Xalapa faces four‑hour queues for high‑school certificate legalisation

Decades of recent high‑school graduates and their families gathered in Xalapa’s central streets, waiting more than four hours to have their diplomas legalised and signatures authenticated. The process is required by public and private universities for enrollment and is handled by the Subdirección de Legalización y Permisos of the state’s Secretaría de Gobierno, operating out of the Alberto Beltrán Auditorium.

The surge of applicants, arriving as early as 05:00 h from municipalities across Veracruz, created a bottleneck because the service is strictly in‑person and lacks a digital system. In addition to students, professionals and other citizens seeking document legalisation for various administrative procedures queued alongside them. Officials said the overload coincides with the peak graduation period, when diploma delivery overlaps with university admission deadlines, and applies only to certificates from state‑run or state‑supervised schools, not those issued by federal institutions that already have automatic validation.