Although the hacendados did manage to increase their landholdings during the Porfiriato, they did not succeed in breaking the Indians' “negative communion” with the tropical rainforest of the Huasteca. The oilmen from the United States and Britain did. They took two decades, from 1900 to 1920. Dispensing pesos as readily as the hacendados had dispensed bullets, the oilmen achieved what had eluded Mexican elites for at least a century: the wholesale alienation of indigenous land and conversion of the lush forest into a revenue stream. But the native population was not the only one who lost control of the rainforest. The hacendados did, too. Eagerly entering into deals with the oil companies, they found themselves shortchanged when the wells started producing oil like sprinklers on a lawn. Both groups reacted to the changes. In all cases, the protesters extracted small and large sums of money from the companies, but there was no stopping the oil entrepreneurs. They created a true real estate market out of the rainforest, commodifying it thoroughly for the first time in its history. Thus, the foreign oilmen achieved in two decades what Mexican elites had failed to do in a century: a radical shift in land tenure patterns. That was the first major transformation in the ecology of oil.