Indigenous Mayan justice in the Southeast of Mexico

Abstract

The Indigenous Justice System of Quintana Roo, was created and implemented by the local government more than ten years ago, and it has not been sufficiently investigated. The aim of this paper is to analyse its performance from the point of view of legal sociology, using the law reports of the called traditional judges. Today and thanks to their actions, the Mayan traditional judges are socially legitimized into the indigenous communities, although they were created “from the outside of the communities” by state authorities a little bit more than a decade ago.