A judge in Playa del Carmen ordered that possession of a Tulum property be handed to the plaintiff in a civil suit at noon Tuesday, the newest turn in a Tulum land dispute that has been running since 2016.
The Tulum Times has not been able to confirm whether the diligence was carried out. No court notice, municipal statement, or account from any party involved had surfaced by Wednesday morning.
What is documented is the order itself. It identifies the property tied to the commercial business known as "Naay Tulum Beach," fixes the hour, and authorizes two court officers to call in police and force the locks open if the delivery meets resistance. On a stretch of Tulum where possession has already changed by court order, and where hotel guests have been put out during the operation, the paperwork carries weight even before anyone knows the outcome.
Two court officers cleared to break locks
The order came from Víctor Alfonso Escalante Hernández, an instruction judge attached to the Juzgado Civil y Familiar Oral de Primera Instancia in the Playa del Carmen judicial district. He set the delivery for 12:00 on August 11 and commissioned two actuarias, identified in the document only by the initials N.A.F.N. and M.E.A.R., to execute it.
Both were given the power to request assistance from public security forces and, if conditions required, to force the locks. The court asked Tulum's Secretaría de Seguridad Pública y Protección Ciudadana to cooperate.
The restitution proceeds through the vía de apremio, the enforcement track a Mexican civil court uses once a ruling has to be carried out rather than argued. The file has moved from the judges to the officers who show up at the gate.
Parcel 1981 and the ejido it sits in
The property is identified in the file as sitting inside parcel number 1981 of the Nuevo Centro de Población Ejidal José María Pino Suárez, the agrarian nucleus that covers a large share of southern Tulum.
That name carries history. Pino Suárez land has produced the longest-running property fights in the municipality, and the case this order descends from, expediente 324/2016, was opened in the same year as the largest eviction Tulum has seen.
How the 2023 incident undid a 2021 handover
The case has already reversed once. In September 2021, a federal authority granted a definitive suspension that returned possession to the parties then acting as complainants in amparo 1005/2016-V, filed by Ernesto García Amador and José Fernando Jiménez Soto. In November of that year, court officers went out and physically delivered the property recorded in the file as "Naay Tulum Beach."
Then it moved back.
On May 30, 2023, a court resolved an incident seeking modification of that suspension, filed by Mauricio Esteban, Ciro Miguel, José Rafael, and Francesco Saveria Schiavon Magaña. Later determinations lifted the impediments that had been holding up enforcement, and the judge found it proper to restore possession to the plaintiff in the underlying ordinary civil suit. The order covers the property linked to "Naay Tulum Beach" and the land that was the subject of the original contested eviction.
The document does not name the plaintiff who receives possession. That silence matters. The same file has moved this property between parties twice in five years, and nothing in the order tells a reader who holds it once the officers leave.
A Tulum land dispute shaped by the 2016 evictions
The Schiavon Magaña name is familiar on this coast. In June 2016, court officers from the same Playa del Carmen civil court, backed by municipal police and private guards, executed an eviction order across 16 properties along 600 meters of beach at kilometer 7.5 of the Boca Paila road, in the Punta Piedra area. Forbes and Proceso reported at the time that the diligence came out of a desahucio suit, expediente 326/2016, filed by a legal representative of the four brothers.
Roughly 300 tourists were turned out of small hotels that morning, according to reporting in La Jornada. Hidalio Martínez, then comisario of the Pino Suárez ejido, called the eviction illegal and said the land was ejido property covered by parcel certificates issued by federal authority. Hotel operators publicly held a group of businessmen responsible and accused them of using false public deeds. The businessmen have maintained the opposite position, including through signage posted along the strip asserting that the land is registered in their names at the state public property registry. Roberto Palazuelos, then head of the Tulum hotel association, said publicly that the land belonged to Schiavon Magaña and had been invaded and resold by ejido leaders.
Three months after the eviction, El Universal reported that a district court in Cancún granted the first amparo from that group, restoring the Azúcar hotel to Allan Dieck while the ownership question was decided. That same article listed a business called "Naay Beach Club" among the properties on the strip then bearing the private property signs. The Tulum Times has not confirmed that it is the same business identified in this week's order.
The agrarian office says the ejido never reached the sea
In March 2022, Luis Hernández Palacios Mirón, head of the Procuraduría Agraria, said the José María Pino Suárez ejido does not extend to the sea and that no ejido title or certificate covering the coastal strip is valid. He added that a set of newer titles had been canceled. Federal officials presented the statement as a clarification that would settle who could claim what. The suits kept coming.
Nobody has confirmed the property changed hands
As of Wednesday, this publication has seen no record that the noon diligence took place. No images, no municipal police report, no notice from the court. None of the parties named in the order has spoken publicly about it, and The Tulum Times will publish their accounts if they do.
The open question is narrow. Either the two actuarias delivered the property at noon on Tuesday, and the enforcement track closes on that point, or the delivery stalled again, as it did between 2021 and 2023. The document that settles it is the certificate the officers file with the court, and it is not public yet.
Should Quintana Roo courts make enforcement records in coastal property cases public so residents can see who holds what? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.