Recent Latin America Court Cases

Abstract

This Latin American survey complements the journal’s United States and European coverage of recent court decisions affecting real estate appraisal practice. As a baseline installment, this survey covers calendar years 2025 and 2026; subsequent quarterly installments will report only changes from the position established here. Entries are organized by court or national jurisdiction.

Several cross-cutting themes are visible across the Latin American jurisdictions during this period: continuing development of Inter-American Court of Human Rights jurisprudence on indigenous communal property and the compensation owed for non-demarcated ancestral territories; significant Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) and Superior Court of Justice (STJ) jurisprudence on desapropriação methodology, particularly the relationship between provisional deposit, judicial expertise, and the federal-precatory regime; a Mexican Supreme Court (SCJN) decision treating avalúo–price divergence above ten percent as a taxable income event; sustained Chilean Supreme Court attention to comparable-sales weighting and highest-and-best-use claims in expropriation; and Colombian constitutional approval of the new Jurisdicción Agraria y Rural, which will reshape the procedural environment for land-restitution valuation work beginning in 2027.