Enrique Hernández was everything in this life and now, at the age of 66, he sees the story become more complicated and the peace he dreamed of in retirement crumbles in his hands. “They want to take the land away from us,” he says in disbelief. Made to the body with beatings of flesh, armored and at the same time delicate, Hernández was a chiclero, lobster fisherman, barber … He gave up lobster fishing because one day, more than 40 years ago, half his face swelled in the depths The Caribbean Sea. He almost drowned. He left the Chiclería because a few years later, on another day, he fell from a ten-meter high zapote while harvesting sage in the jungle. The barber won’t let her, a sentimental matter: it’s about what little remains of her father, one of the most famous barbers in old Quintana Roo.
“My father gave Leona Vicario the first thermoelectric power plant,” says the man proudly. “He brought the light!” she adds, “he was very well connected politically.” He also managed to invade the ejido, which is perhaps more important given the value of land in the peninsula Yucatan has risen. Before the turn of the century, the father joined the ejido Leona Vicario. At the time, the ejido consisted of more than 60,000 hectares of jungle 50 kilometers from a small coastal colony, Benito Juárez. The son inherited a few years later. Today, the small neighborhood has become Cancun and the common country, the scene of a struggle over different visions of the future and development.
Hernández had hopes for the country, he wanted to live happily in retirement, but now the country has become a problem. The man is among a group of ejidatarios from Leona Vicario denouncing the recent major attempt by the Quintana Roo real estate industry. He accuses members of the same ejido, with the support of foreign businessmen, of building a 10,000-hectare city in the middle of the jungle, also using ejido land allotted to himself and other colleagues. “What they want to do is illegal, they can’t dispossess us,” says Hernández.
Enrique Hernández, Ejidatario and member of the Assembly of the Leona Vicario Ejido in Quintana Roo, Mexico, on May 11, 2023. Rodrigo Oropeza
The project is called Ciudad Aurum and has been the focus of ejido gatherings since January. Hernández and his companions explain that the city is an idea of the new policy of the commissioner, the governing body of the ejido. Its current president, Juan García Asbún, took office in November and has already presented the project to others in informal meetings. Initially, it is said, it should be a small settlement, 600 hectares. countries of them. But over the months, García Asbún and his partners showed different intentions until they reached 10,000 hectares and took the land from the ejidatarios who didn’t agree. EL PAÍS contacted García Asbún via WhatsApp and although he initially said he was willing to grant an interview, he later stopped responding.
Aside from its proximity to Cancun and the Riviera Maya, the area’s appeal lies in the nearby passage of the Mayan Train, one of the current government’s key projects. Leona Vicario got the executive headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador to approve the construction of a train station next to the municipality, from which she incidentally bought tens of hectares of land to lay the tracks. If the mere boom in tourism and real estate has been enough to transform social and economic dynamics in the Yucatan over the past quarter-century, the appearance of the Mayan train on the horizon has accelerated that process on a scale that is still difficult to understand. .
“I had heard that they were going to create this new population center linked to Leona Vicario,” says Aarón Siller, a lawyer with the Mexico Center for Environmental Law. “The Mayan train doesn’t account for these kinds of consequences, these poles of development aren’t accounted for in the environmental impact. [El tren] It is a mega-project that encourages speculation and land expropriation. There were many conflicts. The project has sparked impressive real estate speculation. It causes the division of the jungle, of the land. We are in territorial anarchy,” Graben said.
Aerial view of the construction of a bridge that is part of Section 5 of the Mayan Railroad in Quintana Roo, Mexico, May 11, 2023. Rodrigo Oropeza
speculators
Conceived to cater to the post-revolutionary population, the ejidos appeared in Mexico as units of collective property in the countryside. Since the 1930s, the government distributed millions of hectares to millions of farmers. The country was organized into ejidos. There were no owners, the community was. The children of the Ejidatarios inherited their rights to the fields, forest and pastures when their parents died. That’s how it worked for decades. But then came modernity.
During the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994), the all-powerful PRI amended the Constitution and the Agrarian Law to allow for two fundamental changes in the functioning of the ejidos. First, it allowed for the division of the land and allocation to the ejidatarios. Second, it advocated the privatization of already shared collective property. In few regions of Mexico have these changes had such a large impact as in the south-eastern peninsular states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo and Campeche.
In the study Three Decades of Privatization and Social Expropriation in the Yucatan Peninsula, the author, anthropologist Gabriela Torres-Mazuera, provides several figures that allow us to understand the scale of the privatization wave. “From 1992, when the Farm Code was reformed, until May 2019, a total of 22,660 parcels covering 192,600 hectares of land in Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán ceased to be socially owned and became private property. ” he writes. 192,600 hectares, a little less than the entire state of Mexico, three cities like Madrid, one after the other.
The law has settled the trap. The possibility of dividing and selling common land led to the emergence of a new, predatory species in the Yucatan Peninsula: the speculators, skilled hunters of legal redoubts, inventors of various illegalities, levers that they used to seize the land at the lowest possible cost . There in the region, they are referred to as the “agra mafia,” a changing and amorphous entity. Hernández and his colleagues from Leona Vicario say that the agrarian mafia is behind Ciudad Aurum.
A worker from the Leona Vicario Ejido cleans a cenote in Quintana Roo, Mexico, May 11, 2023. Rodrigo Oropeza
The question, of course, is how they did it, how the agrarian mafia got in. The forest type is widespread and jungle dominates much of Leona Vicario’s territory. With changes in the law in the late 1990s, the ejidatarios began to demarcate their possessions. There were several “plots”, as they say, part of a lexicon, the Ejidals, rich and intricate. The ejidatarios showed them their plots, all huge, tens of hectares in size. In the heat of Cancún’s development, some began selling land. Others sold their ejidal certificates in addition to the land.
Hernández and the others say the last large apartment building in Leona Vicario was in 2009, a verifiable situation thanks to a map they sent to EL PAÍS. The map shows how the area where “the others” want to develop Ciudad Aurum today is divided among dozens of ejidatarios. “The problem,” explains Santiago May, one of Hernández’s colleagues, “is that many of us don’t want to give up our land for this project.”
Little is known about Aurum City. Hernández and the others have recently sent some videos and photos from the presentation of the project in the meetings of the first four months of the year. Appearing in the images are the President of the Commissioner, García Asbún, and a criticized figure who became an ejidatario a few years ago, José Leonel Noya. “At the last gathering in April, they sold the idea that every ejidatario who supported them would get 25 hectares under the project,” May says.
Both May and Hernández say the big problem of land in the ejido is related to the number of ejidatarios who, while remaining ejido members, have already sold all their land. Following the 2009 allocation, Leona Vicario’s 389 ejidatarios had already selected their respective 100 hectares, as a reserve for another 54 hectares to select in the future. Some have sold them all, but they still have one vote and one vote in the congregation. The two men point out that this is the weak point of the ejido. “They manipulate them, they tell them that they will give them land, that they will pay them to vote for Aurum,” they insist.
Santiago May (R), ejidatario and member of the assembly of the Ejido Leona Vicario, during a meeting with workers in Quintana Roo, Mexico, May 11, 2023. Rodrigo Oropeza
development versus development
Despite what it may seem, Leona Vicario’s battle is not between a group of poor, disinterested Ejidatarios and the horrific and ravenous agrarian mafia. There are interests on both sides. The dispute goes beyond the Manichaean notion of tradition versus development. Ultimately, there are two forms of development. Both sides manage resources because they have enormous amounts of land and therefore money. Hernández, May and their colleagues intend to develop an ecotourism project, the Route of the Lagoons, which they believe will have less impact.
It is unclear how one side or the other should implement their projects. In an interview with this newspaper, the anthropologist Torres-Mazuera points out that in the case of Leona Vicario, “it is illegal to subdivide parts of the ejidos with forest areas”. Nevertheless, the jungle is gradually giving way. During a visit last week, the presence of hotels, glamping sites or small real estate projects was constant. “Since 2018, the agricultural prosecutor’s office has been very strict with the question of changing the destination,” explains the scientist. Torres-Mazuera refers to a legal system common in the region since the 1990s that allows ejidos to change the nature of the land to pave the way for real estate developers.
On May 11, 2023, an excavator breaks ground at the Ejido Leona Vicario in Quintana Roo, Mexico. Rodrigo Oropeza
Attorney Aarón Siller also says that local and state legislation should curb development in the region, at least in the case of Ciudad Aurum. Leona Vicario belongs to the young community of Puerto Morelos, which broke away from Cancun a few years ago. Because of its youth, Puerto still lacks an environmental management plan and Leona Vicario needs to be governed after Cancun’s. “Cancun’s local ecological order establishes boundaries and boundaries of use. And without a doubt, given the estimated population, that number of hectares is not allowed in the regulation,” he explains. “What I think Puerto Morelos is aiming for is creating its own local order, self-allocating large population densities, which shouldn’t be the case because it puts not only that place at risk, but Cancun as well.” Much of the water that’s there arrives is recharged in that area,” he adds.
In the middle of the jungle, Santiago May points to a stake driven into the ground. “That’s all that concerns my country and that of my wife,” he explains. The man says that he arrived in the ejido in the 1990s. “I bought my certificate at the time. They were very cheap back then, a million pesos,” he says. “Right now they’re worth 15, 20 million.” About a million dollars. May married the daughter of an ejidatario and on his death the wife inherited. Together they collected just over 200 hectares of forest, jungle, cenotes and monkeys.
“I want to build an ecotourism park here. My daughter is about to graduate as a lawyer, but she has focused more on that topic, leadership. He likes it,” the man explains. “And he said to me: ‘Dad’, help me and I can do this,” he says. When he first heard in the assembly that the Commissioner intended to build Ciudad Aurum directly on his hectares, he said: “Leave me at least 10 hectares for my project.” Then he could use the rest of his land in another part recover the ejido. But they told him that if he wanted them, he should pay for them: four million pesos a piece. “What they want to do to us is robbery, it’s not a right,” he says.
Santiago May, Ejidatario and member of the Assembly of the Ejido Leona Vicario, during an interview in Quintana Roo, Mexico, May 11, 2023. Rodrigo Oropeza
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