Spectator's Journal/Letter from Puebla

...The financial mess left by the last president and his cabinet is of such proportion as to have undermined the country's whole economic structure...

...If, as seems to be the case, they are convinced that "it'll come," one has to admit they are riding to the storm with grace and elan...

...The two labor groupings made plans last February to hold rival May Day parades in the capital...

...At least that is the expectation...

...Will they be...

...Third, how many businesses are going to be able to outlast a prolonged crisis...

...How many large and small companies that borrowed extravagantly during these last good years, when the country's GNP was growing at eight percent annually, are doomed to fail now, nobody knows...

...Following President Lopez Portillo's nationalization of the banks last September there was speculation about possible military takeover but the secretary of defense, General Galvan...

...Life really does go on and in the particularly exuberant way that is Mexican...

...Statistics say it has to...

...Toward evening every day from May to October rain falls abundantly on the great brown stretches of the land...

...Could this be a nation slated for collapse?Families enjoying Sunday afternoon around the fountains of the lovely central plaza in this town of Puebla may be spending three times as many pesos for balloons, pin-wheels, and ice-cream cones as they did a year ago but every child clutches them...

...Nearly as important as the question of oil prices, however, is the need for a wiser use of this great potential source of wealth...

...It'll come...

...Four of the city's half-dozen dance companies are performing and two of its three symphony orchestras...

...Already the recent $5 billion emergency loan, which moved the total foreign debt to $85 billion, has only resulted in a request for a moratorium on interest payments until next August 15...

...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL LETTER FROM PUEBLA PUEBLA, Mexico-It has been ten months since 74 million Mexicans got word that their country was dead broke and owed more money abroad than any nation on earth...

...The queer thing is that whatever it is that is hanging over Mexico has yet to drop down...

...The next great unknown regards world oil prices...

...He laughed, "This is a Flag Day parade...

...An individual wants to buy an airplane, another offers an early Ta-mayo for $150,000...

...Already ALFA, said to be the most important industrial complex in Latin America, is so deep in dollar debt that it cannot continue without heavy government subsidy...

...That the threat is a great unknown-I see it as five of them-only adds to the feeling of unreality...

...A chamber-music ensemble offers by Mary Martinez Brahms, there is an evening of Arab music, another of Spanish guitar and Henry Purcell's Dido and Eneas...

...Everybody is waiting for something but nobody knows what it is...

...Japan Airlines suggests a jaunt to Nepal for $5000 and this to a people whose money has dropped 82 percent against the dollar...

...Grave technical and economic errors committed during the first boom years will have to be corrected, and quickly...

...But the CTM's support of the government's unpopular ceiling on wages makes it vulnerable to inroads by activists in a new Marxist combination initialed UOI and PSUM which has been organizing strikes at Volkswagen, Diesel Nacional, in the universities and the urban transport systems...

...Well as I know the country, when I flew in this time from Rome after a two-day wait-over in, of all places, Moscow, this exuberance burst on me like a spray of fireworks...

...People seem to be living in a state of animated suspension, conscious they have been despoiled but unvengeful because as yet they are not quite sure what it is that has been done to them...

...While politicians are cartooned in the press as turtles in what it calls "this race against time," radical forces can hardly be said to be rushing to the barricades...

...In office since December 1, de la Madrid has gone through these dramatic times in a notably undra-matic way which may be for the best but which raises anxious questions about the future political trend of the government...

...These are strange days in Mexico...

...Finally, in the wake of possible hunger, spiraling inflation, and unemployment-as well as further devaluation of the peso-is any leadership going to organize the unrest...

...But last summer water was so scarce that harvests fell sharply, necessitating enormous increases in the importation of basic foodstuffs and spelling misery for many of the country's small farmers...

...As an over-extended debtor Mexico has been forced to pay interest at one and seven-eighths percent above the London interbank rate so that servicing alone is going to come to $20 billion by mid-August...

...All this makes the idea that a colossal threat is hanging over Mexico seem incredible...

...Or take the 100-page Sunday edition of Mexico City's Excelsior with its scores of display ads for cruising the Caribbean, the Greek Islands, even the coasts of New Zealand, for touring the Canadian northwest or skiing in Argentina...

...was quick to demonstrate Army support of the government by appearing at the president's side on several formal occasions where no Army man had appeared before...

...Given the enormous power of Mexican chief executives the ability of this one man to handle whatever the other four unknowns present him with is basic...

...The new secretary of defense and his staff are said to be taking a more objective view of the situation and keeping alert to any sign of breakdown which the Left could be expected to exploit...

...Seeing a line of some fifty armored cars rolling along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City one morning I asked another on-looker if la hora de la verdad had finally come...

...For every drop of one dollar per barrel Mexico stands to lose half a billion of its current $14 billion annual oil revenue, a fact which has caused shivers among the international bankers attempting to bail the country out of its financial pit...

...On the popular level one senses a wanting to trust along with a certain growing impatience...

...Three full pages in color urge housewives to splurge on complete new kitchens...

...Then in this city that began printing books nearly a hundred years before the Mayflower landed, throughout last month there was an international book fair exhibiting over a million volumes in the main languages of the world...

...The paper shows that in Mexico City there are a dozen art-show openings in a single week, 25 plays are on the boards from contemporary Mexican works to Shakespeare and Moliere, five musical shows, and four entertainments for children...

...Then, as if business were booming, firms take eight pages in Excelsior to list job openings for sales managers, electrical engineers, computor analysts, public accountants, bilingual secretaries, data processors...

...As for political elements to the left of the ruling Center-Left PRI there is the major "official" trade union, CTM, which goes along, if reluctantly, with the austerity measures imposed on Mexico by the IMF as part of its bail-out program...

...Offered are dozens of skyscraping condominia beginning at $100,000...

...Taking them one by one, the most important question is, probably, how good a president is Miguel de la Madrid going to be...

...This year, if rains are disappointing, there could be hunger...

...Then, will it really rain this year...

...But it'll come...

...If that news astounded them, the fact that nearly a year has gone by and life in Mexico goes on surprises them even more...

...This year's Holy Week exodus to the Pacific resorts broke all records with the two national airlines scheduling over four hundred flights a day at the peak and three European cruise ships abandoning scheduled stops at Aca-pulco, warned of a shortage of even daytime accommodation in bars and restaurants...