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This type of crime is on top of mind for everybody in Mexico City right now. Each day, an average of 11 homes are effectively stolen in Mexico City. The police can't keep up with the sheer number of home invasions. The government is trying to keep up, but the underlying causes are more difficult to nail down.
This property crime is legally referred to as dispossession because criminals invading a property take possession but don't usually become the owners. So, how does someone actually steal property in Mexico? Criminals will stake out a property, monitoring when it will be vacant for an extended period of time. While the owner might be away in vacation, they will forcibly enter, change the locks, falsify a deed, and sometimes even start renovations. The original owner will return to find their property invaded and themselves locked out. From there, the owner will start a police report and a lengthy legal process follows.
There are a lot of cases where it's very complicated for authorities to figure out who's the rightful owner. Both sides claim to be the victim. In some cases, authorities will take over the place while they investigate who is the rightful owner. So they'll tape it up, move everybody out. Nobody can come in while the case goes to court, while the police investigates. Over the past decade, cases of property theft in Mexico City and Mexico State have added up to almost 100,000. Authorities say that at least a third to a half of them are property disputes between family members, which is a different kind of property theft.
But home invasions are thought to be about the other half. In this map, you can see Mexico City divided by neighborhoods. Since 2015, each has seen thousands of cases. Those numbers speak to how widespread this type of crime is. The numbers that we have right now for property theft go back to 2015 because that's when the governments made some changes to the methodology and to how the data is used and reported. These types of crimes have been happening in Mexico for a long time. It just got more media attention.
They've started happening in more upscale neighborhoods. Some of the neighborhoods in Mexico City have really started seeing gentrification, and some lawyers say that's what's driving the crimes, because properties have become much more valuable than they were just a few years ago. We spoke to Enrique Amezcua, whose property was invaded last year, and he hasn't been able to move back in. Their case got enough media attention that authorities quickly threw out the invaders.
But Enrique's family has not been able to return to their apartment as the investigation continues. What makes these cases so complicated is that some of them go to criminal court. Some of them go to civil court and the procedures can take years. There are groups that get their lawyers so they can also appeal some of the court decisions. And it just makes for a very confusing landscape legally. The order and legal certainty that you have on your documentation is crucial in the efficiency and the time it takes to resolve these type of cases. If everything is in order, it usually takes, in our experience, from eight months to two years.
However, that's not the case in many of the cases that we see, and that might take more than five years. As more cases come into the spotlight, victims like Enrique are pushing for more assistance from local and national governments. The mayor, Clara Brugada, has been more actively involved in dealing with these types of crimes. They've apprehended some of the members trying to get into homes.
They have also offered the 100 lawyers to help out pro bono to several victims. Property theft has even reached President Claudia Sheinbaum. She has been asked about it during her morning press conferences. Solving this systemic crisis may require more than additional government focus. Renewed attention from authorities will maybe help some of the victims that get specialized attention. But the problems that are underlying and that allow this crime to just
be as pervasive as it is one of them is gentrification, which is pushing prices higher. Then there's the culture of not registering your properties or of doing private sales that are not notarized. There is also corruption between public officials, notaries, judges that can all come in together to make the environment ripe for these types of crimes to happen, and to not get solved quickly. In some cases, it gets restituted to its rightful owner. But even then, people don't want to move back in because they're too scared. This crime shows no sign of abating and the backlog is expected to continue to rise.
