111 Arrested after battle over land in Mexico

13/5/2008 - 22:23(GMT)

Cancun, Mexico, May 13 (EFE)- A total of 111 people were arrested Tuesday outside this Caribbean resort city after armed toughs tried to forcibly evict some 80 poor families from a parcel of land, authorities said.

The Cancun Public Safety office said that the incident began at 4 a.m. when around a hundred armed men wearing hoods stormed the property, which covers more than 3 hectares (7.4 acres).

The assailants, 84 of whom were nabbed by the police, set fire to close to 30 huts where the squatters, 27 of whom were arrested, were spending the night.

After a battle lasting almost five hours, Cancun police intervened to control the clash that left 11 people injured, including a reporter whose hand was cut by a machete, according to a Red Cross report.

The property was located on the outskirts of Cancun, on the highway from that town to the city of Merida.

Women belonging to the group of squatters told the media that the assailants showed up with compressed-air pistols and began to expel them violently.

"They dragged one old lady out of a palm shelter by her hair.

We're not violent people, we only want some land to build a house for our children," one of them said on Enfoque Radio.

For his part, before getting into one of the patrol cars one of the toughs told reporters that they had been offered money to kick the families off the land.

The squatters' attorney, Ramiro de la Rosa Bejarano, said that the assailants had arrived in police patrol cars.

According to reporters' accounts, the squatter problem in Cancun got worse after the recent change in the municipal government, when groups opposed to Mayor-elect Gregorio Sanchez Martinez supposedly began to goad poor people into taking over properties in order to destabilize the community.

In response to the attempted eviction, De la Rosa, who has links to Sanchez's political rivals, announced demonstrations by other groups that have forcibly occupied another eight premises around the city.

Last week the Spanish company Playa Senator complained that since April 23 close to 30 people have been living without permission on some properties along the beach in which that company and Hotetur, also based in Spain, plan to start building hotels later this year.

EFE lc/cd

Terra/EFE