Word: ejido
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Planned Success. Since then, in theory, all a landless Mexican peasant has to do to get a farm is petition the government. If his claim is legitimate, he can then colonize unsettled government lands, join a communal farm called an ejido (pronounced eh-hee-doh), or move onto nearby expropriated plots. Land on any private farm that exceeds the government-set acreage ceiling, running from 250 acres to 1,500 acres, according to improvements, is subject to expropriation without compensation. Since the revolution, governments have parceled out some 125 million acres to 2,700,000 families and established...
...Carey '64, a Psychology concentrator, studied the relations between Indians and latinos (Indians who have adopted Mexican dress and language). Nicholas H. Acheson '63 analyzed the distinctions Zinacantacans use in classifying animals and birds (harmless/harmful; running/slithering; omening well/omening ill...). Matthew B Edel '62 undertook a history of the ejido land reform, and Allen Young, a senior at Columbia, studied the economics of corn marketing in San Cristobal...
...swoop in 1938, Cárdenas took over 395,000 acres of henequen (fiber) land in Yucatán and turned it into a vast government collective farm. It was the nearest thing to a Soviet-style Sovkhoz (state farm) outside the U.S.S.R. Cardenas called it the Gran Ejido to distinguish it from numerous smaller semi-collectives in Mexico's ejidal system...
Since then, the Gran Ejido has been sacrosanct in Mexican politics. No public official dared to say that it was an abysmal failure. Profits from the henequen were raked in by corrupt bureaucrats, while henequen growers and their families lived on barely $1 a week. Mexico's total production, despite a $1.900,000 annual subsidy started by President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines in 1953 (TIME, April 13, 1953), dropped steadily. Last year it hit a low of 450,000 bales, compared with the World War I high of 1,000,000 bales...
Last week, after a flying trip to Yucatan, Agriculture Minister Gilberto Flores Muñoz said bluntly: "In my opinion the so-called Gran Ejido should be abolished." He could not have astonished his countrymen more if he had run naked across the Zocalo in Mexico City. Other public figures, wondering if Flores' statement could possibly have the approval of President Ruiz Cortines, waited for the Jovian thunderbolts to fly from the iron-faced Cardenas, still, even in retirement, the country's most powerful political figure...