A thousand signatures over Tulum power bills went to the president

CFE bills in Tulum doubled from one period to the next in Aldea Zama, residents and business owners told the news site Partidero, with accumulated debts above 24,000 pesos in two bimonthly periods.

Partidero published the complaints on Monday, attributing them to microbusiness owners, merchants and residents of the Aldea Zama area. The outlet says it holds copies of the bills and of a letter the group addressed to President Claudia Sheinbaum, and that it is withholding both documents to protect the identities of the people who signed them. The Tulum Times has not seen those documents and has not independently verified the amounts.

The calendar gives the dispute a deadline nobody involved chose. Summer rates across Quintana Roo, Yucatan and Campeche run until October 31. Consumption recorded from November 1 is measured against the narrower non-summer ranges, which is the point in the year when a bill on this coast tends to climb without anyone plugging in anything new.

4,000 pesos for an apartment nobody lives in

What separates this from an ordinary complaint about prices is that it turns on measurement.

Residents told Partidero that receipts exceeding 4,000 pesos were issued for homes and apartments that were completely unoccupied, which they present as evidence of metering inconsistencies rather than heavier use. The same group says the increases on occupied properties arrived with no operational change behind them and no rise in real consumption.

An empty apartment in Tulum does generate a bill. The consumer guide Recibo de Luz sets the floor at the equivalent of 25 kilowatt-hours, roughly 27 to 30 pesos plus taxes, charged whether or not anyone is using the service. The distance between that figure and a four-digit charge is what the signers are asking a federal agency to account for.

More than 1,000 signatures, and two emails that bounced

The group collected more than a thousand signatures of inconformidad and directed them to the authorities with jurisdiction and to the federal executive. The text tells Sheinbaum that the charges are choking the local economy and that Tulum will empty out further if they hold, according to the passages Partidero published.

Delivering it proved harder than writing it. The letter went out by email on October 2, was resent the following day through a different provider, and both messages returned as automatic delivery failures. The group then pushed the text through the chat on the president's official Facebook page.

Their request is narrow and specific. They want the Secretaría de Energía and Profeco to examine the methodology behind the charges and stop what they describe as a systematic abuse.

Amparos have not stopped the charges

Some of the affected have already gone to court on their own. The amparo filings have not frozen billing or removed the risk of service suspension associated with an unpaid balance, the complainants said.

The consumer route works the same way. Profeco has told groups pressing collective demands against CFE that a complaint proceeds only when filed individually, which leaves a thousand signatures carrying political weight and having no procedural effect on any single account.

No response from CFE on the Aldea Zama bills has been published.

Complaints of the same shape have surfaced elsewhere this autumn. Users in Guaymas, Sonora, held a protest of about three hours outside CFE offices on October 9 over high charges and service cuts, and residents of Nautla, Veracruz, went public with their own billing complaints in mid-October.

What tariff 1B does to CFE bills in Tulum

Domestic customers in Tulum are billed under CFE tariff 1B, which removes the household subsidy once the rolling 12-month average exceeds 400 kilowatt-hours per month. One class up the temperature ladder, on 1C, that ceiling is 850. A service that crosses the line falls into the high-consumption tariff known as DAC, where the rate per kilowatt-hour increases, and climbing back out requires 12 consecutive months under the limit.

Commercial services sit on their own tariffs, where the domestic subsidy ranges do not apply at all. A shop and the apartment above it can receive very different numbers for similar use.

That classification has been contested locally since the summer. A petition opened on July 13 by Alex Monroy asked the municipal government and CAPA to formally request a move to 1C or 1D, and gathered 1,708 supporters. CFE has published no answer, and the code printed on a Tulum bill still reads 1B. Our guide to how electricity bills work in Tulum sets out the blocks and the thresholds in full.

One more line on the paper is worth checking. The Supreme Court struck down Tulum's 5 percent public lighting charge, collected through the CFE bill, on September 17, 2025, in Acción de Inconstitucionalidad 19/2024.

A complaint filed before the due date blocks the cutoff

CFE runs an aclaración process built for this scenario. The customer calls 071, which operates around the clock, provides the service number, requests a billing review and a re-verification of the meter, and keeps the folio. Luz Noticias reported this month that answers usually take five to ten business days, with some cases running to two months.

Timing decides whether that process is worth anything. CFE's own customer information states that when a user has filed a complaint with the supplier or with Profeco before a suspension, the supply is restored and cannot be cut during the conciliation. Infobae reported in August that an inconformidad presented before the 30-day deadline halts the suspension while the case is resolved. A balance left to run past its due date with no complaint on file carries none of that protection.

Summer rates end on October 31, and the non-summer ranges take over across the peninsula on November 1. The signers are waiting on two federal offices for an answer, and on a presidential inbox their emails never reached.

Has your CFE bill in Tulum jumped between periods this year, and did an aclaración change the amount? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.