At least 150 Jalisco state police in full riot gear evicted some 800 people living and working in the beach community of Tenacatita and the neighboring village of Rebalsito in the early hours of August 4.
Although officers said they "invited" residents to leave, some reports suggest there were as many as 27 arrests and three people injured with gunshot wounds.
At least 11 people who resisted the eviction are being held at the municipal jail in Ciuhuatlan. Four minors have been released, according to the Attorney General's Office.
State police said they acted on the order of a judge in Autlan, who ruled that some 50 families were illegally occupying land that belonged to Jose Maria Andres Villalobos, a successful and influential businessman and realtor, and former president of the Guadalajara Chamber of Commerce and current president of Expo Guadalajara.
Villalobos has been trying the get the low-income families evicted from the land for two decades, ever since he purchased 42 hectares of Tenacatita beachfront land from the wife of a former state governor in 1991. (He apparently obtained the federal beach concession rights in 1993.) Many of the businesses on the undeveloped beach are palapa seafood restaurants that have been serving tourists and locals for more than 40 years.
Francisco Martinez Flores, the ejido (local land commune) commissioner for El Rebalsito, said the ejiditarios own the 42 hectares and have the land titles to prove it.
La Huerta Mayor Carlos Ramirez Nuñez called the eviction "unfair" and said municipal authorities would do all in their power to help the families return to their homes.
But if they get ever back to their homes and businesses, there may be nothing left of them. After the families left in pick-up trucks with their belongings – some making as many as 10 trips to and from the highway – police brought in heavy machinery, presumably to demolish the palapa huts and homes, and blocked the only road leading to the beach. None one was allowed in without an "official" escort. Both the La Huerta municipal secretary and a Puerto Vallarta-based Jalisco Human Rights Commission observer had to give up their cellphones and cameras to police before they were allowed to enter the area, according to reports from Spanish-language daily Milenio. La Huerta municipal cops who turned up to provide "additional security" were also barred from entering. The area resembled "a war zone," commented one foreign resident at the scene.
The omens were not good for the residents. "Everything on the beach will be demolished. It's not infrastructure. It's only rubbish," Villalobos told Mural newspaper on Friday.
"They treated us like criminals, They pointed guns at us and hit some of the kids," said Maria Lopez Mendoza, the proprietor of a hotel in Tenacatita.
“They are removing people's belongings from their homes – refrigerators, washing machines, ovens, furniture. They are throwing everything out. This goes further than anything one can tolerate," said PRI State Congressman Gabriel Ponce Miranda, the 72-year-old former leader of the Jalisco Agrarian Communities League. "We are not opposed to a judicial ordered being carried out, that should be respected. What we are denouncing is the force and arbitrariness used by 200 state police officers – that is completely incorrect and illegal."
Anger was rife as more than 300 people confronted a wall of officers on the coastal highway and set up their own barricade in protest. "We don't want a fight. We're just carrying out orders," said one senior officer, as he tried to calm irate citizens who had been turfed out of their homes.
"There are people coming in from other villages and there's real danger of a confrontation," Salvador Magaña, a local activist and former La Huerta councilor, told a reporter from Milenio.
Back in Guadalajara, Villalobos was unrepentant, although reluctant to talk to newspapers, apart from Mural.
"I'm returning to get back my home after 30-plus years. The people who are there are delinquents," he told the daily.
The community of Tenacatita knew full well that Villalobos meant business. He tried to have them removed in 1993, 1998, and most recently in 2006, when eight people were arrested during a similar operation. In 2008, La Jornada newspaper reported Villalobos as saying that he would get the "squatters" out by "blows (chingadazos) sooner or later."
He also claimed they were ruining the eco-system. "They've messed up the wetland and built tennis courts and thrown garbage there. They've screwed up the environment and flush sewage directly into the wetland. And what does Semarnat (the environment watchdog) do? They go every month and take bribes from every one of these people. That's what these federal inspectors do and the head of Semarnat knows it. He knows it because we've been denouncing it."
Villalobos told La Jornada that the same land-ownership problem is repeated all along the Jalisco coast, putting on hold tourism projects worth millions of dollars. He claimed to have won every legal battle, even at the Supreme Court level. "It time the government did something about it," he said.
La Jornada said the Guadalajara businessman had been negotiating with "foreign investors" to develop the land. Villalobos said he envisaged a tourist complex in Tenacatita comparable to the luxury and elitist Careyes resort further up the coast.
The PAN government of Emilio Gonzalez has made tourism development in the Costa Alegre, as the southern part of the state's coastline is known, one of their main priorities. It's promoting a number of polemic developments, most notably in Chalacatepec, south of Tomatlan, an ambitious development that has been dubbed "the New Cancun."
No one from the state government spoke out in either approval or condemnation of the police operation in Tenacatita. The only PAN legislator to comment, Ramon Demetrio Guerrero Martinez, said he had spoken to the state public security chief, who had assured him that no one had been injured in the operation.
Jalisco Attorney General Tomas Coronado Olmos said he believed most of those arrested during the eviction would probably be released on bail. He added that there would also be an investigation into whether police officers had used any unwarranted force.
The Jalisco Human Rights Commission observer, Javier Perlasca Chavez, told Publico that two people had filed reports of police abuse by Friday afternoon.
According to a 2006 profile in El Informador's "Gente Bien" social supplement, Villalobos trained as a lawyer, and after a spell working in the Infonavit public housing department, ventured into the real estate sector. He mentioned that his business was badly affected by the 1995 economic crisis, so he moved into the security service arena, specializing in tracing stolen vehicles by satellite. According to some other sources, this venture has made him a lot of money.
Interestingly, in the El Informador profile, Villalobos talks of how "for the good of the country," businessmen should strive to work "hand-in-hand" with the working-class.
Video taken of the standoff
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
