Part of the land that was sold to Tesla in 2023 for the installation of a Gigafactory in Nuevo León is under legal dispute, as a citizen originally from Monterrey, residing in McAllen, claims that part of those properties were illegally taken from her family.
In 2019, that is, four years before the company owned by Elon Musk acquired the land, María de los Ángeles García Viuda de Bryant, and her family filed an administrative litigation in which they claim that, during the administration of then-governor Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, “El Bronco,” officials from the Registry and Cadastral Institute of Nuevo León and the State Secretariat of Finance and General Treasury erased cadastral records and files of the land of a ranch known as El Carvajal.
The property is located on the Saltillo-Monterrey highway, in the municipality of Santa Catarina, west of the Monterrey Metropolitan Area, and part of it was sold to Tesla for the construction of its now-paused electric car assembly plant.
In an interview with MILENIO, Mrs. García presented documents based on which she claims that the land of the El Carvajal ranch was owned by her great-uncles Manuel García Rodríguez and Apolonia García Viuda de Luna.
She claims that the cadastral file of her grandparents’ properties was canceled and explains that, for this property, her relatives paid the property tax for the last 80 years.
However, two years ago, on March 9, 2023, Tesla bought 1,194 hectares of that ranch from the great-grandchildren of the former Nuevo Leon governor Lázaro Garza Ayala, who presented themselves as owners of the same after receiving them as an inheritance from the former president. For these properties, Elon Musk’s firm paid almost 100 million dollars.
The journey of Mrs. García
María de los Ángeles García, Widow of Bryant, who resides in McAllen, Texas, where she has lived for 40 years, is originally from Monterrey, but has been traveling to the city for years to visit different secretaries, public notaries and a group of lawyers who have left the case after ignoring or only collecting without results. In this way, the lady is trying to recover the properties that, she claims, were illegally taken from her.
Although she initially asked that no photographs or video be taken of her, she later partially agreed, due to the fear generated by the interests involved in the case.
The woman, 71 years old, went to the MILENIO-Multimedios office in Monterrey to report the alleged dispossession that, she claims, involves former officials of the Public Registry of Property and the General Treasury of the State during the Rodríguez Calderón government.
On October 17, 2019, the lady’s brother, Pedro Manuel García Jiménez, filed a lawsuit for which he was assigned file number 1255/2019, claiming that former officials of the Registry Institute and the Secretariat of Finance and General Treasury were responsible for erasing the registry and cadastral files of the El Carvajal ranch land, owned by his great-uncles Manuel García Rodríguez and Apolonia García Viuda de Luna, along with the cadastral file number 16001040.
García de Bryant claims that entry 26, pages 66 to 69 of the Large Property Book, dated June 15, 1931, of the Santa Catarina Unit, disappeared.
“This Lázaro Garza Ayala (former governor of the state) bought a piece of land from (Graciana García), a sister of my grandfather; This is deed number 35 of October 15, 1931, property where the abandoned racetrack is located and another 450 hectares adjacent to the Lázaro Garza Benavides property, right next to (the high-capital gains subdivision) Terralta,” he explains.
All these properties make up the area in which Tesla planned to install its Gigafactory.
By canceling the cadastral file without his consent, he details, an alleged dispossession of 2,577 hectares of land was carried out, where Lázaro Garza Benavides and Lázaro Garza González presented themselves as relatives of former governor Lázaro Garza Ayala, to ask the State Government for a rectification of the properties.
The trial involves former directors Roberto López Gallardo, of Cadastre; Víctor García Rosales, of the Public Registry of Property and Commerce, of the Registry and Cadastral Institute of Nuevo León; and the registrar of the Ninth District of the Registry Institute.
The legal action was also filed against the former notifier and the director of Credits and Collections of the Secretariat of Finance and General Treasury of the State, a department still headed by Carlos Garza Ibarra.
The MILENIO-Multimedios platform confirmed the edict published in the Official State Gazette and in the newspaper El Norte on December 11, 2020, where the administrative contentious trial against the former public officials began.
Therefore, the First Ordinary Chamber of the Administrative Court of Justice summoned on November 19, 2020 (three years before the purchase of the properties by Tesla) the siblings Lázaro Genaro, Cecilia Lamar, Laura Leticia and Elvia Garza Dávila, great-grandchildren of former governor Lázaro Garza Ayala, to appear as injured third parties, who were identified as the co-owners of the properties sold to the automaker.
They found out in 2015
On September 28, 2015, the family of Mrs. María de los Ángeles García learned that the cadastral file for the land now in dispute had disappeared.
That day, when they tried to initiate an intestate succession trial of their grandparents’ assets, they were notified that the files referring to the properties could not be located.
“By means of this letter I inform you that I cannot make the lot (lot or portion of property) ordered by you. The above, by virtue of having carried out an investigation, both in the Municipal Treasury of Santa Catarina, NL, and in the Cadastre Directorate of the IRYCNL, it turned out that the file number in the name of the cujus (deceased) does not exist, reason for which I am returning the certified copies of the aforementioned file,” said at that time Gerardo Jesús Reza Santos, public notary number 99 to the Sixth Family Judge of the First Judicial District in the State.
A year later, on November 25, 2016, Víctor García Rosales, former director of the Public Registry of Property of the IRyCNL, confirmed to the Texas resident in official letter number 20235/2016 that the registration of the property was not found.
In an interview, the affected party showed documentation of the property tax payment in file number 16001040, in which surcharges from 1941 to 1954 appear with receipt number 96630 that her family made to the Revenue Collection Office of the General Treasury of the State, dated October 20, 1955.
Among the documentation whose copies she gave to MILENIO, there are other more “recent” receipts identified as C155503 and C11835, from April 22, 1999 and February 7, 2000, respectively, with the property tax payments for Rancho El Carvajal, which is part of the land sold to Tesla.
“The Land Registry erased the number that we had and that we paid for over 80 years. According to the director (of the Land Registry), Roberto López, there was no paper there to prove that we were the owners. The owner was notified and all the necessary protocol was followed because the Garza de la Paz and Garza Dávila made some corrections and took all our land, evil witches, and that poor director (López),” he accused.
According to the public deed of the sale of land to the car manufacturer, Hilda Lamar Garza de la Paz appears as the person who pays for the water services of one of the properties sold to Tesla.
In the public deeds of the Bi del Norte company, her daughter Cecilia Lamar Garza Dávila appears as one of the co-owners to whom the car manufacturer paid one sixth of the 50 percent that was due to her father Lázaro Garza González from the sale of the four plots of land where the Gigafactory would be located.
Source: milenio
