Quintana's Box

Mexico City sits upon a reclaimed lake, and for centuries it has slowly been sinking into the spongy soil. Buildings along the same block often settle at differing speeds, and streets also sink at random. The famed Palacio de Bellas Artes, where American tourists fight for tickets to the Ballet Folklorico, has dropped nine feet since it was completed in 1934. Considering its flimsy underpinnings, Mexico City is a particularly treacherous locale in which to construct a subway.

Despite such obstacles, the city is building the world's highest (elevation: 7,349 ft.) underground transit system. Later this month President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz is to dedicate the first ten-mile stretch of the $300 million, 26-mile net work. Then French-built, orange-colored trains with rubber tires will start rolling along the tracks at three-minute intervals. For months, proud Mexicans have been lining up on Sunday afternoons by the thousands to gawk at the project and its artfully decorated stations, including one built around an Aztec pyramid unearthed during the excavations. They have dubbed the subway "el Cajon" (the Box), from the shape of the concrete tunnel that en cases it.

That shape, and the ingenious engineering that made the project feasible, is the handiwork of Mexico's largest builder, Bernardo Quintana. His box tunnel literally floats like a ship on subsoil that is 80% water. The trick was to remove precisely the right weight of soil and water without undermining buildings alongside the right of way. To do so, Quintana first built sidewalls for a trench, then removed the muck between them through a complex electroosmosis process of his own devising. The roof to form a tunnel came last. By the time the whole subway is completed in November 1970, it should accommodate 3,600,000 passengers a day and provide some relief for residents who now get trapped in the city's Tokyo-like traffic snarls.

Mother Hen. The work was started in mid-1967 by Quintana's Ingenieros Civiles Asociados (ICA), which owns outright or has an interest in 33 firms in Mexico. The ICA group employs 30,000 people, more than any other private enterprise in Mexico, and had sales of $220 million last year, the equivalent of 1% of the country's gross national product. Outside Mexico, it is engaged in heavy construction work in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Quintana, 49, started ICA 22 years ago with shoestring capital of $8,000 and the cooperation of 16 fellow engineers aged 23 to 28. He staked the firm's future on a public-housing project and completed the job ahead of schedule. He thus began a close association with the government, which remains ICA's best customer.

Soon realizing that virtually all construction equipment had to be bought abroad, Quintana expanded by setting up, by himself or in cooperation with foreign firms, other companies to manufacture the materials and machinery he needed. Says Quintana: "ICA has become a mother-hen company that creates everything and has its own chickens and eggs around it." Among the results of that policy are Industria del Hierro, a machinery producer in Queretaro, and partnerships with a dozen European and U.S. firms--including Link-Belt Speeder Co., now a division of FMC Corp. of California.

Stable Partnerships. As a builder, Quintana has constructed hundreds of miles of highway and a dozen dams in Mexico, including the 720,000-kw. El Infiernillo power project on the country's southwest coast. He also served as the main contractor for building the Sports Palace for the 1968 Olympic Games. Partnership with a stable government, in the hands of the same political party for more than 30 years, has paid off handsomely.

When Mexico bought 66% of the Mexican affiliate of Pan American Sulphur Co. in 1967, Quintana was one of four businessmen invited to share 35% of the investment. Now that Mexico seeks to develop its own oil industry, Quintana is reaching out again. He will provide all the drilling equipment for the venture.

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