MEXICO: Jungle Project

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A TVA for the tropics will pace President Miguel Aleman's whopping $300,000,000 land development program. In the biggest reclamation project ever undertaken in Mexico, more than 17,000 square miles of steaming, flood-soaked and disease-ridden jungle in the states of Vera Cruz and Oaxaca will be turned to agricultural and industrial profit.

This week Adolfo Orive de Alba, President Aleman's Minister of Hydraulic Resources, is deep in this tierra caliente, finding suitable spots for work camps and hospitals to shelter and care for an army of laborers. Four huge dams will be built across the Papaloapan's tributaries, creating giant lakes in the shadow of snowcapped Orizaba (18,701 ft.). The twisting Papaloapan itself will be dredged to make a ship channel from Tuxtepec, 149 miles from the Gulf. At Chacaltianguis a canal will be built to link the river with swampy lakes farther north and to provide a catch basin to control floods. A war will be waged on the hookworm disease and malaria that infest the hot lowlands.

All this will take time (about six years) and money ($200,000,000). But Orive de Alba knows that Papaloapan can do much for Mexico. To invite industry to the valley, more power than all Mexico now produces will flow from the four dams. Reclaimed swamps, flood lands and arid areas soon to be irrigated will be opened to farmers. The region's present population of 170,000 poor bush-grubbers, Engineer de Alba hopes, will grow to more than 600,000 when his work is done.