Read an Excerpt
Cardenas compromised
The failure of reform in postrevolutionary Yucatan
By Ben Fallaw Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-2767-8
Chapter One
Agrarian Cardenismo, the Rise of the CGT, and the Fall of Governor Alayola, 1934-1935
As a presidential candidate in March 1934, Lazaro Cardenas pledged to carve dozens of collective henequen ejidos out of the haciendas of Yucatan. Even before Cardenas took office, the federal agrarian bureaucracy had been planning an "energetic offensive" to achieve the "social liberation of the Yucatecan peasantry."
This chapter considers land reform and its political and social ramifications from the beginning of the Cardenas presidency to the overthrow of Governor Cesar Alayola Barrera in a general strike in September-October 1935, an event usually (and somewhat erroneously) considered as a victory for Cardenismo over its enemies in Yucatan. The first part considers the institutional means employed by the Cardenas regime to try and create collective henequen ejidos. It then turns to the political effect of agrarian reform, principally the rise of the agrarian camarilla. I will then consider the reaction against agrarian reform-the rise of anarchosyndicalist peon unions sponsored by hacendados. The rise of strong opposition to land reform in the henequen zone played a major role in toppling Governor Cesar Alayola.
The Mechanics of Agrarian Reform
To fulfill his "solemn promise" of land reform,Cardenas created a special committee to oversee the new Mixed (joint federal-state) Agrarian Commission just instituted in April in Yucatan. In December 1934, he promised (but had not yet allocated) 7 million pesos to the new federal National Bank of Agrarian Credit (soon to be the National Bank of Ejidal Credit). The Agrarian Bank would provide credit to peasant-run collective ejidos in the form of "advances" against future earnings, in cooperation with the recently created Autonomous Agrarian Department, which would provide technical support and management expertise.
To head the agrarian bureaucracy in Yucatan, Cardenas dispatched Candelario Reyes, a native of the northeastern state of Tamaulipas and protege of fellow Tamaulipeco Emilio Portes Gil. The latter was a former president and a powerful member of Cardenas's inner circle. Unlike many other federal lieutenants sent to Yucatan, Reyes stuck to his orders and refused bribes from landlords and local politicos, which led to his reputation as intocable (untouchable). The fact that an unelected outsider wielded so much power over Yucatan's fortunes rankled the regional oligarchy as well as many average Yucatecans; taxis carried signs saying, "This car will not pick up Candelario Reyes," and many cafes and restaurants put signs in their windows reading, "In this house Candelario Reyes will not be served." Although Reyes was personally honest, he wielded his power and large budget like a veteran political player.
It was understandable that many Yucatecan officials remained ambivalent about land reform. For starters, the Agrarian Bank's numbers simply did not add up. It planned to take 20-25 percent of all the henequen acreage in the state from haciendas to create ejidos. But even if officials divided all the haciendas' henequen land, the daily per capita income of the ejidatarios (peasants with rights to join collective ejidos) would have been 1.27 pesos, well below the barely adequate 2.50-4.00 pesos daily average. The Agrarian Bank anticipated planting henequen on vacant land to make up the difference-but that meant subsidizing ejidos for the seven years needed for the young sprouts to mature. Moreover, the process of dividing up planted and fallow fields among eligible pueblos proved to be a task worthy of Solomon. In an attempt to give ejidos convenient access to nearby raspers (the machinery that processed henequen leaves on haciendas) and fields, some haciendas were spared, while others were almost completely divided up among two (or even more) ejidos, creating confusion and disputes among ejidos and resentment among hard-hit hacendados.
Even more problematic was the situation of the peons, the rural workers who lived on the haciendas. Cardenas promised to give the henequen fields to those who worked them. But agrarian law and federal policy generally excluded peons and privileged peasants, who lived in towns and villages and worked on henequen plantations as day laborers. The peons, an estimated half of the sixty-thousand-person workforce in the henequen zone, found themselves shut out of the new ejidos. Cardenas encouraged them to form labor unions to raise wages through federal arbitration, but, again, the numbers did not add up: land reform left many haciendas with lower labor requirements and therefore many peons unemployed. As we shall see, the mobilization of the peons proved to be a formidable factor in regional politics, although not in the way in which Cardenas intended.
The fate of federal teachers under agrarian reform presented another unexpected obstacle for the Cardenista agrarian project. When hacendados lost land to ejidos, they stopped paying the federal teachers to educate the children of peons, as required by Article 123 of the Constitution of 1917. When the Agrarian Bank took over private henequen land, neither the bank nor the state government would assume responsibility for the schools, leaving the children of the peons without schooling and the teachers without work. The fact that federal teachers organized the peons into unions and that unemployed teachers blamed the Agrarian Bank both for their predicament and for the exclusion of peons from land grants drove a wedge between teachers and peons, on one hand, and the Agrarian Bank and the Cardenista agrarian project, on the other.
To make matters worse, the combination of disorganization and underemployment on the ejidos and layoffs on the haciendas proved disastrous for the rural poor. Peasant villagers still depended on work on the declining haciendas, and estate-dwelling peons resented their exclusion from agrarian reform. Governor Alayola fruitlessly petitioned the national Cardenista authorities for a suspension of agrarian reform, arguing that the lack of work and hunger provoked riots. Protests by hacendados, complaints by state officials, and the threat of rising social instability in the henequen zone led Cardenas to convene a series of meetings with all interested parties in Mexico City. In May 1934, and once again in October 1935, Alayola, the state's official party (the PSS), and the state PNR forwarded an alternative agrarian plan that would transfer much less land, do it more slowly, and involve far less government supervision than did the federal blueprint for agrarian reform.
Even when faced with growing resistance and escalating costs, Cardenas stood by Reyes and the original, much more aggressive federal agrarian reform plans. His determination was in no small part due to the fact that, while his solemn promise of agrarian reform had antagonized many groups, it had also given new hope to some peasants across the henequen zone. Cardenas hoped that an agrarian Cardenista base would be mobilized among villagers demanding land in the henequen zone.
The Rise of Agrarian Cardenismo
Since the Mexican Revolution, many Yucatecan villages had been using legal channels to try to recover land seized by hacendados and planted with henequen during the Porfiriato (the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, 1877-1910). Despite the wave of petitions from rural communities, only a handful of grants affecting henequen land had been authorized since the end of the radical Carrillo Puerto administration (1922-23). Having already waited for years, many peasant communities did not stand by for official sanction to reclaim their land once Cardenas took office. Long-running boundary disputes between hacendados and communities flared up in the tense atmosphere of early 1934 in places like Cacalchen. In October and November 1934, at least seven villages legally laid claim to the land of neighboring henequen haciendas.
Despite mounting tension in the countryside and some eruptions of popular Cardenista agrarianism, federal agrarian authorities made little progress in establishing functioning henequen ejidos during the waning months of 1934. The next year, however, they redoubled their efforts to establish two model henequen ejidos in the towns of Cacalchen and Motul. Despite hacendado resistance in the form of destruction of henequen fields and refusal to negotiate access to raspers, by the end of April 1935 ve new henequen ejidos functioned: Komchen, Chuburna, Dzununcan, Seye, and Mococha. To address growing resentment among peons who feared unemployment should their haciendas be turned over to ejidos, the Agrarian Bank promised them (unspecified) aid in the future. Reyes even held out the prospect of financial independence from the federal government by setting aside a percentage of each year's harvest to be put toward a social fund for the future needs of ejidatarios, such as schooling, medical care, and pensions. The Agrarian Bank chose May Day 1935, traditionally a high holiday of leftists and organized labor in Mexico, to promise 1.3 million pesos in credit to nine new henequen ejidos.
As Cardenista authorities forged ahead, both state officials and hacendados raised further objections. More ominously popular complaints increased and were gleefully reported by the Diario de Yucatan, the Merida daily that often acted as the mouthpiece of Yucatan's business and landowning classes. For instance, on 1 May 1935, federal officials granted the peasants of Tixpeual land. But, much to the dismay of federal agrarian engineers, most of Tixpeual's peasants refused to accept the entry of henequen fields on the bank's conditions, realizing that with the mandatory federal credit came debt and dependence. Federal officials pressed ahead and created the ejido anyway, but, in July 1935, peasants demanded land without outside interference. That same month, a bomb, apparently planted by aggrieved peasants, went off outside the ejidal headquarters while visiting federal inspectors were meeting inside.
Similarly, federal engineers received a hostile reception in other communities. Rumors spread that census taking and mapping were preludes to a military draft and the loss of land. Such beliefs fed peasant perceptions of federal officials as authoritarian and unresponsive and reflected a deep-seated suspicion that prerevolutionary debt peonage was to be replaced with a new debt servitude, this time to federal bureaucrats.
Faced with mushrooming peasant resistance and sporadic violence, the federal engineers often overreacted. The ejidatarios of Dzununcan complained that Agrarian Department officials threatened them with five years in prison should they not join the collective land grant. To make matters worse, frustrated agrarian engineers at times called in federal troops to deal with peasant obstinacy.
By mid-1935, popular and hacendado resistance, financial shortfalls, and administrative errors threatened Cardenas's agrarian plans for Yucatan. But other political and economic commitments-above all, the looming showdown with Calles-occupied Cardenas. The president could only manage to lean on Governor Alayola to help out the ejidos. In response, the state government grudgingly moved to expropriate raspers so that the ejidos would not have to rent them from hacendados, in the process giving federal agrarian officials a potent weapon to use against recalcitrant hacendados. Landowners promptly blocked these measures with the ubiquitous amparo, an appellate court's judicial stay issued on constitutional grounds. Consequently, the pace of agrarian reform further slowed.
The Agrarian Bank originally had planned to organize some 236 ejidos (about half henequen, half corn) by the end of 1935, but by mid-September even optimistic figures showed that only 11,816 of 53,778 eligible peasants had enrolled in the Agrarian Bank's local credit societies. This meant that over three-fourths of peasants eligible to receive land either had not been organized or refused to cooperate. While the Agrarian Bank claimed to have sown some 90,900 mecates (one mecate is twenty by twenty meters, or one-twenty-fifth of a hectare) of henequen by mid-September 1935, some two years later bank jefe Candelario Reyes admitted that only 4,361 mecates were actually sown during that entire year. During 1935, only three of the thirty-one ejidos that should have been planting henequen actually did so, despite outlays of some 190,000 pesos toward that end. An estimated 30 percent of productivity was lost through deficient management (poor cutting, badly timed burning) of henequen ejidos by federal engineers. An additional unknown percentage was lost through fraud. Moreover, it seems that federal spending never came close to matching Cardenas's promises and Reyes's plans.
Agrarian Cardenismo as Camarilla: Ejidal Caciques and the New Notables
Federal agrarian reform unintentionally created a powerful new regional group referred to here as the agrarian Cardenista camarilla. It was made up of the federal agrarian officials themselves and ejidal caciques, community leaders who supported agrarian reform to increase their own power. These local power brokers, who would play an important role in local and state politics in the coming years, came to exert influence, ironically enough, because of the centralized nature of Cardenas's agrarian plan.
In theory, the Cardenista doctrines of popular empowerment and economic justice entrusted the management of ejidos to a locally elected comisariado ejidal, or ejidal commissary. But in practice, the agrarian bureaucracy proved unwilling actually to turn over management of the ejidos to peasant representatives. Agrarian engineers generally held sympathetic but patronizing attitudes toward the peasants, believing them incapable of running the complex agricultural and industrial process of henequen production. Because the Agrarian Bank considered Maya-lingual peasants "helpless" owing to their supposed political inertia and inability to speak Spanish, lower-level Agrarian Bank officials created their own network of pliable intermediaries to control the ejidos. Patron-client ties between federal engineers and so-called ejidal caciques undergirded the operation of federal agrarian institutions. The Agrarian Bank's field agents, predominantly native Yucatecos despite their federal positions, used these petty agrarian bosses to carve out their own political bases. The agrarian reform bureaucracy, sent to free Yucatan from control by the landlords and Callista officials, paradoxically created a new system of caciques.
The political and economic clout of the federal agrarian engineers and the arbitrary power exercised by their loyal ejidal caciques created a great deal of popular resentment. Residents of Tixkokob complained that the president of the local ejido had already been robbing the people for more than fourteen years as an elected local official and that those who complained were denied land. In nearby Homun, peasants denounced Maximiliano Pacheco for controlling its ejido for six years, extorting illegal rents, denying land to an opposition mayoral candidate, and illegally enrolling medium-size landowners and the unemployed on the ejido's rolls. Pacheco's exploitation and violation of the "noble principles" of the ejido, they complained, was sanctioned by the Agrarian Bank chief, Reyes, who "decidedly supported this individual, whom he converted into the cacique of the ejido." To be sure, minority factions of peasant communities mastered the use of the discourse of caciquismo (boss rule) to try to provoke government intervention on their behalf, but there is ample evidence that many ejidos fell under the control of the same person or clique for years on end with the complicity of Agrarian Bank personnel.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cardenas compromised by Ben Fallaw Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
