Panama by '59?

For the man in Flint or Fresno who dreams of some day loading the wife and kids in the family sedan and steering a few weeks later across the big swinging bridge over the Panama Canal, prospects looked a little brighter last week. Rolling up its maps in Mexico City at the end of one of its occasional meetings, the directing committee of the Pan American Highway Congress released information showing that only 6% of the 3,200-mile Laredo-to-Panama stretch is still missing. Work is going ahead on two of the three main gaps, and Vice President Richard Nixon has called for a new U.S. effort to get the road done. The country-by-country rundown:

P: Guatemala has the most frustrating gap. Mexico's fine paved stretch of the highway reaches the border at a different point from where Guatemala's road net touches the Mexican border. At present a 164-mile, $35 railway-flatcar haul bridges the gap. With $1,425,000 granted last October by the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, construction is getting started to connect the loose ends. But Nixon, who wants to help anti-Communist President Carlos Castillo Armas with public works, backs a speedup (with $20 million to $30 million in U.S. aid) that will quickly close the gap and pave the rest of the highway--now mostly gravel--through that country.

P: Tiny El Salvador takes the traveler through rich coffee land on paved roads, and he crosses Honduras' corridor to the Pacific on good gravel. Nicaragua's part of the highway, looping here and there to touch at the various ranches of President Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza, is mostly macadam.

P: Costa Rica stops the driver at the border with a seven-mile gap near the scene of January's revolutionary fighting, but work now going on should open this stretch to traffic by May 1. At the other end of the Costa Rican sector, after a breathtaking mountain drive offering glimpses of two oceans, the highway dwindles into nothing more than 134 miles of lines on a surveyor's map. Current construction: nil.

P: Panama, where a determined tourist can pick up the road after a sea trip, has a road of varying quality to the canal. Beyond lies the forbidding Darien country--400 miles of lofty jungles, wide rivers and spiny mountains not yet even surveyed.

The Darien breach is probably a job for another generation. But Nixon guessed that even closing the Central American gaps would take 15 to 25 years at the present rate. The speedup he recommended to Washington will--he hopes--finish the road to Panama in four years.

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