What/Whose Property Rights? The Selective Enforcement of Land Rights Under Mexican Liberalism

Abstract

We examine the way in which social resistance and elites’ interests shaped the politics of compliance of liberal land laws under Mexico’s liberal era (1855-1910). During that period, liberal governments in power recognized the enclosure of public lands and the disentailment of collective lands as key endeavors. However, the content and enforcement of liberal land laws varied significantly across governments. Before 1876, such laws were almost entirely left unenforced by state authorities vis-à-vis indigenous groups. In contrast, the 1876-1910 government of Porfirio Díaz enacted complementary regulation that tightened the grip of liberal land laws regarding indigenous lands, and eagerly promoted their enforcement across the territory. At first sight, this difference could be explained as the outcome of divergent levels of state capacity. Nevertheless, we argue that variation in the enforcement of Mexican liberal land laws was also the result of political will. We study judicial decisions as a strategy to capture how state authorities at different levels contributed to the strong or weak enforcement of land rights of different actors, as well as to tell apart the potentially different motivations at play. We theorize that both interest-based motivations and liberal ideological motivations can lead to the enforcement or over-enforcement of individual private property rights to the detriment of collective and public land property rights. But only interest-based motivations—not ideologically liberal ones—can lead to the weak enforcement of the individual property rights of indigenous or poor persons. We substantiate the theory using a novel dataset of judicial cases related to land issues that the Mexican Supreme Court published between 1871 and 1910.