Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [90]
Insurgent Mexico
From 1920, when the guns of the revolution fell silent, until the early 1980s, the Mexican economy developed along inward-looking, state-led corporatist lines in a pattern similar to Brazil’s and common throughout Latin America. Under Porfirio Diaz, Mexico was said to be the mother of foreigners and the stepmother of Mexicans.31 As The Nation correspondent and historian Carlton Beals described in his biography of Diaz, “His group had only one basic idea, to steal, much, often and scientifically.”32 This was particularly so after the US war with Spain in 1898, when under commercial pressure from the north, Diaz slipped into the authoritarian caudilloismo for which he is best known. Economic depression in 1903 made it worse. Strikes during the recovery in 1906 and 1907 were met with vicious repression. His methods—pan o palo, “bread or stick”—combined repression and corrupt patronage. During his last decade in power, economic policy was in disarray, and in response to the international economic crises of 1893 and 1903, Diaz borrowed heavily and at high rates of interest.33
By the eve of the revolution, power relations in Mexico were rotten. Beals painted a picture (perhaps exaggerated) of unbearable humiliation: “Everywhere, the hacendado had first right to women. Frequently the hacendado, or foreman, after enjoying a girl just entering puberty, would call in some young peon, with the remark ‘this is your wife’ such was the marriage ceremony.”34 At the top of this heap was Diaz.
When the revolution against him finally broke out, it was a chaotic affair, pitting geographically and ideologically heterogeneous forces against Diaz and his backers: hacienda landlords, the corrupt officialdom, and large foreign capitalists, mostly British and European.35 The rebels included Liberals, demanding free politics; Indian peasants, demanding land; cowboys and gangsters, demanding loot; and nationalist entrepreneurs, seeking a path toward modern economic development. As Frank Tannenbaum put it in his contemporary classic Peace by Revolution, “The Mexican Revolution was anonymous. It was essentially the work of the common people. No organized party presided at its birth. No great intellectuals prescribed its program, formulated its doctrine, outlined its objectives.”36
Article 27 and the Corporatist State
In victory, the revolution settled on an agenda of economic modernization and capitalist development that pivoted, interestingly, on the world’s first socialist constitution.37 More specifically, Article 27 of that 1917 document read, “In the Nation is vested the direct ownership of all natural resources.” That meant all lands, minerals, and forests, all the waters and all the fish. The actual text goes on in great detail to enumerate “precious stones, rock-salt and the deposits of salt formed by sea water . . . petroleum and all solid, liquid, and gaseous hydrocarbons.”38 (Even the rock salt!) At the heart of Article 27 was land reform, which liberated much of the peasantry from debt peonage. By 1940 almost 23 percent of all land was collectively owned in the ejido system, up from 1.6 percent at the end of the revolution.39 In 1960, about 20,000 ejidos with about 2 million members worked “slightly less than half of all cultivated land.”40
The relatively autonomous state sought to spur economic development through