At Las Cocinas Beach, along the Nayarit coastline, heavy machinery was piling up mounds of rock and sand right up until last Tuesday. In the distance, the idyllic landscape was abruptly marred by several of these machines engaged in ceaseless activity. In this area—Punta de Mita, located within the municipality of Bahía de Banderas—the company Cantiles de Mita (part of the developer group Dine) has been constructing a luxury hotel and apartment complex since March; the project encroaches upon a portion of the federal zone designated as part of the beach. Residents of Punta de Mita and neighboring municipalities have been staging protests for the past month to defend their right to free access and to oppose the privatization of this space. “While we are asked to be patient, the machinery keeps advancing, and that sends a very clear message: that the authorities are not defending the people, but rather private interests,” says Efraín López, one of the local land defenders.
After five meetings involving local, state, and federal authorities—as well as residents and environmentalists—neither the proposals nor the dialogue have succeeded in halting construction. It was only last week—when images went viral showing nearly a hundred state police officers cordoning off the site and guarding the machinery—that the work finally ground to a halt. Residents had been protesting peacefully until they were verbally harassed and physically confronted by the uniformed officers; three of the demonstrators were ultimately detained and transported to Tepic—the state capital, located some 150 kilometers away—where they were charged with trespassing on private property, resisting arrest, and assaulting public officials.
In Mexico, the law establishes a 20-meter strip of land immediately adjacent to the beach, designating it the Federal Maritime-Terrestrial Zone (Zofemat). This space is considered a public domain asset, meaning it is the property of the nation and cannot be privatized or fenced off. For this reason, López—one of the individuals who joined the group that went to retrieve their companions from Las Cocinas Beach—believes that the charges brought against them (from which they were cleared just one day later) were unfounded. “None of those claims are true; perhaps they resisted arrest because they didn’t expect it, but neither the assault nor the trespassing charges hold water, as they were located within a federal zone,” he recounts.
One of the proposals the residents of Punta de Mita have received from the Dine Group is a commitment to modify the Montagne project—specifically, to set the construction back five meters further inland from the shoreline. This specific figure has only heightened the residents’ discontent: “The law is not negotiable. At this stage, there is nothing left to negotiate.” Consequently, they have now escalated their demands: “Not five meters, and not twenty—now we want them to leave us a 40-meter buffer zone so that the sea turtles can lay their eggs,” says López.
