Ejido - Reform and Decline

Reform and Decline

In 1991, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari eliminated the constitutional right to ejidos, citing the "low productivity" of communally owned land.

The change was largely a result of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement:

Entry into a free trade agreement with the United States and Canada required intense preparation for Mexico. To quell U.S. investors' fears of political upheaval (and thus, possible confiscation of foreign property), the authors of NAFTA included an extensive section on expropriation and confiscation. Mexico was also pressured by the World Bank and the United States to re-write Article 27 of its Constitution - a pillar of the new government that grew out of the 1910 Mexican Revolution - effectively doing away with the ejido system of collective land ownership. This opened up traditional Mexican territory for sale to foreign investors eager to buy up land. The ejido system had been a cornerstone of indigenous and peasant rights in the Mexican agricultural system. Eliminating ejido protections and privatizing traditional landholdings left the most marginalized populations even more vulnerable.

Since then some of the ejido land has been sold to corporations, although most of it is still in the hands of farmers. Since the 90's there has been a trend amongst many indigenous Mexicans to use the ejidos granted to them for more productive activities than farming such as building hotels, industrial centers and resorts. The communal owners of the Tolantongo ejido near Ixmiquilpan for example have turned their ejido into a large commercial and tourist facility.