The Haciendas

     The colonial hacienda system, with its exploitation of land and the people working it, had dominated rural Mexican life for nearly three centuries by the time of the Pofiriato.  The political and economic reforms put in place by Diaz did little to address the problem.  In fact, the Diaz regime served to expand and strengthen this system through a variety of governmental actions.  Perhaps most detrimental to the livelihood and well-being of the few independent Mexican farming communities was the Land Law of 1883.  This law, which in essence allowed foreign companies to purchase large swaths of Mexican land, would see the dissolution of much of the communal land holdings across rural Mexico, as community leaders were unable to confirm their claims to the soil through legal processes.  With their communal lands now privatized and sold off to foreign companies and wealthy hacendados, many of the workers in these agrarian communities would have little choice but to seek work as peons on the very haciendas that now occupied their familial lands. It was this situation from which the seeds of rebellion would be sown.

     In June, 1909, the declared value of hacienda land in Morelos was lowered by the Governor, reducing the amount of money that a hacendado had to pay in property taxes.  This, rather unsurprisingly, allowed haciendas to take better advantage of the newly privatized pueblo lands that had been brought to market.   In many areas, logging rights were sold to private companies, with local villagers being driven from the forests where they made their living. These actions served to push more and more pueblos into peonage on haciendas

     This situation, no doubt, saw that the village of Anenecuilco faced what must have seemed like a hopeless situation.  Having worked hard and long to prepare their ancestral fields for planting, Anenecuilco would see those very fields seized by the nearby Hospital Hacienda.  In a desperate attempt to coax official intervention, the villagers would send a letter to Morelo's governer, pleading, "We implore you for your protection so that, if it pleases you, you would kindly grant us your support to sow to aforementioned lands without fear of them being stripped from us by the owners of the hacienda de Hospital.”  Despite their pleas, however, Governor Escandon did not step in to resolve the tense situation.  The Hospital Hacienda had managed to seize the fields that the villagers of Anenecuilco toiled over.

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