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Mexico, the old, picturesque land of the eagle and the serpent, of barefoot peasants drowsing in the plazas and well-shod politicians browsing in the treasury, is passing through a new kind of revolution. After the pistol-packing generals and the gay-grafting statesmen, the republic has a new and different President who has embarked on nothing less than a wholesale program for cleaning up Mexico. This revolutionary President is a slight, grey, austere man named Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, who took office last December at 61, the oldest man to become Mexican President since Porfirio Díaz fell in 1911.
In the Mexico of the past, graft and corruption in high and low places was accounted part of the very system of government. Drawing salaries too low to support their families, petty bureaucrats, cops and inspectors took their "bite" as a legitimate and necessary part of their living. In the highest ranks, public office was private opportunity, and during the recently completed six-year regime of handsome, youthful-looking President Miguel Alemán, the carefree cynicism of the grabbing reached its highest, or lowest, point. It was more than Mexicans could take, and when the time came, the Party of Revolutionary Institutions—Mexico's only real political party—read the popular mood and nominated its most conspicuously honest man. Don Adolfo, as he is known in deference to his years and dignified bearing, is the very opposite of his spectacular predecessor. He dislikes personal publicity, and his idea of a good time is to play dominoes or go for a long walk. A new type of Mexican hero, he seems to be pleasing the people with his cleanup. And the way he is going about it shows a shrewd aptitude for the Mexican style of strong presidential rule.
Building & Boodling. In the last years before Ruiz Cortines took office, Mexican public morality was alarmingly on the skids. After World War II, the beguiling Alemán, a breezy, magnetic type with a flair for the big and splashy, led the way into an unexampled period of economic expansion. He preached industrialization, and he spent lavishly. Among his dams were grandiose, TVA-type projects, among his schools was a $25 million University City (TIME, Feb. 23). For Alemán and his friends, the biggest was best for Mexico—and for themselves. They remembered well the maxim of President Manuel Avila Camacho's brother: "If you build a road for 75,000 pesos and pocket 1,000, everybody will howl. But if you build a road for 75 million pesos and knock Dack a million, nobody will notice."
The building and boodling that went on during Alemán's six years broke all records in a land accustomed to high, wide & handsome ways in government. Mexico's press had been too close to the game to chronicle much of it, and every journalist knew about one rash editor who had been hurled, along with his typewriter, from his fourth-floor office window for daring to question the sudden wealth of a leading Alemán crony.