Russell Blackwell (Rosalio Negrete) Archive
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Agrarian Question
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 49, 28 October 1933, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The period of governmental reaction initiated under Portes Gil in 1928, also marked the cutting short of the agrarian reform. Only a small section of the peasantry was satisfied with the manner in which this reform, based on Article 27 of the 1917 constitution, had been carried out. Of those lands expropriated from the feudal landholders, the best were generally seized by the politicians and generals of the revolution. Most of the remaining arable tracts remained in the hands of their old owners on some pretext or other. The barren hillsides, rocky, dry, stream-beds, and otherwise undesirable lands were left for the peasants. Every hectare of this land has been paid for with peasants blood and even when they have received it, all kind and color of strings are tied to it.
In some cases, those villages which have shown greatest militancy during the early period of the revolution, were given satisfactory grants or ratified in the possession of lands they had forcibly seized, in order to silence them and set them up as a barrier to hold back the great mass of landless peasantry who were being “fed” on promises and government surveys.
The newly rich, having themselves acquired great landed wealth in the course of the revolution, now found it necessary to seek alliances with the remaining, politically crippled, feudal holders and wealthy ranchers in order to preserve their own booty. A new policy was then instituted by degrees in one state after another, to wind up all pending agrarian matters and declare the land reforms at an end. Not only was this done but the breaking up of the “ejidos” (communal land grants) was also ordered. This constituted a still greater betrayal of the interests of the peasant masses without the aid of whom the democratic revolution of 1910–1917 would have been impossible.
From time immemorial and antedating the coming of the Spaniards the peasant villagers owned their land in common. In some cases the soil was tilled in common also and in others by the individual families but without any private land tenure. These commons, called altepetlalli under the Aztec regime, were the direct forerunners of the ejidos of more recent times.
Many of these village commons remained intact until comparatively recent times although the tendency in the colonial period was for the Spanish hacendados to absorb and destroy the primitive village economy, converting the peasants into peons or serfs of the haciendas. There were a number of peasant uprisings but prior to 1810 these did not acquire great strength. The Mexican war for independence was, especially in its first stage, the revolt of a land-starved peasantry fighting for the restitution of its communal holdings. Other revolutions since that time have had the same objective, culminating in the Zapatista movement of 1910–1919. Another such uprising is now in the offing.
Traditionally, the bulk of Mexico’s peasants aspire to communal holdings. Left to themselves they seldom abandon common ownership for individual tenure, although the land is almost always subdivided by the village council for cultivation in small lots by individual heads of families. Primitive methods of cultivation, however, make collective-farming impractical excepting in rare instances.
Realizing the danger to their communal unity and the consequent strengthening of their enemies, if the village commons are broken up, the peasants prefer collective ownership. Most of them realize that individual tenure at this time would weaken their position as a class and would only serve the hacendados by playing the individual small and middle peasants against each other.
Two short years ago, the high priests of the National Revolutionary Party, to which at that time the major portion of the peasantry nominally adhered, launched a campaign for the subdivision of the “ejidos”. The peasants were told that their dignity as human beings, their duty to their families and their individual interests required the breaking up of these communal grants into individual parcels. Many of the peasants succumbed to the arguments of the politicians, especially when the leaders of their own organizations, many of them middle-class ranchers themselves, counselled support of the new government policy.
In several regions however, the peasants revolted on a local scale and the government linked its attack on the ejidos to a campaign to disarm the peasants, thousands of whom still held arms loaned them by the government during the reactionary revolts. In 1932, there were numerous sporadic outbreaks in the states of Michoacan, Jalisco, Sacatecas and Guanajuato. These local uprisings were easily suppressed and the military reports appearing in the press, usually referred to them as bandit or Catholic outbreaks. All news was, of course strictly censored.
In the state of Veracruz, the hostility of the peasants to the government assumed such an alarming aspect that the whole state was placed under military rule in order to forestall a general uprising. The Tejeda political faction dominant in that state, being unprepared to undertake a genuine armed insurrection at that time, although it was itself more or less closely identified with the defiant peasantry, was willing to compromise with the federal authorities. Large sections of the peasantry were disarmed although many of them offered resistance locality. At present the strictest watch is kept by the federal authorities to prevent the rearmament of these elements. It is known that many have secret arms caches. Arrests are being reported of peasants being caught with arms in their possession. A letter just received by the writer of these lines, from a peasant living near the port of Vera Cruz, says in part,
“The government has taken our arms away, and even now a few days ago in Villa Jose Cardel if you entered on horseback carrying the machete (cane knife) you use to work with, the federal soldiers would take it from you. So you see we must be careful and keep our eyes wide open.”
Ed. Note: This is the first of two articles on the Mexican Questions by comrade Negrete. The second will appear next week.
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