MEXICO: Down on the (State) Farm

When President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) was thumbing his nose at the world’s great powers by expropriating their oil holdings in Mexico, he scared the striped pants off U.S. diplomats, who feared that he was setting up a Communist-type state right next door. At one swoop in 1938, Cárdenas took over 395,000 acres of henequen (fiber) land in Yucatán and turned it into a vast government collective farm. It was the nearest thing to a Soviet-style Sovkhoz (state farm) outside the U.S.S.R. Cardenas called it the Gran Ejido to distinguish it from numerous smaller semi-collectives in Mexico’s ejidal system.

Since then, the Gran Ejido has been sacrosanct in Mexican politics. No public official dared to say that it was an abysmal failure. Profits from the henequen were raked in by corrupt bureaucrats, while henequen growers and their families lived on barely $1 a week. Mexico’s total production, despite a $1.900,000 annual subsidy started by President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines in 1953 (TIME, April 13, 1953), dropped steadily. Last year it hit a low of 450,000 bales, compared with the World War I high of 1,000,000 bales.

Last week, after a flying trip to Yucatan, Agriculture Minister Gilberto Flores Muñoz said bluntly: “In my opinion the so-called Gran Ejido should be abolished.” He could not have astonished his countrymen more if he had run naked across the Zocalo in Mexico City. Other public figures, wondering if Flores’ statement could possibly have the approval of President Ruiz Cortines, waited for the Jovian thunderbolts to fly from the iron-faced Cardenas, still, even in retirement, the country’s most powerful political figure.

But even before newspapers headlined Cárdenas’ refusal to comment, a farm credit union official hailed Flores’ words: “At last a top-ranking official has publicly recognized failure in the ejidal system, which has so long seemed to be taboo, and on whose altars truth and justice have so often been sacrificed.” Then up spoke a Congressman: “We have been inhibited too long by fear of being called reactionaries for talking of problems like this. Now what is needed are solutions that will make Yucatáán as well as other depressed areas of our country truly places of production and prosperity!”