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El Tigre, champion of Land Reform in Mexico
By Harriet Cochran Murrray • Cochran Real Estate - May 2009

In the year 1910, a peasant named Emiliano Zapata led a rebellion, which mobilized thousands in an effort to resist the government’s expropriation of land. It was an armed revolution that lasted close to a decade and cost nearly two million lives. Nine years later, Emiliano Zapata was assassinated.

Although many saw the revolution as a failure to an unchanged system, the legacy and strength of his fight for land and liberty lives today. In Southern Mexico the state of Chiapas has been formulating a defense to confront this system for almost a quarter of a century. Modern Mexico’s dependency on the United States and Canada for remittances* (the second largest source of income for Mexico in this century) addresses Zapata’s main belief that Mexico should be independent of foreign influence.

Emiliano Zapata was of mestizo heritage and the son of a sharecropper. From the age of eighteen, after the death of his father, he had to support his mother and three sisters. The little family farm prospered and gave Zapata status in his native village. In September of 1909, the residents of Anenecuilco elected Emiliano Zapata president of the village's "defense committee," 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. Zapata and his group’s complaint before President Diaz was the encroachment of their farms by the plantations acquiring more land illegally to increase their sugar cane production.

No assistance came from the meeting with Diaz, but Zapata continued to lead various peaceful occupations and re-divisions of land, increasing his status and his fame which give him regional recognition. His increased status in the region of Morelos was destined to involve him in what happened next.

In 1910, Francisco Madero, a son of wealthy plantation owners, instigated a revolution against the government of president Díaz. Even though most of his motives were political, Madero's revolutionary plan included provisions for returning seized lands to peasant farmers. Zapata began organizing locals 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 Maderistas (the followers of Francisco Madero), and only forty-eight hours later, the first shots of the Mexican Revolution were fired. While the government was confident that the revolution would be crushed in a matter of days, the Maderista Movement kept gaining in strength and by the end of November; Emiliano Zapata had fully joined its ranks. Zapata, a rather cautious, soft-spoken man, had become a revolutionary of Mexico.

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.

Under different circumstances, this could 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. But Madero could not assuage the peasants, especially since his allegiance was clearly with the rich planters who were trying to regain control of Mexico.

The police forces, in disarray after fighting the revolutionary forces, were no match for the new wave of bandits that were now roaming the land. The situation in Mexico deteriorated, assassination plots against the new president surfaced, renewed fighting between government and revolutionary forces ensued, and the smell of revolution was once again hanging over the cities of Mexico.

In the "Plan of Ayala" (the city of his forced retirement); Zapata declared Madero incapable of fulfilling the goals of the revolution and promised to appoint another provisional president, once his revolution succeeded, until elections could be held. As part of his plan, a third of all land owned by the hacienda owners were 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 “Tierra y Libertad or Land and Liberty”.

The Zapatistas avoided battle by adopting guerrilla tactics. They farmed their land with rifles on their shoulders, went when called to fight, and returned to their plows at the end of a battle or skirmish. Sometimes Zapata assembled thousands of men; he paid them by imposing taxes on the provincial cities and extorting from the rich. Their arms were captured from federal troops.

When General Victoriano Huerta deposed and assassinated Madero in February 1913, Zapata and his men arrived at the outskirts of Mexico City, but rejected Huerta’s offer to unite with him.  Huerta could not then send all his troops against the guerrillas of the north, who, under the direction of a moderate politician, Venustiano Carranza who had organized the Constitutionalist Army to defeat the new dictator. Huerta was forced to abandon the country in July 1914.

When Zapata's forces occupied Mexico City**, the infamy that had preceded him caused many of the city's inhabitants to quake with fear, fully expecting to be brutalized or killed by the savage peasants from the south. Zapatista peasants went door to door, merely asking for some food to aid the under-supplied and under-fed forces.

Zapata knew that Carranza’s Constitutionalists feared him. He attracted some intellectuals from Mexico City, among them Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, who became his theorist and later established an agrarian party. When Huerta fell, Zapata invited the Constitutionalists to accept his Plan of Ayala and warned them that he would continue fighting independently until the plan was put to practical use.

Zapata's revolution was first and foremost an agrarian one. He believed and fought for the re-establishment of ejidas or communally owned lands with shared use rights -- a system common among the Mexican indios. His position was not, however, a contradiction to private property. Zapata believed in the common man’s right to benefit from land.

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. Zapata argued for the destruction of the reigning feudal system which kept the sharecroppers and small-time farmers in perpetual poverty.

Zapata was cautious and prudent in not arguing for the dismantling of all haciendas but rather for a kind of coexistence between an empowered peasant population and a number of larger plantation owners.

Zapata's Manifesto proclaimed that the revolution must "emancipate the country from the economic domination of the foreigner. His belief that a nation cannot fully develop economically and socially as long as it remains dependent on or under the control of the "First World" (then Spain), is now his big brother to the north.

Throughout history, political and revolutionary, leaders have been glorified by their followers in life as well as in death. Few in modern history, however, have experienced the apotheosis that has been bestowed upon Emiliano Zapata.

The modern Zapatistas draw strength from this myth, and they claim to be the true heirs to the tradition started by a peasant revolutionary with a vision of social justice.

*Remittances are transfers of money by foreign workers to their home countries.

Harriet Murray
E-mail: harriet@casasandvillas.com

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