ROSARITO, Mexico — Livio Santini is blessed: He owns 26 acres atop an ocean bluff ripe for houses and condominiums, just when this beach town's cachet has never been higher.
And he is cursed: A dozen rustic bungalows, long occupied mostly by Southern Californians, block what would be a multimillion-dollar ocean view from his property.
He wants them out. The residents, whose homes sit on seaside land owned by the Mexican government, have dug in. The result has been a nasty war of wills and finger-pointing--and the most extreme display of tensions cracking lately over development along the northern Baja California coast.
Residents say that the Santini family has been ruthless in trying to uproot them, including cutting them off from gas and water supplies by plowing a 15-foot-wide trench along several hundred feet of the property line. There have been angry set-tos, vandalism and reports--impossible to confirm--of threatening gunshots. When one couple's empty home burned flat in the middle of the night in November, neighbors accused the Santinis of a terror campaign.
Santini, a Tijuana architect, and his brother Aldo dismiss some of their adversaries as "high-class squatters" with no claim to the federal coastal strip. They say that they would like to settle with the others before applying to the government for control of the strip. The Santinis suggest the burned house was torched by troublemakers trying to frame them. They defend the huge trench as a way to keep out interlopers.
"It's worked to get a couple of them to leave," said Aldo Santini.
The showdown reflects the unease over potential development on the Rosarito coast, where thousands of U.S. retirees and weekenders paid cheap rents to settle rustic lots long before glitzy hotels and vacation homes filled much of the shoreline and a new major movie studio bestowed extra marquee appeal.
Even more hotels are opening or planned, and a cruise ship dock is taking shape downtown, about 20 miles south of the U.S. border. The rental market has taken off, too. "There's a lot of activity right now," said Silvia Marcor, a leading real estate agent in town.
Some worry that Rosarito's rising promise and shrinking stock of vacant land next to the sea will spell cutthroat competition for a beachfront once populated mainly by camper trailers and little cabins.
