PREFACE TO THE FIRST ENGLISH EDITION

Cancun, Fantasy of Bankers, was originally a series of journalistic reports written at the end of 1984. In its first version the text was published in unomsuno(then Mexico's leading intellectual national daily newspaper) and Novedades de Quintana Roo at the beginning of 1985. The enlarged manuscript appeared in book form that August this was the first edition and, a few weeks laterContenido Magazine published a condensation. A second edition was published two years later. Five years later, the story is still fascinating. But the cast has gone through many changes. There's a new government, resignations abound among functionaries, pioneers have changed residences and even abandoned this world. The warning is inevitable: all citations of time today, now, at the moment date back at least five years.

cancun, fantasy of bankers

six-year term of President Diaz Ordaz, a group of bankers conceived an absurd project: found a tourism city in dense jungle with the basic idea of capturing foreign exchange. The plan appeared to have neither head nor feet. As the site of their Utopia, the bankers had chosen the Territory of Quintana Roo, geographically and logistically the furthest and most forbidding area in the nation, 2,000 kilometers from Mexico City and without a single international airport. The beaches selected were located 200 kilometers from the nearest city, barely accessible by jeep paths snaking through swamps. Any reasonable observer could have confronted this group with a judicious question or two. Where, for example, were the half a million people needed to colonize the city going to come from in the little that remained of this century? That was the figure envisioned in the preliminary outline, but the document lacked a master colonization plan. The colonists would have to come voluntarily, arriving in the zone spontaneously.

URING THE MIDDLE OF THE

t h e document said that the area would have outstanding hotel capacity, but to date not one investor had shown the least interest in the matter. In reality, not even they knew. The rows of fully- outfitted hotels, the intense traffic of an international airport, the reservations system connected to the world, the creation of thousands of jobs, and the capture of mountains of foreign exchange existed only in the imaginations of the plan's creators. Moreover, there was one detail that could justify any form of skepticism. The authors of the plan were career bankers. Not one had any experience whatsoever in tourism. As if this were not enough, the opinions of the official organizations connected with tourism the Department of Tourism and the National Tourism Council not merely had not been solicited, but also had been ignored with complete disdain. By all means, the scheme did not include among any of its ingredients a single dot of common sense. But the bankers showed extraordinary tenacity. They convinced the Director of the Bank of Mexico, the Secretary of the Treasury, and, finally, the President of the Republic. The project was set in motion. The succeeding president Echeverria did not like the idea, and froze its funding upon taking office. Part of his cabinet was openly opposed to the plan, while another part intended to boycott it. Utopia appeared to be condemned to die of starvation. The bankers insisted time after time, always with the same refrain. They went out and gathered allies, recruiting partisans. To make a long story short, that very same doubting President Echeverria wound up not merely convinced but also irretrievably enchanted by the project. With the following administrations there were no problems because both succeeding presidents participated as functionaries at the beginning of development. Today, the bankers' plan is the third most populous city on the Yucatan Peninsula, second in economic capacity. It will soon pass Campeche in population and, by the beginning of the next century, equal Merida in both areas. For now, the face of the Mexican Caribbean has been radically changed and the tourism currents which flow to and through the region have been altered profoundly. It's no longer Utopian. In little more than a decade, the number of visitors to the Cancun area has multiplied by a factor of twenty and become a determining factor in the country's tourism balance. At the same time, it has become an important diplomatic arena. During the past few years, more than fifty heads of state have come to visit, surpassing Mexico City in this regard. Cancun, in brief. ' A community that arose from nothing, that grew in the minds of the urbanologists, that was constructed within the area of the drawing boards, that was seen populated by virtue of demographic calculations and became a multi-million dollar business...before the cornerstone of a single house was laid. Cancun is... Kemil Rizk, Director of Fonatur: "It's an excellent business for the nation. It's the destination that attracts the most foreign visitors after Acapulco, and, consequently, the most foreign exchange. It's also a good business for Fonatur, as it enables us to obtain resources that can be directed to other developments. Pedro Joaquin Coldwell, Governor of Quintana Roo: "It's the most important city in the state. It's difficult to imagine what the state profile would be if we hadn't developed this project. Cancun represents 66 per cent of the state gross product and 67 per cent of its tax collections. To me, it's one of the Revolution's greatest successes." Sigfrido Paz Paredes, Director of Aeromexico: "Cancun was an extraordinary school, a seedbed of the first order. The present Secretary of Tourism, the three Sub-Secretaries, the Chief of Staff, the Director of

Fonatur, and I myself were all involved in the development. It is the most important tourism accomplishment in the country's history. Joaquin Gonzalez Castro, Mayor of Cancun: "It's a mosaic and a laboratory. There are no natives here. We're all immigrants. This has created a highly energetic society, formed by courageous men and women, whom I would call 'spiritual nomads'. Cancun is a promised land." Antonio Enrfquez Savignac, Secretary of Tourism: "Cancun is a Mexican development, conceived, planned, constructed and administered by Mexicans. This is important because it is the world's first tourism development developed from a base of zero. After Cancun, many countries have wanted to follow the route drawn by Mexico. But no other project has had the success of ours. Cancun is a Mexican triumph." And this is the story of Cancun.

the hunt for foreign exchange

Ernesto Fernandez Hurtado is known as a serious man. Discreet of manner, sparing of speech, with a demeanor at once courteous yet ceremonial, his is the perfect picture of the banker, that constant and conscious search for serenity and tranquillity. The portrait fits the person. Fernandez Hurtado has been a traditional banker all his life. A career economist, he spent the first 33 years of his professional life in the Bank of Mexico, scaling the entire pyramid until he arrived at the position of Director General. Possessing a post-graduate degree from Harvard, he had ample opportunity to demonstrate academic solidity during the happy years of the Mexican miracle. Until 1966, Fernandez Hurtado occupied the sub-directorship of the Bank of Mexico, whose hierarchy was headed by Rodrigo Gomez, one of the principal ideologists of moderate growth. Above both, in the Secretary of the Treasury, was no one less than Antonio Ortiz Mena, the father of stable development. They were a fine team of prudent bankers, trying to conduct the country through an economic breakthrough with few surprises and less upsets. Paradoxically, it would be this group of conservatives who promoted the carrying out of a project as audacious as Cancun.

A;

MONG HIS ACQUAINTANCES,

Ernesto Fernandez Hurtado, chairman

of Bancomer

11

functioned with relative success and domestic production was growing at a rate of six per cent annually, while population increase scarcely reached 3.5. It was true that the proposed strategy would permit concentration of wealth in few hands, but from the bankers point of view, the priority was how to create wealth, not how to distribute it. Moreover, Ortiz Mena and his people were convinced that it was not possible to grow more rapidly. Given the characteristics of the existing industrial plant, any heating up would have as inevitable consequence an explosive increase in imports. In order to pay for them, it would be necessary to seek foreign loans, thus creating a vicious circle leading to an unsustainable financial imbalance for the stability of the peso. In
Cruises represent a flourishing business in the tourism sector and have been very fashionable since the 1960s. Many shipping lines include Mexican ports on their routes, predominantly those along what is known as the Mexican Riviera, that is, the Pacific coast. In the Caribbean they make an average stopover of 24 hours at Cancn and Cozumel The economic potential of cruise vacations promises to continue to grow rapidly over the next few decades.

other words, the collapse of fixed exchange rates and devaluation. As a matter of fact, under normal conditions it was quite a problem merely to maintain an exchange rate of 12.5 pesos to the dollar. Imports always exceeded exports and the deficit had to be covered with foreign credit. As a result, the capture of foreign exchange was one of the Bank of Mexico's constant worries and one of Fernandez Hurtado's principal areas of responsibility. Two decades later, at the head of the country's most important commercial bank, Fernandez Hurtado held firm opinions about that: "The Achilles' heel of this country's economy was, is and will continue to be its inability to capture sufficient foreign exchange. There lies the origin of the better part of our ills." According to classic liberal theory, the only way to obtain hard currency was to succeed at exporting more than importing. On that premise, government institutions had adopted a defensive policy, import substitution, which basically consisted in protecting local capital that decided to produce goods normally coming from the outside. The results were discouraging decades of development of overprotected and dependent industry, a true parasite in a captive market that had to support the combined strategies of high prices and low quality. Both factors impeded participation in international markets in such a way that the ancient longing to obtain foreign exchange in this manner had gone up in smoke, and by the middle of the sixties, the strategy had suffered a considerable loss of prestige. Fernandez Hurtado said, "Applied fully, import substitution is a policy that wore itself out. Thus would have happened to us at any rate." It was necessary to seek new alternatives. There was a very promising possibility, a post-World War II activity that had reached unsuspected levels massive tourism. Some undeveloped countries, principally Spain, had practically resolved their foreign exchange problems this way. Fernandez Hurtado had real experience in that

12

respect: "When I began at the Bank of Mexico my job consisted in gathering statistics about the balance of payments, specifically in the invisible areas, which included tourism. And so I went out on a pilgrimage of the city's hotels carrying very elementary questionnaires how much did each tourist spend, what countries did they come from and so on. Later, when I was manager of the international division, we carried out detailed studies of tourism expenditures at the border. And this was what really oriented us. We didn't know much about tourism, but we had a very clear idea of its potential for generating foreign exchange." Fernandez Hurtado decided that it was worthwhile to entrust someone to investigate the matter in depth. The school bell rang. The choice fell on a young banker, 35, with a post-graduate degree from Harvard, named Antonio Enrfquez Savignac. His studies finished, after marrying a most Bostonian young aristocrat, Enriquez Savignac became a loan officer at the Inter-American Development Bank, where he remained for about three years. After a fleeting stay in Wall Street, he had been incorporated into the hosts of the Bank of Mexico at the beginning of the presidential term. Now Femadez Hurtado conferred upon him an enviable task to travel at government expense to the principal tourism destinations of Mexico and the world, with the goal of preparing an assessment of this activity and exploring the possibilities for Mexico in such territory. It was a job that undoubtedly invited dissipation, but Enriquez Savignac took it very seriously. During eighteen months, he examined the various tourism basins, concentrating on those that represented direct competition for Mexican attractions Florida, Hawaii and the Caribbean. He simultaneously submerged himself in a world of statistics on per capita income, recreational spending, behavior and flow of tourism currents, return on investment, availability of financing, design and execution of new developments, and several dozen other technical indicators. In the middle of 1967, Enriquez Savignac was able to show the results of his studies to his superiors. Some of his conclusions were surprising; for example, that at the world level tourism was increasing much faster than exports. As a result, traditional destinations the Mediterranean, Hawaii were generating record earnings, while some new areas Yugoslavia, Morrocco, the South Pacific and Far East were beginning to acquire renown. Something else had happened in the Caribbean. Florida had been almost fully developed as a tourism center. With the closing of the Cuban beaches and casinos after the Revolution, all of the islands in the zone had hurried to become alternate destinations. To complement existing installations in Montego and Kingsport, Jamaica had put into operation tourism developments in Ocho Rios, Port Antonio and Negril. Freeport, Paradise Island and Treasure Cay had opened in the Bahamas, and Puerto Rico's hotel capacity had tripled. The same path was being followed by the Virgin Islands, Martinique, Barbados, Guadeloupe and Trinidad. Even Venezuela was studying the possibility of exploiting its Caribbean coast more successfully. This dynamic international panorama contrasted remarkably with what was happening in Mexico. In the first place, there wasn't one organization overseeing tourism, but two the Department of Tourism and the Tourism Council. The Tourism Council, created by President Lopez Mateos in 1958 to honor the institutional status of ex-President Aleman, had monopolized all tourism promotion task and their budgets but

Statistical surveys on tourists ' origins and destinations have become very complex. In the case of Mexico, tourist flows have been calculated to the smallest percentage. The diagrams below summarize such information. The US. market, for example, is divided here into large zones, whereas the detailed surveys actually showed the number of visitors per state in that country and per county along the border zone.

had focussed them according to the personal perspective of its director. In practice, this could be summed up in one word Acapulco. The Council's preeminence seriously weakened the Department and impeded even minimally coherent management of the sector. A plan of national goals was never created nor published, neither was the problem ever contemplated as a whole. The conclusions of Enriquez Savignac's study affirmed that tourism growth had come spontaneously, that hardly any public sector help existed, that no financing programs were in operation, nor were there specific hotel credits, that promotion was insufficient and that the national tourism offering was scanty at best. From that point, Enrfquez Savignac became an expert in the matter.

Antonio Enriquez Savignac, Secretary of Tourism

CHRISTA COWRIE

He continued being a banker, but he managed the theme of tourism with absolute fluidity. "It was a little strange," he comments. "We began by looking for foreign exchange and we wound up with an entirely different animal in our hands." The animal in question was suffering from anemia. Between 1961 and 1967, tourism had registered a 12 per cent increase annually in Mexico, compared with 24 per cent in the Far East and 46 per cent for the Pacific Islands. In 1967, a little more than twenty million travelers had visited Florida, and four million had gone as far as the Caribbean islands, in frank contrast to Yucatan, which had received only 60,000 foreigners in the same period. The Mexican tourism offering was even worse, in the quantity as well as quality of rooms, concentrated in Acapulco. A logical response would have suggested diversification, the creation of new tourism centers. What kind? Where? No one knew at the Bank of Mexico, but Fernandez Hurtado had already selected the person to find it out. Enriquez Savignac would have a new assignment.

the beach hunters

. nac never understood the meaning of "9,000 kilometers of coast" until he had to examine it step by step: "Mexico is an immense country, incredibly rich and complex. You notice this when you fly over the coasts dozens of ideal places, true paradises that remain completely virgin." The first glimpse took several months. At that time, Pedro Donde Escalante had joined the team. Later Sub-Secretary of Planning, he was then a young professional who did not hide his eagerness to know every corner of the country. He and Enriquez Savignac alternated in the search. "We concentrated on the coast, because our previous studies had revealed that the beach was the principal attraction sought by the foreign tourist. But the number of potential beaches that this country has

NTONIO ENRlQUEZ SAVIG

Infra-red photograph of the Baja California Peninsula and the Sonoran coast taken from a meteorological satellite. The scale is approximately 1 to 3 millions. No human construction is perceptible, not even the San Diego-Tijuana megalopolis.

15

The natural rock formations at the extreme south end of Baja California. It wasn't mere chance that caused Los Cabos to wind up among the selected sites.

Antonio Ortiz Mena

Rodrigo Gomez

is almost inconceivable." Dond Escalante recalls a somewhat unconventional routine: "We spent many years in two almost antagonistic activities. One, touring the nation's beaches, arriving by plane, helicopter, boat or mule-back, sleeping in tents or in the vehicles, living in intimate contact with nature. And, on return, cloistered in offices making statistical graphs and charts, feeding the computers our data, making cost-benefit evaluations. It was a strange kind of work." In any case, it generated real enthusiasm among the functionaries of the Bank of Mexico. Fernandez Hurtado himself"We're going to tread the beaches," he would say occasionally would be included in the group of explorers. Wenceslao Salas, another member of the original team, participated in some of the trips: "It was quite arduous. We would have no kind of privacy or comfort. There were expeditions that lasted two or three weeks." At this stage, the Spanish businessman Juan March, was a significant personality advising the group in an absolutely spontaneous and complementary manner, due to his close friendship with Fernandez Hurtado. March was a valuable counselor, given his enormous personal experience in the tourism field, where he could be considered an expert and an innovator. Aboard his private yacht, March had circled the globe on many occasions, studying tourism developments from the point of view of the investor. Settling finally in Mexico, he acquired from the hands of Manuel Suarez a knoll with Acapulco Bay in the bargaintheoretically without tourism possibilities and constructed Las Brisas, a hotel concept so versatile that it continues functioning to date without modifications. But his most important facet was the experience he had acquired. Suddenly it would be suggested to do this or that thing and it would turn out that the same thing had been done in Jamaica or in Puerto Rico or in the Greek islands and, March knew, had been a failure. Because of this, his participation in the strategy search was not scorned. On the other hand, although the original criterion of foreign exchange capture remained vaild, the investigations of Enriquez Savignac suggested that other factors would have to be considered. For example, it was clear that tourism required the intensive use of manual labor, as the traditional positions cooks, waiters, chamber maids, guides are impossible to mechanize. Even more, training the necessary was minimal, unlike industrial transformation. Any person could carry out these tasks

with reasonable efficiency after a few weeks practice. This opened the possibility of locating the sites of the new developments in the nation's neglected areas, attempting to alleviate the social tensions produced by the pauperization of rural centers. Implied as well was the possibility of geographically relocating important population strata, changing the historic tendency which had brought us to hide ourselves in the country's central mountains. With these elements in mind, the Bank of Mexico team agreed to concentrate forces in five key areas: [1] the peninsula of Baja California, especially in the southern portion, where a weak economy and shortage of population had motivated concern for several federal administrations; [2] the coast of the states of Jalisco and Colima, which could function as escape valves for the western mountain zones; [3] the coast of the states of Michoacan and Guerrero, from Acapulco above, alleviating port congestion and opening new opportunities for the area; [4] the coast of the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, one of the nation's poorest agricultural regions; and [5] the Yucatan Peninsula and, especially, the Caribbean zone, in which Mexican presence shone in its absence. The exploration and analysis of the proposed regions consumed more than a year the end of 1967 and all of 1968. This is hardly strange when considering the range of themes examined climate (days of sunshine, prevailing winds, rain), geographical location (possibilities of access, map of immediate roads, table of air distances), existing infrastructure, sources and potential of water supplies, electricity and fuel, population and its characteristics, area of influence and surrounding region, beach qualities, vermin, history of natural catastrophes (hurricanes and earthquakes), probable tourism competitors, land ownership... The process was slow because the questionnaire was applied rigidly to a great number of alternatives. In the Yucatan Peninsula alone, for example, six distinct locations were investigated: Celestun (where the prevailing winds proved to be an insuperable obstacle), Progreso (which had problems of land ownership and coastal configuration), Isla Mujeres (which was too small for any plan), Cozumel (where water supply turned out to be too expensive), Akumal (with severe unpleasant fauna problems or, to be less drastic, mosquitos) and Cancun. However it might be desired, by the end of 1968 the Bank of Mexico technicians had selected six ideal points to lodge new tourism developments. Two were in what was then the South Baja California Territory the Los Cabos corridor, at the Southern point of the peninsula, with incredible natural formations; and Loreto, some 200 kilometers north of La Paz, on the calm waters of the Sea of Cortez. Both had a basic difficulty the transpeninsular highway had not yet emerged from the planning stages, so they would have to be limited to aerial and maritime connections, or, better, wait until the highway would be ready. Two other sites were in Oaxaca. One of them, Puerto Escondido, is an opening to the sea scarcely a few kilometers in length. In reality, it lent itslef only to modest development. The other, Huatulco, is a chain consisting of nine ample and beautiful bays with an extraordinary variety of beaches. To be truthful, Huatulco was the bankers' favorite project. It had a certain historical flavor. During the colonial era, it had functioned as a working port and some experts said that it was through there that certain prohibited books of the French Revolution had been introduced, among whose recipients was Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who began the uprising that lead to Mexico's independence from Spain. Years later, the community was witness to the treason of Picaluga, who captured Guerrero by trickery in Acapulco and delivered him to Huatulco, where this hero passed into the hands of conservative troops in an idyllic spot now known as Delivery Beach. As a probable tourism development, however, Huatulco shared a problem with Puerto Escondidothe coastal highway was no more than a plan and the nearest port, Santa Cruz, was 100 kilometers away, so that the only option was

The six resort sites on the coast selected by bankers. Fifteen year later, all but one are in operation.

Pedro Dond Escalante

air travel. Or, better, to wait until the highways were ready. A fifth site was found in Guerrero Ixtapa, only a few kilometers from Zihuatanejo. This plan contemplated taking advantage of the zone's existing infrastructure and creating an additional tourism center within the state of Guerrero. A potable water system already existed, so did an airport, so did a highway (even if not on the coast). But Ixtapa was also a project of medium dimensions, so it was approved and put in the portfolio of plans pending. By this time, without any doubt, the bankers' hearts were elsewhere. A slender tongue of land in the form of the number seven attached like an oyster to the eastern coast of Quintana Roo had thoroughly seduced and enraptured the group. Technically speaking, it was an island, as two narrow channels separated it from the continent. Lodged in the hole of the 'seven' were a series of brackish lagoons, fed by the sea as well as by uncountable cenotes, sinkholes. The island in question was called Cancun, or Kankun, or Kan Kun... It could be given any name. The fact was it had passed all the tests. The quality of its beaches and the sand was extraordinary. Water temperature was temperate and tended to be stable. Thanks to the lagoons, the distance from dry land was sufficient to make it easy to control noxious fauna. And given the topographical characteristics, hotels could be lined up one after another, all facing the beach. There was some basic infrastructure a highway passed less than ten kilometers away and nearby Isla Mujeres had some tourism experience, however limited. Enriquez Savignac invited Fernandez Hurtado to see the new paradise and his calculations were confirmed the traditional banker was stricken by love at first sight. The feasibility studies had been welldone, the qualifications for each entry were satisfactory and the place was openly gorgeous. Fernandez Hurtado recalls, "I was impressed by the great quantity of usable beach, because that's what we needed to justify the large investment that an international airport would require. But what really seduced me was the place that we landed, the natural cove of Punta Cancun. It was paradise itself." By the time the two men left the island, the decision had been made. Rodrigo Gomez approved the plan and it was taken to Ortiz Mena. Ortiz Mena, after conferring with Javier Rojo Gomez then territorial governor approved the project and it was taken to Daz Ordaz. And one fine day at the beginning of 1969, Fernandez Hurtado and Enriquez Savignac had lunch over some good news. The project had the approval of the president. Cancun would be the new face of the Mexican Caribbean.

Until the end of '60s, Zihuatanejo was a tourism destination with little success. But it had a basic infrastructure and was located in a poverty-stricken and conflict-filled region, urgently needing economic assistance. This situation hastened the approval of the Ixtapa Project, practically Cancun's twin.

a far corner of Mexico

spent most of his life on Isla Mujeres. He is a fairly rich man, with several farming properties and some real estate investments. His real fortune is not located in his wealth, but rather in his contacts. For many years, Pepe Lima has enjoyed the affection and friendship of the powerful. On his remote island, very few men could boast of having a telephone book that included the private numbers of such weighty names as Miguel Aleman Valdes, Adolfo Lopez Mateos, Anibal de Iturbide, Manuel Barbachano Ponce, Javier Rojo Gomez. Friendship aside, Lima married Rebeca Zuno, daughter of the Jaliscan patriarch Jose Guadalupe Zuno and sister of Maria Esther. At the beginning of 1969, Lima was director of Sports Promotion of the National Tourism Council, a post created by Aleman expressly to channel Lima's enthusiasm for regattas. In any case, it was a wellmerited job, as no one had exercised greater energy to develop the zone touristically. During the six-year term of President Ruiz Cortines, Lima had suggested to Carlos Lazo, Secretary of Communications and

in

OSE

DE JESUS

LIMA HAS

Public Works, that the highway that then ended in Valladolid, in the eastern portion of Yucatan, be brought to the coast of Quintana Roo. Lazo allowed himself to be convinced because he had a much more ambitious plan a ferry which would unite Puerto Juarez and Isia Mujeres with Havana and Florida. The ferry never got to function, but at least the highway which Lima wanted so much was completed. Motivated by this success, Lima invested a good part of his fortune in the construction of a 30-room hotel on Isia Mujeres, which he named the Zazil-Ha. In May 1964, he arranged for President Lopez Mateos himself to come to the island to open it. To complete the picture, Lima was the owner of a strip of Cancun, land that he used to grow coconuts and had constructed his leisure house, the only solid building on the island. It was a simple two- room residence, built at the top of a dune, looking out on the Caribbean Sea. It was the only refuge for many kilometers around. As a result, when the Bank of Mexico technicians began snooping around in the region, they were quickly detected by Lima. Even though the new arrivals did not bear imposing credentials in fact, had nothing to do with the tourism sector organizations for Lima there were no greys. Definitely count on him for approval if someone were disposed to invest in the region, even a little hotel, not to speak of an entire tourism city. He had devoted his life to that battle... If Quintana Roo was at then the furthest corner of Mexico, the eastern coast of the state was itself the furthest corner of Quintana Roo. In fact, there was nothing worth mentioning along the entire lengthy of coast from Cabo Catoche to Chetumal. The main coastal settlement was* Puerto Juarez, a tiny political sub- division of Isia Mujeres which had only 117 inhabitants. Pablo Pacheco, the deputy mayor, was also simultaneously postman, telegrapher, bailiff and jailer, jobs which he carried out on a bicycle owned by the municipality.

President Lopez Mateos traveled to Isia Mujeres to dedicate Pepe Lima's hotel. The chief of state adored the region. Before finishing his term he built a house on Cozumel, with the professed aim of making it a permanent retirement. This he never did, but he became an assiduous vistor to the area. Lopez Mateos was the first president of Mexico to understand the tourism perspectives of Quintana Roo.

The three original inhabitants of Cancun: Emilio Maldonado (above), Cachito and Gabuch. Cancun has not been generous with its primitive dwellers.

A few kilometers south, Cancun could be found, which had very few inhabitants Emilio Maldonado and his family, Cachito and Gabuch. They were caretakers of the coconut plantations and were living totally separated from the rest of the world, surviving on fishing and foodgathering. Maldonado recalls those times: "I would go to Isla Mujeres every month or so to buy the most necessary. But we were very isolated. Today I can hardly believe what has happened on the island. It's like a miracle." At the end of the island strip was Lima's house, occasionally used for recreation. Thirty kilometers further down was Puerto Morelos, an impoverished fishing village. Not that there was nothing to fish for lobster and conch were abundant. The problem was that there were no customers. When the first workers arrived in the area, the fishermen offered lobster tails at two pesos each(about .16 us)the minimum salary was then thirty pesos ($2.40 us)and felt they had made a good deal. The next spot on the map was Playa del Carmen, a fetching name for a simple pier where the passenger boat that served Cozumel docked and docks. Near Playa del Carmen, convinced and encouraged by Lima, Anibal de Iturbide had constructed a mansion in an idyllic place, Chakalal. It is a small cove protected from the prevailing winds, ending

Pablo Bush

mouth of a cenote, both part of the property. The only inconvenience was that access to the house was only by boat. Further south, some 100 kilometers from Cancun, was a tiny tourism developmentAkumal. Its owner and creator, Pablo Bush, was a genuine pioneer in the area. With unlimited confidence in the region, many years before the Bank of Mexico entered the game, he had constructed a group of rustic cabins and had tried to set up a nautical club. When he became aware of the plans, Bush pressured heavily for Akumal to be selected as the seat of the development. There were good reasons. Bush and Iturbide were owners of a strip of beach...34 kilometers long! This monopoly assured the rejection of the Akumal option, but Bush continued his own expansion plans and built a hotel and sub-division that still operate with great success. President Echeverria expropriated 26 of the 34 coastal kilometers to form the tourism trust Fidecaribe. About twenty kilometers south of Akumal was the archaeological zone of Tulum, found at that time hardly visited because of the difficulties that access represented. And from there down... nothing. From Tulum to Chetumal, a practically uninhabited coast of some one hundred kilometers. If we except the state capital, the entire eastern coast of the territory did not contain more than a thousand permanent residents. The exceptions to this were the islands, situated a few kilometers from the continental shelf. Isla Mujeres, in the northern part, counted a little more than six thousand inhabitants, which yielded a considerable density relative to its humble dimensions. A few kilometers south, the country's largest and most populated island, Cozumel, had some 30,000 souls. Additionally, Cozumel was the only site in the region that registered any tourism activity worthy of the name. It had exactly two hotelsthe Playa, with eighteen rooms, constructed by the local government and

Quintana Roo contains more than 800 kilometers of coast with some of the best beaches in the country, as well as the only islands capable of attracting tourismIsla Mujeres and Cozumel. As if in counterpoint, with the exception of the southern area, the agricultural qualities of the land are extremely poor. There is no doubt that the future of the state will be found in the sea, whether it be tourism, or fishing activity, a field that has not received the attention it deserves and is practised with rudimentary techniques.

operated by a private concessionaire, and the Playa Azul, a group of six bungalows located on the northwest coast. Moreover, the concessionaire of the Playa and the owner of the Playa Azul were the same person, businessman Nassim Joaquin, who was at the same time Mexicana's representative on the island. This concentration of tourism activities in a single person had a chance origin, however. Joaquin recalls, "In 1960 an American journalist from Holiday magazine appeared saying that he wanted to rent a room. As there were no hotels, I found him a house on the beach, with three bedrooms and the service of a cook and housekeeper. I didn't set the rent, but rather the ownerfive pesos a day (then .40 us). Well then, he stayed about two or three months, left, and then suddenly an article appeared in Holiday saying that Cozumel was paradise. Soon after dozens of Americans showed up asking for Sr. Joaquin to rent them the same house." Once the flow was channeled, Joaquin convinced the territorial authorities to lease him an old abandoned hotel, a building originally erected by the administration of Margarito Ramirez and closed as unprofitable. There were good reasons for its failure to functioneach bathroom was shared by two rooms. But Joaquin remodelled it and in one way or another succeeded in capturing and satisfying the incipient avalanche of visitors. Cozumel was one of the sites seriously considered as the location of a Caribbean tourism development. Again, Joaquin: "I believe that the island fascinated Enniquez Savignac. He came here many times to talk with me. We would sit on the beach and there he would take out his questionnaires. He wanted to know everythinghow many tourists, from where, how much they would spend, what they said." The possibility of Cozumel finally confronted an unsolvable problempotable water. The prior studies indicated that the water table was insufficient to cover the needs of widespread tourism development in the long term. The only proposed solutiontransport water from outsidewas judged excessively costly. Despite this, it never appeared totally fair to the Cozumeleos that the Bank of Mexico's final decision should tall on the desolate reaches of the coast, almost without resources or population. Population scarcity had been a historical constant in Quintana Roo, a characteristic intimately tied to its backward and disconnected condition. During the entire colonial period, the mainland territory remained virtually virgin, populated only in the surroundings of Lake Bacalar, Cozumel and Isla Mujeres, sites frequently visited by pirates. In the second half of the 19th Century, Mayas defeated in the War of the Castes sought refuge in the central areatoday known as the Mayan Zoneand continued their resistance for several more decades, until the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz took Chan Santa Cruztoday Felipe Carillo Puertothe last rebel bastion. The first colonization attempt also took place during the Daz administration. In 1898, following the dictator's personal instructions, ViceAdmiral Othon P. Blanco transported a group of colonists as far as Chetumal Bay and, on a pontoon barge, founded the town of Payo Obispo, the direct ancestor of Chetumal. In 1902, Quintana Roo adopted its present name by Presidential decree on being segregated from the State of Yucatan and passing to the direct control of the President of the Republic. The change was more formal than real. During the last years of the Diaz regime, the territory became a land of exile and imprisonment. In her book, Quintana Roo de siempre (Eternal Quintana Roo), Lilia Arellano points out, "The great landholders practiced slavery in a not very disguised form. They purchased political prisoners, common criminals and vagrants for 25 pesos a head in Veracruz and forced them to work in the chicle and logging camps." Fine hardwoods and chicle (used as a base in chewing gum) constituted the base of the local economy during the better part of this cen-

The old Cozumel of Nassim Joaquin

President Cardenas explores the coast of Quintana Roo during his visit to the Yucatan Peninsula.

tury. The sales of these commodities were not controlled by Mexico, however, but rather by neighboring Belize, on which practically all regional business depended. As a result, one of the most significant figures in Quintana Roo then was an American trader, Robert S. Tourton, who had virtually monopolized the purchase of Mexican chicle. Tourton used to have a representative in Chetumal, Pedro Manuel Martinez, and at their meetings were attended only by Tourton's secretary and Martinez's son. Politics is the natural daughter of business. Tourton's secretary was George Price, for 25 years Prime Minister of Belize. Martinez's son was Jesus Martinez Ross, who was to become the first governor of the State of Quintana Roo. In 1936, President Cardenas visited Quintana Roo. He was transported by boat from Progreso and, on arriving at Playa del Carmen, because of the shallow draught and the shaky dock, he had to dive in and swim to dry land. The first highway that connected the territory with the rest of the country was dedicated in the time of President Lopez Mateos and was the bridge that united Merida with Chetumal (discounting Carlos Lazo's highway, which only communicated with the hundred or so inhabitants of Puerto Juarez). In the following Presidential term, the Bank of Mexico technicians selected this territory as the seat of the most ambitious tourism development in the nation's history. This was more than Jose de Jesus Lima had ever dreamed. He would have preferred the development for Isla Mujeres, but when Cancun was selected he enthusiastically approved. In fact, he lent his house in Cancun permanently to the Bank of Mexico,

The War of the Castes swept the Mayas to the eastern portion of the peninsula, where they survived in highly precarious conditions. In 1901, General Ignacio Bravo took Chan Santa Cruztoday Felipe Carillo Puertothe rebelslast bastion. The Maya Zone continues to be the poorest region of Quintana Roo today.

Pepe Lima's house in 1972, as it was found by the pioneers of Infratur. The installations have been amplified and now include two more houses and a swimming pool, but the original building has hardly suffered modifications. Today, it forms part of the residential complex where the Mexican government lodges distinguished visitors.

Pepe Lima and his brother-in-law, President Echeverria, on the southern beach of Cancun. In the following picture, the President's wife, Maria Esther, takes the hand of her sister, Rebeca Zuno de Lima.

and later, when they bought it from him, accepted a merely symbolic payment. Cancun's luck would not depend on Lima nor on the Bank of Mexico's technicians. Practically the entire six-year term of Daz Ordaz had been consumed between the research and the selection of the place. A project of this magnitude would require the definite approval of the next government or would be condemned to disappear. The year had one more surprise for Pepe Lima. In the month of September, the PRI nominated his brother-in-law, Luis Echeverria Alvarez, as candidate for President of Mexico.

the little Caribbean island

zano was the first urbanologist who imagined what the urban design of Cancun would have to be. In his capacity as planner in the firm headed by Enrique and Augustin Landa, Solorzano had demonstrated an extraordinary creativity in the technical solution of varied and complex problems. By 1969, before he had reached forty, his resume would already include a remarkable series of projectsthe Legaria Mint and currency printing plant; the 20th of November Hospital; the French Church of Polanco; the Stock Exchange building and the demolition of the facade of the Arbeu Theater to reveal the hidden front of the church of San Felipe Neri. The only thing he hadn't planned was a city and this city was Cancun... Now Sub-Director of Development at Fonatur, Solorzano vividly recalls that challenge: "It wasn't an easy project. The island was 17 kilometers long, equivalent to the distance that separates Xochimilco [a suburb of Mexico City] from the Zocalo [the capital's central plaza]. But in some parts it wasn't even 50 meters wide. And there they wanted to place great hotels, shopping centers and a golf course." Solorzano made a thorough study of the island. Eliminating the width of the mangroveswhich from the air appeared to be firm landhe dis-

RCHITECT JAVIER SOLOR-

The Cancun symbol,

by FONATUR

The only human work appearing on the Cancun horizon in 1970 was a primitive trail, which can be seen as a thin white line in the right-hand portion of the photograph. A good part of the mangroves, which may be seen on the banks of the lagoon, turned out to be swamps.

ARCHIVO RAFAEL LARA

Javier Solorzano

covered that in some parts the coastal highway wouldn't even fit when the twenty meters of Federal Zone on both beach and lagoon was discounted. For passage, the island would be reduced to a narrow dune separating the interior lagoon from the sea. The urbanization possibilities for these formations were practically nil. As a result, the urban design proposed by Solorzano surprisingly included the audaciousalmost the entire interior roadway, a good number of business zones and fourteen of the eighteen holes of golf were located... in the lagoon! The author remembers, "There could be no alternative. We would have had to fill out the island to a minimum of 250 or 300 meters. The grand hotels would not fit in any other or they would remain well separated by wasted land. As to the golf course, the only solution was to take it off the main route. If we were to have placed it full length, it would have occupied half the island." The proposal, then, was to fill the lagoon. There was no problem about material. Yucatecan sand, known as sascab, had proved to be formidable fill. But costs would explode and progress would have to be held back. Solorzano was invited to discuss the problem on many occasions with the heads of the project, Fernandez Hurtado and Enrfquez Savignac. And there on the carpet"the island was so large that the plans wouldn't fit on any desk"with suggestions such as let's twist it here or let's cut out there, Cancun took on its ultimate silhouette. In these meetings it was decided, for example, that the entire island would be destined to be a hotel zone, locating the city proper at the extreme north of the mainland and the international airport exactly at the opposite pole. For the city itself, a novel design was adopted, known among urbanologists as the broken plate. Acccording to this concept, the urban areas would be distributed in independent blocks, each one with its own schools, shopping, services, green spaces and so on. This design revoked the traditional grid square design, substituting for it perimeter avenues on which retornos opened, conceived to slow down high speed traffic. These blocks, known in Cancun as super- manzanas [after the traditional manzana, for city block], contain many exclusively pedestrian zones, which facilitate the functioning of various environmental protection programs. Moreover, this was another obvious concern in the original design, which foresaw the existence of numerous territorial reserves free of construction. Except for the filled areas, the lagoons would be respected and preserved as ecological environments. With these elements, Enriquez Savignac calculated the definite dimensions of the development. From the beginning, these would comprise the entire island, the site to be occupied by the city, the ecological strip protected from development and all of interior lagoonssomething like

The design of Cancun was not merely a work of audacity and imagination. In reality, the urban concepts were ruled by very strict technical criteria, on many occasions the fruit of cybernetic matrices, which in time gave birth to the story that the site had been selected by a computer.

11,000 hectares, of which more than 4,000 were covered by water. Once the limits were defined, it would be necessary to find the owners of the land. Even though it would not be known whether to proceed by expropriation, direct purchase, or whatever other arrangement, it was necessary first to know with whom it would have to be arranged. The project ran into luck. Of the 7,000 hectares of firm land, a little more than 2,000 were national propertywhich would be assigned at no charge by the federal governmentand, as well, in that 5,000 were cooperative parcels belonging to the cooperative of Isla Mujeres, established on the land of the old Santa Mara hacienda. Theoretically, these properties would be nationalized and handed over to the development. Finally, some hectareashardly a few hundredremained in private hands. But these few were indispensable, because they included almost the entire island and without the island there could be no hotel zone. During almost all of 1969, Enrfquez Savignac dedicated himself to searching for the owners. For this he counted on the help of Carlos Nader, an enterprising lawyer, who confronted the thankless task of submerging himself in the chaotic title registries of Isla Mujeres and Chetumal. His task lasted several months, but at the end he achieved a highly satisfactory property management identification of the island and its surroundings. With this information at handand given the small number of ownersthe Bank of Mexico decided against expropriation, avoiding the mistrustful business climate that this action would generate, but rather to acquire the properties case by case. This strategy had a little problem. The Bank of Mexico had decided to pay for the properties at commercial prices, but it was obvious that this sudden interesting news would spread immediately and, in well-known dynamics, would set off galloping speculation in the rest of the properties. But Nader was an ingenious and astute negotiator. He went to live on Isla Mujeres, introducing himself as a landowner interested in purchasing Cancun and everything around it. He displayed decisiveness but not desperation and, slowly, went about acquiring parcels, supposedly for his personal portfolio. When the majority of the property had fallen into this disguised trap,

he had to fightnow openlywith the reticents. An engineer Ponce, of Merida, was owner of Punta Nizuc, located exactly at the base of the 'seven. Ponce had acquired the land with the idea of developing a subdivision, but the plan had never crystallized. So he sold it, grumbling a little and haggling over the price, but he sold. The coconut groves of Jose de Jesus de Lima were another property end, supposedly, his beach house. In practice, this residence had been converted into the Bank of Mexico's headquarters. In fact, the house is still part of the residential complex in which official guests are lodged. Lima looked on the project sympathetically, so he sold. At the upper end of the 'seven,' exactly at the angle the two lines form, Punta Cancun is found. The land was property of the acting cacique [strongman] of Isla Mujeres, Ausencio Magana, who had accumulated quite a fortune controlling the fishing fleethe was the only buyer of productionand the transportation boats in the years prior to the arrival of the ferry. Magaa wasn't very tough. A little pressure was sufficient to convince him. And so he sold... But he didn't sell to the Bank of Mexico, rather to an Engineer Strauss, also from Merida, who offered him a few cents more per square meter. Strauss was of German origin and could not legally own coastal property, but the operation had been cleverly concealed. And Strauss refused to sell. Enrfquez Savignac invited him to the place in question to offer him some explanations. After the definition of the lines of municipal property, and the appropriation of the federal zonestwenty meters of beach on either sidehardly anything remained. That's the way it is, Strauss agreed, but I'm not selling. His property remained blocked, unusable, out of service. Yes, said Strauss, but I'm not selling. They decided to take energetic measures, and within a few weeks, the management of Cordemex [the parastatal sisal commercialization company] threatened to cancel some juicy contracts. That's all right, said Strauss, but I won't sell. They even threatened to apply Rule 33, [deportation]. I'll leave, said Strauss, but I won't sell. And he did not sell. Years later, there was no remedy but to come to a price with him. There was one even more stubborn personalityCoral de Martinez,
ARCHIVO JAVIER SOLORZANO

Practically the entire island was in private hands when Infratur set the project in motion. Punta Cancun, one of the prettiest coves on the tongue of land, was also one of the areas whose acquisition turned out to be the most conflictive. This end was reserved to harbor luxury hotels and the Convention Center.

owner of a little more than six hectares and a resident of Mexico City. The deal with her was not closed until 1984, at astronomical prices, of course. Unfortunately, Carlos Nader, the man who contributed most to the success of the planting, was not present at harvest time. Cancun was always a plan for him, never a reality. In 1970, when he had almost completed his task and was bringing to Mexico City the notarized documents that granted the Bank ownership of the island, the plane in which

he was travelling crashed at Bacalar, in the reaches of Chetumal. A central street of Cancun carries his name in memory. Nader's death was a dramatic event, as he formed part of the intimate group of experts who had gathered in turn around Enriquez Savignac from the beginning of the adventure. Aside from Nader, who handled the legal aspects of the project, the team had three other personalities: Armando Basurto, who functioned as project manager of Ixtapa; Wenceslao Salas, an expert in international banking law, who had been designated Cancun project manager; and Pedro Dond Escalante, in charge of marketing studies and the operating plans of the new centers. By 1969, however, this organization was proving to be insufficient. For that reason, the Bank of Mexico decided to create a trust to be directly responsible for the tourism developments. Thus, with the presidential farewell and patronage of Ortiz Mena, the National Infrastructure Development Fund [Fondo Nacional de Infraestructura Turistica] was formed, adopting the acronym Infratur, in accordance with the style of the time. The first formal meeting of the technical committee, at which the principal appointments were issued, took place in August. The position of director fell on Rodrigo Gomez and administrator on Enrfquez Savignacwith the title of delegado fiduciario especial, Special Fiduciary Delegateas the secretariship of the committee was being assigned to a young lawyer, 34, then Sub- Director of Credit in the Department of Hacienda,more or less equivalent to the American Treasury. The functionary in question showed himself to be discreet and reserved during the first meeting, but in those that followed he raised his voice in song. In the first, he urged Enrfquez Savignac to deliver to the committee the proposed budgets for Infratur for 1970, in order to make a formal request to the Presidential secretariat to authorize the expenditures. Enrfquez Savignac answered that such a thing was impossible. Infratur still neither had offices nor employees. Calculating how much money would be necessary to begin Cancun and Ixtapa would be merely speculative. It was an important problem, as the Presidential secretariat cus-

The configuration of the island required filling a "pocket" in the lagoon to provide room for the golf course. A fleet of dump trucks made trip after trip, transporting hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of sascab. A great part of Cancun is, in reality, a work of engineering.

Carlos Nader

tomarily would assign in the month of November the budget endowments for the following year. If Infratur were to remain outside the package, it could lose an entire year for lack of funds. But the lawyer returned to his charge. In the October meeting he suggested soliciting a "trick trunk" of extra-large dimensions and use the influence of the members of the committee to achieve its approval, even without the requisites demanded by budgetary mechanics. Even when it was reduced by formal debate, something would always remain to begin progress. It was a good tactic and it produced results. Three months later the first campsite was installed and they could begin work, thanks to this new and unexpected ally of Cancun. With time, he would turn out to be a superbly valuable partisan, as this strategist of official finance was named Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (who in 1982 became President of Mexico).

Miguel de la Madrid

the jungle unknown, habitat, challenge...

from the State of Hidalgo, was named Governor of the Territory of Quintana Roo by President Diaz Ordaz. Founder of the National Federation of Country People, twice governor of Hidalgo, mayor of Mexico City, Rojo Gomez arrived in the state with great political prestige. Given his experience, the appointment could have had a notably honorary character. But Rojo Gomez played the role to the hilt. Instead of being a sick man, he governed vigorously. He drew the map of the state highway network, improved communication with the islands, speeded the adoption of modern agricultural production systems, cleaned up state finan-

Rojo Gomez looks at Echeverrfa during the first tour of the presidential term.

N 1967. JAVIER ROJO GOMEZ,

The first camps were installed in what is today the center of the city, on an axis which later would become Tulum and Nader Avenues. In the first houses, local customs of construction were the only recourse, especially with reference to roofs, made of palm thatch following Maya techniques. The only social center, as in all advanced base camps, was the communal dining room.

ces and multiplied the local budget. Of course, his personal contacts were predominant at the bottom line. Quintana Roo was a territory. The amount of its spending was unilaterally determined by the Federal government. Rojo Gomez had well-placed friends. One of them, the influential Secretary of the Treasury, Antonio Ortiz Mena, virtually worshipped him. At the beginning of his career, Ortiz Mena had served as private secretary to Rojo Gomez, who acted as his political godfather when the time came to obtain his first assignments. Ortiz Mena never would forget the protection he received. There are those who assert that it was he who convinced Rojo Gomez to emerge from his political retirement and accept the governorship of the territory. However it might have been, it is true that Ortiz Mena used to visit his mentor frequently in faraway Chetumal, and in 1970, he went to congratulate him personally in his home on the very day that his appointment was ratified. It is difficult to know, but not to imagine, to what point this friendship influenced the Bank of Mexico's decision to push the development of Cancun. It is certain that Rojo Gomez was enthusiastic about the project. He visited the island on various occasions and became its most persuaded promotor. He constantly urged and pestered the funcionaries of Infratur to begin work immediately.

Parallel to the fills, the construction of the first tourism lodgings began on the island. In any case, by the beginning of 1972, Cancn still showed a quite desolate aspect.

In order to cross the clarity of the Nichupte River, the pioneers constructed a provisional wooden bridge, which by 1971 registered occasional tourism traffic, basically consisting of people from Merida and eastern Yucatan. Curiosity was the principal incentive.

The first campsite was established in January 1970. It was a tiny group of workers captained by a sole engineer, hired by the Consorcio Caribe company, to which Infratur had assigned the first jobs. In reality, Consorcio Caribe was yet another invention of the Bank of Mexico. During the second half of 1969, the officials in charge of the project had sounded out several construction companies, but not one of them had shown any interest in carrying out the initial jobs. The explanation was very simple. Working conditions would be absolute hell. There were no towns in the area from which workers could be recruited, nor deposits of materials, nor maintenance shops for the equipment. Thus the result of the probe was clear. Courteously, but firmly, everyone declined. Fernandez Hurtado went back to his old acquaintances. This time he turned his gaze upon someone who in spite of having been considered one of the best builders in the country had suffered reversesJose Garcia de la Torre. A native of Pachuca, civil engineer of the old school, distinguished roadbuilder during the term of Aleman, Garca de la Torre enjoyed enormous prestige in the construction world. Among his long list of finished projects, was the construction of a cement boat in Veracruz, on instructions of General Heriberto Jara, when it was believed that this exploit was technically impossible. But Garcia de la Torre was a true adventurer, with all the contradictions that category implies. At 70 years of age, he was still planting trees, but had never established a fixed residence.

Clearing wasand still isone of the basic costs of construction in the jungles of Quintana Roo. This is the typical look of the beginning of road making.

ARCHIVO RAFAEL LARA

His financial situation was as fickle as his life. Many times rich, he always wound up embarking on romantic and risky businesses, which invariably led him to ruin. And this was exactly his situation at the end of 1969, when he was contacted by Fernandez Hurtado and formally invited to join in the Cancun adventure. Of course there had to be a problem to resolve. At that time, Garcia de la Torre no longer had a construction company. Fernandez Hurtado turned to a strategy recalling Solomon. He called together three important Bank of Mexico contractorsRaul Chazaro, Augustin Ibaiiez, Ignacio Cortinaand explained the problem to them and persuaded them to form a new company, putting it under the command of the prestigious builder. Thus was born Consorcio Caribe. And thus, at the beginning of 1970, the first engineer, Daniel Ortiz, arrived at the place of the deeds: "The first week, we slept in our cars, while we cleared the bush and could put up a hut. We cooked on campfires and we bathed in the lagoon, where the brackish water curdled the soap. It was quite a primitive existence." But the discomforts could be explained by knowing Ortiz's specific assignment: between January 23rd and March 15th, his mission consisted in opening a five kilometer track and building a provisional bridge over the Nichupte River with the incredible aim of making it possible for presidential candidate Luis Echeverrfa to inspect the island during his electoral campaign tour. Once in contact with the terrain, Ortiz understood that his mission was impossible. And so he communicated his impressions to Mexico. The road might be possible. The bridge was out of the question. The immediate problem was manpower, but Ortiz ran into luck. A few kilometers south, about where the airport is now located, a camp of chicle-gatherers were facing a financial disaster. The harvest had been very bad, provisions were running out, and the specter of hunger hovered over the group. So the appearance of Ortiz, offering steady work and steady money, was providential.

By the end of 1971, the dismantling of the provisional bridge was carried out. The photograph was taken from the structure of the final bridge.

The deal worked out magnificently. In exactly fifteen days, the eighty hired chicleros cut at the point of machete some 54,000 square meters of open path, right to the bank of the river. Echeverria could not step on the island, but at least he would be able to see it close up. The problem was that the candidate arrived in Puerto Juarez a little late, and so he pitilessly ignored this titanic effort and continued on his way. It was in a certain sense a rather paradoxical snub, given the number of times he would return to the island as President. Moreover, Garcia de la Torre himself arrived in Cancun at the beginning of March and work picked up pace. The first plan contemplated the construction of a campsite, building the first fifteen houses and starting up the coastal road. It was not too much, but the work conditions were

extreme. In summer, some of the workers preferred to sleep buried in sand with a protection over the face rather than put up with the insect attacks in the dormitories. Ortiz was the only man who left the purgatory from time to time, but this hardly represented any great pleasure: "I had to travel 320 kilometers to go to the bank and withdraw money, ninety kilometers to the telephone and some thirty in order to buy bottled sodas. I could have gone to Isla Mujeres as well to use the telephone, but long distance calls could require an average wait of five hours. So during the first five months, I averaged ten thousand highway kilometers monthly". Today Director of Fidecaribe, Ortiz could be considered the area's first immigrant. But the camp was rapidly populated. Drawn by the magnet of stable income people began to come down from the cooperatives, from the ranches, even from the far-flung flocks of the chicleros. Cancun inspired a kind of euphoria in the recent arrivals. Even the professionalsengineers, topographers, architectsgenerally at first resentful at moving into the advance base camps, would soon change and become captivated by the area, living in any kind of discomfort as if it were nothing, acting as if to settle forever in Cancun were absolutely inevitable. Such was the case of engineer Rafael Lara y Lara, who after having worked for ten years in the Department of Public Works, by chance made the acquaintance in an airplane of Manuel Morales Zacarias, then technical director of Infratur. Morales described the development to him. Lara decided to give it a look, and three months later he moved into the encampments, in tact, Lara was the first engineer who settled in Cancun with his familyincluding his second daughter, three years old and built the first private house in the city. Cancun was being born. Black storm clouds were beginning to darken the panorama, however, even though the pioneers ignored them. By the middle of 1970, for example, it became clear that it would be impossible to obtain international credit support before the end of the current Presidential term. This measure formed part of Infratur's overall strategy. The technicians considered it useful to tie the Cancun and Ixtapa projects to international loans in order to avoid the risks inherent in changes of Presidents, considerably reducing the likelihood that the projects could be cancelled. From this perspective, at the end of 1969 Infratur formally applied to the Inter-American Development Bank for a credit of 21.5 million dollars, equivalent to a little less than half the investment required for the first stage of Cancun. But the IDB insisted that no precedent existed in the entire world for tourism cities developed from a base of zero, and it would require new feasibility studies and a more detailed description of the financial mechanics. The IDB asked for more time. In the language of international banking, this signified a delay of several months. The IDB's request was absolutely reasonable. Negotiation of international credits had always been a slow and torturous process, requiring the participation of experts in many specialties, so that the discussions would not be obstructed in trying to clarify the multitude of technical criteria the contracts included. In the case of Cancun, the situation was complicated by the very nature of the project and the lack of antecedents. The Cancun duty manager, Wenceslao Salas defended the colors for the Mexican side: "We wrote the loan document, making every kind of economic and financial evaluations, obtained the approval of the Loan Committee and, from there, went on to create the contractsof the guarantee, of the project, of the loan. Saying it this way sounds really easy. In reality, it was extraordinarily complicated. We had to go to Washington dozens of times. Each advance in the clauses was a genuine triumph. Imagineit was necessary to put in the entire urban plan, the construction of a new city, in each contract. To top it off, the IDB insisted on tying the development of the infrastructurewhich would depend+ on

The first birth certificate registered under Caneiin is dated 1975 and belongs to Susana Yvette Herrera Montiel. It is in fact an error: Canen formed part of the municipality of Isla Mujeres at that time and all births were registered there. But babies and later a hand of healthy youngsterswere always a daily part of the camps.

Once the project was set in motion, official visits became routine things. In the picture, during the inaugural flight of the Bank of Mexico's Grumman plane, appear from left to right Ruben Zaldivar, Juan March, Ernesto Fernandez Hurtado, exPresident Miguel Aleman, Hugo B. Margain, Agustin Salvat and Antonio Enriquez Savignac, in charge of the Cancun Trust.

usto the number of hotel rooms constructed, a field we would promote but would not directly control." The matter became so complicated that Salas spent almost all of 1970 negotiating, only to find himself at the end with yet another request for more time. An important element now entered. In December of that year, the Mexican government would change. Cancun would be subject to the good will of the next regime and there was some evidence that the project could not count on true sympathy. The now president-elect Luis Echevema had not visited the encampments during his campaign, nor had he made any clear statements in favor of the matter. On the contrary, some of his close associates had criticized it publically as a "foreignization plan," claiming that it would "compromise national sovereignty and attack Mexicanism." To complicate things further, Rodrigo Gomez, director of the Bank of Mexico, died suddenly. And just two days later, Antonio Ortiz Mena was removed as Secretary of the Treasury. For sure, one of the promotors of the project, Ernesto Fernandez Hurtado, would remain at the head of the Bank of Mexico, but no one knew the point of view of the new cabinet minister, Hugo B. Margain, and this could be definitive. Echeverrfa took office December 1st and on December 12th traveled to Quintana Roo. But neither in this trip did he support the Cancun project. It was basically a courtesy visit to Governor Javier Rojo Gomez, who was now gravely ill. Rojo Gomez would die before the year was over, on December 30th, denying Cancun another ally. Now everything depended upon the will of the new government...

a small bureaucratic quarrel

did not like the Cancun proect. Someone had told him the development was a private business of Ortiz Mena, and Ortiz Mena was the new president's least favorite person in the entire Mexican government. Almost immediately on assuming power, he asked Hugo Cervantes del Ro to investigate the matter. Merely a glimpse was enough for Cervantes del Ro to realize that the rumor was false. Almost all the land Cancun would occupy was national property, the majority in cooperatives that were controlled by the Department of Colonization and Agrarian Affairs. The private properties were minimal and did not represent a big business from any point of view. And, according to the plan, everything would pass into the hands of InIfratur to avoid any possibility of speculation. But the Presidential Secretary had his own plans. From 1966 to 1970, Cervantes del Ro had been governor of another great federal territory, Baja California Sur, during which he joined in friendship with a local politician, Milton Castellanos. In the first few weeks of the new administra-

RESIDENT LUIS E C H E V E R R I A

President Luis Echeverria

Hugo Cervantes del Ro

Augusto Gomez Villanueva

Hugo B. Margain

tion, the PRI proposed Castellanos as governor for the northern part of the peninsula, and Cervantes del Ro pressured for the formation of the Commission for the Integrated Development of Baja California, known by its Spanish acronym as Codibac. The reason was obvious. Both politicians had forged great plans for the region, and one of them was the creation of tourism centers. Cancun was in their way. Cervantes del Ro managed to convince the President to study the matter in greater depth, and, at his department's expense, hired a firm of American consultants expert in the specialty, who within a few months produced a study with predictable resultCancn was not a viable project. Cervantes del Ro had some natural allies in his strategy of dissuasion. The most important was the group captained by Augusto Gomez Villanueva, who apparently for ideological reasons, was frontally opposed to the development. His followers warned that the project amounted to "foreignization," and also hurling the head- splitting argument of "effective loss of national sovereignty." Another element possibly influenced this attitude. During the term of Daz Ordaz, the head of the Department of Tourism, Agustin Salvat, had conceived the creation of an enormous nautical club on the coast of the state of Nayarit, a few kilometers from Puerto Vallarta. Because it dealt with communal lands, Salvat had put forth the idea of the creation of a trust which would administer the property and look out for the interests of the campesinos, the country-folk who formed the membership of the cooperative or ejido. So, almost on the rebound, a tourism developmentthe Bahia de Banderas Trustfell into the hands of the Department of Colonization and Agrarian Affairs. Gomez Villanueva gave this toy to his soul-buddy, Alfredo Rios Camarena, and dedicated himself to boycotting Cancun. He was in a memorable position to do so. Of the 7,000 hectareas Cancun would occupy, 5,000 were in agricultural terrain controlled by the DCAA. So only delaying their delivery... But Cancun also had allies, beginning with the phlegmatic Secretary of the Treasury, Hugo B. Margain. Because Infratur was a dependency of the Bank of Mexico, and the Bank of Mexico a dependency of Treasury, Margain could consider it his project. Moreover, he was convinced of the seriousness of the studies and the intellectual honesty of their authors. And so he entered the pursuit of the international loans and he urged the DCAA to make delivery of its lands, while at the same time attempting to convince President Echeverria in favor of the idea. At the institutional level, a paradoxical situation had been created. On one side, Margain and the bankers were pressuring for authorization to continue construction. On the other, Cervantes del Ro was scheming to place the existing funding with the Baja California coast. Further on, Gomez Villanueva's team, brandishing nationalistic banners, ground its own axes. Position unknown, Secretary of Tourism Agustin Olachea Borbon appeared to have no idea what would happen. At the middle of the scramble, President Echeverra received versions that no longer could be called merely divergent, but rather openly antagonistic. The battle lasted a little less than a year. Meanwhile, Cancun was at the point of coming to an untimely end. Enriquez Savignac, appointed Director of Infratur, recalls: "The President's secretary froze the funds on us, even though they had supposedly already been authorized. We had to slow down many projects and postpone implicitly urgent work. In all of 1971, we invested hardly 30 million pesos [2.4 million 1971 dollars] of the more than 200 million we had calculated. And the major part of this money came from the Bank of Mexico on the sole order of Ernesto Fernandez Hurtado." Settling accounts, the balance of power would not be tipped by any of the three groups, but rather by an interested party who had remained relatively neutralthe territorial governor- designate, David Gustavo Guitierrez Ruiz. Filled in on the details of the project by Fernandez Hurtado himself, he had formed a favorable opinion of it, but he had conducted

President Echeverria and Governor Gutierrez Ruiz on an inspection tour of Cancun. In the committee appear Jesus Martinez Ross, Jesus Castaiieda, Eugenio Mendez Docurro and, in the rear, Pedro Ojeda Paullada.

himself cautiously with the factions in the battle. One fine day, however, he was invited to speak openly. It was an invitation he could not decline: "One Sunday, I was summoned to Los Pinos [the Presidential residence]. The President received me and invited me to walk in the gardens. Abruptly, he began to talk about Cancun. He told me that he was tired of hearing so many stories, that the affair had turned into a dilemma. Then he added that he had to make a decision, that the thing couldn't continue prolonging itself. And he asked me what I thought... Guitierrez Ruiz' response might have been decisive: "My opinion was 100 per cent favorable. I gave several reasons. Quintana Roo had little population, but the Cancun area had none. Tourism was the only resource that could be developed in the area. The financial aspects were well structured, and so on. The future of the state depended in good measure upon this project, I told him. President Echeverria looked at me for a few moments and then he said to me/Very good, Mr. Governor, we shall go forward." David Gustavo didn't lose a single day. He immediately got in touch with everyone involved. If he had previously kept his distance,he was now more Catholic than the Pope. "It was the critical moment. So I tried to put the pressure on all sides, on Enriquez Savignac to hurry up, on Augusto to turn over the land, on Margain to pressure Augusto, on Fernandez Hurtado about the money, and always on Enriquez Savignac." For Cancun, September 1971 was a month of rebirth. Echeverria mentioned the development by name in his first report to the nation [the equivalent of the American State of the Union address]. A few days later, the Department of Agrarian Affairs turned over to Infratur the 5,000 hectareas under its control, even though this was conditional on the formation of an ejido [a farming cooperative]. Toward the end of the month, the Inter-American Development Bank informed the Secretary of the Treasury that a credit of 21.5 million had been approved, with a term of eighteen years, with three years grace, at eight per cent annual interest, representing 45 per cent of the resources the first stage of Cancun would require.

The entire world had to see the beginning of Cancun. In the photograph, shirt open, Jose Lopez Portillo, in his first visit to the development, followed by Carlos Loret de Mola. In the background, Wenceslao Salas, Cancun project manager.

Wenceslao Salas

Wenceslao Salas recalls this moment: "It was the starting signal. It" must be taken into account that the IDB only authorized credits for the foreign component of the plans, that is to say, it only financed foreign exchange. Without its participation in the matter, it could not have been gotten off to a solid start. This obstacle had now been overcome. Cancun could finally take off." Work intensified rapidly. The dredging of the lagoon was assigned to Protexa, a Monterrey company, and Consorcio Caribe began the work to build the real bridge over the Nichupte River. To carry out this task they counted on the experience of Garcia de la Torre, but the Infratur technicians wanted to be sure. Thus, Manuel J. Castillo arrived at the encampments in October 1971 with the responsibility of General Superintendent. His resume included the construction or supervision of so many bridges that they would have extended some twelve kilometers placed end to end. Among the better known are the international bridges across the Rio Bravo [in the United States called the Rio Grande] at Reynosa, Laredo and Ciudad Camargo, the drawbridge of Coatzacoalcos and the Tampico bridge across the Tamesi. At first glance, this would appear to have been too much experience for a river as unspectacular as the Nichuptehardly forty meters wide but Castillo had a different opinion: "This little bridge had all the design problems imaginable. It was a bridge with a vertical curve and a horizontal curve. That is to say, while the road turned, it was simultaneously rising or falling." Castillo's principal job, however, was not to be the bridgewhich was finally settled as a Garcia de la Torre projectbut rather a much more delicate task: to organize and control the country's most populated and complex construction camp. From the beginning of work in 1970, there had been a constant avalanche of workers. At the end of 1971 and during the length of 1972 it reached spectacular levels. There were times when there were more than 5,000 workers in the area, with all the dislocation that this implied. When Castillo arrived in Cancun, the encampment left much to be desired. To begin with, Infratur had no offices. Rafael Lara as well his subalterns used their homes as offices. So did the paymaster. The

Two Cancun pioneers: Manuel J.Castillo and Daniel Ortiz.

dining hall, a key point in the functioning of the instalations, simultaneously operated as a cantina, which caused more than one disorder. These binges customarily wound up in Valladolid, by the easiest way at hand. On many occasions the high-spirited revelers "borrowed" the camp's trucks, a prank that more than once ended in accident. Castillo imposed order. It would be tedious to enumerate the discipli-

nary measures he adopted, but the fact is the misconduct stopped, and, despite this, good feeling prevailed. Later, the inhabitants changed the title of his post to "Superintendent and General" in recognition of the General Superintendent's steely character. In addition to these adjustments, Castillo took on fully the plan of work the project contemplated. This covered four areas of activity: [1] urbanization, centered primarily in boulevard construction; [2] conduits, which included the network of underground lines feeding gas, water and electricity; [3] dredging and filling, which contemplated the widening of the island and the formation of a pocket in the lagoon to contain the golf course, and [4] the airport. If resources had been scarce, they now flowed generously, so much so that Enriquez Savignac considered it only prudent to request the Bank of Mexico to locate an expert auditor in Cancun. The appointmet fell on Jose de Jesus Martinez Juarez. His arrival faithfully illustrates the camp's prevailing conditions. "I was seeing the jungle for the first time. It was fascinatingeverything so green, so moist, so beautiful. But the first morning, when I was on my way to breakfast, I was intercepted by a terrible-looking monster, between pre-historic and antidiluvian. I was paralyzed. Finally, since it wasn't moving, I made a large circle to avoid it. No one was impressed by my story. There were plenty of iguanas in Cancun." During this first stage, the tasks that undoubtedly consumed the greatest energy and resources were the operations of dredging and filling. In general, this was slow and painful work. Tons and more tons of sea sand were extracted from the bottom of the ocean and deposited in the lagoon bed, with the aim of enlarging the dimensions of the island to provide room for the proposed urban plan. Rafael Lara y Lara was in charge of supervision. "The dredges were working 24 hours a day and continued doing so until 1973. Hundreds of thousands of cubic meters were moved, perhaps millions, no one knew precisely. Afterward it was necessary to improve the soil with dry matter and compact it well, as he-

The cooks were central personalities in the life of the encampments. In the case of Cancun, Alicia Canche and Luisa Canche became genuine institutions. Alicia continues working in the Fonatur guest house. Luisa owns a restaurant. Furthermore, Dona Luisa became Canc{un's first mother-in-law, by virtue of her daughter's marriage to a villager.

ARCHIVO RAFAEL LARA

CHRISTA COWRIE

Sigfrido Paz Paredes

re on the island the solid rock runs between seven and eleven meters. It was a titanic labor that today would be impossible. In that era, a meter of fill cost twelve pesos [about one dollar], today it costs a thousand. We practically constructed half the island." They worked according to a master plan, but improvised events were not entirely alien. Thus it was necessary to relocate badly designed streets, straighten up a crooked dock, use all the tractors existing in the area to re-arrange a pedestrian bridge. There were also inspired strokes. Exasperated by the stench produced by the miasmas of the lagoon , Sigfrido Paz Paredes, then Sub-Director of Infratur, authorized on his own a marine connection channel. The contracts with the IDB foresaw the existence of this waterway, but its construction had been held off pending the delivery by University of Mexico scientists of a hydraulic simulation that would guarantee its proper functioning. An arbitrary cut

Fernandez Hurtado and Enriquez Savignac with the Presidential Chief of Staff, Jesus Castarieda, on a working tour of the island.

Manuel Castro

could have been disastrous, not only in economic cost, but also because of the environmental destabilization it could produce in the entire ecosystem. Paz Paredes was lucky. His improvised channel functioned so well that today it is offically known as Canal Sigfrido. Furthermore, the incorporation of Paz Paredes into the Infratur team was a result of the fourth task of the master plan, the airport. At that time, Paz Paredes was one of the few Mexican experts in airport planning and Enriquez Savignac did not want to leave any loose ends. In truth, in those days an airport did exist in Cancun, laid out almost at the beginning of construction in a highly improvised form. The builder was Manuel Castro, a young Yucatecan engineer who did not then even know of the existence of Cancun: "I had been hired by some investors on Isla Mujeres to equip a sub-division. So I come down with my machines and when I get to Puerto Juarez I sit myself down to wait for them to come for me. I was a little nervous because the trucks that transported the machines charged high rates, but the days began to pass and no one appeared." Castro's anxiety lasted four days. "I was already half desperate when one fine day a gentleman appeared who introduced himself as Daniel Ortiz and asked whose machinery it was. 'It's mine,' I said. And so he proposed that he would pay me double what I had been promised in Isla Mujeres if I would help him do some jobs on terra firma. I thought he was a little crazy, but then he took me to Garcia de la Torre and this one told me that they weren't going to pay me double but triple, but that what had

ARCHIVO JAVIER SOLORZANO

Despite its rustic appearance, the original airport functioned adequately until 1973. In 1976, when it was long out of service, a commercial jet landed by mistake on the narrow strip, causing real alarm among the population. All these installations have now disappeared.

to be done was to make an airport in four months. That convinced me that they were in fact crazy, but anyone who would pay what they were paying had the right to make an airport in the middle of the jungle." Castro put his machines to work at a feverish pace. The airstrip was ready in less than the stipulated time and the planes of the Bank of Mexico began to bring in visitors. Some were enchanted with the project, others more cautious, and some confessed frank skepticism. Among the skeptics was Crescencio Ballesteros, the principal stockholder in Mexicana. There are still those in Cancun who remember him commenting to his old friend, engineer Garcia de la Torre, "Look, Pepe, excuse me for telling you this, but I don't believe that any Mexicana jet will ever land here."

the construction of paradise

re or less. First, draw the complete plans of a tourism city, from its very foundations up. Then sell the idea to the President of the Republic. Don't be disheartened if the administration changes and the new President displays skepticism. Convince him, even if this means a battle with his cabinet. Follow up by getting some international loans. Do not delay the beginning of construction. Move millions of cubic meters to construct your paradise, and even if it costs dearly, put all the installations underground, so that everything will look nice when the tourists come. Of course you do have to think about where the tourists are going to sleep... Well, then, go see the hoteliers, those simple fellows who accuse the government of creating and being unfair competition. . with just one chain of hotels! Offer them the best locations, the most beautiful, the cheapest. They will tell you, no, it's too risky. Argue that you have the

HE BEGINNING IS EASY, 1710-

Alberto Bojorquez

support of the President, the Governor, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Pope's blessing. They will tell you, hmmm, we are not sure. Give them advice, get them loans, lower their interest rates, set up their businesses, beg them, plead with them, promise them the pearls of the Virgin. They will tell you, thanks, now we'll think about it. Don't call us. We'll call you. There was no way... From 1969 on, they began searching for investors and by 1972 the first one still hadn't appeared. First Rojo Gomez, then Gutierrez Ruiz, had organized tours and conferences for the hoteliers of Chetumal and Cozumel and obtained a unanimous responsepure evasion. Then they invited them from Merida, much more powerful, perhaps a little more courageous. More evasive. Agustin Olachea and Enrfquez Savignac went to the national hoteliers, the veritable sharks of the business. Not one committed himself. As a last resort, perhaps the international chains? Identical response. Even the Secretary of the Treasury went around promoting the matter and was unable to obtain a single custo-

The traffic circle where the highway ended was constructed in one night, a feat of engineering with precise aim--fishing for investors.

The first grand hotel under construction, the Cancun Caribe, required the financial participation of Infratur and several banks. It continues functioning today, operated by an American chain.

mer. And, really, it was difficult to imagine a tourism city without hotels. But Fernandez Hurtado had not been a banker all his life in vain. As a result, he ignored the hoteliers and resorted to his old friends. It is impossible to know what type of arguments he used, but the fact is that he convinced several private banksin Mexico City, Merida and Monterreyand turned them into pioneers. The formula was the following: the banks would construct a medium-sized hotelthe Cancun Caribe, 203 rooms and 23 bungalowsand Infratur would provide the land, in return for 19 percent of the equity. Thus, in the middle of 1972, it was possible to lay the cornerstone of the first hotel. Given its size, however, it was obvious that it would not be in operation for at least two years. And even though it might seem incredible, the tourists were already beginning to arrive. The majority were adventurers who had somehow heard the name Cancun, and, with their backpacks their only luggage, gone forth looking for it. But entire families also arrived and, once in a while, an organized group. They did not find any place to sleep and their stays were plagued by discomforts. This situation inspired Jose Garcia de la Torre to put himself at risk once more. Without thinking too much, he asked Daniel Ortiz to draw up the plans for a minimal hotel, twelve rooms, almost entirely constructed of wood. Ortiz was constructing a tourism city, but his knowledge of the hotel business was nil. He himself knew that the design was a mistake: "Many people said that it looked like a shoe box and, well, it was quite ugly. It looked, shall we say, like. . . a shoe box. Fortunately it never got past the drawing board." Actually, it was Enrfquez Savignac who in the final instance vetoed

the building. As soon as Garcia de la Torre presented himself to show him the plans, the then-director of Infratur detected the many flaws. Some had to do with the strength of the materials, others with the design of the property, yet others with financing problems and, finally, strong objections could be made to the profitabity of a hotel of this size. Experience demonstrates that a hotel of twelve rooms is always a bad business. But Enrfquez Savignac had not spent so many years looking for investors in order to allow the first candidate to escape. On the contrary, he convinced Garcia de la Torre to embark on a much more ambitious adventurea 72-room hotel on the beach, entirely designed by Fonatur technicians. And this offer included a packagenot just the design, but also the land and, in passing, a loan to get the property started. Garcia de la Torre remained fascinated with the idea. Because he lac-

The most famous of Cancn's posters

Celebrated motifs of propaganda

ked sufficient resources, he went looking for partners. One of them was his nephew, Diego de la Pea, a well-known builder in Mexico City, who counted among his achievements the urbanization of the sub-division Bosques de las Lomas, considered a very difficult project because of the multi-level terrain. This was the origin of Cancn's first formal hotel, the Playa Blanca, dedicated in September, 1974. The entire upper strata attended the ceremony, but even this brilliant glare could not conceal the precarious operating conditions. Recalls De la Pea, who became the owner of the hotel at last, "We weren't connected to the drinking water system, so Fonatur had to deliver water daily by tank truck. We weren't connected to the sewer system, so we had to construct rudimentary septic tanks. We weren't connected to the electrical system, so we had to install provisional generators to provide juice for the air conditioners." Despite these annoyances, plans multiplied, and, as luck would have it, not a single full-time hotelier participated in them. The next one to be inspired was Alberto Bojorquez, a travel agent, who began the construction of a little 25-room hotel next to the Playa Blanca. Then Banamex purchased one of the best properties on the island, Punta Cancun, destined to lodge a branch of the Camino Real. At about the same time, the para- statal company Nacional Hotelera started up the construction of the Hotel Presidente. And, on the island's southern extreme, Infratur it self put up a semi- horizontal 300-room hotel which it had previously arranged to be operated by Club Mediterrane. But Enriquez Savignac and his team understood perfectly that Cancun would never function if they were unable to convince the hoteliers to join in the adventure. As a result, the experience of Playa Blanca was revived and adopted as an integrated system which left nothing to chance. Infratur would define the sites, draw up the architectural plans of the hotels, even begin construction, and, en route, try to convince investors. Stunts of engineering were a parallel strategy. They did not follow a predetermined standard, but gave excellent results. Daniel Ortiz recalls the enormous effects produced by their spontaneity: "One weekend, Fernandez Hurtado dropped in with a group of investors. The coastal highway just about reached the Cancun Caribe hotel, scarcely half-built, and the street abruptly ended in an unfinished dirt road. Fernandez Hurtado commented that it looked awful, and his companions agreed. Then they went to the guest house to sleep. Well, it was a matter of working all night. We sliced and levelled and filled and smoothed and, finally, we planted a palm tree in the center. The sun rose on a highway perfectly finished in a perfect traffic circle. I believe that we dazzled them." At the same time, Enriquez Savignac and Paz Paredes, promoted to adjunct director of Infratur, had decided to start a publicity campaign for the new tourism center, at the international as well domestic levels. To get it going, they hired Guillermo Grimm, a tourism promotion specialist who until then had worked in the private sector. Grimm carried out his work with extraordinary efficiency. Within a few months after his appointment important quantities of visitors began to arrive in Cancn, among them some perfectly equipped golfers, with their bags and everything, when there was yet no golf course. Grimm's talent also was the source of a poster that became world-famousa footprint in the white sand of Cancn seconds before being erased by the foam, with the turquoise sea as background. On the other hand, it had to be recognized that the arrival of the golfers would have been better if more expected, but this was a result of the delay in the construction of the course. The golf course was a good example of the pitfalls that the builders encountered on the way and the doses of imagination required to resolve them. From the beginning, the design of the course had been assigned to an American expert, Robert Trent Jones. The choice resulted as expected. The course is smooth and harmonic, taking perfect advantage of the irregularities of passage

and containing many degrees of difficulty to delight duffers or professionals. The problems came later. Some of the subterranean brackish water currents practically touched the land surface and, with the changes of the tides, the low parts were flooded. The accumulated salt wound up killing the turf. Francisco Javier Alvarez was in charge of coming up with a solution: "We made infinite tests. We compacted the sand, lay down covers of rock and earth, compacted again, filled some parts more and nothing. The brackish water continued to rise. Finally we discovered a totally unexpected alternative. To begin, we forgot about topsoil. We planted grass directly on the sand. Then we flooded the sand with freshwater, with the aim of forming a cushion which impided the climb of saltwater. And this produced results. It's necessary to keep the subsoil of the course soaking wet, but it works. The players never notice." In this way, resolving problems on the way, Cancn took form. The first cement skeletons were appearing on the coastal highway, their imposing mass omen of the boom. The beach was being populated with hotels. Not far from these towers of recreation, however, a problem of considerable importance was beginning to show its face. Even before birth, Cancn already had its "lost city." Attraction of colonists and workers had exceeded all expectations. By 1971, almost 6,000 people were living in camps, or, even worse, were settling unregulated within the borders of the lands controlled by Infratur. Recalls Alfonso Alarcon, in charge of city planing: "I went to see Enriquez Savignac and I explained the problem to him thoroughly. I told him that we were going to create a precarious center that we were not going to regularize even in twenty years. I believe that he understood the problem, but our hands were tied. There was no way that we were going to hand over to the people urban land without water, without sewers, with electricity. It would have been the same." Part of the problem, of course, had been caused by the rigid norms of Infratur and the project itself. This foresaw the creation of a perfect community, basically middle-class, in which the regular inhabitants of Cancun would live. But there was no place for the poor. And Mexico, simply and plainly, is a country of the poor. Enriquez Savignac gave Alarcon instructions to act pragmatically and this, according to his own words, knocked down the barriers. He even authorized prices as low as ten pesos [less than a dollar] a square meter, with his superior's agreement, for buyers who could demonstrate sufficient economic fragility. Among the other measures he took was the relocation of the spontaneous market which had formed in the outer reaches of the city at the crossing of the Merida highway. It was called, precisely, "The Crossing."

Guillermo Grimm and the posters of Cancun

The urbanologists of Infratur found an original Mayan ruin in what was to be the golf course. With great insight, they decided to restore it and leave it in place, even though this meant modifying the design of the course slightly.

Alarcon gives details of the move: "The construction of a definitive marketplace, the 23, was foreseen. So I went and told the squatters at least to move to the neighboring block, inside the Infratur line. I don't know if it was better or worse. Soon, the thing became a pigste for me. The booths piled up in an extraordinary way and this almost became a ghetto, with all kinds of hiding places, secret illegal liquor outlets, hidden prostitution. And it was the only place that you could go shopping. People called it Calcutta, and it really did have a certain Asiatic flavor." When the new marketplace was ready, of course, no one wanted to move. The first had to be convinced, the next pressured, a few more threatened, and the last removed by the police. While this was being resolved, approximately a thousand heads of family were demanding lots and Alarcon simply could not deliver them. The real obstacle, however, was those who weren't even demanding. Alarcon recalls: "The plan never took into account the philosophy of the Mayas of Quintana Roo. In the jungle, property is held in common. One builds his house wherever he wishes, on any vacant site. It's been that way for generations, for centuries. Now when they come to Cancun they find themselves in another world with rules that say that they have to buy land and contract credit to pay for it and build according to certain specifications and demonstrate previous solvency. And you know what happens? They never understand it. But this is our problem, not theirs. It is we who should have foreseen this behavior." Finally, after investigating a possible solution, in 1975 the Puerto Juarez Trust was created, with the exclusive mission of attacking the avalanche of the precarious. It was not an easy task. It constituted the first case in the history of the country in which a city, before being a city, already had an urban cancer.

the torrid passion of luis echeverria

Luis Echeverria had believed that Cancun was a private business of Ortiz Mena. In 1974, everyone in Mexico believed that Cancn was a private business of Luis Echeverria. It is certain that Echeverria had fallen in love with Cancun. Versions differ as to when he saw it for the first time. Martinez Ross believes that it was in December 1970, during his first visit to the territory, when Rojo Gomez was still alive. Gutierrez Ruiz says that in May 1970 Echeverria brought Costa Rican President Jose Figueres to see Cancun. But Jose de Jesus Lima gives the most significant date, asserting that Echeverria was part of a committee of officials that Lima himself guided to the deserted island with promotional aims as early as 1964, when the future President was Sub-Secretary of the Interior. The fact of the matter is that he was enchanted. But his plans were not limited to Cancun. Recalls the governor at the time, Gutierrez Ruiz: "The idea of converting the territory into a tree and sovereign state was exclusively his. And he gave me instructions to work toward that end."

N 1970, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

The four municipalities of the territory became seven when it turned into a state. Shown in shadow in the lower sketch, the new and controversial municipality of Benito Juarez, site of Cancun.

Echeverria received Costa Rican President Jose Figueres in Canciin, the first foreign head of state to visit the island.

There were a lot of things to be done. The census of 1979 had revealed that Quintana Roo had no more than 255,000 inhabitants, not even enough to have two Representatives. But the most serious problems derived from the state's internal structure. In the first place was the distribution of these few inhabitants, the majority of whom were concentrated in the south, engaged not very enthusiastically in agriculture. Next, communications. Nothing existed that even resembled a coast highway and normal traffic between the north and south of the state had to take place via Yucatan. When Infratur's technicians arrived on the island, the then-Secretary of Public Works had begun construction of the Puerto Juarez-Tulum highway independently of the tourism project, but it advanced literally at turtle's pace. The jungle and the lack of maintenance destroyed the road faster than SOP could build it, a common phenomenon with all of the state's roads, which enjoyed a justified fame for inefficiency. During the time of Rojo Gomez, a local journalist urged the Governor to widen the Merida-Chetumal highway, for the simple reason that the pot holes no longer fit. To complicate things further, there were four free-trade perimeters within the state, that is, tax-free zones, open to international business Chetumal, X-Calac, Cozumel and Isla Mujeres. And there were customs houses at the borders of all of them. Guitierrez Ruiz comments, "The entire territory was dotted with sentry boxes. Not even the Quintanaroenses could move freely within their own territory." Of course, the Cancun project made things a lot easier for the plan to convert the territory into a state, practically resolving the entire future of the northern partthe coast to be dedicated to tourism and the inner areas to agriculture, oriented toward supplying the recreation centers. The problem was the south. Even though Chetumal had excellent logging areas nearby, it was relatively distant from the important centers of consumption. At that time, Chetumal itself hardly totalled 43,000 inhabitants. Commerce was an unstable alternative. In neighboring Belize, the free zone operated without restrictions, so the only market that it could capture with certainty would have been Yucatan. Gutierrez Ruiz tried to resolve these matters step by step. Between

1971 and 1973 he re-started the Carrillo Puerto-Tulum highway, reuniting the coast with the rest of the state. In 1973, he convinced President Echeverria to declare the entire territory a free trade zone, eliminating the obstacles to internal circulation and providing Cancun (which had

Echeverria and David Gustavo inspect public works in the hotel zone, accompanied by Julio Hirschfield Almada and Julio Sanchez Vargas. In the background, Antonio Enriquez Savignac, then Director of Infratur.

been outside the free trade perimeters) with yet another attraction. The most painful task turned out to be the Alvaro Obregon sugar mill, conceived to develop the southern strip, an old plan which had been abandoned during the time of Lopez Mateos: "I dedicated the greatest amount of time and energy to it. No one wanted it at the beginning, neither the Secretary of Agriculture, nor the Sugar Commission, nor the banks. They said that the land wasn't suitable for it, in spite of the fact that experience demonstrated the contrary. And so I was grinding and grinding with one and another, almost persecuting them. President Echeverria once admonished me harshly,'You're very stubborn, Mr. Governor,' when i put forth the matter for the hundredth time. And I said,'I am stubborn, Mr. President, because I know that this is good for Quintana Roo.'" It was not strange that the idea would provoke such resistance. The project contemplated the construction of a mill with the capacity to process a million tons annually, which would make it at one stroke the most important in the Southeast and one of the ten most important in the country. All the sugar cane was to come from the surrounding cooperatives, whose production frequently did not meet expectations. Despite everything, Gutierrez Ruiz got all the necessary signatures, and in 1974 the construction of the monster began. With this, President Echeverrfa judged it advantageous to accelerate the formal conversion of the territory. The formalities were rigorously observed. The Federal Congress authorized the Governor to convoke a Constituent Congress, whose management was assigned to a very youthful Cozumel politician, Pedro Joaquin Coldwell, scarcely 24 years old. Following an outline created by Guitierrez Ruiz, the delegates wrote the local Constitution, dividing the state politically into seven subdivisions, removing Cancun from the jurisdiction of Isia Mujeres and assigning its headquarters to the new municipality of Benito Juarez. The affair excited enormous controversies. The inhabitants of Isla Mujeres, who al.eady felt injured when the option of puttting the project's seat of government there had been discarded, now faced raw reality. Their municipality would be curtailed and the most productive area would become independent. To top it off, the map created by David Gustavo's administration tore away all of Isla Mujeres' mainland territory and

David Gustavo Gutierrez Ruiz

ARCHIVO GARCIA DE LA TORRE

In front of the house of President Echeverria under construction, engineer Garca de la Torre explains the functioning of the Mayan arch to the President. Observing are Jose Campillo Saenz, Jesus Castaneda and Lucha Garca de Campillo Saenz. In the rear in the right corner, in impressive platform sandals, Rosa Luz Alegria.

imprisoned the municipality of Isla Mujeres within the limits of the island. Pedro Joaquin had to negotiate an agreement: "An assembly was called on the island. All the bigshots were there, set for warthe Limas, the Pastranas, the Magafias. The truth is they were right. A good part of the mainland properties belonged to the islanders and, in case the territorial lines were modified, they would have to come to terms with a faraway municipality. They understood the ceding of Cancun as painful but inevitable. What they were fighting about was the rest, so we modified the design and achieved a more coherent partition." To succeed himself, Gutierrez Ruiz suggested the candidacy of Martinez Ross and Martinez Ross demonstrated complete satisfaction with the suggestion. For Mayor of Cancun, Gutierrez Ruiz suggested the candidacy of Alfonso Alarcon.. . and Martinez Ross demonstrated absolute dissatisfaction with the suggestion. Despite this, for Gutierrez Ruiz, the decision's pragmatism was irreproachable: "Cancun was too young a project, and required special care. Who better to exercise it than those who had built it step by step and who understood it in depth?"

The outcome appeared logical to Alfonso Alarcon: "As the one in charge of the project for FonaturInfratur and a little fund of Nacional Financera called Fogatur had merged in 1974 to form Fonatur, still under the baton of Enriquez SavignacI had become the authority de facto if not dejure. For example, when we had a wave of robberies, I informed the authorities and what they did was send some police and put them under my command. I handed out the licenses for booths in the market, for opening businesses, for the sale of food and so on. Also I was in charge of turning over land. I was a kind of mayorIn quotation marks." Moreover, the candidate's selection had nothing less than Presidential endorsement: "I had never been a politician, nor did I know how to handle that sort of thing. David Gustavo had already asked me if I would accept, but in a way that I could not reject. One day I was summoned to a dinner at Casa Maya, you know, one of those action-filled dinners of Echeverria, with half the cabinet and everything. To top it off, I arrived late andLord save me!--they seated me next to the President. The dinner was an interrogation. The President in person was subjecting me to an examination and I was trying to answer the best I could. Finally, Echeverria stopped cross-examining me and began conversing with other people. I was in no way sure of how it had gone for me, except to think that he had flunked me, but at the end of the dinner Jesus Reyes Heroles, then PRI's president, approached me and roguishly said,'Hello, Mr. Mayor." Of course, when a President of the Republic shows so much interest in a town of 8,500 inhabitants as personally to select its municipal president, it's plausible to suppose that his concern goes beyond the limits of good government. And the rumor spread like wildfireCancun was an Echeverrfa business. Even today, this is a well-accepted commonplace. Is it true? Enriquez Savignac believes that the rumor is unfounded: "Infratur-Fonatur controlled the sale of land and I believe that speculation was avoided to the maximum. Clearly some cases can be g i v e n people who bought and never built, as always, and later sold at great profit. But I am sure that no one could have done that on a large scale. Moreover, Echeverria openly purchased property on the beach and built his house on it. And he paid us to the last cent." The house in question, registered on the name of his daughter, Maria Esther, is certainly splendid. The 2,400 meters of land lodge a

The house of Echeverria in all its magnificence. The residence occupies a site of 2,400 square meters, with a spectacular beach frontage.

very ample garden and the architectural design takes advantage of the multi-leveled site to descend in step-by- step terraces to the beach. Some of the windows and doors are constructed according to the technique of the Mayan arch, which confers a touch of originality on the property. The decor obeyed the affection which the President always felt for austerity. The complex is far from being ostentatious, although its dimensions are quite respectable. To top it off, Echeverria has decided to make life difficult for the gossips. If he does have business interests, they are well hidden. And the house, his only publicly-known property, was sold at the beginning of 1985 to Jim Plante, a Texan millionaire. Perhaps it pained the President to let go off his little fief, but the price must have been a consolationa million dollars, on one showing, in cash.

of love affairs, forgetfulness, reverses, and failure

tice, without any ceremony, the members of the Presidential staff would show up in the office of the mayor of Cancun. "Licenciado Alarcon, Mr. President is waiting for you." Go in a sudden trip to Villas Tacul, where the President usually stayed. Echeverria was accustomed to arriving on impulse, no welcoming committee or escort, usually on Saturday. He was accompanied by his daughter-in-law, Rosa Luz Alegria, acting in the place of secretary. It was strikingly unusual direct contact between the President of Mexico and the mayor of a town with a population of 8,500. "I have seen garbage piled up on the sidewalks, licenciado. I see some dirty streets. . ." "We don't have sanitation equipment, Mr. President. We've requisitioned it, but. . ."

ITHOUT PREVIOUS NO-

Alfonso Alarcon first mayor of Cancun.

Guillermo Rossell

Romarico Arroyo

Mario Mova Palencia

"What do you need?" "Basically, five garbage trucks and a sweeper." "And how much does this cost?" "Plenty." "Take a memo, Rosa Luz. . . "In a few days, Mario Ramon Beteta then Secretary of Finance, would be calling, half-serious, half-joking, following the instructions he had received: "Licenciado Alarcon, I'm going to plead with you not to bother Mr. President with your provincial problems. Call me and I will take care of you with great pleasure. Ah, yes, I have here a check for the trucks and the sweeper. . ." But Alarcon continued bothering, Echeverrfa listening, Rosa Luz taking notes and, in a few days, Mario Ramon Beteta calling. In this way, Cancun obtained a firehouse and fire-fighting equipment, buildings for the police, Federal Highway Patrol and Conasupo [the governmentsponsored supermarket chain], the Alfredo V. Bonfil School, the Red Cross hospital, immigration offices, Markets 23 and 28 [numbered after the super-manzanas in which they are located]. . . State Governor Jesus Martinez Ross did not like it one bit. Not only was he being jumped over, but also the President's constant interventions were provoking a fracture in the incipient local political order: "Cancun had become a state within a state. It was Fonatur that was making all the decisions. And Alfonso Alarcon was a Fonatur person. Fonatur was not paying taxes on hotel properties. Fonatur established the amount of the property taxes in the urban area. Fonatur was in control of the state tax collection department. Fonatur said when and where. In fact, the state government was forced to sign an agreement ceding to the municipality its power to issue construction permits." Taking the other side into account, this judgment was perhaps a little exaggerated. Recalls Alarcon: "I was between two currents, between the wishes of the governor and those of Fonatur. And I tried to act as whom I was supposed to be, mayor of Cancun, elected by the people. So I had my run-ins with Martinez Ross, but also with Enrfquez Savignac. Even I have to acknowledge one thingthey both behaved like gentlemen. They always respected my mission, and never directed words appearing to be orders at me. Each one simply wanted to pull for his own side." Moreover, it wasn't absolutely strange that control of Cancun was generating such a tug of war. Growth of development had passed all expectations and it was on its way to becoming the most important city in the state. In exactly seven years, since the establishment of the first encampments in January, 1970, to the end of the Echeverrfa regime, Infratur had realized truly impressive accomplishments. The hotels aligned along the length of the coast road now totalled 23 and the number of rooms exceeded original predictions. The international airport had been inaugurated in 1973 and several American and European lines were now operating regularly, along with the two domestic airlines. The coast road had been completed, even though the airport spur only had one lane. And in the city, 1,600 houses were being completedsufficient to house some 8,000 personsbut the urban infrastructure and services were capable of supporting 25,000 inhabitants. But the most surprising was the efficiency of operation. In 1976, Fonatur had only 195 employees. Such were things in 1976 when the Governor's Meeting of the InterAmerican Development Bank took place in Cancun. The bank had financed the development. Significantly, it was presided over by Antonio Ortiz Mena, the Secretary of Finance who had authorized the project. More than a thousand bankers attended the meeting. Special auditoriums had to be set up, as that many persons could not fit even in the Convention Center. But the meeting had an obvious reasonto demonstrate to the world the biggest and best success obtained from an IDB loan. A few months later, Echeverria's term came to its end. Enriquez Sa-

During Rosa Luz Alegria's administration of Sectur, futuristic high-speed hydrofoils were put into service, uniting Cancn and neighboring Cozumel. Unfortunately, someone forgot the force of the waves in the marine channel separating the two coasts, a decisive operating factor for these kinds of vessels. As a result, the ships remained in port more than half the time, whether for repairs or because of bad weather. They were finally sent to Veracruz, where they also failed. Some years later, the gigantic investment was worth only its weight as junk.

vignac was promoted to Sub-Secretary of Tourism and the directorship of Infratur was assigned to Romarico Arroyo, a qualified professional in finances who had joined the team in 1972 to manage the credit operations in which the fund directly intervened. The matter appeared to function under a certain surface calm during the first year. But a silent war was taking place. The new Secretary of Tourism, Guillermo Rossell de la Lama, did not sympathize entirely with the founders of Cancun. He went to war against them and harvested resignationsEnriquez Savignac, Romarico Arroyo, Pedro Donde, Guillermo Grimm, Oscar Corral, Martinez Juarez, Kemil Rizk. During the succeeding years, Fonatur followed an erratic course. Jose Antonio Murillo, Arroyo's successor, considered the instructions he received so arbitrary that he wound up opposing the secretary of the branch himself. Rossell fired him and substituted in his place, Miguel Angel Reta, but forgot a required procedureconsult with the President. Lopez Portillo fired Reta and handed over the Fund to Mario Moya Palencia, who had been his strongest competition for the presidential nomination. Moya put the house in order, but at the same time, converted it into his political sanctuary and created an enormous number of directorships and consultancies for his group, with the inevitable charges of bureaucracy which such conduct implies. Finally, Rossell was relieved by Rosa Luz Alegrla, at the middle of the term, who added her dose of whimsey to an already chaotic and confused situation.

Rosa Luz Alegria

ALMAMAQUE DE MEXICO

ALMANAQUE DE MEXICO

Jesus Martinez Ross, first governor of the state.

Felipe Amaro

Santana

Things had also changed with reference to Cancun. Alfonso Alarcon had lost his protector and Lopez-Portillo always treated him frostily. L6pez-Portillo was aware of the development from its beginnings. As Presidential Sub-Secretary in 1969, he had authorized the special entitlements that had permitted the project to be started up. He always demonstrated a certain disaffection for Cancun's luck, however, and this attitude was not modified by his arrival at the top. Thus the pressures on the municipal president intensified, as much on the part of Fonatur as well as the local government. Alarcon exploded. He went to Mexico and verbally resigned before Jesus Reyes Heroles, Secretary-designate of the Interior in the new regime. The old politician handled the situation skillfully. He consoled him as well as he could and sent him home. At the bottom, the struggle was for the succession in Cancun. The new authorities at Fonatur wanted a mayor who would represent their interests. Therefore they were supporting a more-or-less spontaneous movement promoting the candidacy of Rafael Lara y Lara, the engineer who had been the first technician to settle in Cancun. As well as knowing the project like the back of his hand, Lara had become a kind of leader of the original colonists, who had in turn gathered in an informal association. But Martinez Ross had other plans. The gradual distancing of Cancun had transcended the limits of political disagreement and was visibly affecting the social management of the state. In fact, open resentment against Cancun was being created. . right in Quintana Roo! In Chetumal, in Cozumel, even in Isla Mujeres, people considered the intervention of the official dependencies excessive and labeled the new center something rather alien to local interests. The PRI's general delegate in the area, Victor Cervera Pacheco, diagnosed the situation accurately. Another Fonatur municipal president would win in Cancun, but would be highly unpopular in the rest of the state. The best was to have recourse to a conciliator, and the selection fell on the then-president of the Court of Justice, Felipe Amaro Santana. Like any good conciliator, Amaro Santana arrived on the field of battle ready for war. Martinez Ross had already made an inelegant gesture at his own inauguration, commenting in front of a group of journalists that with the change, at last, he now felt in Quintana Roo. Amaro's inaugural speech took the same toneregain Cancun for the state, supposedly from the hands of Fonatur. So he started his term furiously. The following day, he jailed four Fonatur employees who were wandering about drunkenly making a racket. He kept them prisoners the entire night and made them pay an adminstrative fine. Immediately after, he summoned the local head of Fonatur and warned him that the excesses would have to end.

What never ended was Amaro's belligerent attitude, suddenly transformed into a medieval warrior in his crusade against Fonatur. The new administration traded conciliation for direct confrontation, with terrible results for the city. For example, Amaro "ordered" Fonatur to turn the public beaches over to the municipality, but since the law forbide the fideicomisosio unilaterally cede their holdings, his demand was justifiably ignored, with the consequent deterioration of his public image. Without further ado, he sponsored a trespass and, violating all ordinances, authorized the operation of a cantina at Playa Langosta. He did more impudent things. One fine day he informed the director of Fonatur that he had decided to close the coast highway and the work of enlargement being carried out, because they did not have the required municipal permission. His listener had no more to do than to make a call to Mexico. That same night, Amaro was summoned to Mexico to explain his conduct. In any case, tangling with his assaults consumed much more energy and time than they deserved. His executive achievements, moreover, were quite modest. Amaro set in motion a program called Social Integration and National Identity, which theoretically tried to get the people of Cancun to acquaint themselves with their roots and identify with them, even though they were national, as local ones did not exist. The program encouraged a carnivalwhich still hasn't taken firethe organization of the first regional fair (1980), the creation of a radio station, Radio City Hall, and the erection of an enormous monument to Mexican history, re-baptized "The Blender" by Cancunenses (equal fortune of the monuments to Jose Marti"The Bananas"and the North-South Meeting Commemorative"The Insectronic"). Amaro's program also included a campaign of regional baptisms.

Amaro and Cuban sculptor Jose cle Larra pose in front of the Monument of the History of Mexico, mischievously rebaptized "The Blender" by the Cancun community.
EXCELSIOR

Thus on the original old baseball stadium they imposed the name of Jacinto Canek; upon the municipal auditorium for social events, that of Cecilio Chi; a sports park, Venancio Pec, and so on in like style. Everything seemed to be going along fine when a Cancun lady, fed up with so much indigenous nomenclature, confronted the municipal president in a restaurant and publicly demanded that he call off the Saints Day epidemic. If you like those names so much, she told him, give them to your children. Despite his mistaken behavior, given the factionalism so common to our political system, Amaro Santana was convinced he had done a good job. In the end, all he had done was carry out the governor's instructions, attempting to put reins on Fonatur. Clearly, this had caused certain friction and his popularity was hovering at pavement level, but it was evident that he merited a great reward. Something as great, perhaps, as the great. . . This was the situation on the 24th of November, 1980, when a dinner

Rafael Lara, soul of the pioneer residents' group.

CHRISTA COWRIE

was celebrated in the Cecilio Chi salon attended by some 200 persons. Presiding, Governor Martinez Ross, Mayor Amaro Santana, and special invited guest Enriquez Savignac. The motive of the party, the first ten years of Cancun. Lara y Lara had reunited the original colonists and it had been arranged to give them diplomas. They were involved in this when unexpected news arrived from Chetumal. The Party sectors had just finished nominating Pedro Joaquin Coldwell for next Governor.

vacation arena, diplomatic arena

Rodolfo Leal Moguel has had the luck of knowing an impressive number of the world's important personalities. Few Mexicans could presume to a similar listthe Shah of Iran, Marshall Tito, Indian president Zail Singh, his German counterpart Walter Scheel, banker Jacques de Laroisiere, King Gustave of Sweden, Premier Gaston Thorn of Luxemburg, Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Brazilian president Figueiredo, Henry Kissinger, Robert MacNamara. . . In the field of letters, he has been introduced to individuals of the measure of Nicolas Guillen, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garca Mrquez. Nor has he neglected more frivolous activities. Recently he accompanied vacationing Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela. At the national level, Leal Moguel has served his turns at the top, having taken care of four Mexican presidentsMiguel Aleman, Luis Eche-

Rudi and his boat

D
1

ESPITE HIS HUMBLE ORIGINS,

CHRISTA COWRIE

The diplomatic persistence of the charro sombrero: Fidel Castro, Maragret Thatcher, Ferdinand Marcos.

ARCHIVO RAFAEL LARA

verria, Jose Lopez Portillo and Miguel de la Madrid. Today he knows the entire cabinet personally and recalls dozens of tasty anecdotes featuring national political stars. Of course he speaks respectfully of all of them, but in his heart he has chosen a favorite for the next presidential race. The curious thing is that Rodolfo Leal MoguelRudi, to everyone has developed so many relationships in one house, the Fonatur guest house in Cancun. Rudi and the property have a common history. They have been together since the first stone was laid, brought to the coast in Rudi's own launch, back in 1968. Since then, Rudi has been the informal host of the housechief steward, head of maintenance, chief of security, kitchen supervisor, emergency lifesaver, distinguished visitors' guide, all these posts carried outnever officiallywith a masterful sense of improvization. In reality, it was Rudi's lot to live the parallel history of Cancun, a tropical paradise suddenly converted into a diplomatic arenasummit meetings. In its short lifethe first hotel hardly in operation eleven yearsCancun had received more than fifty heads of state. Rudi's list is incomplete. It does not include the King and Queen of Spain, nor Reagan, nor Mitterand, nor Indira Gandhi, nor Queen Elizabeth, nor Sandra Pertini, nor Olof Palme, nor dozens more of those names that shine so well in headlines. Moreover with so many celebrities in the hotels together, the people of Cancun have wound up surfeited with importance. They simply treat them like anyone else. With one exception. . . One visit jolted the people, aroused controversies, revived Panamerican dreams. Felipe Amaro Santana, then municipal president, recalls that moment: "Cancun went crazy. Hundreds of people poured out to the Hotel

Zone to see him. They went by truck, on bicycle, on foot, however they could. It was as if an idol had appeared." Fidel Castro, in flesh and blood. Amaro continues, "The gringo tourists were petrified. For them, imagine, it was the Devil in person. After they had time to react, they wanted to touch him and get his autograph and greet him. But it's something difficult to describe. Fidel has a magnetism that you have to feel to believe." Castro arrived by yacht at Cozumel and later flew to Tulum, where he visited the ruins. From there he moved to Cancun. In order to reduce risk, they considered it useful to make this last leg by helicopter, landing on the golf course right in front of the Hotel Presidente. Any other way would have required guarding many kilometers of highway from the international airport. Afterwards, all this precaution turned out to be useless. Amaro again: "The people broke through the barriers and got near him. According to plan, Fidel was to arrive at the hotel in less than five minutes from landing. But with the crowds, it took more than a half hour. And this happened throughout the visit. Wherever he went, people were waiting. No one had to bring them out in busses." Castro left and calm returned. . momentarily. Eight days later President Lopez Portillo returned to receive his Costa Rican colleague, Rodrigo Carazo Odio. And, by surprise, in a declaration issued in the main reception area of the Camino Real, broke off relations with Somozan Ni-

A warm reception for President Reagan.

caragua. The international battle that drove Cancun completely crazy was the one in which twenty-three of the nations from the world's most diverse latitudes played the leading role on the occasion of the North-South Meeting of October, 1981, celebrated in the installations of the Sheraton Hotel. The preparations began years in advance. Alejandro Cardini, at that time public relations director of the local government.remembers the schism: "Cancun took a spectacular leap forward, because they constructed in months things that had been awaited for years. Which? Well, the peripheral road which goes around the lagoon was completed, the Social Security hospital was constructed and endowed with the most advanced equipment, the entire Hotel Zone

The Presidents of Contadora, in July 1983, in front of Caneun palapas: Belisario Betancur, Luis Herrera Campins, Miguel de la Madrid, Ricardo de la Spriella.

uNOMASUNO

The North-South Meeting made life in Cancun dizzy for a couple of weeks. The security measures around the Sheraton were extreme, not strange when twenty-four heads of state met at the same table for

was illuminated, the water treatment plants enlarged, the airport installations improved and the runway lengthened, and a television station was constructed." If the city changed, so did the Sheraton, needless to say, seat of the event. Recalls sub-manager Alfredo Castro, "The hotel was physically occupied by the government. They painted different areas different colorsblue, red, greenand gave us all access badges. All the entrances had metal detectors. The entire hotel was surrounded by soldiers, and two Mexican warships were stationed at the beach. Meanwhile, helicopters and planes were making reconnaissance flights over the area every few minutes." The hotel lobby was totally transformed. Walls were turn down, others thrown up, and an interior garden planted, with vegetation flown in from Mexico City. All the commercial areas were turned into rest zones for the world leaders, and some of the banquet salons were fitted out as press

UNOMASUNO

rooms. The entire conference area was laid with sky blue carpet brought by plane from Mexico Cityand furnished with sea blue couchessame origin, same methodwithin a few hours. A suite and ten rooms were assigned to each delegation, two or three of which were converted into offices, requiring additional telephone and telex installations. According to Castro, Reagan was the most exceeded: "Not content with the security measures, their own metal detectors were brought and placed in front of the door of their suite. Inside the room were situated the security agents with six German shepherds trained to detect arms and explosives. They also brought an immense desk and had to remove a door to get it inside the room, supposedly for bilateral talks." The Reagan desk was well-visited right away. The whole world has matters pending with the United States. Other leaders, less sought- after, enjoyed the beauty of the island more. Some never even appeared to leave home. Ferdinand Marcos, virtual dictator of the Philippines, used to spend all his afternoons closed up in his room consulting with

A photograph that went around the world, taken on the grounds of the Fonatur Guest House. In front: Ronald Reagan (United States), Simeon Ake (Ivory Coast), Mohammad Huq (Bangladesh), Benjedid Chadli (Algeria), Hans-Dietrich Genscher (West Germany), Pierre Elliot Trudeau (Canada), Jose Lopez Portillo (Mexico), Fahd Bin Abdul (Saudi Arabia), Willebald

his faraway ministers. Castro adds an anecdotal aspect: "The worst mess was food. Each head of state brought his own chef and his own foods. During the official banquets, of course, they all ate the same, but during the rest of the time it was each to his own taste. Think about only thattwenty-four chefs, each with four or five assistants, all accustomed to command in their own countries, and here all put in the same kitchen. The Indian was fighting with the American, the Frenchman with the Chinese, the Venezuelan with the Swedie, and so on." The Mexican government, in any case, took care of making amends to the owners of the hotel for all this annoyance. The bill it paid after a week of fuss amounted to the equivalent of a million dollars.

Pahr (Austria), Ramiro Saravia (Brazil), Zhao Ziyang (China) and Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines). Standing: Sergej Kraigher (Yugoslavia), Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Margaret Thatcher (Great Britain), Zenko Suzuki (Japan), Lyr Jon Forbes (Guyana), Francois Mitterrand (France), Indira Gandhi (India), Alhaji Shehu (Nigeria), Thdrbjorn Falldin (Sweden), Luis Herrera Campins (Venezuela) and Kurt Waldheim (United Nations).

CHRISTA COWRIE

The gauntlet on Avenida Tulum

three faces of cancun

exists, but rather three. The first is the Hotel Zone, the narrow urbanized strip that once was a deserted islandaround 6,000 hotel rooms which lodge a little more than 750,000 tourists annually. The second, the city planned by Fonatur. It has somewhat more than 35,000 inhabitants, is organized into super-blocks, a modern urban concept that enormously facilitates providing services. And the third, Puerto Juarez, the lost city, the misery belt of Cancun, something like 60,000 inhabitants with deficient services of potable water, electricity, land title, garbage collection and, especially, sewers. The present municipal president, Joaquin Gonzalez Castro, does not like such an arbritary division: "There is only one Cancun and one poorly distributed wealth which is the origin of many contrasts. And without in-

The downtown

restaurants
battle for customers. Some of the tricks used-sing menus, ring welcome bells, applaud the diners.

ODAY, NOT ONE CANCUN

Cancun today is home to a little more than 100,000 Mexicans, a community that has become the third largest city on the peninsula. In the photograph, the urban conglomerate can be seen in the foreground, the Hotel Zone and the Caribbean in the distance.

dulging in demagogic illusions, we are integrating the marginal zones at very good speed." In any case, the division is not capricious. Poverty begins almost exactly where Avenida Lopez Portillo ends, that is, the old border of the areas controlled by Fonatur. At the border where Federal control ended, spontaneous settlement began. Recalls Alfonso Alarcon, first municipal president (1975-78): "The problem clearly overflowed on us. We did a little, but the people came as if attracted by a magnet. When I became mayor, we were 8,500 when I left, almost 25,000. Triple in three years. . ." During this time, the Fideicomiso Puerto Juarezwas created, (the Puerto Juarez Trust), an organism in which Fonatur and the state participated, covering an area of 60,000 hectares comprising the old Santa Maria Hadenda.The main effort consisted on regularization, which reached a satisfactory rate. But there were no resources for much more. Felipe Amaro Santana succeeded Alarcon in the municipal government (1978-81): "When I made my electoral campaign, the Colonia was an endless line of pot holes. They looked like battle trenches, several meters deep.When it rained they were real death traps. An automobile would easily fit inside." The second step was paving. In order to avoid cyclical flooding, the streets were artificially raised above the surrounding terrain by means of artificial fill. It was a good solution for the streets, but a disaster for the houses, because upon being surrounded by avenues which acted like dikes, the blocks became artificial lakes. During the term of Martinez Ross the state government did not demonstrate very much enthusiasm of any kind for the Colonia. They were dealing with a Fonatur planning error, of course. It was not a pleasant task to pay the bill for cleaning it up.

In 1982, at the direction of new governor Pedro Joaquin Coldwell, the local government set in operation a program called New Horizons, which essentially consisted of providing basic services and housing. And during four years almost all the fiscal surplus of Cancun was absorbed by the project, as were considerable state resources as well. In the opinion of the mayor, "New Horizons is the nation's most ambitious urban rehabilitation and development project, involving in the solution of the problem all units at all three levels of government. As a result, Cancun today continues to have a lost city, but it is the least lost city in the country. The water network has been extended to 90 per cent; electricity, 100 per cent, and pavement to 80 per cent, while regularization of land ownership reaches 95 per cent. The installation of the networks, of course, does not necessarily signify that all the homes have all services. The water system does exist, but many houses are not hooked up. The same thing has happened with electricity. Street lights function, but the interiors of many houses are still illuminated by oil lamps. Gonzalez Castro asserts: "It's a phase. It would be absurd for us to have gotten this far and be held back. But the problem of resources does exist. The majority of the people now own their own land and are paying for it. They also have to pay for services, and installing water in

The construction boom has been a constant in the existence of Cancun. And color has been another. Even the public housing of the New Horizons program testifies to the chromatic exuberance of tropical

CHRISTA COWRIE

Whole armies of masons and laborers are recruited in the labor market. In many specialties (plaster, plumbing, carpentry) there is a chronic scarcity of qualified personnel and wages have climbed to very high levels.

the home is not cheap today. We have public water outlets where they can go and supply themselves, so they can have water meanwhile." The Puerto Juarez colony has absorbed a little more than 4.6 billion pesos during the last three years [since 1982, say $10 million US in average 82-85 pesos] from federal and local resources. The gravest problem remains to be resolved, sewers. The subsoil in the settlement has turned out to be a very resistant layer of rock. Consequently, the installation of sewer lines requires the use of explosives. The alternative, pick and shovel, is extremely tedious. Because there are no sewers, almost the entire population of the Colonia defecates outside. The municipal government has started a program of constructing septic tanks, authorizing very accessible loans to homeowners, but success has been limited. In the past year, only 500 septic tanks were installed and nothing indicates an accelerated rate in the future. The deficit is now calculated to be 4,000 tanks, so the problem of fecalwaste does not appear to have a solution in sight.

The current director of Aeromexico, Sigfrido Paz Paredes, considered the problem at its beginning and today records his memory of the results: "There has never been a project that hasn't suffered changes while in progress. This is valid for a simple house, a thousand times more so for a complete city. Because Cancun had a part that wasn't planned, we had to re-plan and inject large doses of imagination and enthusiasm. After Fonatur, the local government has done a great job. They have adopted novel plans and propelled them decisively. I believe that the Puerto Juarez problem is a problem on the way to being solved." One of the measures has been to stop looking at the Colonia as an isolated problem and seek integrated solutions for the entire urban complex. This task is partially the responsibility of a coordinating commission headed by Jorge Lobo, head of operations with respect to the Municipal Urban Development Plan. In his opinion, the panorama is favorable: "Some problems are being solved. The rate of water delivery, presently 3.5 cubic meters per second, guarantees the demand until 1988. Putting in sewers is a question of time. The routing was complicated for us, but in the new neighborhoods we have restored the traditional grid, less expensive than the original. In my judgment, the principle challenge will be to accomodate hotel zone growth to the urban zone's." The search for this balance confronts some problems: "There are many departments that have voice and vote, and this complicates matters. Each one has its own priorities, its criteria, its norms and its method

of killing fleas. And so sometimes we get in each other's way." The excess of departments is especially notorious in the hotel strip. First, the ocean, which as an ecological reserve, is the responsiblity of Sedue [Secretary of Ecology and Urban Development]. Then the twenty meters of federal zone, assigned to the Maritime Secretary. Then the hotels, regulated by Sectur. The municipality controls the coast highway, but the gardens in the dividing malls continue to be Fonatur area. After this comes the lagoon, Sedue again, and to this it would be necessary to add the service supplierswater, the state government; electricity, Federal Electricity Commission; gas, direct with Pemex. Gonzalez Castro comments: "No doubt so many participants do make municipal life very complex." Much further from the urban problemsin some ways in common with other Mexican citiesthere was a cultural phenomenon in Cancun worth notingworth a full depth study, in factwhich cuts directly into the community social profile: the incorporation into Mexican society of the Maya of Quintana Roo. Since the end of the War of the Castes, the Mayas of Quintana Roo and a good part of the eastern and southern areas of Yucatan have lived in a virtually complete state of isolation. Cancunand the series of roads built around itbroke the shell and made possible the indigenous country folk's entrance into civilization. But it was too abrupt a change. Daniel Ortiz recalls the organization of the first encampment: "In the second week of work a group of workers arrived, about 80 chicleros. They're strong men, accustomed to heavy work, and so I was happy. But of the 80, only three spoke Spanish. The other 77. Maya. And so that they could understand mewe were clearing bush, each man assigned a designated areaI had to fasten strings to the trees and explain to each one in sign language what they meant." Pioneer resident Jorge Gleason: "The first telephone in Cancun was located in my house, and, of course, it became a communal apparatus. Everyone made and received calls there. During the day, we answered, but at night we assigned a Maya. Curiously, during the day many people called, but no one at night. Finally, it occurred to me one day to ask the man on duty if he was sure that no one had called. 'No one,' he replied. 'You're sure the telephone never rang?' I insisted. 'It rang,' he told me. It rang all night.' The telephone rang, but he didn't know that he had to answer it." The first months are the hardest. Even though many country people speak in Spanish, they really think in Maya. So they say things such as "I looked for it and didn't look for it," wishing to say "I looked for it but I did not find it," because only one word is used for both actions in Maya. Or, equally, "I will lend you a shovel," wishing to say, "Lend me a shovel," according to the correct formula in their language. The Mayan country folk, called mayitas with a certain perjorative flavor, literally jumped cen-

Many fortunes have grown parallel with Cancun: Abid Burad in his auto business center, Santiago Pizano in sporty repose, Cotty Trujillo and family at a reception in their hotel.

The two ends of the seven: Piinia Cancun above, at the angle formed by the two lines; and Puma Nizuc at the base of the islet. The number of hotels corresponding to the first stage contrasts markedly with the relative isolation of Club Mediterrane.

Carlos Constandse

turies when they left their jungle habitat and joined the world of Cancun. Other country-folk don't have so many problems. In fact, many have found in Cancun the Mexican version of the Promised Land, a virgin territory replete with possibities and achievements. The stories are as varied as they are similar: Punished by his father, Cotty Trujillo arrived in Cancun twelve years ago, at the wheel of a dump truck. In the jargon of construction they are called dumpers and earn by piecework, transporting loads of sand and gravel. Trujillo did more turns than anyone. Today he's owner of the Cotty, a 60-room hotel, which leaves him sufficient time and money to dedicate himself to his favorite business, a marina. Another dumper, Santiago Pizano, arrived in Cancun with two old trucks, two new children and his wife. His present business, Materiales Pizano, specializing in the construction line, is billing several million pesos a month. Adib Burad Cabrera sought a sentimental refuge in Cancun after a disappointment in love in his native Campeche. Son of the owner of an automobile parts outlet, Burad quickly repaired dozens of vehicles that remained halted for weeks for lack of parts. He opened what was then the port's first auto parts supply and, in a few years, was a millionaire. The business was too small for him and so he sold it and dedicated a few vears to real estate. In a few weeks he will open an automotive bu-

siness center he owns in Cancun. Manuel Castro Lopez was hired as a topographer. But his work turned out to be obstructed by lack of materials and, even worse, replacement parts. And so he had the idea to form a company called Equipment for Roads, which today occupies the leadership in its line in all Quintana Roo. Enrique Arce Guzman arrived as a foreman at Consorcio Caribe. Today he is owner of a fleet of dump trucks and principal partner of a quebradora, a sand and gravel plant. His comfortable economic position permits him to dedicate himself to promoting his favorite passion, fighting cocks. Rafael Lara y Lara was one of the first engineers on the island. He worked at Fonatur several years and, in 1978, was close to obtaining the ruling party nomination for municipal president. He hasn't done badly as an independent builder. Among his works are the Isla Mujeres Palacio Municipal, the Secretary of Public Works in Chetumal, the Cancun packing plant, a dozen condominiums, the enlargement of the Bojorquez Hotel, part of the Hotel Casa Maya and around 350 private

Enrique Arce and his cocks.

CHRISTA COWRIE

The ten businesses of Abelardo Vela

houses. This year, Lara expects to bill several hundred million pesos. Money and more money. It's possible to obtain examples by the dozens and all would have the same common denominatoreconomic success. Not only status but also prestige seem to depend upon the size of the bank account. The proto-humans of Cancun, the examples to follow, according to well-generalized opinion, the spiritual guides of the vox populi, without exception bear the seal of prosperity printed on their faces. There are names that are on everyone's lips. Carlos Millet, for example, owner of Place Vendome shopping center. Or Salim Abraham, owner of Supermercado San Francisco de Asis. Or Abelardo Vara, who came to Cancun as a hotel manager and today is partner in ten businesses. Or Carlos Constandse, migrating from Mexico, with multiple real estate interests. Or Alfredo Cabrera, in restaurants and the automotives line. Fortunes of many million pesos. Of course the richest remained poor in comparison to the big hoteliers. A 300-room beach hotel is worth no less than five billion pesos [about 25 million 1985 dollars]. Here other names are heard: Gaston Azcarraga, Agustin Legorreta, Yolanda Vargas Dulche, Humberto Lobo, the ICA Group, the Visa Group. But the biggest hoteliers don't live in Cancun, so the local rich exercise the entertaining role of community

leadership. And the only requisite is accumulation. Cancun is a river of money for its fortunate. A single case: in the nigh season, Carlos 'n' Charlie's restaurant averages 800 meals daily, which, according to a good restauranteur (Alex Cardini), should run about twenty dollars a unit. Eight hundred times twenty is 16,000 dollars. . .daily! Of course, this is a very popular company, but the truth is no business fails in Cancun. Municipal President Joaquin Gonzalez Castro explains it this way: "The demand for services is very great, the same for quali-

Times have changed in Cancun. Lobsters are no longer the same size and neither are the prices. The lobsters shrank, the prices expanded. The only thing that remains unchangeable is the generosity of the Caribbean sun.
CHRISTA COWRIE

FONATUR

fied personnel. Anyone who knows how to do anything has work in Cancun. Here we even lack lawyers, supposedly surplus in the country. There are times when we have problems finding professionals to occupy positions as district attorney's agents, judges too." Money is a kind of god in Cancun and in the final instance everything comes from the Hotel Zone. But it's working very efficiently. In recent

years, occupancy has been better than 90 per cent, considered saturation in tourism terms. At present, a little more than 6,000 rooms are in operation, but this number is increasing rapidly. In any case, with this demand, it's not strange that Cancun should be the country's most costly tourist destination. A hotel room, between 15,000 and 40,000 pesos [60 to 610 dollars]. Breakfast, between 600 and 1,200 pesos [2.5 to 5 1985 dollars]. A highball on the beach, 500 pesos [two 1985 dollar]. A lobster 2,500 to 4,000 [$10 to $16]. A boat to go fishing, 10,000 pesos an hour [40 1985 dollars]. With statistical graphs in hand, Sectur demonstrates that the reputation is unjustified. There are inexpensive lodgings in Cancun. But Sectur itself assures that the polls that it takes show clearly that the tourists come to Cancun seeking beach pleasure as their number one goal. And the inexpensive lodgings are found far from the beaches. Of course the Fonatur plan contemplates opening and supporting many public beaches. In fact, some of the bestLas Perlas, Langosta, Caracol were reserved for that purpose. But curiously, in fifteen years, they have hardly gone beyond being open to the public and in no case been fitted out. There are no public toilets, nor dressing rooms, nor sunshades, nor restaurants, nor lifeguards. Otherwise, however, the exquisite cares that Fonatur takes in the preservation of the area and its tourism image must be recognized, an aspect that pays attention to the most unsuspected facets. For example, in 1984 there were 22 drownings in Cancun. Fonatur made a study of this and discovered that some of these deaths were unavoidablepeople who had gone into the sea in states of drunkeness or under the effects of drugs. But in at least a pair of cases, the accidents could have been foreseen. This was the case of the parachutes drawn by speedboats that because of the prevailing winds are highly popular in Cancun. Fonatur affirmed that a good number of the boats suffered constant mechanical failures and that equipment quality was below par. It could not be proved that these factors had caused deaths, but cases were reported in which the boat had failed in middle passage and the parachutes fell down, tourist and all, or even similar cases in which the line had snapped. Fonatur pushed new regulations. Each boat, in the first place, must carry a second crew member, whose only responsibility would be to help the tourist in case of a breakdown, even if it were the scarce help

Cancun presumes to have the world's best discoteque18,000 lights operated by four computers, four video screens, hardwood floor and 1,200 seats. Getting in is the problem. The place is jammed even mid-week.

Joaquin Gonzalez Castro, Mayor of Canciin

of getting the lifeguards to come. Then, the linesof silk and nylonhave to be replaced every month, the harness every six months and the parachutes every two years, even if still usable. Finally, any violation of these regulations implied license cancellation. In the first three months of this year, not a single accident was registered involving the parachutes. Another advantage of wealthy Cancun is that the tourist spendsand leaves in the countryan average of 100 dollars a day. But one must not be unjust with Fonatur. The plan was to create tourism business and Cancun functions for the tourists, not even for the rich. In fact there are practically no private residences on the entire island. They hardly reach a hundred and the better part are aligned along the golf course, in a narrow stretch where hotels simply won't fit. And these, of course, do cost a lot. At this time, the original expectations have been achieved with a notable degree of accuracy. Cancun is receiving 750,000 visitors a year, a figure that places it among the nation's top three beach resorts. And there is surely much more to come in the distance. After all, at only fifteen years old, Cancun it's barely an adolescent.

Caribbean
visitors to Cancun sign, there is an entry that reads: "Scarcely ten years since this site was selected for a tourism development, I render full and warm homage to the true founder of Cancun, the one who conceived, encouraged, financed and promoted what is today a deed: Ernesto Fernandez Hurtado; and to all shall read this, it pleases me to inform you, who was the quiet, modest, honest but visionary Mexican to whom we all owe the pleasure of this tourism paradise." The notation is dated July 1977 and the signature is that of Secretary of Tourism, Antonio Enriquez Savignac. Coming from whom it comes, the text has a remarkable degree of detachment, as Fernandez Hurtado and Enrfquez Savignac were close partners in the first years of Cancun.

cancun, profile of the mexican

N THE BOOK THAT DISTINGUISHED

Pedro Joaqui'n Coldwell: "We continue forward."

The first as creative brain, the second as executive arm. Alfonso Alarcon, first municipal president, today entirely out of the tourism sector, has his own version: "I don't know whose idea it was, but the construction of Cancun is the exclusive achievement of Savignac. To begin with, he motivated us to an incredible work mystique. We were the project and the project was our very life. We were willing to do anything, to give up our souls, to go through any kind of privation to carry it forward, all in exchange for really miserable salaries. Who knows how he did it, but he had us totally hypnotized." Another important personality, David Gustavo Gutierrez Ruiz holds a different opinion: "Of course, the intellectual and material authors of Cancun are Fernandez Hurtado and Enriquez Savignac. But the credit for its actualization, the force that permitted it to begin and consolidate, was the political will of President Echeverria." Gutierrez Ruiz holds that the development of Cancun was one of the most important achievementsnot merely local, but also nationalof the 70-76 term, an opinion shared by his successor in the governorship, Jesus Martinez Ross: "Without Echeverria, Cancun would have remained a plan, like so many plans that have never left desks. I have no fear in making public the enormous admiration I feel for the work of the government of Luis Echeverria. His name and Cancun's will be tied forever." The opinion of Governor Pedro Joaqufn Coldwell is found to be tempered by distance: "Cancun is a triumph of institutional continuity. It was begun with Dfaz Ordaz, but was effectively supported by Echeverria, by Lopez Portillo and by Miguel de la Madrid. The federal, state and local governments participated, each to the measure of its possibilities. And the only beneficiary was the nation. For me, it is palpable proof of national institutions working well." But if speculating on the paternity of Cancun could well be idle, perhaps it would not be so much so to speculate on its future. And a good

Tulum

Cozumel

Isla Mujeres

Chemuvil

Cancn will probably grow toward the south, integrating itself with the tourism corridor of the eastern coast of Quintana Roo. Along the 150 kilometers that separate Tulum from the development, there are at least a dozen coves and beaches with enormous potential, to which are added the traditional alternatives, Cozumel and Isla Mujeres. The future of the Mexican Caribbean is promising.

Xel-Ha

tool could be the predictions of Fonatur itself. On taking account, the calculations and projections adopted by the creators of the project at the end of the 60s, have been achieved with surprising accuracy (which has not happened with other master plans, beginning with Cancun's twin, Zihuataneo). The original sketch divided the Cancun Hotel Zone into three parts. The first extended from the city, at the north end, to the site where the Hotel Sheraton is found, covering more or less half of the total island length. In this territory, the construction of 7,500 hotel rooms is contemplated. Today there are a few more than 5,000 and Fonatur still owns four or five large hotel parcels on which, theoretically, the 2,000 remaining will be located. The second step is even more ambitious. It extends from the Hotel Sheraton to Punta Nizuc, where Club Mediterrane is in operation and it is supposed to contain 11,000 rooms. To date, there are 500 in operation and 1,700 under construction, some almost finished. Enriquez Savignac is committed to opening a minimum of 1,200 rooms annually from 1985 to 1988. Orlando Arroyo, local Fonatur Director, speaks about the third and last stage of Cancun: "This is still a nebulous project and it is better that it should be. No one knows how Cancun will function with 18,000 rooms, those of the first two stages. This should take place in 1994, not at the end of the present term but rather of the next. The problem is that we are playing with many unknowns. How many inhabitants will we have? Where are we going to continue getting tourists from? How will the Caribbean market evolve?" The number of inhabitants is important. In a small tourism center, it is

Kemil Rizk

Orlando Arroyo

supposed that each hotel room generates a direct job and an indirect job, that is to say, work for two heads of family, representing ten people. But as tourism destinations grow, this ratio changes. Later there are one direct and two indirect, then one and three, etc. Acapulco, with 28,000 rooms, has almost a million population, that is 35 inhabitants per room. Of course, this does not mean that the 35 Acapulquenos depend on a single room, but rather that cities complicate and diversify when they grow. To date, Cancun has 6,000 rooms and 100,000 inhabitants, a ratio of 16 to 1. Fonatur calculates that this figure could increase to 25 on the completion of 25,000 rooms, which would give a population of 450,000 inhabitants. Orlando Arroyo again: "A city of 450,000 is just about medium-sized for this country. But we're talking about 18,000 rooms in 1994, only nine years from today. The problem isn't the absolute figure350,000 more peoplebut rather the relative: from 100,000 to 450,000 in nine years. It is a colossal leap." Moreover, Fonatur might be short in its ratio of 25 to 1, because Cancun appears destined to become the economic axis of the east coast of the peninsula and, eventually, of the entire Mexican Caribbean. Kemil Rizk, Director of Fonatur nationally, offers his ideas on the subject: "Cancun not only changed the Caribbean's physiognomy and tourism currents flow. It also did something more important. It changed our concept of tourism activity forever. It's true that we have natural attractions, true that we're close to the potential markets, true that we're hospitable, but today we know that all this is not enough. Now we know that planning is needed, that loans are needed, that specialists are needed, and, above all, a large dose of courage and energy. Now we know how to put the package together. We have found a good formula." Rizk by all means knows that the formula doesn't produce results by magic: "We made many errors in building Cancun, in planning as well as in execution. But the basic concept has been demonstrated to have been correct. From this base, we can confront the development of the new centers with greater optimism. We're going to give the final push to Ixtapa, reinforce our activities in the Baja California Peninsula, and, in Oaxaca, we have begun Huatulco. And in Cancun itself, our plans are even more ambitious." Based on these projections, it would not be exaggerating to foresee explosive tourism growth for the east coast of Quintana Roo for the coming decades. Some clues: A narrow strip of territory of great natural beauty, very similar to Cancunsea one side, lagoon on the otherextending almost to Isla Contoy have been acquired by a group of investors among whom stand out Carlos Hank Gonzalez and Paulino Rivera Torres. Plans to begin tourism development in the area are very advanced. A serious intention exists to develop the coast of the middle part of the state, a 30-kilometer beach strip situated north of Tulum. An organization called Fidecaribe undertook the construction of the installations of a beach called Aventuras, and a small business center is functioning in the cove of Xel-Ha. There is a more ambitious plan to convert this transit route into a terminal zone (where tourists sleep), integrating the beaches of Chemuyil and X-Cacel with these and the existing center at Akumal as well. These projects will have to be a task for the state government, as Fidecaribe is in the process of being liquidated. Given the quality of the beaches and the environmental beauty between Cancun and Fidecaribe, it is very possible that spontaneous destinations will arise. An isolated case, but not unique: the cove of XCaret. Less than two kilometers from the coast highway, the little cove is available for the practice of aquatic sports and has the mouth of a cenote and some Mayan ruins only a few meters from the beach. Two important points can be counted on to close the pincers, Isla Mujeres and Cozumel. Both have drawbacks for massive hotel develop-

Fonatur's forecasts for the urban growth of Cancun have been achieved with notable precision. This punctuality partly obeyed the control which the trust exercised over its salable property, and, as a result, over the advance of urban blight. For the year 2000, municipal projections contemplate a city area easily four times larger than today.

mentIsla Mujeres, land scarcity, given its diminutive size; Cozumel, the supply of potable water. Each can provide services complementing the general attractions of the area, however. Cozumel, for example, receives 350,000 day-tourists a year, passengers on the cruise ships, which arrive between 7 and 9 A.M., and leave at night. Unfortunately, the existing superstructure is very poorthe number of restaurants is small, the diving and sailing clubs have few boats, the variety of handicrafts is very limited, the only aquarium is a disaster and prices are higher than Cancun. There are studies estimating that Cozumel could capture up to a million of this kind of tourists, but the focus has to be changed. Private boats are another important option. In Florida alone, without any doubt the principal market, there are more 30,000 private boats larger than fifty feet, that is to say, able to cross the Gulf of Mexico. The problem is that they can't dock in Cancun, simply and only because there is no marina. This is certainly contemplated in Fonatur's plans and it is a good sized marina, that will host some 5,000 ships a year and will be complemented by a private marina, also already approved. In Cozumel, at the same time, there are two small bays that could be fitted out for the same purpose. But the mother lode is found on Isla Mujeres. where the Nacax marina, by means of enlargement, could have capacity for 22,000 ships a year. Finally, it would be worthwile to consider the undiscovered coasts

HOTEL PANORAMA OF CANCUN

OPENING HOTEL ZONE ROOMS YEAR BY YEAR TOTAL

1974

Villas Tacul Playa Blanca Caribe Cancun (Bojorquez) Camino Real Presidente Villas Presidente Club Mediterrane Carrousel DosPlayas Kin Ha Club Verano Beach Vacation Club International Carisa y PaIma Maya Caribe Casa Maya Sheraton Cancun Viva Calinda Krystal Club Lagoon Sina Fiesta Americana Mission Crea Hyatt Regency Aristos Exelaris Hyatt Girasol Brisas

60 161 111 291 197 100 300 111 88 127 77 200 98 40 257 471 210 280 328 91 37 281 189 88 301 222 202 66 54

332

1975

588

920

1976

499

1419

1977

404

1 823

1978

138

1961

1980

938

2 899

1981

736

3 635

1982

558

4193

1983

523

4 716

1984

332

5 048

1974-84

DOWNTOWN: America, Antillano, Arabe, Atlantis, Batab, Canto, Caoba Bonampak, Caribe International, Carrillos, Colonial, Coral, Cotty, Flamboyanes, Hacienda, Handall, Kokai, Komvaser, Marfa del Lourdes, Marrufo, Novotel, Parador, Plaza Caribe, Plaza del Sol, Plaza Tulum, Rivemar, Soberanis, Tropical Caribe, Villa Maya, Yaxchilan.

1292

In less than one decade,the Cancun airport has become the country's fifth largest in numbers of passengers during the tourist season and the eleventh in total users. In fact, of the 750,000 visitors who arrive in Cancun a year, more than half do it by plane.

of Isla Mujeres and Cozumel. It's true that given that they face the open sea, they have been traditionally unappreciated. But now the situation is beginning to change. After all the principal competition is the Caribbean islands. Don't they all have undiscovered sides? Cancun still has a lot to grow. Governor Pedro Joaquin Coldwell comments: "The vocation of Quintana Roo is tourism. We have 860 kilometers of coast and we are exploiting less than 50. The immediate challenge is development and I am sure that we can do it. With Cancun, we've demonstrated our spirit, ability and imagination. We're continuing forward."