Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico
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Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822375876 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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Political Landscapes
Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico
By Christopher R. Boyer
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7587-6
CHAPTER 1
The Commodification of Nature, 1880–1910
When General Porfirio Díaz seized the presidency from his weakened and unpopular predecessor in 1876, it seemed as if Mexico might fall back into the cycle of instability that had characterized its first decades as an independent nation. Instead, Díaz remained in power for thirty-five years (punctuated by only one hiatus, from 1880 to 1884), until revolutionaries forced him from office, in 1911. His autocratic regime brought fractious regional leaders to heel and cracked down on bandits who thrived on political turmoil. Hacienda owners enjoyed strengthening markets and a political atmosphere that encouraged the expansion of their domains, while foreign investors attracted by unprecedented stability and business-friendly policies rushed to build railroads, mines, oil fields, and other industries great and small. By 1900, American and Canadian companies started to turn their attention to timber as well. The economic development and intellectual ferment of the Díaz years, which are known as the Porfiriato, brought some parts of the nation more closely in step with the developed world in the span of a single generation. Yet the wrenching advent of Porfirian order and progress had ominous implications for a rural society that still retained many of its colonial traits. Laws ostensibly intended to modernize the market in rural property forced most indigenous communities (including acculturated ones) to privatize their collectively owned lands, or at least to incorporate themselves into holding companies. In either case, most communal property slipped into the hands of outsiders or wealthy villagers, leaving increasing numbers of rural people destitute. Some joined the ranks wage labor. At the same time, the land, water, and forests owned by the federal government or formerly held as village commons were fashioned into commodities that could be bought by investors or savvy residents who understood how to manipulate the expanding state bureaucracy.
The Porfirian order adhered to a peculiarly nineteenth-century variant of political liberalism, whose core tenets included secularism, equal rights for all, the capability of trade to grow the wealth of nations, and the virtues of individual choice. Liberalism had at least nominally become the law of the land ever since the so-called reform era of 1855–1857. When Díaz came to power two decades later, his inner circle of advisors known as científicos (scientists) hoped that a reinvigorated liberal agenda would finally allow the nation to overcome a colonial heritage marked by caste privileges, weak markets, and clerical prerogatives. They intended to lead Mexico down the same economic path as Europe and the United States yet despaired of their countrymen's fitness for the journey. The Church continued to wield immense authority and had little use for secularism and the sort of modernization the científicos envisioned. Geography made it difficult for one region to trade with another, and bandits roamed the land. Indigenous communities posed a particularly thorny problem, because many still owned common lands granted by the crown during the colonial era, but few native people could read, and they appeared hopelessly backward to the upper classes. By the time Díaz became president, liberal politicians had all but given up on the liberal touchstones of political equality and individual choice; instead, they turned their attention to stimulating trade on a national and international scale. State and federal governments attracted foreign investment by granting concessions—that is, contracts that provided tax exemptions, access to public lands, and other perks—to corporations willing to invest in railroads and extractive industries. Most concessions went to foreign interests that had the requisite expertise, capital, and political connections to undertake such projects, though Mexican businesses received a modest number as well.
The científicos hoped to expand domestic commerce, and the market for rural property in particular. Liberal leaders during Benito Juárez's era (1858–1872) had forced the Church to sell off most of its properties, but their Porfirian heirs worried that too much land still languished beyond the reach of markets in village commons that could not be bought or sold. The administration dusted off the 1856 Lerdo Law, which obliged the owners of communally owned property (comuneros) to divide it among themselves and title it as individuals—a process known as "disentailment." The partition of village commons facilitated a massive transfer of property from rural communities to hacienda owners, wealthy villagers, and in some instances a rising class of independent family farmers known as rancheros. Many peasant communities had lost track (or simply been robbed) of the colonial documents that constituted the most direct means to establish a clear title to the commons. The absence of these "primordial titles" opened the way for unscrupulous landowners or village elites to encroach on communal property. Landowners were known to redraw their boundary lines (sometimes by moving the ubiquitous stone markers known as mojoneras) or to take a more direct route and fraudulently title village lands with the collusion of local officials. Even if villagers successfully managed to avoid dispossession, divide the commons, and title it with the authorities, they still faced threats to their property. Some sold it for a pittance to some local profiteer. Others fell into arrears on their tax bills, either because they lacked the money to pay, or more likely because they failed to negotiate the opaque and sometimes hostile process of making a payment at the tax assessor's office. Tax sales became a commonplace in central Mexico during the late nineteenth century and helped create a mass of land-poor villagers, whom haciendas used as a reserve labor pool during planting and harvest seasons.
Another problem was that village lands got swept up in the tidal wave of public land sales during the 1880s. The officials who made public lands available to investors needed a clear picture of the extent and location of national landholdings; however, few such maps existed. A law passed in 1883 remedied this problem by promising survey companies a third of any unoccupied public land (known as terrenos baldíos) they mapped. This enticing offer was meant both to compensate surveyors for their work and to encourage them not to leave any corner of the nation uncharted. According to the best available estimate, the survey companies received 21.2 million hectares of putatively public lands during the Porfiriato, and the government sold or granted another 22.5 million to private landowners. In all, 20 percent of the national territory, or an area around the size of modern-day Germany, passed into private hands, most of it between 1883 and 1893 in the frontier states and territories of Baja California, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Tepic in the north, and Campeche, Chiapas, and Tabasco in the south. Many of these supposedly vacant public lands actually belonged to rural people—many of them Indians—who either lacked a proper title or had failed to navigate the disentailment process successfully. Privatization on this scale was controversial even in its own day, and nowhere more than in Chihuahua. In the Sierra Tarahumara, for example, the mere presence of engineers bearing transits and plumb bobs set Rarámuri communities on edge, and rumors of indigenous uprisings dogged survey teams in the highlands throughout 1883 and 1884.
Threats to village commons also came from within. Villagers who had a bit of wealth or guile were in an ideal position to buy or swindle land from their neighbors. A new class of wealthy peasants appeared in many communities, as a handful of locals gained control of what had once been the commons but had now become private property. These sorts of imbalances occurred everywhere, but particularly in communities that tried to skirt privatization orders by titling the commons in the name of a respected local figure who would figure in the cadastral roles as a private landholder. This strategy rarely succeeded in the long run. Local authorities usually spotted the ruse, and even if it worked, the new village-approved "landowner" sometimes seized the commons for himself. In other cases, peasant communities found clever ways to create a collective corporation (usually known as a condueñazgo) that could legally own the land as a single entity without resorting to individual ownership, but this tactic also posed threats of malfeasance, loss to tax sale, or increasing economic differentiation.
Despite these pressures, most villages retained at least some of their former commons. The privatization law made allowances for villages to retain their central townsite (the fundo legal), the extent of which villagers usually tried to keep deliberately vague. Some communities employed the "weapons of the weak" and complied with the privatization order slowly or incompletely. Others—particularly those in remote areas—succeeded in ignoring it altogether.
The conversion of village commons into private property was only the most obvious instance of a broader trend that gripped Mexico in the late nineteenth century in which a vast array of natural resources underwent a process of commodification. Foreign-owned mines extracted silver and copper in northern Mexico, converting subterranean ore into profits. British and North American interests arrived to the rainforests of northern Veracruz and converted what local people thought of as troublesome puddles of percolating oil into one of the world's premier petroleum industries. Along the way, the oilmen oversaw "the wholesale alienation of indigenous land and conversion of the lush forest into a revenue stream," in the words of the historian Myrna Santiago. Water also became a source of discord. The Italian-born owners of Michoacán's most modern hacienda not only chipped away at the common lands of neighboring villages, they opened new agricultural land by draining the marsh that villagers had used for generations as a source of fish and reeds for weaving. The stakes were even higher in the state of Morelos, southwest of Mexico City, where burgeoning sugar haciendas needed a reliable source of water to irrigate their thirsty cane fields during the dry season. According to the historian Alejandro Tortolero, landowners sought and received concessions of river water, regardless of its implications for people who lived downstream; some expropriated village lands (or other haciendas) because they had reliable springs or wells. The resulting water crisis helped touch off Emiliano Zapata's revolutionary uprising in 1910. By the first decade of the twentieth century, much of Mexico's "nature" had a price tag attached.
FORESTS AND PORFIRIAN PROGRESS
Forests were the most extensive ecosystems swept up by Porfirian development. People had always used the woods as a source of fuel and construction materials. Some had been subject to intensive logging for cooking fuel and construction materials even before the Spanish conquest in 1521. But logging on an industrial scale did not appear until the 1880s, when the Lenz family acquired the venerable Loreto y Peña Pobre mill and made it into the nation's primary producer of high-quality papers. San Rafael y Anexas, based in Mexico State, entered the newsprint business a few years later. Its two primary mills had their own electric generators and rail lines tended by a workforce of 2,000. By the turn of the century the company had cornered the newsprint market. More than paper mills, however, it was railroads that drove industrialization in the woodlands. Porfirian progress relied on railroads to transport industrial ores, workers, and timber to distant markets, and the steel lines expanded to nearly every state in north-central Mexico. The nation had a mere 640 kilometers of railway when Díaz took power in 1876; by the time that revolutionaries pushed him from office, in 1911, there were 24,720 kilometers of track. Railroad construction created immense demand for forest products in the form of ties, construction material for trestles, and fuel for engines. The transportation revolution also made it feasible to ship and sell timber on an increasingly broad scale. Landowners and a few enterprising foreigners formed the first logging companies around the turn of the century. By 1905, major international trusts moved into the untouched pine forests of Chihuahua and developed an industry capable of exporting wood to Mexican mining centers and markets in the United States; timbermen in heavily wooded states like Michoacán, Puebla, and Oaxaca contemplated jumping into the international trade as well. At the opposite end of the country, the Yucatán henequen planters razed scrubby woodlands for their agave plants, while small-time timber magnates expanded from their longtime base in the rainforests of Tabasco into the great Lacandón jungle in search of mahogany for export to the United States and Europe.
The emerging timber regime held some allure for rural people. Small numbers of Rarámuri headed down into the foothills to cut wood for railroad ties in Chihuahua, for example, and scores of villages in central Mexico made a few extra pesos by renting their commons to logging companies. Some even dabbled in the business on their own. For example, the villagers of Cuanajo, Michoacán, offered to pay part of their tax arrears by cutting trees suitable for use as telegraph poles from the village woodlot. For the most part, however, commodification posed a threat to indigenous commons, as forests once considered communal property filtered into the hands of private interests. Conflicts broke out in villages throughout the country over ownership and the limits of customary use. The trees themselves became monetized and hence subject to laws and complex transactions, including long-term rental agreements that many village leaders willingly or unwillingly signed with timber contractors. For the first time ever, commercial logging denuded entire hillsides and jeopardized the economic and ecological foundations of some unlucky populations.
The scale of commercial logging eventually caught the attention of Mexico's intellectual elite. Scientists and civil engineers worried that deforestation might damage the nation's climate by reducing rainfall and possibly converting some regions into desert wastelands. Even if the rains continued to fall, some observers concluded that deforestation aggravated the severity of seasonal flooding. Without vegetation, soils eroded and precipitation could not soak into the ground as efficiently. Rainwater coursed across the barren ground and swelled rivers beyond their capacity. Led by the visionary civil engineer and forestry expert Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, a collection of polymath intellectuals called on the government to regulate the industry and protect the forests. They succeeded in creating the nation's first forest service and professional school, and they organized a reforestation campaign on the outskirts of Mexico City. Despite experts' growing sense of apprehension about logging, they rarely paused to consider its impact on the people who lived and worked in the forests. When they did take rural society into account, it was usually to excoriate peasants' misuse of the woods. They had already come to imagine the woods as spaces best suited for a regime of scientific management.
COMMODIFYING THE COMMONS IN MICHOACÁN
Michoacán did not experience the breakneck industrialization that overtook the border states and the Mexico City hinterlands, nor did the privatization of village commons permit landowners to subjugate indigenous peasants to the same extent as in other parts of the country, such as the Yucatán. The disentailment of village commons and the halting pace of economic development nevertheless led to dispossession and to commercialization of land throughout the state. The woods were no exception. The commodification of Michoacán's forests began slowly and took place in relatively limited areas, most notably in the emerging timber heartlands around Ciudad Hidalgo and Uruapan, and then expanded alongside the railways. Most of the land caught up in this process belonged to poor rural people, although loggers also worked haciendas and federal land as well. For the rural poor, the commodification represented something of a puzzle. Most villagers preferred farmland and pastures to seemingly worthless timberland. Early conservationists lamented that peasants despised the woods and only wanted to clear the land for planting. Indeed, many villagers applauded the arrival of logging crews, particularly if they could hire on and earn a bit of money hauling logs or cutting trees. Since the most desirable agricultural land had been opened long before the nineteenth century, Porfirian deforestation did little to expand Michoacán's agriculture, and villagers soon realized that railroaders and timbermen paid little or nothing for the wood they harvested. It did not take long for most rural people to conclude that the commodification of forests represented more of a threat than an opportunity.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Illustrations xiPreface xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
Part I. The Making of Revolutionary Forestry
1. The Commodification of Nature, 1880–1910 25
2. Revolution and Regulation, 1910–1928 60
3. Revolutionary Forestry, 1928–1942 93
Part II. The Development Imperative
4. Industrial Forests, 1942–1958 129
5. The Ecology of Development, 1952–1972 167
6. The Romance of State Forestry, 1972–1992 203
Conclusion. Slivers of Hope in the Neoliberal Forest 239
Appendix 1. Federal Forestry Codes, 1926–2008 259
Appendix 2. UIEFs, 1945–1986 261
Notes 263
Bibliography 309
Index 327
What People are Saying About This
"Political Landscapes is an excellently researched and meticulously documented environmental and political history of modern Mexico. Christopher R. Boyer's focus on the forests shows us a new way of writing Mexico's history from the Revolution forward. A masterful narrative, this will become a very important and influential book."