible. Since then, the pine forests that held rain water on the mountain slopes have been cut away. The result has been drought. The Indians have lost their skill in terracing their fields, and their lands are gullied and eroded.

In Cortes' time, the Indians planted their crops in 16 inches of topsoil. Now they count themselves lucky if they plant in six. Corn, grown year after year on the same plots, has sapped the goodness from the soil. In the current Harper's Magazine, William Vogt, chief of the conservation section of the Pan American Union, warns that "unless there is a profound modification in its treatment of the land, the greater part of Mexico will be a desert within 100 years." (The peril, warned Vogt, hangs over all Latin America.)

Mexicans are trying to do something about it. In the past 21 years, their government has spent $200 million on irrigation which has brought water to two million parched acres. President Miguel Aleman hopes to do as much in his six years of office as were done in the previous 21. But last week many a Mexican put his hope in God instead of man.

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