Richard Jernigan -> RE: Marchas de Procesión (Oct. 16 2017 22:45:28)
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Of the books Bill recommends I have only read "The Power and the Glory," which I recommend as well. It is consonant with stories I have heard from the period. Mexico, for all its brilliance in style, culture and art, has often been a brutal place. Though Benito Juarez, the principal leader of the Reforma of 1857, was a poor Indian boy from the hills around Oaxaca, nurtured and educated at age 12 by a kind hearted priest in the city, Juarez and the Reforma were against the Church for a number of reasons. The Church was largely aligned with the Conservative political faction, who opposed the Reforma. The Reformists suspected the Church of lending financial support to the Army, whose power the Reforma intended to reduce. But perhaps the weightiest reason was that the Church was among the largest landowners in the country, perhaps the very largest. The concentration of land ownership in the hands of a small group of wealthy landowners and the Church condemned landless peasants to poverty and oppression. The Church was the leading institution responsible for this oppression. Much, if not most Church land was administered by wealthy secular leaseholders. The Church hierarchy played only an indirect role, but it was Church land ownership which enabled the abuses. The "Ley Juarez" law removed many privileges of the clergy. Priests had been under the exclusive jurisdiction of church courts. The Ley Juarez subordinated church courts to civil law. The "Ley Lerdo" forbade land ownership by corporate entities. It dictated that such land be sold to its occupants on easy terms. If the owners did not voluntarily sell, the land was put up for public auction. This law had two serious defects. It left large amounts of land in the hands of wealthy individuals, and it deprived native communities of the communal lands they had held since before the Spanish conquest. But the Ley Lerdo eventually led to the confiscation of Church lands, which touched off a war between the Liberal Reformists and the Conservatives. The Reformist land policy was a failure. Just before the Porfirio Diaz presidency ended, near the beginning of the 1910 Revolution, 97% of Mexican land was held by 1% of the population. The land reform provisions of the 1917 Constitution were never fully implemented, and have essentially been abandoned. The 1926 Calles administration may have been a brutal time for the Church, but the preceding 1910-1920 Revolution killed a fifth of the population in armed combat, famine and epidemics. My family connection to those days is not nearly as close as Bill's. I only heard first hand accounts by relatives from those who have raised coffee near Jalapa since the 1870s. They supported Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregon. RNJ
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