Word: agrarian
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...March issue is introduced by a discussion of the agrarian reform in Mexico. Its author is Dr. Ramon Beteta, Mexico's energetic Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs. He presents the government policy of forced land redistribution, inaugurated in 1915, as a "restorative" development--"giving Mexico back to the Mexicans." Compared with the steady progress of the preceding enclosure movement in Spain as well as in Mexico, the peasant emancipation under Tsar Alexander II is bound to appear in a most favorable light...
...while in Spain agrarian reform became a practical possibility only after the collapse of monarchy in 1931, Mexico's "reconquest of her territory" from foreigners, absentee owners and large-scale operators has now been under way for more than twenty years...
...author, while emphasizing the accomplishments under President Cardenas, admits that the agrarian reform has still a long path to go. In the meantime, we are assured, the former peons "now labor with new ferver and a boundless faith to wrost from the unhewn rocks of the past the Mexico of the future...
...slight overstatement. Mexico is far from Sunday-afternoon quiet. Almost daily occurrences for the past few months have been bloody strikes, clashes between rival labor groups, bandit raids, ominous grumbles by the newly-enfranchised peons against the failure of President Lázaro Cárdenas' agrarian program and revolts by disenfranchised landlords. Crux of the trouble is Cárdenas' lack of money. With a failing credit he has had to curtail public works projects, throw thousands out of work. He has divided huge estates into small peasant holdings, but has been unable to advance the peons...
Neutral observers in Mexico City judged that President Cardenas and his associates have only just realized what economists have known for months: that his agrarian decrees of the past year have had many disastrous results. Total production of such Mexican staple crops as wheat, corn and cocoa has shrunk sharply partly due to drought, partly to inefficient working of lands divided and parceled out among the peons...