Led by Emiliano Zapata, the people of Morelos implemented a series of wide-reaching social reforms based on the proposals laid out in the Plan of Ayala.
During the Mexican Revolution, the economy of Morelos was completely reorganised, seeing the nationalisation of its sugar industry and the widespread redistribution of land from haciendas to the peasantry.
After Álvaro Obregón's rise to power, many of Zapata's proposals were implemented in Morelos by the new government of Mexico and the ELS was integrated into the Mexican Army.
The native institutions of Morelos traced their ancestry back to the time of the Aztec Empire, before the Spanish conquest of the Americas; the local Nahua people held the land in the region under common ownership, which guaranteed them autonomy and self-sufficiency.
[5] Lands previously held under common ownership were taken over by haciendas, which extracted increasingly high profits from the sugar crop, with many of the state's peasants becoming landless.
[7] Still the people of Morelos managed to maintain some of their traditional self-governance, holding enough property under common ownership as to provide an alternative to the industrial estates.
[10] This series of expropriations of privately-owned land by armed peasants led to the establishment of the Liberation Army of the South (ELS), which spearheaded the revolutionary uprising in Morelos.
Huerta subsequently ordered the intensification of the war against the peasantry of Morelos, killing thousands and causing many more to flee, but he was ultimately unable to eliminate the Zapatistas.
But when Zapata demanded that the constitutionalists incorporate his Plan of Ayala into their programme, Carranza refused, rejecting its egalitarian policies of land redistribution.
[20] Municipal councils of local elders were convened in order to determine how to break up the haciendas and redistribute their land holdings, with decisions being passed from the bottom-up to the Zapatista command for enforcement.
[24] But the Zapatistas' threats against private property nevertheless alarmed the government of the United States, as over one-quarter of Mexican land was held by American corporations.