Just after Christmas, Jesus Manchado left his family’s small farm in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas to head for California and the promise of work in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley.
It was a journey the 22-year-old laborer and his older brother, Oleando, have made for the last five years. But this year things have changed for the Manchados and for millions of other Mexican peasants.
On New Year’s Day, Mexico’s first serious guerrilla action in more than two decades erupted in Chiapas, where armed rebels from a previously unkown group called the Zapatista National Liberation Army overran several towns.
They declared the rebellion to be in the name of the state’s poor indigenous population, people just like the Manchados, and timed their first shots to coincide with the start of the North American Free Trade Agreement, an accord the rebels said only would worsen the already impoverished existence in rural Chiapas.
“I really don’t know what the situation is,” Manchado said as he searched for a trucker willing to help him start his long journey home to learn what had happened to his family. “I never heard of these guys. I don’t know if they are doing the right thing, or not, but nothing ever changes in Chiapas.”
That no longer may be true. Changes even more fundamental than the brief rebellion have begun in rural Mexico, changes that many believe could lead to the most profound social and economic transformation of the countryside since the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
The advent of free-market pressures and the start of unprecedented rural reforms are expected to force hundreds of thousands-if not millions-of Mexicans off the land and out of their traditional ways of life.
Driven by the free trade agreement, the changes are part of the government’s drive to diminish Mexico’s agrarian sector and to build a modern urban industrial and service-oriented economy in its place.
The scope of that task can be glimpsed in the fact that more than half of Mexico’s 761,604 square miles are held by small- and medium-sized farmers working frequently marginal land granted to them by the government.
They are organized in semicommunal farms called ejidos, traditional communities that grew out of the revolution’s promise of land to every Mexican.
These farms provide employment for 3.1 million farmers and millions of their dependents. Overall, an estimated 18 million of Mexico’s 92 million people live, work or depend upon the ejidos.
Experts say the economic upheaval that will accompany this rural reformation was an overlooked aspect of NAFTA, an aspect that could have profound effects on big cities in Mexico and the United States as those leaving the land look for livelihoods elsewhere.
“NAFTA is not about agriculture,” said David Myhre, a research fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
“NAFTA’s impact will be on the maquilladoras,” Myhre said referring to the well-established product assembly plants along the border. “NAFTA is about Fortune 500 companies and manufacturing.”
Myhre, part of a team of experts studying the effecot the reforms are likely to have on Mexico, estimates that between 700,000 and 10 million Mexicans might be forced to leave rural areas during the next 15 years.
“NAFTA is purposefully designed to have its impact on big cities and medium-sized urban areas,” said Jorge Bustamante, president of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a Tijuana-based institute that monitors the Mexican economy and immigration patterns. “This agreement has nothing to benefit small towns and rural Mexico.”
Bustamante said agrarian reform and NAFTA would accelerate the rate of migration from rural Mexico to urban areas and ultimately to the U.S. if the trade accord does not create sufficient and suitable jobs in Mexico for those who have spent their lives knowing only farm work.
NAFTA opened Mexico to low-cost imports of U.S. and Canadian grain products, it forced the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to end decades-old subsidy systems and-perhaps most importantly-it brought an end to the granting of land to Mexican peasants.
“Land reform is now over for good,” Myhre said. “If you are landless, you will remain landless.”
He estimated that a million families in Mexico, about 5 million to 6 million people, would be denied a government land grant as a result of the change in the ejido policy.
But other aspects of the land and agricultural reform are expected to have even more sweeping effects. The Salinas government’s decision to end subsidies was forced by the free-trade aspects of NAFTA that forbid such government payments.
When the final subsidy on corn is eliminated next year, for example, Mexican farmers will be paid world market prices, rather than the inflated rates they now receive. The current government guaranteed price for corn is $205 a ton, compared with the world level of $95 a ton.
The subsides enshrined inefficiencies in Mexican agriculture. Without the money, experts say, huge numbers of people either must accept a subsistence existence or abandon their land and seek work in an industrializing society.
To further coax people off the land, the Mexican government took a step similar to one taken several years ago in the former Soviet Union when it began phasing out the state monopoly on farming in 1988.
The Salinas government changed Article 27 of the constitution to allow the ejido land to be rented, or sold, even to foreigners. “This may make for a more fluid market in agricultural land,” Myhre said, “but it will also create a sink or swim environment based strictly on profitability.”
Many ejido farmers, like the Manchado brothers, already work in the U.S. Typically they are younger men who do this to help supplement the family’s income until their children can take their places.
But if farm earnings decline in the way experts think they will, there will be little incentive for future generations to return to the countryside.
“What is going to happen to the next generation?” said Karen Lehmen, a senior fellow at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “It (the Mexican countryside) is going to be a much tougher place to farm in the future.”
Lehmen, too, predicts a massive exodus from rural Mexico and says the high estimates of the number of people who could leave the land come from the Mexican government itself.
“Everybody who is involved knows that there is going to be massive displacement,” she said. But that is exactly what the government’s policy is designed to bring about.
Mexico’s Undersecretary of Agriculture Luis Tellez, one of the architects of the land reform, argues that Mexico needs institutions that are in keeping with free markets and NAFTA and that the ejidos are not such an institution.
Neo-liberal economists like Tellez and other members of the Salinas government want to see far fewer people involved in agricultural production, particularly in corn. They want efficiencies on the scale of industrialized nations such as the U.S., where corn yield per acre is four times that of Mexico’s.
These leaders believe rural reform is a painful but necessary step in healing Mexico’s economy, an unavoidable stage in the transformation begun in 1988. But recent studies show that economic liberalization has widened the gap between rich and poor.
According to the 1990 census, the richest 10 percent of the country-those who earned 32.8 percent of the national income in 1984-saw their share rise to 37.9 percent by 1989. At the same time, the poorest 40 percent of the country saw their share of the national income fall from 14.3 percent to 12.9 percent.
These statistics are not lost on the Zapatista rebels who used their uprising to highlight the plight of the poor and to demand national political changes, including overhaul of Mexico’s corrupt electoral system.
The rebels succeeded in bringing government negotiators to the bargaining table last week and in winning some early concessions from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, which traditionally has used the ejido system as the core of its control over peasants and the land.
Experts note that in changing the ejido system the ruling party is gambling that tinkering with a vital cog in its political machine, like negotiating with the rebels, is the best route to a peaceful transition to greater democracy.
“The Mexican system has changed as it has had to,” said Jeffrey Rubin, a professor of political science at Amherst College. “There was a lot of grass-roots organization in Chiapas throughout the 1980s, neighborhood organizations, unions and ejidos. The Zapatistas were able to get the government’s attention and international attention. Their timing was well done.”
