Word: alem
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...government. Drawing salaries too low to support their families, petty bureaucrats, cops and inspectors took their "bite" as a legitimate and necessary part of their living. In the highest ranks, public office was private opportunity, and during the recently completed six-year regime of handsome, youthful-looking President Miguel Alemán, the carefree cynicism of the grabbing reached its highest, or lowest, point. It was more than Mexicans could take, and when the time came, the Party of Revolutionary Institutions-Mexico's only real political party-read the popular mood and nominated its most conspicuously honest...
Building & Boodling. In the last years before Ruiz Cortines took office, Mexican public morality was alarmingly on the skids. After World War II, the beguiling Alemán, a breezy, magnetic type with a flair for the big and splashy, led the way into an unexampled period of economic expansion. He preached industrialization, and he spent lavishly. Among his dams were grandiose, TVA-type projects, among his schools was a $25 million University City (TIME, Feb. 23). For Alemán and his friends, the biggest was best for Mexico-and for themselves. They remembered well the maxim of President...
...building and boodling that went on during Alemán's six years broke all records in a land accustomed to high, wide & handsome ways in government. Mexico's press had been too close to the game to chronicle much of it, and every journalist knew about one rash editor who had been hurled, along with his typewriter, from his fourth-floor office window for daring to question the sudden wealth of a leading Alemán crony...
...Good Times. Toward the end of the Alemán regime, the government's gay caballeros seemed to abandon all restraint. The smiling President, who loved the companionship of happy people and prided himself on his conviviality, went from one party to another. Sometimes the cronies would repair to an Acapulco yacht or to one of the ranches, and certain members of the inner circle would invite a planeload of high-spirited girls to join the party. At one time or another, the name of almost every well-known Mexican movie actress was whispered as a presidential party guest...
Mexicans are tolerant of amor, and few higher compliments can be paid a gentleman than to call him "very manly." But Alemán and his pals got going so fast in their dizzy ride that the elder statesmen of the party decided things were getting out of hand. In Mexican politics, such former Presidents as Manuel Avila Camacho, and the enigmatic Lázaro Cárdenas, holed up in his western mountains, exercise great power in the background. When the time came to choose Alemán's successor, the party leaders did not interfere with Alem...