Mexico’s next two presidents, however, weren’t so convinced. For millions of Americans rotating through Tijuana and other border cities in the 1950s, Mexico was a cheap drunk, a bag of pot, whores having sex with burros. The federal government watched the impending revolution in Cuba and shuddered. Overnight, tourism seemed freighted with political imperatives, forcing President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines in the mid-’50s to preach a more explicit gospel. “While it is my aim to promote this major source of income,” he stated, “it is also necessary for tourist activities to respect our customs and ethical principles.” He stumped for higher moral standards, natural beauty, wholesome recreation, Mexico’s unique history. Simultaneously, he railed against profiteering, “coarse commercialization of activities catering to low human passions and vices.” His successor, Adolfo López Mateos, echoed this new creed, emphasizing tourism as a means of “strengthening ties of human understanding and international intelligence.” In the minds of Mexico’s leaders, tourism seemed to take form as a sort of multinational Chautauqua.
When an imbalance of payments due to insufficient foreign exchange earnings threatened to destabilize the country in the late 1960s, Banco de México began analyzing the sources of foreign exchange—exports, in-bond industries, and tourism—that supplemented the country’s oil revenues. Only tourism exhibited a clear potential. For the first time, Banco de México constructed, between 1966 and 1968, a statistical portrait of Mexico’s tourist activities. Pondering the reams of data, the bank’s theoreticians suggested an idea without precedent—“the building of complete tourist resort cities from the ground up.” Consequently, Banco de México funded a meticulous exploration of the country’s six thousand miles of coastline. Bank analysts calculated average weekly hours of sunshine. They analyzed soil types and tidal patterns. Research teams evaluated socioeconomic levels and identified routes of supply. Finally, early in 1969, Banco de México recommended to the federal government the creation of “five integral tourist resorts.”
An uninhabited barrier island known as Cancún topped the list because of its location on the Caribbean basin. Ixtapa, north of Acapulco, was chosen in the hope that it would alleviate the excessive concentration of tourists in the older resort. In Baja California Sur, an underpopulated region dozing in geographical and political isolation, the bank foresaw a “ladder” of nautical stopovers from the border southward, crowned by the integral resorts of Los Cabos and Loreto. Thus, California’s 250,000 boats capable of navigating the Pacific offshore waters would be lured down the Baja Peninsula and into the Sea of Cortés. For the capital of its planned Pacific Gringolandia, Banco’s team targeted Oaxaca, bastion of the pre-Hispanic past and one of the nation’s most destitute states. There, on the belly of the southern Pacific coast, were the Bahías de Huatulco—a cluster of nine paradisiacal bays, an incipient Rio de Janeiro. Here was the last link in the Pacific archipelago: in its dimensions and future potential, Huatulco was to be the grandest resort of them all.
The magnitude of Banco de México’s scheme was enormous—a thirty-year comprehensive strategy. The government quickly blessed the creation of an overseer agency, the National Fund for Tourist Infrastructure (Infratur), which just as quickly broke ground for the first two resort cities—Cancún in 1970, Ixtapa in 1971. Three years later, the heretofore irrelevant Department of Tourism was awarded cabinet-level status. Fonatur—the National Trust Fund for Tourism Development, heir to Infratur—was given permission to grant loans for hotels and even build its own, making direct investments in the projects. Although President José López Portillo took office in 1976 in the midst of a deepening financial crisis, he wasted no time in launching the Los Cabos and Loreto projects, certain that tourism had “sufficient economic impact to solve our problems.”
By the time of Miguel de la Madrid’s inauguration in 1982, tourism had become a lauded national pillar, one that might be counted on to keep the economy from collapsing. All that Fonatur required of the new president was that he promote the industry’s benefits not to the treasury but to the public welfare. The president went a step further, asserting that the touristic process strengthened “the cultural identity of our people.”
After spending a few days in Acapulco I drove south into the state of Oaxaca. Eight hours on the road brought me to the small coastal town of Puerto Escondido—surf-rat kingdom, haven to retro-hippies, way station for your basic assorted Eurotrash. Not a Fonatur kind of place. Here one could bump into gringos who would cringe at the word tourist, though gringo tourists of a sort they were. I found them loitering along the harbor-front street, composing themselves into a bohemian scene—privileged gypsies who more or less wanted the Third World to remain, at least in this place, as loose and carefree as it appeared (to them) to be.
Before driving to the water, I had picked up a pair of hitchhikers who were practicing a slightly more upscale form of drifting—gringos feeding off gringo dreams. Crystal and J.P., down from the States, were time-share sellers, part of a significant entrepreneurial subculture spawned by the burgeoning Third World resorts.
Crystal was thirty-two; J.P., three years older. Married for two years, they’d been knocking around Mexico for one, adroitly harvesting Mexico’s money tree despite the fact that neither of them had an FM3, the Mexican work permit for foreigners, which would make their efforts legal. They were following the time-share season south—San Miguel de Allende, Manzanillo, Ixtapa—heading for the heralded Huatulco, two hours south of here. Only, their savings had run out, and now they were stuck in Puerto Escondido. Here there were no condos to hustle. I dropped each of them off on separate money-borrowing missions around town.
We met again in the morning over breakfast. I had requested a mini-seminar on time-sharing. I wanted to hear how Gringolandia got sold to gringos. The night before had not been a good one for them. Wounded in Vietnam seventeen years ago, J.P. had been eating painkillers ever since. The rent was due, and he was out of Percodan. Somehow he had lost the key to the padlock on their cabana and shattered the door kicking it in. At breakfast he was woozy and sweating, his face bloodless, but he wanted to talk, get right into it, tighten the focus, redeem himself. I sat back and listened.
“We go into a resort,” he said, “and try to talk to the president of a time-share marketing company. They take me as a ‘liner,’ Crystal as an ‘OPC’—an off-property contact. The OPC gets people to come in-house—you’re out on the street grabbing them, answering questions, giving them free-drink cards, asking them to go on a tour of the facility. The tour is called lining—the sales effort between bringing the people in and closing them. The liners guide them, take them to breakfast, fill out their forms, warm them up, and become their friends. Then you ask them three simple things. Do you like it? If you get a yes, you write down the word like and put a check by it—the visuals are important here. Next, if you had this would you use it? If they say yes, you write down the word use. Put a check mark. Next. If this was affordable, if it wouldn’t take any bread and butter off your table, da da da, would you buy this today? Most people won’t say no at this point, because they’ve just spent an hour with you and they still haven’t heard the price, they’re dying to know the price, but you’re not going to give it to them until they say yes. So they usually say yes to the third question, and you write down affordable.
“At that point,” J.P. continued, “you assume the sale. Okay, so now I’ll highball ’em. Let’s say the product costs $3,995. The going rate in Mexico for a one-bedroom time-share condo—one week a year for life—is about $4,000. I’ll tell them $5,500 plus this cost, plus that cost, all adding up to six grand and something. ‘Oh no,’ they say, ‘that’s too expensive.’ Then we do what’s called the drop. Okay, I say, let me give you your free gift then. That’s when I call for the back man, the closer. I can do the back hit myself, but the proper way to do it is to bring in another salesman, another gringo—they’re almost always gringos. ‘Mr. Jones,’ I go,
‘these people are from Timbuktu, they said they like it, they said they’d use it, but it’s just too expensive for them. They like to fish, they like to golf, they love this place because of such and such, but boy, it’s just too high.’ The backer nods his head for a while and then he goes, ‘Well, I’ve got a special deal today.’ Could be a repossession, a divorce, anything. Okay, so the backer drops it from fifty-five to $3,995. Special deal, today only. ‘If you walk out the door,’ you say to them, ‘this nice-looking couple waiting over here is going to get it.’ They start thinking—man, $3,995 for thirty years, one week a year, fixed or floating time, 1/52 of a dream come true.”
The liner receives four points—4 percent of each sale he is on. As an OPC, Crystal was making more money because of the faster click—anywhere from twenty to forty bucks for getting a client to take a tour whether the client buys or not. And if a client does buy, the OPC also shaves a point. “Not bad for Mexico,” she said.
Crystal wanted to know if Fonatur was in Huatulco. I told her yes. “Oh God,” she said, erupting with nervous laughter. “It’s going to be hard to work as an OPC then. I’ll have to be a liner, because where Fonatur is, they’ll have Mexicans out front, to show that the Mexicans are capable of getting people in there, but once they’re in-house, they need Americans to talk to them. Only Americans. You’ve got to paint a picture for them of beautiful vacations from now until they drop dead”—her voice turned husky and slow and seductive—“in places just like this, places just like where you want to go, and you need to trap them into coming back, into coming back, into coming back.”
The road I took south to Huatulco was uncharacteristically straight and conspicuously well attended. I recalled the subtitle from the title page of a four-color, high-sheen coffee-table-style book detailing Fonatur’s many accomplishments: “The Imprint of Fonatur on the Geography of Mexico.”
Among Fonatur’s many achievements have been the following: During the initial stages of each resort project, every hotel room built brought ten new residents to the area, and twice that many by the time the project’s goals were completed. While under construction, each hotel room created 2.5 jobs directly and the same number indirectly, and consistently paid these workers above the minimum wage. Similarly, the operation of each hotel room generated four permanent jobs. For every federal peso invested in the projects, ten private-sector pesos chased after it. By last year, Mexico was tenth in the world in tourist revenues. The foreign-exchange surplus represented by the tourist sector during the de la Madrid years of the mid-1980s exceeded $7 billion. Six hundred thousand jobs had been added to the economy during this time, and Mexico’s total hotel capacity reached 305,000 rooms—eighth in the world. With customary foresight, Fonatur had built infrastructures for the addition of 50,000 new rooms in the coming years, a capacity equivalent to two more Acapulcos.
About thirty minutes from the heart of the new resort, just past the new international airport, the roadway abruptly convulsed as it wound through the steep mountains that had for so long isolated the coastal plain from any development. My first glimpse of Bahías de Huatulco was not idyllic—I looked down upon the workers’ boomtown of La Crucecita.
Situated on the small plain in a valley opening its arms onto Huatulco’s premier bays, La Crucecita was, until 1984, nothing at all save a scattering of palapas, or shacks. A few miles to the south on the pretty bay of Santa Cruz, forty families grew corn and practiced subsistence fishing, as they had since colonial times. Altogether, fewer than a thousand inhabitants scraped a living out of Huatulco’s coast. Local income was below the state average, the lowest in Mexico. There was no electricity. No drinking water. No permanent buildings. No reliable roads, no clear land boundaries. Dengue fever and malaria, though, were there, as they always had been, along with a range of other diseases already eradicated throughout most of Mexico.
Enter Fonatur. Twenty-one miles inland, Santa María Huatulco—a community of two thousand people serving as the municipal seat—was granted legal title to the properties it circumscribed in May 1984. A day later, although individual buildings were unresolved, 52,000 acres of ejido lands in the municipality were expropriated by presidential decree. It happened virtually without a whimper yet not without its complications. Santa Cruz, for example, was the proposed site for Huatulco’s primary marina and inner-harbor complex of shopping malls, sports clubs, and restaurants. The peasants who resided there were each given a few hundred dollars and a house in outlying La Crucecita. (The relocation was interrupted and stalled when many of them turned around and sold the houses to newcomers, then moved back to their palapas on the beach, holding out for more money and houses to budge them a second time.)
The La Crucecita I drove into was home to fifteen thousand people, maybe twenty thousand—it was growing too fast for statistics to be accurate. The master plan’s maximum density for the town was forty-five thousand, but that ceiling might prove unrealistic. Now in La Crucecita there were clinics and liquor stores, dentists and a video bar, a travel agency and welding shops. There were factories for ice cubes, floor and roof tiles, adobe bricks. Stores sold restaurant equipment, beds, office supplies, auto parts, hardware, pharmaceuticals. Incredibly, there was a computer store and copy center and an ice-cream shop called Paletas Manhattan.
Everywhere haywire whiskers of rebar (concrete reinforcement rod) rose into the sky, a marsh of iron reeds. Everywhere the gunfire of hammers, the thumping of pickaxes, the thunder and gargle of diesel machinery. Men were erecting utility poles, laying sewer lines. Men were shaping roof beams with machetes, tying the joints with sisal rope. Some thirty thousand rooms are to be built—room enough eventually for two million tourists a year. In front of a nearly finished complex of condominiums, I saw the rarest of signs in Mexico: HELP WANTED.
The demand for workers’ housing had been only partly satisfied by temporary construction camps. Men slept in the airy frames of apartments they were building, bathing with hose and bucket. But even after dark La Crucecita worked on, hyperactive, a streetlight casting just enough illumination to saw a board or drive a stake with a sledgehammer. Whoever had knocked off was still in motion, promenading the sidewalks, playing mob basketball under the lights on a gigantic new court.
In weird contrast to these industrious scenes, the palapa restaurants on the water in Santa Cruz—a designated tourist area—were empty once the sun went down. One of Huatulco’s three hotels in operation, the Sheraton on Tangolunda Bay, was a glittering ghost town. Bats fed happily in its spotlights, and across from the hotel’s echoing lobby entrance, unskilled laborers crouched around campfires in the dirt fields, making eerie postapocalyptic tableaux. Only Club Med out on the promontory of Tangolunda Bay jumped to a beat, guarded by soldiers at its gates.
Still, the outlines of the future of Huatulco were boggling. In all directions, the harsh mountainous terrain was being gouged and terraced. Plowed inland from the Sheraton, a golf course had been sculpted, its naked earth awaiting seed. Everywhere I looked there was someone burning scrub, someone being lectured by an architect, someone digging a trench, installing a satellite dish. Huatulco was being prepared for a population of six hundred thousand. It didn’t take long for the intricacies of scale to become, for me, conceptually unmanageable, superhuman—it was as if I were bearing witness to a modern-day equivalent of the Zapotecs raising their sacred city atop Monte Albán.
One evening in La Crucecita I met a young journalist named Ismael Sánchez at a meeting of the town’s two-year-old Association of Merchants. These fellows were all from Mexico City or some other modern, urban place; they had started a Lions Club and then a Rotary Club. Sánchez, the local correspondent for El Imparcial Del Istmo, Oaxaca’s only daily, was astonished by the enormous and rapid development. Like me, his sympathies were divided.
“Four years ago,” he said, “the people of Santa María Huatulco went to bed at seven. Now they don’t even get home from work in Huatulco
until then, and stay up until midnight to watch TV. They have money and houses now, concessions for businesses, but they say they were happier being poor than living this new way.”
I asked him about the locals who had lived along the beaches.
“They’re not happy about the opportunities; they have no interest in them. All the people getting the nice jobs come from outside, and the Huatulcans take the bad jobs. People here are nice, they are special, but not in good ways. They are stupid because they don’t want better lives. And still they say, ‘Shit on the government.’ Everything came so fast, they are in a dream, and they’re going to stay there.”
Before leaving Huatulco, I got the chance to talk to Dr. Ricardo Ferré, fifty-five, the current regional director for Fonatur for the Huatulco project, appointed by Mexico’s new president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. By this time, my questions had essentially narrowed to one: What, amid all the developing—all the massive hotels and computer stores and video bars—would there be to remind a gringo that he was in Mexico? Ferré was ready for my question.
“I’m a soul engineer,” he answered with an ironic gleam, a cocked grin. Huatulco was a shell without soul; he was trying to create a soul, he said, to burn inside this shell. “I’m like God, I’m a demigod. It will be like”—he held his right hand up to his lips, the fingers pinching an imaginary coal upon which he blew until it burst into flame—“Spirit! You will come in a year and say, well, Ricardo, you failed, or not.”
Ferré is short, stout, white-haired, and has a face like Mickey Rooney’s. His job requires him to be part Cecil B. DeMille, part Walt Disney, part Wizard of Oz. But I began to think as we talked that he was mostly the grandchild of Conrad’s Kurtz. I heard him called a tyrant more than once, and when I told him this, he seemed pleased.
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