MEXICAN POLITICS AND ECONOMY 249
professional men, and businessmen made up a
closely knit clique of Díaz’s advisers. Known as
Científi cos, they got their name from their insis-
tence on “scientifi c” administration of the state
and were especially infl uential after 1892. About
fi fteen men made up the controlling nucleus of the
group. Their leader was Díaz’s all-powerful father-
in-law, Manuel Romero Rubio, and after his death
in 1895, the position passed to the new minister of
fi nance, José Yves Limantour.
For the Científi cos, the economic movement
was everything. Most Científi cos accepted the
thesis of the inherent inferiority of the native and
mestizo population and the consequent necessity
for relying on the native white elite and on foreign-
ers and their capital to lead Mexico out of its back-
wardness. In the words of the journalist Francisco
G. Cosmes, “The Indian has only the passive force
of inferior races, is incapable of actively pursuing
the goal of civilization.”
CONCENTRATION OF LANDOWNERSHIP
At the opening of the twentieth century, Mexico
was still predominantly an agrarian country; 77
percent of its population of 15 million still lived
on the land. The laws of the Reforma had already
promoted the concentration of landownership,
and under Díaz, this trend greatly accelerated. The
rapid advance of railway construction increased
the possibilities of production for export and there-
fore stimulated both a rise in land values and the
growth of land-grabbing in the Díaz period.
A major piece of land legislation was the 1883
Ley de Deslindes that provided for the survey of
public lands. The law authorized real estate com-
panies to survey such lands and retain one-third of
the surveyed area; the remainder was sold for low
fi xed prices in vast tracts, usually to Díaz’s favorites
and their foreign associates. The 1883 law opened
the way for vast territorial acquisitions. One indi-
vidual alone obtained nearly 12 million acres in
Baja California and other northern states. But the
land companies were not satisfi ed with the acquisi-
tion of such lands. In 1894, the Ley de Terrenos
Baldíos declared that a parcel of land without legal
title was vacant land, opening the door to expro-
priation of untitled land cultivated by indigenous
villages and other small landholders from times
immemorial. If the victims offered armed resis-
tance, Díaz sent troops against them and sold the
vanquished rebels like slaves to labor on henequen
plantations in Yucatán or sugar plantations in
Cuba. This was the fate of the Yaquis of the north-
west, defeated after a long, valiant struggle.
Another instrument of land seizure was an
1890 law designed to give effect to older Reforma
laws requiring the distribution of indigenous vil-
lage lands among the villagers. The law created
enormous confusion. In many cases, land specula-
tors and hacendados cajoled illiterate villagers into
selling their titles for paltry sums. Hacendados also
used other means, such as cutting off a village’s
water supply or simply brute force, to achieve their
predatory ends. By 1910 the process of land ex-
propriation was largely complete. More than 90
percent of the indigenous villages of the central
plateau, the most densely populated region of the
country, had lost their communal lands. Only the
most tenacious resistance enabled villages that
still held their lands to survive the assault of the
great landowners. Landless peons and their fami-
lies made up 9,500,000 of a rural population of
12,000,000.
As a rule, the new owners did not use the land
seized from indigenous villages or small landhold-
ers more effi ciently. Hacendados let much of the
usurped land lie idle, waiting for a speculative rise in
value or an American buyer. By keeping land out of
production, they helped keep the price of maize and
other staples artifi cially high. The technical level of
hacienda agriculture was generally extremely low,
with little use of irrigation, machinery, and com-
mercial fertilizer, although some new landowning
groups—northern cattle raisers and cotton grow-
ers, the coffee and rubber growers of Chiapas, and
the henequen producers of Yucatán—employed
more modern equipment and techniques.
The production of foodstuffs stagnated, barely
keeping pace with population growth, and per cap-
ita production of such basic staples as maize and
beans actually declined toward the end of the cen-
tury. This decline culminated in three years of bad
harvests, 1907 to 1910, due principally to drought.