Mexico strikes oil

I am in Mexico, far from a city or a newspaper and consequently I know nothing about the wars and rumours of war in Yemen, Uganda, Angola, Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia or wherever.

I've been looking at a people, the Zapotecs, descended from the peoples who inhabited the Gulf Coast of Mexico about 3,000 years ago. I've been seeing what was once a great fort built over a stretch of 25 square miles and housing maybe 50,000 people. Today what you look at and pad around is a vast courtyard flanked by pyramids and tombs and, in one corner, what they call 'the medical school' – stone statues of men, women and children sculpted to exhibit various deformities, afflictions and normal clinical experiences like childbirth, from which it's thought the students learned about medicine. 

There are several theories, and none for sure, about what transformed Monte Alban into a city of tombs and ruins. A famine is always a popular guess, the stripping of the forests for lime to build more and more temples is another, so that the fertile valley was eventually left barren and the people moved on. A stronger theory, to which many quite placid scholars subscribe, is that what we're looking at is an ancient Jonestown, a shuddering memorial to a race whose priest demanded human sacrifice on a grand and ritual scale beginning with the best of the young men so that, in time, fatherhood simply gave out. At any rate, another race or tribe took over about a thousand years ago and converted this great city into what is now called 'the City of the Dead'. 

I'm not saying that looking over such things is a healthy corrective to our obsession with diets and comforts and the general pursuit of longevity, but it does pull you up with a jolt to see the remains of a civilisation that had, shall we say, ideals markedly different from our own. Of course, I hasten to say I'm talking about Ancient Mexico. The ideals of modern Mexico are not much different from those of people everywhere but the transistor radio, if nothing else, has given rise to a knowledge in the remotest and poorest corners of the world of the great world outside. And this makes peoples, once resigned to poverty and a short life, wonder when they're going to get a share of the wealth of what we call 'the developed world'. 

Now, of course, the big news from Mexico is the sudden discovery of vast oil reserves – and 'sudden' is not too journalistic a word. The man who's in charge of Mexico's national oil monopoly, Jorge Diaz Serrano, took on the job at the end of 1976 and at that time Mexico had six billion barrels of proven oil and gas reserves. Today it has 40 billion barrels and every month the prospect gets brighter. Just think, when I was first in Oaxaca two years ago, Mexico exported a modest 150,000 barrels a day. Today it exports almost 500,000 a day and by the middle of next year it expects to produce two and a quarter million barrels a day which would make it, after Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, the United States and Iran, the fifth-largest oil producer in the world. 

Well, the immediate effect of this is that in the oil-producing centre, in the crook of land that contains the southern stretch between the Gulf and the Pacific, the population has doubled and food and housing are now about twice as expensive as they are in Mexico City. What it does to the people is to put them anxiously in two minds. They talk about the 'good' oil and the 'bad' oil. The good oil is that which will be used to modernise and develop the native land. In other words, to bring industry and jobs and prosperity to the poorest people – and Mexico is bowed down with the poor and a ferocious birth rate. The bad oil is that which will be sold to foreigners. 

Now of course this is an extremely over-simple view of the alternatives that face the government and the people in developing their new gusher of liquid gold. But if you're hungry, you tend to be over simple and the government has to bear this in mind in putting out any news about the new oil strikes and where the stuff is going to go. 

It was perhaps unfortunate that President Carter went when he did, last month, to Mexico. Or let's say it was a time which no American should have wished on him. For many years, there has been one great bone of contention between Mexico and the United States. It is the presence in the United States of somewhere between six and seven million illegal Mexicans. Politicians in southern California and the border states make much of this complaint when they face their own constituents, especially their unemployed constituents. And then again, there are politicians who, say, in the long central valley of California – which is the lettuce bowl of America – they keep their mouths shut when they see that the big working force that reaps this vast vegetable and fruit harvest is, mainly, Mexican. 

During the Second War, the American government turned a blind eye to the so-called 'wetbacks' – so-called because they waded across the Rio Grande from their own country into the United States. California needed what they call 'stoop' labour for the lettuce fields and the strawberries and the sugar beet crop and the escarole to replace the labour of the men who'd gone to war. And there's no doubt about it, the growers could pay pretty much what they chose to. Now the Mexican government deeply resented this exploitation and, in the middle of the war, signed an agreement with Washington which guaranteed certain minimum care by way of wages, hours of work, free transportation between the states – for the stoop labour force was mostly a mobile population moving north according to the ripening of each crop. 

I remember one provision that the Mexicans insisted on which riled quite a few growers in California, not to mention the Congress. The Mexicans said, 'What happens to our women who work in your fields and then find themselves pregnant? Can you imagine the shame, the indignity of their delivering a baby which might have to be considered an American citizen?' So, the United States government paid for Mexican women to be taken back home, have their baby and then be brought back again if they chose. 

Well, in spite of the terms of this trade treaty and several amendments made since, many Mexicans inevitably work for pretty scrimping wages. 'Inevitably', I say, because there are so many of them. It's difficult for seven millions who've been close to starvation in their own country to stand up and bargain for minimum wages but in the past ten or 15 years, they've found a tough leader in Cesar Chavez who has unionised a lot of them, pulled them out of the fields, bargained for, and won, higher wages and more decent conditions. Only last week he called a boycott against a well-known American banana company. 

I think that the... the wetback problem is probably insoluble. Mexico is naturally relieved to have six or seven million people taking the burden off the other 66 million. Imagine, as late as 1940 the population of Mexico was only 19 million; now, 66. Yet it must also complain when the migrants are treated differently from Americans. Mexico's also extremely touchy about American efforts to police the border and keep the wetbacks out. 

Realistically, the Mexicans shouldn't worry. It's an impossible job. The border wriggles from the Atlantic to the Pacific with the enormous loop of the Rio Grande making in all about between 2300 and 2500 miles of bare country, and along most of it you'd have to be a white hunter with cats' eyes to spot, by night or day, even a straggle of humans crossing from one country into the other. 

Where the big towns are there are the ports of entry. On the Texas border, Brownsville in the east, El Paso in the west. El Paso is in fact the great funnel, the national funnel for Mexican labour and a great many Mexicans have permits to work in El Paso by day and go back at night into Juarez or beyond and you can see that the possibilities of evasion and fakery are infinite. 

So, from time to time, some congressman who feels his constituents are afflicted gets up in the House and demands that the United States start to build a 2500-mile fence or a border guard or increase the helicopter patrol. Last time I checked I believe the number of helicopters patrolling 2300 miles had been beefed up from five to ten. Well, there isn't going to be a fence or a vast border patrol. The Mexicans would regard this as nothing less than a Berlin Wall. 

So now spouts the oil and, with it, a downpour of problems for the United States. Plainly, the United States, about to suffer from the shortage in Iran and the raising of the price of oil elsewhere, is eager to get some of this gorgeous new Mexican oil and before the president came down here, he'd negotiated a possible price. He suggested that the Canadian price might set a fair standard of what the United States should pay Mexico but the Mexicans wanted considerably more. So the negotiations were stalled when President Carter took off for Mexico. 

I don't know how well he was briefed – very well indeed, I'm sure, about the Mexican oil prospects and the price bargaining that had gone on. But what hit him between the eyes was something that nobody could have anticipated – a mood, a mood of defiance that he never bargained for. The great oil strike had not made Mexicans say, 'Aha! Now we can deal with the Yankee as an equal trading partner', it filled them with a natural pride which induced in them a burst of total recall in which they itemised in anger all the humiliations that they have suffered at the hands of the United States, from losing a vast amount of the far West to the United States in the war of 1848, on through to the bitter days when they expropriated American oil companies on to the wild suggestion of a coast-to-coast concrete wall. So Mr Carter was the beneficiary of a well modulated outpouring of scorn and sermonising. 

I suppose it was inevitable but the old grievances will pass and so, too, let's hope will the old, touchy pride of the Mexicans and the old condescension of the Americans.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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