National Agrarian Registry

The National Agrarian Registry (RAN) is a decentralized organ of the Secretariat for Agrarian Reform responsible for the control of the common and communal land (“ejido”) tenancy. It also offers documentary legal certainty derived from applying the Agrarian Law.

Among RAN main faculties there are: to register and intervene on land tenancy, to release certificates and property deeds according to the Agrarian Law, to record communal, common, farming and breeding communities lands, as well as national lands and those denounced as areas of waste land.

RAN also registers the resolutions derived from local assemblies where lands are converted from common to communal regime (“régimen ejidal”) and the expropriation decrees on common and communal property. It registers unions of “ejidos” and communities, rural associations of collective interest, rural production cooperatives, unions of rural production cooperatives, and cooperatives of social solidarity. The succession lists of communal land owners are deposited at RAN records. The organism also processes, classifies and manages the statistical, documentary, technical and registry-related information of its competence.

RAN resolves matters related to social property possession throughout 65 different services.

At present, RAN keeps in operation the following programs:

National Rural Land-Registry Modernizing Program

The National Rural Land-Registry Modernizing Program will contribute to planning and executing policy in order to promote sustainable development with legal certainty.

This Program will concentrate in only one system the information about the different property regimes, the land usage and the current management of social-type rural property (“ejidos” and communities) and private-type property (small properties and rural lands), which represent 83% of the whole national territory (180 million hectares).

The Program will also facilitate that Federal Government’s dependences and organisms, as well as those of States and Municipalities related to land management, to share among themselves information by the means of interconnected data bases, and make all the necessary real-time up-dates with reliable data about infrastructure, natural reserves, protected areas and all other important country’s information.

Supporting Fund For Non-Regularized Agrarian Nucleuses (FANAR)

By the means of the Supporting Fund For Non-Regularized Agrarian Nucleuses (FANAR), RAN keeps on regularizing rural property in order to offer legal and documentary certainty on land tenancy to people living in the almost 2,850 agrarian nucleuses not recorded in the Communal-Land Right Certification and Plot Entitlement Program (Procede) either because of their own decision or impossibility derived from judicial, technical or social problems.

FANAR has as goal to boost the human and social development in the Mexican countryside and to continue regularizing the rural property in order to offer legal and documentary certainty on land tenancy to people holding agrarian rights.

Modernization Of Agrarian General Archive (AGA)

The Agrarian General Archive (AGA) is passing through an integral modernization process. At the present Administration, more than 29.9 million pages forming the country’s historical archive have been digitalized. These pages also integrate Mexico’s social property documentation.

AGA documentary asset accounts to a little more than 242 million pages (grouped in approximately 2 million files), which are distributed into 54 documentary groups (in a linear form, they would reach a 44 kilometer distance).

The importance of this work is that once digitalized and systemized all these archives (including planes, Presidential decrees, donations, amplifications, “ejido” restitutions, expropriations and so on), file query (through internet) will be easier, and all the documentation that originated Mexico’s social property, constituted by 31,000 agrarian nucleuses, will be absolutely in safety.

“Ahora es más Fácil” (Now it is easier)

This program started in March 2009; its purpose is to decrease the number of non-reclaimed agrarian documents that are still at RAN’s Regional Offices, so that either land-owners or their beneficiaries reclaim them obtaining judicial certainty on land tenancy.

During the year in which the Program has effect, RAN will intend to hand 187,000 certificates and property deeds (136,578 documents released by Procede and 50,422 by FANAR but not handed between 2008 and the first quarter of 2009).