doing justice outside the courts: from 19th century demands to the reparations of the agrarian reform

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.