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Abstract
It is argued here that development studies tend to ignore the ways in which external interventions become embedded within existing fields of power and are influenced by past experiences. This explains to a large extent the failure of many so-called ‘participatory’ programmes. Crucial changes introduced by the Mexican Agrarian Law in 1992 are examined, with particular reference to the impact and grassroots perception of new ‘participatory’ styles of government intervention. The latter process is illustrated by means of peasant–state interaction on an ejido in Jalisco, where ‘local participation’ that is central to government programmes ‘imposed from above’ reinforces stereotypes such as the ‘corrupt’, ‘ignorant’ official and the ‘lazy’, ‘distrustful’ peasant. Accordingly, encounters between state officials and smallholding peasants in the ejido display a combination of trust/distrust and cooperation/resistance.
Notes
ANAGSA Aseguradora Nacional, Agrícola y Ganadera, SA (National Agricultural and Livestock Insurance Company which provided insurance subsidies for ejidatarios working with credits from BANRURAL); BANRURAL Banco Nacional de Crédito Rural (National Bank for Rural Credit); FIRA Fideicomisos Instituídos en Relación a la Agricultura (Second-level Government Funding for Agriculture); INEGI Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (National Institute for Statistics, Geography and Informatics); PA Procuraduría Agraría (Attorney General's Office for Agrarian Affairs); PROCEDE Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Solares Urbanos (Ejidal Rights Certification Programme); RAN Registro Agrario Nacional (National Agrarian Registry); RI Reglamento Interno (Internal Ejido Regulation); SARH Secretaría de Agricultura y Recursos Hidraulicos (The former Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources); SRASecretaría de la Reforma Agraria/Ministry of Agrarian Reform
The first part of the research, conducted from 1991 to mid-1995, was financed by the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO). The ongoing research project is financed by the Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
As La Canoa did not have enough work for the villagers during the whole year, they were allowed to work on other haciendas as labourers or as sharecroppers.
For these data, see CitationINEGI [1990; Citation1991] and acta de posesioń y deslinde de Lagunillas, 11 February 1938.
The literature about this is vast. On the revolutionary land settlement in Mexico, see for example CitationSimpson [1937], CitationChevalier [1967], CitationRedclift [1980], CitationBartra and Otero [1987] and CitationRandall [1996].
For details, see CitationINEGI [1990].
Small private properties were established at the same time as ejidos were formed. These smallholdings were to a large degree the result of the subdivision of the haciendas. First of all, many hacendados themselves decided to divide their property into smaller units that were offered for sale, precisely in order to avoid expropriation under agrarian reform legislation. Second, large haciendas were often themselves subdivided into smaller properties and registered under different names, while in practice remaining a single unit owned/controlled by one landlord.
The Agrarian Law of 1917 extended to the indigenous population of Mexico a restitution procedure, through which they could reclaim rights to lands that had been taken away from them in the past. In cases where restitution was awarded, an agrarian community was established. However, in order to get back their lands, the Indian communities had to prove their claim by means of official land titles. Communities that started the procedure of reclaiming property by delineating the existence of former rights to certain lands frequently changed the petition into a request for endowment, once it became clear that they could not provide the documentation necessary to validate the existence of these former rights [Citation Ibarra, 1989; Citation Zaragoza and Macías, 1980]. As a consequence, the establishment of ejidos became a much more common procedure than the creation of agrarian communities. Between 1916 and 1934, 124 agrarian communities were established as against 5,598 ejidos [Citation Escárcega and Botey, 1990: 25].
Most ejidos have between 20 and 100 members [Citation INEGI, 1990].
This tension between the ‘individual’ and ‘social’ character of ejido land tenure became especially clear in the registration of ejido land. Although almost all ejidos made use of the opportunity to subdivide the land into individual plots, the law never provided them with a corresponding procedure for the registration of a specific plot of land in the name of a particular ejidatario. Hence, maps of the individual ejido plots were seldom made. At the SRA ejidos were registered with their name, a map of the total ejido (if the ejido was lucky), and a list of ejidatarios (members of the ejido).
For a further explanation of this development see CitationNuijten [1997].
The widely held view that the ejido land markets were manipulated by local and regional powerholders has prevented many academics from studying what actually happened to this kind of holding. CitationGledhill [1991] presented the first detailed historical study of the history and transfer of plots in an ejido in Michoacán. He demonstrated the existence of a complex and active land market that was certainly not characterized by monopolization of land by cacique ( = ‘strong man’) families.
According to the Agrarian Law an ejido plot could not be divided, and should be inherited by a single heir.
See CitationNuijten [1997] for an explanation of how these illegal transfers were protected from the Agrarian Law, and the role of the SRA in these transactions.
Interestingly, the percentage of women ejidatarias has increased considerably since the establishment of the ejido, from 6 to 22 per cent. The most important reason for this increase is that at the start of the ejido land was normally given to men and not to women. However, Mexican women live longer than men, and many male ejidatarios leave their plot to their wives. At the transfer to the next generation, parents prefer a son to inherit the land.
As CitationGledhill [1991: 154] points out, ‘the possibility of sustaining a rural household by means of seasonal migration, often supplemented by income remittances by children working elsewhere, was what permitted the eventual resurrection of ejidal farming […] Migration is therefore a facet of a dialectical process of decomposition and recomposition which has marked the history of the peasantry as a social category’.
In this connection, it is important not to depict kinship in a romanticized manner. That such an approach should be avoided is clear from CitationWilkie [1971], who charted the agrarian transformation in the cotton producing ejido of San Miguel in the Laguna region over a 14-year period (between 1953 and 1966/67). A pathbreaking analysis at the time, it showed among other things how this unit was unambiguously capitalist, and how only 3 per cent of those who worked on the haciendas in the pre-reform era received ejido land as a result of the reform. What had originally been a collective (or, more accurately, a cooperative) was then decollectivized, the privatization of previously commonly held land leading to sub-letting and the employment of hired workers paid low wages. What is of particular interest is that these hired labourers (libres) were the landless kin of ejidatarios who not only worked for (or instead of) the latter but also for local landowners and industries. As in the case of La Canoa, struggle inside the ejido was expressed largely in the language of intra-kin group reciprocity, obligation and duty. Within the context of the ejido, therefore, land concentration by small agrarian capitalists employing paid workers was not only taking place but also being resisted ideologically, albeit in the disguised idiom of kinship.
On the basis of a similar development in an ejido in Michoacán, Gledhill arrived at the conclusion that ‘the problem of the countryside is not the problem of the ejidatarios, who constitute a relatively privileged minority, but the problems of the landless who remain in the countryside, or move between countryside, city and the United States. These include, of course, a high proportion of the ejidatarios' own children’ [Citation Gledhill, 1991: 9].
Although of interest, this migration pattern is not considered here, since it has little to do with either the land titling programmes or participatory programmes involving the ejido sector.
The data on demography are contained in CitationINEGI [1991].
Households with entitlement to an ejido plot are those with (at least) one ejidatario or heir of a deceased ejidatario. Ejidatarios who live outside the village, and who no longer have any family connection with the village, are not counted among the 196 households. For that reason, only 58 households with access to an ejido plot are included.
For the economic and cultural importance to Mexican peasants of maize, see CitationBarkin [2002].
Many women prepare meals for sale on Sundays, do the laundering for other people, and sew or embroider. Women who work in agriculture are seen as a sign of an impoverished rural household.
This, it should be emphasized, is not always the case, and there is plenty of ethnographic evidence to suggest that the landless within the ejido system sometimes adopt direct action to remedy their lack of access to ejidal resources. A study by CitationRonfeldt [1973] of the sugarcane growing ejido of Atencingo in the state of Puebla, where expropriated landholders managed to retain the best lands, recounts how landless villagers there invaded ejidal lands twice, in the late 1930s and again in the late 1960s.
In this context the Internal Ejido Rules posed more dangers for the landless than the measuring of the individual arable plots. According to the IER, the ejido had the power to allocate common land. Some ejidatarios wanted to dispossess the landless of the common land, and divide everything among themselves, which in law they have the right to do. This plan, however, is a topic of heated debate among ejidatarios, who cannot agree on this point. There are also serious conflicts involving ejidatarios over parts of the commons, so no decisions have been taken thus far concerning the fate of the common lands.
At present I am conducting research into the history of the distribution and ‘management’ of the common lands in the ejido. More so than arable land, it is in this particular terrain – common land – that differences of interest exist, not just between landless and landowners but also between the ejidatarios themselves. Such differences have given rise to fundamental antagonisms, resulting in physical conflict leading to deaths.
Most of those who possess this land belong to the regional elite of Autlán. One of the owners is the former head of the public security police in Autlán. Another person occupying land belonging to La Canoa is the lawyer implicated in several murders that have taken place in the region. A former head of the regional association of horticultural producers is another who today possesses part of the ‘lost land’. In the past, the regional cacique General García Barragán (who died in 1979) also played a role in this conflict by protecting the interests of his friends against the ejidatarios of La Canoa.
The ejidatarios have demanded that the SRA measure their lands according to two official SRA documents which clearly indicate the borders of their ejido and the total number of hectares they should possess. Several times, SRA surveyors have been sent to the ejido to measure the lands, but the task was never completed, and consequently the conflict remained unresolved. I found a letter in the archives of the Ministry of Agrarian Reform in which a SRA engineer, who had started measuring work in La Canoa, was summoned by the head of the SRA in Guadalajara and instructed to stop the work immediately, as it posed serious problems for private landowners in the region. The ejidatarios realize that the way in which a powerful landowner prevents them from resolving the issue is by bribing the bureaucracy and through political connections in Guadalajara and Mexico City. Besides money and politics, there is also the threat of violence. Many people in the village have been murdered for lesser causes.
Although this system made the credit rather expensive (because of the high fee for the crop insurance) ejidatarios with rainfed land favoured the remission of debts in the case of bad harvests.
Officials from the ANAGSA and BANRURAL offices in Autlán would visit the ejido in order to check that the crop was well taken care of.
For example, CitationCarlos [1992: 93] points out that peasant hierarchies ‘are the principal conduit through which the Mexican State transfers economic and political goods to the peasantry’.
The PA, RAN (National Agrarian Registry) and INEGI (Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics) all cooperate in this programme.
If the majority of ejido plots have been measured, the ejido assembly is then able to recognize the private ownership rights of ejidatarios whose land has been surveyed. If all ejido members decide unanimously to follow this path, and become the private landowners of their plots, the ejido regime in effect comes to an end. Only if 20 per cent of ejidatarios (or at least 20 ejidatarios) agree to continue, can they remain an ejido.
The officials who arrived at La Canoa were not known to the ejidatarios. One was from the SARH and the other from FIRA. Together with their colleagues, they were sent to all ejidos to explain and promote the change in the Mexican Agrarian Law and the accompanying programmes.
These amounts are the equivalent of US$233 and US$166.
It may well have been the case that ejidatarios interpreted ‘an end of paternalism’ as meaning no more than ‘you are on your own now’; that is, the state taking from them even the minimal protection and resource provision it had made available to the ejido system hitherto.
At least 50 per cent of the members of the ejido have to be present at this meeting. If the majority agrees to enter the programme, INEGI and RAN are requested to undertake a land survey. This is followed in turn by the issuing of certificates and – if requested – the corresponding land titles. INEGI is responsible for measuring the perimeters of ejido land, individual plots and house lots, plus drawing up maps. Land is measured in the presence of a specially created auxiliary commission and the ejido authorities. Boundary disputes are passed to the Agrarian Tribunals.
The casa ejidal is used only for ejido meetings and storage.
There were problems in only two cases, where different relatives claimed ownership rights to the land. The Agrarian Tribunals deal with these disputes and INEGI does not interfere in such cases.
Studies show that no massive land sales have occurred after 1992 [Citation Cornelius and Myhre, 1998; Citation Rivera, 2000; Citation Preciado, 2000; Citation Zepeda, 2000].
An interesting phenomenon is that, in ejidos that have been through the PROCEDE process, ejidatarios do not seem to keep up the registration. This is partly due to a lack of mechanisms for the actualization of land tenure. Another reason is that ejidatarios are opposed to the single heir rule, preferring to continue as before with the subdivision of the land among several children. The latter procedure is still forbidden under the new Agrarian Law. Given this legal prohibition, ejidatarios avoid registering the new owner(s) of the land. What this suggests is that, as a source of grassroots ‘reality’, land records must still be regarded with caution.
By ‘progressive’ bureaucrats is meant committed officials who try to contribute to a better life for Mexican peasants, and who also recognize the corruption endemic in many state institutions and the detrimental effects of many government programmes. They are defined in relation to ‘non-progressive’ officials, who are uninterested in improving peasant livelihoods, and are concerned only in lining their own pockets and maintaining their political contacts. Obviously, most officials find themselves between these two ‘extremes’.