Oversight as a business: Tulum City Hall and the legalization of extortion

For years, Tulum has been fertile ground for tourism development and real estate investment. But instead of establishing a clear, transparent, and sustainable framework, the City Council has opted for a much more lucrative path—for themselves—to empower themselves to extort, disguised as territorial planning.

With the recent approval of the Urban Development Program Reform Agreement, the City Council not only discretionarily expanded land uses and densities in sensitive areas like Hul-Kin, but also delegated to the General Directorate of Urban Territorial Development and Oversight almost absolute power to authorize, block, or impose conditions on any type of project, without objective criteria, transparency, or accountability mechanisms.

This means that a single City Council office can decide whether a project moves forward or is frozen, depending on how much the developer, builder, architect, or even a small business looking to open a business is willing to pay.

The Directorate of Urban Development, historically known for corrupt practices, has been shielded and strengthened by this reform. What in theory should be a technical agency charged with verifying compliance with urban regulations has been transformed into an instrument of pressure, blackmail, and opaque negotiation.

This institutional redesign also appears to respond to a deliberate effort to weaken the Directorate of Urban Development, which traditionally held the reins of planning and permitting. City Hall has preferred to transfer that control to a department with less technical scrutiny and greater political flexibility: the Directorate of Urban Development, the perfect arm for operating without clear rules.

The reform also empowers this Directorate to expand its “inspections” to existing private and commercial buildings, opening the door to a new wave of illegal tax collection disguised as oversight. In short, it’s not just about controlling what’s yet to be developed, but also about squeezing what’s already been built.

This entire legal and institutional framework has a name: Diego Castañón, the current mayor of Tulum, a member of the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico (PVEM), is the one spearheading this transformation of the municipality into a tax-collecting apparatus disguised as an authority.

His administration has consolidated a model where urban planning, far from being a tool for orderly and sustainable development, has become an excuse to persecute, intimidate, and collect taxes, without accountability or long-term vision.

Tulum is not being planned or organized: it is being managed as a tax-collecting fiefdom. Anyone who wants to build must go through the customs of fear: an oversight that does not seek legality, but rather collection opportunities.

Meanwhile, the real problems—cenote contamination, loss of rainforest, vehicular traffic, insecurity—remain unresolved. Because the goal was never to protect Tulum. The goal, now more evident than ever, is to extract maximum economic profit from its disarray.

Source: excelsior