# The Mexican Problem (1917)/American Interests No Base Of Disorder

CHAPTER II
The Mexican problem can be studied better at Tampico than elsewhere in Mexico. Here the civilization and business forces of Europe and America have opened the jungle and the prairie, tapped the greatest oil basin in the world, harnessed it, piped it to the Gulf coast, and here light and enlightenment, work and wages, invite human development. Here is the American boom town of Mexico, grown to fifty thousand population, with asphalt-paved streets, business blocks, markets, and parks.
Here in turn the warring factions of Mexico fight for the privilege of protecting and taxing the developing properties about Tampico. Here the new order meets the old. The native Mexican, more than two-thirds the population of the country, gladly accepts the extended helping hand. The Anglo-Saxon, the European and the American, are welcome throughout Mexico. "Gringo" is only a border term.
What, then, is the Mexican problem? ​It is the problem of one civilization and one order, one rule and procedure, in contact with another civilization, another order, procedure and morality.
A WORLD PROBLEM
This is the problem belting the world. It is the problem of China, it is the problem in Egypt, it is the whole of the southern-eastern question. It is the issue that blazes in northern Europe.
Here the issue is complicated because the oncoming order finds not only one but two civilizations already in the field and more or less in conflict for four hundred years.
Governments in Europe are breaking up. Governments in Mexico are one after another breaking down; but the breakdown in Mexico has no more relation in its causes to the United States than has the European war, as the facts when ultimately presented before the American people must clearly demonstrate.
But it was not with any purpose to theorize on the Mexican problem that the writer took a trip across the country and the Gulf to Tampico and studied the resources of Mexico in the Tampico-Tuxpan oil field to get the facts of the existing ​situation and note the factors springing therefrom related to American investments.
Tampico has a broader meaning in the American investment field than is yet generally realized. The development of the gold fields of South Africa has been important, not because of the South African war costing England $1,200,000,000, but because the output of South African gold affected the civilization and the economic and social order of the world.
Vera Cruz, Mexico City, and the west coast of Mexico are to-day as Mexican as ever— both in order and disorder. But Tampico and Tuxpan are international and are basic in the economic and social progress of both Europe and America, and possibly of Asia.
Here is the British naval oil base. Here, before the war, were the German experts studying the future relations of German commerce to the oil supply of the world, which later may center in Mexico.
THE AMERICAN PIONEER
American pioneers, however, were first in the field and American business talent and American capital have maintained leadership without government invitation, support or even recognition. ​It is a popular misconception in the United States that the people of Mexico have been, are, or are about to be exploited in the interest of the Standard Oil refineries, the Guggenheim smelters, or the Hearst ranches. Nothing could be further from the facts as related to the present situation, although both in Texas and Mexico, Standard Oil interests attempted years ago to arrest the oil development.
The wealth of the world is planetary wealth until it is lifted by human discovery, human forces, and human hands into human uses. The agricultural wealth of the world giving food to man is from the sun through the soil by labor. The mineral and oil wealth of the world is by human discovery, engineering, machinery, finance, and complex forms of human labor. Almost universally have the nations of the earth recognized right by discovery in underground wealth, and thus invited its discovery and development.
Under the administration of President Diaz Mexico was opened to the outside world, which was invited to pour in its talent, money, and skill to lift to the surface the undeveloped resources of the country, teach the unskilled labor of the land, and put Mexico, its people and its resources, ​in the way of modern development and civilization.
What are now the oil fields of Mexico were formerly the "bad lands" of the jungle and the plain. The black asphalt oozes softened the soil and enmeshed and swallowed up cattle, horses, and wild animals. They were in 1900, as they had been for nineteen hundred years, worse than valueless.
Edward L. Doheny, American engineer-prospector, miner, and pioneer developer in the oil fields of Los Angeles, California, was more than millionaire, and so also was his partner Canfield, when they entered Mexico in 1900 to prospect for petroleum. They were not freebooters, seeking conquest or the exploitation of people, laws, or government. They were looking to do in Mexico what they had done in California and with their own fortunes lift values of this old planet to the surface, under Mexican laws, treaties, and customs and with the aid of Mexican labor. Diaz and Mexico had invited outside talent and money; Boston money had built the railroad from Arizona to the port of Guaymas on the Gulf of California and from El Paso to the City of Mexico, with a branch to Tampico.
Into the jungle from Tampico to Tuxpan ​went Doheny and Canfield by foot and on horseback. They located the oil seepages. They sought out the owners of the lands. First they bought 450,000 acres thirty-five miles west of Tampico and later 170,000 acres in various tracts south toward Tuxpan. They paid from sixty cents per acre upward and astonished the Mexican people by the prices paid for such unproductive lands. They were advised against such large prices by the Mexican lawyers, landowners, and statesmen
But the Americans retorted that the price was immaterial if they found what they were after; they would not hesitate or haggle. The Mexicans named their own terms, took the cash and delivered title deeds running back through generations, some titles making a heavy volume.
NO DISPUTE WITH THE GOVERNMENT
Nowhere have these interests disputed with the government, or refused their due taxes or cooperation with the local and national authorities. The only complaint against them was that they raised wages from less than twenty cents a day to a minimum of one dollar a day and made native Mexicans into blacksmiths, carpenters, shipbuilders, and engineers at three dollars and fifty cents a day in gold.
It has been a new economic era. It has been a development. It has not been a conquest or an exploitation either of peoples or of governments, and the same may be said of all the other interests, British and American, in mining and in agriculture, in Mexico.
The fighting in Mexico has not been with or concerning American or foreign interests. The fighting has been between local factions, leading families, political parties, the ins and the outs.
The strife has been for the possession of the citadel and the reins of government at Mexico City. There has been danger to the American interests only by reason of their location at times between the conflicting forces, but neither the American nor the foreign interests have so much ​as possessed arms for their own defense. No guns are allowed on any of these oil properties nor are they desired. Their possession would be a menace, because they would be desired and fought for by the politically contending forces and the roving bands that at times overrun Mexico from north to south and east to west.
TAMPICO HARBOR
When a generation ago the Boston people ploughed the railroad line from Atchison to Santa Fe and across the great American desert into California, they had great hopes of traffic from the Mexican Central line they built from El Paso to connect with the City of Mexico, a thousand miles distant. They believed it would be a great feeder to the Atchison.
In this they were disappointed, but they still had the courage to build a branch to Tampico, hoping therefrom to make a new port for the development of the interior of Mexico. They had no thought of oil and no other thought than the wealth of the great high plateau in the center of Mexico.
For years the Atchison folders printed the Mexican lines almost as their own. To-day on the Atchison folders connections north even into ​Canada may be traced, but Mexico is a foreign country upon which the railroads need not waste paper in maps or time-tables. A thumb-nail corner in the Santa Fé map shows Mexico, and on it from Mexico City to the Rio Grande on the coast is a wilderness broken only by the harbor of Tampico.
To all American lines meeting at El Paso the business in and out of Mexico has been for more than thirty years a disappointment.
It is now clear that the greatest development in Mexico may take place from the coast and through her oil wealth. From the Rio Grande to Tampico the Gulf coast of Mexico is largely an unpenetrated jungle, rich in natural resources and capable of maintaining a population of many millions.
Tampico harbor is simply the mouth of the Panuco River and the city is nine kilometers from the jetties, which defend the river mouth from the lashings of the Gulf waves. Tampico is capable of indefinite development as a port. It has a large water basin to the south and another to the northwest, while from near the mouth of the river runs a government canal almost due south, defended from the Gulf by a narrow strip of land. This Chijol Canal enters the great lagoon of ​Tamiahua, which is continued by another waterway near the coast almost to Tuxpan. Therefore, for almost the entire one hundred miles between Tampico and Tuxpan there is inland water transportation for barges and shallow steamers just inside the coast line.
Between the Chijol Canal and the Panuco River are the termini of the Mexican Petroleum pipe lines "tank farm" and Tankville, with altogether one hundred and three tanks, each filled with 55,000 barrels of oil. There is also a storage basin carrying more than 800,000 barrels of oil. Here are the machine shops, carpenter shops, and shipbuilding plant, piers that will automatically load the largest steamers in a few hours, and a topping plant to take the gasolene or distillate from the crude oil. About ten per cent of the oil is gasolene and its removal does not impair the fuel qualities of the ninety per cent remaining.
Here also on the east side of the river are the Standard Oil and Royal Dutch works and a refinery and topping plant of the Mexican Eagle Company. On the other side of the river are the Pierce Oil refinery, the railroad terminal, and a magnificent government wharf.
​cooperation between the Carranza government in control at Tampico and the oil interests, more than a dozen American companies cooperating to advance the money, the same to be repaid from taxes on a part of the increase of their business. Under this arrangement the Mexican Eagle Company, Lord Cowdray's company, advances twenty-five per cent and the Mexican Petroleum Company thirty-three and one-third per cent.
PICTURESQUE EBANO
The first oil developments began at Ebano, thirty-five miles west on the railroad from Tampico. Here the Mexican Petroleum Company has now 450,000 acres bounded on the north by the Tamesin River, and reaching almost down to the Panuco River, the general direction of which is parallel with the Tamesin River. Here is the heaviest oil, while as one goes south the oil is lighter and increases in commercial value.
Ebano is one of the most picturesque towns in Mexico, an American creation, of Mexican architecture, covering a beautiful mound rising nearly two hundred feet above the plain, now a fertile ranch, the whole reminding one of the beautiful Italian villages set on a hill; but ranch and hill were seventeen years ago a jungle ​thicket with no life but that of the panther, the serpent, the parrot, and all the other animal and bird life of the jungle.
From this point the National Railways of Mexico are furnished their fuel oil. With the railroads working at their capacity in a settled country they would be consuming twelve thousand barrels a day, but at present less than six thousand barrels is taken and the proceeds are credited on the company's tax bill. The tax is about five cents per barrel for exported oil.
Until Mexico has settled down, it is not worth while to dwell upon the oil or agricultural wealth or the few millions here first invested, for the wells farther south are abundantly sufficient to fill four times the present pipe lines and four times the available ocean tonnage.