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 News from Around the Americas | December 2005 
Texas Families Lose a Round in Claim
 Sandra Dibble - Union-Tribune
| | Major General Winfield Scott. General in chief, United States Army. Currier & Ives, c1846. |
A group of south Texas families fighting for compensation from the Mexican government for lands they say were unjustly taken from their ancestors have suffered a setback before Mexico's National Commission for Human Rights.
The commission, whose rulings are advisory, has found that it "did not have sufficient elements to show harm to the human rights" of the petitioners, all U.S. citizens who claim to be direct descendants of the original European settlers.
The finding is the latest twist in a lengthy battle by the 27-year-old Asociación de Reclamantes, or Association of Land Claimants, who have gone to court and lobbied politicians on both sides of the border. But if members have found occasional sympathy for their cause, their demands for $2 billion in compensation have gone unanswered.
The group's attorney, University of San Diego law professor Jorge A. Vargas, said his next step will be to sue the Mexican government in Mexican federal court. The group's founder and secretary-treasurer, Aminta Cavazos Zarate, now 87, said she is not giving up and will demand that President Bush take up the matter.
"Mr. Bush should make Mexico pay us," Zarate said.
Her small brick house in Edinburg, outside McAllen, Texas, is filled with documents and family histories. She traces her ancestry to the recipients of 16 land grants, the largest belonging to her great-great-grandfather, José Narcisco Cavazos, who was deeded 600,000 acres in 1792 by the king of Spain.
After the signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, descendants of Cavazos and the other original land grantees found themselves on smaller and smaller parcels.
Zarate and her fellow Reclamantes say this was often due to deceitful practices by Anglo settlers – but historians debate to what extent this was the case.
The group's claims arose in a 1923 General Claims Commission established by the United States and Mexico to settle outstanding claims between the countries after the Guadalupe treaty. Mexico presented 836 claims against the United States, of which 433 were in south Texas.
Sixteen years later, the U.S. and Mexican governments agreed to swap claims. Mexico thus agreed in 1941 to pay all claims originally lodged against the United States by 433 south Texas families for the loss of 12 million acres between the Rio Grande and Nueces rivers.
The land once belonged to Mexico but became part of the United States after the Guadalupe treaty.
The U.S. government paid off its obligations by 1948. In Mexico, then-President Manuel Avila Camacho signed a decree calling for legislation to provide compensation for the claimants, but no law was ever passed.
The Human Rights Commission, in an eight-page letter to Vargas dated Oct. 31, said the petition did not properly document "before the competent legal authorities" the successions that are the basis for the families' claims. Vargas said he provided exhaustive documentation of the five petitioning families, showing their direct link to the land grantees.
Vargas said his next step will be through the courts: "I'm going to sue the Mexican government, the president, the secretary of the treasury, and any government official responsible for not enacting the 1941 agreements." |
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