The long road to getting land back in Mexico
"The land to those who work it", Linocut/transfer © Mitzi Jan.
Reportage • Ricardo Balderas • August 23, 2024 • Leer en castellano
The battle for land in the ejido of San Isidro, located in the municipality of San Gabriel, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, crossed a threshold in January 2022. That’s when government authorities informed 91 farmers that it would return 280 hectares that had been taken from them almost 90 years ago in the tumultuous period following the Mexican Revolution. Justice would be done.
Before me sits Raúl de la Cruz. A relentless man, he has worked to defend his community for the last three years. With the passage of time, he lost the fear of speaking out against out injustice. “I would tell those who will soon make the decision to leave us in peace,” said De la Cruz, who currently heads the ejido (communal landowners association). "We’ve already gone through three generations and have seen our grandparents pass away without getting justice from the state," he said as he adjusted his hat. “That’s unacceptable.”
De la Cruz describes a land conflict arising in the foothills of the Eastern Sierra Madre mountain range in Jalisco. Here, the Mexican Revolution bears a debt to peasants, as land promised to enslaved communities never returned to those who worked it. He and the other 90 members of his ejido demand the 280 hectares that President Lázaro Cárdenas granted them by decree almost a century ago.
Raúl de la Cruz, the head of the San Isidro ejido, in March of 2024. Photo © Ricardo Balderas.
“We have had neither land nor peace” since then, say the members of the ejido. A company acquired the land knowing that it was in dispute and farmworkers believe the state is complicit in blocking their access to what belongs to them by law. Shortly before the end of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s six-year term, the federal government affirmed the community’s right to the land through the Secretary of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development (SEDATU), but the process was never concluded.
“Authorities issued a new order on April 27, 2022, which showed that the order to return the land dated back to 1939,” said De la Cruz when we spoke in his lawyer's office, two hamlets away from San Isidro. "We are the third generation to participate in land defense. The SEDATU officials ruined the process. As far as I’m concerned, they are the ones responsible for this, since the order [to return the land] was issued, it took them forever to send it to Guadalajara to be signed.”
Powerful interests claim to own the land: Amway/Nutrilite S.R.L. de C.V., a medical supplement, skin care and multi-level marketing conglomerate owned by the DeVos family. Betsy DeVos is the best known person in her family today: she was the richest member of Donald Trump's cabinet when he was President of the United States. According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), DeVos earned (at least) $225 million while she was Secretary of Education, including at least $75 million for her work with Alticor, which owns Amway. DeVos has been charged in the U.S. with using a pyramid scheme to avoid paying workers.
The owners of Nutrilite (as Amway was called at the time of the purchase and sale) acquired the 280 hectares belonging to the San Isidro ejido in 1994. Land disputes were so common at that time that land sales included clauses in which purchasers of disputed lands recognized their liability in case they suffered any type of damage.
In the case of San Isidro, historically the ejidatarios carried out the land redistribution process “in the shadows,” according to lawyer Evangelina Robles, who represents the ejido. The reason was simple: as a community with Indigenous and peasant origins, there is a real threat of disappearance and violence against its members.
“In the case of San Isidro, they did the paperwork in silence because they lived as indentured laborers on the plantations. That is, they were semi-enslaved laborers,” said Robles. “They’ve always lived there. They’re Indigenous, although they do not recognize themselves as such. If you investigate, the region is totally Indigenous, their great-great-grandparents lived there. They grew up there, they speak Spanish because the plantation owners forced them to. They had their identity stolen from them.”
The sun sets outside of San Gabriel, Jalisco in March of 2024. Photo © Ricardo Balderas.
Contemporary and archival records affirm the existence of slavery in the region. For example, there were 500 enslaved Africans in the state as early as 1600. More than four hundred years later, in 2013, the then Central Prosecutor's Office of Jalisco carried out an operation to free 270 enslaved agricultural laborers in the southern part of the state, right where San Isidro is located.
The Jalisco state government routinely acknowledges San Gabriel residents’ Indigenous origins in statistical records and other reports. For instance, state and local authorities note that the municipality of San Gabriel is made up of Toltec, Otomi and Nahua people who speak Otomi and Nahuatl.
It was San Isidro that inspired Juan Rulfo to write his books, Pedro Páramo and El Llano en llamas, which tell stories of slavery, dispossession and environmental destruction. Government officials recognize that the land is rich in natural resources and home to one of the few aquifers in the country with no reports of overexploitation. This is not just a case of a company being favored by the state. Here, the death of the people carries the name of a transnational.
Chronology of dispossession
In 1917, a process of agrarian reform began that sought to end rural exploitation by correcting the unequal distribution of land. It barred landowners from owning more than 100 hectares and allowed ejidatarios to request ownership of the excess lands.
The government set up three mechanisms by which land reform was to be carried out. The first was the creation of communal property through the recognition of residents living inside plantations. The second was the registry of those who inhabited areas to be mapped and registered as ejidos. The last was the endowment of ejido lands, which could be requested by groups of 20 peasants.
In 1939, after these three mechanisms had been codified in law, President Lazaro Cárdenas del Río issued a decree granting the San Isidro ejido 536 hectares for self-management.
Members of San Isidro's ejidal council in March of 2024. Photo © Ricardo Balderas.
In 1994, U.S. company Amway/Nutrilite S.R.L. de C.V., bought the land from the former plantation owners, who were in deeply in debt, under the regulations of the North American Free Trade Agreement. According to attorney Robles, the company did so knowing that the land title was disputed. The company purchased the land nonetheless, while accepting liability for any conflict that might occur. It never complied with the agreement that its representatives signed. Amway has asked the courts to affirm its claim to the land, but this should be dismissed given this clause, according to the ejidatarios and their lawyer.
Ojalá attempted to contact Amway's communications department via phone and email to inquire about the reasons for its lawsuit, despite having agreed during the purchase to assume the consequences of having acquired the land in default. We have not yet received a response.
Eighty hectares of hope
Ejido members initially regularized their deeds to formalize the ownership of their homes. In early 2022, SEDATU authorities assured the ejido that they had the authority to hand over the land. They spent a year in proceedings, with the belief that the lands would finally be handed over, despite the health crisis caused by COVID.
On July 27, 2022, thanks to the progress made in court and support from a few politicians, the SEDATU began returning the lands to the farmers. They laid boundary markers and marked out the annulled property. However, without explanation, the government halted the process before the rightful owners of the land could take possession of it.
Lands occupied by Amway/Nutrilite in territory that belongs to the San Isidro ejido, municipality of San Gabriel, Jalisco, Mexico. Photo © Ricardo Balderas.
The reason for this, according to lawyer Robles, was that agrarian law states that if a property has seeds that have been sown, the owners (even apocryphal ones) have up to six months to conclude the harvest, after which they must hand over the land. During this period, the transnational's lawyers filed for another writ of protection with which they were able to provisionally suspend the distribution of the lands, once again delaying their delivery to the ejidatarios.
Today the atmosphere in the community is mixed. Some are unwilling to back down; others cannot continue. Armed men of unknown origin also invaded their territory. “One day people showed up in civilian clothes, other days they wore police uniforms,” they explained.
“The land in Jalisco must be returned”—Alejo Enciso Estrada, secretary of the ejido commission; Commissioner De la Cruz and Isidro de la Cruz, an ejidatario, all agree on this. The three grew up hearing stories about how their grandparents fought for the land where their families and their children's children grew up and how President Lázaro Cárdenas took their side and granted the land to them.
This report is a collaborative effort between El Aullido, Ojalá, Técnicas Rudas and Colectiva ADA. It aims to contribute to the struggle of the ejido of San Isidro and to all struggles in defense of land and water.
