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In 1933, to aid private capital in speeding industrialization, Mexico devised a development agency, patterned after Herbert Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corp., called Nacional Financiera. Today, financed by bond issues, loans from the Export-Import Bank of Washington, the World Bank, private U.S. banks and its own profits, Nacional Financiera is a powerful catalyst for industrialization. It measures Mexico's need for a particular industry, finds private sources, domestic or foreign, for part of the necessary capital, puts up the rest itself. When the industry prospers, Nacional Financiera pulls out (although Mexican businessmen charge that it is suspiciously slow in pulling out of its more prosperous enterprises). Since 1946, it has founded or refurbished some 200 plants and businesses, scoring notable successes in copper, steel, sugar, china, textiles, fertilizers, chemicals.
Today, near the big Papaloapan dam, a new paper mill that is 50% U.S. and Canadian and 50% Nacional Financiera is chewing jungle into pulp for newsprint. Next door to the Nacional Financiera-supported Altos Hornos steel mill at Monclova, a new nitrogen fixation factory is rising, financed one-third by private Mexican capital, one-third by French, one-third by Nacional Financiera.
In its haste to develop industry, the government also cares for the worker who keeps it running. His food bills are forcibly held down by the Mexican Export and Import Co., a government agency that buys and stores crops in order to avoid price fluctuations. His rent, in the government-owned multifamiliar (apartment house), is pegged by the government at a modest $16 a month for a two-bedroom flat. Social Security gives him free medical treatment; movie prices are frozen at 32¢ for the best seats in the house.
DDT & Freight Cars. New industry is rising from Yucatan to Baja California. In Guerrero state, a $2,000,000 cement plant is under construction to feed the fast-growing Acapulco area. In fruit-growing Hermosillo, south of the Arizona border, another nitrogen fixation plant is going up to supply its fertilizer mixing plants. In industrial Monterrey a new chlorine plant is feeding DDT and other insecticides to Mexican farmers. In Irapuato, Salamanca, León, Aguascalientes, Querétaro and San Luis Potosi—centers of a new industrial complex north of Mexico City—new factories are pouring out detergents, oil, glass, shoes, corn flakes. On the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, U.S. firms are pumping up sulphur, shipping it to a modernized port at Coatzacoalcos.
In the irrigated deserts of Baja California, around Ensenada, grow acres of cotton, harvested and ginned in a near-continuous operation. Tomato gardens supply a sizable part of the U.S. market. In a dry wasteland in central Hidalgo state, the new city of Sahagún has sprung up in four years to turn out Fiat cars and trucks, looms, and bright orange freight cars. In the jungles of Tabasco state, on the Gulf of Campeche, government bulldozers have cleared tangled vines and trees to build a sprawling new oil city and a new natural-gas absorption plant to feed lines snaking toward Mexico City.