The Mexican Problem. Clarence Walker Barron
Oil and Southern Pacific interests came in, but the American interests stand at the head.
CLEARING CAMP FOR PETROLEUM CAMP
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.
The mouth of the river is being dredged by
CHRISTMAS DAY AT EBANO. UNVEILING STATUE OF JUAREZ
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.
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