One of the most idyllic beaches and tourist destinations on the Pacific Coast of Mexico was wiped out recently. In a matter of hours. Not by any obvious force of nature such as a hurricane, earthquake or tsunami. This devastation was the result of big-bucks human greed swathed in a miasma of assumed political malfeasance.
Before daybreak on August 4, a reported 200 armed Jalisco state police officers began evicting 800 residents, visitors, and business owners in Tenacatita. (That’s one gun against every four persons, quite a show of force in a small, remote fishing village when most troops are fighting a major drug war.) Riot police restricted access to citizens trying to get back in to retrieve belongings.
Reports from the slow exodus of trucks heaped chock-a-block with hastily packed furniture, appliances, clothing, toys, pets, and whatever else they could grab in the few minutes eventually allotted were grim: police tossing personal possessions into the street in the rain, looting food and liquor from the restaurants, chopping down and burning palapas, bivouacking in the retirement home of an absent American citizen.
A week later, the Guadalajara Reporter was still the only English-language news source reporting on this travesty. No U.S. news medium picked up on it. Amazing! They’re all over stories about swine flu, dengue fever and drug violence: scare-tactic assaults on Mexico that affect very few Americans personally. But give ‘em a story that could impact the million or so American property owners already here, plus the 10 to 25 million baby-boomers forecast to retire in Mexico within the next two decades and … nary a peep.
This land grab didn’t stop with the displacement of hundreds of Mexicans from their property along the bay side of Tenacatita’s beach. Dozens of titled properties on the open-ocean side of the Tenacatita peninsula also were seized, properties held by a number of Americans, as well as Canadians and Europeans.
Real estate laws and practices in Mexico bear little or no resemblance to those taken for granted by buyers and sellers in the United States. Here, titles for foreigner-held property within 100 kilometers of a coast or international border (the restricted zone) are difficult to obtain. All manner of involvement by various government entities to the highest level is integrated into the process – and no one’s working for free. The official document bears the signature of the President of Mexico.
Rules and regulations are different outside the restricted zone, but surely foreign property owners in Mexico’s interior hold some legal and official assurance that their property really belongs to them. So did the people in Tenacatita. Yet, after a 20-year court battle and four previous attempts to evict them from land he claimed was his, a powerful Guadalajara real-estate developer finally got a circuit-court judge to rule in his favour. Next thing you know state police with a court order occupied the village and dispossessed everyone with a dismissive “your title isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” As of this writing, none of the affected residents has actually seen the order of eviction.
The developer realizes his dream of a luxury seaside hotel and golf course, and the people who have nurtured the area, some for over 40 years, have had their lives and their livelihood destroyed. Each of us who has relaxed on Tenacatita’s delightful beach, watched children frolic in the gentle surf, snorkled the Aquarium, or savored a chilled libation or a seafood delicacy in one of its many palapa restaurants loses, as well, to a much lesser extent. Admission to this exquisite respite from reality may never again be free, if available at all.
If this absurd situation can happen in little, tucked-away Tenacatita, who’s to say it can’t happen anywhere a mogul developer sees $$$. The precedent may already have been set that a legal and binding Mexican document can be instantly rendered invalid at the whim of cronyism and well greased palms. So far, that’s what the people of Tenacatita are being led to believe.
Meanwhile, they’re “not taking this lying down!” Tired of these traumatic takeover attempts, for the first time the victims have organized and mobilized. They’re fighting back in the Mexican press, in the courts, and with all the legal, moral, and financial support they can get. They’re prepared to ‘take it to streets’ if that’s what it comes to. They’ve endured enough violence and personal injury at the hands of the police.
So far, the occupying forces have not given ground to repeated written legal orders to cease and desist and give the people of Tenacatita their lives back. Various factions appear to be in some sort of pissing contest about whose signature supersedes whose. It already may be too late. The last I heard, heavy machinery was already destroying what traces of this once flourishing fishing village and popular family beach are left after the burning and pillaging. No one knows, because now no one but police have access.
The future economic health of Mexico, Jalisco, the Costalegre, La Manzanilla, and the friendly family who owns the corner store could depend on the outcome of what happens next in Tenacatita. Keep your fingers, eyes, toes and t’s crossed.
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