48% of Mexico’s Ejidos Lack Access to Banks or Federal Support

ByAlexia Villaseñor

This article by Alexia Villaseñor originally appeared in the April 13, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

Although ejidos and communities in Mexico represent 50.7 percent of the territory, with 32,266 agrarian centers, there is a backlog in this area, since only 48 percent of them have updated their representative bodies, which is a limitation, since they cannot carry out procedures or request any support from federal agencies to exploit their forests or open a bank account or obtain their federal taxpayer registration, says Arturo García Jiménez, advisor to the National Coordinator of Ejidos and Communities.

For him, the agrarian backlog faces great challenges that “require a change of course” to return the land to those who have been dispossessed and to put locks on the legal elements that gave rise to the thefts.

It is “worrying,” he says, that just over 30 years after the reform of Article 27 of the Constitution and the promulgation of the Agrarian Law, the exploitation of private interests, corruption, lack of public funds, institutional disorganization, intermediation and marginalization have disrupted the organic life of these entities.

In an interview with this media outlet, he emphasizes that the ejidos and communities are home to the country’s biodiversity, where forests, water sources from which rivers originate, mines, beaches, among other natural resources abound, and on which 5.5 million ejido members or rights holders, along with their respective families, depend.

Photo: Jay Watts

Key Factors in the Lag

The agronomist from the University of Chapingo identifies several key challenges of the agricultural lag in the country, which are added to the need to update representative bodies.

One of them is the renewal of registers, since of the 8,764 requests for purging registers received by the National Agrarian Registry (27 percent of the total number of agrarian communities in the country), only 1,589 have been updated, that is, 4.9 percent.

Poorly Drafted Statues

In addition, only 25 percent have prepared or renewed the internal regulations or communal statute, but, he laments, most are poorly done because they are based on templates and do not have the participation of the communities.

The final challenge is the succession list, where 64 percent of the ejido members have updated their list of heirs, which will prevent future problems.

He emphasizes that among the consequences of the Agrarian Law, enacted in 1992 by then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, was the privatization of land. While this mechanism allowed ejido members to obtain certificates guaranteeing full ownership of their property, it also allowed them to sell or rent it.

This led to ejido farmers being able to rent their land to national and foreign businessmen through mining concessions, forestry operations, contract farming, and carbon capture. However, when the natural resource runs out, generating large amounts of pollution, “those who rent it go somewhere else and leave everything poisoned, without trees,” he says.

On the anniversary of the death of General Emiliano Zapata, who started the agrarian revolution and was assassinated on April 10, 1919, García laments that there is no coordinated response from the federal government to combat the backlog, and that the agencies in charge of resolving this problem (Attorney General’s Office, Registry and Unitary Agrarian Courts) “have a smaller budget.”

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