(4 of 5)
This land distribution, for years the chief plank of National Revolutionary Party platforms, is the cornerstone of the Six-Year Plan. Flatly the Plan postulates that over the period 1934-40 Mexico's budget will be saddled with "an augmentation of 81%" to pay the cost of putting peasants on what the Government hopes will be more than subsistence farms, with irrigation. Candidly the Plan admits "a great part of Mexico's lands are rather poor. . . . The country's sparsity of population is the chief obstacle in its progress. . . . Mexico is constantly threatened by diseases characteristically tropical. . . . The National Revolutionary Party believes that athletic training and sports are . . . an ideal manner of combatting vices, especially that of alcohol. . . . Delinquency offers a singular problem in the Republic . . . particularly cases of crimes committed by abandoned children—already perverted or on the point of being so. . . ."
In the glaring spade-calling of such passages the Six-Year Plan may offend the squeamish for whom two-fisted Boss Calles cares nothing. In the words of General Cárdenas, the Plan lays down "a comprehensive program of action for 1) return of land to the villagers; 2) stimulation of education;* 3) improvement of public health; 4) promotion of irrigation; 5) extension of roads and railways and building up of our merchant marine; 6) industrialization of Mexico under close government control."
To his last Plan-plank the radical new President attaches major importance. "'Our Six-Year Plan is to transform and replace Capitalism!" Candidate Cárdenas shouted in speech after speech. From the Plan he quoted many a pledge such as this: "The supply of electric energy shall be reduced in price so as to enable industrial production to live through electrical energy and not for electrical energy!"
It remained for Professor Moley to pry out of taciturn Boss Calles the Chief's own definition of his new and square deal. "Trying to sum up," wrote Today's Moley, "I asked him whether it [Mexico] could not be described as a republic, in which authority is exercised by government through the will of the people and in which government, in its relation to the economic system, is a regulating force rather than a paternalistic owner, directing and partially controlling capitalistic enterprise. He agreed with this interpretation."
Mexicans agree that Calles is their Mussolini. They blame him for everything that has gone wrong in the last decade. But they know he has given them much peace and talked enough Revolution to kill the goose of entrenched Capital—outside the Calles circle. For better or worse Mexico has now slammed the door against "imperialist exploitation." Three big foreign banks have cleared out of Mexico this year. The upping of silver prices has eased matters by producing a local boom.