Income Gap in Mexico Grows, and So Do Protests

One simmering Sunday in May, a hundred peasant farmers stormed a luxurious hillside mansion here and, in a scene out of an old newsreel of the 1910 Revolution, pounded on the gates with machetes and their clenched fists until the wealthy owners abandoned their brunch and fled.

Peasants now stand guard at the exclusive grounds about 35 miles south of Mexico City. They have painted "House of the People" on the imposing wooden doors, but they still find themselves ogling such luxuries as the artificial lake just inside the gates and the mounted bison head on the warehouse wall.

The only thing that one can feel is embittered," said Guillermo Noriega Garcia, 56, a farmer who took part in the assault on the 20-acre estate that stands in the middle of parched subsistence farms. "How can it be that one man has everything and others don't even have water?"

The episode is just one sign of how the current economic crisis has deepened already serious divisions in Mexico. It has exaggerated the gap not only between rich and poor, but also between the industrialized north and the rural south, between Spanish-speaking Mexicans and the 10 million who are Indians and between those whose lives are increasingly tied to the United States economy and those who are entirely dependent on the fortunes of Mexico.

The degree of income disparity in Mexico is among the worst in the world and is steadily growing more extreme. Excluding African countries, Mexico has the largest gap between rich and poor of all but six nations in the world, United Nations and World Bank figures show.

Today the richest 10 percent of Mexicans earn 41 percent of the country's income, while the bottom half of the population receives only 16 percent of all national income. The Government admits that the number of Mexicans living in extreme poverty has grown to 22 million, an increase over the last 15 months of 5 million people.