VERY SIMPLISTICALLY - The ejido land ownership concept inherently stopped Mexico from becoming a first world nation and reinforced its servitude to its northern colossus.Very basically, ejido means a conglomerate of people joined in a communal effort, owning common community property and small parcels of personal property. Aside from other socialistic endeavors, this particular effort had its roots in the promises of the Mexican revolution of 1917 representing a revolt against the amassment of land wealth by individual Mexican owners. Basically the idea was to confiscate large landholders lands and distribute it to landless peasants. At present estimates place ejido ownership on more than half of Mexico's arable land.
(the ejido system was and is fairly complex and I would suggest you study it before believing everything I say here.)
The ejido system was destined to fail primarily because of inheritance problems, whereby each original landowner, potentially, would be diminishing the original property to accommodate inheritors. Meanwhile ejido laws were changed so many times, that finally, the Mexican government surrendered, and permitted ejido holders to sell their property.
Nevertheless there are still thousands of ejidos owning thousands of hectares with a very limited number of ejiditarios (actual property owners) and many more disenfranchised family members or workers, working the ejido land in a more or less tenured system. Those landless ejido members have provided many of the illegal border crossers to the USA.
A less debated aspect of the creation of ejidos is their direct contribution to the ecological destruction of Mexico. After the Mexican government became stymied at giving away private property it had to attack the wealth of the public domain and began giving away unexplored areas.
The area of Los Tuxtlas was one of those victims, and starting in the early 1950's, thousands of land hungry peasants were assigned property rights in virgin forests.
The outcome is now painfully obvious with less than 10 per cent of the the original forest surface remaining in Los Tuxtlas. That is probably not much different than the development of Miami, Florida, USA.
EXCEPT, in this case the outcome was government instituted, and as of today, that outcome still obliges the Mexican government entities to support the mayhem it created, in areas more populated by tree rats than people, and each demanding basketball courts, health facilities, meeting halls and social welfare programs for population centers which a long time ago were wiped out in Texas and "other" first world places by the establishment of rural roads, capitalist market economy and the affordability of pickup trucks.
In Los Tuxtlas, the most obnoxious sign of the failure of this system is the condition of the Los Tuxtlas coast. Dozens of ejidos occupy this zone, each more intent than the other to fatten another cow. Meanwhile, municipal service is almost absent, the consolidated strength of the cattle industry has no outlet and it takes a day's travel to sell a cow. Tourism is nonexistent.
Of course, most individual properties, until lately, are extraordinarily fractured and economically dysfunctional on an early 20th century level, where milkers still think that electric milkers sicken their cows.
Meanwhile the area supports a relatively large, almost illiterate population, living on or near the Mexican minimum wage of less than 5 dollars a day, which, if you remember a previous comment, are clamoring for municipal and social services which at the current rate, may be provided in the next century.
