Salinas copied Zapata’s words and urged: go sign those who are not afraid
▲ On December 1, 1991, then President Carlos Salinas de Gortari called a meeting in Los Pinos with 268 peasant leaders.Photo Elsa Medina/File the day
LHN
Newspaper La Jornada
Tuesday, November 1, 2022, p. 5
Come and sign those who are not afraid, said the then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, copying the words of Emiliano Zapata, to 268 rural leaders, among whom were relatives of the Caudillo del Sur. In Los Pinos, before a cadre of the head of the Liberation Army, the leaders of the national centrals went one by one to sign the Peasant Manifesto that endorsed the end of the agrarian distribution and the privatization of the ejido. The date was recorded: December 1, 1991.
Before starting the ceremony, a few representatives who smelled what the trap was about, asked where the bathroom was and put their foot down to avoid joining the document. The commitment of the leaders to overcome the agrarian distribution by calling for a great conciliation effort among the men of the countryside acquired that day was seen as a great betrayal by hundreds of thousands of peasants throughout the country who had been fighting for decades for land. That counter-reform to article 27 of the Constitution clouded the horizon in the countryside and produced multiple transformations in the rural world. That is what these reports and interviews attest to just over 30 years after the meeting in Los Pinos.
