The Determinants of Judicial Land Conflicts: Mexico under the Porfiriato

• In Event: Property Rights, State Capacity, and Political Behavior in Latin America

Abstract

What institutional and non-institutional factors explain the type of land conflict cases that are brought to justice, and the way in which they are decided? Are legal and institutional factors facilitating or inhibiting access to justice enough to explain the magnitude and type of cases that parties attempt to resolve through judicial channels? Or are economic and political factors related to the value of land, power fragmentation, political elite alignment or state capacity also relevant? We will attempt to address these questions using original archival micro-level data on the state of Mexico on judicial land conflicts under the Porfiriato (1876-1910). As we have shown in prior work, during this period, Mexico experienced its first export boom as well as the consolidation of the national state through an oligarchical government. As a result, conflicts over land ownership between agricultural elites and indigenous/peasant communities intensified. Many of those conflicts were brought to the federal justice through amparo writs, which tended to benefit individuals over communities. Though it is possible to identify the general or aggregate traits of those cases, the analysis of the factors that can explain their magnitude and types and the way in which they were solved by judges requires more fine-grained data, which can be better gathered and analyzed at the micro level. We will focus on Mexico State, one of the states with the highest levels of judicial land conflicts during the Porfiriato. We will use municipal-level census, geo-referenced and bibliographical data on number and types of bureaucrats, levels of education, land suitability, distance to the railroad, loyalty of jefes políticos, among others.

Authors

• Juan F. Gonzalez Bertomeu, ITAM

• Maria Paula Saffon, UNAM