The government chose the latter route, offering the ejido owners a pittance in compensation and which resulted in protests, highway roadblocks, and marches in Mexico City featuring machete-wielding farmers from what now became known as the Frente Popular por la Defensa de la Tierra (FPDT, the Popular Front for Defence of the Land). Atenco is mostly composed of ejidos - a collective rural landholding system established in the early 20th century but which following liberalization in the 1990s could be put up for sale or taken over through eminent domain. Trouble began in October 2001 when the Fox administration chose the municipality of San Salvador Atenco as the site for the new airport. The failure of Vicente Fox's airport plan is indicative of the Mexican government's goldilocks attitude towards authority: too hard handed when it needn't be, too indecisive when it needs to show its strength. That the few canals that remain in Xochimilco are a major tourist attraction points at the lost opportunity had more of them been preserved. Still, even up to the 1930s and 40s the city retained various usable canals (some dirty, some clean) but most were filled up to build the city's urban expressway system - the inner ring, or Circuito Interior, still keeps the names of the rivers that one flowed beneath. Nearly gone as well were Tenochtitlan's waterways, which as early as the colonial period had been turned into sewage canals. By the middle of the 20th century, the eastern and northern bits had shrunk into three smaller lakes and in the 1990s the middle lake - which retained the name of Lake Texcoco - had almost fully evaporated, leaving just a few wetlands and reservoirs. After catastrophic floods in 15 there began a centuries-long effort to dry out Lake Texcoco and by the time of independence most of the western half of the lake (the part directly under Mexico City) was gone. After the conquest, the Spanish would have to come to terms with the city's one major urbanistic scourge: its vulnerability to flooding, which was exacerbated the destruction of the Aztecs' delicate but effective regulation mechanisms.
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