Digging Out

Mexico, according to one etymological theory, is an Aztec term meaning "land of the people buried under lava." Today it is a country almost half of whose 48.3 million people are buried in poverty. Urban industrialization and agricultural reform have made Mexico the most economically successful of Latin America's countries, with an annual growth rate exceeding 6% over the past decade. In the past two decades, per capita income has doubled to almost $600 a year. Yet most of Mexico's small farmers, as well as the country's 3,000,000 Indians, still live on less than $100 a year. Last week, as the green-white-and-red sash of office was draped over his right shoulder during inaugural ceremonies in Mexico City's Chapultepec Park, incoming President Luis Echeverria Alvarez pledged that his first order of business would be to help those people start digging out.

During a strenuous, eight-month campaign tour that covered 35,000 miles and took him to 900 towns, Echeverria, 48, got an eyeful of the hardscrabble conditions under which so many of his countrymen live. So did scores of government officials and businessmen who accompanied him for three-week periods. Many Mexicans wondered why Echeverria even bothered. As the candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (P.R.I.), which has only token opposition, he was a shoo-in; in July's elections, he won 86% of the vote. Nevertheless, Echeverria was determined that he and other Mexican leaders should get "reacquainted" with what life was like beyond the broad terraces and soaring towers of Mexico City.

Into the Desert. The father of eight, Echeverria is a strong disciplinarian with a puritanical streak. He made it clear last week that he would not tolerate a repetition of the Mexico City student uprisings that preceded the 1968 Olympic Games. Echeverria was Minister of the Interior under outgoing President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz when those riots erupted: at least 33 people were shot to death and 500 wounded by police and soldiers. Campus unrest could well plague Echeverria throughout his six-year term, particularly with 150 people still in prison as a result of the 1968 riots.

Even so, he seems determined not to be deflected from his top priority. On the first full day of his presidency, Echeverria ordered plans to be drawn up for the incorporation of Mexico's farmers into the social security system. At week's end he headed off to the desert regions of north central Mexico to launch a program for rehabilitation of one of the country's poorest areas. The real revolutionary, he had said in his inaugural address, is the upright public servant and the honest citizen, rather than the "dreamer of revolutions, the anarchist, the agent provocateur."

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