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Political Conflict and Land Tenure in the Mexican Isthmus of Tehuantepec

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Leigh Binford
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From March 1981, when a radical local administration took office, the municipality of Juchitán, Oaxaca, located in the Southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec, has been in the national (and more recently the international) spotlight. The newly elected officials were from the COCEI, the Coalición de Obreros, Campesinos y Estudiantes del Istmo (Coalition of Workers, Peasants and Students of the Isthmus), a radical local political group which had, for tactical reasons, formed an electoral alliance with the Mexican Communist Party (since August 1981 the leading component of the PSUM or Unified Socialist Party of Mexico, organized to contest the 5982 presidential election). Land reform was one of the major issues — along with municipal corruption and the paucity of educational, health and other services — mobilized substantial proportions of a largely agricultural-based population to support the COCEI against the PRI, the Revolutionary Institutional Party which has ruled Mexico without serious challenge since 1929.

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Articles
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Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , May 1985 , pp. 179 - 200
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 This paper is a revised form of chapter IV of my Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Agricultural Crises, State Intervention and the Development of Classes in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico’, Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, 1983. I am grateful to Scott Cook for numerous useful suggestions. All translations from Spanish are my own.

2 Laura, Nader, ‘The Zapotec of Oaxaca’, in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 7, Robert, Wauchope and Evon, Z. Vogt (eds.) (Austin, Texas, University of Texas Press, 1969), p. 333.Google Scholar

3 That community members control disposition of the land is generally only appearance: ‘In general, the cultivable land is appropriated and worked in an individual form and its possessors consider their lots or parcels as private property, even though they may not have registered them as such or may not possess the respective titles’. Sergio, Reyes Osorioet al., Estructura Agraria y Desarrollo Agriícola en México (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974), pp. 538–9.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., p. 543.

5 Armando, Bartra, ‘Crisis Agraria y Movimiento Campesino en los Setentas’, Cuadernos Agrarios, nos. 10–11 (1980), p. 55.Google Scholar

6 Alejandro, López, ‘La Situación Agraria en la Comunidad de Juchitán’, ms., (Juchitán, nd.), p. 1.Google Scholar

7 Luis, G. Alcerregía, ‘Conferencia Sobre la Tenencia de la Tierra’, ms., (Juchitán, 1976), pp. 2–6.Google Scholar

8 Roger, Bartra, Estrucura Agraria y Clases Sociales en México (Mexico, Serie Popular Era,1974). p. 112;Google ScholarLucio, Mendieta y Nunez, El Problema Agrario de México (Mexico, Porrua, 1966), pp. 109–14;Google ScholarReyes, Osorioet a1, Estructura Agraria…, op. cit., pp. 536–37.Google Scholar

9 Brian, R. Hamnett, ‘Dye Production, Food Supply and the Laboring Population of Oaxaca, 1750–1820’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 51, no. 1 (1971), pp. 55–9.Google Scholar

10 Binford, ‘Agricultural Crises…’, op. cit., pp. 88–98. In 1810 it was calculated that 928 pueblos de indios (indigenous towns) lay within the Intendancy of Oaxaca compared to only 83 haciendas and 269 ranches. Also heavily indigenous, the Intendancy of Puebla contained 764 Indian villages, 478 haciendas and 911 ranches. Hamnett, ‘Dye Production…’, op. cit., p. 52. On the development of land tenure during the colonial period in the Oaxaca Valley see William, B. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1972), especially pp. 197–201.Google Scholar

11 Brian, R. Hamnett, Politics and Trade in Southern Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

12 Ibid.

13 Mendieta y Nuñez, El Problema Agrario…, op. cit., p. 89.

14 Alejandro, Prieto, La Colonización del Istmo de Tehuantepec (Mexico, I. Cumplido, 1884).Google Scholar

15 Concern with climatological barriers led Prieto to focus his attention on the few irrigated areas then in existence: ‘in order for the colonizing farmer to be protected from misery in years of scarce rain, when the siembras de temporal… are always lost, he must possess… a certain extension of land at the margin of the rivers, in which it might be possible to opportunely provide the plants with irrigations’. Ibid., p. 13. Two of the three sites which he surveyed were near the banks of the Tehuantepec river; the third was located 3 or 4 kilometers southeast of Comitancillo close to spring-fed canals which irrigated the terrains of Comitancillo, Tlacotepec and Ixtaltepec. Ibid., pp. 23–4.

16 See Corinne, Azen Krause, The Jews in Mexico: A History with Special Emphasis on the Period from 1857 to 1930, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh, p. 103.Google Scholar

17 Miguel, Covarrubias, Mexico South (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), p. 172.Google Scholar

18 A number of immigrants sought land and some members of local communities sought ways to protect their land rights. The formation of the Sociedad Fuentesy Guzmán (Fuentes and Guzman Society) is a case in point. In 1786 brothers representing two families, the Fuentes of Espinal and the Guzmans of Ixtaltepec (located 5 kilometers north of Juchitán and a kilometers north of Espinal) jointly purchased 5781.28 hectares, known locally as Sopiloapan, from Don Juan de Castellejos, whose rights can be traced back to a Spanish land grant of 1605. Archivos de la Sociedad Fuentes y Guzmán, Act of 1786 documenting the sale of the Hacienda San Antonio Sopiloapan and the attached lands of Alvarado (Espinal, Oaxaca). Diffusion of inheritance rights through intermarriage gave most of the inhabitants of Espinal and Ixtaltepec a claim to some of the Fuentes and Guzman lands in the course of the next century. Since 1903 the land has been administered by a board composed of representatives of the two families. Regulations governing the use and transfer of land make it clear that the object of the society was to provide for the current and future land needs of the two families and their descendants. The formation of the society was most likely a response to the threat of land usurpation by foreigners entering the area from the beginning of railroad construction in 1902. Any direct descendant of the original founders was eligible to request land from the governing body. If the request was approved, then that person received the right to use a specified piece of terrain in Sopiloapan and to alienate that land by gift or by sale to any other qualified member of the society. Under no circumstances could non-members hope to control a parcel, although non-member males could obtain use rights if married to women who were recognized associates. In this way collective access was guaranteed and individual abuses (sales to outsiders, for instance) were minimized.

19 López, ‘La Situación Agraria…’, op. cit., p. 1

20 The lands within a few kilometers of the towns vary from 2 to 3 hectares in size and, according to informants, have been cultivated for many generations. The land which is, 8 or more kilometers away was worked only by a small proportion of the peasants. Today these land parcels tend to be much larger–5, 10, 30 or more hectares –indicating that many claims were staked in recent years by speculators or by persons who anticipated obtaining access to the technology needed to put them to productive use. One individual of 68 years, who worked a parcel over 12 kilometers from his home, claimed that because of the distance, he used to spend several days at a time in the fields as he could not travel by carreta (oxcart) from town, work and return in the course of a single day. Most peasants were unwilling to labor in that manner, but they did not have to because, considering the small population and the crude technology, there was no overall shortage of land closer to the village.

21 In 1958 the Agrarian Department became the Departamento de Asuntos Agrarios y Colonizcíon (Department of Agrarian Affairs and Colonization, commonly known as Asuntos Agrarios and referred to here as the DAAC); in 1975 it became the Secretaría de Reforma Agraria (Ministry of Agrarian Reform).

22 Expedient No. 3383 of the DAAC, 23 June 1964, Juchitán, Vol. I, Archivo de la Secretaría de la Reforma Agraria (Archives of the Ministry of Agrarian Reform), Oaxaca. Henceforth these archives will be designated AMAR, followed by the name of the municipality and volume number. An earlier solicitation for restitution of ejidos dates from 22 April 1930. AMAR, Juchitán, vol. I, Expedient 375.

23 AMAR, Juchitán, Presidential Decree, 21 November 1962.

24 Land prices approximately doubled between 1961 and 1963. Land grabbing extended to the Fuentes and Guzmán Society in which solicitations for land increased to o per year for 1962 and 1963 from an average of 17 per year for the pre-irrigation period of 1953−61.

25 Ideally user fees were to be set high enough so as to cover the costs of maintenance as well as to gradually pay the bill for construction. In reality this was seldom the case. Reyes Osorio et al., Estructura Agraria, op. cit., p. 875. While the peasants appreciated the security which the irrigation system provided with respect to the availability of water, they resented the fact that they had to pay for a substance which had in the past always been a gift of nature– despite the fact that nature had often given too much or too little for their needs. Protests were most vehement when the Directive Committee of the irrigation district saw fit to raise the water fee, as they did in 1964 from 9 pesos to 30 pesos per irrigation. Numerous agriculturalists turned again to rely upon rainfall and irrigated only in cases of severe drought. AMAR, Juchitán, vol. I, Letter from Professor Domingo Marguez Cueto, Vice-President of the Sociedad Agrícola de Pequeños Propietarios del Distrito de Riego de Tebuantepec to Sr Alfredo del Mazo, Minister of SARH, 2 January 1964.

26 AMAR, Juchitán vol. I, Decree of 13 July 1964.

27 Ibid., pp. 2, 50.

28 Strangely enough, Espinal was treated in these documents as an ‘annex’ of Juchitán, whereas it had been, since the latter part of the nineteenth century, a separate municipality.

29 AMAR, Juchitán, vol. I, Document of 28 August 1964. Another group of Juchitecos claimed a violation of Article 143 (Article 62 in the 1981 version of the Federal Law of Agrarian Reform) which states that only comuneros can solicit a change from communal land to ejido. Although the Juchitecos may have been comuneros by tradition, they had not received legal recognition as such, nor had they requested a conversion to ejido. On these two points they judged the resolution invalid. AMAR, Juchitán vol. I, n.d. It will be recalled that the original plan for Juchitán, drafted in 1947 and activated in 1959, was for the restitution of communal lands. As early as 7 July 1961 the chief of the DAAC received a memorandum from the Director General of Jural Matters explaining, in answer to a query, the requirements which would have to be met in order to convert a communal regime into an ejido. Citing relevant articles of the Agrarian Code (Articles 144 and 145) he said that ‘population centers which possess communal land can adopt the ejido regime by means of the will of the inhabitants’ and that with the co-operation of the Departamento Agrario they must proceed ‘to raise acts which set down the express will of the members of the communities, in adopting the ejido regime, since the General Assembly of Communeros is the supreme authority of the communal population centers’. AMAR, Juchitán, vol. I, letter of July 1961, from the Director General of Jural Matters to the Chief of the DAAC. This is more or less what occurred in the case of the 10,579 hectares of the nearby town of Ixtaltepec which received title to communal lands on 9 October 1954 and converted to ejido in 1963. Diario Oficial, 9 October 1954 and 30 November 1963. One must differentiate between the ‘confirmation’ of communal land and the ‘restitution’ of communal land. Communities seeking restitution have found it almost impossible to demonstrate, to the satisfaction of agrarian authorities, their prior ownership. Between 1915 and 1966 there were executed only 222 presidential resolutions restoring communal land, and 181 (80%) of these were executed before 1941. Confirmation of communal lands remaining continuously in the control of communities is somewhat more common. To restitution of communal land the government has favored the granting of ejidos, perhaps because of the greater political and economic control possible over land which is de jure the property of the nation and not the community. See Reyes Osorio et al., Estructusra Agraria… op. cit., p. 54. Juchitán had never received any title whatsoever before the expedient creating the ejido was published, and informants in the Espinal area claimed that the DAAC instigated the requests for ejidos by encouraging small groups of landless peasants to make the solicitations. Others said that no solicitation was ever made.

30 AMAR, Juchitán, vol. I, Notes from a protest lodged by eight litigants, n.d. They pointed out too that when the lands of Asunción Ixtaltepec were entitled in 1954, the private properties owned by Espinalinos in the zone denominated ‘Huamichal’ were exempted from the resolution. A summary of objections to the resolution is contained in Alcerregía, ‘Conferencia…’, op. cit., pp. 12–13.

31 AMAR, Juchitán, vol. I, letter from Jorge Milagro Ross, n.d.

32 Alcerregía, ‘Conferencia…’, op. cit., pp. 12–13.

33 See, for instance, Pablo, González Casanova, ‘El Partido del Estado: II. Fundación, Lucha Electoral y Crisis del Sistema’, Nexos, no. 17 (05 1979), pp. 3–19.Google Scholar

34 This body is an organ of the executive power composed of members freely designated and removed by the President of the Republic. Ley Federal de Reforma Agraria (Mexico, 1981), pp.547–8.Google Scholar Among other things, it is empowered to make judgements pertaining to expedients which are resolved by presidential decree and to give opinions when there are conflicts owing to the execution of presidential resolutions. Ibid., p. 550. That this body made the final decision is evidence of the direct involvement of Diáz Ordaz.

35 In a letter to Echeverria, the engineer assigned to the matter characterized the decision as though it were the most humane option permitted under the agrarian reform laws: ‘Having had conversations with the comuneros individually, in informative assemblies, in general assemblies with all the representatives of every one of the annexes, the conclusion was reached that it would not be convenient to change the communal lands to the ejido regime, since in this case the individual holding would have been io hectares; in consequence, with the 27,000 hectares of irrigated land only 2,700 peasants would have benefited, thus having to relieve 1,300 of their possessions which they have occupied since time immemorial’. The engineer was referring to Article zzo (in the 1981 version) of the Agrarian Reform Law, which fixed 10 hectares as the minimum individual ejido grant of irrigated lands. Government of Mexico, Ley Federal…, op. cit., p. 87. This article was passed during the presidency of Miguel Aleman. Reyes Osario et al., Estructura Agraria…, op. cit., p. 41. The Resolution of 1964 was to have been implemented by providing each ejidatorio with approximately hectares of irrigated terrain; tshus Article 220 takes its place alongside numerous other legal prerequisites which were ignored in the drafting of that resolution. It is less probable that the government was concerned with the fates of the 1,300 peasants who would have been displaced than with the political turmoil and anti-government sentiment that a forced ‘ejidalization’ would have engendered.

36 El Heraldso de México52 2 April 1966, p. I.

37 López, ‘La Situación Agraria…’, op. cit., p. 3.

38 Ibid., p. 4. The whole situation posed a dilemma for the Sociedad Fuentes Guzmá. Application of the López Mateos resolution would have converted their lands into part of the Juchitán ejido and would have limited each landowner to four hectares. On the other hand, the granting of individual titles contravened the society's own rule restricting land possession to legitimate descendants of the Fuentes and Guzmán families. Because they were receptacles of the ‘higher’ authority of the federal government (higher than the ‘local’ authority of the Society) the titles empowered their possessors to sell their lands to persons of their choice, regardless of local kinship ties. Because of the way the titles have been interpreted and used, the Society has lost all control over its irrigated lands since 1966 and continues to administer only its less desirable temporal lands to the north of the main irrigation canal. In the course of the struggle between 1964 and 1966, the society attempted to obtain a special dispensation from the DAAC, but minority status forced it to side with the majority of the landholders in the Juchitdn region in lobbying for individual private property. See AMAR, Juchitán, vol. I, Letter from Manuel Cruz Fuentes to Engineer Norberto Aguirre Palancaes of the DAAC, 17 April 1966.

39 Regarding this point a letter of 11 July 1974, from Jorge Milagro Ross to Licensiado Pastor Marquia Gonzalez, Director General of Agrarian Rights in Mexico, stated that a legend was originally to have been put in the plan of execution approved on 14 August 1964 (Resolution of Lopez Mateos) denoting that a 25,175 hectares individually possessed by 3787 comuneros did not form part of the area confirmed and titled to Juchitán and its annexes. It still has not been done. AMAR, Juchitán, vol. II.

40 Noticias, 24 May. 1978, p. I. From the early 19705 this office, filled by a general election every three years, was the object of bitter struggles between adherents of the COCEI and the local PRI.

41 All land titles must be inscribed in the National Agrarian Register in order to acquire the protection of the law. Government of Mexico, Ley Federal…, op. cit.., pp. 229–30.

42 AMAR, Juchitán, vol. II, Letter from Mijanos Ross to Marquía Pastor, 7 November 1974.

43 AMAR, Juchitán, vol. III, Letter from Franco Gabriel Hernández to Ruben Ramírez Cruz, 29 December 1976. In reality the existence of a space labeled ‘transfers’ proves nothing. Communal and ejidal lands are also transferred –use rights, however, and not rights of permanent alienation – to legally designated descendants.

44 For a sophisticated theory of populist ideology and an appreciation of its importance in political struggle, see Ernesto, Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London, New Left Books, 1977). One of Laclau's major points – relevant to the situation under review – is that the ideological elements inscribed within populist discourse (the discourse of ‘the People’ versus ‘the State’) can be subsumed by class discourses of different character, Those with political programs to promote must, therefore, take populism seriously since to underestimate its importance is to abandon the terrain to the opposition.Google Scholar

45 On this see Binford, Agricultural Crises…, op. cit., chapter II.

46 Collective ejidos, in which credit was administered co-operatively, machinery and animals were used in common, and income was distributed among the members in accordance with the quality and quantity of work performed, were created mainly between 1936 and 1939 during the Cárdenas administration. Nora, Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 164–9.Google Scholar Reyes Osorio et al., Estructura Agraria…op cit., pp. 490–1. After 1940 agrarian policy changed; a more conservative administration viewed the collective ejidos communist experiments and dangers to the stability of the regime. Reyes Osorio et al., op. cit., p. 40.

47 This situation is illustrated by a dispute which lasted from 1974 to 1976. In 1974 elements of the COCEI backed the invasion of 170 hectares of irrigated terrain in an area known as Los Arbolitos in the vicinity of La Ventosa, an agencia (political dependency of a municipality) of Juchitán. The owners sent urgent telegrams to agrarian authorities demanding support for their titles. The invasion eventually led to a meeting, convened on 8 August by the Banco Nacional Agropecuario, attended by representatives of about every government agency and significant political group in the region. A resolution was drawn up, agreed to by all, and sent by telex to the Director General of Inspection, Procedure and Complaints of the DAAC. AMAR, Juchitásn, vol. II, telex to Manuel ávila Saldado, 8 Aug. 1976. Requested were ‘an investigation of the origin and validity of the titles expedited by the Departamento de Asuntos Agrarios y Colonizacion… as well as an analysis to determine if they protect the rights of pequeños propietarios or are titles expedited individually as comuneros’ and the commissioning of two topographers of the DAAC to determine whether or not there was land monopolization in the region. The Director General responded on 11 December 1974 to the request for title clarification. He emphasized that the titles could not be considered as protecting private property within a community, ejido or irrigation district because that ‘is a violation of the Constitution, of the Federal Law of Agrarian Reform and the Federal Water Laws’ and that the titles ‘protect ejido rights, that must be respected always and when the original users… are subject to the dispositions of the Ley Federal de Reforma Agraria’. AMAR, Juchitán, vol. II, letter from Manuel Avila Saldado, 11 Dec. 1974. The work of the topographers revealed both the monopolization of land (more than the legal amount owned) and non-cultivation, both of which are grounds for deprivation of ejido rights. Learning of the survey results, an assembly of ejidalarios in Juchitán voted to suspend the rights of 226 ejidalarios who were monopolizing land and voted as well for the removal of the agrarian rights of 6,085 ejidalarios ‘by virtue that they abandoned personal cultivation of their endowments for more than two consecutive years and without justified cause’. The assembly, controlled by the COCEI, also voted rights for 1,313 landless agriculturalists without indicating the destination of the remaining units of land. AMAR, Juchitán, vol. III. The Mixed Agrarian Commission took the solicitude under consideration. AMAR, Juchitán, vol. III, document of 6 February 1976. However, on 5 March 1976 they ruled against the request, citing insufficient proof. AMAR, Juchitán, vol. III, Ruling of the Commission, March 1976. The considerations which led to the decision focused upon failure of the local authorities to carry out adequately a number of technical requirements of the Agrarian Code. As a result, nothing changed. The federal government had passively defended its definition of the tenancy situation without altering the situation in any significant way, except to acquire the anmity of both sides in the conflict.

48 Elias Chávez, ‘Lo Que el Pueblo Gana en las Urnas, Lo Arrebata Vazquez Colmenares’, Proceso, no. 353 (8 Aug. 1983), pp. 6–10; Oscar Hinojosa, ‘La COCEI Sigue SuCamino Tras de Resistir Todas las Formas de Represión’, Proceso, no. 174, (2 Jan 1984), pp. 12–15; Ignacio, Ramírez and Ernesto, Reyes, ‘El Ejercito y La Policía (Culminaron el Plan Oficial Contra la COCEI’, Proceso, no. 372, (19 12 1983), pp. 6–11; The Guardian, 25 January 1984.Google Scholar