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EXPLORING OAXACA

Lines in the Sand, Part 1
by Wendy Call

MEXICO FORUM

This two-part series about rural tourism development in Huatulco, Oaxaca was published by the Institute of Current World Affairs. Click Here for Part 2.

PHOTO GALLERY: Pacific Oaxaca

MATIAS ROMERO, OAXACA - On the bus to Huatulco, six of us (three German tourists, two Mexican market vendors, and me) watched dull cement houses, tan thatched huts, blue sky, and green hills blink by. The images appeared at odd angles as the bus grumbled up steep hills and tilted around sharp curves. After about five hours, the first of Huatulco's nine bays yawned in front of us: a white crescent nuzzled by green vegetation and curled around a blue pearl of Pacific sea.

Seconds later, the poster-perfect image was torn away, another pasted up in its place. The bus lurched around a sharp curve, descended, and huge buildings leaped into view: a pink flat-topped pyramid, a stucco sand castle with palm-frond awnings, a pale orange square-edged fortress, all surrounded by manicured green grass, white curbs, and smooth, wide-shouldered roads. I had reached Tangolunda Bay, number two of Huatulco's nine. More buildings stood half-constructed than finished. At least as many signs said "for rent" as "welcome."

Two Huatulcos, the old and the new, welcomed me. A farmer me offered a coconut cut fresh from one of his palm trees. A fisherman's son who now runs a tour boat offered me a rum-and-Coke at 11 in the morning.

At first, Laurentino Cormona did not seem happy to see me, even though I had arrived with a friend of his. We took a bus, then hopped in a collective taxi packed with people and produce headed for the agricultural community of Bajos de Coyula. When we arrived, I walked down a dusty path unshaded from the mid-day heat, pulled off my shoes to cross a shallow river, climbed through a barbed-wire fence, and, finally, arrived at a cluster of banana trees that poked from low grasses. One of Cormona's sons appeared, stared for a while, then slowly turned back to get his father. Cormona did not extend an invitation to his house, but stood and talked with me in the shade under his banana trees. After a few minutes, he told an older son, Guillermo, to fetch coconuts.

Machete tied to his waist, Guillermo shimmied rapidly up the palm's smooth, branchless trunk. Perhaps 20 feet overhead, he balanced at the crown of long, drooping fronds and wrestled a large cluster of coconuts into a harness. Standing below, his father eased the soccer ball-sized fruit to the ground using a pulley that Guillermo had rigged. With two swift swings of his machete, Cormona separated each coconut from the gnarled branch and sheared off just enough of one end to open an inch-wide hole. I pressed the flat, damp side of the coconut to my face, leaning back to pour the thick, slightly sweet, slightly sour liquid into my mouth. After this welcoming, Carmona was ready to talk to me about how the Mexican government had expropriated his land in 1984, and how he had spent the 16 years since then refusing to acquiesce.

The motor of the Huatulco Fiesta catamaran purred; the deck was spotless; new bottles of brandy, tequila, rum, and mescal lined the bar. Francisco Hernandez and nine other men and teenaged boys helped their 14 guests put on life jackets, poured mixed drinks, announced the day's itinerary, pointed a video camera in all directions, handed out cold beer, untied the boat from its mooring, and generally seemed to enjoy the morning even more than the passengers did. As we eased out of the Santa Cruz Huatulco harbor, the children ran around the boat as their parents sipped the day's first cocktails. I focused on taking photos and watching the waves evaporate into white foam against peach cliffs.

Hernandez explained the geography of the coastline as we traveled west. We passed Playa La Entrega, "Entry Beach," where Mexican independence hero and president Vicente Guerrero (who had a state named after him) was brought ashore as a prisoner of war to be executed. Next came Punta la India, "the best snorkeling," Hernandez said - much better than the coral reefs we were headed to at Playa San Agustin. We then passed Playa Cacaluta, a Zaptoec word that means "where the black birds are." Hernandez explained that the hill next to the Cacaluta beach is littered with ancient artifacts.

The shards of pottery and worked stones are evidence of how long Oaxaca's indigenous people have been coming to Huatulco's coast. Before 1984, Hernandez's family lived on the beach, in a hut near what is now the marina we had left that morning. Wearing cuffed khaki shorts and lug-soled deck shoes, he looked more like a tourist industry worker than the son of indigenous fisherfolk from the old village of Santa Cruz Huatulco.

Laurentino Carmona doesn't remember exactly what he was doing the morning of Wednesday, May 30, 1984. He was probably somewhere on the five acres of land that he has worked his entire life. Around mid-day, someone came by and showed Cormona a newspaper. An article announced that the Mexican government was taking control of all the coastal land in the municipality of Santa Maria Huatulco. Cormona's five acres were part of 51,380 acres of beach, forest, and field that would become the "Huatulco Tourist Program," a government-managed development. Two days later, a national newspaper ran a small article about the expropriation. It announced that, of all of Mexico's tourist meccas, Huatulco "will be the most important and significant of the current system...on the order of Cancun."1 In some other national newspapers, the event did not even merit a mention. For the people of Santa Maria Huatulco's coastal communities, however, everything has been divided into before May 1984, and after.

Five weeks before the news reached Huatulco's residents, the Diario Oficial (Mexico's Federal Register) published a letter from the Secretary of Urban Development and Environment requesting permission to expropriate a portion of the rural, very poor Oaxacan coast to create the Bays of Huatulco resort.2

The land was to be turned over to an agency of the Secretary of Tourism, FONATUR (National Fund to Promote Tourism). FONATUR was founded in 1974 to build and manage a half dozen coastal resorts in Mexico - and to avoid the mistakes made in earlier, unplanned resorts. Acapulco, Mexico's oldest beach city, had grown out of control: unplanned, ugly, overcrowded. International tourism dropped off as the beaches became polluted and the streets clogged. FONATUR was given the mandate of turning six coastal communities, Los Cabos and Loreto in Baja California, Ixtapa in Guerrero, Cancun and Cozumel in the Yucatan peninsula, and Huatulco into magnets for foreign currency.

In some cases, it worked. The "Mayan Riviera Corridor" that stretches from Cancun south in the state of Quintana Roo welcomes 4.3 million visitors a year. They stay in 45,000 hotel rooms, attended to by nearly 100,000 tourist industry workers. About 40 percent of the tourist dollars entering Mexico arrive via that corridor.3

Before Cancun became a beach hopper's paradise, it was a nearly uninhabited barrier island stretching for more than ten miles next to a mangrove-lined lagoon. It provided an important nesting area for birds and sea turtles. Today, golf courses and amusement parks stand on part of the lagoon. Developers dug quarries to meet the need for construction fill, and then turned the quarries into landfills. Sewage has poisoned the groundwater. With 80% of Cancun's land now paved, storm water carries all kinds of pollution to canals that run into what is left of the contaminated lagoon.4

The original plan was for the Bays of Huatulco to duplicate a good measure of Cancun's economic success, without duplicating the ecological destruction that came with it. Seventy-five percent of the expropriated land in Huatulco was to be "ecologically preserved." In 1984, FONATUR described its vision for the Bays of Huatulco in the year 2000: 875,000 tourists visiting a newly urbanized region, home to 100,000 permanent residents, 50,000 of whom would work in the tourist industry.5

According to Jorge Ayanegui, the eleventh of 12 individuals who have held the position of FONATUR director for Huatulco, in November 2000 the real Bays of Huatulco had 2,130 hotel rooms (with an occupancy rate that hovered listlessly around 50 percent) and 18,000 permanent residents. He could not tell me how many people had visited Huatulco in the last year, nor how many jobs the development had created. However, I read in a glossy coffee-table book he gave me that 171,000 people visited the Bays of Huatulco in 1998 and a total of 1,432 jobs had been created.6

Ayanegui did tell me that they were still preserving 75 percent of the land. According to the coordinators of Huatulco's national park, the protected area encompasses a little less than 15,000 acres, about 29 percent of the Bays of Huatulco. To push the figure to 75 percent, FONATUR includes everything that isn't paved or built upon: the golf course, small squares of grass hemmed by roads, and other pieces of land that no one could reasonably call "ecologically preserved."

A small group of environmentalists in Huatulco was a primary force in creating the Huatulco National Park, located in the tourist development. The park was formally created in 1998. There are still disagreements over how it will be managed and what kind of development will be allowed on its margins. The park's managers have put together a broad-based community council to oversee park management and help make hard decisions. It includes more than 70 people, from fishermen and tour boat operators to university professors and naturalists. Neither the developers nor the ecologists are happy with the compromises that have been made so far. The long list of signatures of people agreeing to be part of the community council does not include the representatives from FONATUR or the National Institute of Ecology.

According to Enrique LaClette, head of the local environmental group that fought for the park, the nature reserve was really the result of large-scale arm-twisting - not any environmental concern on the part of FONATUR. The Interamerican Development Bank (IADB), which made a multi-million dollar loan for infrastructure in the Bays of Huatulco, required that 75 percent of the expropriated land be preserved. As LaClette tells it, the IADB told FONATUR, "You have to preserve part of the forest because it's the last forest of this type in the world."

LaClette is from the state of Guanajuato, in central Mexico. His hair and his eyes are light brown; his skin is tanned from working under the sun that almost always shines in Huatulco. He spoke to me in fluid English, only occasionally slipping in a Spanish word that did not have a precise translation. He came to Huatulco twelve years ago, after finishing college and spending a year backpacking around Europe and Africa. "I realized that Mexico was the place that I really wanted to live. I was looking for something new, something fresh for starting my life, and I heard about this Huatulco thing."

LaClette was attracted by the idea that the new tourist development would include a national park. When he first arrived, he lived in a palm hut and offered scuba lessons on the beach. All his personal belongings fit in one box. He is melancholy about those early days, though he says, "It was good, but not that good." His shop is now a shiny, two-story building that faces the sport fishing boats and yachts that fill the small Santa Cruz harbor. He worries about his scuba diving business and the lack of growth in Huatulco's tourist industry in the last decade. In fact, he is worried about the entire country's tourist industry. "In the 60s we had the world's elite tourism in Acapulco. In the 70s, we had it in Puerto Vallarta. In the 80s we had it in Cancun, and in the 90s, it is gone. We are becoming a third-class country for tourism," he says.

A large, rainbow-colored wall map in Huatulco's FONATUR office shows the current development plan: three golf courses, dozens of resort hotels clustered around three bays, an international airport, a large bus station, three ports, a zoo, and the national park. According to FONATUR, their land stretches nearly 22 miles from the Copalita River in the east to the Coyula River in the west, and north from the beaches and cliffs about four and one-half miles, just past the coastal highway that connects Huatulco with the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the east and with Acapulco to the west. Even today, more than 16 years after the expropriation, many local residents insist that these borders have not been settled.

Where the lines are drawn, what they mean, and who decides remain bitterly contested. Ecologists describe the border between two different ecosystems as a volatile place. This is true in Huatulco. In a natural ecosystem, the inhabitants adapt to changes in the environment. The Huatulqueżos, Huatulco's original residents - either in small or very large ways - have adjusted their way of life, striking a careful balance between assimilation and resistance.

The Huatulco Fiesta tour boat is managed by the Cooperative Tourism Society of Tangolunda, whose members are all Huatulqueżos. It was founded a couple of years before the expropriation as a fishing cooperative. Francisco Hernandez joined in 1985, when the coop had shifted from fishing to ferrying around FONATUR representatives. When Enrique LaClette introduced me to Hernandez, he warned me that the cooperative members would only talk about how much better things had been before the expropriation and how unfairly they had been treated by FONATUR. They did not.

Hernandez spoke much more about what the cooperative members needed to do to meet the challenges of development, repeating how essential it is to be "well-prepared" for the new economy and culture in Huatulco. He is forever thankful that his mother forced him to complete high school, something he resented at the time. That education allowed him to get a job working on the Mexican oil tankers that pass by the Bays of Huatulco on their way from the oil fields of Mexico's south to the refineries that dot the country's Pacific coast. He has always loved the ocean, and was happy to return to Huatulco to work for the cooperative. He still does a little fishing, mostly with tourists who pay 15 dollars for a day on one of the nine motor boats or four fishing yachts owned and operated by the cooperative.

In early November, the Huatulco Fiesta - the backbone of the coop's business - was on wood blocks on a small strip of unused beach west of Tangolunda Bay. None of the workers painting, sanding, and cleaning the catamaran were cooperative members, or even from Huatulco. The coop contracted with an employer that brought temporary workers down from the state of Jalisco for the job. Hernandez had stopped by to make sure it would be ready for the first trip of what they call "American season."

Life, work, and even the seasons have changed for the Huatulqueżos. There used to be two seasons in the region: wet and dry. Now, things are more complicated. Huatulco's tourist workers wait all year for the stretch from Thanksgiving to Easter, "American season," when the foreigners come and spend their dollars, francs and deutchmarks. There are several "Mexican seasons," including summer vacation, Easter, and long weekends in autumn. Then there is septihambre, or "hungry September," the stretch between late August, when children go back to school, and the long weekend in late September for Mexican independence day.

West of the improvised dry dock, the Club Med resort sprawls across three fingers of land that include five beaches. Although it is illegal to totally restrict access to beaches in Mexico, Hernandez explained the Club Med beaches are often guarded by men with rifles who turn away all visitors. Still, the coop works with Club Med. A few years ago, coop members volunteered to go out during a severe storm and rescue Club Med guests who were stranded on a remote beach. Since then, the resort has hired the coop to give snorkeling and fishing tours for its patrons. The coop members worry about the precedent Club Med sets by closing its beaches. If all the other waterfront hotels refuse access, "Where will we take people?" Hernandez wonders.

As Hernandez checked the repairs to the Huatulco Fiesta, Enrique LaClette rushed around the small marina in Santa Cruz Huatulco, where the catamaran is usually moored. Sweat streamed down his face as he carved chinks into Volkswagen-sized blocks of Styrofoam and doled out instructions to his work crew. At nine in the morning he was ready for a break, but there was no time for that. A group of state and federal government representatives were arriving the following day for a meeting on the progress of the Bays of Huatulco development. Before the meeting, they would be taking a tour of the tourist sites, and LaClette had to show them some real progress on the dock he had been hired to build.

LaClette is a typical tourism industry entrepreneur; he has several jobs. In addition to building the dock, he owns a dive shop, offers dive lessons in Spanish, English, and French, and coordinates the local environmental association. The latter position is strictly volunteer. "We have only one rule for membership," he says of the group. "You have to have another job."

Huatulco is supposed to be Mexico's first large-scale ecological development. Indeed, nearly everyone I spoke with in Huatulco talked about ecotourism. LaClette says, "First, we have to describe what ecological tourism is. The problem is that we don't have a model to follow. If you go to Costa Rica, which is one of the models we can point to on the map, you will find a lot of problems and a lot of things that don't make sense." The same seems to be true in Huatulco.

During my day trip on the Huatulco Fiesta, I joined the other passengers snorkeling at the San Agustin beach. As at most other Mexican beaches I have visited, there were rustic open-air restaurants selling seafood, young women selling coral necklaces and polished shells, and children selling candy, cigarettes, and soda in disposable plastic bottles. With each receding wave, the beach was littered with more pieces of bleached, dead coral. Under the waves, the coral reef was sandy - a telltale sign that it is slowly dying. Coral organisms in a healthy reef keep it clear of sand. Hernandez sent the entire group out over the reef to snorkel when the tide was too low. Our fins kicked the top of the reef, contributing to its destruction.

After leaving San Agustin, we visited the most popular of Huatulco's nine bays, Maguey, named for the agave used to make tequila and mescal. The coral at Maguey is so degraded that no one bothers to snorkel anymore. A teenaged boy tried to sell me a four-minute Jet-Ski ride for $2.50. I declined. When he pressed, I explained it wasn't the cost, but the contamination, that turned me off. (Twenty-five percent of the fuel and oil poured into a Jet Ski is dumped, unburned, directly into the environment. Because of this, they are banned from most national parks in the United States.7) He assured me that I shouldn't worry about the pollution, because "you can't see it." The cooperative used to have four Jet Skis, but got rid of them - not because of the environmental damage they cause, but because they were worried about someone getting hurt in an accident.

Enrique LaClette sees a trio of challenges facing the Bays of Huatulco. First, finding a balance between addressing poverty and protecting the environment. The others are two sides of a single, golden coin: attracting international tourists and wooing international investors. There are three ways, of course, to bring tourists to a coastal resort: by air, land, or sea. From Mexico City, a flight to Huatulco costs nearly as much as a flight to New York or San Francisco. The highway from Oaxaca City, the state's tourism hub, is nearly eight hours of twisting, narrow roads through the mountains. There is not a port in Huatulco deep enough for anything bigger than a yacht.

The options are: (1) improve the highway that connects Huatulco to Oaxaca City; (2) decrease the cost of flights from Mexico City; or (3) build a port for large cruise ships. The first would increase Mexican tourism, but probably not really affect the number of international visitors. The second should increase both national and international tourism. The third would increase the number of foreign tourists, but bring tourists who are more interested in shopping than in the ecotourism touted at Huatulco. When I asked LaClette what he saw as the highest priority, he replied without hesitation: the cruise ship port. He believes cruise ships are the most important "because they can fill the hotels the fastest." FONATUR has already dredged the bay next to Santa Cruz Huatulco, the first step in the six-million-dollar project of building the port. LaClette says, "We know that the [ecological] impact on the bay is going to be very big. It is a sacrifice that we must make."

Still, cruise ships may not bring hoards of people to fill hotels, as their passengers tend to stay in the room they already paid for: the one on the boat. Cruise ships do, however, bring lots of other things. An average cruise ship on an average one-week voyage generates 210,000 gallons of raw sewage (which can legally be dumped anywhere three miles from shore); one million gallons of "greywater" from sinks, showers, and laundry (which can be dumped anywhere); and 125 gallons of photo processing chemicals, paint, and other toxins, along with eight tons of garbage (which are often illegally dumped into the ocean).8

Santa Cruz was the first, and so far only, port to be developed in the Bays of Huatulco. Santa Cruz is either a town that has not yet fulfilled its potential, or one that has prematurely become a ghost town. The visitors to the marina are often outnumbered by the crowd of tour boat operators offering day trips. Many of the streets shown on the map in my two-year-old travel guide do not exist. Others are bare stretches of pavement that lead to empty grass lots.

This kind of planned but unrealized development is a bit of an anomaly in Mexico. Usually, the urban development plan is simply: form follows function. People move into a new area and throw up houses, then public services and roads follow (if sometimes very slowly). In the Bays of Huatulco, the process has been turned on its head. The roads have been built, but the people - both residents and visitors - are still missing.

Click Here for Part 2.

REFERENCES

1 El Nacional, May 30, 1984, p. 2
2 Diario Oficial, Tuesday, April 17, 1984, p. 16.
3 La Jornada, November 29, 2000, p. 24.
4 Peter V. Wiese, "Environmental Impact of Urban and Industrial Development; A case history: Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico," Published by UNESCO/Environment and development in coastal regions and small islands (CSI), July 2000.
5 El Nacional, May 30, 1984, p. 2.
6 Beatrice Trueblood, ed, Los 25 Ażos del Fondo Nacional de Fomento al Turismo, 1999, p. 210-211.
7 "2-Stroke Engine Fact Sheet," Bluewater Network, http://www.eii.org/bw
8 Kira Schmidt, "Cruising for Trouble: Stemming the Tide of Cruise Ship Pollution," Published by the Bluewater Network, March 2000.

AUTHOR

Wendy Call is a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affair (ICWA) and she lives and works in southern Mexico.

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