No Cause to Hedge

Getting ready for next year's Olympic games in Mexico City, Mexico's 45 million people are rightfully proud of their visible share in the appurtenances of the modern world. A subway is abuilding in the capital, and Mexico has just begun producing its own color TV tubes. The country's electricity output is computer-controlled, and planning is under way, with U.S. help, on Mexico's own space satellite for educational TV relay. The gross national product is increasing by 7% annually; foreign investment is flooding in at the healthy rate of $200 million a year. The country has an impressive 72% literacy rate, and the government is conducting an agrarian-reform program that will have distributed nearly 50% of the nation's land to campesinos (peasants) by 1970.

Mexico's progress is the result of more than 30 years of political and economic stability under the uniquely long-lived, seldom heavy-handed rule of P.R.I., the Institutional Revolutionary Party. But P.R.I, and President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz have had a scattershot of troubles of late. Within the past 18 months, Diaz Ordaz has had to use paratroopers to quell student strikes on three campuses and militia to put down several rural protests over food prices and campesino grievances. Outside the glittering, wealthy cities live nearly half the people, scratching out incomes that average less than $16 per family each month.

So far, the unrest is so small in scale and occurrence that it would hardly be noticed if it were not that modern Mexico is usually so free of any disturbances. Diaz Ordaz and P.R.I, are nonetheless concerned: the emphasis on building up industry is a calculated gamble that industrialization will raise the standard of living for all Mexicans before the day the peasants lose their faith in the Institutional Revolutionary Party. There seems no early cause for the party leaders to hedge the bet; last week, in legislative and gubernatorial elections across Mexico, P.R.I, candidates took 90% of the vote, winning all but one of the 178 seats in Congress.

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