Salinas de Gortari's proposed reforms attempt to end this social pact. They amount to a settling of accounts with the Mexican revolution, its ideology and its popular aspects as well as its aspects of false consciousness. By questioning ejidal property and promoting the reconcentration of landed property the government seeks to advance its programme of capitalist reconstruction in the countryside. These reforms are a necessity from the point of view of the interests of capital and the economic projects underway in Mexico today, and especially for the free trade agreement.
The most significant elements of Salinas' reforms can be rapidly summarized here. On one hand the ejidal property becomes constitutional. On the other hand, the stipulation preventing the ejidios from. being expropriated, rented or sold is now threatened. The government has also announced the revision and the resolution of agrarian conflicts (under the presidency of de la Madrid the large landed owners had been favored over the peasants through the law of agrarian protection) concerning an estimated 42,000 requests for land.
The government claims that there is no more land to be distributed. Consequently, the misnamed small holdings (small holdings can be as much as 100 hectares, though for decades peasants demanded that it be limited to 30 hectares) as well as the latifundia system will not be touched.
Agrarian commercial firms
On the other hand, there is now a possibility that agrarian commercial firms of up to 2,500 hectares can now be formed. And to top off this "moderizing" project it is proposed that private international can participate in mercantile firms. This would in practice mark a break with the principal that "all the soil and subsoil belongs to the nation" and would sooner or later lead to a discussion about denationalizing the oil industry. 3
Almost simultaneously with these pro-
MEXICO land
SERGIO RODRIGUEZ* posals the government announced ten measures to revitalize the Mexican coun tryside. These take up some old peasant demands as well as involving huge investments in the countryside. As far as these measures are concerned, the most important concerns the repudiation of the carteras vencidas (debt contracted by peasants). This was welcomed with much fanfare by the sectors tied to the state. But in reality these measures are indispensable for the development of capitalism in the countryside because the peasant debt has inhibited increased productivity of agricultural labor.
The government is therefore not engaging in charity. Worse yet, it is taking advantage of the cancelling of the debts in order to reap political dividends. It transfered the peasant debt to an organism called the National Program of Solidarity (PRONASOL) - its key tool for social control over the population and assuring electoral support for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). In the final analysis only a small part of what the govemment saved in terms of social spending was transferred to the PRONASAL. This is tantamount to playing with the hunger and misery of the Mexican people. In other words, PRONASAL is a government mechanism that attempts to avoid any true * Sergio Rodriguez is a leader of the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT - Mexican section of the Fourth International). 1. The ejidos are parcels of state land handed over for individual and collective usufruct to the peasants in 1920. The state has done everything to ensure that these latter work the land individually. Almost half of Mexican territory is covered by the ejidos. 2. Article 3 of the constitution says that primary education must be non-religious, free and compulsory. Article 123 sets out the basic framework of the country's 15 labour relations. 3. President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized oil in 1940.
The Mexican revolution
THE Mexican revolution broke out on November 20, 1910. Two essential factors lay at the root of the 20th century's first social revolution: the attempts of
MEXICO social representation and at the same time reinforces the "presidential" and dictatorial character of the regime. It is interesting to examine the source of the funds to be allocated to rural investdictator Porfirio Diaz to prolong his 34 years of rule, in spite of the election vicments. The renegotiation of the Mexican tory of Francisco Madero; and the opposition of the peasantry to government foreign debt has given the government a measures aimed at "modernizing" the countryside and putting an end to com-
Though the respite.
government was munal land ownership one of the rare features of Aztec society respected by unable to attain its initial objective of lowering payments on the service of its debt the Spaniards from the time of the conquest.
to 2% of its internal GDP - in 1991 it
Finally Porfirio Diaz was forced into exile and Francisco Madero was elected paid 10 billion dollars — Salinas was, president in new elections. Contrary to the hopes of the population, Madero however, able to save nearly $1,600,000 continued the "liberal project" in the countryside; and thus began 11 years of million through negotiations and had peasant struggles for land. Led by Emiliano Zapata and in support of the soreduced the principal debt from 102 to 83 called Ayala Plan, these struggles reached their height in December 1914 when armed peasants following Zapata and Francisco Villa took control of
Moreover the Gulf War increased the
Mexico City.
price of oil, signitying increased income
Lacking an overall social project beyond the demands relating to land, Zapafor Mexico. But it was the sale of nationalta and Villa were unable of offering a credible and viable project to the different ized enterprises that resulted in an income sectors of Mexican society - notably the working class, which was under of billions and billions of dollars. The prostrong anarchist influence — and they finished by returning to their regions of cess of privatization during Salinas' manorigin, Morelos and Chihuahua, which permitted the federal army to regroup date amounts to a qualitative change.
and later defeat them.
Profiting from this situation, Venustiano Carranza, the new figurehead of the bourgeoisie, convoked a congress at Queretaro which promulgated the 1917
Selling the family silver constitution, one of the most progressive of the epoch, which recognized the right of workers to organize, reduced the power of the state and, above all, pro-
While the preceding government was able to sell off relatively important enterprises, the Salinas regime has sold the
After the killing of Zapata and Villa, a long period of internal struggle between most important and profitable ones.
different factions of the bourgeoisie began, lasting from 1920 to 1934 (Carran-
Among these have been the selling off the za was defeated by Alvaro Obregon, who was in turn replaced by Plutarco Eli-
Mexican
(which as Calles; Obregon won new elections but was assassinated before he could telephone company brought in $3,200,000 million), the privattake office)
ization of the nationalized bank, and the
This period ended with the conclusion of a kind of political pact which put a sale of nearly all of the steel mills. All this full stop to the revolution and with the foundation of the National Revolutionary bolstered the state coffers by almost 20
Party (PRN) fore-runner of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The billion dollars and constitutes a record
PRN, it could be said, succeeded in "channeling" the various bourgeois polireserve of 16 billion dollars.
cies, while permitting the "peace" and "stability" that have been the main char-
All of this money that has come from acteristics of more than 60 years of "perfect dictatorship" by the "government privatizations has been earmarked for a born of the Mexican revolution" as the writer Vargas Llosa has put it. — Agus-
"contingency" fund which the government claims will be saved for difficult times in the future. It is out of these funds that PRONASOL is funded and from there that the peasant debt is "paid off". In other words, a small part of the income received from the squandering of the nation's resources was used to "pay off"
the peasant debt which was the failed product of an agrarian policy that sunk millions of Mexicans into hunger and mis-
In its presentation of its plan for the reform of the constitution, the government began with a long introduction reinterpreting Mexican history from the period prior to the Spanish invasion through Tenochtitlan to the present. It is an attempt to expropriate the national historical consciousness and to expunge from it all refto social clashes.
But erences the fundamental objective of this ideological reinterpretation is to rewrite the history of the period of the presidency of Lazar Cardenas between 1936 and 1940.
This was the period of the expropriation of the oil industry, the nationalization of the railroads, the support (including the sending of arms) to the Spanish republic and the granting of asylum to Leon Trot-
16 sky. It was nise under Cardenas that the
International Viewpoint #224 • March 16, 1992 semi-corporatist domination population was put into place inaugurating the basis of the antidemocratic and dictatorial Mexican system that the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has cordictatorship".
Today, the principal target of the current government team is Cardenism. The reasons are clear. Cardenism represented a means by which a part of the government bureaucracy sought to take advantage of the international situation to build a nation independent of the whims of
The Cardenist project was not a socialist one, but rather a project to develop a type of state capitalism that would favor the formation of a strong national bourgeoisie. Cardenism therefore launched the industrialization of the country (through import substitution policies), revitalized the agricultural sector with a large agrarian distribution (with an infusion of state credits and ambitious irrigation projects), ad built a nationalized industrial infrastructure to service these projects.
The current reforms of Salinas are in practice the antithesis of all this. But the reforms of both Cardenas and Salinas were both anchored in the same political structure. Both claimed to be the legitimate heirs of the Mexican revolution. This is why Salinas tries to present his reforms as "anti-Cardinista" but "proZapatista".
Some writers have sought to identify Cardenas' projects with socialism and even socialist policies on agriculture with Stalinist forced collectivization. Trotsky's analysis of the Cardenista agrarian reforms are quite useful in this regard and are worth quoting at length. "This part of the program (Mexico's second six year plan) the most important part for Mexican life (the agrarian reform), is based not on an analysis of the needs of the country, but rather on some general formula borrowed from the vocabulary of the USSR and very badly adapted to national realities...
"What is the main question in Mexico today? Agrarian reform, or the democratic agrarian revolution; that is, the life of the
March 16, 1992 • #224 International Viewpoint peasants is characterized by a massive accumulation of the holdovers of feudal property reforms and the relations and traditions of slavery. It is necessary to courageously and definitively liquidate these holdovers from medieval barbarism with the aid of the peasants themselves. The large parasitic or semi-parasitic landed proprietors, the and political domination of the landowners over the forced agricultural labor, the quasi-patriarchal sharecropping system, which is fundamentally equivalent to slavery - these are the things that must be definitively liquidated in the shortest possible time.
"Now, the program does not even defend socialism. At least one pro-Salinas writer has sought to lump the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Cardenas together in opposition to those of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Makhno, Zapata and Salinas de Gortari.
Unfortunately, the demagogic discourse of Salinas has begun to register certain results. Salinas de Gortari presents himself as an uncompromising warrior against unproductive populist corporatism, the defender of peasant freedom
MEXICO proves that the reforms of article 27 of the constitution were closely tied to the Free Trade Agreement. Salinas needed to have his privatization proposals ratified before his trip to the United States in December
His modifications sought to capitalize the countryside by transforming the ejidos, moving towards privatizations and therefore perfecting the superexploitation of agrarian labor. In 1990 Mexico had to import $4.7 billion worth of food in spite of a record corn harvest. This reveals a deliberate policy of the government that consists of allow-
TERRA call for the completion of this task, which is essential to the democratic
LIBERTAD revolution, within the next six years; but at the same time it does call for the complete collectivization of the common lands in the same period of time. This is a complete inconsistency, which can lead to the most dire consequences, economic, social, and political... Collectivizing ignorance and misery by means of state compulsion advancing agriculture, but rather would inevitably lead to forcing the peasants into the camp of reaction... Imitating these methods (those of the Stalinist bureaucracy in USSR) would mean heading for disaster. It is necessary to complete the democratic revolution by giving the land, all the land, to the peasants.
"On the basis of this established conquest the peasants must be given an unlimited period to reflect, comexperiment with different methods of agriculture. They must be aided, technically and financially, but not compelled. In short, it is necessary to finish the work of Emiliano Zapata and not to superimpose on him the methods of Joseph Stalin... If methods of compulsion are used, this will only produce collectives that exist at state expense, while lowering the general level impoverishing country." (Leon Trotsky, "On Mexico's Second Six Year Plan" in Writings of Leon Trotsky pp. 221-228, Pathfinder Press, New York).
In fact, Cardenas' agrarian reform resulted in an enormous corporative bureaucratic web that subjected organizations to the vagaries of the various governments. In this way a formidable cycle of peasant struggles was ended as the political independence of peasant organizations was subordinated to government forces and a profoundly unproductive agrarian system was put into place. In practice, the Mexican government prioritized control over productivity:
Today, Salinas de Gortari and his acolytes try to lay the blame for all of the problems of the country on the Cardenas regime and by analogy on all those who
Y
DOSTOO against collectivism, proposing to develop peasant individualism, and ending the old corporatist organizations that controlled the peasantry. He claims to favor the emergence of a new layer of peasant leaders that will no longer be characterized by their being members or not of the PRI, but rather their capacity to lead productive organizations.
### Liquidation of ejidos
What are the key elements of these Finance and Agriculture Pedro Haspe and Carlos Hank (one of the largest landowners in the country sent a letter to the World Bank (WB). They took up the suggestions of the WB and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made in 1987 concerning the liquidation of the ejidos as a condition for the granting of credits for
In this letter they announced the end of state paternalism, claiming that Mexican agriculture would henceforth function
Wing agricultural production to drop, creating the conditions of poverty that would allow capital to go on quite revealing. State investments for the development of agriculture fell by 70% between 1981 and 1989. The agricultural credits allotted by the development bank were reduced by 55.3%. Per capita production for the ten principal crops in 1988 were 33.5% lower in 1988 than they were in 1981. Between 1982 and 1988 agricultural prices fell by 34.6% in relation to prices in general. Fertilizer prices fell by 48.7%. All this means that the town and country deteriorated at the expense of the countryside. But the fundamental aim of the Salinas reforms is to change the forms of property in the countryside. According to the National Institute of Statistics (INEGI) there were 28,058 ejidos and communities in 1988 with 3,070,058 peasmaking up 48.6% of the national territory. The government cannot permit this to continue and the logic of Salinas' plan is a privatization of this. The key element in the plan concerning this question is to sell or rent the individual 25,388,413 hectares, or 27% of ejido land, which is 13% of the national territory. These figures are even higher if we look at the question from the point of view of production, for in the collective part of the ejido there are lands where the institutions of the peasant community are located, such as schools, churches, municipal facilities, clinics, and so on. The collective lands constitute a smaller percentage from the productive point of view and the individual plots are more significant. It is the latter which will be shared out to the commercial firms.
Foreign investors can participate here, as well as the new agricultural capitalists and certain rich peasants who are becoming capitalists. Though it is said that nobody would sell off their patrimony, erty of these peasants without resources.
ESCUELA EJIDAL
International Viewpoint #224 • March 16, 1992
MEXICO
We are confronted with an ultra reactionary plan to privatize society which at the same time seeks to take advantage of the economic situation to propose "solutions" to old problems (like the peasant debt) in exchange for the acceptance of the privatization of the countryside. Of course at the same time the government reinforces its new corporatist project around PRONASOL.
Landed property is put on the market in an attempt at redistribution that will allow it to be concentrated into large capitalist holdings. This amounts to a new phase in separating producers from the means of
These developments accompanied by violence and
The peasant movement is experiencing a crisis. After several years of radicalization, maturation and accumulated experiences, we are today experiencing worst offensive of the government against the independent peasant organizations. This is a different and more dangerous offensive than the traditional repressive policies. Not only because repression will be used but but because the policies of are being successful. These cooption tactics serve the goal of agrarian capitalist restructuring. As in all bourgeois plans this one attempts to integrate and reinforce the most productive sectors and allow the rest to wallow in misery.
### Divisions in peasant movement
These policies have already succeeded in provoking division in a good part of the peasant movement. The Permanent Agrarian Council (CAP) played a big role in this. The CAP was used by the government for two functions. In the first place the government needed a new organism as the old structures of control of the PRI over the countryside were exhausted. In the second place it needed to put into place an agrarian counter-reform that involved not only peasant organizations tied to the PRI, but those outside of it.
The inclusion of independent forces into the CAP was not a mistake. They were there to the degree that the majority of organized peasants are in the CAP. The problem is that in the context of this plan the independent forces did not represent a radicalization and consciousness within the CAP. In practice these forces play the role of privileged interlocutors of Salinas and have increasingly identified with his
An important organization like the General Popular Peasant and Worker Union (UGOCP), initially set up primarily by the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT — Mexican section of the Fourth International), could have been a basis for the reorganization of the peasant movement in the direction of a majority organization independent not only of the PRI but of Salinas as well. In this sense it missed an historic opportunity. Its general secretary, Margarito Montes, has not only supported the president's line, but has become one of the leading propagandists for Salinas' policies (as a result of this Montes' resignation was unanimously accepted by the
There is much division in the peasant ranks as a result of which the president's hand has been greatly strengthened. There have been however, some reactions, such as a march on Mexico city of some 8,000 peasants organized by the National Peasant Resistance Movement (MOMARCA), which was established by rank and file members opposed to the support given to Salinas by some of their leaders. But these are minor developments compared with the constitutional agriculture and its effects on the peasant-
These changes amount to a substantial altering of the balance of forces between the masses and the state. It must be remembered that the balance of forces that existed before was established under the Cardenas regime and had been quite effective in forging a social pact that lasted for decades. Thanks to this pact the state was able to enjoy social peace and order for an extended period. These policies and the way they evolved sacrificed productivity for stability. It was precisely this stability that guaranteed GDP rates in spite of the low productivity of labor, which was a function of the low wages and super-exploitation of the peasantry who became, de facto, state
This all came to an end when the state no longer had the resources to subsidize the low productivity of labor. A system like that of Mexico could not solve its problems by expanding democratic space in order to increase productivity. Rather, it chose to allow the full brunt of the crisis to fall on the workers in order to later restructure production and raise productivity with compulsory methods. But the old structures were an obstacle to this.
The state therefore tried to dismantle the old organizations from above, using a "democratic" discourse that misled those who, desperate to destroy the old corporatism, found Salinas' measures positive.
The government seeks to establish a new long term social consensus. But this time it will not be between the social organizations and the state but rather through the weakening and crushing of the social organizations. There will be attacks against any organization that is even remotely collective. This amounts to a historical turning point: the government is trying to end the Mexican revolution in the interests of capital. It is not trying, as some have held, to finish the work of Zapata (which, according to this logic, had been "distorted" by Cardenas), but rather, to put an end to the vestiges of Zapatismo and promote the interests of agro-business by selling off the land that the 1910-1917 revolution considered as the property of
As always the modernizers think that all is settled and under control. But they fail to take into account the consciousness of the Mexican people. This reform will not only not result in the desired stability, but will, on the contrary, lead to new peasant struggles. The dictator Porfirio Diaz used to say that it was necessary to avoid upsetting the tiger that is the Mexican peasantry. Salinas has done just that, with the help of a series of ex-militants of the left who have passed over to the camp of the
But the gains of the state will appear much weaker as the process of reconcentrating the land deepens, when a good part of the Mexican peasantry are transformed into day laborers at hunger wages, and when the latifundia system is revived. Then it will be clear that Salinas should have followed the advice of his "illustrious" predecessor and not disturbed the tiger. When that happens the validity of Trotsky's opinion that "the next Mexican revolution must continue where Zapata left off" will be clearer than ever. *