A city of 10,000 hectares threatens the Yucatan jungle

Enrique Hernández has been everything in this life and, now, at 66 years old, he sees how history is complicated and the peace he dreamed of in his retirement is undone in his hands. "They want to take our land," he says, incredulous. Blows of flesh made body, battleship and at the same time fine, Hernández has been chiclero, lobster, hairdresser ... He gave up lobster fishing because one day, more than 40 years ago, half his face swelled in the depth of the Caribbean Sea. He almost drowned. He quit the chiclería because another day, a few years later, he fell from a nine-meter sapote while harvesting sage in the jungle. The hairdresser does not let her, a sentimental matter: it is the little she has left of her father, one of the most famous hairdressers in old Quintana Roo.

"My father brought the first thermoelectric station to Leona Vicario," says the man, proudly. "He brought the light!" she adds, "he was very well connected politically." He also managed to enter the ejido, something perhaps more important, given how the value of land in the Yucatan Peninsula has increased. Before the turn of the century, the father joined the Leona Vicario ejido. At that time, the ejido was 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 colony has become Cancun and the ejido, the scene of a battle for different visions about the future and development.

Hernandez had hopes for the land, he wanted to live happily in his retirement, but now the land has become a problem. The man is part of a group of ejidatarios of Leona Vicario that denounces the last great attempt of the real estate industry in Quintana Roo. He accuses that members of the same ejido, supported by foreign businessmen, intend to build a city of 10,000 hectares in the middle of the jungle, also using ejido lands awarded to him and other companions. "What they want to do is illegal, they can't take away from us," says Hernandez.

Enrique Hernández, ejidatario and member of the assembly of the ejido Leona Vicario in Quintana Roo, Mexico, on May 11, 2023.Rodrigo Oropeza

The project is called Ciudad Aurum and has been the protagonist of the ejido's assemblies since January. Hernández and his colleagues explain that the city is an idea of the new directive of the commissariat, the governing body of the ejido. Its current president, Juan García Asbún, took office in November and by then, in informal meetings, presented the project to others. At first, they say, I thought it was going to be a small development, 600 hectares. Their lands. But as the months went by, García Asbún and his partners showed different intentions, until they reached 10,000 hectares, taking lands from ejidatarios who did not agree. EL PAÍS contacted García Asbún via WhatsApp and, although at first she said she was willing to grant an interview, she later stopped answering.

Beyond the proximity to Cancun and the Riviera Maya, the attraction of the area lies in the nearby passage of the Mayan Train, one of the most important projects of the current Government. Leona Vicario got the Executive, headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to agree to install a station next to the ejido, from which, by the way, they bought dozens of hectares of land to install the tracks. If the mere push of tourism and the real estate industry has been enough to change the social and economic dynamics in Yucatan in the last quarter century, the appearance on the horizon of the Mayan Train has accelerated the process to a degree that is still difficult to understand.

"I had heard that they were going to create this new population center, associated with Leona Vicario," says Aarón Siller, a lawyer with the Mexican Center for Environmental Law. "The Mayan Train does not consider this type of consequences, these poles of development are not contemplated in the environmental impact. [The train] is a megaproject that promotes speculation and land dispossession. There have been many conflicts. The project has led to impressive real estate speculation. It is causing the subdivision of the forest, of the lands. We are in a territorial anarchy," he said.

Aerial view of the construction of a bridge that is part of section 5 of the Mayan train route, in Quintana Roo, Mexico on May 11, 2023.Rodrigo Oropeza

Speculators

Designed to do justice to the population after the Revolution, ejidos appeared in Mexico as collectively owned units in the countryside. Since the 1930s, the government has distributed millions of hectares to millions of peasants. The land was organized into ejidos. There were no owners, the community was. The children of the ejidatarios inherited their rights to the countryside, to the forest, to the pastures, when their parents died. That's how it worked for decades. But then modernity came.

During the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994), the all-powerful PRI modified the Constitution and the Agrarian Law to allow two fundamental changes in the functioning of the ejidos. First, it made it possible for the lands to be divided and awarded to the ejidatarios. Second, he endorsed the privatization of collective property, already chopped up. In few regions of Mexico, these changes had as much effect as in the southeastern peninsular states of Yucatan, Quintana Roo and Campeche.

In the study Three decades of privatization and dispossession of social property in the Yucatan Peninsula, the author, anthropologist Gabriela Torres-Mazuera, gives several figures that allow us to understand the magnitude of the privatization wave. "Since 1992, when the agrarian law was reformed, until May 2019, in Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán, a total of 22,660 plots, with an area of 192,600 hectares of land, ceased to be socially owned and became private property," he writes. 192,600 hectares, little less than the entire State of Mexico, three cities like Madrid, one after the other.

Made the law, made the trap. The possibility of cutting and selling ejidos motivated the appearance of a new species, raptor in the Yucatan Peninsula, that of speculators, expert hunters of legal strongholds, inventors of various illegalities, levers that they used to take the land at the lowest possible cost. There in the region they are called the "agrarian mafia", a changing and amorphous entity. Hernández and his colleagues at Leona Vicario say the agrarian mafia is behind Ciudad Aurum.

A worker from the Leona Vicario ejido cleans a cenote in Quintana Roo, Mexico, on May 11, 2023.Rodrigo Oropeza

The question, of course, is how they did it, how the agrarian mafia got involved. A forest-type ejido, the jungle dominates much of the territory in Leona Vicario. With the legal changes of the late 1990s, ejidatarios began to delimit their properties. There were several "aparcelamientos", as they say, part of a lexicon, the ejido, rich and convoluted. The ejidatarios pointed out their plots, all huge, of tens of hectares. In the heat of Cancun's development, some began selling land. Others, in addition to the land, sold their ejido certificates.

Hernández and the others say that the last major parceling in Leona Vicario was in 2009, a situation verifiable thanks to a map that they sent to EL PAÍS. In the plan, they say, it is observed how the surface where today "the others" want to develop Ciudad Aurum, was distributed among dozens of ejidatarios. "The problem," explains Santiago May, one of Hernández's colleagues, "is that many of us don't want to give our land to that project."

Little is known about Aurum City. Hernández and the others have sent some videos and photographs these days, of the presentation of the project in the assemblies held in the first four months of the year. In the images appears the president of the commissioner, García Asbún, and a character of whom they throw pests, turned into an ejido a few years ago, José Leonel Noya. "In the last assembly, in April, they sold the idea that each ejido who supported them was going to be given 25 hectares within the project," says May.

Both May and Hernández say that the big problem of land in the ejido has to do with the number of ejidatarios who, although they remain so, have already sold all their land. After the 2009 parceling, the 389 ejidatarios of Leona Vicario had already chosen their 100 hectares corresponding, to reserve 54 more hectares that they could choose in the future. Some sold them all, but they still have a say in the assembly. The two men point out that this is the weak point of the ejido. "They manipulate them, they tell them that they are going to give them land, that they are going to pay them, so that they vote in favor of Aurum," they say.

Santiago May (D), ejidatario and assembly member of the Leona Vicario ejido, at a meeting with workers in Quintana Roo, Mexico, on 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 terrible and voracious agrarian mafia. There are interests on both sides. The dispute transcends the Manichean notion of tradition versus development. They are, in the end, two forms of development. Both sides manage resources because they have huge amounts of land and, therefore, money. Hernández, May and their colleagues have in mind to develop an ecotourism project, the route of the lagoons, whose impact, they say, will be less.

What is not clear is how one side or the other is supposed to carry out their projects. In an interview with this newspaper, anthropologist Torres-Mazuera points out that "it is illegal to parcel out parts of the ejidos with forest cover," in the case of Leona Vicario. Despite this, the jungle gives way little by little. On a visit last week, the presence of hotels, glampings or small real estate developments was constant. "Since 2018, the Agrarian Attorney has been very strict with the issue of change of destination," explains the academic. Torres-Mazuera refers to a legal ruse, common in the area since the 1990s, that allows ejidos to change the type of land to pave the way for real estate.

A bulldozer makes its way in the Leona Vicario ejido, in Quintana Roo, Mexico, on May 11, 2023.Rodrigo Oropeza

Attorney Aaron Siller also says that local and state legislation should contain development in the area, at least in the case of Aurum City. Leona Vicario belongs to the young municipality of Puerto Morelos, which broke away from Cancun a few years ago. Due to its youth, Puerto still lacks an ecological management plan and Leona Vicario must be governed by Cancun. "The local ecological ordering of Cancun establishes limits and unbrales of use. And without a doubt, that amount of hectares, with the estimated population, is not allowed by the management, "he explains. "What I think Puerto Morelos seeks is to create its own local order, to self-assign large population densities, which should not be, because they put at risk not only that place, but also Cancun. A lot of the water that comes there is recharged in that area," he adds.

In the middle of the jungle, Santiago May points to a stake driven into the ground. "This is as far as my land and my wife's land goes," he explains. The man says he arrived in the ejido in the 1990s. "I then bought my certificate. At that time they were very cheap, a million pesos," he says. "Right now they're worth 15, 20 million." About a million dollars. May married the daughter of an ejido and, upon his death, the woman inherited. Between the two they gathered just over 200 hectares, forest land, jungle, cenotes and monkeys.

"I want to make an ecotourism park here. My daughter is about to become a lawyer, but she has dedicated herself more to this, to guidance. He likes it," the man explains. "And he said, 'pa,' help me and I'll manage it," she says. When he first heard in the assembly that the commissioner intended to build Aurum City right on top of his hectares, he said, 'Well, at least leave me 10 hectares for my project.'" He could then recover the rest of his land in another part of the ejido. But they told him that if he wanted them, to pay them: four million pesos each. "What they want to do to us is theft, they are not rights," he criticizes.

Santiago May, ejidatario and member of the assembly of the ejido Leona Vicario, during an interview in Quintana Roo, Mexico, on May 11, 2023.Rodrigo Oropeza

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