91

The objective of this paper is to examine the political dimension of land dispossession in its twofold expression: the decisions that inform action, and its implementation in the exercise of government power. To this end, the article presents the measures taken by the Mexican government to support direct foreign investment, thus making communal land available to the free market. The communal land of “Caleras de Ameche,” in the state of Guanajuato, was chosen to analyse the Manichean use of legal instruments and of other mechanisms of duress, for a takeover of communal land by the automotive manufacturer Toyota, and for local actors to benefit undeservedly from the value added of communal land. The dynamic observed points to the fact that the political regime is characterised by a social relation of “coercive redistribution” of the land in which government officials carry out expropriations based on different criteria for communal land owners and private ones. Property developers resort to duress to access the land. Government officials appraise the land differentially, and pay for it according to the place of the actors within the social structure. Finally, the foreign corporation sets its terms of investment for the local government to comply with. Acts of resistance on the part of communal land owners have been observed, yet the owners have proved ambivalent towards formal institutional pressure, and have accepted the commodification of their land.