Cerritos Beach, one of the best for surfing in Baja California Sur, is at the center of a legal dispute. The retreat of the sea led federal authorities to re-outline the 20-meter strip adjoining the beach, a stretch that has left in limbo land occupied by service providers that the ejidatarios claim their own.
Source: Own elaboration.
The current tensions originated in 2020 when the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) delimited the aforementioned coastal strip of the Federal Maritime Terrestrial Zone (Zofemat).
This new delimitation is not a straight line, but rather it wraps up to encompass an area that floods behind and considered it to be a body of water. For Moreno, Semarnat paid too much attention to this flood, while lenders say they did it this way to affect private property.
“The Federal Law on National Assets indicates that for private property to become a federal zone, it has to be under water for more than six months, but in this case the water enters the area every five years and lasts a week, because it is filtered, it is not a body of water itself,” said a service provider in the area whose identity we keep.
The ejido is awarded the entire beachfront on the grounds that when they gave it its land endowment, it was granted the entire surface from a georeferenced point to the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Under this perspective, any extension of the surface belongs to them.
In addition, the Ejido has a concession on the Zofemat that was granted to it by Semarnat in 2022, through which it gives it the right to use the area for a certain time, but does not create property rights.
However, the service providers point out that the area in dispute is the product of land gained from the sea, so they demand that the ejido stop controlling and profiting from the area and that Semarnat intervene to organize the area in dispute and the Zofemat, that is, the strip of 20 meters adjacent to the average of the highest tide in a year.
History of the controversy
20 years ago, Cerritos Beach was quiet and spacious. Its waves attracted tourists that required food, drinks and surf lessons. But in the last decade, it has become a real estate and tourism hub that has generated accelerated urban growth.
Cerritos is a town with 126 inhabitants that is part of the delegation of El Pescadero. Like the neighboring towns of Todos Santos and El Pescadero, Cerritos has experienced high national and international migration and has an economy focused on tourism.
In November 2023, the commissioner of the El Pescadero ejido called separately all the tourist service providers of surf schools, umbrella rentals, masseurs and street vendors who worked on the beach, to inform them that Semarnat granted them a Zofemat concession and that they had two options: to vacate the area or pay a monthly rent.
“The ejido arrived, relocated me and began to charge me 12,000 pesos per month for 100 square meters. They also went to other merchants asking them for floor rights. I was abused, but I paid them and at the same time I investigated,” said a second service provider interviewed for this report.
Map of lotifications to be rented by the El Pescadero ejido. Source: Courtesy
Despite the fact that the lots they offered for rent were above the Zofemat and over the area of controversy, the ejido had a contract signed for the lease of land for common use that did not include the coordinates of the space to be rented and emphasized the confidentiality of the contract.
One of the service providers paid two months' rent. In that same period, he found out, together with other lenders, that the concession title for the 5,000-square-meter ejido of the Zofemat was granted on December 26, 2022.
The service providers noticed that they were working in the area of controversy and not in the Zofemat del ejido concession, so the latter had no right to charge them rent.
Also, the concession can only have one use for protection, so the ejido can only carry out activities that aim to preserve the landscape and the environment. Undertaking activities other than these may result in administrative sanctions and the revocation of the concession, according to John Moreno, lawyer and resident of Todos Santos.
Around 100 service providers were grouped together as the Cerritos Beach Service and Surf Providers Association, and they stopped paying the ejido. However, the ejido began to intimidate and threaten them.
“We respect the ejido and are not trying to take an inch away from it. I told them, 'I know I have to pay to be here, but I want to pay the person who actually proves that he belongs to him'. These people from the ejido get upset and some colleagues were sued saying that their assets were being taken away from them,” said one of the service providers.
For this report, Carlos Salgado was sought for an interview, current president of the El Pescadero Ejidal Commissioner, and the Zofemat Directorate of the City of La Paz (Zofemat La Paz), but there was no response.
Notification sent by the El Pescadero ejido to Cerritos service providers. Source: Cerritos Beach Surf and Service Providers Association.
Since the end of 2023 and throughout 2024, service providers, merchants and the installation of restaurants with fixed structures have proliferated in the controversial area with the consent of the ejido. The restaurants used heavy machinery, foundations, and installed septic tanks on the beach, however, it is unknown if they have an Environmental Impact Statement authorized by Semarnat for these works and activities in a coastal ecosystem.
In 2023, the Cerritos Beach Surf and Service Providers Association filed a complaint with the Federal Attorney's Office for Environmental Protection (Profepa) for the environmental impact of restaurants in the area.
However, when Profepa inspectors came to the area, they focused on service providers and not on restaurants, and to date there is no favorable resolution yet.
“The restaurants are on land earned from the sea, just like us. The only difference is that we don't harm nature. The restaurants arrived with heavy machinery and made a disaster, but to date there has been no investigation of the environmental impact they caused,” said a member of the association.
The restaurants paid between 40 and 50 thousand pesos per month to the ejido. “It was all happiness until the town arrived,” he said.
At the beginning of 2025, the City Council of La Paz came to verify the trade that takes place on Cerritos Beach and asks restaurants to verify the legal occupancy of the space.
“That's where the second bomb exploded. The first was when we revealed ourselves and stopped paying them. The second was when those in the municipality tell the restaurateurs that they have to stop paying the ejido and pay Zofemat La Paz as an irregular occupant,” said one of the service providers.
In February 2025, Baldomero Mendoza, director of Legal Affairs of the City of La Paz, notified the ejido that the common land was properly delimited and that the area in dispute was outside these limits and subject to the administration of the Zofemat La Paz.
He also warned him to stop carrying out acts that involved the domain of the polygon, and to demand payments for land use from people, since if he did so, he would be reported to the Public Prosecutor's Office.
As a result, the ejido stopped harassing merchants for a month, but in March, to pressure restaurants to pay them again, it placed a booth with a pen on a public road to control the access of people and vehicles to the beach.
Some of the service providers have sought a Zofemat concession from Semarnat but have not been successful. Instead, what they have obtained, along with some restaurants, is a permit as irregular occupants provided by the City Council of La Paz.
Booth removal
In response to a citizen complaint through the La Paz App, the City Council of La Paz initiated administrative proceedings against the construction of a booth for not having a construction permit and because it obstructed a public road registered with the Municipal Land Registry Office, however, the Ejido El Pescadero did not release the road, and for that reason, on May 23, the authority closed and demolished the works.
“Notifications and summons were left by the Directorate of Mobility and Public Space and the Public Works Directorate, the deadline expired and as a result the order was given to demolish and vacate the public road. By not doing it individually, the City Council has the power to go and do it, and that is how with an operation it demolished the booth and we were able to free up that space,” said Pavel Castro, comptroller of the City Council of La Paz.
The role of the comptroller's office has been to rearticulate a strategy of freeing access to beaches through the attention of complaints, legal review of cases and referring complaints to the competent areas of the City of La Paz.
In turn, Profepa removed and closed the booth on April 19 and an investigation into this fact is ongoing.
Land allotment: the controversy to be resolved
Map showing the delimitation of the commonly used areas that currently belong to the El Pescadero ejido shaded in yellow. Source: National Agrarian Registry.
When the ejido of El Pescadero received its land endowment from the Secretariat of Agrarian Reform, currently the Secretariat of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development (SEDATU), there were no high-precision instruments and this gave rise to the controversy that currently exists regarding the boundaries of ejido lands
“There were a lot of inaccuracies and errors, so the delimitation of the entire coastal strip is imprecise. People say that there is land earned from the sea, but that is something they are saying to justify possession of the surface. There are groups that align more with one delimitation than with another, however, the presidential decree by which the ejido was created is very clear: it provided everything entitled with a georeferenced point all the way to the coast. Any vacant surface will correspond to the ejido,” said lawyer Moreno.
However, service providers insist that when the new delimitation is made in 2020, land is generated in the middle, which, according to the General Law of National Assets, must be considered as earned from the sea.
“Legally, they should be called land earned from the sea, but until the authority issues a written piece of paper that recognizes it. That's why they took advantage of that loophole in the law to give all restaurants permission to go to the beach,” said one of the providers.
Towards the resolution of the dispute
Because the controversy has arisen due to the uncertainty of whether or not the disputed area is a federal zone, the solution to resolve it is for Semarnat to make a correct delimitation of the federal zone.
“The proposal for how to put order is that, the Zofemat Federal Directorate... together with Sedatu, carry out a delimitation that they recognize virtually as permanent, where they delimit common use, private property and therefore, the rest, which by default would turn out to be a federal zone,” Moreno said. This federal result would be subject to a concession from Semarnat for its use.
Moreno points out that it is desirable for the City Council of La Paz to ask Semarnat for its destination agreement, and in turn the City Council to place the area under the administration of a local council to order the territory in a precise and democratic way in that space other than the ejidal one.
“There will be certain irregularities in administrative matters, that's normal. What is not normal is the lack of commitment and the lack of decisive intervention on the part of the authority. There is a lack of will to act and bring order based on the law,” Moreno said.
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