Mexican Constitution Research Articles

Indigenous Environmental Rights in Mexico: Was the 2001 Constitutional Reform Facilitated by International Law?

This article argues that internal affairs (namely, the 1994 EZLN armed indigenous uprising and the rise to power of the right-wing PAN party) had much more influence on the reform of Article 2 of the Mexican Constitution in 2001 than did international law. In effect, it points out the fact that although international treaties are legally binding, they do not always have effect on domestic legislation, as the latter may ignore or even contravene international regulations. In practical terms, this means that international law does not necessarily impact amendments made to national constitutions and laws. In reviewing the 2001 constitutional reform, we come to realize that this amendment had two major drawbacks. First, it failed to comply with international norms, since specific provisions established in the CBD and C169 were not fully respected. Second, it established a series of provisions that fail to allow indigenous peoples to fully exercise their environmental rights (in particular, access to natural resources). As a result, the Mexican authorities never adequately responded to many indigenous peoples’ claims based on the 1996 San Andrés Accords and Cocopa Law agreed upon with the Zapatistas.

El pensamiento ilustrado novohispano y la revolución de independencia

During the 17th century a new approach to reality originated in Europe: the Enlightenment, which elaborated its own theories about society, law and government, finally emerging in the late 18th and early 19th centuries into what is known today as the Bourgeois Liberal Revolution. This essay will assess the impact the Enlightenment had in 18th century Mexican intellectual circles, and how influential it was to the Mexican War of Independence, as well as to the incipient Mexican constitutionalism between the years 1810 and 1824.

Group Litigation Reaches Mexico: Revisiting Mexico's System of Collective Actions as a Vehicle to Ensure Efficient Implementation of Environmental Justice

This Note analyzes the decision of the Mexican legislature to allow for a system of group litigation to redress a particular set of environmentally based legal problems. The laws of Mexico, as they currently read, do not comport with the legislative intent of the authors of the legislation to allow for group litigation. This is primarily an effect of the economic incentives imposed by the new system of group litigation on institutional interests and corporate actors in Mexico. The argument advanced by this Note is that either judicial or legislative clarifications must be made to this legislation to effectuate the intent of the acts of the Mexican Congress. This may be achieved through Jurisprudencias, Ejecutorias, expansive judicial interpretation in the coming years, or through additional legislative amendments; all of which could provide additional parameters to ensure the unassailable environmental and constitutional rights of Mexican citizens. However, this Note advances the idea that the most effectual vehicle for implementing such change is through the introduction of additional pecuniary damages with regard to group litigation. In the coming years, the system of group litigation in Mexico is certain to come under heavy criticism and scrutiny from citizens, legal scholars and politicians alike. The arguments proposed herein must be addressed by the Mexican Congress to ensure that the environmental rights of citizens, guaranteed by the Mexican Constitution, are not subordinated to institutional economic interests.

Forest cover change and land tenure change in Mexico’s avocado region: Is community forestry related to reduced deforestation for high value crops?

Forest cover change in highland pine-oak forests of Michoacan, Mexico is due to a process of conversion of natural forests to avocado orchards. Privately-owned avocado orchards are found on land that was common forest before the 1992 Reform of the Mexican Constitution. We ask how forest cover change was facilitated by policy changes that affected land tenure rules and existing community forestry programs. We use a comparative case study of four communities, an analysis of forest cover change, and interviews and household surveys. Results show that 33.1% of forest cover was lost over a 16-year-period across the region. However, two forestry case study communities lost 7.2% and 15.1% of forest cover, while two adjacent non-forestry communities lost 86.5% and 92.4%, respectively. Interview data show that the Reform of Article 27 combined with the 1992 Forestry Law led to collapse of local governance, illegal division of common forests, and illegal logging in the two non-forestry communities.

Negotiating worlds: a young Mayan child developing literacy at home and at school in Mexico

In Mexico almost ten million people speak an indigenous language. Recognizing the pluralistic nature of the nation, the Mexican Constitution mandates bilingual‐intercultural education; in reality, however, the school system typically imposes the Spanish language and dominant culture on indigenous children. For these children their academic success comes at the expense of their own language and culture. In this article we share the case study of Yadira, a Mayan girl living in Yucatan, Mexico, whom we met when she was in first grade. Using ethnographic tools we document the different literacy events in which Yadira participates at home and at school, and how these shape her understandings about print. We discuss how Yadira negotiates between two worlds using informal sources of Maya and Spanish to construct meaning from written language.

The IDIEZ Project: A Model for Indigenous Language Revitalization in Higher Education

The IDIEZ Project:A Model for Indigenous Language Revitalization in Higher Education John Sullivan (bio) The Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology (IDIEZ) is a Mexican nonprofit corporation founded in 2002 and associated with the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. In cooperation with Macehualli Educational Research, our nonprofit corporation in the United States, we provide scholarships to indigenous college students who are native speakers of Nahuatl, train them to work as teaching and research assistants, and involve them with Western scholars in collaborative projects designed to revitalize and develop their language and culture. This brief essay is divided into two parts. First, I would like to share a few anecdotes that mark in my mind fundamental moments in the development of our work. Second, I discuss a series of principles, in many cases emanating from the anecdotes, that guide our activities; they may be of use to other institutions of higher education that have academic programs for native speakers of indigenous languages. Important Moments In 1990 nine young Nahua students from the Mexican Huasteca region were invited by Antorcha Campesina, a Maoist political organization within the Partido Revolucionario Institutional, to attend high school in the city of Zacatecas and participate in the group's political activities. After graduating, the majority of them left Antorcha Campesina and continued their studies at the Zacatecas State University (UAZ), taking advantage of the institution's room and board scholarships for low-income students. More important, they began inviting friends and relatives [End Page 139] from back home to study in Zacatecas, creating a social network that to this day informally supports more than fifty indigenous high school and undergraduate students from the states of San Luis Potosí, Hidalgo, and Veracruz, as described by Angelina Belmontes Martínez (La migracion de indigenas nahuas de la Huasteca potosina, hidalguense y veracruzana que realizan estudios en la Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas [Zacatecas: Universidad Autónoma de Zactecas, 2002]). During the latter part of the 1990s I was working as a professor in the Humanities Division at the UAZ, teaching Hispanic literature courses and a workshop in classical Nahuatl. A colleague in the Economics Department, Rodolfo García Zamora, told me that he had two students who were native speakers of Nahuatl and asked me if I would like to meet them. I will never forget that meeting. Urbano Francisco Martínez, from the village of Chapulhuacanito, municipality of Tamazunchale, in the state of San Luis Potosí, and Delfina de la Cruz de la Cruz, from the village of Tepecxitla, municipality of Chicontepec, in the state of Veracruz, told me: "Nosotros casi no sabemos hablar náhuatl. Nuestros papás y nuestros abuelos sí lo hablan en la casa. Pero nosotros, no. Sólo entendemos un poco." (We don't know how to speak much Nahuatl. Our parents and grandparents do speak it at home. But we don't. We just understand a little.) Here were two indigenous college students denying a fact that I became aware of soon afterward: both were 100 percent fluent in the language and practiced all aspects of the culture. This policy of denial took many forms. I remember visiting the UAZ law school library searching for students to recruit into our program. Ofelia Cruz Morales, who is now a lawyer as well as a permanent teacher and researcher at IDIEZ, would turn her head and scrunch down into her seat, hoping I would not notice her. Every one of the students who has worked at IDIEZ has suffered systematic and continuous physical and/or psychological abuse coercing them to abandon their native language and culture. It does not matter what the Mexican Constitution says; it does not matter that there is a National Institute of Indigenous Languages; and it does not matter that there is a bilingual primary education system. The truth is that one of the goals of Mexican society and its institutions is to erase indigenous languages and cultures from the face of the earth. I began practicing conversational Nahuatl for one hour per day, first with Urbano and then with Delfina, paying them twenty pesos per [End Page 140] hour from my federal research stipend. We...

Los jueces de control en el sistema acusatorio. ¿Un nuevo órgano de control constitucional en México?

El autor propone la tesis de que, en términos de una interpretación lógica y sistemática del artículo 16 constitucional, párrafo décimo cuarto, los jueces de control en el sistema acusatorio en México, en su función de garantía, deben ser considerados como un nuevo mecanismo de control constitucional porque al custodiar derechos fundamentales de los indiciados, las víctimas u ofendidos, tales como la inviolabilidad de su domicilio, la dignidad humana y la reparación del daño, protegen no sólo esos derechos subjetivos sino la propia Constitución.

¿Se necesita una nueva Constitución en México? Algunas reflexiones y seis propuestas

En México se expedirá una nueva Constitución cuando la realidad política y la social lo requieran. Sin embargo, por el momento, no es necesario, ya que son más los aspectos negativos y peligrosos que los positivos, situación que nos llevarían a un serio riesgo de retroceso democrático. En todo caso, cuando se llegue el momento de expedir una nueva Constitución, debemos confiar en que se haga por la vía pacífica y como un proyecto pactado entre las principales fuerzas políticas, sometiendo el texto final a un referendo por parte del electorado. La Constitución de 1917 ha sido longeva debido, entre otras razones, a que no se ha dado una ruptura político social, su estructura fundamental ha sido aceptada mayormente por la sociedad, ha sabido evolucionar y cambiar a través de reformas constitucionales, y porque ha impulsado la paz social.

Los desafíos de la libertad: Transformación y crisis del liberalismo en Europa y América Latina

Writing in the 1930s, the Mexican philosopher Antonio Caso lamented the fact that individual rights, as the hallmark of the French Revolution, were being discarded in favor of increased state power. At the same time, Jorge Cuesta, in an attempt to vindicate Mexican constitutionalism, insisted that wherever antiliberalism dominated, one could observe an intellectual divorce between politics and high culture. Both figures, discussed by José Antonio Aguilar Rivera in a chapter on Mexican liberals, were emblematic of the time, as they attempted to propagate the values of liberalism while rejecting the excesses of democracy and distancing themselves from the more radical ideas of men such as Lázaro Cárdenas. As Mark Mazower stresses in The Dark Continent, the liberal politician was assaulted with revolutionary ideologies and the tactics of mass mobilization from both the Left and the Right in interwar Europe. Mazower argues that “Liberalism seemed too individualistic to cope with the demands of a more collectivist age” as new political programs arose which provided legitimate alternatives to nineteenth-century paradigms of constitutional governance. The edited collection Los desafíos de la libertad pushes forward similar claims, engaging with the multiple challenges faced by a generation of European and Latin American liberals from the turn of the century through the 1930s.Predominantly political in scope, the text offers exegesis of political theory and national historiographies as well as structural analysis of a wide range of countries from Italy and Portugal to Argentina and Mexico. The transformation of the state, the economy, and education, especially as witnessed by the foremost intellectuals of the epoch, occupies the majority of the 17 chapters. The editors begin by emphasizing that comparative historians, in moving away from insular national studies, have shown that fundamentally analogous processes of political development shaped fin-de-siècle Europe as well as Latin America. Thus nineteenth-century liberals’ distrust of the people vis-à-vis politics — what José Ortega y Gasset subsequently disparaged as the “rebellion of the masses” — frames much of this work. Even the novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, according to Scheherezade Pinilla Cañadas in the penultimate chapter, portrayed the people as an enigma, capable of horrible extremes. With the rise of social science and positivism, conservative liberals began to break with more radical interpretations of popular sovereignty as enshrined in the Constitution of 1812 in Spain or that of 1822 in Portugal. They embraced the notion that governance in an age of increasing specialization and bureaucratization must be the concern of a class of educated elites. Yet this was not a monolithic movement; a number of the contributors, including Dario Roldán and Rui Ramos, emphasize the plurality of liberalisms that appeared throughout the course of the nineteenth century, with influences ranging from Benthamite utilitarianism to the philosophies of Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville.While the first two chapters take a broadly comparative approach, more might have been done to draw out the connections between the national case studies that follow. For example, the authors that cover Italy, Portugal, and Chile note that liberalism has been considered a failure, because weak state institutions inhibited a successful transition to democracy in the first third of the twentieth century. This is precisely the argument that has dominated the literature on nineteenth-century Spain, yet it is not mentioned by way of comparison. Furthermore, liberals in Spain as well as Portugal manipulated elections by relying on corrupt local bosses (caciques) and excluding mass-based political parties. In Italy, Spain, and Portugal, the political balance of power rotated between conservative and progressive liberal parties with the complicity of the monarchy. However, these fraudulent systems, known as trasformismo in Italy, rotativismo in Portugal, and the turno pacífico in Spain, are not compared explicitly until chapter 12; earlier in the book, they are discussed separately by Renato Camurri, Ramos, and Javier Moreno Luzón. Because some authors focus on specific nations while others compare and contrast, facts and figures are repeated in many of the chapters.In reassessing George Dangerfield and the decline of liberalism in England, María Jesús González Hernández hints at the blasé attitudes Europeans exhibited toward their empires. Dangerfield famously claimed that the English, always in favor of peace, preferred their wars to be fought as far away as possible and in the name of God (he also was a misogynist). Yet no chapters are devoted to women or to discourses on gender and imperialism as corollaries to liberal thought. In order to recover different histories of liberalism, scholars such as James Dunkerley and Florencia Mallon suggest building upon an expanded theoretical framework and decentering high politics. Methodologically focused on the state, this volume nonetheless makes the case that historians should embrace a transnational perspective, just as their cosmopolitan intellectual forebears did in the midst of the manifold crises of the early twentieth century.

The Right to Health as the Unheralded Narrative of Health Care Reform

IN PASSING THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT, THE UNITED States took a giant, if partial, step toward joining other nations wherein the right to health constitutes an inalienable moral and legal right. Although not widely appreciated, the right of every person to enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health (the right to health for short) is not merely an abstract moral imperative. Rather, it is an established international legal precept still to be fully embraced in the United States. Even though the right to health was overshadowed during the health care debate by other narratives, such as insurance reform, cost control, and care delivery, this right remains a central if unheralded narrative of the Affordable Care Act and its legacy. What is this right that engenders these bold claims? It is an assertion of the responsibility of governments to strive for “the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.” It is an asseveration that governments will respect, protect, and fulfill the right to health by ensuring the availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality of the care required. It is an averment that governments will honor the tenets of accurate information, nondiscrimination and equality, and participation. It is an avouchment that governments will address the “underlying determinants of health” such as sound housing, clean water, and adequate nutrition, especially as these determinants apply to the needs of poor and other marginalized populations. As such, the right to health constitutes a concept broader than that represented by the right to health care, covering elements that the Affordable Care Act, with its focus on health care, addresses only in limited, although important, ways. The right to health—or more precisely, to health care—as a moral dictum is associated with Senator Edward Kennedy’s impassioned expression of hope “that every American— north, south, east, west, young, old—will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.” Others have echoed these sentiments, not least President Obama who framed last year’s health care debate as a core ethical and moral obligation. Americans appear to agree, evidenced by the very existence of and broad support for the Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP public safety net programs. Moreover, 72% of Americans strongly believe that health care should be considered a human right. The right to health is also a matter of international law, one drawing on the collective force of national constitutions, international and regional treaties, and other instruments. As such, the right to health is as established as the more familiar rights to freedom of expression and religion. Leading the way were British laws as early as 1802 triggered by the health threats of the Industrial Revolution, and the Mexican Constitution of 1843, which recognized the state’s role in public health. In 1925, Chile became the first nation to incorporate the right to health into its constitution. Now more than 100 countries boast a commitment to the right to health or health care in their constitutions. Beyond these national efforts, several critical global pacts incorporate the right to health. First among them was the constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO), which in 1946 identified the “enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health” as “one of the fundamental rights of every human being.” Two years later, the United Nation (UN) General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), article 25 of which guarantees the right to “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being . . . including food, clothing, housing and medical care.” Many international lawyers view the UDHR as creating a binding customary international law, including as an interpretation of the human rights commitments in the UN Charter, under which states have committed to the “universal observance of, and respect for, human rights.” In 1966, the UDHR was expanded upon by the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which asserts that signatory states recognize “the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.” It was against this backdrop that the UN Commission for Human Rights created the mandate for a Special Rapporteur on the right of every person to enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. The combined force of the

Cultural Heritage, Human Rights and Development: Coincidences, Ambiguities and Disagreements

Based on the analysis of two legal experiences that took place in Mexico and Peru, this article examines the way in which the development of the legal protection of cultural heritage is related to the concepts of cultural rights and sustainable development. On one hand, a recent reform to the Mexican Constitution, which acknowledged the access to cultural rights, imposes the need to clarify its definition and the way it should be articulated. On the other hand, Peru recently issued two laws in order to promote investments in public and private works, which shows us that many Governments do not understand that cultural heritage protection and sustainable development can be complementary.

Mexico’s Federal Law of Firearms and Explosives

This article explicates Mexico's constitutional right to arms and Mexico's main gun-control statute, the Federal Law of Firearms and Explosives (Ley Federal de Armas de Fuego y Explosivos). Along the way, the article notes various proposals to move U.S. gun laws in a Mexican direction. Part II of this article is an English translation of the Mexican constitution's guarantee of the right to arms, as well as predecessor versions of the guarantee. Part III explains the operation of Mexico's gun-control system and provides some historical and statistical information about gun ownership and gun smuggling in Mexico. Part IV describes some of the past and present cross-border trade in arms between the United States and Mexico and potential legal ramifications. The Appendix provides a translation of the Mexican federal government's current gun-control statute. The Appendix also offers some explanatory footnotes to the statute when appropriate for better understanding. Language: en

Annex E

Strengthening local auditing: The technical capability and independence of state legislature audit organs is to be strengthened (head audit officers are to be appointed by a majority of two-thirds of legislators and for seven-year terms). State audit organs are also bound by principles of impartiality and legality (Mexican Constitution, Articles 116 and 122).

Tenure, tourism and timber in Quintana Roo, Mexico: Land tenure changes in forest Ejidos after agrarian reforms

We present and apply an analytical framework for understanding land tenure change in the wake of radical land policy modifications in Mexico’s communal tenure system. We posit that the changes in land tenure vary as a result of a complex interplay of drivers external and internal to the land tenure unit. Using interview and socio-economic data, we apply this framework to six ejidos in Quintana Roo, Mexico in order to understand the extent to which these ejidos have shifted towards private individual property as promoted in the 1992 amendment of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. In our case study ejidos, we conclude that external factors, including community forestry, tourism, and urbanization, have synergized with factors internal to the ejido, such as ethnicity, livelihood strategies, migration, and attitudes, leading to different trajectories in land tenure arrangements.

Tenure, tourism and timber in Quintana Roo, Mexico: Land tenure changes in forest Ejidos after agrarian reforms

We present and apply an analytical framework for understanding land tenure change in the wake of radical land policy modifications in Mexico’s communal tenure system. We posit that the changes in land tenure vary as a result of a complex interplay of drivers external and internal to the land tenure unit. Using interview and socio-economic data, we apply this framework to six ejidos in Quintana Roo, Mexico in order to understand the extent to which these ejidos have shifted towards private individual property as promoted in the 1992 amendment of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. In our case study ejidos, we conclude that external factors, including community forestry, tourism, and urbanization, have synergized with factors internal to the ejido, such as ethnicity, livelihood strategies, migration, and attitudes, leading to different trajectories in land tenure arrangements.

Forensic Investigations of Torture and Ill-Treatment in Mexico

Torture and ill-treatment have been documented in Mexico,1 despite the clear prohibition of these practices under international treaties ratified by Mexico2and the Mexican Constitution.3 Torture is...

El problema cualitativo en la producción del hábitat popular en la Ciudad de México: análisis cualitativo de la vivienda popular

The 63% of the housing built in the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico, has been made the inhabitants themselves, who without any support of State and with limited resources, have built up over decades outside the law. In order to solve this problem, in the nineties changes to the Mexican Constitution were made by the government, to involve the private sector in the construction and financing of Social Housing and therefore be able to satisfy the increasing demand. After ten years that these changes were made, the residents remains being the main actor, if no longer in the construction of their habitat itself, in the continuing suitability and transformation. This coupled with the high selfhelp building housing, not only denotes an action that continues to be conducted outside law, but the lack of quality of housing produced by the formal sector. Despite the fact that one of the goals by the Mexican Government has been fulfilled: meet the demand in terms of quantity, the quality of the formal production is questionable in the absence of a adaptation between the housing structures and characteristics of those living. Being the resident the main actor in the production of low-income housing, either produced by real state companies or self-help produced by the same users, this paper shows the results of an analysis of habitability of social housing made in Mexico City, where we compared both types of production, from the view of those who inhabit and consistently adapt their homes.

The Rise, Fall, and Reconfiguration of the Mexican Ejido*

ABSTRACT. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910 the Mexican federal government created a communal resource‐holding institution, the ejido, to redress long‐standing land‐tenure inequality. Between the 1930s and the late 1970s, the period of active redistribution of federalized and previously private resources, half of Mexico's entire area was transferred to the ejido sector. Local ejidos became the driving political and economic force at the municipio level for agrarian reform, redistributing local power and affirming the national stamp of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the dominant national party of the twentieth century. Although the 1992–1993 reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution prohibited any future expansion of communal lands and allowed privatization of communal resources, few widespread privatization schemes have taken hold in the vast majority of ejidos. In this article I provide examples of this new communal framework and its implications, with illustrations based on fieldwork in the states of Guanajuato and Sonora.

Políticas públicas, estructuras del Estado y defensa del derecho a la protección de la salud

Not always public policies for the advocacy of citizen rights meet their goal, among other things, because between their formulation and their implementation there is a lack of appropriate structures to generate, articulate and execute these policies. This has been the case of Mexico regarding the advocacy of the rights of non smokers. Very few has been achieved in this matter in the past. This article lists some of the potential causes of the lack of implementation of public policies. At the same time, explores the highly dynamic nature of the health care system at the present and towards the future. The magnitude of the challenges faced by the health care system requires concerted actions of many actors, not only from the very health care system but also from outside. Thus, public policies have to be considered not just at the governmental level but at the state level. Therefore, the main argument of this paper is that given the need to respond to complex challenges to protect the health of the population and their rights in a very complex context, there is a need to formulate and implement state policies that require the intervention of the appropriate state structures to make sure that the design and execution leads to the expected achievements. One such structure at the state level, among others, is the General Health Council, an organization established in 1841, that was incorporated within the Mexican Constitution in 1917, depending directly from the President of Mexico as Head of State. This Council has been reinforced to improve its assigned role to better participate, along other state structures, in the formulation and implementation of public policies such as those for the advocacy of citizen rights.

The Logic of Liberalism: Lorenzo de Zavala's Transcultural Politics

In 1830 a Mexican aristocrat and politician who helped draft the Mexican Constitution of 1824 and would later go on to assist in the creation of the 1836 Texas Constitution traveled to the United States, a full year before Alexis de Tocqueville's now-famous journey. Lorenzo de Zavala's voyage began in New Orleans and led him north through Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, reaching its longitudinal apex in Quebec before returning south from New York to Philadelphia and Washington, DC. His published account of the journey Viage a los Estados-Unidos del Norte de America (Journey to the United States of North America) (1834), has two purposes, his preface tells us. First, the narrative is intended to serve as a biography of sorts, as he had previously offered to publish [his] memoirs (1). Second, and more importantly, the text is intended to give useful in politics to the citizens of Mexico, instructing them in the manners, customs, habits and government of the United States, a country whose social and political institutions Mexicans have heretofore copied so servilely (1). The tension between Zavala's desire to impart useful lessons yet not have those learned too well, too servilely, implies a search for a foundational politics: a liberal praxis that emerges not from the US, but also not necessarily (as we will see) from Mexico. And while Zavala's text does engage political topics and explore the possibility of a transamerican liberalism, it does so in a very specific context. Despite its stated goal of conferring useful in politics, the work is first and foremost a travel narra-