The fate of the scorpion perceives the model of our tourism industry as a great scenic lie, since its promise of development turns out to be a mirage that in reality excludes and precarizes the local population, destroys or depletes natural resources, and makes sustainability impossible. A business whose excessive desire for profit includes real estate fraud, extortion and corruption of municipal authorities while harassing communities, tearing the social fabric and promoting inequality that makes coexistence difficult. This is observed in Tulum, Huatulco, Puerto Vallarta and Bahía de Banderas, “tourism paradises” that the scorpion includes in this brief atlas of our tourist catastrophe.
At least since the fifties of the last century, tourism was presented as the engine of progress. Megaprojects were built, concessions were awarded, record numbers of visitors were celebrated. But behind the official discourse, reality was revealed: displaced communities, abandoned public services, unworthy salaries, growing insecurity. Tourism, far from integrating, has used local inhabitants as cheap labor and keeps them as spectators of a paradise that does not belong to them.
Tulum empties. Not because of “media campaigns”, but because of the exhaustion of the exorbitant prices of terrible services, of discrimination and classism, of the exhaustion of walking between privatized beaches and undrained streets, of living with extortion as a routine, growing insecurity and precariousness as the norm. What happens in Tulum is no exception, it is the broken mirror of a failed tourism model that privileges hotel corporations and tourist interests over the well-being of the communities.
Tulum faces a drop in hotel occupancy. Tourists flee due to lack of water, power outages, insecurity. They are fleeing a destination that was sold as eco-chic and ended in urban-tropical chaos without planning or social justice. The collapse of a tourism model.
Originally, the Oaxacan area of Huatulco was conceived as a sustainable destination, with ecological planning and control of urban growth. The predatory tourism model was terminated in the name of ecology. However, pressure from developers exceeded the limits of that original aspiration and has generated problems with access to water (watering a golf course is equivalent to one day’s worth of water for an entire town), deforestation, and displacement of communities. Municipal services are insufficient and workers in the tourism sector live in marginalized areas, without transportation or adequate housing, while organized crime begins to infiltrate the region, taking advantage of institutional weakness and the lack of surveillance in rural areas.
The scorpion now wants to focus on the area of Puerto Vallarta and Bahía de Banderas, where it has lived for three years, because it represents the most extreme case of hotel concentration. Large corporations control the coast, access to beaches, tourist services, large fenced subdivisions, while the population faces water cuts, poor transportation, precarious and expensive housing, and miserable salaries. There are protests and resistance movements in Bahia, but the governor arrives and in a pompous ceremony with wealthy developers decrees: “A hotel will be built here!”
Official and commercial campaigns drive the arrival of visitors and celebrate investment, tourism offices participate in presentations to position Bahía de Banderas as a growing destination: the Riviera Nayarita. On the ground, however, this “attraction” translates into an economy dependent on temporality and jobs subject to the pace of employment. The priority will always be the tourists, however, the working population that sustains and gives life to this entire “scenography of hospitality” is hardly taken into account.
The positions generated by the hotel industry—from cleaning and cooking to floor and food services—are mostly low-paying and high-turnover, with minimums of between 48 and 52 hours per week (talking about a 40-hour week is blasphemy in this business). The salary structure does not allow a large part of the staff to access decent housing or cover basic services regularly; These are jobs that support the tourist image, but not the social fabric of the municipality. This precariousness is fueled by unstable seasonality, as well as temporary contracts (30 or 60 days and sometimes even weekly) to avoid full benefits for employees.
And while this Riviera is promoted, the municipal services that sustain daily life remain fragmented: insufficient and irregular public transportation, failures in water supply, overloaded drainage networks and deficiencies in electricity supply in neighborhoods far from tourist centers. This disconnection between tourism investment and the provision of public services such as health and education turns luxury hotels and real estate developments into islands of prosperity surrounded by neighborhoods with precarious services.
Added to all this problem is a double fraud: that perpetrated by private developers and public officials to privatize land and sell popular housing with irregularities (the famous Infonavit case), plus that suffered today by families who bought condominiums and timeshares, from Puerto Vallarta to Punta Mita, under fraudulent schemes organized – according to complaints and investigations – by networks of the Jalisco Cartel. The legal process continues to develop somewhat confusingly, but in fact, what was offered as an “investment opportunity” ended up being the loss of assets for hundreds of buyers, and, for the municipality, a long-term legal conflict.
Bahía de Banderas faces a structural dilemma: maintain a model that privileges the arrival of tourists and hotel expansion without demanding social responsibilities from large investors (generally they are asked for a cut, not responsibilities), or reorient the agenda towards truly comprehensive development. If the logic of concentrated profits and externalization of social costs persists, these “tourist paradises” will continue to exploit their workers, tolerate deficits in public services and leave spaces for criminal penetration. The Mexican tourist dream is over.
@Åladelagarza