Mexicans Ponder a Triumph

When a few thousand subsistence farmers vowed last fall to resist construction of a $2.3-billion airport in their cornfields, it appeared to outsiders that they might stand a better chance trying to stop Mexico’s next earthquake.

But President Vicente Fox’s government underestimated the value the farmers put on land handed down to them over four generations, their willingness to shed blood in its defense and their refusal to be bought off.

Breaking from what it called heavy-handed methods of the past, the government announced late Thursday that it was canceling plans to build a six-runway airport for Mexico City on the dried-up Texcoco lake bed 18 miles to the east and would study alternative sites.

As villagers in San Salvador Atenco rang church bells Friday to celebrate their unlikely victory, Mexicans weighed the costs and lessons of Fox’s humble retreat--in the face of machete-wielding peasants who last month held 15 hostages--from what would have been his administration’s biggest public works project.

The backpedaling, some Mexican commentators warned, will encourage any group with a grievance and a weapon to resort to violence; will undermine the rule of law; will diminish public confidence in Fox’s ability to complete projects; will make investors reluctant to finance them; and, eventually, will leave North America’s largest city with inadequate air service.

Others portrayed the triumph of the underdogs as a healthy product of the more democratic--and less manageable--Mexico that Fox has led since ending, with the 2000 elections, seven decades of authoritarian rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The decision came as a newly independent Supreme Court was weighing the constitutionality of the law the government was using to expropriate the farmers’ 13,300 acres of land.

“This is a positive precedent,” said Pedro Cerisola, minister of communications and transport. “It’s not a sign of weakness or a fear of using force.... We are not going to impose decisions. The government is willing to take no for an answer, and that is a sign of change.”

One thing is beyond dispute. Fox and his team of technocrats learned what the World Bank and other development experts have found out the hard way in many other countries: If you want to build an airport in a field, you’d first better talk to the farmers.

“The government’s biggest error was not taking us into account,” said Ignacio Yanez, a 48-year-old corn grower who was arrested last month when the farmers’ protest exploded in violence. “We own this land. They owe us respect. But they were accustomed to imposing their will. Well, those times are finished.”

Fox’s government announced the project in October, ending a decades-long search for an alternative to the capital’s hemmed-in Benito Juarez International Airport. Officials simply decreed the takeover of land held by 5,600 farming families in 13 villages, offering them a price fixed in the expropriation law: $2,835 per acre.

Most farmers in the area own fewer than five acres, and many complained that the payoff was insultingly low. Others recounted with pride that the land they inherited had been seized from the rich seven decades ago and distributed to the poor by the revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata, and they weren’t about to sell at any price.

In any case, few trusted the government to pay at all. It was only last fall, Yanez said, that farmers got compensation for land seized more than 15 years ago for a highway.

“What would have happened to us?” he asked.

It was only after the farmers went to court to try to block the airport that government negotiators began visiting Texcoco villages in February.

And it was only last month--after the bloody five-day hostage standoff in Atenco--that Fox’s aides sweetened the offer, increasing it sevenfold. They also offered land swaps, new housing, scholarships and vocational training for airport jobs.

By then, it was too late. The airport battle had become the cause of a combative array of leftists, anarchists and anti-globalization activists who poured into Atenco to protest alongside the farmers. Ten of the area’s 13 villages were willing to negotiate, but a militant minority carried the day.

In Mexico’s more open political environment, the militants also took encouragement from Fox’s political opponents. Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party, opposed the airport project. On Friday, he called Fox’s decision “reasonable and brave.”

Cerisola said the government “accepted reality and decided to stop fighting” after concluding that there was not enough time for legal battles and negotiations with the farmers.

Meeting with reporters Friday, he noted that such disputes had delayed construction of airports in Madrid and Vancouver by more than a decade.

He also cited Tokyo’s Narita Airport, where locals damaged the control tower in 1978, adding years more work and considerably more cost to the project.

Cerisola admitted that the government made “errors in human management” in Texcoco. But he said that consulting the farmers before choosing the airport site would have set off uncontrollable land speculation.

And he defended the initial financial offer to the farmers, saying legal limits on such payments were designed to prevent corrupt and exorbitant deals involving kickbacks to officials.

Vincent Abreu, a consultant to the World Bank on development issues, said Mexico’s leaders should never have chosen the site without a full study of its potential effect on the farmers.

The World Bank, under similar criticism in the early 1990s, adopted guidelines requiring environmental and social impact studies before financing dams, roads and other projects.

Such large-scale projects, according to a World Bank study, uproot about 10 million people from their homes worldwide each year--a higher figure, on average, than the number displaced by armed conflict.

“Governments keep making the same mistake,” said Abreu, who teaches at the University of Michigan. “In Mexico, where the capital has severe problems because of migration from the countryside, they should know better.”

Cerisola said not all the alternative airport sites on the table are inhabited. He declined to list the locations but said new technology could revive some options rejected in the past, including an expansion of the capital’s existing airport into a federally owned lake bed on its eastern edge.

Tizayuca, a strip of land in Hidalgo state that last fall was Texcoco’s principal alternative, is apparently back in consideration. Officials have also proposed sites in the states of Morelos and Puebla. All three are much farther from the city than Texcoco.

The current airport can keep handling increasing volumes of air traffic for seven to eight years, Cerisola said, adding that Fox was determined to launch an alternative before his term ends in December 2006.