Spring Offensive

By last week, every Mexican knew that the foot-&-mouth war was on. Motoring city folk met it on the highways where olive-grey-clad soldiers had set up roadblocks. Cars were stopped while passengers tramped through a box filled with caustic soda-saturated sawdust. Then the cars slushed through a cement tank of the solution. Far & wide over the area of battle* Army planes patrolled, spotting cattle for ground troops. Once found, the beasts were slaughtered and quickly buried. In the costly offensive against aftosa--foot-&-mouth disease--there could be no quarter.

The new Mexico had shown its real stuff in the way it met its crisis. Soon after infection was discovered last year, and after the U.S. had slammed the door on Mexican cattle imports, the Government went decisively to war (TIME, March 3). President Miguel Aleman named himself head of the Anti-Aftosa Committee. Army, Navy and Agriculture departments, working with U.S. Department of Agriculture experts (the U.S. appropriated $9,000,000 to help Mexico in the fight), quarantined infected areas. Then the slaughter began, widening out into new areas as infection spread.

A Man & His Ox. To back-country peones the killings are hard to take. Reported TIME Correspondent John Stanton:

"These hot nights, when quiet Indians in white suits squat along the highway watching cars from Vera Cruz labor up the mountains, they have something deep and puzzling to talk about. Today a veterinarian decided that one of Juan Fernandez' five steers was infected. Tomorrow soldiers will come, shoot it, bury it deep. Then they will shoot all the healthy cattle in the village herd and send that meat to market. The small owners will all be paid market prices. But what of the rule that no new cattle can graze on village land for two months? Where will the new foundation stock come from? When will the Government make good its promise to replace Juan's work ox with mules?

"The Indians murmur of these things. On one hand, says Juan, the Government argues that the spreading epidemic is a great national evil; everyone should contribute to stamping out the disease. On the other hand, local Sinarchist leaders (clerical fascists) shout that the campaign is turning the country into a vast slaughterhouse, that it will take more than a million cattle deaths to stamp out the disease. They argue until a man's head aches that campesinos are not being paid enough for their losses, that most of the sick cattle get well by themselves, that the 'European' method of inoculating the cattle is better than the 'American' method of shooting them, that farmers should resist the 'sanitary rifles' of the troops. Now who, Juan asks, is right?

Profit in Panic. "Sly Pedro Gonzalez has another angle. He has heard of smart men buying healthy steers (at panic sale) for 99 pesos, inoculating them with aftosa and selling them to Government agents for 250 pesos, a goodly profit, gracias a Dios. Less enterprising men have smuggled healthy cattle from aftosa-free areas into infected areas and then stood piously by while Nature did the rest."

* All the countryside between Mexico City and Vera Cruz, sweeping northward into Guanajuto Queretaro, an area containing one-third of Mexico's population, one-seventh of its cattle.

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