Bullish on Baja : The Idea of Taking Over the Peninsula Has Always Made Businessmen Slaver

AN ORANGE County marketing executive has an idea on how to retire the national debt--buy Baja California from Mexico and open it up to American-style development.

The mind boggles.

The proceeds would not only pay off our own debt, writes Charles W. Roberts, president of Roberts/Mealer/Emerson, Costa Mesa, but it would also enrich Mexico, it would thrill both Mexicans and Americans, and, to get down to the nitty-gritty, “it would make our poor developers really rich.”

Roberts’ scenario is the stuff of dreams: The United States buys Baja at a price that would pay off Mexico’s foreign debt; it sells the land in chunks to the highest bidders, thus paying off our debt; the buyers and their banks engage in a frenzy of development.

“Americans would go nuts. Think of the weather. Thousands of miles of shoreline. Great terrain. The harbors.”

If Roberts’ idea were new, I’d have to assume he is kidding. But the Americanization of Baja is a fantasy that flowers periodically in the minds of Orange County businessmen. It makes them slaver like sharks in bloodied water.

The United States buying Baja California would be an act of arrogance and cynicism almost as perfidious as the dispossession and genocide of the American Indians.

Its value lies in its pristine nakedness, its isolation. The naturalist-essayist Joseph Wood Krutch called it “the forgotten peninsula,” cherishing its desolate beauty as an example of “what bad roads can do for a country.” Leonard Wibberley called his book on Baja “Yesterday’s Land.”

The Baja peninsula, 800 miles long, was broken off from the mainland by some geological cataclysm millions of years ago and cut off from the United States by treaty at the end of the Mexican War. These two events created the peninsula and left it, for the most part, in its prehistoric state.

Pine-covered mountains rise 10,000 feet between two seas; the great central desert gets no rain for years on end, yet it grows flowering cactus and the boojum tree found nowhere else in the world; turquoise coves and white beaches abound; alluring islands lie in a warm gulf teeming with game fish; and finally there is the cape, land’s end, where mangoes, bananas and papayas grow and hurricanes are not unknown. Towns are small and few.

When the trans-peninsular highway was opened, my wife and I drove the length of it. Sometimes we didn’t see another car for hours; there were no roadside stands, no billboards--nothing but an occasional government sign announcing some new reclamation project. I had a feeling that if I didn’t hold my breath, it would all explode into Southern California.

I can easily see the fruition of Mr. Roberts’ vision. Gas stations, coffee shops and motels along the road; cities proliferating on the shore; coves dominated by towering condos; real estate promotion signs polluting the landscape; traffic jams and auto-wrecking yards; resort hotels with swimming pools, hundreds of square miles of tract homes, and an overnight burgeoning of slums for the “aliens” who would flock to these glitzy oases for jobs as waiters, busboys and maids.

In short, it would soon look like Southern California.

Mr. Roberts and his associates may point out that I myself have befouled the Baja coast by building a house on Santo Tomas Bay. That was almost 20 years ago. Today there are only 10 American houses on the bay; the land is leased, and access is protected by 18 miles of very bad road. That is hardly the kind of flash development that would be ignited by American ownership and promotion.

I have concerned myself only with the aesthetic changes that would be visited on Baja by an American takeover. What about damage to Mexico’s national pride? They have already lost Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. Is nothing sacred?

I have a better idea for paying off the national debt--one that Roberts and his colleagues should really warm to. Why doesn’t the government sell all our national parks and reserves and open them to development, including the undefiled shoreline along Camp Pendleton, on the South Coast?

Wouldn’t you love to own a condominium in Yosemite?

Photographed by Neal Brown; globe courtesy of Geographia Map & Travel Book Store, Burbank