Hunger for Land Triggers Bloody Feuds Among Impoverished Mexican Farmers

The truck showed the scars of the latest land quarrel, and the sight was enough to convince the villagers that they did not want more trouble.

The windows of the red vehicle were smashed, and all of its tires were slashed. Gashes in the body were clearly the work of a machete. The vandalism had followed a wave of incidents: broken windows in the common meeting hall; attempts to burn down thatch-roofed huts; fights and threats in the corn fields; one bruised farmer in the hospital.

The villagers fretted that more violence would come. They wondered if they should not give up some land to their foes just to avoid further trouble, for in other places, such rivalries had ended in much worse than a ruined communal truck.

“Better to divide the land than have your head split,” said Rafael Jimenez, 27, a resident of Mesa Larga, a corn-growing community in the state of Hidalgo, northeast of Mexico.

Tension Not Unusual

The tension at Mesa Larga is not unusual in Mexico’s countryside, where land warfare among farmers erupts with unsettling frequency.

A total of 705 farmers have died in rural violence since 1982, according to a new report compiled by the Chapingo Autonomous University, most of them in conflicts over land tenancy or in efforts to occupy land owned by someone else. Others were apparently killed for organizing independent peasant movements; a small number died in drug battles or in feuds over credit payments.

The violence points up the persistent difficulties on Mexico’s farms. More than 70 years after a revolution was fought in part to give peasants a better life, the Mexican countryside not only is largely impoverished, but it is prone to sudden violence.

More than 30 million Mexicans live in the countryside, and over the years, the government has dispensed millions of acres to satisfy land hunger that still endures.

Despite the balmy climate that prevails in most of Mexico, the land does not yield abundance easily. Much is semiarid. Only 20% of the nation’s farmland is irrigated. Legions of poor peasants head north during the off-season to earn money harvesting crops in the United States, while others migrate to large farms within Mexico, tolerating harsh nomadic lives for wages equivalent to less than $3 a day.

Rights May Be Challenged

When and if the migrants come home, they often face vexing problems basic to their meager livelihood: The rights to the land they live on may be challenged by neighboring farmers or the former owners.

In Mesa Larga, about 300 families inhabit a landholding called an ejido. Ejidos were formed in the wake of the Mexican Revolution to provide poor farmers with plots of land. By law, the land is owned by the state, and the farmers nominally have the right to government credits in order to cultivate it.

In the 20 years since the Mesa Larga ejido was formed, periodic disputes have arisen over who has the right to farm parts or all of it. First, a conflict with an adjoining ejido broke out and resulted in the division of some good bottomland between the two.

Then, in 1978, landless peasants invaded part of Mesa Larga. The dispute simmered for seven years, and longtime residents of Mesa Larga suspected that former owners of the land had encouraged the invaders to cause trouble. Machete battles became frequent.

Finally, trouble broke out among Mesa Larga farmers themselves. About two-thirds of the families decided to farm the land communally and divide the income equally. The idea was promoted by an independent peasant union. But a third of the farmers, loyal to a government peasant group, have resisted the program, preferring to farm individual plots for individual profit.

In June, fights erupted among the Mesa Larga farmers. The violence ended, for the time being, with the vandalism of the truck. In the meantime, credit has been delayed because inspectors from the bank fear making the trip to Mesa Larga.

“It is difficult for us to go on like this,” said farmer Rafael Lara, 29. “Without a clear idea of who has right to the land, we can’t farm in security.”

If credit problems were not enough, the example of farm violence elsewhere would probably be enough to prompt them to settle the dispute by dividing up the land again.

In San Juan Copala, a village in Oaxaca, 200 farmers have perished in land battles since the early 1970s, according to press reports. Some of the bloodshed was attributed to rivalry between a government-controlled peasants’ union and an independent group.

Not long ago, 300 peasants occupied land in Tequixquiac in the state of Mexico in an effort to wrest it from its owner. The peasants used sticks and stones to try to fight off police who were sent in to evict them. Three peasants were reportedly killed in the melee.

In June, nine members of an independent peasants’ union were shot dead during a land battle in Embarcadero, Veracruz. As happens in many cases of rural violence, no one was arrested in the killings.

In La Trinitaria, Chiapas, in far southern Mexico, peasants have been battling a landowner for rights to 350 acres in a conflict that dates to 1953. One hundred and fifty peasants have occupied the land in a standoff that has produced injuries but no deaths.

Sometimes, violence erupts over seemingly minor problems. In 1982, state police surrounded a group of peasants in Urapicho, Michoacan, on behalf of large landholders trying to reclaim three tractors supposedly on loan to the peasants. Shooting broke out, and nine farmers were killed.

The role of the government in such disputes is often murky, if not sinister. Independent farmers’ unions accuse the government of hiring thugs to break up organizations not under their control. Sometimes, these critics say, the government will employ its own peasant groups to create false rivalries with peasants who may be trying to wrest land from large, private landholders. While the peasants clash, the landholder maintains his property.

One such government-affiliated group, Antorcha Campesina, has been accused of mounting armed attacks on other peasant organizations in Puebla state.

“Antorcha Campesina creates problems, the government intervenes and it is the rightful peasant who suffers,” asserted Jose Luis Hernandez, an official of the Independent Farm Workers and Peasant Central, a leftist farm group.

Non-government organizers like Hernandez contend that the problem of rural violence results from the refusal of the government to dispense good land to needy farmers. Hardly a month goes by without one peasant group or another coming to Mexico City to lobby for more land or to protest some abuse in the countryside.

Since 1919, the government has given out 250 million acres in what is Latin America’s most extensive land reform program. However, up to three-quarters of the land is unsuitable for farming, critics contend. The best lands in Mexico, mostly under private control, yield 70% of Mexico’s farm production. The rest produces mainly corn and beans for consumption by the people who live on it.

Some good land is tied up in courtroom squabbles that can take years to resolve. And there are at least 10 million acres of good land still under control of large landholders, peasant activists assert.

The government considers land reform to be virtually at an end. “We have given out all there is to give,” said Agrarian Reform Secretary Rodriguez Barrera during a recent commemoration of the anniversary of the death of Emiliano Zapata, the revolution’s legendary land reform crusader.

8 Million Acres Granted

The administration of President Miguel de la Madrid, in the fifth year of its six-year term, has so far issued decrees granting about 8 million acres to peasants. The numbers may be deceiving. Land grants are often held up in court for years. Moreover, much of the land may simply be unfarmable.

In any case, De la Madrid reportedly is averse to giving out too much land. The government is said to fear that handouts will reduce Mexico’s food production. In addition, expropriations often set off a wave of uncertainty among businessmen.

Recent Mexican governments have been remiss in providing money for farm development. Since the early 1970s, Mexico has spent heavily on industry at the expense of agriculture. Much of the revenue earned from oil sales in the last decade has been invested in projects in such industries as petrochemicals, steel, hydroelectricity and even nuclear energy.

Agricultural production has stagnated. In most years, Mexico imports thousands of tons of grain from the United States to make up shortfalls. Farmers continue to flock to the city seeking work; even the dusty slums surrounding Mexico City represent an improvement over their stifling and idle life in the country.

In the state of Mexico, which borders the capital on three sides, a quarter of a million ejido-based peasants live in misery, a report from the Agriculture Ministry said recently. The peasants receive an income of just over $200 a year for the corn they grow because the land is so poor in nutrients and moisture.

It is not surprising, then, that many farmers head north during the Mexican dry season to supplement their income. Some farm states are virtually empty of young men during large parts of the year.