Mexico’s Land of Discord

For more than half a century, residents of this largely indigenous town battled quietly and inconclusively in court over ownership of a remote and rocky patch of land called Agua Grande. Then on July 9, war broke out.

That’s when 300 machete-wielding Xalatlaco townspeople descended on the disputed turf 10 miles away in the mountains west of Mexico City. They took hostage a dozen police and government officials sent there to enforce the rival land claim of residents from Santo Tomas Ajusco, also a town of indigenous people. A day earlier, the police had torn down half a dozen food stands built in Agua Grande by the Xalatlacans.

The hostages were released after 18 hours, but their commandeered police van sat in the Xalatlaco town plaza as a trophy for two months, its tires slashed and its sides painted with defiant graffiti. The situation remains tense as federal, state and city officials try to mediate.

“The people of Ajusco, 500 years after the fact, want to expand their communal territory with ours,” said Xalatlaco town historian Donanciano Vargas, maintaining that his community has used the land as a ceremonial center since before the Spanish arrived. “But it’s not possible. We won’t let them, ever.”

The elders of Ajusco are just as adamant. “We will defend our interests until the final consequences,” said Jose Guadalupe Romero, an Ajusco alderman, who contends that his community’s use of the land for grazing and woodcutting goes back longer than tribal memory.

The conflict over Agua Grande is one of thousands roiling Mexico from the jungles of Chiapas in the south to the Sonoran Desert in the north. Some battles are between native groups that have long used land with little or no documentation while others are between individuals squabbling over property titles or boundaries.

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.

While property fights have been a fact of life since the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1519, these days they are increasing in number and violence due to Mexico’s poor economy and burgeoning population, said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego.

Government officials admit they are overwhelmed by the volume of conflicts. “We do what we can do. We fix one and there are a thousand more waiting for justice,” said David Rodriguez, a member of Congress’ agrarian reform commission.

The disputes are most often between groups of poor peasants or indigenous communities. But occasionally U.S. investors can get caught up in the tangled laws. Such was the case three years ago, when 300 residents, mostly Americans, were evicted from homes they thought they owned near Ensenada in Baja California, losing $50 million in property.

A sizable portion of the fights stem from opposing and often impossible to verify “primordial” rights based on vague, centuries-old royal deeds granted by the Spanish colonial government before Mexico achieved independence in 1821.

That is the case in the dispute between Xalatlaco and Ajusco for Agua Grande, a 3,750-acre mountainous parcel with economic and ceremonial importance for both tribes. Each group claims to have 16th century deeds signed by a Spanish viceroy. Xalatlaco’s leaders say they have kept the land as an ecological reserve and spring-fed grazing land for cattle. Aqua Grande is also where the tribe celebrates the equinox with ritual dancing.

“If our forefathers preserved the land for centuries, how are we not going to preserve it for 100 years more?” said Vargas, 72, a member of Xalatlaco’s council of elders. “We will defend ourselves with the law but when laws are crooked, we will use whatever means necessary.”

In Ajusco, citizens also speak uncompromisingly. Hundreds of Ajusco residents responded to Xalatlaco’s raid by blocking the area’s main road and threatening to occupy the land by force. “They lit the fuse, which set off the rocket and made all the noise. Let’s see where it takes us,” said Antonio Mireles Morelos, secretary of Ajusco’s community assets commission.

“I’ve been coming here since I was a child,” added Ajuscan Juan Camacho during a visit to the disputed parcel last month. “The land is what matters, and it must be respected. The four springs replenish our water in the town and the trees give us our fresh air.”

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. “They are fighting over bare crumbs, as desperate people always do.”

It’s understandable then that here in Xalatlaco, the mood is militant about holding on to property valued for its four freshwater springs and lush pastureland. Vargas, the town historian, doesn’t expect a solution to the dispute soon.

“We are not in any hurry. We will keep visiting the mountain, having our ceremonies and enjoying the countryside. We can wait 100 years more, two or three generations more. But we will never give up the land.”

Ajusco leaders are just as resolute.

“The government has recognized what the Spanish crown did 500 years ago. We want what we feel is ours,” said Ajusco Alderman Romero. “We are waiting for the rule of law to prevail, but we are also prepared emotionally to fight.”