A quarter century ago I stood in a market place in Chiapas and watched two worlds come together:  an Indian subsistence farmer who lived from growing corn on a tiny clearing in the jungle confronted a mestizo merchant who lived from selling hardware in his little shop in the town. The Indian man, who may have been making his first visit to the town, was obviously much taken by a galvanized tin pail, because for him it represented a major improvement over the large clay pot in which his wife customarily fetched the water.  Not only was it much lighter to carry but it also wouldn't break if it were accidentally dropped.  Holding it up to the sun, he satisfied himself that it also wouldn't leak, for no light came through it.  In a mixture of sign language, Indian words, and Spanish numerals he queried the merchant as to how much it cost, and when told, he shook his head wistfully.  Obviously, it was a lot of money for someone who had none.  But, the merchant was prepared for this and he pointed to a bow and quiver of arrows that hung in the corner of his shop, and then he pointed back at the pail.  The Indian nodded thoughtfully because now he understood that if he brought the merchant a similar trophy, he could exchange it for the pail.  It would probably take him a few days to make them and he might not get back to the market for another month but his wife would just have to wait a while longer for her water bucket. 

           When the Indian departed, I approached the merchant and asked the price of the bow and arrows, not that I particularly wanted to purchase them but because I was curious as to what they would fetch in the market place.  The price he quoted clearly revealed that he did a rather lucrative trade in selling such wares to gringo tourists like myself, because had they not been such a "hot item" his shop would probably have been full of them.

           A little farther along I eavesdropped as an Indian woman was just about to conclude the purchase of some small packets of detergent, each of them tagged with a price of one peso.  She obviously wanted them very badly but shelling out five pesos for a small handful of the packets no doubt seemed somewhat extravagant to her.  (One could almost imagine her having to justify her purchase to her husband when she returned home).  But, having made up her mind, she was handing the money over to the merchant when suddenly another cluster of small detergent packages hanging from a pole caught her eye.  These, she could see, contained glistening particles of green mixed with the granular white soap powder.  The merchant was quick to explain that these were "green power crystals" which would make her wash even whiter, but his explanation went completely over her head; she didn't understand what they did or how they did it, and what's more she didn't seem to care either.  What fascinated her was that they were green -- a color sacred to the Indians!   When she asked the price, she almost winced as the merchant told her they were three pesos apiece, and the anguish on her face was all too apparent.  Yet, digging in her bolsa for another peso, she decided to settle for two of the slightly larger packets with green crystals instead of six plain white ones.  Certainly, this was a purchase whose soundness her husband would never question! 

           The commercial activities of the Mexican Republic are primarily concentrated in the larger urban areas of the country with more than one-quarter of all commercial employees and fully three-eighths of all commercial income being found in the Federal District and the adjacent state of Mexico.  When the Guadalajara node is added (Jalisco), the employees total one-third of those in the entire country and sales make up more than 45% of the Mexico's grand total.  Include Monterrey (Nuevo León) and we account for 3/8 of all commercial employees and more than 52% of the income generated in commerce.  Indeed, the commercial life of modern Mexico is so geographically concentrated that the Federal District and seven states  -- the remaining four being Veracruz, Guanajuato, Puebla, and Chihuahua -- carry on two-thirds of all the country's commercial activities.

            It is interesting that less than a decade after the railway's break-through in England, English entrepreneurs were eagerly marketing the new means of transportation not only throughout the British Empire but also in all other countries in the world in which they had any conceivable economic interest.  One of these was Mexico, long known for its mineral wealth.  Although no one in Mexico had given any thought to a plan for the development of a national transport system, much less had any idea of the real needs of the country in this regard, the English realized that the nation's economic life-line was the connection between the mines of the plateau and the export port of Veracruz.  So, as early as 1837 they succeeded in winning a concession for a railway between the Gulf coast and the Mexican capital, to be operated "in perpetuity". 

           Perhaps they underestimated the topographic problems with which they would be confronted, for not only did the concession pass through many hands within a few years, but also by 1859 no more than 13 km (7 mi) of tracks had been laid.  Nevertheless, work continued throughout the period of the civil wars and the French intervention and by 1869 President Juarez officially opened the first leg of the line between Mexico City and Puebla.  Four years later, his successor, Lerdo de Tejada, was able to inaugurate the entire line down to Veracruz.

           There was no question that the Veracruz-Mexico City railway was something of an engineering miracle, for it climbed from sea level up to the plateau by way of Jalapa, closely paralleling the trajectory of Cortes's initial march. Once on the plateau, however, it curved north of both Tlaxcala and Cholula to avoid the great volcanic ridge formed by Popocatépetl and Ixtaccíhuatl and entered the basin of Mexico by the low pass that had been strategically controlled by Teotihuacán in pre-Columbian times.

           It was clear from the very outset that in a country like Mexico topography would be a major deterrent to the new form of transportation, for in order to keep the gradient no greater than 3%, it was necessary to lay out the trajectory in circuitous loops which were linked by numerous lofty bridges, and, not infrequently, by lengthy tunnels.   Construction costs accordingly were high, and, unless an ample flow of traffic could be expected, there was little prospect of their being recouped by the line's investors for some time.  Moreover, once completed, the railway could only be operated at reasonably slow speeds and with relatively modest amounts of freight, especially on the up-bound climb to the plateau.  All of these considerations likewise raised the question as to which commodities were valuable or perishable enough to warrant the costs of shipment in the first place.

           Where terrain was less of a problem, the construction of railways obviously provided a feasible solution to the mass movement of even relatively low-value products.  One such area was the Yucatán where a number of short, narrow-gauge lines were built around 1880 to haul henequen from the nearby plantations into the city of Mérida for processing and then down to the port of Progreso for export.

           After witnessing the lengthy and troubled negotiations which had been required to complete the country's first major railway, President Lerdo de Tejada resolved that further construction should be financed by Mexican investors and carried out by local entrepreneurs, with the assistance of the state governments if necessary.  Of course, with the Mexican economy in the doldrums, this meant that further railway construction was essentially put on hold for the foreseeable future.

           When Porfírio Diaz came to power in 1877, he reversed the policy totally, not only throwing the country open to foreign capital but even offering a subsidy of 8,000 pesos for each kilometer of line that was built.  All land required for railway construction was to be deeded to the concessionaire free of charge, no import duties were to be levied on equipment or materials involved in the project, and the builder was to have full rights of operation for 99 years.  Immediately United States investors jumped in, winning concessions to build the Central Line from El Paso/Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City and the National Line from Laredo/Nuevo Laredo via Monterrey to Mexico City.  The first of these railways was rapidly pushed southward through the desert to Chihuahua, Torreón (one of the few Mexican cities actually "created" by the railroad),  Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, León, and Querétaro to Mexico City, a clear objective being to "capture" as many of the mining centers as possible without any particular regard to the distribution of the country's population.   The fact that the Central Railway was completed and operational by 1884 not only spoke to the advantageous conditions established by its concession but also to the relatively open terrain through which it passed. 

           About the same time, work was getting underway on Mexico's first and only "transcontinental" railway, a line linking the ancient Gulf coast port of Coatzacoalcos (now renamed Puerto México by the railway company) with the Pacific.  Here the trajectory of the railway led first through swampy lowlands densely covered by rainforest, and numerous concessionaires lost their shirts trying to lay a credible road-bed through the region which had been the very heart of  "the Olmec metropolitan area".  Finally, the English firm of Pearson agreed to rebuild the entire line in return for a 51-year lien on the port revenues of both Puerto México and Veracruz, a condition that Diaz willingly accepted.

           As the railway advanced through the Tehuantepec Gap, the two towns of Juchitán and Tehuantepec literally were brought to the verge of war with each other, knowing that whichever of them became the Pacific terminus of the line would experience a major impetus to its growth.  However, as it turned out, both geography and politics intervened.  Juchitán's access to the sea lay through the shallow lagoon known as the Laguna Inferior, and thus did not truly afford the deep-water anchorage that was being sought.  Tehuantepec, for its part, lay on a river that was anything but navigable but had to be crossed on the way down to the open sea.  Moreover, Porfírio Diaz' mistress lived in Tehuantepec and had expressed the desire to be able to see the trains as they passed by.  So, at Porfírio's direction, the Pearson engineers routed the track right down the main street past her house, where it still goes today.   From there it bridges the river and continues to the tidewater port of Salina Cruz. 

           Because the Tehuantepec railway afforded a reasonable "short cut" between the Atlantic and Pacific over a height of land hardly higher than 200 m (650 feet), it served as a viable route for the movement of freight not only for Mexican interests but also for some United States firms as well.  At the peak of its traffic, some forty trains a day rolled between the Gulf and the Pacific.  However, the hey-day of the Tehuantepec railway lasted only up until the time that the Panama Canal was completed, for then cheap water transportation quickly undercut the costs of transshipment by rail, even across the 200 km (120 mi) width of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.  Today the traffic has diminished to a couple of mixed trains of passenger cars, freight, and oil tank cars per day.

           By 1898 the anarchy prevailing in Mexico's rail system became so apparent to the Minister of the Treasury that he prevailed in the enactment of a General Railway Law whose purpose it was to ensure that any new construction would serve to complete a national network rather than sponsor the building of detached lines in remotely separated parts of the country.  As a result, in the later years of the Diaz administration, the Mexican government began acquiring the majority of the shares of the Central and National Lines and fusing them into a unified company called the National Railways of Mexico, so by the end of the Porfirian period the major lineaments of the Mexican rail system had been pretty well established -- the country as a whole boasting some 20,000 km (12,000 mi) of trackage.

           Included within this total were several other lines built by American interests.  The Southern Pacific, for example, had pushed a line across the border at Nogales, through Hermosillo to the coast at Guaymas, and then along the Pacific littoral to Mazatlán and into the state of Nayarit. There difficult terrain interposed a gap with the railways of the highlands, which by then had pushed a tentacle westward beyond Guadalajara. 

           The first Pacific seaport to be reached by a railway connection from the capital had been Manzanillo, though another link southward from Veracruz provided a link with the Tehuantepec railway, so it was also possible to reach Salina Cruz from Mexico City.  Another line, the so-called Pan-American railway, continued south along the Pacific coast to the Guatemalan border and opened a connection into Central America.  However, because it both paralleled the seacoast and joined two areas having little or no complementarity, i.e., any real reason for exchanging goods or services with each other, the latter railway has never experienced any great volume of traffic.

           Besides the cross-border link between Laredo/Nuevo Laredo and Monterrey on the edge of the Gulf coastal plain (the so-called National Line) another railway was pushed across the United States/Mexican frontier from Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras southward to Monclova and Saltillo on the plateau.  A connection between these two lines was made up through the canyon between Monterrey and Saltillo, a spectacular climb of some 600 m (2000 ft), after which the railway struck out directly west across the desert to Torreón, providing a link to the main El Paso-Mexico City line, and then continuing on to Durango.  From the latter city the railway pushed into the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental, with its intended goal being the Pacific port of Mazatlán.  Despite the good intentions of its builders, however, once it reached the crest of the mountains at El Salto the impossibility of such a venture became so abundantly clear that the project was abandoned. 

           Similarly, once a railroad had been pushed into the heart of Michoacán with the thought of reaching the Pacific at the old colonial port of Zacatula, by the time it had descended into the Balsas depression -- the hottest and driest area in all of southern Mexico -- cooler heads prevailed and that project was likewise shelved.  A bold attempt to link Mexico City with Acapulco, the chief colonial port on the Pacific, also faltered by the time the river Balsas was reached and the line dead-ended there without even crossing the river.   A fourth projected line to the Pacific dropped off the plateau and followed the old Aztec trade route southward through a great structural valley to Tehuacán, after which it climbed back into the highlands of Oaxaca and pushed its way into the foothills of the Sierra Madre del Sur, its target being the old colonial port of Huatulco.  However, about 40 km (25 mi) southeast of Oaxaca city, the futility of this venture also became apparent, and neither a railway nor a highway has penetrated the intervening 3000 m (10,000 ft) range to this day.

           Similar challenges faced Mexico's railway builders when it came to establishing a link between the country's growing rail network and the booming oil port of Tampico.  A branch line started eastward out of the main Mexico City/El Paso trunk line at Aguascalientes, curved circuitously over to the old mining center of San Luis Potosí, and then wound its way across the escarpment of the Sierra Madre Oriental down to the coastal plain, after which it dashed for the mouth of the Pánuco river on whose north bank Tampico stands.  A somewhat easier approach, but far longer in total distance, was that afforded by a second line which cuts straight across the coastal plain to join the national network at Monterrey.

           Ironically, with most of Mexico's rail network in place at the outbreak of the Revolution, it is easy to understand why many of the critical battles of that war took place at or near strategic rail junctions or along critical routes of movement.  For the first time in Mexican history, many parts of the country could be reached quickly and with relative ease.  Yet, for the very reason of their strategic importance, the railroads also suffered considerable destruction and by 1914 were in such deplorable financial situation that President Carranza decreed their consolidation under a special Director Generalship of Constitutionalist Railways.   Although some routes were rehabilitated, others were abandoned and the contract signed with the Pearson firm concerning the Tehuantepec railway was revoked.  By the end of the Revolution the railroads' indebtedness had reached such proportions that serious consideration began to be given to the notion of returning them to private ownership, a move which was finally made early in 1926.  

           Since the Revolution, continued railway construction has filled in the network a bit more and two major additions have linked the peripheral areas of Baja California Norte (specifically the cities of Tijuana and Mexicali) and the Yucatán with the country's core -- the latter routed circuitously around the vast swamps of Tabasco.  Four years of labor by thousands of men and $14 million helped close the gap between Guadalajara and the west coast during the 1930's, finally completing the Southern Pacific railway.  In 1937, President Lázaro Cárdenas re-nationalized the railways by expropriating those shares of the companies still in private hands and at the end of World War II the government bought the Southern Pacific line.  Finally, in 1962 the first railway succeeded in penetrating the Sierra Madre Occidental from the plateau and reaching the Pacific.  It did so by following a precipitous gorge called the Copper Canyon between Chihuahua and Topolobampo -- an engineering masterpiece that has subsequently turned the rail line into a stunning tourist attraction.  Unfortunately, it didn't do much for Topolobampo, which, despite its honest boast of being the "nearest Pacific port to New York City", hardly figures in any shipper's plans as a viable freight terminal on that account.   

           Of far greater economic importance to the Mexican nation, however, has been the completion of the railway through Michoacán to the mouth of the Balsas river -- not to the old colonial port of Zacatula as it was originally intended to do, but to the entirely new city of Lázaro Cárdenas, a major "growth pole" for the revitalized Mexican steel industry which is now situated there.  One of the most modern, heavy-duty rail-lines found on the North American continent, this railroad today is the vital link in supplying the Mexican market with domestically produced steel.     

           The modernization of the Mexican road system did not get seriously underway until the late 1920's and early 1930's when the automotive revolution first began to pick up momentum.  The country's first paved highway was that connecting Nuevo Laredo with the Mexican capital -- National Road No. 1 -- largely financed with United States assistance because it was visualized as the first link in a hemisphere-wide highway system whose most immediate strategic objective was to provide an all-land, all-season connection between the U.S. and the Panama Canal.  Completed in 1936, the so-called Pan American Highway was gradually extended as far south as Oaxaca by the early 1940's.  Among the other main roads which were soon up-graded for automobile traffic were the country's historic "life-line" between Mexico City and Veracruz by way of Jalapa, a link across the west-central part of the country to Morelia and Guadalajara, and the old road leading up from the Pacific coast port of Acapulco to the capital.  Also branching off the Pan-American Highway was a paved highway to the booming oil port of Tampico and a cross-desert link from Brownsville, Texas through Monterrey to the rail junction of Torreón.  Otherwise the only paved highways found in Mexico in the early 1940's were a couple of spurs between Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua in the north, between the port of Progreso, the city of Mérida, and the Mayan ruins of Uxmal and Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán, and a link between the Pacific lowland and Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of the state of Chiapas.

           In the 1940's the railways of Mexico still continued to carry the bulk of the country's long-distance passenger and freight traffic, limited in volume though it was.  However, it was quickly realized that the motor car and the truck were not as sensitive to gradients as was the railway train and in a country as rugged as Mexico this soon resulted in the abandonment of almost all new railway construction and the diversion of funds into highway building instead.  Following the end of World War II, the rapid rise in tourism served to further accelerate the building of improved highways.  Major projects included the completion of Mexico's portion of the Pan American highway into Guatemala, linking Yucatán to the core of the country, and the construction of highways closely paralleling almost the entire length of both the Gulf and Pacific coasts.  In addition, the numbers of cross-country links have been greatly expanded, and the first tentacles of vehicular communication have been steadily pushed into ever-more remote and rugged parts of the backcountry.

           In few parts of the United States, or of Europe for that matter, have highway engineers been faced with such topographic challenges as they have in Mexico.  Ascents to the plateau from either coast have entailed tremendous efforts at cutting, filling, tunneling, and bridging, whereas the climbs themselves slow the speed of traffic and curtail the weight of the goods that can be carried.  Buses have taken over almost all but a small fraction of passenger traffic from the railways, while the enhanced flexibility of movement afforded by trucks has also given them the lion's share of goods-traffic today.  Not only has bus and truck traffic burgeoned in all parts of the country but also contributing further to the volume of movement on the highways has been a growing crescendo of U.S. and Canadian tourist activity as well as a rapid increase in the number of privately owned Mexican automobiles.   Indeed, by the early 1970's, the volume of automotive traffic in and around the Mexican capital had swelled to such a point that the beginnings of a multi-lane system of divided highways already embraced Puebla on the east, Cuernavaca on the south, the pyramids of Teotihuacán to the northeast, and Querétaro to the northwest.  In the subsequent quarter-century, the system of express highways has been rapidly expanded, as shown in Figure xxx.   Because many sections of the system built by foreign investors have being designated as toll-roads whereas numerous intervening stretches permit free access, the motorist often finds himself confronted by tollbooths "in the middle of nowhere".  Because the tolls charged are among the highest in the world per mile, it is obvious that the new toll-roads were designed to paid for by foreign tourists and wealthy Mexicans because the local trucks avoid them wherever possible.

           As the modern Mexican economy has developed, sea-borne commerce has become increasingly important, despite the fact that most of the trade with Mexico's largest trading partner, the United States, moves overland either by road or rail instead.  Several of the ports which handle the largest tonnages of cargo today did not even exist in colonial times, whereas many of the seaports which were important when Mexico was a Spanish colony now serve as little more than recreational harbors.

           In general, the seaports of Mexico may be divided into two very different groups, according to their predominant function.   One group consists of those ports whose chief function is the export of bulky raw materials, such as petroleum, sulfur, fertilizer, and other mineral products.  Not surprisingly, this group handles by far the greatest tonnages of cargo.  The second group consists of general merchandise ports, i.e., ports that handle the diversified manufactures and cargoes that constitute the basic imports and exports of most commercially developed countries.  In Mexico's case, these ports are not only fewer in number but also much more restricted in the volume of movement that passes through them.

           Looking first at the specialized bulk ports, we find that six of the eight Mexican ports handling the heaviest tonnages are all engaged in the export of petroleum.  The volume of their shipments likewise testifies to the fact that the center of gravity of the Mexican oil industry has increasingly shifted to the south and east through time.  Whereas the oil boom in Mexico had essentially begun in the area around Tampico just before the Revolution, today the heaviest production is coming out of fields, both on- and off-shore, in the Campeche/Tabasco region.  Thus, today Mexico's largest oil exporting "port" isn't a port at all, but rather a wellhead located about 150 km (90 mi) offshore at Cayos Arcas in the Bay of Campeche.  In the early 1990's, tankers were loading more than 18 million tons of crude oil per year at this tiny limestone reef.   Not far behind in terms of the volume of its shipments, some of which included sulfur and petrochemicals as well as crude oil, was Coatzacoalcos (also known as Puerto México in the hey-day of the Tehuantepec railway).  Total tonnages here average nearly 18 million tons annually as well.  The third and fourth largest export ports lie geographically between the two top-ranking ports in Campeche and southern Veracruz, namely at Dos Bocas in Tabasco, which ships over 17 million tons of petroleum a year, and at Ciudad del Carmén in southwestern Campeche, which exports more than 11 million tons per year.   In fifth place is the Pacific port of Salina Cruz that receives its crude by pipeline through the Tehuantepec gap.  Indeed, the Japanese were quick to appreciate its importance as an oil source on the Pacific and they have been instrumental in increasing its pipeline capacity by investing in its expansion.  Today Salina Cruz is shipping over 7.5 million tons of petroleum products annually, much of it destined for Japan.  Among the oil export ports of Mexico, Tampico now ranks in sixth place with yearly shipments totaling about 4.7 million tons

           The remaining two bulk ports of Mexico concern themselves with mineral exports other than oil, salt in the case of Isla de Cedros, located off the Pacific coast of Baja California Norte, and copper ore at Santa Rosalia, located on the Gulf of California side of Baja California Sur.  The former ships some 5.5 million tons each year while the latter annually handles about 2.2 million tons.

           By contrast, the general merchandise ports are chiefly involved in imports and the volume of their traffic therefore rather pointedly reflects their situation vis-à-vis the Mexican domestic market.  In the 1990's the country's largest import port was Manzanillo, with about 2.7 million tons of goods being unloaded there each year. That this port now handles more goods than second-place Veracruz (with 2.3 million tons per year) reveals how strongly the Mexican economy has been reoriented toward the Pacific Rim following the Second World War.  It also illustrates how important its rail connection and its relative distance from the Mexican core are as well.

           Ranking in third place today in terms of the volume of its imported cargo (averaging about 1.9 million tons per year) is the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, though the great bulk of its imports consists of coal from Colombia bound for the new steel furnaces located within this rapidly developing "growth pole."  Unlike Manzanillo, little of the city's imports move inland beyond the city itself.  On the other hand, Coatzacoalcos annually imports about 1.9 tons of goods a year as well,  but a larger portion of these goods appear to be destined to its hinterland, thanks to the city's central location along the coast and its better road and rail links with its surroundings.  Similarly, Tampico affords the only port of entry in the northeast of Mexico, and annually receives about 1.7 million tons of cargo for distribution within its hinterland.  By the same token, Guaymas on the Gulf of California affords the only deep-water anchorage in the northwest of Mexico, and ranks as the country's sixth largest import port.  Thereafter, follow a cluster of secondary import ports whose much-reduced volume of traffic reflects the limited extent of their respective hinterlands.  Of these, two are on the Gulf or Atlantic side of Mexico, namely Tuxpan (with about 700,000 tons a year) about half way between Veracruz and Tampico, and Progreso, the main import port for the peninsula of Yucatán (whose traffic usually runs around 400,000 tons annually).  The remaining two import ports serve isolated clusters of population along the Pacific littoral in the Tijuana and Mazatlán areas -- the port of Rosarito, receiving about a half million tons of cargo each year, and Mazatlán unloading about 400,000 tons annually.

           The origins of commercial aviation in Mexico may be traced back to 1920 when the first air route was opened between the booming oil port of Tampico and Mexico City by way of the intermediate port city of Tuxpan. Lacking any easy or viable surface connection to the country's capital, the business leaders of Tampico saw the airplane as a means of providing the contact that the lack of roads and railways had denied them.  (In many countries of the world the isolation experienced by one particular region has been the impetus for the development of an airline which eventually became national in scope, often leaving its original regional orientation preserved in its name.  A couple of examples which readily come to mind are QANTAS, now the largest national and international carrier in Australia, which originally began as the Queensland and Northern Territory Air Services, and VARIG, the most important national airline of Brazil, which started life as the Vias Aéreas do Rio Grande do Sul.  Far more numerous, however, are those airlines which changed their names as they went from a narrow regional scope of operation to a more widespread network of services.)

           Nevertheless, it was not until just after the Second World War that air travel began to take on national importance in Mexico as the domestic economy expanded and international tourism started to develop.  By 1953 over a million passengers were being carried on Mexican airlines each year, three quarters of whom were Mexican nationals and the other quarter of whom were international tourists.  Since that time, the volume of passenger traffic has increased more than twenty-fold, and in the early 1990's about 27 million passengers were flying annually within Mexico, one-third of whom were foreign tourists.

                       Table 15-1.  Air Passenger Traffic at Mexico's 20 Leading Airports, 1988.

AIRPORT	TOTAL	NATIONAL	INTERNAT'L	TRANSIT	CLASSIFICATION
Mexico City	9,697,098	6,449,407	3,247,691	173,003	Commercial
Guadalajara	2,668,284	1,836,903	831,381	499,662	Commercial
Cancún	1,731,761	394,700	1,337,061	116,788	Resort
Acapulco	1,602,584	735,310	867,274	33,557	Resort
Pto. Vallarta	1,390,358	484,529	905,829	210,823	Resort
Tijuana	1,357,859	1,355,673	2,186	7,095	Commercial
Monterrey	1,035,530	805,465	230,066	102,277	Commercial
Mazatlán	761,568	359,503	402,065	308,388	Resort
Zihuatanejo	570,703	370,697	200,006	49,515	Resort
Mérida	491,535	388,706	102,829	104,508	Commercial
Cozumel	391,269	190,688	200,581	101,786	Resort
Oaxaca	342,732	342,546	186	54,472	Commercial
Villahermosa	282,638	282,638	---	40,057	Commercial
San José del Cabo	275,017	114,752	160,265	89,628	Resort
La Paz	256,267	237,286	18,981	224,497	Transit
Hermosillo	247,190	231,644	15,526	92,782	Commercial
Manzanillo	246,856	160,449	86,407	54,515	Commercial
Tampico	228,098	227,709	389	2,202	Commercial
Chihuahua	203,613	194,969	8,634	72,236	Commercial
Culiacán	200,137	200,137	---	76,567	Commercial

           When the major airports of Mexico are examined according to the nature of the traffic they handle, several interesting patterns emerge regarding the economic functions of the cities they serve.         Not too surprisingly, Mexico's two busiest air-traffic centers are its two largest cities, Mexico City and Guadalajara.  On the other hand, the next three busiest airports are all resort centers -- Cancún, Acapulco, and Puerto Vallarta -- all of whose international traffic exceeds the domestic. Ranking in sixth place in the number of air passengers handled is Tijuana, the most distant Mexican city from the capital. Alternative forms of transportation, such as bus or train, require such long travel times to reach Tijuana that, despite the higher cost of air travel, it becomes a far more attractive option than otherwise might have been expected.  On the other hand, the city of Monterrey, which ranks third in population, does not rank higher than seventh place in air passenger traffic, no doubt because bus connections with the remainder of the country are so frequent and dependable.

           The next five major air-traffic centers are all tourist centers of some importance, though Mérida, the capital of the state of Yucatán, also affords an excellent example of the "distance syndrome" at work once again, because surface means of travel consume so much travel time that air again becomes a viable option.  Moreover, Mérida's strategic location vis-à-vis the U.S. to the north and Central America to the south make it an important transit point, with the added attraction of likewise being a convenient destination for those interested in the Maya ruins located nearby.

           Of the top twenty air traffic centers in the country, the remaining seven all qualify in importance more by virtue of their distance from Mexico City than by the overall size of their populations.  Each of them is far enough away so that alternate means of travel involve too much time or difficulty to be reached conveniently or comfortably, especially for business travelers and international tourists. Three of them are beach resorts, with both San José del Cabo and La Paz being situated on the peninsula of Baja California and Manzanillo lying on the Pacific coast; two others are "oil" towns with virtually no tourist traffic (Villahermosa and Tampico); and the remaining three are fairly remote state capitals, all located in the northwest of the country -- Hermosillo in Sonora, Chihuahua in the state of the same name, and Culiacán in Sinaloa.

           Although many of the airports located in the west and northwest of Mexico handle substantial amounts of transit traffic to and from the western United States, only one of them -- La Paz, the capital of Baja California Sur -- is dominated by such traffic. The recent expansion of regional air carriers, especially in the south and southeast of Mexico, has given added importance to places such as Oaxaca in terms of transit traffic between the Yucatán and destinations on the Pacific coast.

           Visitors to Mexico fall into two major categories: short-term excursionists crossing from the United States into the northern border towns and longer-term tourists whose destination within the country lies beyond the frontier zone.  In 1997, nearly 93 million persons were documented as having crossed of the northern border, of which fully 73.5 million were short-term excursionists with destinations in the frontier cities.  The revenue generated by their visits totaled some $1.846 billion, or about 24.3% of the country's earnings from tourism.

           In 1997, some 9.8 million foreign tourists ventured beyond the northern border towns to visit the Caribbean and Pacific beach resorts and colonial cities of interior Mexico. Of these, some 8.6 million (88.1%) were from the United States, 779,000 were from Latin America (8 %) 369,000 were from Canada (3.8%), and 347,000 were from Europe (3.5%).  Of these visitors, almost 7 million (71.2%) arrived by air and 2.8 million (28.8%) arrived by land.

           The total receipts from tourism in that year were $5.3 billion, of which $4.6 billion (86.7%) were derived from airborne visitors and the remainder, $704 million, came from visitors arriving by car and bus.  The average expenditure per visitor within the country was $543.20, although it varied from $654.70 spent by air travelers to $249.90 spent by land travelers. The average daily expenditure per visitor was $54.60, but again it varied from $71.90 per day for air travelers to $20.90 per day for land travelers. The average length of stay in Mexico was 10 days, ranging from 9.2 for air travelers to 12.1 days for land travelers.

           Mexican statistics single out twenty-three cities as major tourist goals within the country, and, of these, twelve are beach resorts, eight are interior cities, and three are border cities adjacent to the United States. Among the beach resorts, a distinction is made between five newer centers which were government-planned, integrated developments, namely Cancún, Bahias de Huatulco, Ixtapa-Zihauntanejo, Loreto and Los Cabos, and seven older ones which arose more spontaneously, to wit, Acapulco, Cozumel, La Paz, Manzanillo, Mazatlán, Puerto Vallarta, and Veracruz. The eight interior cities include the three largest metropoli -- Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey -- and five centers known for their colonial charm -- Guanajuato, Mérida, Morelia, Oaxaca, and Zacatecas.

The three northern frontier cities for which data are available are Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Reynosa.

           Not too surprisingly, four of the five government-planned beach resorts find their clientele dominated by foreign tourists; only the newest of them, Huatulco, still draws more domestic visitors than international ones.   On the other hand, all of the older beach resort centers except Cozumel attract far more domestic tourists than they do foreigners.

Likewise, the tourists who frequent Mexico's interior cities are overwhelmingly of domestic origin, as are those who visit the northern border cities. Clearly, when most foreign visitors think of Mexico as a vacation destination, it is primarily the newer, swankier more exclusively tourist-oriented beach resorts that seem to have the most appeal. 

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