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Firma – The Price for Land
By Harriet Murray
October 25, 2003 |
The right of the common man to own
private property is a recent event in history. Wars
have been waged throughout history over territory or
land.
In the 1800’s, Mexico experienced
a revolution that opened the ownership of land to the
common people. One of the leaders of this revolution
was Emiliano Zapata.
 Emiliano
was born on August 8, 1879, in the village of Anenecuilco,
Morelos. Zapata was a mestizo and the son of a peasant
medier, ….a sharecropper or owner of a small plot
of land. From the age of eighteen, after the death of
his father, he supported his mother and three sisters
with the family farm. In September of 1909, the residents
of Anenecuilco elected Emiliano Zapata president of
the village's "defense committee," which was
a group charged with defending the community's interests.
In this position, it was Zapata's duty to represent
his village's rights before the president-dictator of
Mexico, Porfirio Díaz, and the governor of Morelos,
Pablo Escandón.
During the 1880s, Mexico had experienced
a boom in sugar cane production. This led to the acquisition
of more and more land by the hacienderos or plantation
owners. Their plantations grew while whole villages
disappeared and more and more medieros and other peasants
lost their livelihoods or were forced to work on the
haciendas. It was under these conditions that a plantation
called El Hospital, neighboring Zapata's village began
encroaching upon the small farmers' lands. This was
the first conflict in which Emiliano Zapata established
his reputation as a leader. He led various peaceful
occupations and re-divisions of land, which increased
his status and fame regionally. The stage was set for
another strong personality to become part of the revolution
of 1910
In 1910, Francisco Madero, a son
of wealthy plantation owners, instigated a revolution
against the government of president Díaz. Though
most of his motives were political, Madero supported
a platform for national suffrage and prohibition of
presidents succeeding themselves. Madero’s revolutionary
plan also included provisions for returning seized lands
to peasant farmers. The latter provision became a strong
cause for the peasantry. Zapata began organizing local
citizens into revolutionary bands, riding from village
to village, tearing down hacienda fences and opposing
the landed elite's encroachment into their villages.
On November 18, the federal government began rounding
up Maderist's the followers of Francisco Madero. Forty-eight
hours later, the first shots of the Mexican Revolution
were fired.
The government was confident that
the revolution would be crushed in a matter of days,
but the Maderista Movement kept gaining in strength
and by the end of November, Emiliano Zapata had fully
joined its ranks. Zapata, known as cautious, soft-spoken
man, had become a revolutionary.
During the first weeks of 1911, Zapata
continued to build his organization in Morelos, training
and equipping his men and consolidating his authority
as their leader. Soon, Zapata's bands of revolutionaries
were poised to change their tactics and take the offensive.
They became Zapatistas.
On February 14, Francisco Madero
returned to Mexico after escaping from New Orleans.
He realized that it was time to restart his revolution
with an all-out offensive. Less than a month later,
on March 11, 1911, the bloody phase of the Mexican Revolution
began at Villa de Ayala.
There was no resistance from the
villagers, who were mostly sympathetic to the revolution.
They were sharecroppers or hacienda workers themselves,
and the local police were disarmed quickly. Not all
battles that followed were this quick, however. The
revolution took its bloody course with Pancho Villa
fighting in the northern part of Mexico, while Zapata
remained mainly south of Mexico City. On May 19, after
a week of extremely fierce fighting with government
troops, the Zapatistas took the town of Cuautla.
Only forty-eight hours later, Francisco
Madero and the Mexican government signed the Treaty
of Ciudad Juárez, which ended the presidency
of Porfirio Díaz and named Francisco León
de la Barra, former ambassador to Washington, as interim
president.
Under different circumstances, this would have meant
the end of the Mexican Revolution. Madero's most important
demands had been met, Díaz was out of office,
and regular elections were to be held to determine his
successor. León de la Barra, however, was not
strong president. While Barra had great personal integrity,
his political skills were weak. The new president could
not assuage the peasants, especially since they knew
his allegiance was clearly with the rich planters who
were trying to regain control of Mexico by using the
conditions of the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez. Zapata
had been ordered to cease all hostilities, but he and
5,000 men entered and captured Cuernavaca, the capital
of his native state of Morelos.
In 1911, Madero was elected president
of Mexico, and Zapata met with him to discuss the demands
of the peasantry. The meeting was fruitless and the
former allies parted in anger. Officially, the Zapatistas
were disbanded and Zapata himself was in retirement.
The police forces were in disarray after fighting the
revolutionary forces, and they were no match for the
new wave of bandits now roaming the land.
The situation in Mexico deteriorated
and assassination plots against the new president surfaced,
fighting was renewed between government and revolutionary
forces, and the threat of revolution was once again
hanging over the cities of Mexico.
In the "Plan of Ayala",
Zapata declared Madero incapable of fulfilling the goals
of the revolution and promised to appoint another provisional
president, once his revolution succeeded and until elections
could be held. As part of his plan, a third of all land
owned by the hacienderos was to be confiscated, with
compensation, and redistributed to the peasantry. Any
plantation owner who refused to cede his land would
have it taken from him without compensation. The revolution
was once again in full swing, and it was in these days
that Zapata first used his now famous slogan of “Tierra
y Libertad” or “Land and Liberty.”
It was in February of 1913, after
almost three years of violent struggle, that a former
loyal federal General, Victoriano Huerta, murdered Madero.
The Zapatistas reached the outskirts of Mexico City.
Huerta offered to unite his and Zapata's troops in a
combined assault on the city, but Zapata declined. Even
though Huerta eventually was declared the new president,
after a sham election, he was forced to abandon the
country in 1914, after yet another revolutionary faction,
under "constitutionalist" Venustiano Carranza.
At this point there were three major revolutionary powers
in Mexico: the army of Pancho Villa to the north, the
Villistas; the” Constitutionalist Army" of
Carranza; and the Zapatistas to the south. In an attempt
to consolidate these forces and become their supreme
commander, Carranza arranged a meeting at Aguascalientes,
in which the Zapatistas and the Villistas -- the majority
at the meeting -- agreed to a new provisional president.
Carranza rejected the choice. War broke out between
Carranza's moderates and the more radical Zapatistas
and Villistas.
On November 24, Emiliano Zapata commanded
the Liberation Army of the South. This was the new name
for his fighting force of over 25,000 men who were to
occupy Mexico City. Eventually, Villa and Zapata held
a meeting at the national palace and agreed to install
a civilian in the presidency. The war had not ceased.
The Wilson Administration now officially recognized
Carranza’s federal government. The “Constitutionalist
Army” and the Zapatistas in Morelos appeared to
be at a permanent stalemate. Carranza knew that he could
never fully take Mexico while Zapata was still alive
and in charge of his army. To rid himself of his enemy,
Carranza plotted Zapata’s murder.
A letter had been intercepted where
it was learned that Zapata had invited a colonel of
the Mexican army, who had shown leanings toward his
cause, to meet and join forces. Colonel Jesús
Guajardo, under the threat of being executed as a traitor,
pretended to agree to meet Zapata and defect to his
side. On Thursday, April 10, 1919, Zapata walked into
Carranza's trap as he met with Guajardo in the town
of Chinameca. Zapata was shot and killed by federal
soldiers. The legend of Zapata did not die with the
man.
Carranza did not achieve his goal of ruling Mexico by
killing Zapata. In May of 1920, Álvaro Obregón,
one of Zapata's right-hand men, entered the capital
with a large fighting force of Zapatistas. After Carranza
fled, Obregon formed the seventy-third government in
Mexico's history of independence. In this government,
the Zapatistas played an important role, especially
in the Department of Agriculture. Mexico was finally
at peace.
Zapata's revolution was first and
foremost an agrarian one. One of the ideas in Zapata's
ideology was the re-establishment of ejidas or communally
owned lands with shared use rights -- a system common
among the Mexican indios. One of the best documents
describing Zapata's position on land reform is the 1917
Manifesto of the People.
“To unite Mexicans by means
of a generous and broad political policy which will
give guarantees to the peasant and to the worker as
well as to the merchant, the industrialist and the businessman;
to grant facilities to all who wish to improve their
future and open wider horizons for those who today lack
it; to promote the establishment of new industries,
of great centers of production, of powerful manufacturies
[sic] which will emancipate the country from the economic
domination of the foreigner...”
Zapata's main goal was the political
and economic emancipation of Mexico's peasantry. Land
reform was not an end in itself but a means to achieve
independence for the common man. Zapata argued against
a system that kept the sharecroppers and small-time
farmers in perpetual poverty. He was cautious and prudent
in not arguing for the dismantling of all haciendas.
Zapata supported the coexistence between an empowered
peasant population and a number of larger plantation
owners.
Emiliano Zapata was an intelligent,
rational leader, who tried to lead the people of southern
Mexico out of extreme poverty by giving them back some
of their land, terra firma.
Harriet Murray
Sources for this article are
from Robert Million “Zapata—The Ideology
of a Peasant Revoluntionary”; Roger Parkinson,
“Zapata”, and John Womack, “Zapata
and the Mexican Revolution”
Harriet
Murray, Broker
For additional information on properties for sale or
lease within the bay, please call or e-mail me at: harriet@casasandvillas.com
Thanks and until next week.
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