• RED TAPE: Thousands of Mexicans applications for Spanish citizenship from descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in the late 15th century risk not to be fully completed due to delays in the certification of official documents by the Nuevo Leon State Government.
• ORIGINS: With 20,000 of a worldwide total of 132,000, Mexico is the country with the largest number of Spanish citizenship applications using a 2015 law trying to atone for the medieval expulsion of Jews from that country; many come from the Monterrey area in Nuevo León state.
• DEADLINE: “The issue here is that we have a peremptory deadline (December 15) to upload these documents. If they do not hurry up, we will run out of time to upload them and many people will be very angry”, says attorney Francisco Javier Limón, who helped file several applications.
• CAPACITY: According to employees and attorneys, the State Government’s delay in certifying official documents (a process known as “apostille”) is occurring due to a lack of personnel; the official application deadline was October 1; the deadline to upload original documents is December 15.
