For Mexico Peasants, Crisis Means Harder Row to Hoe : Economy: Squeezed by skyrocketing costs, farmers could turn to opposition parties--or to social unrest.

A few miles from the clamorous village market here, a dirt road leads past meandering dogs and oxen into Gabino Aguilar’s silent land: three acres of corn and a few plum trees.

It is a long walk, says Aguilar, 52, a courtly, portly peasant with a neat mustache and a sweater-vest, his tennis shoes scudding through the dirt. Although he does not own a car, he no longer has to lug water from town; he proudly points out a narrow cement channel built with neighboring farmers. In the field beyond, Aguilar’s elderly mother wields a machete among bales of corn, her straw hat silhouetted against the mountains.

In some ways, life has not changed much here since 1915, when Mexico’s revolutionary government gave the Aguilar family--and millions of other campesinos , or peasants--their land. Today, however, the future looks bad for this village of 5,000 people in the heartland state of Puebla, about 100 miles southeast of Mexico City, where the administration of President Ernesto Zedillo is grappling with a 4-month-old economic crisis of fearsome proportions.

“In the old times, it was tough in this town because we didn’t have communications, electricity, water, highways,” Aguilar said. “But with our work, we could make it better. Now we have those modern things. But we can’t make it better with our work. We don’t have any hope. The situation is critical, very critical.”

Mexico’s economic crisis has been a crushing blow to the nation’s struggling farmers, small and large. A kind of economic paralysis has resulted from skyrocketing interest rates and prices for imported machinery and agricultural chemicals, experts say.

The aftermath in already desperate communities like San Rafael Ixtapalucan has been grim: deepening poverty and a rising number of people abandoning their land for the overwhelmed, job-scarce cities--and for the uncertain horizons of immigration to the United States.

“It has gone from a crisis to a disaster,” said Isabel Cruz, who heads a national association of credit unions that work with peasant communities. “Every 10 acres that are no longer harvested represent another potential migrant to the United States. The sector can take no more. What you have in the countryside is a time bomb.”

For decades, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has exerted a seemingly unbreakable grip on the countryside, which remained a bastion of ruling party dominance even as change swept urban areas. But hard times--and accompanying political scandals--appear to be weakening the formidable, often repressive machine run by peasant unions and government agencies.

Spreading anger could push rural political sympathies toward opposition parties, nascent civic protests--such as a nationwide debtor movement--and even armed uprisings like last year’s landmark guerrilla revolt in the southern state of Chiapas, say scholars, activists and farmers.

Gildardo Espinosa, an engineer who runs a rural credit union based in Puebla, said one peasant from San Rafael recently compared the volatile political mood to a search for a doctor to heal a sick child.

“He said, ‘If the brujo (witch doctor) of the village can cure the child, I’ll go to the brujo ,’ ” Espinosa said. “If an organization, whatever its affiliation or ideology, shows that it is going to solve their problems, the peasants will go with that organization. This is a moment of opportunities, of change,” of political realignments.

Rural Mexico was suffering long before the current calamities, even as the ambitious modernization program of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari reached its apex in the early 1990s. Salinas’ liberalization and privatization drive, with the North American Free Trade Agreement as its centerpiece, opened the national economy to foreign competition and thrust Mexico’s 25 million farmers into the global market.

The lot of “the underdogs,” as Mariano Azuela dubbed Mexican peasants in his classic 1915 novel of that name, has always been bleak, and this neoliberal shock policy made them an increasingly archaic population, according to some experts. The message was painfully direct: Inefficient Mexican agriculture could compete only if there were fewer farmers cultivating larger plots of land. Many small harvesters of corn, beans and other heavily subsidized staples would ultimately have to find something else to do.

“Understanding how the Chicago commodities markets are affecting you--it’s hard” for Mexican farmers, said David Myhre, an agriculture expert based at the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies at UC San Diego. “There was no transition strategy. It was sink or swim. A lot of Mexican farmers might be able to swim, but not in 20-foot waves.”

Trying to provide a lifeline in a nation where almost half the 90 million citizens live in poverty, Zedillo last month unveiled a program that will create 550,000 jobs in needy communities, urban and rural. Weeks earlier, as part of the president’s broad, much-criticized economic program, the agriculture secretary had announced a farm aid package to freeze fertilizer prices, continue subsidies and price guarantees for basic grains and expand much-needed credits.

“It would be unjust for the countryside and the peasants to pay for the effects of this grave crisis that we are confronting,” said Francisco Labastida Ochoa, the agriculture secretary, as he launched the new program.

Nonetheless, harsh experience has left the people of San Rafael wary of government programs and promises. They suspect that federal funds are pilfered as the money moves down the bureaucratic pipeline; Aguilar cites mysterious delays in the construction of a village school that remains incomplete after four years. Gesturing at his crops, he compares the phenomenon to diverting a water source until it dries up.

“Sometimes the government says we are going to give this much money to the countryside,” Aguilar said. “But then the money goes to those below--they take some of it. And then those below them take some of it too. And by the time it gets to our village, there’s hardly anything left.”

The rhythms of San Rafael on a Saturday afternoon are serene. In the plaza, enclosed by a pink-and-white church and the peeling arches of the unimposing City Hall, merchants sell fruit from tables. Men with folded arms watch a game of dominoes. Mourners congregate at a wake. On a nearby soccer field, youths raise clouds of dust.

Migrants from this area generally find work in the city of Puebla or in Mexico City, some returning on weekends to tend their fields. Puebla is not one of Mexico’s eight prime “sending states,” from which millions have gone north to the United States along decades-old migratory networks. And while the state of Puebla endured conflict over disputed election results in rural areas last year, the conflict was not comparable to the violence in Chiapas or to that in other states, such as Guerrero and Oaxaca, that are considered political tinderboxes.

Beneath the placid veneer of San Rafael and other communities, however, there is an urgency arising from the continuing deprivation--and in it lie the seeds of migration and even social unrest like that now troubling much of rural Mexico.

Inside a dim meeting room in the village city hall, furniture was stacked aside to make room for visiting doctors and dentists who treat peasant families in a makeshift medical clinic run by the Puebla credit union. Many patients are not covered by the federal social security system, which provides medical coverage for only about 40% of Mexico’s working population, and they cannot afford private doctors or bus fare to public hospitals.

These periodic visits by volunteers from the city, who arrive in two Volkswagens loaded down with medical supplies, are the main source of health care.

“With the crisis, it becomes more difficult to gain access to medicine,” said Guadalupe Trajuis, coordinator of the clinic. “Those who arrive are already sick: malnutrition, cancer, acute appendicitis.”

A dentist examined a young boy’s teeth beneath the rather forlorn gaze of former President Salinas on a wall poster. This is curious for two reasons: In Mexico’s presidentially centered culture, the new leader’s picture usually replaces with great speed that of his predecessor. And Salinas’ reputation has plummeted to unusual depths because of the nation’s turmoil.

The townspeople shrug when asked why the picture of Salinas survives; apathy, they say. The town voted staunchly for the Institutional Revolutionary Party in August. But people have expressed little affection for either PRI leader, Salinas or Zedillo, since the wrenching days in December when Salinas’ “economic miracle” collapsed around his successor, whose devaluation of the peso ushered in a traumatic new year.

“During this past year, it has been difficult,” said Juan Osorio Cruz, 46. “The worst came when this new president came in--Zedillo. That’s when it all really hit us. The peasants have been abandoned. . . . Actually it started with Carlos Salinas. He started out with good words and good works, but it ended badly.”

Osorio, his straw hat pushed back over sweaty black hair, had come to the medical clinic with his wife, Sofia, and his infant son, Kevin, for a checkup. Grinning, displaying the gap where his upper front teeth should be, Osorio also wanted to talk to the dentist about false teeth.

But he knows that for the moment he cannot afford anything besides absolute necessities. Prices of cooking oil and other staples have doubled during the past year.

The costs of tending his modest two-acre plot of corn have also climbed: Because of higher gasoline prices, the local tractor operator now charges the peasants who share his services 100 pesos (about $16), a 30% increase. The price of fertilizer has jumped by more than a third.

“If I work for someone else for a week, I make 150 pesos,” Osorio said. “But by the end of the next week, I don’t have anything left. This crisis is eating us alive.”

Moreover, even modest bank loans for farm equipment and chemicals have become prohibitive because of interest rates soaring above 100%, Osorio said. More and more farmers are letting land go unharvested, limiting production to what they need for food and looking for other sources of income.

Even before the economy collapsed, agricultural experts predicted that as many as 10 million Mexicans will leave farming during the next decade. And they cite recent cases in which peasants have deserted entire ejidos , the once-sacred but now increasingly imperiled communal farms that were created during the revolution and privatized during the Salinas administration.

In San Rafael, an alternative industry has emerged in recent years of small textile workshops that produce socks and hosiery for wholesale markets. In addition, village leaders have fought a long battle--going hat in hand to Mexico City bureaucrats, sleeping on the smoggy sidewalks outside government offices--to win the rights to a tract of federal land about an hour away. Their dream is to create a profit-making, tourist-oriented nature preserve operated by a village collective.

The vast extent of the crisis has also fostered the rise of El Barzon (Plowshare), a popular protest movement made up of debtors. The drive began among better-off farmers in the state of Jalisco in 1993, then spread across socioeconomic and geographic lines. In Puebla and elsewhere, sympathizers have marched on banks and blocked highways, demanding reform of credit policies that have left many individuals and businesses in financial ruin.

“It is a questioning of the financial system,” said Cruz, the head of the credit union association. “We are asking for a moratorium so that debtors can take a breath. This is a reality that requires extraordinary measures.”

The powerful, grass-roots character of this civic movement, experts say, is one of the signs that the traditional political structure could be in trouble in the countryside.

The peasant unions that are a pillar of the PRI are having a “harder time delivering benefits to their members,” said Myhre of UC San Diego. “The mobilization of the farmers is going to increase. They are going to be upset and organizing.”

Similarly, some government agencies have lost credibility. Procampo, a billion-dollar cash subsidy program that has aimed its activities at farmers, is regarded by critics as a machine-style, abuse-riddled effort designed primarily to help the ruling party win last year’s presidential elections. They dismiss it with the mocking nickname “PRI-campo.”

The PRI’s current disarray offers a rare opportunity for a new distribution of power, but it is unclear who the beneficiaries in the countryside will be. The National Action Party, or PAN, has established itself as the main opposition force nationwide, capturing important governorships and mounting a tough presidential challenge last year. But the party’s basically urban, middle-class character has thus far restricted its rural appeal.

Although the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, has greater support among the downtrodden, it is still recovering from a poor showing in last year’s elections.

“There is a vacuum of representation,” Cruz said. “If there were elections today, (the rural poor) would not vote for the PRI. But there will not be presidential elections for six years.”

That vacuum could produce new configurations, such as the alliance between the PAN and the PRD that materialized last year in Huaquechula, a farming town not far from here. The opposition coalition won municipal elections there, according to supporters, but was prevented from taking power in a violent clash with ruling-party loyalists.

Months later, hundreds of miles from Chiapas, there are simmering fears about the potential for generalized political violence.

“There are some people who think there’s going to be a war against the government,” Gabino Aguilar said. “We don’t know what to do. If it keeps on like this for another two or three years, what’s going to become of us?”

Hands clasped behind his back, Aguilar walks pensively toward the road to town. His generation still faithfully cultivates the land, he says, whether for the meager earnings, the food or simply out of habit.

The sad truth, however, is that younger generations appear less likely to wait out the current crisis in the same way, he says. The sons and daughters of San Rafael are trying their luck in other business ventures, the cities or even the odyssey to the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Asked if he too has considered an alternative to this hard existence, Aguilar looks up in surprise.

“Abandon the land?” he says. “No. Because truthfully, the earth is the Mother. Rain, thunder--whatever happens, she keeps her promise. She gives us food if we work.”