Hal pursed his lips and said, "I know the outside world calls Oliver the Anti-Government Forces, but the truth is exactly the opposite. We all know that Mexico's second land reform began long ago, and its focus is land titling."
"This policy means exactly what it says: whoever owns the land should have the land. But the problem is, would the cartels want the land to belong to the farmers?"
"Of course, they could also control the farmers and have them grow poppies for them. Many fields around Guadalajara operated that way. As I mentioned before, northwestern Mexico mostly used large-scale operations, while the existence of village communes in the central and southern regions caused the land to be divided into very small plots."
"One person's land belonged to one person. No one wanted to give up the right to cultivate their own land. As a result, even though it was flat, vast plains—some of the best places in the world for large-scale mechanized farming—they still used the most backward method of manual cultivation."
"This caused another major problem. All the farmers fought alone, like scattered guerrillas, so drug lords and gangs could control them very easily. In fact, the plantations owned by several major drug lords in Guadalajara were supposedly village communes."
"Americans wanted to buy land there and build factories, which harmed the drug lords' interests. But they had no way to do anything to American corporations, so they could only plunder other village communes to ensure the output of their evil products."
"The other village communes had been farming peacefully when their fields were burned down. Gangsters held guns to their foreheads and forced them to grow poppies. They were forced to do so, yet the government said it was illegal and wanted to burn their crops.