The struggle went on for nearly ten years—against Diaz, against Madero, against Huerta the assassin, and later against Venustiano Carranza. The long war years were also years of continual U.S. intervention: the Marines staged two landings and several bombardments, diplomatic agents framed a variety of political plots, and Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson successfully organized the murder of President Madero and his vice president. The successive shifts of power did not dilute the fury of the attacks against Zapata and his forces, for they were the real danger, the open expression of the class struggle deeply imbedded in the national revolution. Governments and newspapers clamored against “the vandal hordes” of the general from Morelos. Powerful armies were sent, one after the other, against him. Fire, massacre, and the devastation of villages proved equally futile. Men, women, and children were shot or hanged as “Zapatista spies,” with proclamations of victory following the butcheries: the clean-up has succeeded! But in the nomadic revolutionaries’ mountain camps in the south, bonfires soon blazed up again. More than once Zapata’s forces counterattacked successfully up to the suburbs of the capital. After the fall of Huerta’s regime, Zapata and Pancho Villa—the “Attila of the South” and the “Centaur of the North”—entered Mexico City as conquerors and arranged a temporary division of power. At the end of 1914, a brief period of peace enabled Zapata to put into force, in Morelos, an agrarian reform even more radical than that outlined in the Plan de Ayala. The founder of the Socialist Party and some anarchosyndicalist militants considerably influenced this process; they radicalized the leader’s ideology without weakening his traditionalist roots, and afforded him indispensable organizational know-how.
The agrarian reform proposed to “destroy at the roots and forever the unjust monopoly of land, in order to realize a social state which guarantees fully the natural right which every man has to an extension of land necessary for his own subsistence and that of his family.”41 Lands taken from communities and individuals since the deamortization law of 1856 were restored; maximum limits were laid down for holding sizes, according to climate and fertility; and the lands of enemies of the revolution were declared national property. This last political decision had, as in the Artigas agrarian reform, a clear economic meaning: the latifundistas were the enemy. Technical schools, tool factories, and a rural credit bank were established; sugarmills and distilleries were nationalized and became public services. A system of local democracy put the reins of political power and of economic maintenance in the people’s hands. Zapatista schools sprouted and spread, popular juntas were organized for defense and the promotion of revolutionary principles, and an authentic democracy took shape and gained in strength. The municipalities were nuclear units of government and the people elected their leaders, courts, and police. Military leaders had to submit to the wishes of organized civilian communities. Bureaucrats and generals no longer imposed methods of production and of living. The revolution tied itself to tradition and functioned “in conformity with the customs and usage of each pueblo … that is, if a certain pueblo wants the communal system, so it will be executed, and if another pueblo wants the division of land in order to admit small property, so it will be done.”
In the spring of 1915 all the fields of Morelos were under cultivation, mostly with corn and food crops. Meanwhile food was short and hunger loomed in Mexico City. Carranza, who had won the presidency, also ordered a land reform, but his henchmen speedily cornered all its benefits. In 1916 Morelos’s capital, Cuernavaca, and the Zapatista district were threatened by powerful forces. Crops now coming to fruition, minerals, hides, and machines were attractive booty for the advancing officers, who set fires as they came, and proclaimed “a work of reconstruction and progress.”
A stratagem and a betrayal ended Zapata’s life in 1919. A thousand men lying in ambush fired into his body. He died at the same age as Che Guevara. The legend of a sorrel horse, galloping alone southward through the mountains, survived him. But not only the legend: the resolve of all Morelos to “complete the reformer’s work, avenge the martyr’s blood, and follow the hero’s example” found an echo throughout the country. Time passed and under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), the Zapatista tradition regained life and vigor with the nationwide implementation of agrarian reform. Mainly during this administration, 67 million hectares owned by foreign or Mexican corporations were expropriated, and in addition to the land peasants received credits, education, and the means to organize their work. The economy and population had begun their accelerating rise; agricultural production multiplied while the whole country underwent modernization and industrialization. Cities expanded and the consumer market grew in breadth and depth.
But Mexican nationalism did not lead to socialism and consequently, like other countries that failed to take the decisive step, Mexico did not fully achieve its goals of economic independence and social justice. The million dead in the revolutionary war years had paid blood tribute “to a Huitzilopoxtli more cruel and insatiable than the one our ancestors worshiped: the capitalist development of Mexico under conditions imposed by subordination to imperialism.”49 The fading of the bright banners has been studied by a variety of scholars. Edmundo Flores writes in an official publication that “at the present time, 60 percent of Mexico’s total population has incomes below $120 a year and goes hungry.”50 Eight million Mexicans consume almost nothing but beans, corn, tortillas, and chilis. The Tlatelolco massacre of some 500 students in 1968 is not the only evidence of the system’s deep contradictions. Using official figures, Alonso Aguilar concludes that Mexico has some 2 million landless peasants, 3 million children not attending school, around 11 million illiterates, and 5 million who have no shoes. Collectively owned ejido land is continually being partitioned, and along with the multiplication of minifundios—which themselves become steadily more fragmented—a new type of latifundio system, and a new agrarian bourgeoisie engaged in large-scale commercial farming, have made their appearance. Local landlords and entrepreneurs, who have achieved a dominant position by trampling on the letter and spirit of the law, are in turn dominated: a recent book classifies them within the words “and Co.” attached to Anderson, Clayton.51 In the same book, Lázaro Cárde-nas’s son writes that “the camouflaged latifundios have been established, when possible, on the best and most productive lands.”
Novelist Carlos Fuentes has reconstructed, in reverse chronological order, the life of a captain in Carranza’s army who, in war and then in peace, uses gun and cunning to make his way to the top.52 A man of humble origin, Artemio Cruz sheds the idealism and heroism of his youth as the years pass: he helps himself to land, founds and multiplies businesses, gets a seat in the Congress, and climbs the shining steps to the peaks of society, accumulating wealth, power, and prestige by wheeling and dealing, bribery, speculation, audacity, and the bloody repression of the Indians. His pilgrim’s progress resembles that of the potently impotent party of the Mexican revolution which virtually monopolizes the country’s political life in our time. Both have fallen upward.
THE LATIFUNDIO MULTIPLIES MOUTHS BUT NOT BREAD
Latin American agricultural and livestock production per capita is lower today than on the eve of World War II. During the thirty years since then, world production of food has grown in the same proportion as it has fallen in Latin America. The structure of backwardness in our countryside also functions as a structure of waste: waste of labor, of available land, of capital, of the product, and above all of the fleeting opportunities for development that history has offered. In almost all Latin American countries the latifundio—and its poor relation the minifundio—are the bottlenecks choking the growth of agriculture and the development of the whole economy. The private property system molds the production system: 1.5 percent of the agricultural landlords own half of all the cultivable land, and every year Latin America spends more than $500 million on importing food that its own broad and fertile lands could produce without difficulty. Hardly 5 percent of the total area
is under cultivation: the lowest proportion—and consequently the greatest waste—on earth. Furthermore, yields from the small acreage that is cultivated are very low. In many areas there are more pointed-stick plows than tractors. The use of modern techniques—not only the mechanization of tasks, but the aid and stimulation of the soil with fertilizers, herbicides, seeds, pesticides, and artificial irrigation—is the exception rather than the rule. In a manner sometimes recalling the “Sun King” Louis XIV, the latifundio forms a constellation of power which, in Maza Zavala’s apt phrase, multiplies mouths but not bread.53 Instead of absorbing labor, the latifundio expels it: in forty years the proportion of rural workers in Latin America has fallen from 63 to 40 percent. There are plenty of technocrats, mechanically applying ready-made formulas, to tell us that this is a sign of progress: massive transfer of the peasant population accelerated urbanization. The unemployed continually vomited by the system do indeed pour into the cities and extend its suburbs. But the factories, which also create unemployment as they modernize, provide no refuge for this surplus and nonspecialized labor force. The scanty technical advances in the countryside sharpen the problem. Landlords increase their profits by adopting more modern ways to exploit their properties; as more hands become idle, the gap separating rich and poor only widens. For example, the introduction of motorized equipment eliminates more rural jobs than it creates. Malnutrition is the normal lot of Latin Americans who produce the food in dawn-to-dusk workdays; they receive paupers’ wages while the income produced by the countryside is spent in the cities or sent abroad. A technical improvement that increases the soil’s meager yields while leaving the property system intact is certainly no blessing to the peasants, despite its contribution to general progress. There is no rise in their wages, nor any participation in the crop. The countryside radiates poverty to the many and wealth to very few. Private airplanes soar over forlorn deserts, sterile luxury is spawned in fashionable resorts, and Europe teems with banknote-stuffed Latin American tourists who neglect to cultivate their lands but not their souls.
Paul Bairoch attributes the principal weakness of the third world’s economy to the fact that its median agricultural productivity is only half what today’s developed countries achieved on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.54 In fact, for industry to expand harmoniously, a much greater increase in the production of food and agricultural raw materials is needed. Food because the cities keep growing and eating more; raw materials for the factories and for export, so that agricultural imports can be cut and foreign sales, which provide currency needed for development, increased. Furthermore, domestic consumption, which must expand if infant industries are to thrive, is enfeebled by the latifundio-minifundio system. Hunger wages in the countryside and the ever growing reserve army of unemployed encourage this weakness: the emigrants from the rural areas who come to beat on city doors keep pushing down the overall level of the workers’ wages.
Ever since the Alliance for Progress trumpeted the need for agrarian reform to the four winds, the oligarchy and technocracy have tirelessly elaborated projects. Dozens of projects—fat ones, thin ones, broad and narrow ones—gather dust on the shelves of every Latin American parliament. No curse is attached anymore to the theme of agrarian reform: politicians have learned that the best way not to have it is to keep invoking it. The simultaneous processes of concentration and atomization of the land continue olympically in most of the countries.
Nevertheless, exceptions are beginning to break through. For the countryside is not merely a seed bed of poverty: it is also a seed bed of rebellion, and acute social tensions often lie concealed behind the apparent resignation of the masses. Brazil’s Northeast, for example, impresses one at first as a kingdom of fatalism whose inhabitants consent to die of hunger as passively as they accept nightfall at the end of each day. Yet it is not so long, after all, since that mystical explosion when the Northeasterners fought beside their way-out Messiahs, raising cross and gun against armies to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to this world; nor since the cangaceiros created waves of violence. Fanatics and bandoleiros, seeking Utopia and vengeance, made a bed for the river of desperate peasant protest, even though it was still blind. The peasant leagues later recovered and deepened these fighting traditions.
The military dictatorship that seized power in Brazil in 1964 was prompt to announce its agrarian reform. Paulo Schilling has drawn our attention to the uniqueness of the Instituto Brasileiro de Reforma Agrária: instead of distributing land to the peasants, it proceeded to expel them and to restore to the latifundistas the acreage that had been spontaneously invaded or expropriated under previous governments. In 1966 and 1967, before press censorship was applied with greater rigor, the dailies used to report the spoliations, conflagrations, and persecutions with which the military police carried out the hardworking institute’s orders. In 1964 Ecuador proclaimed another agrarian reform that deserves recognition: the government distributed unproductive land only, while facilitating the concentration of better land in the grip of the big landlords. Half of the land distributed by Venezuela’s agrarian reform, beginning in 1960, was public property; big commercial plantations were untouched, and such generous indemnities were paid to expropriated latifundistas that they bought new land in other areas with the profits.
In 1968, a couple of years before his fall, Argentine dictator Juan Carlos Onganía tried to apply a new tax system to rural property. The idea was to tax unproductive “bare plains” more heavily than productive land. The cattle oligarchy protested to high heaven and mobilized their own forces on the General Staff, and Onganía had to forget his heretical idea. Like Uruguay, Argentina’s naturally fertile lands and benign climate have brought it relative prosperity in Latin America. But erosion does its remorseless work on the vast abandoned plains, which are neither farmed nor used for pasture, and the same occurs on a large part of the millions of hectares used for cattle-raising. This extensive method— again as in Uruguay, but to a smaller extent—was at the bottom of the crisis that shook the Argentine economy in the 1960s. Argentine latifundistas show no interest in technical innovations. Productivity is low because it suits them; the law of profit prevails over all others. Extending estates by buying new acreage is more remunerative and less risky than applying modern intensive techniques.* In 1931, the Sociedad Rural defended the horse against the tractor: “Cattle farmers! Working with horses on agricultural tasks is protecting your own and the country’s interests!” Twenty years later it insisted: “It is easier, as a well-known military man has said, to put grass in a horse’s stomach than gas in the tank of a heavy truck.”56 According to ECLA calculations, in proportion to arable acreage Argentina has sixteen times fewer tractors than France and nineteen times fewer than Britain. Also in proportion, the country consumes 140 times less fertilizer than West Germany.57 Yields of wheat, corn, and cotton are much lower in Argentina than in developed countries.
* From the large-scale livestock owners’ standpoint, artificial pasture means transferring capital into an investment that is larger, more risky, and at the same time less profitable than the traditional investment in extensive cattle-farming. Thus the private interest of the producer is in contradiction with the interest of society as a whole: the quality and yield of cattle can only improve, beyond a certain point, through the increase of nutrients in the soil. The country needs cows to produce more meat and sheep to produce more wool, but the landlords make greater profits from yields at the present level. In this matter, the conclusions of the University of Uruguay’s Instituto de Economía are equally applicable to Argentina.55
Juan Domingo Perón had defied the interests of Argentina’s landowning oligarchy by imposing the Statute of the Peon and compliance with a rural minimum wage. In 1944 the Sociedad Rural declared: “In fixing wages, it is essential to determine the standard of living of the ordinary peon. His material needs are sometimes so limited that the use to which any surplus will be put is of little social interest.” The Sociedad Rural c
ontinues to refer to peons as if they were animals, and its reflections on the workers’ limited need to consume provide an unintentional key to the limitations of Argentine industrial development: the internal market neither expands nor deepens sufficiently. Perón’s economic development policy never broke the structure of agricultural underdevelopment. In a speech at the Teatro Colón in June 1952, Perón denied any intention of agrarian reform, and the Sociedad Rural commented officially: “It was a masterly dissertation.” In Bolivia, thanks to the agrarian reform of 1952, nutrition visibly improved over large areas of the altiplano—so much so that increases in height were noted among the peasants. Yet the Bolivian population as a whole still consumes barely 60 percent of the protein and 20 percent of the calcium necessary for a minimal diet; rural consumption is even more deficient than these average figures reveal. While agrarian reform can certainly not be called a failure, the division of altiplano land has not been enough to prevent Bolivia from spending one-fifth of its foreign currency on imported food.
The agrarian reform introduced in 1969 by the military government in Peru looked from the outset like a serious experiment. As for the Eduardo Frei administration’s expropriation of some Chilean latifundios, it must at least be credited with opening a channel for the radical agrarian reform which the new president, Salvador Allende, is announcing as I write these pages.
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent Page 17
