After the fall of the Porfirio Díaz regime, pueblo representatives sent hundreds of petitions to Pres. Francisco I. Madero, demanding that the executive branch of government assume the judiciary's ...control over their unresolved lawsuits against landowners, local bosses, and other villages. The Madero administration tried to use existing laws to settle land conflicts but always stopped short of invading judicial authority. In contrast, the two main agrarian reform programs undertaken in revolutionary Mexico-those implemented by Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza-subordinated the judiciary to the executive branch and thereby reshaped the postrevolutionary state with the support of villagers, who actively sided with one branch of government over another. In Matters of Justice Helga Baitenmann offers the first detailed account of the Zapatista and Carrancista agrarian reform programs as they were implemented in practice at the local level and then reconfigured in response to unanticipated inter- and intravillage conflicts. Ultimately, the Zapatista land reform, which sought to redistribute land throughout the country, remained an unfulfilled utopia. In contrast, Carrancista laws, intended to resolve quickly an urgent problem in a time of war, had lasting effects on the legal rights of millions of land beneficiaries and accidentally became the pillar of a program that redistributed about half the national territory.
Este trabajo propone entender la reforma agraria como un reajuste de las facultades y competencias entre los poderes Ejecutivo y Judicial. A pesar de que en el siglo XIX los representantes de los ...pueblos y los gobiernos de los estados frecuentemente trataron de resolver los conflictos por las tierras de los pueblos fuera de los costosos y dilatados tribunales, el Poder Judicial defendió exitosamente su jurisdicción sobre asuntos contenciosos. Durante el maderismo, la Secretaría de Fomento intentó ampliar su esfera administrativa para resolver las demandas revolucionarias; pero el Poder Judicial continuó defendiendo el principio de la división de poderes entre los órganos del Estado. Cuando Venustiano Carranza firmó una ley agraria en medio de una guerra civil en la que había desconocido al Poder Judicial, permitió al Ejecutivo ejercer la justicia fuera de los tribunales, al transformar los juicios reivindicativos en restituciones agrarias. Más aún, las primeras dos supremas cortes revolucionarias legitimaron este poder extraordinario del Ejecutivo. Esta perspectiva permite revalorar una serie de suposiciones que se han aceptado sin cuestionar sobre los orígenes de la reforma agraria mexicana, así como sobre los poderes extraordinarios del poder Ejecutivo federal. This article interprets Mexico's revolutionary agrarian reform as a rearrangement of the balance of power between the executive and judicial branches of government in which village representatives played a key role. In the nineteenth century, when villagers were unable to resolve their land conflicts in the courts, they often asked the executive to intervene. However, the judiciary successfully defended its authority over contentious land matters. The same dynamic played out during Francisco I. Madero's government, when pueblo representatives assumed that the Ministry of Development would take over land and settle boundary disputes, but the judiciary continued to defend the constitutional separation of powers. Yet the existing balance of power changed radically when Venustiano Carranza, in the middle of a civil war during which he shut down the judiciary, signed an agrarian law that allowed the executive to appropriate court functions. The first two reinstated Supreme Courts subsequently gave up some of the prerogatives that constitutionally belonged to the judiciary. This analysis reevaluates prevailing understandings of Mexican agrarian law and the origins of the federal executive's extraordinary twentieth-century powers.
Este trabajo propone entender la reforma agraria como un reajuste de las facultades y competencias entre los poderes Ejecutivo y Judicial. A pesar de que en el siglo XIX los representantes de los ...pueblos y los gobiernos de los estados frecuentemente trataron de resolver los conflictos por las tierras de los pueblos fuera de los costosos y dilatados tribunales, el Poder Judicial defendió exitosamente su jurisdicción sobre asuntos contenciosos. Durante el maderismo, la Secretaría de Fomento intentó ampliar su esfera administrativa para resolver las demandas revolucionarias; pero el Poder Judicial continuó defendiendo el principio de la división de poderes entre los órganos del Estado. Cuando Venustiano Carranza firmó una ley agraria en medio de una guerra civil en la que había desconocido al Poder Judicial, permitió al Ejecutivo ejercer la justicia fuera de los tribunales, al transformar los juicios reivindicativos en restituciones agrarias. Más aún, las primeras dos supremas cortes revolucionarias legitimaron este poder extraordinario del Ejecutivo. Esta perspectiva permite revalorar una serie de suposiciones que se han aceptado sin cuestionar sobre los orígenes de la reforma agraria mexicana, así como sobre los poderes extraordinarios del poder Ejecutivo federal.//This article interprets Mexico's revolutionary agrarian reform as a rearrangement of the balance of power between the executive and judicial branches of government in which village representatives played a key role. In the nineteenth century, when villagers were unable to resolve their land conflicts in the courts, they often asked the executive to intervene. However, the judiciary successfully defended its authority over contentious land matters. The same dynamic played out during Francisco I. Madero's government, when pueblo representatives assumed that the Ministry of development would take over land and settle boundary disputes, but the judiciary continued to defend the constitutional separation of powers. Yet the existing balance of power changed radically when Venustiano Carranza, in the middle of a civil war during which he shut down the judiciary, signed an agrarian law that allowed the executive to appropriate court functions. The first two reinstated Supreme Courts subsequently gave up some of the prerogatives that constitutionally belonged to the judiciary. This analysis reevaluates prevailing understandings of Mexican agrarian law and the origins of the federal executive's extraordinary twentieth-century powers.
With the Zapatistas conducting repartos in Morelos and in parts of neighboring states, and with several Constitutionalist generals and governors implementing their own reforms, Venustiano Carranza ...was compelled by circumstances to come up with his own land reform program. A landowner himself, Carranza rejected far-reaching redistributive initiatives based on the expropriation of large landed properties (latifundios). Instead, in early 1915 Carranza signed Finance Minister Luis Cabrera’s law, which focused more narrowly on pueblo land and water restitutions and grants for subsistence agriculture. Despite Cabrera’s earlier insistence on avoiding the revindication of usurped pueblo lands, the 6 January 1915 law granted
At the Constitutional Convention called by Carranza in Querétaro (20 November 1916 to 31 January 1917), the delegates in charge of writing article 27 of the 1917 Constitution incorporated the 6 ...January 1915 law into its provisions. Therefore, when Congress elected a new Supreme Court in 1917, thereby reopening amparo proceedings nationwide, the cna (now under the Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento, or Ministry of Agriculture and Development) had already assumed authority over restitution claims and land expropriations for dotaciones. Despite having for many decades protected their authority over contentious property matters, the justices of the reinstated Supreme Court fully
As thousands of villagers throughout Mexico were taking advantage of the fall of the Díaz regime to file land claims with the de la Barra and Madero governments, in Morelos a revolutionary movement ...under Emiliano Zapata’s leadership allowed pueblo representatives with colonial land and water titles to take back their usurped lands immediately. In the early years, military chiefs acting as first-instance judges provisionally restituted pueblo lands. Later, in response to complaints about favoritism and abuse of power, the General Headquarters of the Liberating Army of the South and Center (henceforth General Headquarters) became the highest judicial authority ruling on
Epilogue Helga Baitenmann
Matters of Justice,
05/2020
Book Chapter
After Zapata’s assassination in 1919, the Obregón administration tried to unite warring factions by promoting the idea that all sides were fighting for the same agrarian ideals. Other political ...leaders followed suit. At the first Agrarian Congress in 1923, Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama (the Zapatista delegate to the Aguascalientes Convention) stated that President Obregón was “the executor of the thought of Emiliano Zapata.”¹ A year later, at a ceremony held on the fifth anniversary of Zapata’s death, “several people spoke, including one who asked those listening to be thankful that they had an honest politician in Calles, who would
Introduction Helga Baitenmann
Matters of Justice,
05/2020
Book Chapter
Studies of land reform in twentieth-century Mexico tend to project onto the past concepts that were created in the 1930s and 1940s, bestowing the early revolutionary agrarian reforms with meanings ...they did not have. This book is a study of the two main agrarian reform programs in revolutionary Mexico—the Zapatista and the Constitutionalist projects— as they were implemented in practice at the local level and then reconfigured in response to unanticipated inter-and intravillage conflicts.¹ What archival documents show is that neither of these agrarian projects intended to create what we now know as the twentieth-century ejido—that is, population
Two of the many legends about the Porfiriato are seemingly contradictory: some critics of the regime decried that pueblo representatives lost their ability to take their land and water claims to ...court, while others argued that pueblos that took their claims to court usually lost because judges were corrupt and biased in favor of landowners. This chapter shows that although many pueblos (as civil corporations) did lose their right to own land with the Liberal reforms of the 1850s and the Constitution of 1857, and, on this basis, judges sometimes denied pueblos juridical standing (the right to take their claims
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