Article 27: The One Constitutional Article Every Foreign Buyer in Mexico Lives Under

Every article we've published — on ejido land, on the fideicomiso, on water concessions, on the Bacalar case, on who owns the beach — has been, without saying so, an article about a single provision: Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917. It is one of the longest constitutional articles in the world, it was written in the middle of a revolution fought substantially over land, and it is the operating system underneath every property decision you will ever make in Mexico.

This piece maps it — clause by clause, in plain English — and shows how each clause becomes the Agrarian Law rules we apply every week. If you read only one technical article on this site, make it this one.

The founding move: the Nation owns first

Article 27 opens with the sentence that makes Mexican property law unlike Anglo-American property law:

Read the sequence: the Nation owns first; private property derives from it. Your title — anyone's title — is not a natural fact the State recognizes; it is a transmission the Nation made and can condition. Everything else in the article is the working-out of that premise:

• Expropriation (second paragraph): private property can be taken "only for reasons of public utility and by means of compensation." This is the clause that powers everything from highway takings to the INSUS regularizations we've written about — because Article 93, section V of the Agrarian Law plugs into it by declaring land-tenure regularization a public utility.
• The power to impose "modalities" (third paragraph): the Nation may at all times impose on private property the modalities dictated by the public interest — the constitutional root of zoning, environmental restriction, and land-use law.
• Direct dominion over the subsoil (fourth and sixth paragraphs): minerals and hydrocarbons never leave the Nation; private parties get concessions, never ownership. Buying a ranch does not buy the silver under it.
• National waters (fifth paragraph): the waters are the Nation's, usable by private parties only through concessions granted by the Federal Executive — the constitutional basis of the entire CONAGUA system, the concession titles, and the 2026 regularization window we covered this month.

Fraction I: why the fideicomiso exists

The article then descends into numbered fractions. The first is the one every foreign reader has already met, knowingly or not:

That final sentence is the restricted zone — and the reason the fideicomiso was engineered: a Mexican bank holds title inside the strip, the foreigner holds every beneficial right. Not a loophole; the constitutional design working as intended.

Fraction VII: the agrarian heart

Now the fraction that our practice lives in — and that the Bacalar buyers never heard about:

Unpack what that constitutional language does:

1. The ejido is a legal person. Not a cooperative, not a neighborhood — a constitutional subject that owns its land. Individual members hold derived rights; the community holds the land.
2. Its land is constitutionally protected — which is why the Agrarian Law's Article 74 can make common-use land inalienable, imprescriptible and unattachable, and why a private contract "selling" it isn't merely risky but void: the statute is executing a constitutional protection.
3. The asamblea's supremacy and the internal organs (comisariado, vigilance council) flow from this fraction's mandate that the law respect and strengthen community life — the reason no individual member, however friendly, can sell what belongs to the body.

Fraction VII is also where the 1992 reform — the most important agrarian event since 1917 — did its work. Before 1992, ejido land was untouchable, full stop, and the State was obligated to keep distributing land (the reparto agrario). The 1992 amendment ended the reparto, and authorized — under strict community procedures — what had been unthinkable: ejidos adopting dominio pleno (converting parcels to private property, today's Agrarian Law Articles 81–82) and associating with private capital, including contributing common-use land to companies (today's Article 75). Every legitimate route from ejido land to private ownership that we describe in The Ejido Trap was born in that reform — and every fraudulent shortcut pretends the reform said more than it did.

Fractions XV and XIX: the guardrails and the courts

Two more fractions complete the system a buyer actually touches:

• Fraction XV prohibits the latifundio (large estates) and defines the protected small property (pequeña propiedad) — the hectare limits (100 irrigated hectares as the base unit, with equivalencies for other land classes and higher caps for certain crops and livestock land) that still shape how much land any one owner, including your seller, may lawfully hold.
• Fraction XIX creates agrarian justice: federal agrarian tribunals with full autonomy and jurisdiction, and the State's obligation of expeditious justice for land tenure. This is why ejido disputes don't go to ordinary civil courts — they live before the Tribunales Agrarios (the specialized forum where our litigation practice appears), with the Procuraduría Agraria as the social advocate.

The map, in one table

Why this matters to you (the honest close)

Foreign buyers get hurt in Mexico when they assume property is a universal language. It isn't. Mexican property law starts from a different first principle — the Nation owns first — and one century-old article distributes everything downstream from it: who may own, where, how much, what can never be owned at all, and which court hears the fight. None of the rules that surprise foreigners are improvisations. They are Article 27, executing.

Which is exactly why they can be navigated. The article is long, but it is written down — and a deal checked against it holds. That check is our work.

Sources: Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos — Cámara de Diputados (current consolidated text) · Agrarian Law (Ley Agraria) arts. 74–75, 80–82, 93–94, 117–124 · DOF Oct 28, 2025 decree (official quotation of Art. 27 ¶¶5–6 on national waters).

Constitutional and statutory quotations are unofficial translations with excerpts; the Spanish originals control. This article provides legal information, not legal advice; no attorney-client relationship is created by reading it. © 2026 Terra Firma Attorneys at Law · terrafirma.law