Tourists might be surprised to hear that's twice the daily minimum wage, which is what is paid to many workers who toil in the glittering hotels, in this Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Not that there's much contact between the tourists and the 700,000 Mexicans who live in & around Cancún. A de facto economic & social apartheid keeps the two worlds of Cancún, the served & the server, quite distant except when conducting necessary business.
"I've worked here 22 years, and never once have I been able to bring my kids to this beach," complains Sonia,
middle-aged single mother of 2 who serves drinks & snacks to sunbathers at a 4 star oceanfront hotel. She earns 50 pesos a day (about $4.50), sometimes tripled by tips. "Employees & their families are simply not allowed to use the facilities," she says. "We're prohibited."
"Go just about anywhere in the world & the city, its streets, its markets, its people, are all part of the tourist
attraction. Yet, here in Cancún, they hide it," says Araceli Dominguez, a leader of the local environmental-action
group known as GEMA. Hiding it might be somewhat of an exaggeration. But certainly the bulk of foreign tourists
hardly know of the existence of the actual city of Cancún, legally known as the municipality of Benito Juarez.
The gritty downtown sits immediately adjacent to the hotel zone. Even here small local business has been pushed out by big-box franchises, including 2 Wal-Marts, a Sam's Club and an Office Max. Inner rings of the city consist of graffiti-covered tenements, incubators of a robust coca-driven youth-gang culture.
This is Cancún's Soweto, ghetto dormitories that house many of the tourist industry's impoverished workers.
Behind most of the grim cinder-block houses stand cramped, low-ceiling, add-on structures with tin roofs, wood-slat walls and earthen or concrete floors. Little more than human stalls, these cuarterias, little rooms, are illegally rented out by the day or month to the 40,000 or so mostly Mayan construction & hotel workers who commute into Cancún from their rural villages and go back home on weekends or once a month.
"Cancún's development has caused the disintegration of the whole Mayan region instead of its development," says Araceli Dominguez. She & other critics complain that while billions have been invested by intl capital in the resort hotels, almost nothing is spent on those who work in them.
The water system was privatized a decade ago, but with deference to the tourist hotels; many in Benito
Juarez have running water only 3 or 4 hours a day. 1994 implementation of NAFTA has also contributed to the
collapse of local services. Job-seeking subsistence farmers, bankrupted by the import of cheap American corn,
have flooded Cancún, accelerating what was already explosive & chaotic growth. Today, about half the
residents are not connected to the sewer system, and local groundwater has turned toxic.
[ Likely result in cholera ]
Some tourist-industry workers live a bumpy, hourlong bus ride from the hotels in places like Colonia Avante, crude settlement in front of a modern Coca-Cola bottling plant and nestled around the towering pylons of a crackling high-tension electric line. As wages have fallen over the past 5 years and with most workers hired month to month and facing layoffs in the slow season, for many, places like this are their only choice.
The unpaved roads into Avante are so rough, the local police use sure-footed horses on their patrols. The residents live mostly in palapas, rough-hewn shacks made of strapped-together poles. Water is gathered from open wells. Hijacked electric power snakes through the village on a jumble of wires & cables held up by forked sticks no more than 5 feet off the ground.
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A half-mile into Avante, the pirated lines disappear, replaced by candles & oil lanterns. In the early morning
hours, residents, some in their colorful corporate uniforms, stream toward the highway to catch a bus to work.
Directly overhead an American Airlines 757, like a giant creature from another world, makes its approach into
Cancún Intl Airport.
There are some tourist-industry workers climbing the economic ladder. New housing developments dot the city's periphery. Along dusty, unpaved but leveled roads, the more fortunate of the working-class families can buy a new, brightly painted "mini-casa" for about $16,000. Each mini-casa in a row of attached homes consists of one main room with a window, a separate shower stall and a tiny patio with a barbed-wire front fence, total living space of 11 by 15 feet. "You live so close to one another," darkly jokes a local journalist, "that you have to cut the tails off your dogs, ask Jesus on the cross to hang his hands out the windows, and prepare for having your neighbors hear even your secrets."
Back in the air-conditioned, aptly named Restaurante California in downtown Cancún, Pepe Zuniga feels a sense of bitter personal betrayal when it comes to Cancún. As a young urban planner, he helped draft the original plans for Cancún in the early 1970s; he even named some of its streets. Now a full-time activist, he leads a network of environmental groups critical of his own creation. "The original Cancún project was sensational," he says. "A pedestrian-based town with ample green spaces, gardens and schools."
But demand for immediate profit by investors and rampant political corruption guaranteed Cancún would be Frankenstein's monster from outset. In precursor of free-trade policies tcodified 2 decades later in agreements like NAFTA, Mexican govt made sweeping regulatory & tax concessions to investors in the nascent Cancún project.
Later, investment-for-debt swaps which gave juicy tax breaks to investors, further heated up the Cancún investment market.
"In Cancún it never mattered, and it still doesn't matter, who you were or where your money came from," says local historian José Antonio Callejas. Bundles of narcodollars washed through the resort building projects. Mario Villanueva, state governor until the late 1990s, now doing a prison term after a stint as a fugitive, built a massive political/criminal empire buoyed by cocaine cartels while in office. That legacy still haunts Cancún.
The current mayor's brother, 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.
But biggest problem with Cancún's development is that it was left solely to whim of the
market. "No one ever figured out where or how the workers would live. Better said, no one cared," Zuniga
says. When the city sprouted in 1975, it had 5,000 residents, compared with its nearly 700,000 today. As
impoverished job hunters poured in and found no infrastructure, they simply set up squatter villages.
Dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which monopolized the govt until 3 years ago, hungry for votes,
capitalized on the shantytowns by legalizing them where they stood. As billions of dollars were plowed into the
beach resorts, nothing went to build infrastructure for the locals.
"Everyone comes here desperate to find a job," says Zuniga. Mix that with the greed of local political bosses and
the result is "total urban disaster." Cancún, he says, is the "mirror that reflects the social crisis" not only of Mexico but of the entire global South. While an average city has 9m sq of green space per inhabitant, Cancún has 1.2 .
In Jamaica, he notes, the ratio of tourist hotel rooms to industry workers is about 1 to 15. In Cancún it's 1 to 40.
Local forest reserves have been sold off to private interests. Shantytowns have been built atop
groundwater reserves. Now there are plans to fill in the everglades and replace them with golf courses.
"The original idea was to produce a diamond, an expensive diamond that would attract development," Zuniga says. "Instead, we've seen them degrade this place, cheapening the tourism and squeezing for profits. Cancún used to sell sun, beach and relaxation. Now it sells sex, discos, alcohol and, yes, the beach. My beauty queen that I loved has been turned into a streetwalker."
That "degrading" Zuniga refers to is very much on the minds of many local Cancún businessmen. They, too, are
feeling the effects of globalization; they don't like it. Three-fourths of Cancún's hotel capacity is owned by
foreign interests, Americans, Canadians, Italians and, most notable, Spanish hotel chains.
The Spanish are making a move to dominate the local market, wringing it dry for profit, driving down prices, cutting costs and squeezing the competition. Spanish chains flood the market with "all inclusive" deals that offer tourists airfare, a luxury hotel room and all meals & tips, often for $50-$65 a day, half or less what the room alone might fetch on a market peak.
This all-inclusive policy has wiped out the income of workers dependent on tips and has led to the closing of a
number of restaurants & clubs.
Local leftists had a good laugh recently when newspapers ran a story quoting the usually conservative &
antistatist leaders of the Cancún Hotel Association calling on the Mexican govt, no less, to intervene in the market and impose price controls on resort hotel rooms, controls that would guarantee a price floor, not a ceiling.
"It's the only way we are going to overcome this problem," says association exec. Tomás Aunon, problem being
that in spite of 98% hotel-occupancy rates this summer, many of the Mexican-owned hotels are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, and local suppliers say their invoices are regularly going unpaid.
Already this year, ten luxury hotels have been sold off or are currently on the auction block. There's a palpable fear Cancún may now be embarked on a downward spiral with no bottom in sight, that it might become a globalization-whipped Caribbean version of Flint, MI.
Those concerned about Cancún's problems can't expect any help from the govt. President Vicente Fox is a big
promoter of globalization, while the left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party, in opposition, which has criticized Cancún-style development, has been losing strength. Its vote was down to about 17% nationally in July's congressional elections, and it did particularly poorly in the state of Quintana Roo, dropping into single digits.
At least one Cancún businessman, 49-year-old Armando Rangel Diaz, is convinced that Cancún faces
"catastrophic problems in the near future" if nothing is done. Rangel Diaz, the great-grandson of a former president of Mexico, a former industry adviser to the Mexican Congress and a longtime businessman who today owns fish-packing warehouses, is an unlikely critic of the economic system.
But he's quick to call himself a "victim of globalization." His small fleet of shrimp boats was driven out of business by trade concessions to Asian corporate fleets, and he says he has painfully watched his adopted city of Cancún succumb to a lethal brew of intl capital & local corruption, a formula he says is embodied in policies of agencies like WTO.
The crisis, he says, runs much deeper than a few greedy Spanish hotel chains. "Globalization is a process that
radically undermines national projects," he says. "International capital, as you can see here in Cancún, wants to
offer only enough wages, healthcare and education to guarantee a minimum of stability. It then becomes complicit with corrupt local govts. Neither side asks very much of each other. Instead they fuse into a single mafia that robs the population of its human dignity."
2 years ago, Diaz helped lead a study of the Cancún economy that detailed the radical shortcomings in its model of free-market development. "We have a $10 billion industry here, and all it does is consistently degrade the work force," he says. "Labor was brought in but never trained or upgraded. We have 2 miserable libraries, only 2 athletic fields, only 4 youth coaches, only 6 baseball diamonds, no public university, but we have public schools where the principals pocket 'registration fees.'
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? Do you think this is fair treatment by a $10 billion industry?"
The study made hundreds of concrete suggestions for reform & improvement, but he says, "We have been totally, but totally ignored. Not one of our suggestions has been implemented. The globalizers couldn't care less about sustainability or even social order. What's most important to them is competitiveness. And, damn it, if being competitive means they have to pay you $4 a day, then $4 a day is all you're going to be paid."
Creel, Mexico Still a toddler, Marcelino Moreno already looks exhausted by life, his body hanging
from his bones as if he were an old man. Marcelino will be 2 in March, yet at 11 pounds, he weighs as little as a 3-
month-old baby. He is lethargic, barely moving his thin limbs while lying in a hospital bed. His skin is loose and
wrinkled, his belly bloated. For nine years, a drought in northern Mexico has been slowly starving the reclusive
Tarahumara tribe in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua, an 800-mile mountain famed for mile-deep gorges of Copper
Canyon.
Many people fear the coming year could be even worse. In October, farmers ended their most devastating growing
season in nearly a decade, harvesting a third of the corn usually produced in the past, years in which the number of
reported child deaths averaged three dozen annually. But experts think the real number is much higher and expect
it to rise even more. From January on it's going to be difficult," said the Rev. Juanito Cordero, who ministers in
remote villages. "The rains arrived too late, and the soil is chalky and hard. There was very little land that could be
worked."