Barnard Thompson’s excellent mexidata.info is running (actually it’s a reprint from Frontera NorteSur) a very thorough, and very on-spot article called “Coastal Areas — the Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, that covers a lot of the issues you’ve been hearing about over on defrente.puerto-penasco.com: real estate and beach property ownership, ecological impacts of Mexican development, etc.
From the article:
A senator from Baja California Sur, Mexico, is pushing legislation that would remove constitutional restrictions on direct foreign ownership of lands situated within 50 kilometers [31 miles] of Mexico’s coasts. Senator Luis Alberto Coppola Joffroy, a member of President Felipe Calderon’s National Action Party (PAN), is expected to introduce the measure in the Mexican Congress in early August. If approved, the constitutional reform will eliminate a long-standing law that was crafted to protect Mexican sovereignty from foreign encroachment.
Presently many coastal properties are owned indirectly by foreigners who purchase through trusts administered by Mexican banks. Arguing that new global economic and political conditions favor the lifting of all ownership restrictions, Senator Coppola contends that friendly legislation would boost economic growth.
The article’s at http://mexidata.info/id1471.html