Echeverria relights age-old conflict

Press, 29 November 1976, Page 8

Echeverria relights age-old conflict

By JOHN PARCELL, NZPAReuter correspondent Mexico City President Luis Echeverria has reignited an age-old feud between Mexican landowners and the rural poor during his last weeks in power. His decision to over-ride normal legal processes and break up big estates occupying some of the country’s best farmland will pass on an immediate challenge to the authority of President Jose Lopez Portillo, when he

takes office on Wednesday. Mr Lopez Portillo, an urbane, 55-year-old lawyer, will have to placate the landowners and the private sector in general. He will face intense pressure from the peasants and their powerful leaders, whose appetite for victory has just been whetted. In Mexico, land ownership i- a deeply emotive isue. It as the mainspring of the revolution and subsequent civil strife which claimed a million lives between 1910 and 1917. President ‘Echeverria’s decree expropriated some 100,000 hectares (a quarter of a million acres) of prime cropland in north-west Mexico for division between some 9000 peasant families. Now farms, factories, and shops all over the northern region are idle as their owners carry out a series of lock-outs to protest against the expropriation.

The lock-outs will continue at least until Mr Lopez Portillo’s inauguration day, and then the private sector will expect some quick conciliatory move.

At the same time peasant organisations are invading rich estates in other parts of the north-west, 900 miles from Mexico City, demanding fresh handouts from the Government.

The army and police, which have violently crushed similar invasions in the past, have been ordered not to intervene this time, but eyewitnesses have reported that there is tension among rival peasant groups, some of which are well-armed.

Mr Lopez Portillo may have great difficulty in avoiding bloodshed and persuading the peasants to be patient. The agrarian crisis has been building up for many years. Since the revolution, the slogan of “Land for all” has been part of the armoury of even the most conservative politicians on their vote-seeking excursions to the countryside. The slogan has simply masked reality. Most of Mexico’s 28 million countrydwellers are still without land because there is little more to be shared out in this arid and mountainous country. Some three million families have obtained their own plots, but almost all of these are so small and so primitively exploited that they can barely feed their occupiers. Successive governments have allowed agriculture to stagnate while money was poured into rapid industrial development after World War 11. By the early 1970 s Mexico could no longer feed itself, and food for the mushrooming cities was provided more and more from the neighbouring United States. But there were exceptions in the north-western states of Sonora and Sinai .. Energetic families with good political connections began taking advantage of improved irrigation techniques and new high-yielding crops. Large estates, held in the names of numerous nominees, emerged in the fertile valleys

along the coast, despite laws which strictly limit the size of individual farmholdings. Now these estates provide most of the grain that reaches Mexican consumers in the cities and about half the United States agricultural imports — mainly winter fruit and vegetables. Their efficiency and high profits have not endeared the estate-owners to the hundreds of thousands of peasants in the region, many of them unemployed except at harvest time.

They have made political enemies because of their close connection with the conservative private sector, which has long been hostile to President Echeverria’s Left-wing rhetoric and personal invective against the rich. Now, before leaving office, Mr Echeverria has hit out — to the alarm of privateenterprise organisations, still wondering whether he has further unpleasant surprises in store. The decree, on November 19, coincided with a new wave of panic-selling of the peso, which has already lost half its value against the dollar in the last three months. Mr Lopez Portillo has maintained a cautious silence on the dispute, but the outgoing President’s action is known to run counter to his own policies. One of the few issues he was clear about during his election campaign was the rural problem. He proposed that the uneconomic smallholdings which now dot the countryside should be grouped in collectives to grow specialised crops. He suggested that increasing production was far more important than the old revolutionary pieties. “At this moment it is not simply a question of giving land to the peasants, but of feeding all

the Mexicans,” he told one rural campaign rally. President Echeverria’s decision to parcel up more land will guarantee his personal popularity with the peasant organisations that form an important sector of the ruling institutional revolutionary party. Mr Echeverria has given many other signs of wishing to preserve his personal power base after he leaves the Presidency — a fact which is likely to make it even harder for Mr Lopez Portillo to impose his own different policies.