Americans in Baja Face Big Fees or Eviction

More than 150 Americans facing eviction from their Baja California property next month have no alternative but to pay thousands of dollars more to landowners to remain on the site, a top Mexican official has told The Times.

A source at the federal Agrarian Reform office in Mexicali, which is directing the eviction process, said all the homeowners’ legal options have been exhausted and that Mexican police will escort them off the premises Oct. 11 unless they make new financial agreements with the landowners. Residents are not entitled to any reimbursement for their houses, the source added.

Residents of the oceanfront development on Punta Banda, 15 miles south of Ensenada, received eviction notices last month, climaxing a protracted legal battle. Most are elderly U.S. retirees, many of whom invested life savings in what they thought were their dream houses.

Their development is on an ejido, or land grant, awarded to a group of Baja peasants in 1973. The Mexican Supreme Court in 1996 ruled the land transfer was illegal and ordered that ownership revert to the original owners, thus making the U.S. citizens trespassers. Eviction notices finally were handed out last month.

Since then, panic-stricken residents have been buffeted by conflicting legal advice from Mexican attorneys, some of whom urged them to pay enormous sums to seek an injunction to delay the evictions. Other attorneys maintained they could win them reimbursements for their homes.

“I’m feeling very confused, like a lot of people are. I’d like some concrete information,” said Rick Anderson, a Punta Banda resident who also manages a U.S.-owned manufacturing plant in Ensenada.

Some landowners have told residents that they would be allowed to stay only if they paid them large sums ranging from $30,000 to more than $100,000 for oceanfront lots.

“Some people are elderly retirees that just don’t have that kind of money, for whom these houses are all they have. It’s going to be quite a scene when the federales show up Oct. 11 to drag those people out of their homes,” said educator Joe Maruca, a Punta Banda resident from Imperial.

One of the landowners, Lourdes Cardoso of Ensenada, said in an interview Thursday she doesn’t yet know what terms her family will offer residents to stay, adding that some owners plan to meet with the Americans in early October to discuss the situation. “We want the people to not worry. We don’t want to remove anyone from their houses,” Cardoso said.

The Agrarian Reform official, who asked not to be identified, said the eviction notices are as final as a U.S. Supreme Court edict.