Argentina's Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned a lower-court ruling that had blocked President Milei's repeal of the 2011 Land Law, putting back into force a decree provision that removes the limits on foreign ownership of rural land, according to La Nación, Infobae and the Buenos Aires Herald.
Justices Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz and Ricardo Lorenzetti ruled that the Center for Malvinas War Veterans of La Plata (CECIM), which had challenged the repeal, lacked legal standing to bring the case. "Territorial sovereignty cannot be framed under the category of a 'collective good,'" the court wrote, according to Infobae. The justices added that their decision "does not constitute a ruling on the constitutional validity of Article 154" of the decree, the Herald reported.
The Land Law barred foreign individuals and companies from owning more than 15% of rural land at the national, provincial or municipal level, and capped any single foreign owner at 1,000 hectares in the country's core farming region. Milei repealed it through Article 154 of Decree 70/2023, the sweeping deregulation decree he signed weeks after taking office. A federal judge restored the law after CECIM sued, and the federal appeals court in La Plata later declared that section of the decree unconstitutional; the government appealed to the Supreme Court in 2024.
The ruling achieves in court what the government could not pass in Congress. In August, the ruling party's property-rights bill initially proposed scrapping the foreign-ownership limits, was changed to raise the cap to 25%, and then dropped the chapter altogether after allied governors, including Tucumán's Osvaldo Jaldo, Neuquén's Rolando Figueroa and Misiones' Hugo Passalacqua, opposed it, according to La Nación and the Herald.
Ownership of farmland by foreigners has long been politically sensitive in Argentina, a major agricultural exporter, and the 2011 law was passed on sovereignty grounds. Left-wing lawmaker Myriam Bregman called on the lower house to reject the whole decree: "The decree must be annulled now," she said, according to the Herald.
The Senate voted to reject Decree 70/2023 in March 2024, but an emergency decree loses force only if both chambers reject it. Unless the Chamber of Deputies does the same, foreign individuals, companies and states can now buy rural land without the previous caps.