TomG
Oct 13, 2003, 9:16 AM
Post #7 of 13
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I am quoting heavily from a very good L A Times article so as not to bum up the interpretation.
It seems to flesh out what you said about the existence of another conflicting sort of pre-layer of communal ownership under a lot of ejido land.
The reforms seemed to have been an attempt to nudge urbanization and history in a favored direction. My opinion has always been that people are a lot more secure and better off being poor spread out on small plots than packed into cities totally dependent on a money economy. I don't think the reports are all in on this 100+ year long experiment. And at this point all the report makers have been residents of only one side of the equation. The belief on large agricultural efficiency is, in my opinion, a myoptic belief which receives much of its force from vested interest.
Anyway, back to real property legal issues, I think it is worth banking the most comprehensive information we can get - it is more valuable than fear for guidance.
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http://www.latimes.com/...l=la-headlines-world
......At the heart of the matter is the tangled and contradictory state of Mexico's property ownership laws and record-keeping.
Only 18% of farm properties in Mexico have been definitively mapped, said Nabor Ojeda, a member of the Mexican Congress' agrarian reform commission, which mediates land disputes.
Rather than being surveyed and plotted, the boundaries of most Mexican properties are simply understood among neighbors. They can be defined on documents as being demarcated by the location of a boulder or tree that may no longer be there.
"These disputes are generations old, but they have never been adequately adjudicated. Typically they have been pushed back into the future and into the future. Now the future is here," said Kenneth Shwedel, head of food and agribusiness research at Rabobank in Mexico City. ....
.......Yet another major source of conflict are the 27,000 ejido gifts of land to peasant and indigenous communities by Mexican presidents from 1917 to 1992.
The 1917 Mexican Constitution created ejidos, which now cover more than half of Mexico's farmland, as the principal means of redistributing land that had been amassed by the wealthy. A stipulation was that recipients could not sell the property, only use it, because ejidos were still owned by the state.
Now many of those post-1917 ejidos are in conflict because Mexican presidents simply carved them out of "communal" properties, a separate and older land-ownership status typically conferred by the Spanish crown on Mexico's indigenous peoples. In many of those cases, the original communal or indigenous landowners are fighting for their land back.
That is behind a conflict over 13,000 acres called Bernalejo that straddles Zacatecas and Durango states in northwestern Mexico. This year, Durango's indigenous Tepehuana tribe recovered communal land that had been granted to a peasant group as an ejido in the 1950s — after hundreds of armed Tepehuanans forced 74 ejido families out of their homes at gunpoint. Women who had taken refuge in a church were told to leave or the church would be burned down.
"These agrarian conflicts inevitably become a political issue with a political solution that has nothing to do with the law," said Miguel Herrera, an assistant to the mayor of Valparaiso, a town near the disputed land.
A 1992 constitutional amendment in effect ended the ejido land-reform process. It also created new problems by allowing ejido members to sell their property, either as a whole or in part. These days, members frequently sue other members over how the once jointly owned lands were carved up and sold.
The 1992 amendment also created what was envisioned as an efficient dispute-resolution mechanism: an agrarian reform tribunal exclusively designated to hear and arbitrate cases like that of Agua Grande. But the cases move at a snail's pace. And even when the court makes a decision, enforcement is often held up by conflicting orders from other courts or because government officials are reluctant to enforce eviction orders.
In the case of Agua Grande, the tribunal decided in Ajusco's favor in 1997, but Xalatlaco later got an order from a federal judge suspending the decision's implementation. Both sides have asked President Vicente Fox to intervene, to no avail, and the issue remains in limbo.
Xalatlaco dismisses the tribunal's decision as a symptom of a "corrupt, mercantile" society. "Do you think a culture as ancient as ours is going to allow this invasion of our land just on the word of some judges who are in the pay of commercial interests?" Vargas said.
In Ajusco, community leaders say the tribunal's verdict was a triumph of justice, the recognition of a claim stretching back to 1531. "Each side showed their documents, and they lost. Now they are trying to enforce a right that is not theirs," said Julian Arenas, an Ajusco sheep and turkey farmer.
The landownership picture has been further clouded by presidential expropriations, which have wreaked legal havoc and bitterness. In 1997, President Ernesto Zedillo ordered that 7,000 acres near the port city of Guaymas in the state of Sonora be taken from communal holdings of the indigenous Yaqui community and made available for development.
The Yaquis have never accepted their loss and have repeatedly confronted the government by demonstrating and blocking highways, said Ana Maria Lopez, a researcher at the Postgraduate College in Chapingo, near Mexico City.
"I am not saying the government is bad, but it doesn't give any priority to the problems of our tribe. If it wants the indigenous to prosper, it must," said Rafael Perez, a Yaqui representative in Vicam, Sonora.
Then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari thought the 1992 constitutional amendment, which he championed, would offer economic alternatives for poor rural farmers by permitting ejido members to sell their lands. Such sales would accelerate the consolidation of unproductive small farms into larger cooperatives with economies of scale, he contended, speeding investment in Mexican agriculture and helping farmers compete better with American agribusiness.
At the same time, the rural work force, then 25% of all Mexican earners, would flow into the cities, where its members could be more productive. Or so his reasoning went.
Things haven't worked out that way. The 1994-95 peso devaluation and the ensuing economic crisis killed the reform's underlying assumption that Mexico's economy would grow at such a high rate that hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs would be created for peasant farmers.
The massive investment in larger and more efficient Mexican farms that Salinas envisioned never materialized, owing to the lack of loans, unfavorable tax laws and the fact that the Mexican government didn't really promote the concept, said Rabobank's Shwedel.
"People are still stuck in their communities, and they can't sell out," said John Womack, a history professor at Harvard University. .......
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