Why it matters
The provincial average hides the phenomenon. Measured by department, the 15% ceiling has already been exceeded in 36 districts, and four of the most foreign-owned are lined up along the Paraná: Iguazú, Ituzaingó, Berón de Astrada and Campana.
As the new deputies and senators took office, the national government announced a package of bills that includes the definitive repeal of the Law on the Protection of National Ownership of rural land, passed in 2011 as Law 26.737. It is not the first attempt. Article 154 of Decree of Necessity and Urgency 70/2023 had already repealed it, and in January 2024 an injunction filed by the Centre of Malvinas Islands Veterans of La Plata provisionally halted the measure in court. What is sought now is to obtain from Congress what was blocked in the courts.
This piece does not discuss the text of the bill, which we examine in The Land Law: towards territorial disintegration (in Spanish). It addresses the empirical basis on which that debate should rest: how much land, exactly where, and owned by whom.
Why the law existed
The law that the government wants to remove was born of a measurement. The turning point of the contemporary process of foreign land acquisition came in the late 1990s. In 1996 the Secretariat of Internal Security was created and absorbed functions of the National Border Superintendency. In its first years, that Secretariat authorised the sale of more than eight million hectares in border security zones, areas that Decree 15,385 of 1944 reserved for purchase by Argentine citizens. The 1944 rule was never repealed. It was simply violated through irregular operations and corporate triangulation. Lago Escondido, in Río Negro, acquired by the British tycoon Joe Lewis, and the Patagonian lands bought by the Italian Luciano Benetton are the two cases that fixed the issue in public debate.
The following decade added economic pressure. The international rise in food prices drove up the value of land, while devaluation made fertile and strategic land cheaper in dollar terms. Against that backdrop, the 2011 law set a ceiling of 15% foreign ownership of land area, measured at both provincial and departmental level, and strengthened the mechanisms meant to prevent triangulation without state oversight.
The thermometer that changed in 2016
In 2016 Decree 820 modified the application of the law without touching its text. It relaxed procedures, allowed corporate changes to be reported after the fact, reduced requirements for purchases and broadened the criteria that define who counts as a foreigner. The decisive change was methodological. It altered the way foreign ownership is measured in companies, estates, joint ownership and indirect holdings.
The effect becomes visible when comparing the first official survey, of 2015, with that of 2022. The percentages of land in foreign hands fall. That fall does not reflect a reversal of the process. It reflects the impact of the new methodology. The thermometer moved, not the fever.
The government maintains that no province exceeds the 15% limit. If the problem were solved, repeal would be unnecessary. The relevant question, then, is what removing a law enables when, according to the official measurement itself, nobody would be breaching it.
The province is the wrong scale
Nationwide, about 5% of Argentine territory is in foreign hands, more than thirteen million hectares, an area equivalent to the size of England. The figure is striking, but it is the least useful of all, because the provincial average dilutes exactly what matters. The real dimension of the phenomenon emerges at departmental scale, and above all when that information is crossed with the location of watercourses, aquifers and areas with mining potential.
According to National Rural Land Registry data updated to 6 August 2025, 36 departments already exceed the legal limit. In four of them (Lácar, in Neuquén; General Lamadrid, in La Rioja; Molinos and San Carlos, in Salta) foreign ownership exceeds 50%, more than three times the ceiling set by law. All four concentrate strategic assets, either fresh water or mineral resources. Another four are well above 30%: Iguazú, in Misiones; Ituzaingó and Berón de Astrada, in Corrientes; and Campana, in Buenos Aires.
Own elaboration based on data from the National Rural Land Registry (National Directorate of the RNTR, Ministry of Justice), obtained by the Observatorio de Tierras through freedom-of-information requests (Law 27.275), file EX-2025-94747803, updated to 6 August 2025.
The ranking by nationality completes the picture. US citizens lead, with more than 2.7 million hectares, an area larger than the province of Tucumán, followed by Italians and Spaniards. Those three nationalities alone hold half of all foreign-owned land in the country.
Reading the map from the river
The eight critical departments are not randomly distributed. Four lie on the Andean border and in the north-west, over fresh water and minerals. The other four trace a recognisable line. Iguazú, Ituzaingó, Berón de Astrada and Campana are aligned along the country’s main navigable waterway, from the triple border to the mouth of the delta. The emerging pattern is consistent. The most compromised situations occur in border areas and in territories with water, mining or port-logistics advantages.
That alignment calls for a river-based reading. Nicolás Boscovich argued that the axis of the great rivers is the backbone of physical integration and of Argentina’s leading role in the region. The navigable waterway is infrastructure rather than an accident of the landscape, and like all infrastructure it depends on who controls its banks. Ownership of the riverbank decides who can build a port, who has access to water intake and which land uses accompany the corridor. A riverside department with a third of its area in foreign hands is a concrete constraint on future infrastructure decisions along the Litoral, far beyond a statistical anomaly.
The second key operates at a larger scale. Juan Carlos Puig defined autonomy as the maximum capacity for independent decision that a State can exercise given the constraints of the real world, and warned that this margin is a material construction rather than a declaration. Land ownership is one of those material conditions. The Observatorio frames the debate within a growing international contest over strategic resources and points to the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine as the expression of a shift in US strategy towards the region, aimed at securing access to its natural resources. Read this way, repeal is far more than regulatory simplification. It redefines who will control key territories going forward.
The framing needs precision, because the point is not the nationality of a buyer. It is the State’s capacity to plan over its own territory, which is the very definition of geopolitics as a tool for development (industry, energy, infrastructure and the effective occupation of space), in line with how Guglialmelli conceived the relationship between territory and national project. Patagonian lakes, native forests, mountain ranges with critical minerals, border strips, the banks of the great rivers and land over aquifers that supply millions of people are the assets on which any long-term public policy rests, and they are the assets affected by removing the 15% ceiling.
What to watch from now on
Four indicators allow the process to be followed without depending on anyone’s interpretation. The first is the text that actually reaches Congress: whether it repeals Law 26.737 wholesale or keeps some quantitative limit, and whether it keeps or removes the department as the unit of measurement, since the change of scale, more than the percentage, decides what becomes visible. The second is the fate of the CECIM La Plata injunction, which has kept the law provisionally in force since January 2024. The third is the continuity of the National Rural Land Registry, meaning whether it keeps publishing surveys, how often and with what methodology, because without comparability between 2015, 2022 and 2025 the series stops measuring the phenomenon and starts measuring the criterion. The fourth is the list of the 36 departments already over the limit, which works as the cheapest control map available. The acceleration of the process will or will not be verified there.
Defining what may be sold, what may not and under what rules is far more than an administrative matter. It is the operation through which a State orders access to the goods that sustain everyday life and any development project. Dismantling those protections at a time of growing pressure on water, energy and minerals produces a territory where the decision on who gains access and who is left out is taken elsewhere.
Sources
- Julieta Caggiano and Matías Oberlin, «La extranjerización de tierras en nuestro país: un acuciante problema de soberanía», Observatorio de Tierras (PRIHA-FCE-UBA / MILPA), 15 December 2025, https://www.observatoriodetierras.ar/2025/12/la-extranjerizacion-de-tierras-en.html (accessed 31 July 2026). The regulatory history and the cases cited come from this source.
- Caggiano and Oberlin, op. cit. Figures come from reports of the National Rural Land Registry (Ministry of Justice of Argentina), obtained by the authors through freedom-of-information requests (Law 27.275), file EX-2025-94747803, with data updated to 6 August 2025.
- Nicolás Boscovich, Geoestrategia para la integración regional. Ejes fluviales claves y complementarios para el protagonismo argentino en la integración física del Mercosur (Buenos Aires: Ciudad Argentina, 1999).
- Juan Carlos Puig, Doctrinas internacionales y autonomía latinoamericana (Caracas: Universidad Simón Bolívar, 1980).
- Juan E. Guglialmelli, Geopolítica del Cono Sur (Buenos Aires: El Cid Editor, 1979).
The source reports thresholds exceeded by department, not exact percentages. Primary sources for further reading: Law 26.737 and its regulations; Decree 820/2016; Decree 70/2023, art. 154; reports of the National Rural Land Registry.