Word: ejido
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...largesse is being ladled out with a generous hand. In the dusty mountain village of San Miguel de Ocosingo, farmer Jacinto Mendoza Lorenzo proudly displays a pair of brand new, apple-green John Deere tractors parked in front of his thatched hut. The vehicles were purchased by Mendoza's ejido, or communal farm, on easy-credit terms arranged by the government. Gazing at the precious tractors, Mendoza says, ``We're interested in working, and the government seems to be interested in helping us do that...
Films of Socialist realism, because they promote a particular ideology, always answer in the affirmative. Womack's answer is less biased, but strangely equivocal. He shows how, when Carranza was overthrown, the remaining Zapatista leaders won pivotal roles in the government of Obregon. The ejido program of the early twenties, which granted previously-claimed land to villages, was a Zapatista victory. The boost given the ejidos by Cárdenas in the thirties nearly satisfied the revolutionary goals of the Morelos villagers...
...root of the problem is the ejido system of land reform, enshrined in Mexico's constitution of 1917. Individual peasants are given the use of small farms on government reserves or expropriated land, which they can transfer to their children but cannot sell or mortgage to obtain desperately needed bank loans. The result is the atomization of landholdings: most Mexican farms average 15 acres in size. Grinding poverty has led to peasant invasions of private land in some states, notably Tlaxcala and Oaxaca, and the government has been forced to use soldiers to drive out the squatters...
...Belaúnde's major preoccupations is agriculture. He has pushed through the country's first major agrarian reform bill, and it is one of the most sensible in Latin America. Belaúnde knows the les sons of Mexico's disastrous ejido system, does not intend to splinter the big. highly productive cotton and sugar estates into thousands of tiny plots, each barely able to support its owner. Instead he will break up only those that do not carry their weight, and satisfy the peasants' land hunger by opening vast new areas that have never...
...promise of the Mexican revolution was agriculture-land for the landless and food for all. Yet half a century later, less than one-tenth of the country's acreage is under cultivation, much of it in the semi-arid north and much of that belonging to the controversial ejido collectives. Peasants are guaranteed a plot of land, but the farms are small, dry and often uneconomic, rarely exceeding twelve acres. Peasant families have trouble feeding themselves, to say nothing of providing food for a nation whose population grows by 3.5% annually...