Cortina, Sergio. 2006. "Survival of the Forests and the Common Property in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico." Presented at "Survival of the Commons: Mounting Challenges and New Realities," the Eleventh Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Bali, Indonesia, June 19-23, 2006.

Abstract

"We studied the nine municipalities that form the higher zone of the region. In these municipalities there are 39 ejidos and 11 agrarian communities that represent 73% of the area. The rest of the area is formed by private properties. Ejidos and agrarian communities are pieces of land given by government to groups of peasants after the Mexican 1910 Revolution (Alix-Garcia et al., 2005). In the rest of this paper we only will use the term ejidos for both ejidos and agrarian communities given that the differences between these two types of property are not significant for the purposes of this study. The main distribution of land to the peasants took place from 1937 to 1944, but it continued until the early nineties. In many of the ejidos, it has not been determined if this happened in all of them, the government distributed the land in two different types of property rights: individual parcels and common land. The former were to be used in agricultural production and the later to be used for livestock and forestry. Some ejidos have kept the common land until now, but some have transformed the commons in individual parcels. So, the land under common property varies widely among ejidos, from 0 to 100%. Ejidos are the units of analysis of this work."