Court Returns Seized Mexican Hotel to Owners

MEXICO CITY — After a yearlong legal battle that underscored apparent contradictions in Mexico’s management of land, tourism and private investment, the owners of a luxury hotel in Baja California Sur took back their property this week from dozens of peasants who had seized and occupied it since July.

Backed by a series of court rulings, a state judge and more than 50 police officers, California-born businessman Don Johnson and his wife, Nancy Ugalde de Johnson, moved back into their Hotel Serenidad on the shores of the Gulf of California, ending a standoff that had polarized their sleepy village of Mulege.

The hotel, which drew such regulars as John Wayne, Olivia Newton-John and other stars for three decades before the local peasants claimed it as their own, became a model of Mexico’s effort to balance its commitment to land reform and its policy of courting private investment.

Nancy Johnson, a fifth-generation Mulege native, said this week’s action by state authorities, who evicted the peasants and briefly jailed their leaders Wednesday, proves that “there is justice in Mexico. It just works very slowly.”

“I have never seen the people of this town so happy; it’s like Christmas in June,” Don Johnson, who has lived in Mulege for the past 36 years, said in a telephone interview, referring to the end of the siege that had paralyzed tourism in the resort town.

The eviction of the ejidatarios, peasants who own land communally, came after a state judge ruled against them early this year.

The judge found that their July 14 seizure of the hotel and the forcible eviction of the Johnsons and such prominent guests as a vacationing San Diego County Superior Court judge amounted to “plundering” and that the peasants have no legal right to the land, as they claimed.

The Johnsons’ lawyer, Juan Edmundo Villanueva, explained the long delay between the earlier ruling and Wednesday’s action: “This is how long these procedures take.”

Villanueva said a separate ruling by a state land-reform court bolstered the Johnsons’ claim to the land, which they purchased from the federal government in 1982 after paying rent to the ejidatarios for more than a decade. The land-reform court ruled that more than 2,000 acres of Mulege’s land, which the peasants claimed were theirs, belong to the local government.

That decision paved the way for future development in Mulege, giving the local government authority to sell clear title to the land.

But it appeared to turn back a decades-long tradition of “land for the peasants” in Mexico, where communal landownership has brought peasants pride and identity.

“What we need to see now is a lot more of these kinds of decisions and actions,” concluded Johnson, who said he hopes to reopen parts of the hotel and its 4,000-foot private landing strip later this month.