Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Revolutions

6. Private, Communal, and Privatizing Ranches in Neo-liberal Mexico

6 Private, Communal, and Privatizing Ranches in Neo-liberal Mexico Despite Mexico’s rhetoric of revolutionary land redistribution, the simple fact remains that the vast majority and the highest-quality grazing lands are in the hands of the wealthiest ranchers to this day. This resource imbalance, an unintended consequence of addressing large estate (latifundio ) irrigated agriculture foremost among land resource types, translates almost directly into an uneven geography of political and personal power in the state of Sonora, and for northern Mexico in general. Even the largest irrigated estates in Sonora rarely qualified as a so-called effectible property, with few exceeding one hundred hectares in extent. But even in the current atmosphere that seemingly might favor private landowners and ranchers, the challenges to livestock owners are plentiful, and the so-called neo-liberal era has not been without difficulty even for the relatively fortunate private ranchers. Enduring legacies of land-tenure mosaics , debt, drought, even small pockets of narco-trafficking activity, have made the livelihood tenuous. Landscapes have memory, too, and they can be unforgiving. The grandest agrarian reform clause in the Mexican Constitution, Article 27, was viewed too universally as a social cure; it was a political device for at least transient stability and patronage in the new nation-state, even if the article’s geographic application could never span the range of conditions in Mexico (Morett Sánchez 2003). What is often overlooked is how conjoined the agrarian reforms were to the idea of private property ownership , as long as it remained “small.” It is an illusion of poorly informed social scientists to think that Article 27 was only “about” the communal land reforms that followed its creation (Bantjes 1998; Robledo Rincón 2000). Yet the regulations, stipulations, and exceptions made for private ownership became far more complex over time. Rules that seemed logical to qualify private estates as too large along the Gulf of Mexico rarely Private, Communal, and Privatizing Ranches 151 applied as a solid land-tenure guideline for the arid stretches of northern Mexico. Even less attention, much less adaptive institution building, was given toward the differences inherent between coastal and inland areas of the country. This contrast is especially visible when driving east–west transects from the coast of Sonora to the inland, mountainous areas that border the state of Chihuahua. Once sprawling irrigation districts west of Hermosillo have notably contracted, withered, and turned to dust in the wake of groundwater depletion and soil salinization. The brief period of large, agricultural ejidos in these desert wastes reached its height during the 1960s and early 1970s, an aftereffect of Sonora’s brief fling with desert frontier colonization schemes (Whiteford et al. 1998). Coastal regions of Sonora dominate the international cattle trade, and the largest ranches along major transportation arteries and along the U.S.–Mexico border have fared the best in market accessibility, if not always in climate predictability. These coastal juggernauts of ranching have invested great sums of money into ranch infrastructure, through irrigation works, gasoline pumps, and buffelgrass pastures to increase their local carrying capacity. The interior regions, such as the Río Sonora Valley , generally find themselves already at a spatial disadvantage. They have neither the easy access to international crossings nor the means to acquire the big rigs needed to transport large numbers of animals to the border. Consequently, they sell to larger ranch owners, middlemen, and the occasional “coyote” at a lower price. Many of these are the larger, coastal ranch owners who must deal with increased drought variability, but have the economic means to purchase cattle elsewhere for sale on the border. Ask any Sonoran rancher from the interior, in the foothills of the Sierra Madre, where all the political power and influence is, and the answer is invariably the same, “La Costa,” “Hermosillo,” and an occasional “Nogales” or “con los gringos,” a sarcastic but, in their minds, realist perspective on their abilities to counter market difficulties. This imbalance deeply affected ranchers of the interior during the prolonged drought of the 1990s (Chavez 1999; Liverman 1999). Aid promised by state government, in response to recurring drought, first arrived in coastal regions—and primarily in municipios loyal to the PRI, Mexico’s dominant yet slightly weakened political party of the twentieth century. Several fights erupted or were narrowly avoided during regional livestock 152 Chapter 6 meetings in the fall of 1997 because of the lack of government...