Newsroom-l Public Journal

Cancun Bashing is Now in Season

By Jules Siegel

Bashing Cancun is the fashion in the alternative press these days. Though springbreakers are less than two per cent of Cancun's three million annual visitors, no report fails to call us the springbreak resort. When it comes to what Cancun is all about, the general opinion is that it's bad, very bad. After having lived and worked here with my family since 1983, I disagree.

In an article so twisted and inaccurate that it compares unfavorably with Ann Coulter, The Nation's Marc Cooper presents worst case situations as if they were the rule, making it sound as if Cancun were a vast slum and an environmental disaster and an example of globalization at its worst. Actually, it might be an example of globalization at its best -- except it's not much of an example of globalization at all. Cancun was designed and built and mainly financed by Mexicans.

Many of the hotels carry names such as Omni or Sheraton, but they refer to the operating companies that provide connections into the worldwide travel networks. Some of the newer hotels, such as the Spanish Riu resorts, are principally owned by foreigners, but at least 70% of Cancun's hotels are Mexican-owned. Even the franchises such as McDonald's are Mexican companies. The Cancun Domino's Pizza is not only Mexican but locally owned. In town, Wal-Mart is a part of the Mexican Aurrera group.

The waters off Cancun are crystal clear. The lagoons suffer from some contamination, mainly due to illegal discharges by a small minority of hotels and restaurants, but by the standards of most American cities, the lagoons would be considered unpolluted. There is no visible smog here. The underground water table is beginning to show some signs of pollution, but nothing like what's happening to American cities. Garbage collection and disposal do need a lot of work. The city is way behind on solving this. Unfortunately, lower class Mexicans tend to be quite careless about garbage and litter. It's a cultural problem that is going to require a lot of education to correct.

The overwhelming majority of Cancun residents have water, sanitation, health care, electricity and education, and they live in houses made of cement, not tarpaper shacks. A lot of these houses are quite simple, but Cancun's residents are mainly home-owners rather than renters, and they fix up and expand the basic units with surprising speed. There are also substantial areas filled with very comfortable houses and apartments made of cement block, not wallboard, as in Los Angeles and other American cities.

"They took care of me very well." --Paulina Hau de Puch Paulina Hau de Puch, a housewife, is one of thousands of Cancunenses covered by the Social Security health service system. She broke her ankle. Her husband is a mason. They live in a cement house and have water and electricity and a septic tank. He earns $20 a day. This is one of three Social Security hospitals in the Cancun area. There's also a city hospital. Emergency care is also available at the Red Cross at modest cost.

Cooper uses "some" (usually for positive statements), and "many" (almost always for negative statements) without any statistical references that would enable the reader to judge their relative significance. This is especially deceptive where he discusses the number of people who are moving upward as a result of the Cancun economy ("some," according to him; "most," according to any non-environmentalist Cancunense you talk to). He mentions "some" low-cost public housing for workers (which he very unfairly and viciously derides), but not the much larger number of units being built for the middle and upper middle classes. From what I can gather not all the neighborhoods that he visited are slums, but typically mixed mostly low-budget housing areas you see all over Mexico. The style of the houses reflects traditional Mexican vernacular architecture using cement block instead of adobe.

Many of Cancun's residents have come from the most desperately hopeless poverty imaginable. Perhaps the Mexican authorities could have done a better job in handling the massive influx of people attracted by Cancun's success. That's easy to say after the fact. But the absurdly unfair coverage isn't going to help correct this, because the basic slant seems to be that any development is bad, no matter what benefits it brings. That's just ridiculous. Mexico is getting its population growth under control, but where is it supposed to put all those new human beings being born? How is it supposed to feed, house and educate them? Are they to be consigned to hopeless lives in the Lost Cities of the Distrito Federal? Exported to the urban and rural slums of the United States?

He makes it sound as if the entry area slums are bigger than the urbanized areas. They represent anywhere from 10% to 20% of the city, depending upon how you define Cancun. There are a lot of poor people here, but this is Mexico, not Monaco. Almost everyone in Cancun came here from somewhere else. The largest group came from the Yucatan Peninsula (which they left not because of American corn subsidies -- the principal crop being henequen -- but because of intractable poverty and slave labor conditions). Most of the rest come from the Mexico City area, seeking clean air and better jobs. He never asks a very obvious question of any of the people he talks with: Would like to go back to where they came from?

Part Two: The $7.50 Ice Cream Cone

Marc Cooper complains in The Nation that "In Cancun, a double scoop of Häagen-Dazs ice cream in a waffle cone costs $7.50--more than in Miami or Manhattan."

This is not New York or Miami. It's Cancun, a remote tourism destination supplied by air, road and sea at high cost under difficult conditions. Häagen-Dazs by the scoop is sold only in two Hotel Zone shopping centers, one of them among the ritziest in Mexico. This is like going into The Breakers in Palm Beach and ordering a hamburger. Is it going to be the same price as McDonald's? Of course not. It's the 100% tourist rip-off price. What else do you expect. The Cancun Hotel Zone is a mass market resort designed to give middle and upper middle class workers five days of fresh air, clean water, smogless skies. It does that very well. It's not designed to provide imported ice cream for the workers.

A standard Holanda or Nestlé ice cream cone is about $1 anywhere in the Hotel Zone. An excellent locally made ice cream, Nieve Gelato, costs about $3 for a generous portion in its shop in Plaza Caracol. It's much better than Häagen-Dazs. A liter of standard commercial ice cream is $3 in the Hotel Zone; Santa Clara gourmet ice cream is $9 a liter for regular, and $11 for premium.

"Indeed, finding a small, family-run Mexican taquería or panadería--a taco stand or a traditional bakery--is much easier in downtown Los Angeles or Chicago than it is in Cancún," he writes.

There are no bakeries in the Hotel Zone, true, but there are plenty in downtown Cancun, if we are going to use downtown Los Angeles as an example. The marinas usually have convenience stores that sell non-commercial baked goods. The San Francisco de Asis supermarket in the Hotel Zone sells traditional baked goods such as sweet rolls and the like. There are also taquerías and family-operated food stands in the food courts of at least four Hotel Zone shopping centers, including Forum by the Sea, where Cooper priced the ice cream cone. Taco stands can be found right across the street from this mall.

Several large Hotel Zone Mexican restaurants are outposts of downtown places that began as family operations: 100% Natural (serves organic dishes), El Mexicano (lavish show and regional dishes of all Mexico), La Parrilla (country-style tacos as well as complete meals), La Placita (barbecue) and Pacal (Mayan-influenced menu). If we add other varieties of food such as French, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese, the list starts getting very large. Mexicans like foreign food just as much as Americans like pizza. You go out to eat, you like a little variety, right?

Cooper tells the sad tale of the waitress who's never been to the beach in front of the hotel where she works. She's an employee. She's free to walk on the beach, which is public property, but the lounges and other installations belong to the hotels. Are their workers supposed to compete with the guests for the beach facilities? Moreover, lots of Cancun workers go to very beautiful and ample public beaches in the Hotel Zone such as El Mirador, the most scenic beach in Cancun.

Cooper evidently thinks he's in South Africa, using terms such as apartheid and Soweto. There are economic distinctions, of course, but they are not racial, although lighter complexions do predominate in the ruling class, and racism is not uncommon among the old rich who still think Porfirio Díaz was a misunderstood saint. Nonetheless, the governor of the state of Quintana Roo is black, and almost all government employees are mestizo. He complains about the lack of contact among tourists and hotel workers. Cancun offers plenty of opportunities for mingling. Mingling became such a problem in the discos here because of the rapacious attitudes of some of the Mexican guys and gals (paid and unpaid) who exchanged body fluids with tourists, that the authorities had to impose a code of conduct.

Part Three: The Myth of the Narco-Resort

One statement in Marc Cooper's The Nation story is so infuriatingly deceptive that it sounds like McCarthyism: "The current mayor's brother, a prominent hotel operator, has also done prison time on money-laundering charges, and experts say Cancún is still a major transit point for the drug trade."

The hotelier in question was accused of selling a small hotel to a suspected (not convicted) drug dealer. He made no attempt to hide this. All funds were transferred through his regular commercial accounts and the deal was registered with Hacienda (the Treasury). There was no evidence of any kind linking him to any illicit activities. He was held for about a year and half and found innocent. One of the other three principal defendants was found innocent of all charges after having been held in Mexico's maximum security Almoloya prison for almost two years.

The third defendant, former state governor Mario Villanueva Madrid, became rich on the bribes for the privatization of the Cancun water and garbage systems, and selling permissions to construct hotels in what is now called the Riviera Maya. He got on the wrong side of then-president Ernesto Zedillo, openly defied the PRI national executive committee, and was punished for disobedience by being prosecuted for supposedly helping cocaine dealers. Since drug trafficking control is a Federal function that the local police are forbidden to touch, it's not clear what he did exactly. The state's best witnesses retracted their testimony and said that they had been pressured and threatened.

As part of the prosecution, Zedillo sent a crack team of dozens of Federal agents with law degrees here. They interrogated hundreds of people. Despite the almost servile cooperation of Mexico's court system in major drug cases, they failed to produce a single important conviction, and they have never demonstrated any evidence that cocaine money financed a single Cancun hotel. Villanueva has not yet been convicted of anything, and some of the principal charges have been dismissed, but he is still being held in Almoloya under very harsh conditions.

Cooper cites unnamed "experts" who say that Cancun is a major transit point for cocaine It's not true. All cocaine smuggling takes place in the unpopulated southern regions of Quintana Roo. There's too much heat in Cancun for this sort of thing.

Cooper identifies "one Cancún businessman, 49-year-old Armando Rangel Diaz," as "the great-grandson of a former president of Mexico." The most likely candidate for this ancestor would be Porfirio Díaz, the ruthless dictator who was overthrown at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. If so, this is a little like identifying a Herr Schickelgruber as the descendent of a former German chancellor. Did Cooper know who the former president was? If so, why didn't me identify him by name?

Mr. Rangel Díaz reports, "We have half the population without sewers, but we have 7,000 liquor stores, half of them clandestine, 4,000 prostitutes who each pay the police $10 a month and 400 crackhouses that also produce about $2 million a month in police protection money. Do you think this is just?"

Crack is not available in Cancun. Freebase can be obtained, but the main product, as everywhere, is the one-gram packet of heavily cut cocaine. Cocaine is dealt by individuals. There are no crack houses where destitute cocaine users live together and deal. Liquor stores are a dreadful problem, but people do like to drink. It's not clear whether he's annoyed about the number of prostitutes or the bribes. Prostitution in Mexico legal but soliciting and pimping are crimes. Bribery is illegal, of course, but not exactly a novel feature of Mexican culture.

With awesome irrelevance, he says, "Do you think this is fair treatment by a $10 billion industry?"

Yes, tourism does attract prostitution, but if it's not a crime, why bring it up? The health authorities do their best to make sure that prostitutes come in for checks and receive their credentials. Some prefer to pay bribes to the police when caught without them. What can the Hotel Association can do something about this? One is tempted to ask Rangel Díaz whether or not he's ever paid a bribe himself or visited a prostitute.

He also complains bitterly about corruption in the schools and the lack of public libraries. The "voluntary" quotas as a sore point for parents, but they are mostly used to provide maintenance and other services that the educational authorities do not provide. Principals and other school officials who mismanage these funds have been arrested on the complaints of the affected parents groups. With the new term beginning, no child in Cancun is without place in a public school. The schools are not lavish by any means, but all three of my children attended public schools in Cancun and received a more than adequate education. My daughter, Faera, who lived with us here for ten years, returned to the United States and passed the GED in the first percentile. She was accepted by NYU and is now a court interpreter in the Bay Area.

The public library issue sounds great, except for the fact that although the country is anywhere from 85-95% literate, Mexicans don't read very much. All the daily newspapers in Mexico City (23 at last count) do not add up to a million copies a day. Reforma, the country's largest newspaper, sells less than 300,000 daily. Only one major bookstore has managed to survive here. There's a religious bookstore, one that sells accounting manuals, and there are small book sections (mostly technical) in a few other business establishments. But taking him at face value, what has he himself done about this other than commission a study? The American public library system was essentially created by Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy.

Summing up: This is just a hatchet job on Cancun. It seems that even leftists are prejudiced against Mexicans whether they live in the United States or Mexico. They are required to be campesinos and wear sombreros and sleep under cacti. They don't all want to do that. They want to live in cement houses and have high speed Internet connections and go to discos. They think that Cancun is just great, but a little screwed up, and its needs should be taken more seriously by the federal government. Meanwhile, Cancun is the one place in Mexico that's importing rather than exporting people. It's not perfect. Therefore, it's bad. What kind of reporting is that?

---End---

Drug war crushes Bolivian social project

By María Botey

Three years after a spectacular police operation in which various workers and executives of the Bolivian mining company Tierra, S.A., were detained on charges of having diverted precursor chemicals for the manufacture of cocaine, four of the defendants were sentenced to terms of four to eight years in prison and the factory and its mining concessions were confiscated.

The plant's workers, who refuse to lose their source of employment, consider the sentence to be the result of a highly irregular prosecution organized by international competition (Chilean and American) acting with the complicity of the prosecuting attorney and other obscure Bolivian interests to take control of the continent's mineral reserves.

Originally published in ¡Por Esto!, Mexico

Founded in 1984 according to a Belgian plan aiming at creating employment in the historically marginalized area south of Potosí, Tierra produces boric acid in its plant located in Apacheta, nine kilometers from the Chilean border. After many difficult years, Tierra became profitable in 1998, employing 250 workers in Bolivia and fifty in Chile, and exporting nine hundred tons of product to five continents. It was rewarded for business success by the Chamber of Commerce of Bolivia in 1999 and 2000.

Faithful to its social mission, Tierra has dedicated much energy to worker training, awarding university scholarships to the best students on the condition that they return home, and supporting three medical doctors who provide health services to the surrounding villages in coordination with the Bolivian Health Chest. It is proud to maintain more than 200 kms. of highway that its trucks use, something the Bolivian government hardly carries out throughout the country. It was recently cited by the United Nations as the world's second best poverty eradication project among twenty countries.

The ordeal of the Potosino workers began when a group of Bolivian lawyers repurchased debt that Tierra had contracted with International Investment Corporation, a dependency of the International Development Bank, and began various strategies to take control of the borax-producing deposits the company exploits. Tierra won in court.

A short time later, Aug. 28, 2000 Bolivian and Chilean drug police financed by the DEA carried out Frontier 2000, a joint operation in which multiple human rights abuses were committed that was presented to the media as a spectacular success. As a result, the plant was ordered closed and fourteen executives and workers were detained, accused of supposedly illegally importing sulfuric acid -- a borax production requirement whose transportation and use is regulated in Bolivia because it is a precursor for the manufacture of cocaine -- and diverting of nearly ten thousand metric tons of it to the drug trade in Chapare.

The company defended itself by demonstrating that the entire importation had been legal from the beginning, and had all of the authorizations of the Vice ministry of Social Defense for importing sulfuric acid, whose importation is controlled by the customs authorities. They also alleged that customs and tax authorities never went made out the required post-import documents, despite many requests by the company.

The precursors diversion accusation was based on a report by a FELCN functionary asserting that only .8 kilos of sulfuric acid per kilo of ulexite are required to manufacture a kilo of boric acid. This theoretical presumption was refuted after the Frontier 2000 operation by four studies under the supervision of the Technical University of Oruro (Bolivia), an official government commission and a team of independent experts, which confirmed that the amount of sulfuric acid necessary for the production of boric acid varies but averages one to one.

If the accusation were true it would signify that hundreds of tanker trucks would have been transporting sulfuric acid all along the 1,500 kilometers that separate the production plant and Chapare, a route full of military checkpoints for the control of controlled substances, coca and its chemical precursors. Not a single truck was ever detained nor has the existence of the money proceeding from the illegal sale ever been proven.

As widely reported in the Bolivian media at the time, when the plant closed the workers and their wives and children marched on La Paz and struggled for fifteen months to reopen it, which they achieved after the acceptance of the naming of a judicial supervisor for plant administration. Production started up again, back salaries were paid little by little, and Tierra installations were expanded and improved.

They also began a national and international campaign in which they gathered 3,500 signatures, among them Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. Despite this, in a parallel prosecution under customs law that took place in Potosí in the middle of June, the former executive president was sentenced to four years in prison and one of his associates to two. Neither the defendants nor their lawyers were physically present because they had to attend final hearings on the judicial process in La Paz, but the judge refused to take this into consideration.

Finally, on June 18, the La Paz court decreed the confiscation of the company, its deposits to be auctioned by the government, and penalties of twelve years in jail for Guillermo Roelants, the executive president, a Belgian residing in Bolivia twenty years, eight years for Oscar Bollanti, the ex administrative manager, four years for former Tierra lawyer Mabel Esrada and four years for Carmen Rosa Burgos, owner of the mining concessions. The defense announced that it will appeal the decision.

The workers called the process a trick. They said that the prosecution's intention to transfer the company to the government clearly demonstrated the aim of converting it into political booty in order to hand it over to the international competition that is trying to gain control of the immense ulexite deposits, calculated at more than five million metric tons. Almost the entire Latin American borax market is controlled by US Borax. The other transnational is IMC Chemicals.

Returning to Potosí after mobilizing in La Paz to be present at the sentencing, the workers asserted that they would defend their source of work by all means. They threatened to carry out pressure tactics such as blocking the highways if the plant's functioning were affected in any way. They and the company's executives see the decision as another demonstration of the absence of reliable justice in the country, whose judges are immersed in all kinds of pressures and influences. As a result the prosecution in drug trafficking cases (supported by the DEA) never loses its cases and be discredited in public opinion, even when its accusations are unsustained.

MARIA BOTEY is a Catalán journalist living in Cozumel, Mexico, who writes principally for ¡Por Esto!, Mexico's third largest daily newspaper. She recently came back from an extensive research trip in the Bolivian highlands.