“I reported my daughter and the person who now lives in my property.” Alejandra Margarita says this while holding a folder full of letterheaded and sealed pages from administrative and judicial authorities. It is the bulky file of a legal process that began two years ago, when her daughter dispossessed her of her house in the Tláhuac borough, to later sell it to a third party. Her voice does not tremble when asked who took her property. “My daughter dispossessed me and then I found out that there were other people there.”
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In May 2024, Alejandra’s daughter took over the house her mother had lent her. In September, someone told her that other people were living in her house and, in October, she decided to report the dispossession to the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office. Two years later she is still asking for help, as the property remains in litigation. She is just one of hundreds of people lining up in a tent set up in the capital’s Zócalo, where last Monday the Ponciano Arriaga Social Defense Office formally began, with which Clara Brugada’s government seeks to address the longstanding problem of dispossessions in the capital of the country.
“The Prosecutor’s Office has already secured my property, following the complaint I filed, to conduct investigations, so that the person who lived in my house presents original documentation, which she has not done. She says I made a sale with her, but that is not true. I want to recover my property, it’s been two years and that’s why I’m here,” the woman narrates as she moves forward in a line formed by hundreds of people who have responded to the Administration’s call. Like her, many arrived from eight in the morning, despite the public announcement indicating that attention would begin at four in the afternoon.
Clara Brugada’s government opened Pandora’s box of dispossession and, as in Greek mythology, all evils came to light. With the establishment of the Defense Office that will operate every Monday, all kinds of misfortunes, abuses, and scams that have been covered up for decades by notaries, lawyers, and corrupt officials have surfaced. Each file tells a terrible story. “Here you have the human condition in its maximum expression,” defines an official from the Legal Counsel of the city government, while giving instructions for people to move to different modules, organized according to the problem: dismissals, family abandonment, inheritances, territorial regularization, and, of course, the dispossession desk, which is by far the busiest.
There go Alfredo Arellano and his son Marco, who have a case from the Iztacalco borough dating back to 2020, when the father’s partner changed the lock of their home, put a padlock on it, and barricaded herself inside the property. “In October 2020, he reported the case to the city prosecutor, who at that time was Ernestina Godoy, in a public hearing. She referred him to the family violence prosecutor’s office; they called him, took his statement, and took three years to compile the investigation file, but they opened it for patrimonial violence, not dispossession. Then, in 2023 the file was judicialized and the control judge linked the case to trial for psychological and patrimonial violence, but since the Public Ministry did not act on dispossession, the accused filed for amparo and, some time later, the judge dismissed them from the process,” narrates the son, showing photographs, documents proving his father’s ownership, and ministerial records of every step taken in the tortuous process.
In the three years between the complaint and the judge’s action, the accused disposed of the goods and the car of his father, a 65-year-old man who suffered a stroke and now appears at the Social Defense Office in a wheelchair. Later, the occupants faked the donation of the property, with the help of a notary from the State of Hidalgo. The Arellanos are there to try to untangle an increasingly complex case involving family, civil, and criminal crimes, where administrative authorities, Public Ministry agents, judges, and notaries have acted with indifference. “It was misclassified from the start, the Prosecutor’s Office should have classified it as dispossession and did not. I don’t know if it’s so that dispossession figures don’t inflate, but it affects us; there is misconduct by Prosecutor’s Office staff because knowing it is dispossession, they classify cases as patrimonial violence and automatically that goes to the family sphere,” complains Marco.
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Many meters behind him, Francisco Murillo Loza reports that his home was invaded since 2013 in the Doctores neighborhood, Cuauhtémoc borough. “I come because of a situation that for political reasons has not been resolved. I have a judge’s order that orders the recovery of the house that was invaded, but the Housing Institute has not executed the eviction order.” The most absurd thing is that the apartment was occupied before the building was finished. The owners were part of a housing program and, when they were about to receive the apartment, it was already inhabited by invaders. “We are five families, five apartments, and the people who invaded are still there. In 2016 the trial was won, there is a firm judge’s order, but the INVI does not order the eviction so we can recover our homes,” accuses Francisco.
Thousands of victims
According to data from the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office, 2,285 investigation files for the crime of dispossession have been opened so far in 2026. In response to the recent wave of invasions and dispossessions reported in the Del Valle neighborhood, prosecutor Bertha Alcalde has accelerated investigations and actions against this crime. Between August 5 and 23 alone, they received 214 complaints, arrested 35 people, secured 38 properties, and returned 10 of them. The official admitted that criminal groups such as Unión Tepito, the Tláhuac Cartel, and Los Rodolfos, as well as authorities, have been detected participating in this crime. In fact, 14 officials are being investigated for cases reported in the last month.
The official figures correspond to the drama unfolding before the 100 lawyers available in the Zócalo to attend complaints. Juan Carlos Salvador Hernández and his mother, María Magdalena, expose another form of fraud. They tried to sell half of a 282-square-meter plot in Tláhuac and, before they finished receiving payment, the buyers appropriated 100 more meters than they were entitled to, fenced it off, and sold the piece of land to a third party. In 2016, that third party sued the legitimate owners for boundary and demarcation, and the property entered a legal conflict in which altered documents, influence peddling, and the participation of the former mayor of Tláhuac, Rigoberto Salgado, have come to light. “We have reported quietly because we have suffered harassment and threats; out of fear of physical attacks and because my mother has suffered a lot in her health, she now suffers from stage four kidney failure. Since the last administration, we have submitted documents to the presidency and here in the city a work team from the head of government has already attended to us, but their response was that we apologize to the people who sued us for boundary and demarcation so they don’t take the rest of the land from us.”
Further back in the line, a woman holds an illustration board with both hands. It is a 1.5 by 1.5 meter plan showing the boundaries of a subdivision near the Magdalena River, where her house is located. Marcela Arredondo Iracheta explains that she has had the problem for 20 years. She bought her house in good faith, not knowing that the deeds she was given corresponded to another property and that her house is on land owned by the City Government, where many years ago the Santa Teresa Textile Factory operated, which upon closing donated the land for parks and gardens. “Here there are hydraulic and electrical installations, federal infrastructure. What they want to do today is a shopping center, and with what water, well with the water from our lands. That’s why they want to steal the property from me, they want to dispossess us through a lawsuit for a real estate development. I am a lawyer, I have three open lawsuits, one of those lawsuits has been going on for 20 years, since I started studying law, but what they want is to evict me and, since the water is here, they want to take over the land,” Marcela says firmly before being interrupted by legal counsel Eréndira Cruzvillegas, who comes to take her to one of the modules to attend to her case.
As the afternoon progresses, people continue moving toward the service desks, where they relive their nightmares. They carry copies of their deeds, property tax receipts, criminal and civil complaints, birth certificates; photographs of forced locks, broken padlocks, bars, and fences that appear overnight. Three out of ten cases, according to authority estimates, are complaints among family members: children dispossessing their octogenarian parents, siblings fighting over intestate land, couples who broke up without clarifying the fate of their assets beforehand. Pure human condition. But most are dispossessions involving violence, extortion, threats, and invasions perpetrated by perfectly organized groups.