One of the first significant warning signs for business owners came on Nov. 30, 2009.

That morning, two dozen police officers and a judge descended on Ocho Tulum, a hotel belonging to Mr. Wolf, the American entrepreneur. It sat on beachfront land that he had rented since 2005 under a 30-year lease. In 2006, before he started building, he had learned there was a competing claim to part of the land, but decided to move ahead with the project.

“I heard that it would probably not amount to anything,” he said. “I never thought that I was at risk of losing it.”

He challenged his loss in court, but was defeated after years of litigation.

The seizure of Mr. Wolf’s property stunned Tulum, but people kept building and the tourists kept coming.

For Mr. Jacquet, fear lurked in the back of his mind. “It’s like crossing from France to England swimming and you’re halfway across and you think: Maybe you shouldn’t have gone there. But what are you going to do? You’re going to go back? You keep swimming!”

The evictions continued. There were some in 2011, and another round in 2013.

In May 2014, four more hotels were seized on a judge’s order in a labor case. Two men had sued the estate of a former landowner, claiming they were owed millions of dollars in unpaid wages, and a judge awarded them the four properties as payment.

The Tulum Hotel Association found no record of the two men having worked in Tulum. Furthermore, the hotel owners said they had never been notified that their properties were the subject of legal action.