Ideas Beautiful and Bad for a Baja Buyout
In protesting recently against the proposed purchase of Baja California by the United States, I quoted from a letter from Charles W. Roberts, an Orange County marketing executive, suggesting that American-style development of the peninsula would not only pay off our own debt, but enrich Mexico.
In a letter to the editor, Mr. Roberts now writes: “Guess I piqued Jack Smith’s interest with my idea of how to solve the U.S. and Mexican debt problem. But he missed the point and turned tongue-in-cheek into foot-in-mouth. . . .”
As I said in that column, “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. . . .”
If Mr. Roberts was kidding, I apologize for missing the clues. I responded that “buying Baja California would be an act of arrogance and cynicism almost as perfidious as the dispossession and genocide of the American Indians. . . .”
In his letter to the editor, Roberts says: “My idea may or may not be new. But neither is it ‘arrogant’ nor ‘perfidious.’ All parties would have to agree to merging and sensible land use. Idealistic? Maybe. It sure doesn’t happen here.”
Maybe I’m missing the point again, but it sounds as if Roberts is still for buying Baja; he just wants to make sure that it’s developed sensibly. He points out that as a resident of Trabuco Canyon and “a longtime environmentalist,” he is appalled at the “future slums” the “developer-funded county supervisors” are permitting, “with no regard for topography, watershed and our last remaining native cats, deer and predatory birds,” as well as the massive gridlocking of our own species.
Mr. Roberts says he is “on my side” in hoping to spare Baja the clutter of Southern California-style development. But he fears that Mexico’s growing debt will cause a revolution soon, and then “there may not be a Baja as we know it. . . .”
Thomas B. O’Keefe of Laguna Beach seems to feel that Baja should be American, because it was supposed to be ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Paris in 1848, but that provision was lost through an error.
“If one assumes that the growth of the Baja will continue and be under Mexican control,” he says, “then the Baja will surely become like other parts of populated Mexico and be destroyed.” O’Keefe says most Baja Mexicans favor American statehood.
Martin Zaehringer of Glendale argues that buying Baja would be “manifest destiny” at its best. However, he notes that if Mexico wants to pay its national debt by selling Baja, it does not have to deal with the United States. Mexico could sell it directly to the developers themselves, or arrange new loans from the entities it owes money to and develop Baja itself.
Myldred T. Nultemeier of Apple Valley fears that if American developers don’t “get there first,” Mexico might allow “a nation other than ours to get its hands on that property.” Ms. Nultemeier says she hesitates to name the nation she has in mind, but she says, “I’m sure you know who is buying out the Hawaiian Islands, and what has been done and is being done over there, and a logical next step could be Baja California for them.”
Chuck Dromiack, editor of Territorial Enterprise, sends me a piece he wrote for the March, 1986, issue reporting secret negotiations between Hong Kong bankers and the Mexican president for a 99-year lease on a part of Baja for reconstruction of a new Hong Kong after Hong Kong goes to China in 1997.
He envisions a metropolis of financial towers, a deep-water port, housing for 500,000 newcomers and luxuriously appointed chain hotels, condos, townhouses and apartments. Dromiack expects a mass exodus of Hong Kong’s industrial and financial giants to Baja when Hong Kong goes Chinese.
He says he wrote the piece as a hoax, but it “caused chopsticks to rattle in Hong Kong,” and it made headlines for five days in Mexico.
“In this quick age of instant journalism--quick verification of fact--I never figured that I would fool anyone. I was wrong. . . . I had crazed developers phoning me at home for details, and also had the Mexican government looking for my head.”
But who will laugh last?