Out of the Dust Bowl

Another sweeping promise of the Mexican revolution was agriculture--land for the landless and food for all. Yet half a century later, less than one-tenth of the country's acreage is under cultivation, much of it in the semi-arid north and much of that belonging to the controversial ejido collectives. Peasants are guaranteed a plot of land, but the farms are small, dry and often uneconomic, rarely exceeding twelve acres. Peasant families have trouble feeding themselves, to say nothing of providing food for a nation whose population grows by 3.5% annually.

Last year Lopez Mateos approved a bold plan aimed at transplanting entire farm communities from drier, unproductive sections of the country to Mexico's humid, less populated tropics. So far the biggest of these colonies is in Campeche state, an almost virgin territory of well-watered savanna and jungle down near the Guatemalan border. Last week, after nine months of pioneering, the first 700 peasants of an estimated 20,000 were settling in at Campeche, and a whole new chapter in Mexican land reform was underway.

Campeche's settlers come from Mexico's , drought-stricken midsection--mostly from La Laguna, which once produced half of Mexico's cotton but is now a disaster area (TIME, March 15). Each will be moved by the government, supplied with food for a year, given materials for building a cement-block house, 40 acres of fertile land, plus--on a communal basis--five acres of permanently irrigated land and 56 acres of forest and grazing land. Each town will have a school and a health center with a fulltime doctor and two nurses. The government estimates the cost of the Campeche project at $1,000,000, which the landowning peasants will repay at a rate of $1,200 per family --the first payment due in 1973.

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