In October 1936, under the personal supervision of President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, the distribution of the existing large estates in the Comarca Lagunera region was carried out. It was one of the most decisive actions of his administration. Collective ejidos were formed with the expropriated land, the most appropriate form considering the economic conditions of the production units existing before the distribution. Despite technical errors, aggravated by overpopulation and a lack of irrigation water, numerous ejidos achieved satisfactory results.
But from 1941 onward, official bodies failed to provide adequate support. They even created political difficulties for them, imposing a strategy of increasing production at any cost, but not distributing the resulting profits. Add to this the corruption within the bureaucratic structure of agricultural banking, which also affected agrarian leaders.
The Laguna region is made up of five municipalities in Coahuila (Torreón, Francisco I. Madero, Matamoros, San Pedro, and Viesca; and four in Durango: Gómez Palacio, Lerdo, Mapimí, and Tlahualilo). Its population now totals 1.8 million, of which 1.2 million live in the urban corridor formed by Torreón, Gómez Palacio, and Lerdo. In six decades, the Laguna population has tripled, exacerbating the region's water problems. Rainfall in the region is scarce and random. Therefore, it depends on the Nazas and Aguanaval rivers and the water table. The Nazas river flow is regulated by the Lázaro Cárdenas dam, and the Aguanaval river by the Francisco Zarco dam. These flows provide abundant alluvium rich in highly fertile plant matter, benefiting some 150,000 hectares.
For decades, cotton was La Laguna's main crop (almost 80 percent), followed by wheat. Although it is still grown, alfalfa and other forage crops now predominate, along with melon, watermelon, tomato, barley, chili, and grapes. They depend on water from the aforementioned rivers and groundwater. Thanks to alfalfa, in just a few decades La Laguna became the country's main dairy basin. A brand, Lala, is its flagship. And this was largely due to the fact that ejidatarios sold their plots (or rented them) and their water rights. Thus, market laws, with the approval of the federal government, achieved the concentration of land and water for dairy farming.
