With the one major exception of Lazaro Cardenas (1934-40), Mexican presidents regarded land distribution more as a way to pacify the peasantry and ensure their support rather than as a central component in an integrated rural development program.
Tom Barry, 1995165
After the Second World War, rural Mexico saw a communications revolution. The village of Tepoztlan in Morelos was typical. In 1943, only four villagers there had a radio. By 1958, there were 80 battery-powered sets, and, by 1964, after electricity was introduced, only the very poor lacked radios. In 1944, movies came to San Jose de Gracia, Michoacan. The priests forbade attendance on the grounds that films introduced immorality. That warning notwithstanding, parishioners gradually began to attend the twice weekly showings. During the same period, rural transportation was shifting from muscle power to fossil fuels. In 1940, people overwhelmingly walked or rode carriages, horses, or burros. During the next decades, there was a massive shift to cars and busses as new roads made this alternative feasible. Between 1929 and 1933, when anthropologist Elsie
C. Parsons studied the village of Mitla, Oaxaca, there was one bicycle, one truck, and one automobile in town. By 1964, there were thirty-two motor vehicles and an estimated 200 bikes.166
As anthropologist Oscar Lewis observed in Tepoztlan, the road was key to the entrance of both new goods and ideas:
There were the new asphalt road, the buses, the tourist cars, the Coca-Cola and aspirin signs, the Sinarquista placards on a roadside wall, the queue of women and children waiting to have their corn ground at the mills, the new stores and poolrooms in the plaza, and a few women with bobbed hair and high-heeled shoes.167
Rural Mexicans suffered from the combined effects of soaring population, government neglect, and low productivity. In 1969, the value added per agricultural worker was only 30 percent of the
Average for all Mexican workers. Population growth overwhelmed the tepid efforts at land reform. Between 1940 and 1970, the number of agricultural workers increased from 3.8 million to 7.8 million, while the number of land reform beneficiaries only rose from 1.5 million to 2.1 million. During this same period, the cultivatable area per agricultural worker declined from 3.0 to 1.5 acres. As farm income was spread among an ever increasing number of families, anything beyond a rudimentary education became an unaffordable luxury. In 1970, 49 percent of rural households were below the poverty line.168
The poorest and the most numerous of the agricultural workers were the wage laborers who often joined the migratory circuits that criss-crossed Mexico and extended into the United States. Rural wage laborers were generally unorganized, rarely worked for one employer for extended periods, and were little affected by labor legislation, including the minimum wage law. Between 1940 and 1970, the number of landless agricultural workers increased from 2.5 to 4 million. Not surprisingly, the wages of agricultural workers decreased by 41 percent between 1950 and 1969. In 1950 agricultural wage laborers averaged 194 days of work per year, while in 1970 they only averaged 75.169
According to 1960 census data, 83 percent of farms were less than self-sufficient, meaning that farmers had to find sources of supplementary income to buy food. Members of this group, numbering some 2 million, resorted to a variety of strategies to increase their income. Supplementary income sources included wage labor on other farms, temporary migration to Mexican cities or to the United States to work, and home production of non-agricultural goods.170
A definitive result of Cardenas’s land reform in the 1930s was the breaking up of the traditional patriarchal hacienda with its large resident population. Cardenas’s actions only hastened the decline of the hacienda—a process that was occurring throughout Latin America. Hacendados were replaced by people who, in the 1950s, were called nylon farmers, a reference to both their newness and their synthetic nature. These nylon farmers lacked the aristocratic pretensions of the hacendado— they just wanted to make money and often used their political contacts to do so. They rented land and labor and often moved from place to place. To the extent possible, they relied not on their own wealth but on government credit. Often they invested agricultural profits in cities. As anthropologist Arturo Warman remarked, “In the countryside, they left neither capital, mansions, nor towns with their names attached, nothing, not even a memory.”171
Others formed long-lasting commercial farms—sometimes on land that they retained after the land reform, sometimes on land irrigated at government expense. These farms benefited from roads built by the government, government-supplied credit and crop insurance, and government-funded research. The government also subsidized the costs of fertilizer and provided highly lucrative price supports. The owners of these large units, given their access to credit, could employ the latest agricultural technology and could warehouse and market their corps efficiently. As a result, their profit per ton was higher than the profit small farmers received for producing the
172
Same crop.
The largest 3 percent of farms produced 54 percent of Mexico’s food and fiber. In 1968, the top 7.1 percent of farms produced four times the output per acre and twenty times as much per worker as the 52 percent of farms classified as subsistence. Such large farms produced export crops, industrial raw materials, and animal feed, and supplied the Mexican market with wheat, fresh fruits, and vegetables.173
Landholders with close ties to government officials and with access to a virtually unlimited pool of cheap labor accumulated large amounts of land without facing the threat of expropriation. Some held the large estates cattlemen were legally allowed. Others skirted the limits on farm size the land reform law imposed by registering properties in the names of friends and relatives.174
Increasingly, those profiting from agriculture did not own land or raise crops. They profited instead from their control of financial services, selling pesticide, fertilizer, and farm machinery, as well as the buying and processing of crops. As this occurred, the locus of rural power, which had been the hacienda, shifted to provincial cities and towns.175
Beginning in the 1940s, successive Mexican governments favored privately owned agricultural properties, not the ejido. Each new government would reaffirm that land reform was a “major goal” of the Revolution and then lavish benefits on commercial farmers. The rate at which the government processed petitions for land provided an indicator of its waning interest in land reform. Such petitions would often languish in government offices for years, if not decades. Sociologist Rodolfo Stavenhagen found that the time that elapsed between the filing of a petition for land and receiving final title averaged thirteen years.176
After the Second World War, it became obvious that land distribution per se was not producing equality in the countryside. Ejidatarios and small farmers found themselves caught in a vicious cycle. They had low educational levels, small plots, and little access to capital. As a result of using antiquated technology on land that was often poor to begin with, yields per acre were low. Their meager income was further reduced by their relying on others to transport and warehouse crops. While the rural population was rapidly increasing, job loss occurred as capital-intensive agricultural technology was transferred from developed countries to rural Mexico and land was shifted from labor-intensive crops to raising cattle.177
Ejidatarios and other smallholders faced a huge hurdle in obtaining credit. The Ejido Credit Bank became increasingly bureaucratic and corrupt. Those lacking credit from the government often turned to loan sharks.178
Rural bosses, known as caciques, drained wealth from small producers. In the areas they dominated, caciques, who functioned with PRI and government acquiescence, would often profit from marketing locally grown crops, selling manufactured goods, collecting bribes, and supplying credit at usurious interest rates. They controlled police and public investment within the areas they dominated. In many ways, caciques functioned as an old fashioned political machine, distributing jobs and favors to sympathizers and resorting to violence if anyone challenged their economic and political control.179
In the 1930s, the ejido provided a quick response to the Depression, combining land and labor, both of which Mexico had in abundance. Transferring land to the ejido alleviated immediate employment problems, but in the process created obstacles to increased agricultural production. Corruption undermined the efficiency of many ejidos. Article 27 of the constitution provided the legal basis for the ejido, but prohibited corporate investment in land, thus limiting capital available for both private and ejido land. Even in areas such as Morelos where ejidos enjoyed widespread support, they failed to lift many out of poverty since they lacked credit and few draft animals were available to plow. Over the years, the division of land among many children led to plots so small that it was impossible to achieve economies of scale and apply modern technology. Given differences in plot size, soil fertility, and water availability, some ejidatarios did well and escaped poverty, but many did not.180
Despite the numerous grievances of the rural population, the government effectively headed off rural unrest. One factor enabling the government to contain peasant unrest was the lack of effective rural organization. From its inception under President Cardenas, the CNC relied on patron-client relationships with those it organized. Under Cardenas, the CNC offset the power of the landed elite and channeled goods, services, and land to the peasantry. However, after 1940, as the government’s commitment to land reform waned, the CNC maintained the rural status quo rather than promoting land reform or redressing the imbalance of power between peasant producers and the small elite of commercial farmers. Credit and infrastructure projects were allocated on a discretional basis, leading most peasants to continue looking to the CNC to improve their lot in life.181
The secretary general of the CNC was selected by the president and then publicly “elected” at a national CNC assembly. Those selected to lead the CNC were usually from the urban middle class. CNC staffers found that employment in that agency was a splendid form of upward mobility. With each step up the CNC ladder, salaries increased and there were opportunities for kickbacks, payoffs, and other illicit gains. Top officials often amassed personal fortunes and became large landowners. Career advancement was based on docility toward those above and control of those below.182
The CNC retained its influence by channeling government resources to ejidos. It remained as the only channel available for receiving land via the land reform. If peasants went outside the CNC to make demands, they were ignored or repressed. The CNC depended on the PRI and various government agencies for its operating expenses. In exchange for this subsidy, the CNC faithfully delivered the peasant vote for the PRI. As one former secretary of agriculture commented, “Mexican peasants are organized to vote, not to produce.”183
With the official peasant organization intent on maintaining the status quo, landless peasants repeatedly turned to extralegal methods in their quest for land ownership. Their most frequent tactic was moving onto land they felt exceeded the limits imposed by the land reform law and laying claim to it—a process knows as a land invasion. By doing so, they kept alive Zapata’s notion that land reform should be carried out by peasants without state intervention.
World History
