Surf’s up, land defenders down on the Oaxacan coast

Digital illustration created for Ojalá © Elisa María M.V.

Reportage • Areli Palomo Contreras • May 9, 2025 • Leer en castellano

Death travelled by day, encroaching over hills and tropical plains, homes, shops and hostels, until it reached Barra de la Cruz, a small Chontal community on the Oaxacan coast. 

It advanced onwards until its arrival, on February 28, 2025, in the town center, where an assembly had been called at six o’clock that evening. The issue to be discussed was the placement of a new classroom building. The meeting took place across from the municipal office, in a covered courtyard where Cristino Castro was sitting with his companions. It was there that death whispered its advent, and shots were fired.

Minutes earlier, two people on a motorcycle had pulled up and parked. One of them dismounted, approached Castro and shot him dead.

Castro was part of the collective of land defenders in Barra de la Cruz, one of the most emblematic frontline community organizations on the coast. But he isn't the first killed in the struggle to protect his community's lands.

Juventino Muñoz Castillo was shot dead in 2020, following a previous attempt in 2017. José Castillo Castro took two bullets to the head in 2021 and survived. Yael Robles Vasquez and his uncle Sergio Robles Castillo were shot dead in 2024, in the span of five days. 

To date, no one has been arrested for the murders. 

The problem in this community, which has 751 residents of familiar parentage, begins with the income generated—and potential for further profits—from the growing tourist surf industry. In Barra, as in 76 percent of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, private property does not exist. 

Here, land tenure is communal. That’s how the people of Barra attained what few others in the region have achieved: keeping income from surf tourism inside their community. Communal property cannot be sold. That fact opposes the interests of the tourism industry, which seeks to privatize oceanfront land and guarantee legal certainty for investors. 

The perfect wave

At night, the sound of crashing waves embraces the community of Barra de la Cruz, which sits two kilometers up from the beach, nestled between two rolling peaks. 

Back in the early nineties two Australian surfers visited and were impressed by the noble and powerful wave at Barra, which swells at a rocky point break, then curls along the beach, before forming into a watery tube. Surfers crowned it ‘the perfect wave.’

As word began to spread, surfers the world over began arriving. The decade of the 2000s saw Barra de la Cruz become a surf destination of Puerto Escondido's calibre, recognized worldwide for its waves.

In June of 2006, Barra played host to an international surfing competition for the first time. As the economy grew and tourism increased, the people of Barra began to fear what would happen to their community. They looked to prior developments in the neighboring municipality of Santa Maria Huatulco for an indication of what might be in store. 

Santiago Cruz, whose name has been changed for security reasons, left his chicken soup on the table, and looked up at me, resigned to let his appetite pass. 

“We don't want what happened in Huatulco to happen to us,” Cruz said as he recalled why, as a community, locals agreed not to allow anyone from outside Barra to set up a business or buy communal lands. Huatulco is an Integrally Planned Tourist Center (CIP), only 52 kilometers from Barra. It was created in 1984 when the federal government expropriated 21,000 hectares of communal lands. 

In Huatulco, locals were displaced and exploited as cheap labourers. Large, foreign-owned hotel companies, such as Secrets, took over the best beaches.

Cruz explained how Barreños went to work in Huatulco, where they saw and understood this: competition with big investments would be unequal, and local businesses renting rooms, selling food and providing other services wouldn’t be able to survive. The small villagers' houses, still shrouded in verdant green and local fauna, the nightly roar of waves, all of it would all disappear. 

That’s why a 2004 general assembly decreed that no foreigner nor any Mexican from outside the community could invest in or buy real estate or land in Barra de la Cruz. In 2005, the community opened a restaurant, uniquely authorized to be located on the beach. Surfers, it was decided, would be charged a fee so as to maintain the public restrooms and showers. 

After Barra's first successful world surfing competition in 2007, the influx of tourists in the community skyrocketed. So has tourism income, and with it, conflicts over land. 

Privatization vs. collectives

In Mexico, the common resources commission is the authority tasked with convening assemblies to decide the future of communal lands, among other responsibilities. Assemblies are formed by community members, mainly heads of families and men who hold the right of possession to the land. Such rights can only be ceded to third parties by assembly. In the case of Barra, the common resources commission is made up of members from Barra de la Cruz and San Isidro Chacalapa, with a total of 398 registered communal landholders. Communal landowners like Cristino Castro took a key role in the defense of their lands, founding the collective that leads the struggle today.

In 1991, community members from San Isidro and Barra agreed to alternate the commission's presidency every three years. But in 2007, their agreement broke down.

That year, people from Barra—including some of those later assassinated—began negotiations with federal authorities from the department of Agrarian Reform [now the Secretariat of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development (Sedatu)] to resolve the conflict. For years, the Sedatu did nothing. This resulted in the commission losing legitimacy among its members in Barra and San Isidro, opening a crack that would later be pushed open to split and parcel the beachfront communal land known as “La Playita.” 

“The absence of a local regulatory body for agrarian problems—one approved by Sedatu—had serious implications,” wrote María José Fernandez Aldecua, a researcher at the Tourism Institute of the Universidad del Mar, in her doctoral thesis on community-based tourism. 

In 2007, land tenure oversight committees were created in Barra. Later, in 2013, a committee composed of some community members along with “a mix of people who were not from the community and who had ‘other interests’,” was elected, according to Fernandez Aldecua. This committee falsified a deed, adding signatures allowing them to expand the urban area of Barra, while its real motivation was to create privately owned lots in “La Playita.” 

In a statement of facts dated January 10, 2019 submitted to the National Human Rights Commission, among the individuals who split up the beachfront properties in 2013 was Geronimo Castellanos Sosa, who went on to become the municipal agent of Barra de la Cruz the following year. The process of privatization of at least 19 hectares in “La Playita” continued. 

During Castellanos Sosa's administration, it is alleged that lots measuring 20 meters by 20 meters were “ceded” to people outside the community for between 2,000 and 4,000 pesos (the equivalent to $175 to $350 dollars today). Fernandez Aldecua mentions the illegal sale of lots to people outside of Barra, noting that the municipal agent has no legal authority to change land use, much less to buy or sell land.

The vegetation that was cleared in “La Playita” has grown back, and the lots that were demarcated were never occupied. As this story is published, it remains unclear exactly what happened to the illegal titles that were allegedly sold to people outside the community.

Dispossession and resistance

According to a letter delivered to the delegation of the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) in Oaxaca on March 27, 2014, the authorization to divide the common land was endorsed by Tomás González Ilescas, who was then the head of Oaxaca's Semarnat, together with an unnamed, high-ranking political figure. Beyond the letter, there is no further evidence that González Illescas was involved in the privatization.

The conflict snowballed on July 4, 2016, when an office of Sedatu in Tehuantepec accredited a commission integrated only by communal landowners from San Isidro, ignoring the formal effort underway to reestablish three year rotations with the communal landowners from Barra. 

To this day, the agrarian conflict in Barra de la Cruz remains unresolved. We don’t know who’s behind the illegal land privatizations or the assassinations of the leaders who fought to bring the community’s demands to state mediators. The tragic loss of life is the outcome of land speculation on the Oaxacan coast. Today the main demand of the families involved in defending territory in Barra is that the killings stop, and that the federal agrarian authority step in to put an end to the 18-year-old conflict.

The death of Cristino Castro hangs in the air. Fear is tangible. Tourists, world championships and professional surfers keep arriving, apparently unable to see how death circles the perfect wave and the impeccable beach the people of Barra de la Cruz have given their lives to protect.

This is the fourth in a series of articles made possible by support from the Resilience Fund.