Peñón de los Baños:
A Community in Resistance to Neo-liberal Globalization

by Cliff DuRand

Mexico’s agriculture is a study in contrasts. On the one hand you can see in the countryside large irrigated fields producing vegetables for export to the U.S. On the other hand you can see small family plots growing food mainly for domestic consumption and sale to a local market. Favored by government policies, agribusiness is prospering, while campesino agriculture is left largely to itself as it struggles to survive.

This contrast is dramatically illustrated in the area near the town of Rodriguez, to the northeast of San Miguel de Allende. There on the flat fertile land you will find vast fields cultivated by mechanized agribusiness methods. And in the midst of it lies the community of Peñón de los Baños, a community of 60 families engaged in dairy farming on their own land. And if you ask them, they are likely to tell you they are better off than those people who work on the commercial fields around them.

The primary reason for their well being is that they still own their ejido land. This refers to communally owned land that was protected in Mexico’s 1917 constitution. Since then, while portions of the ejido land would be assigned to individual members of the community to cultivate, under Article 27 of the constitution, they did not own it and could not sell it. For the campesinos of Mexico that protection was the crowning achievement of the Revolution.

However, as a condition for entering NAFTA, in 1992 the Salinas government amended Article 27 to allow the privatization of ejido land and the sale of it by individual ejidatarios. So far, the people of Peñón de los Baños have resisted privatization, holding on to their 220 hectares of communally owned land. But all around them, former ejidatarios have sold their land to agribusiness and they now are wage laborers working from sun up to sun down for 500 pesos per week in the fields that were once theirs.

The people of Peñón de los Baños are highly critical of NAFTA and former President Salinas for having sold them out. When Salinas’s name is mentioned, one man says “son of a bitch.” They are also critical of the wealthy family that now owns the nearly eight square miles (2000 hectares) of prime farmland that surrounds them and whose chemicals they think are poisoning them. They are determined to hold on to their land and their way of life.

And it seems to be a wholesome way of life. Campesinos tell us that there is no alcoholism nor drug problems in their community. “Our sport is soccer, not drinking.” The young women tell us they would like to stay in the community, although often they have to go to San Miguel de Allende for work. One tells us she would like to travel and see some of the world, but wants to come back to Peñón de los Baños to live. Realistically, that will require opening up new economic opportunities in the community and holding on to the communal ejido land that has been the cohesive force holding the community together.

That is not easy to do. They find it increasingly difficult to pay for the electricity to pump the water from the ever receding watertable. The electricity for the pumps costs 800 pesos per person! That is what forced many of their former neighbors to sell their land. It was bought by President Fox’s former Secretary of Agriculture, Javier Usabiaga, who also has extensive agricultural lands elsewhere in the state of Guanajuato as well as other states in Mexico.

The ejidatarios of Peñón de los Baños don’t want to loose their land too. They are able to sell 1000 liters of raw milk per day for 3.5 pesos per liter. They would like to be able to pasteurize the milk themselves so they could get a better price, but cannot afford to buy the pasteurizing equipment. They are also thinking about making organic cheese for the San Miguel market. Then there is the vast amount of manure their cows generate which could be composted and sold as enriched soil. So there are productive possibilities there yet to be developed.

But the project that excites them the most is growing tomatoes in greenhouses using drip irrigation. A small greenhouse of 5,000 square feet costs about $14,000 to build. Visitors to Penon de los Banos this winter have donated $5,700 to the Center for Global Justice’s Fund for Community Support to be loaned to the people of Peñon de los Baños to start the greenhouse. The Center is also putting them in touch with another cooperative in the state of Hidalgo which has a similar project that the Center has been supporting.

But for now, one of the things that keeps them afloat economically are the remittances they receive from family members working in the U.S. An average of two persons per family are working abroad. The community would like to be able to bring them all home. “We don’t want to export our children,” they say.

Even at that, the rate of migration is probably higher in the surrounding communities. Nationally it is the forcing of campesinos off their land through its privatization that is a major factor driving migration. For now, the campesinos of Peñón de los Baños have been able to resist that. With a little help from their friends and from fellow campesinos, they just might be able to preserve their community while contributing to their nation’s development.