1992 Reform of Article 27 of Mexican Constitution

Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution establishes all land within the country’s borders as originally belonging to the nation, which grants rights of possession in the form of property. The nation maintains the right to impose forms of private ownership on the basis of public interest, and to regulate the exploitation of natural resources for social benefit in order to make equitable distribution of public wealth, care for their preservation, secure the balanced development of the country and the improvement of the life-conditions of the rural and urban population. It goes on to state that the nation has direct control over all subsoil minerals and substances as well as water resources and rivers

The Mexican Revolution and article 27 of the 1917 Constitution laid the basis for the redistribution of land and rural development for the following 70 years. Private land ownership was recognised alongside two forms of social or collective agrarian tenure, known as núcleos agrarios. These were the social ‘ejido’ which was established as a land title granted to collectives of peasant farmers on state or expropriated land. The second, agrarian communities (comunidades agrarias), were land titles granted to rural communities, recognising original owner status of land seized from them during and after the colonial period. In theory, the latter primarily enabled indigenous communities to regain collective rights to their traditional lands. Most importantly, ejido and agrarian community lands were not titled to the individual member of the community, but through the legal entity of the Assembly – the collective decision-making body of the community to which the registered members of the Ejido or community belonged. In addition, the collective right to the community lands were imprescriptible and inalienable.

In 1992, the Mexican government of president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, reformed article 27 of the Constitution to break with some of the legal foundations of the developmentalist economic and social model of the post-revolutionary settlement established through the 1917 Constitution. The reforms focused on opening up the economy to international investment and private capital and were part of the Salinas government’s negotiations surrounding the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement with the USA and Canada (Gómez de Silva Cano, 2017).

The reform ended the revolutionary commitment to land redistribution and set the principles for a new legal framework to regulate rural development, land, resource-use and ownership. Above all, the reform ceased to recognise socially or collectively titled land as inalienable and imprescriptible. Instead, it established a process to grant individual title to plots of land to members of núcleos agrarios, so that individual members could sell, rent or associate themselves with businesses or cooperatives to exploit the land on an individual basis. The reform also established federal competence over agrarian legal disputes.

The stated objective of the reform was to develop the agrarian economy through private investment (Gallardo Zúñiga, 2003: 66). However, critics have argued that the reform encouraged the fragmentation of communal lands, disrupting deeply rooted indigenous and peasant cultures. In addition, by strengthening the power of capital and corruption to influence the division, sale and exploitation of land and resources, this increased rural poverty, inequality, division and migration (Carrillo Nieto, 2010).