MEXICO : Progress and Promise : Profile : Talking Land Reform, Free Trade and Zapata : * Margarito Montes Parra’s union is taking a new tack in pressing for peasants’ aspirations to own a plot of dirt.

Barefoot, with pant legs rolled up to their knees, the farmers trudged through mud and tenacious rain to a communal hall of corrugated tin.

There, amid fields of sugar cane, they turned their attention to a short, round man wearing a fine straw hat, a gold watch and a pistol in the waistband of his jeans.

“It’s a farmer’s legitimate aspiration to own a piece of land,” Margarito Montes Parra told the scores of men and women.

They nodded in agreement.

“If it were up to me, there wouldn’t be one big landowner left or one peasant without land. But this struggle depends on you,” Montes said. “We’re not going to deliver land to anyone’s doorstep in a flower pot. Those who fight will get results.

“Viva Zapata!” he shouted.

“Viva Zapata!” they answered, hailing Mexico’s revolutionary land reformer, Emiliano Zapata.

This is old Mexico. On communal lands without electricity or running water, the 120 families of Las Cuatas in the state of Veracruz belong to the most backward sector of the economy--agriculture.

Montes belongs to a time-honored tradition of Mexican peasant leaders. He invokes the memory of the 1910 revolution to rally the farmers to press their claims to land promised years ago in the flush of presidential populism but never delivered.

However, Montes also is a shrewd, university-educated engineer who understands that in a changing Mexico, land alone is not the answer. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari wants to modernize the underdeveloped farm economy to make the country self-sufficient in basic foods and increase exports. He is cutting subsidies and withholding credit to unproductive farms and pushing peasants into alliances with big business.

Montes wants to be part of the transition to a modern Mexico. So, while crying Zapata’s name, he and his Popular Farmers and Workers General Union also praise competition and free trade.

Through land occupations and hardball negotiations, Montes helps poor farmers resolve longstanding property disputes. He says his organization has “recovered” 98,000 acres from the government and wealthy landowners in the last five years.

His organization also has formed a credit union to fill the void from disappearing government loans. He is helping farmers make deals to process their own rice, rather than turn it over to middlemen who take the profits. His most far-reaching project is to put cows on the newly secured farm land--thousands of head of milk cows, producing for a country that is the world’s largest importer of powdered milk.

“We have broken with the traditional peasant organization that only made demands but didn’t get involved in production,” Montes explained on that rainy day.

But riding on a tractor-pulled cane trailer, Montes can’t suppress a smile of satisfaction as he looks over nearly 500 acres of farm land that his followers illegally occupied almost a year ago.

“This is good land,” he said. “It’s worth the fight.”

One of the many contradictions of the Mexican countryside is that the poor peasants of Las Cuatas live on some of the nation’s richest farmland. The area, known as the Papaloapan River basin, covers nearly 1,800 square miles over parts of three states, about 275 miles southeast of Mexico City. The basin contains a web of rivers and two major dams with 10% of Mexico’s fresh water.

While much of northern and central Mexico thirsts for rain, the Papaloapan basin’s annual rainfall is between 58 and 117 inches. If it stops raining for three days residents begin to joke about the drought.

The iridescent lands boast expanses of sugar cane and corn, lush pastures for cattle, orchards of mangoes, plantations of bananas. Unlike the majority of subsistence farmers on lesser lands, Montes said that producers here should be able to integrate into an export economy.

But these rich lands also have a history of violence. Lands worth fighting for are lands that produce bloodshed.

Antonio Kuri, who owns much of the acreage in dispute at Las Cuatas, acknowledges he travels the countryside armed. “I’ve worked this land for 40 years and had problems for 30 of them,” he explained.

Likewise, Montes said, “I carry a gun because they carry a gun.”

In the last five years, Montes said, 30 members of his union have been killed in land disputes. When asked, he also mentions four people killed by union members in a shootout in the town of El Porvenir.

The latest victim of violence was Montes’ brother, Hector, gunned down on a dark road one night last June in a truck that Montes believes was mistaken for his.

“It would be irresponsible for me to say that the landowners are responsible for the assassination of my brother,” Montes said. “But they certainly have participated in press campaigns against me and conspired in meetings where they said they must eliminate the cancer that I represent.”

To the large landowners of the region, Montes is a rabble-rousing “crook” and “cattle thief” whose followers represent the worst of Mexican agriculture.

“Land or Death” was the battle cry of Mexican peasants in the revolution. Subsequently, the government distributed nearly half of the nation’s arable lands to peasants in ejidos , a pre-Colombian system in which members have the right to work the land but not to rent, mortgage or sell it.

Ejido farmers may bequeath their land to their children. Some fathers have opted to give their fields to the eldest son, leaving other children to work as farmhands or make their way into the cities for jobs; others have subdivided their acres into plots too small to support a family.

The ejidos often include a variety of good and bad lands divided among each member. Thus, farmers may have several acres dispersed over a large area, but no plot large enough to plant a substantial crop.

“The biggest error in the history of this country was creating the ejido, “ said a lawyer in a nearby town. “They should be privatized.”

The problem is not the ejido , Montes countered, but a government policy that has discouraged investment in the countryside while promoting urban industrial development. Privatizing the ejido eventually would allow big landowners to gain control of properties such as Las Cuatas.

Agriculture Secretary Carlos Hank Gonzalez acknowledges that the government cannot risk privatizing the hallowed ejido and instead is urging partnerships with landowners who have access to capital.

The dispute at Las Cuatas originated with a 1973 presidential order establishing an ejido on about 8,000 acres belonging to a family named Argudin. But the government gave the farmers less than 500 acres and the rest fell into legal limbo.

Antonio Kuri, Pablo Vilaboa and other landowners argued in court that the property was theirs and that the presidential order did not apply. A judge ruled in their favor, but the peasants continued to fight.

Montes stepped into the fray in September, 1987, when the ejido members joined his union. After failing to move the government with negotiations, Montes led the farmers in an occupation of about 2,400 of the 7,500 acres in dispute. He agreed to withdraw in exchange for a government promise to buy the land for the peasants.

By last year, Montes had secured another 200 acres, but the farmers wanted the rest. He led them in another takeover of 500 acres belonging to Kuri.

“Montes heads a band of thieves,” said Kuri. “He’s a modern Ali Baba, but instead of 40 thieves he’s got 5,000. They took more than 250 head of cattle too.”

Montes acknowledges that a few cattle might have been eaten at supper.

Valentin Rodriguez de la Cruz, a federal agrarian reform official in the capital city of Veracruz, said the government is negotiating with Vilaboa and Kuri to buy more land for the ejido, which is why the farmers have not been evicted from the fields.

“Of course it’s not possible to buy all of the land, but we can negotiate and try to satisfy the farmers with some of the land,” he said.

Montes most likely knows that, but as a negotiator he insists on the whole parcel and threatens to occupy more lands if the government doesn’t act soon.

President Salinas announced in his first state of the union speech in 1989 that agrarian reform was all but over. Montes responds with a laugh: “All presidents since the 1930s have said that. But it also depends on the capacity of farmers to make their demands.”

Despite his combative stance, Montes has a good relationship with Salinas, with whom he has met publicly and privately many times. Montes said that is because organizations like his help ease tensions in the countryside over Salinas’ free-market policies: Farmers have to pay higher prices for fertilizers and other supplies, while competition from imports limits the prices they get for their crops.

The government hails Montes’ milk processing project as a model of cooperation between peasants and private enterprise. With government loans, his union is buying a 20% share of a dairy in Acayucan. Mexican business people will own 60% and Canadian investors the remaining 20%.

“Margarito is very constructive,” said Agriculture Secretary Hank Gonzalez. “He understands the countryside, and his project is very good.”

A government anthropologist who has worked in the combative countryside added: “Margarito is a modernizing force. He is proposing new forms of economic and social relations, where the farmers participate in the process of commercialization.”

* ABOUT THIS SECTION

The principal writers for this special report on Mexico were Marjorie Miller and Juanita Darling of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau, and Richard Boudreaux of The Times’ Managua Bureau. Don Bartletti, of The Times’ San Diego Edition, took the photographs.