The burro at the palace.

• Author: Ross, John (American tribal leader)
• Position: Land sales and indigenous people in Mexico

Stolidly planted before the National Palace under the enormous Mexican flag, Chaparo Sancho seemed singularly unimpressed. He buried his head in a sackful of corn husks and ruminated with placid delight--which is only natural because Mr. Sancho is a small, brown, sixteen-year-old burro with a soft, white underbelly and an ostentatious bray.

In the year since Chaparo Sancho (literally, "Shorty Cuckolder") and the octogenarian Indian farmer Don Pedro Jasso arrived here to protest the illegal sale of communal lands in San Luis Potosi state, they have become a living logo for the struggle of Mexican farmers.

A heavy-set, sun-scorched gentleman of eighty-six who wears trademark faded denim overalls and a battered white sombrero, Don Pedro speaks with all the vehemence of the nearly deaf. He is also as stubborn as, well, a donkey. "They're the same animal," dryly comments his son and translator Tomas.

"My grandfathers are the Huachichiles. We are the owners of our land," booms Don Pedro. But marriages and business deals have transferred control of the Bienes Comunales (communal land councils) in San Juan de Guadalupe, just outside the state capital, to outsiders who have allegedly sold off the land illegally to the encroaching city. San Luis Potosi has come so close to the communal land that Don Pedro's homestead now sits only 300 feet from the major road that encircles the state capital.

Clutching a fistful of papers, Pedro Jasso displays a presidential decree dated 1954. He says it establishes that "not one meter" of Huachichil communal land can ever be sold. "You could roll a stone from Romero to San Isidro to Tumba Calzones down to the dam, and all of that would be ours," the farmer heaves, casing the broad esplanade of the Zocalo as if it, too, were Huachichil land.

Despite a 1992 arrest order charging the accused culprits--a pair of speculators both named Juan--with fraudulently selling off 537 acres of Indian turf, the "Juans" have never spent a day behind bars. Instead, the comuneros of San Juan de Guadalupe have been repeatedly jailed for protesting the speculators' transgressions.

When Don Pedro's son Margarito was arrested on the pretext that he had stolen items from a construction site on communal land, Don Pedro and Chaparo set off on foot and hoof for Mexico City in June 1997 to discuss the matter with President Ernesto Zedillo. The two marked a trail so fellow commune dwellers might follow them easily. Their colleagues caught up...