Article 27 Counter-Reform

On January 6, 1992, Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s constitutional amendments to Article 27 took effect, formally ending Mexican land redistribution and opening ejido lands to privatization, rental, joint venture, and sale. The reform terminated the state’s obligation to distribute land to petitioning communities, freezing a long agrarian backlog and declaring the post-revolutionary settlement complete.

Its significance lies less in the formal transfer of land — less than 1% of ejido land was actually privatized in the following decade — than in what it legalized: a regime of “legal fictions” through which de facto commodification could proceed without formal conversion. Combined with NAFTA’s imminent implementation, the reform was understood by indigenous and peasant communities as an existential threat, and directly triggered the Zapatista declaration of war two years later.