Life on the dole During the past decade, rural Mexico has increasingly been put on the dole. While slashing price supports for many crops, the government gave peasants per-acre cash subsidies, paid to send their children to school and provided cheap fertilizers and pesticides. Peasants served as the party's strategic electoral reserve long after urban Mexico had turned against it. It was a totally paternalistic policy. Dismantling the PRI's rural network, which depends upon local strongmen known as caciques, poses a key challenge, Fox's planners say.
Cacique control is what has kept the peasant in poverty.
Some critics contend, however, that Fox's rural policies won't differ all that much from the ruinous ones of the past. They don't see farms as contributors to national development. Leaders of the National Peasants Confederation, the PRI's largest rural organization, vow to oppose any Fox initiatives that they judge will harm small farmers. They have a business vision, and they aim to make peasants businessmen. Sowing seeds of failure Mexico's rural crisis has been a long time coming.