Mexico Agriculture

In a bold step to mend a historic rift between the government and the Roman Catholic Church, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari proposed Friday to give "a new legal position" to the church, which now is without rights under the Mexican constitution.

In 1937, President Lazaro Cardenas built a huge sugar refinery here, a monument to populism in a sea of cane fields. Patronage counted more than profits for Mexico's rulers then, and a company town blossomed along with the mill's state-financed payroll. Samuel Cerezo Aponte, born here a generation later, worked eight years as an electrician's apprentice in the mill's machinery shop before achieving his dream of "permanent" employment last March.

Barefoot, with pant legs rolled up to their knees, the farmers trudged through mud and tenacious rain to a communal hall of corrugated tin. There, amid fields of sugar cane, they turned their attention to a short, round man wearing a fine straw hat, a gold watch and a pistol in the waistband of his jeans. "It's a farmer's legitimate aspiration to own a piece of land," Margarito Montes Parra told the scores of men and women. They nodded in agreement.

Melchor Gomez and Maria Ynez Torres each raised their families in adobe huts in the Bajio--Mexico's heartland, a rich agricultural and industrial valley--sacrificing to send their children to nearby universities. Today, the old Gomez home is the tiled, wood-paneled office of a thriving agricultural company. And Gomez's sons plant the old family wheat farm in broccoli and cauliflower, selling their crops to international frozen food corporations for export to the United States.

The California World Trade Commission on Thursday endorsed the concept of a free-trade agreement between the United States and Mexico and recommended that the upcoming negotiations tackle issues that recently derailed four years of international trade talks.

This fall, for the first time in years, the dams are full. There will be enough water to irrigate next year's crop. But everyone who walks the dusty streets of this northern Mexico town, not far from where so many Westerns have been filmed, knows the water is running out. Decades of raising thirsty crops such as cotton and alfalfa have drained the underground water supply.

Mexico, stung by new estimates of massive Mexican marijuana production, has challenged U.S. experts to come into the country and point out the illicit crops that the CIA reported were spotted by surveillance satellites. The unusual invitation was disclosed Tuesday by Drug Enforcement Administration chief John C. Lawn, who acknowledged that even he is skeptical about the CIA estimates that Mexico is growing 10 times more marijuana than earlier thought. In an interview, Lawn said that a U.S.

The Mexican ambassador to the United States this week voiced strong objections to an upcoming Bush Administration report on marijuana production in Mexico, telling U.S. officials that the data is "very controversial and questionable," Mexican sources said. The State Department report, based on CIA satellite surveillance, shows that the Administration now believes Mexico produces 10 times more marijuana than the United States previously estimated, The Times has reported.

In a move that could further strain U.S.-Mexican relations, the Bush Administration will report this week that Mexico produces 10 times more marijuana than the United States previously had estimated, The Times has learned. The conclusion, based on new satellite surveillance by the CIA, establishes Mexico as by far the world's leading marijuana grower and gives credence to longstanding suspicions that its government has understated the country's drug-producing role.

The bitter cold that has gripped northern Mexico for more than a week has killed at least 37 people and severely damaged crops, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said Thursday. Twenty-nine deaths were reported in the northern states of Coahuila, Tamaulipas and Chihuahua, where temperatures fell to 4 below zero, a ministry statement said. The arctic cold also claimed eight lives in the eastern state of Veracruz and damaged corn, coffee, citrus, banana, potato and vanilla crops.