The Fate of the Ejido Raul Palma Matamoros, a robust man in his late 40s, walks me around his recent- ly planted ejido fields in Vicencio, about an hour’s drive from the city of Puebla, in central Mexico. It’s late March, and some of the fields have been planted with corn and beans, while others have just been tilled and are awaiting seeding. Twenty years ago, these fields were part of the hacienda that bor- ders the ejido. In the early 1970s, Palma-with the support of one of Mexico’s radical peasant groups, the Independent Organization of Agricultural Workers and Peasants (CIOAC)-led a group of about 70 campesino families in an armed takeover of these uncultivated lands. For a few years, while going through legal negotiations with the government in Mexico City, they fended off pistoleros-hired toughs-belonging to the hacenda- do who had owned the land, and had a tense relationship with state and national police. Finally, on October 19, 1973, a date well- remembered by the ejidatarios, the government granted them the land. Mexico, since the Revolution of 1910-17, may be the only country in the world where the government regularly recognizes armed peasant takeovers of land. As the ejido faces the revolutionary force of Mexico’s neoliberal agenda, how- ever, land-grants to peasants may soon become a thing of the past. Historical memories are long in Mexico. The ejido, a uniquely Mexican model of agrarian cooperation, was the land- tenure system in effect when Cortez conquered the Aztecs. It is a system in which parcels of land are held by individual families while the community of peasants collectively owns the land. Traditionally, ejido land could not be sold as individual parcels. It was passed down from generation to generation, or if no family mem- ber was available to work it, it reverted back to the community itself. While Palma likes to talk about the ejidos of the ancient Tlaxcaltecos and Huejotzingos, the key figure in his narrative is the revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata. Saying “the land belongs to those who work it,” Zapata recreated the ejido in the 1910s by beginning the redistribution of lati- fundio land to the peasants. Redistribution accelerated in the 1930s under President Ldizaro Cirdenas, but slowed down there- after, except when the peasants themselves took matters into their own hands. At Vicencio, about half the ejido’s 245 hectares (605 acres) is cultivated. The rest is used for grazing (some of the ejidatarios have sheep and fowl, and there are a few cows and burros), some fish farming, and living space. The land is fertile, and recent harvests have been good. However, with corn flooding the market, prices have fallen, and ejidatarios-who nego- tiate for credit as a group-can no longer get credit from the bank. The 42 families who now farm the ejido share one tractor. Without credit, they cannot buy the equip- ment and provisions necessary for more efficient production. They wonder why the banks and the government complain about their low productivity while denying them the resources to improve. alma and I visit Ram6n Danz6s Palomino in the CIOAC offices in Mexico City. Danz6s is one of the founders of CIOAC, and a leader of the left wing of the peasant movement in Mexico. He discusses the insuffi- ciency of credit for campesinos, the constantly rising costs of pro- duction, and the low guaranteed prices for farm output. “This is causing the ruin of small producers and ejidatarios,” he says. “And the situation is aggravated because large quantities of grains, oils, meat, eggs and milk are being imported into the country at very low prices and under no specific restrictions.” What particularly rouses his ire is the constitutional reform pushed through by President Salinas that allows individual ejidatarios to sell their own land. Over time, the banks’ ability to foreclose on indi- vidual parcels of land, will spell the end of the ejido system and the return of the latifundio–this time in the form of agribusiness. “The question of land distribution,” says Danz6s, “has been a central and deep-rooted one in Mexican histo- ry. Community-held land, which has been the center of peasant struggles for years, is being elimi- nated. Peasants have been impris- oned and killed in the struggle for such communal land. Now social ownership of the land is no longer inalienable as land is being priva- tized.” Companies with easy access to credit and capital stand poised to buy up the Mexican countryside. The ejido is up for sale and being written out of Mexican law. Peasants who can’t pay their debts are losing their property, and with it, their traditional style of life. As the price of farm output falls, campesinos are caught in the same credit bind that beset U.S. farmers in the 1980s. And they face the same fate: removal from the land and entry into an increasingly glob- al and casual labor market.
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