ROGER BARTRA Peasants and Political Power in Mexico THE AGRARIAN structures and the political situations which arise from them have been and continue to be a challenge for Marxist analysts. There have been many such analysts who have become lost in the labyrinth of rural life without obtaining more than either simplistic schemes or interminable descriptions of more or less incomprehensible phenomena. This statement is particularly the case in work on Latin America: it is noteworthy that those who are supposedly Marxists have, in the process of explaining the evolution of agriculture, completely ignored precisely those tools which Marx has provided for this purpose. At best, most analyses of the Latin American agrarian situation have been limited to populist critiques. This situation has recently begun to change; however, we are still tied to the habits of the past.' While this article L basically theoretical, it reflects the experiences of concrete research and is a synthesis of these experiences.2 The models presented here are posited as valid for Mexican agrarian reality. To a certain point, they may be generalized to Latin America and certain other countries in the so called Third World. One must only add that this work has a preliminary character. While they have left us a number of theoretical problems, the classical works of Marx, Engels and Lenin are