As the main consumer of palm oil in Latin America, the Mexican food industry has led the government to allocate millions of dollars to implement this monoculture in order to meet domestic demand.
In the shadow of oil palms (Elaeis guineensis), only agribusinesses, socio-environmental conflicts, and megaprojects thrive. For seventy-four years, right-wing, centrist, and left-wing governments have spent billions of pesos of public funds to promote oil palm monoculture among farmers and finance industrialists. In the same territory, infrastructure projects such as the Maya Train, intermodal terminals, and the Interoceanic Train are being developed, built, and managed by the army and navy.
The stakes are high: the estimated market value of palm oil in Mexico is US$2.3 billion annually 1. To promote the project almost thirty years ago, “the government convinced small and large producers, the farmers, to plant oil palms, providing them with nurseries and all the necessary conditions,” explains Gustavo Castro of the Mesoamerican Network Against Oil Palms. Obviously, all this was done with public money.
Bermunda Bautista, a farmer from Campeche who has devoted the last 24 of her 70 years to African palm trees, began growing them knowing only that they produce oil. However, like most of those who grow and consume them, she is unaware that in Mexico, 92% of the oil is used by the food industry in snacks, cookies, chocolates, dairy products—including industrial baby formulas—and almost anything that contains “vegetable oil.” She also doesn’t know that 7% is used for agrofuels, while 1%2 goes to the chemical industry, in products such as soaps, shampoos, and detergents.
Before you started planting it, had you ever seen an oil palm or at least the fruit? I ask her.
No, I didn’t even know what they were. They just showed us some videos, I don’t know if they were from Poza Rica or Costa Rica…
Then they gave them the plants and some money for planting (50%), although Bermunda clarifies that “it was no gift!” because they provided the land and the labor, in addition to the initial investment to rent the machinery and prepare the land. In response, Gustavo Castro asks: “Do you think that without all this government support, without all these state policies, oil palm cultivation would be so profitable, if it is profitable at all?” The short answer is no. At least not for all the people who are currently involved in oil palm cultivation.
Thanks to taxpayer money, converted into government spending, and the work of rural communities, since 2010 oil palm cultivation in Mexico has increased at an average rate of 6,174 hectares per year (equivalent to the entire sunflower crop in the country), reaching 129,838.85 hectares in 202334 reaching 129,838.85 hectares, still far behind countries such as Honduras or Guatemala, but enough to rank as the sixth largest producer on the continent.
Also known as African palm, it ranks twenty-fourth among the two hundred and ninety different types of crops in Mexico, although in terms of harvest value it ranks forty-third. By way of comparison, papaya, with just 21,000 hectares planted, has a value that doubles that of palm. Even blueberries, with just 6,000 hectares planted, generated an additional 1 billion Mexican pesos (US$18.7 million).
This shows us that although palm oil as an industrial product generates millions in profits for business owners, those who produce the raw material could reap greater benefits from other crops. In Mexico, domestically produced palm oil is destined for the domestic market5, which is also the main importer of palm oil in Latin America, purchasing 44% more from abroad than the second largest importer, Brazil.
As José Luis Pérez Morett, president of Grupo Oleomex—the largest palm oil conglomerate in Mexico—made clear: “We are major suppliers to the country’s leading food industry, including Bimbo, Sabritas, Nestlé, Unilever, Procter, Colgate, among many others, each of which uses a large percentage of palm oil in its products.6”
The above is a quote from 2012, during the inauguration of one of the company’s four palm oil extraction plants. The event was attended by the then president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón—from the conservative National Action Party—and the then governor of Tabasco, Andrés Granier Melo—from the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party 7. In their speeches, both praised the “benefits” of palm oil and pledged to increase its production.
Nine years later, in 2021, the then governor of the state of Tabasco—and in 2025 a powerful senator for Morena, the ruling and self-defined left-wing party—assured during the inauguration of the Center for Research and Innovation for the Sustainability of Oil Palm (CIISPALMA) that he would turn his state into the “palm capital of Latin America. 8” This speech contradicted that of his best friend and president of the Republic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), who wanted to remove support for palm growers and separate political power from economic power.
The construction of this center involved an expenditure of 54 million Mexican pesos, of which MX$41,694,751.60 9(US$2 million)11 were federal funds from the Joint Fund of the National Council for Science and Technology. The rest was covered by the state government and the Mexican Oil Palm Federation (FemexPalma), which brings together the palm oil business community, to whom CIISPALMA was handed over for operation. On three occasions, I requested access and an interview to find out what the center’s work and public utility consist of, but without success.
Silent invasion
Despite the figures and the much that has been written about its negative effects, opposition to oil palm in Mexico is merely symbolic. “As it is not mining, nor a dam, nor an emblematic case of struggle to defend the land, oil palm has been establishing much more territorial control as plantations increase,” explains Claudia Ramos Guillén, from the collective Reentramados para la Vida Defendiendo Territorio, a group of women who work to strengthen grassroots movements and organizations in Chiapas, where 46% of palm plantations are located.
The growth that Guillén denounces is not silent, but rather deafening. This is because it has been openly announced and publicized by businesspeople, politicians, diplomats, and international organizations. It can be found in official documents, statistics, videos, work reports, speeches, and projects. It has received millions in funding from the Mexican government and international cooperation. It is backed by intense lobbying from various universities, the media, and business and trade organizations. However, few people seem to pay attention to the social, environmental, and territorial problems it entails.
In the National Agricultural Plan 2017 to 2030, the then Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries, and Food (SAGARPA) identified that Mexico had approximately 9 million hectares of land suitable for palm cultivation. But upon reviewing the data, a 2019 cartographic study coordinated by Cristina de la Vega-Leinert and Daniel Sandoval12, based on the same strategic regions defined by SAGARPA and the INIFAP methodology13, calculated a total area of approximately 14.2 million hectares. This area exceeds that of at least 60 countries on the planet.
The oil palm originates in West and Central Africa, especially in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, it was not until the 20th century, as part of the process of colonial and capitalist expansion, that large-scale cultivation developed in Indonesia and Malaysia, where 80% of commercial plantations are concentrated.
In Mexico, it has been planted mainly in the coastal area of Chiapas, but currently the area of greatest expansion is in a corridor that links the southern part of the Tuxtlas region in Veracruz with the Palenque region in Chiapas and crosses Tabasco, reaching the state of Campeche 14, 50 km from the border with Guatemala. It is precisely in this border region that the Central American palm belt begins, extending beyond the department of Colón in Honduras.
On the Mexican side, this corridor coincides with two of former President López Obrador’s flagship projects: the Mayan Train and the Interoceanic Train. The former connects, among other points, Palenque with Puerto Progreso in the state of Yucatán, while the FA section of the Interoceanic Railway runs from Palenque to the port of Coatzacoalcos in the heart of the Gulf of Mexico, where one of the country’s palm oil refineries is also located.
[map of extraction plants and train link at the end of the document]
“And what is this train going to carry?” asks Sara López González of the Civil Resistance of Candelaria and the Regional Indigenous and Popular Council of Xpujil, knowing the answer. “That’s why the pig farms in Yucatán, genetically modified soybeans, sorghum, everything that comes from the Gulf [of Mexico], gasoline, but it also includes African palm, which is one of the major monocultures here between Campeche, Chiapas, and Tabasco,” says the activist.
Initially, President López Obrador assured that the train would be for passengers and would boost economic activity in the area. However, the documents for the mega-project make it clear that 70% of the train’s revenue will come from freight transport: 33% for food and perishables, 26% for fuels, and 11% for the construction industry17”
In December 2024, during her daily press conference, President Claudia Sheinbaum—who refers to her government as the “second floor of the fourth transformation” initiated by her predecessor—spoke about trains. In her speech, the president announced18 the progress and projects of the Secretary of the Navy20 to improve various commercial ports such as Coatzacoalcos and Progreso—which in that year increased its cargo of palm oil and palm stearin21 by 31%—as well as the development of the Interoceanic Corridor.
“In Palenque, the Mayan Train will be a cargo terminal, an intermodal cargo terminal, and the Transístmico will connect to that terminal so as not to have double infrastructure; we are going to work together with Mayan Train to use that terminal, and from there, we will deliver the cargo to Mayan Train and they will take it away,” explained Secretary of the Navy Vice Admiral Raymundo Pedro Morales Ángeles.
In contrast to the government’s position, Juanita from the Tsiji’bä Bij collective, a Mayan organization that opposed the construction of the train and, among other actions, works with farmers to inform them of the negative aspects of planting African palm, warns: “That train is for the benefit of the dominant capitalist system, which is only interested in accumulating more wealth regardless of the impact on Mother Earth, and it was built by buying the consciences of our ejidal authorities, and by simulating consultations.”
Without conflicts
Candelaria is the fifth station on the Maya Train from Palenque. There, the heat is unbearable at midday, above 40°C with high humidity, which makes it feel suffocating. There, in the middle of a jungle region, two large navigable rivers, the Candelaria and the Caribbean, flow into the Laguna de Términos, along with ten smaller rivers, lakes, and wetlands. It is a tropical environment in the full sense of the word. That is why Candelaria is a favorite resort for local tourists and the ideal place to plant oil palms, which require large amounts of water.
Between 2003 and 2022, the Candelaria forest was deforested at a rate of 10.68 hectares per day (according to figures from the National Forestry Commission). Two of the main causes22 were public policies: oil palm monoculture and the construction of the Mayan Train. According to Global Forest Watch, between 2001 and 2023, Campeche was the state with the greatest loss of tree cover24 and communities, 42% is privately owned, and the rest is distributed among national lands, agricultural and livestock colonies, among others. This figure has been declining since 1992, when the first neoliberal government amended the Constitution to allow ejido members to obtain full ownership (private property) of their plots, leaving them at the mercy of urban developers, agro-industrialists, and land grabbers.
For years, it was assumed that ownership of oil palm plantations was evenly distributed, meaning that most were socially owned, and apparently this was the case initially. However, a 2024 study led by Antonio Castellanos Navarrete25 asserts that 63% of the land planted with African palm is now in private hands, which according to the study may include family farmers, former cattle ranchers, a few families of farmers or small landowners, and private national and transnational companies.
One of the biggest players in this new structure is Agroforestal Uumbal, with 12,309.40 hectares according to the audit carried out by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)26, a self-regulatory trade association for the palm oil industry that has been accused of greenwashing on multiple occasions, but whose processes have also made the palm oil production chain more transparent.
“The Uumbal company rents land from producers in the Palenque valleys to sustain this ecological discourse, which is then re-ritualized in international markets for the sale of products using palm oil with sustainability labels,” explains Claudia Ramos, also an academic researcher.
Uumbal is owned by the Esteve Recolons family, of Catalan origin and settled in Mexico for two generations. It owns ECOM International27, a Swiss-based company dedicated to the marketing of commodities in thirty countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Its main products are coffee, cotton, and cocoa, and to a lesser extent, cereals and other agricultural products, as well as pig farming. ECOM was founded in 1849 in Barcelona, Spain, and in 2025 it remains largely a family-owned business.
On July 1, 2011, the Esteve family created three companies, as recorded in the commercial registry: Grupo Agroforestal Uumbal SAPI de CV, Agroforestal Uumbal Chiapas SAPI de CV, and Agroforestal Uumbal Veracruz SAPI de CV, which are engaged in the planting, cultivation, extraction, refining, and distribution of palm oil.
In 2025, both Uumbal and ECOM are run by Jorge Esteve Recolons, one of Mexico’s most prominent businessmen in recent years. In February of this year, he was appointed president of the National Agricultural Council, which is the political action body for agribusinesses. He is also vice president of the Mexican Business Council, the most powerful business organization in the country, founded in 1962 by Miguel Alemán (1900-1983), on whose estate the first African palm plantation in Mexico was planted in 1949, when Alemán was still president of the republic.
Among Uumbal’s shareholders is another of the family’s companies: Agroindustrias Unidas de México S.A. de C.V. (AMSA), which has a profile more similar to ECOM. AMSA has also been linked to labor disputes with community coffee producers in Veracruz30, in a clear case of SLAP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), which refers to legal actions intended to intimidate activists, journalists, and social movements.
At the end of January 2025, the National Coordinator of Coffee Organizations reported that AMSA and Nestlé are punishing and lowering coffee prices through intermediaries31, a practice that they seem to be replicating in palm cultivation. In the Palenque area and the Tulijá Valley, I spoke with several palm growers whom Uumbal did not buy from as agreed and left tons of fruit to rot on the grounds that they had too much production on their own plantations.
In the shade of the palm trees
During a tour of palm plantations in Tabasco, Chiapas, and Campeche, we documented old plantations, survival plantations, where some people get what they can, palm trees abandoned because of the high cost of transporting the fruit, but also producers enjoying a boom and, above all, new, technologically advanced plantations. The latter are owned by the agro-industrial groups that own the oil extraction plants, which will benefit from the new railway infrastructure to transport the palm derivatives they produce.
Examples of this are Palmosur (formerly Palma Tica), where the FA line of the Interoceanic Railway runs between the extraction plant and the company’s plantations. Or cases where they converge with other extractivist agendas such as energy, where Uumbal has set its sights on the generation of agrofuels derived from palm oil32, according to official data on the 75 energy projects accompanying the Mayan Train.
This is no small matter, given that the Mexican government has set out to “play a central role” in expanding the use of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), according to a statement made in June 2025 by Mexico’s Secretary of Communications and Transportation, 33Jesús Esteva. SAF can be obtained from jatropha, reused fats (vegetable oils and animal fats discarded by restaurants and industries) or palm oil.
The business benefit may be greater if we consider that the owner of Uumbal is one of the main shareholders of Aeroméxico, the country’s largest airline, which announced in its 2024 sustainability report that it plans to promote the achievement of 20% of the national target for 2030 with SAF produced in Mexico: “actively promoting its development in the country in collaboration with the main stakeholders.”
Another agro-industrial convergence occurs with the exploitation of bamboo for construction, a booming concept in the Palenque area and one in which Uumbal invested as part of a social housing project for palm growers.
In November 2020, the architectural firm Lucilarq, S.A. de C.V., owned by Jorge Esteve Recolons and architect Lucila Aguilar, was awarded a contract worth $5,835,549.52 for the design of the “Conceptual Urban and Architectural Project for the Ecotourism Neighborhood in Palenque, Chiapas.” However, during two trips to Palenque, I found no trace of this project, and neither the communications departments of the Ministry of Tourism nor the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) are aware of its possible existence.
Lucila Aguilar, who is also listed as a shareholder in other ECOM companies (and in whose office her son Jorge Esteve Aguilar works), told Obras magazine—which specializes in construction—that in 2020 she was invited by Rogelio Jiménez Pons, then head of the Mayan Train project and director of Fonatur, “to roundtable discussions to talk about how to preserve the jungle.” There, according to the publication, Lucila Aguilar presented her idea for “Barrio Palenque,” which would be built entirely of bamboo.
Another palm oil entrepreneur who has also ventured into this business is Felipe Casanova Villanueva, owner of Bambú Maya and son of cattle rancher Felipe Casanova Lastra, owner of the Agroindustria Oléica extraction plant in the Los Ríos region, in partnership with Alejandro Aguilar Reséndez, who was regional manager of agrochemicals for Monsanto and director of agriculture for the state’s Ministry of Agricultural, Forestry, and Fisheries Development (2008-2012) and who, according to his CV from that ministry, “designed and implemented the state oil palm project.”34
This group received a total of $18,69,815 Mexican pesos—in 2011 alone—both personally and through the company Alta Genética de los Ríos SPR de RL., from Trusts Established in Relation to Agriculture (FIRA) for the production, planting, maintenance, and creation of infrastructure for oil palm.
It wasn’t the same for everyone
Ten meters from the house of Bermunda Bautista, known to everyone as Munda, the paved road ends abruptly and gives way to grass, which gradually grows alongside the bustle of birds, insects, and dozens of animals that inhabit this jungle, interrupted only by oil palm plantations, where there is nothing but silence. The only luxury in that house is the cement floor and walls; the roof is made of sheet metal.
In 2001, she and a group of women were engaged in livestock farming. In Mexico, a group of right-wing businessmen came to power. The newly appointed president, Vicente Fox, had been the manager of Coca-Cola in the country. He appointed Javier Usabiaga, an agro-industrialist known as the “Garlic King,” to head the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries, and Food (Sagarpa), while Alberto Cárdenas, former governor of Jalisco and cattle rancher, was appointed to the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat). They promised development for the countryside.
Sagarpa “technicians” toured areas that the government classified as viable for African palm growth, convincing farmers to plant it blindly. They gave them the plants for free and paid them five pesos (US$0.55) for each one to plant. All they had was the promise that in three years they would be harvesting and their production would be purchased. It took five years to get the extraction plants up and running, Munda recalls. Like her, 19,674 producers35 were convinced in 2001 to launch the palm project.
Aurelio Pérez Pérez was one of them. “We wanted to see what the plant was like, so I planted a hectare and a half. Nothing more. Just a little.” In the end, the price of the fruit was very low, and there were no roads leading to the extraction plant. In fact, in some areas, there was no extraction plant until the fifth year. During that time, it was the rural population who largely financed the development of this product and assumed the risks.
“I documented that when palm prices fell, there was hunger in the Tulijá region. They don’t talk about it much, but people went hungry,“ explains León Ávila, professor at the Intercultural University of Chiapas (UNICH) and one of the leading researchers on the socio-environmental impacts of this monoculture. ”That was when the price of a kilo of palm fruit fell from 90 cents to 60 cents,” recalls Munda.
“There is now a very profound change in the sector; we are moving towards large-scale business,” explains Anne Cristina de la Vega-Leinert, geographer and founder of the Agroindustrial Observatory for Mexico36. This transition is mainly taking place in Tabasco and Campeche, “in what could be called a palm corridor stretching from Veracruz to the Yucatan Peninsula,” a growth that she and the Observatory team have been warning about since at least 2019.
As with everything that has happened with oil palm, this shift from small-scale producers to large agribusinesses seems planned, as support for small farmers has been eliminated, leaving them at a disadvantage compared to large agribusinesses. In 2022, Toledo Jamit himself complained that palm oil had not been as good a business for him as it had been for other political-business groups: “the rules of operation had locks, which allowed private investment to obtain greater resources than the social sectors.”37https://www.lajornadamaya.mx/campeche/192384/toledo-jamit-justifica-cultivos-de-palma-de-aceite-en-campeche-como-contenedores-verdes[/efn-note]
“This story is repeated in other countries. It has already happened in Southeast Asia, where small producers start farming and then land grabbing or resource grabbing occurs,” explains Iliusi Vega, a physicist specializing in mathematics applied to biology and a member of the Agroindustrial Observatory for Mexico.
The path seems to be set, and although the Mayan Train does not exclusively serve the development of oil palm, which also competes for territory with other agro-industrial and extractive projects such as genetically modified soybeans, mining, and various energy projects, it does incentivize and favor it. In addition, the shift in land ownership from social to private seems to be accelerating the growth of this crop and thereby incubating future socio-environmental conflicts.
This report has been funded as part of the Bertha Challenge 2025. To learn more about this project, click here.
Original text by David Santa Cruz published in Chiapas Paralelo on August 20, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.
Footnotes
- Own calculation based on the total volume of crude oil and derivatives consumed in Mexico, including palm oil and palm kernel oil, according to data from the USDA and Femexpalma on the average price during the Marketing Year (MY), which gives an estimated value of US$1.488 billion plus 55% commercial and processing value added.
- https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/attachment/file/503575/Publicaci_n_21_-_Octubre_2019_-_Utilidad_de_la_Frontera_Agr_cola_en_el_estado_Tabasco.pdf
- https://nube.agricultura.gob.mx/cierre_agricola/
- https://femexpalma.com.mx/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/ANUARIO-ESTADISTICO-FEMEXPALMA-2024-EDICION-ALTA-CALIDAD-.pdf
- In 2024, Mexico imported US$463 million and exported US$11.6 million, although the figures do not clarify whether the exports were domestic oils or oils refined in Mexico and originating from countries such as Colombia and Guatemala.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tffxNnLBdCg&t=1s
- The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was created by the victors of the Mexican Revolution and governed the country as a state party for 71 years.
- https://tabasco.gob.mx/noticias/tabasco-llamado-ser-la-capital-palmera-de-mexico-y-america-latina-adan-augusto
- Information obtained through access to information.
- All conversions from pesos to dollars in this text correspond to the average exchange rate for the reference year according to the Bank of Mexico.10All conversions from pesos to dollars in this text correspond to the average exchange rate for the reference year according to the Bank of Mexico.
- A. Cristina de la Vega-Leinert y Daniel Sandoval, Iliusi D. Vega del Valle, Jacqueline M. Calzada-Mendoza, Peter Clausing. Cultivo de palma de aceite en México – Balance de la situación actual y análisis espacial. Universidad de Greifswald, CECCAM, México vía Berlin e.V., 2021
- National Institute for Agricultural and Livestock Forestry Research.
- A. Cristina de la Vega-Leinert y Daniel Sandoval, Iliusi D. Vega del Valle, Jacqueline M.Calzada-Mendoza, Peter Clausing, (Opcit).
- http://www5.diputados.gob.mx/index.php/esl/content/download/160440/801949/file/Ficha%20T%C3%A9cnica%20Tren%20Maya.pdf15.
Even during the construction phase of the Mayan Train, the director of the National Tourism Promotion Fund, Rogelio Jiménez Pons, acknowledged that it “will trigger development hubs in the five states it will pass through, including agro-industrial parks for meat, fruit, forestry, organic food, and palm oil.16https://www.milenio.com/politica/primeros-frutos-del-tren-maya-para-ejidatarios-e-indigenas
- https://www.gob.mx/presidencia/articulos/version-estenografica-conferencia-de-prensa-de-la-presidenta-claudia-sheinbaum-pardo-del-5-de-diciembre-de-2024?idiom=es
- The Maya Train is managed by the army and the Interoceanic by the navy.19The Maya Train is managed by the army and the Interoceanic by the navy.
- https://www.poresto.net/mexico/tren-maya/2024/2/10/tren-maya-aumento-un-20-en-la-movilidad-de-carga-en-progreso-yucatan-asipona.html
- https://www.candelaria.gob.mx/storage/normatividad/PROGRAMA_DE_ORDENAMIENTO_POEL.pdf
- https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/MEX/[/efn_note], even though 40% of its territory is protected as a conservation area.
The Agrifood and Fisheries Information Service records that in 1998, the first 2,893 hectares of African palm were planted in Campeche. By 2012, the plantations did not reach 4,000 hectares, but in 2014, the planted area rose to 13,805 hectares. According to the latest report by Governor Fernando Ortega (2009-2015), at least $150.94 million Mexican pesos (USD 8 million) were allocated that year to the different stages of the industry, from nurseries to industrial plants.
Five years later, the state would become the second largest palm oil producer in the country. This rapid progress took place during the administration of Alejandro “Alito” Moreno Cárdenas, national president of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and senator, who appointed agribusinessman Armando Constantino Toledo Jamit as secretary of rural development. Toledo Jamit owns, among other businesses, the Campeche supply center, the company Frutas Tropicales de Campeche (Frutoka), and Grupo Toka. The latter is a palm oil company founded in 2011 which, between 2015 and 2016, brought together various companies owned by him and his immediate family to develop nurseries and industrialize oil palm production.
Thus, while Toledo Jamit dictated Campeche’s agricultural policy, his companies and those of his family obtained government resources. In 2016, journalist Ronny Aguilar confronted Toledo Jamit, who responded: “That’s correct, and where is the conflict? As a palm grower, I believe in the project, and that is why we are promoting it.” The official’s argument was that since the resources he received were federal and not local, there was no conflict of interest. That same year, Governor Alejandro Moreno announced the Strategic Program for African Palm Cultivation.
“Revolving doors are one of the characteristics of neoliberalism around the world, where the apparatus of the state is actually captured by economic power,” explains Víctor Suárez Palma, Mexico’s current agrarian attorney general. A champion of the slogan “separate economic power from political power,” he warns that “government bureaucracy is a construct of decades of governments linked to economic powers, and the problem continues to exist within agencies at the high and middle levels.”
And so it continues to exist that despite complaints within the Morena party, the current state governor, Layda Sansores—daughter of former governor Carlos Sansores (1967–1973)—appointed Toledo Jamit as her chief of staff and in 2023 named him secretary of government, a position he resigned from in January 2025 after being exposed in videos showing him receiving wads of cash from an alleged official of the previous government.
Big business
In Mexico, 50.8% of land ownership is considered social property, consisting of ejidos23It is a territorial and collective entity, consisting of land, forests, and water, originally granted to population centers for communal use. Ejidos are managed by ejido members, who have rights of use and enjoyment over the land, but not full ownership, according to Article 27 of the Constitution.
- Castellanos-Navarrete, Antonio, Marcela A. Colocho-Rodríguez y Nicolás Vargas-Ramírez. «Does community-based tenure prevent land grabbing? The oil palm case in Mexico.» Applied Geography 172 (2024): 103413. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2024.103413
- https://www.rspo.org/wp-content/uploads/Uumbal_En_RSPO_Audit_Announcement_13092017_V.pdf
- https://disclosures.ifc.org/project-detail/SPI/26705/ecom-agroindustrial-corp-ltd
- https://x.com/victor_suarez/status/189420487687350320128who, after demanding fair payment for their beans, were accused by the company on the basis of false evidence29https://x.com/victor_suarez/status/1914509185427153307
- https://www.jornada.com.mx/noticia/2025/01/21/estados/amsa-y-nestle-derriban-precios-del-cafe-acusan-productores-de-veracruz-5657
- https://poderlatam.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ElTrenDeLasElites_final_031220.pdf
- https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-market-news/2697517-mexico-s-asa-to-play-key-role-in-saf-expansion
- Information published in accordance with the law https://www.tenosique.gob.mx/archivos_transparencia/ALEJANDRO%20AGUILAR.pdf
- 1st Report on Labors, Sagarpa, 1 of Sept of 2001.
- https://obsam-mx.org/mapa/