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Can Mexico's Wild Baja California Endure New Marinas?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0912_030912_...
By Robert Roper
National Geographic Traveler
September 12, 2003
Ten miles (16 kilometers) south of Ensenada the sprawl of the city gives way to bean fields and tomato farms. A lone coastal mountain?Cerro de la
Soledad?rises up between the highway and the sea, and it catches my eye as I drive south on this early summer morning.
It catches my eye because there's nothing on it?just woven scrub in subtle shades of green, rose, and brown. No mini-ranchos, no garish signs. A
promise of wild Baja California, Baja incognita, the Baja of legend that lies to the south.
Between the booming border zone (Tijuana to Ensenada, with a population of 1,600,000) and the tourist enclave of Los Cabos, a thousand miles (1,600
kilometers) south at the peninsula's tip, wild lands and wild seas are still the rule. Yachts face long distances between refueling points on both
coasts. And on this inconvenience the Mexican government of Vicente Fox has hung possibly the most ambitious, contentious project for tourism
development in the Western Hemisphere: the Escalera Nautica ("nautical stairway").
"It's a multiple ecological rape of the peninsula," declares Alfonso Aguirre, an oceanographer and Ensenada businessman. Over the next decade, the Fox
government proposes to complete a chain of 27 marina-resorts, none more than 130 miles (200 kilometers) from the next, along the Pacific coast and
around the Sea of Cort?s. To 5 existing ports, the plan would add 15 new developments and greatly expand and upgrade 7 hamlets.
The project spans thousands of miles of rugged coast, assorted national parks, five biosphere reserves, and the entire Sea of Cort?s (Gulf of
California). Many scientists consider this spawning ground essential to marine life throughout the Pacific; Conservation International has designated
it a "biodiversity hotspot."
With the marinas will come hotels (over 10,000 new rooms), roads, 10 to 20 golf courses, new or improved airports, thousands of jobs, and hundreds of
millions of dollars worth of infrastructure. The Baja California of primitive anchorages, whale nurseries, sea turtle hatcheries, and mystical
deserts, say critics, will be seriously compromised.
"Nonsense," replies Alejandro Rodriguez, project director at Fonatur, the federal tourism-development agency. "Escalera Nautica will be built subject
to all environmental laws, under the close supervision of the minister of environment. We are not planning to build more Canc?ns. Some marinas will
not be big-big, and some may be very small, just a market and a fuel station."
Canc?n's story is central to the debate. Canc?n, on Mexico's Caribbean coast, was once just a coastal islet with a population of 200. In the 1970s, it
became the focus of a major federal tourism program. Originally planned as a low-density, high-priced resort, the project evolved instead into a
13-mile (21-kilometer) strip of international-style high-rise hotels with over 25,000 rooms and three million visitors per year.
Canc?n unquestionably generates jobs, and Mexicans flock there looking for opportunity. In a shadow city of 500,000, out of sight of the hotels,
workers and their families live in often harsh conditions, many earning some of Mexico's lowest wages (U.S.$3.85 a day). Still, that's better than no
wage. Canc?n's success has taken an environmental toll: loss of 60,000 hectares (148,000 acres) of rain forest, degradation of the lagoon and nearby
coral reef, and a radical drop in fish population.
If Canc?n was Mexico's great tourism project for the 20th century, Baja is first priority for the 21st. The peninsula is a stronghold of President
Fox's party, the PAN. In 2001, Fox flew there to launch Escalera Nautica, pledging U.S. $222 million to get the U.S. $1.9-billion project moving.
The goal, states Fonatur, is to offer "international-quality tourist services on land, on sea, and in the air." Plans call for as many as 900,000
travelers and 60,000 yacht visits per year (up from 8,000 now) by 2014.
Ruben Lara directs the regional office of Pronatura, the largest environmental organization in Mexico. "Typical Fonatur thinking," he says of Escalera
Nautica, "very touristic, like Canc?n." Mexico's former environment minister, Victor Lichtinger, insist that the goal is sustainable tourism. "We will
allow development projects in our natural beauty spots," he states, "if and when the environment is unharmed."
Mexico's environmental ministry is about to make an official ruling on that. In late September or early October 2003, the ministry is to decide
whether the ambitious project will carry on as originally planned or be downsized to minimize environmental impact. One issue, says Lara, is how the
resorts will handle sewage and solid waste. "Even now, with a small population in some sites, we have big problems."
Alfonso Aguirre, the Ensenada oceanographer, agrees, pointing out that there are "very few examples worldwide of clean marina development. It's just
very hard to do. Are Mexicans expected to become Swedish overnight? We don't have the culture, or the resources, yet."
Environmentalists find the scope of the project unnerving, but some welcome tourism?if it's the right kind.
"In principle there are endless possibilities for ecotourism," says Patricia Martinez, administrative director of a grassroots environmental group in
Ensenada called Pro Esteros. "Local fishermen have been taking training programs in English and other skills they need to be science guides." The
benefits of whale watching in San Ignacio Lagoon were a factor when Pro Esteros in 2000 helped to defeat a risky salt-works proposal there.
The victory protected the whales and coastline, "but the local people say, 'Protected from what? There's nothing here!'" notes Lara. "The schools are
very poor; the roads unpaved; water and electricity uncertain. Some locals have become embittered against environmentalists. The people in these
places have nothing."
For them, and for the legions of impoverished job-seekers who might come from afar, even wrongheaded development can be cause for enormous hope.
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A hard life in paradise
http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/0913cancun13.html
Canc?n is tops for tourists, but poor residents suffer
Tessie Borden
Sept. 13, 2003
CANC?N, Mexico - Alonzo Lor?a Hoil can remember when the long line of hotels jutting into the sky from this turquoise-colored strand was only somebody
else's dream. Now it is somebody else's reality.
"We knew they were going to build hotels and all that," Lor?a Hoil said as he reclined on a hammock in his stuffy, corrugated-roof shack, his wife
cooking tamales to sell out of their even stuffier kitchen. "We could tell because all those who were landowners in the coastal zone were selling
their lots."
A lifetime resident of Puerto Juarez, a small fishing village that once was the only sign of human life on this paradisiacal beach, Lor?a Hoil saw the
hotels rise one by one during the 1970s and 1980s, eventually turning the new city of Canc?n into Mexico's No. 1 tourist destination, a jobs motor
that even today attracts 30,000 people a year seeking employment. And this week, the city, with a population of about 700,000, is playing host to the
World Trade Organization's fifth Ministerial Conference.
Despite the fact that tourism is Mexico's third-largest income source - $8.4 billion in 2002 - some who see Canc?n today wonder about the Mexican
government's once-strong commitment to an industry that could, with the proper backing, create jobs at home for even the poorest of its citizens, and
perhaps stem migration north.
In the early days, Lor?a Hoil watched the hordes of laborers brought in from faraway states like Durango and Sinaloa, all the more faraway because
Canc?n's state, Quintana Roo, on the tip of the Yucat?n Peninsula, at the time was a wild and underpopulated territory.
Lor?a Hoil saw the indigenous men arriving from Yucat?n and Campeche, green and unemployed, to first take up shovels and then waiters' trays in
Canc?n's hotel zone. He joined them eventually, abandoning the air hose he used to dive for lobster for the wheel of a taxi.
But Canc?n's changes have not meant changes for Lor?a Hoil and his family.
"You see how it is," he said. "We are always the ones who are left behind, when we were supposedly the first ones here."
Lor?a Hoil's family was one of seven who fished for a living when the builders and planners began to arrive in 1970 on the narrow island bounded on
one side by a lagoon and on the other by the astonishingly blue Caribbean Sea. Now, his sons continue to do the same but earn less, thanks to
competition. One died several years ago; Lor?a Hoil's only legacy is his grandson, who also wants to dive for lobster.
"I tell him no, that's how his father lost his life," said Guadalupe Pacheco Medina, Lor?a Hoil's wife. "I tell him, 'I want you to study.' "
Sigfrido Paz Paredes also remembers when Canc?n was a dream, because it was his dream. He was the man contracted in 1970 to plan the airport and the
city. The first hotels opened in 1973 and the city was born in 1974.
"Canc?n was an economic project," he said, "not a tourism project."
In 1967, then-Mexican President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz wanted new income to pay the country's inordinately high foreign debt, Paz Paredes said. So he
asked the Bank of Mexico to figure out the fastest way to make money.
The consultants came up with tourism. They told Diaz Ordaz that tourism could go into areas with little infrastructure, generate cheaper jobs than
industry, employ men and women of all ages and create an economic multiplier effect.
Any site chosen for investment would need an international airport, a tourist zone with top-flight services, and a decent place for workers to live.
Planners looked at the poorest sections of Mexico and came up with five candidates, all coastal, with the lowest per capita income: Ixtapa in
Guerrero, Huatulco in Oaxaca, Los Cabos and Loreto in Baja California, and Canc?n in Quintana Roo. That is how Mexico's Plan Maestro de Turismo, or
tourism master plan, was born.
The gorgeous beaches near Puerto Juarez were the perfect place to start. There was just one problem.
"The city had no people, the airport had no planes and the tourist zone had no hotels," Paz Paredes said.
So the government created an agency to buy land, build hotels and run them. Twenty-three went up before private investors began buying land and
building. The Mexican government also negotiated deals that pampered foreign investment. Canc?n hoped, in 25 years, to capture 10 percent of the
Caribbean-bound tourist traffic. At almost 30 years old, Paz Paredes said, it gets 20 percent.
But tourism has changed, Paz Paredes said, and so has Mexico.
Tourists now want to do more than just simply lie on a beach, so Canc?n hotels have to offer more: all-inclusive packages, adventure tours,
time-shares. And the once-centralist government that built Canc?n no longer has the money or power for something like the master plan. As the
government began letting industries privatize, the other master plan destinations were left on their own, and they lagged far behind Canc?n. Such
projects need close and coordinated care until they reach a critical mass, Paz Paredes said. An indicator of tourism health is hotel room numbers.
Critical mass is 4,500, he said. Huatulco has about 2,500. Los Cabos only recently reached about 5,000. Canc?n has about 28,000 rooms.
Tourism has fallen behind migrant remittances as a top source of income for Mexico - petroleum is first - and the annual number of foreign visitors to
the country has stayed at about 10 million for the past 15 years, said Fernando Mart?, author of two books about Canc?n. About 3 million head to
Canc?n.
The government's disinterest in tourism is a mistake, Paz Paredes said. The Canc?n model proved it could bring jobs to poor people in no-industry
areas and generate millions of dollars.
"These are economic policies that have changed," he said. "Once, there was a definite tourism policy in the government, a definite vision that was
gradually lost."
Tulio Arroyo, a local activist, sees the dream of Canc?n as something of an illusion. It's true that, even with the immigration Canc?n bears each
year, practically everyone finds a job. But that doesn't mean there is no misery here.
Workers who live in "the Regions," the working-class neighborhoods that sprang up to house all those waiters, hotel maids and construction workers,
endure inadequate housing built with low-quality materials and spend too much time getting to and from work because of scarce buses.
Drainage hardly exists, and effluent ends up at sea. And now, construction workers at the newest, fastest-growing beach resort area, Playa del Carmen,
to the south, are going to Canc?n to live. In terms of migration and uncontrolled growth, Arroyo said Canc?n can be compared with Ciudad Juarez, on
Mexico's northern border near El Paso.
"Services are always inadequate," he said. "With a real tourism plan, these problems could be articulated and attacked."
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