Loreto “Alert!”

This is an urgent message to the people of Loreto in general; and especially to those whose lives are, in anyway, connected to eco-tourism in the Loreto area. You are about to lose a large part of your eco-tourism base. Think about that....

In regards to tourism in general, Loreto is not holding a very strong hand. You're expensive to get to and unless one is interested in some form of outdoor recreation, you don't have very much going on. The possibility of offering the outside world a very positive eco-experience, certainly. But to draw a worldwide crowd capable of propping up your incredibly sagging economy with some much needed energy input, you haven't won such credentials yet. Lines on a map and signs along the road won't fool the eco-sensitive crowds. They are too well educated and very much more aware.

When these people, lured here by very well prepared and appealing advertising campaigns, discover that the area is not really seriously committed to maintaining a "high class eco-experience atmosphere," they react negatively and almost immediately. And believe me, in this electronic age, they know how to communicate what they find. Good messages draw in others. Bad messages, of course, do exactly the opposite.

One of the strongest legs of your eco tourism industry, is about to be cut away, and I just thought you might like to know a little bit about this...

Your lives, and I'm sure most of you know little or nothing about this, are all wrapped up with El Plano Definitivo for ejido San Jose De La Noria: a provably falsely crafted document that was designed to defraud property owners of their legally held lands and to out-right steal large parts of the incredible "Agua Verde area" coastline for the personal gain of the crafters of the above named document.

The errors committed with this Plano are so outrageously obvious that anyone with normal eyesight and intelligence can understand the falsehoods almost immediately. But so what? What does that have to do with you, a long ways away in Loreto?

Well...this coastline, one of the most spectacular stretches along the Sea of Cortez, just happens to be the hoped-for destination point for most of the eco- tourists that help support your city, that come to experience your Marine Park, which sets in conjunction with this coastline.

Precisely what's goin' on along this important tourist destination is this:

Ejido San Jose De La Noria, using their Plano, which they know to be a fabrication, has illegally parceled a large stretch of that precious coastal resource, what you might call the shoreline that best shows off your Park.

Because of the problems swirling around El Plano Definitivo for this ejido, it has never been in the possession to legally parcelize anything. That didn't stop them though. They went ahead and did it anyway, this with the helping hand of the Reforma Agraria, the architect of that fraudulent Plano. They had nice parcels laid out, they even put in cement markers with a small aluminum plates nailed on top with the letters "SEMARNAP" stamped in, to make it all look nice and official. (SEMARNAP was never involved in this or knew anything about it.) And then of course they drew up official looking parcel planos. At an ejido drawing each ejdio member (98 of them) got one, (the false enginero who assisted them got two).

Then they set about the task of selling their parcels, which, because of an incredible hunger for land along that coastline, this combined with an incredible level of gullibility on the part of the public in general, they easily accomplished.

Most of the ejido members were incredibly in need of something, almost "anything!" they could convert those papers into, to in any way, make their lives just a little bit easier. Most of them had very little experience in any type of business dealings at all. Most of those parcels got sold dirt cheap or traded for some miserable carro that was going to do anything but make their lives better. Some of them ended up getting outright swindled out of their parcels and their ejido rights also. Selling parcels and ejido rights, for a short while, became quite the rage.

Because Ejdio San Jose De La Noria, the pueblo of San Jose De La Noria, lays mostly in the Municipal of Comondu (the Agua Verde members are fewer and in the Municipal of Loreto), and because most of the frantic parcel trading occurred in the City of Constitucion, and because this stretch of parcelized coastline lays so far from the center of things in Loreto, your Municipal establishment was largely unaware of the vast majority of this illegal activity. There were rumblings, of course, but Loreto officialdom has plenty to contend with right close at hand there; they're mostly off the hook in regards to this mess.

Those that bought into this parcel scheme, many of them jumping and buying multiples of these bogus planos, hoping to cash in big, were slow to realize how they'd been taken in. Many of them just simply refused to believe they'd been swindled.

Quite a few arrived to the area around San Cosme and Rancho El Carrizalito and became quite angry to find they'd' bought into a basketful of conflicts. But rather than attack those who'd defrauded them they turned their anger against those occupying lands they already thought as "theirs!"

Believe me, I've lived it all, and, thus far, I've had the good fortune to have gotten the chance to write all about it. If you check my website (www.dondavidonbaja.com) you can look in at this in much greater detail.

So there's this great battle going on right now, all because of the fraudulent Plano Definitivo that gave rise to these fraudulent parcels. And even though the governmental agencies of PROCEDI and INIJE recognize the correct placement of the private properties involved, and do not recognize these fraudulent parcels (none of them have been legally registered), there are parcel holders who stubbornly refuse to believe this reality, and persist in their efforts to occupy and destroy the eco systems that was once thriving there.

Wonderful example exist of just what will happen to the precious and essentially irreplaceable coastal eco zone that I'm referring to...if the parcel holder wins this fight. One parcel holder right at Rancho San Cosme, without anyone's consent, brought in a bull dozer and leveled everything that was alive there, all the natural, soil protecting vegetation. Before anyone had the chance to inniate a complaint, the destruction was done.

Close to San Cosme another parcel holder, Saul Trojillo Gonzalez, entered his parcel by force of a large work crew and immediately started chopping down the desert eco system and constructing fences, this on Historic Rancho Carrizalito, which the ejido with signed official documents had pledged to respect. Irregardless of complaints to the correct officials he continued to denude the fragile desert, block off historic roadways, dig a well without a permit, and now is constructing a monstrous eyesore of a building that is in violation of federal tide zone law. (All this while the organizations responsible for protecting such things have simply sat back and twiddled their thumbs.)

A third parcel owner, an American that goes by the name of Juanito and who lives in or around Ensenada Blanca, and who also knows full well that his parcel is no good, continues to construct an erection high up on a hill where every passing eco-tourist can't help but see it, right in the middle of one of the most important stretch of empty coastline that these tourists have come thousands of miles to experience. Most I've talked to say it hits them like a slap in the face.)

Because I live here right at ground zero in this fight, I hear all the complaints from the kayak guides and their clients, and just about all from the outside that came to enjoy the natural area. Many of these clients are thrown into a state of shock seeing such insults thrown upon on what they think should be held sacred. They stand in disbelief that such sacrilege is permitted to go forward in what they see as an International asset that deserves maximum protection. This is very, very bad publicity Loreto. Use your imagination and consider what will happen if 98 or 99 parcels are allowed to be developed.

Bye-bye, this leg of eco-tourism.

To make matters worse, many ejido memberships have now been snapped up by a much richer class of Mexicans, people never meant to be included into the ejido process. And, by the way, people who can't even legally be ejido members. Naturally, the only reason they've gotten involved is to try to cash in on the sale of ejido lands. They are speculators, nothing more.

Presently there are about 33 percent of Ejido San Jose De La Noria members that are of this class. These "new" members now occupy all the key ejido positions. One of these extra legal members, Sr. Gutierrez, has just been voted in as the ejido commissioner. This Sr. Gutierrez also happens to be on a parcel buying binge, him now having accumulated something like 40 of these false planos, him betting that the ejido is going to win its fight to legitimize these. All that I've talked to have described him, in regards to business dealings, as a real shark that only thinks of his own pocket.

So here's the position that you've been thrown into, you people of Loreto:

A resource that your City can't afford to lose, the empty coastline along your Marine Park, is all tangled up with the provably false El Plano Definitivo for Ejido San Jose De La Noria, which was designed by past corrupt officials in the Reforma Agraria, a governmental agency, which continues to try to make this false plano rule and facilitate the false parcel scam which will certainly kill off a large part of the eco tourism that your city is striving to attract. And now, the head of the ejdio, Sr. Gutierrez from Cd. Constitucion, the one who will be the primary beneficiary of that parcel scam...should it prove successful, controls that ejido, even though by law he can't.

Noise is being made about these adverse developments, I assure you. I'm one of the major noisemakers and believe me...I understand how dangerously I'm hanging out here. But to stop this there's going to have to be a whole lot of noise, and that noise, if it's not generated by you, and if it isn't loud enough to reach your State Capital, indeed Mexico, will fall of deaf ears.

Bye-bye, credentials for your Marine Park. Bye-bye, more vitally needed business for your city.

Bye-bye, Loreto!

And don't say I didn't tell you so.

Email: david@dondavidonbaja.com