Farm Modernization Expands Mexico’s Revolutionary Cry for ‘Land and Liberty!’

He’s no sweating campesino , this man in the air-conditioned cab of a computerized tractor. He turned down the stereo and gazed at rows of bean stalks swaying in the wind.

“I think it will go well for us,” Juan Espinoza said of the coming harvest. “There is no need to leave now, because there is work here.”

Espinoza belongs to the Vaquerias Project, created in June. It joins private investors with peasants to modernize unproductive farms, create jobs and stem the flow of undocumented workers to the United States.

Food imports, including beans and corn, are expected to surmount $4 billion this year, and the goal of self-sufficiency in food remains elusive. About 45% of Mexicans are malnourished.

“The campesino is self-sufficient; he is not dying of hunger, but he does not provide enough to feed the rest of Mexico or to increase his standard of living,” said Pablo Livas Cantu, director of the Integral Development of the Mexican Countryside, a nonprofit trust that administers the Vaquerias Project.

Mexican farm workers, with no jobs at home, flee to the United States. More than 880,000 were caught trying to cross the border illegally between October, 1989, and July, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Livas said the project 130 miles southeast of Monterrey has united GAMESA, a flour and cookie company, with about 400 people who work on 12,350 acres of small landholdings and ejidos, or cooperative farms.

A total of $12 million was invested, 50% by GAMESA, 15% by the state government and 35% through debt swaps with the federal government. The swap money was used to build warehouses, a sprinkler system, power lines, roads, pumping stations and offices.

Swaps involve investors buying discounted government debt, which the treasury then buys back at full value in Mexican currency. The investors agree to invest the money in specified types of projects within Mexico, such as infrastructure and tourism development.

The Vaquerias program will operate for 12 years, the estimated time needed to recover the investment. Then the farm workers can buy the high-tech equipment, such as the $125,000 tractor Espinoza uses, at 25% of the original cost.

Profits will be divided evenly by GAMESA and the campesinos , with the farmers guaranteed a minimum 8% of the estimated crop value in case of a total crop failure.

Land tenant rights have been a passionate issue in Mexico since the revolution of 1910 was fought to establish them. Issues of private investment and modernization are fairly new.

Peasants seeking land rallied to Emiliano Zapata’s cry of “Land and liberty!” during the revolution and helped bring down the government of Gen. Porfirio Diaz.

The Agrarian Reform Act of 1915 gave the government the right to expropriate portions of large estates and distribute it to peasants under the ejido system. Peasants have the hereditary right to work a plot of land collectively or individually, but cannot sell or rent it.

More than 75% of all Mexican farms are ejidos, and the system has created some problems as Mexico modernizes.

Since ejido rights are inherited, parcels tend to shrink with each generation as families grow. Petitions for more land can be filed, but the wait often is long.

Ejido land cannot be used as collateral, so peasants must rely on the government for credit at interest rates of up to 30%.

The amount of land still available for distribution is limited, but the Secretariat of Agrarian Reform said 657,000 acres confiscated from drug traffickers had been distributed since August.

Some holders of ejido rights argue for outright ownership as a means of spurring production, but the government fears that peasants would sell their land or lose their plots by using them as collateral for loans.