The Battle of Zihuatanejo: Round Two

Fronter NorteSur
    Even as the town was festooned in Valentine’s Day red and bouquets of flowers danced in the streets, the scent of popular revolt crackled in the air.
    It all began at the end of January, when the Mexican federal government’s National Trust Fund for Tourism Promotion (FONATUR) took charge of the municipal pier and adjoining port facilities in the Pacific Coast tourist town of Zihuatanejo, Mexico.
    “We’re going to improve the pier, so it is better, for travelers and for maritime security,” vows Fernando Gaytan, the new port administrator for FONATUR. “We’ll do it in a very attractive way.”
    But FONATUR’s takeover of the dock facilities has angered a broad segment of Zihuatanejo’s population. For generations, the pier has been used by residents to work, to play, to fall in love, and to just pass the time watching the spectacular sunsets and lazy pelicans bobbing away on ancient boats.
    Critics of the management change say the local population was never consulted, and they fear the arrangement could be the first step in privatizing the bay, displacing long-time fishermen, raising user fees and otherwise denying access to facilities, waters and beaches.
    “They are ripping us off of our bay,” contends Obdulia Balderas, retired educator and the president of the Zihuatanejo Network of Environmental Organizations (ROGAZ). “We’ve mobilized, because the bay is for everybody, for all the people of Zihuatanejo.”
    Under the terms of the concession, FONATUR has the right to subcontract services to private entities.
    Gaytan counters that FONATUR is a “100 percent” public entity, and has no plans to evict fishermen from or not recognize existing business permits. FONATUR’s relationship with the local public and other government agencies will be an “inclusive one,” he pledges.
    Last fall, without the knowledge of many local people, the federal Secretariat for Communications and Transportation (SCT) granted FONATUR a 25-year concession for the purpose of regulating the use of Zihuatanejo Bay’s waters and managing its facilities.
    The concession also covers the Salinas Lagoon, a mangrove estuary degraded by water pollution that flows into the bay, and the Barra de Potosi, another lagoon located south of Zihuatanejo where undeveloped lots are currently being offered for sale.
    In a place where news often moves faster on the grapevine than on the sometimes sluggish Internet, the FONATUR concession has become the hot topic of recent days.
    On Sunday, February 13, about 300 fishermen, boat operators, small merchants, environmentalists and others rallied at the entrance of the old-dock-by-the-bay in a public protest against FONATUR.
    “Out with FONATUR” and “The Bay: Patrimony of Zihuatanejo” read some of the placards carried by protestors. “We want investment, but investment that respects the environment and Zihuatanejo Bay,” declared Florentino Zavala Climaco, president of the Zihuatanejo Federation of Fishing Cooperatives. “We’re going to defend the little we have left.”
    In a speech that elicited a rousing response, another fishermen said the townspeople would be “worthless” if they didn’t rise to the defense of their home; a woman yelled from the crowd that the world had just witnessed the example of another people in another land deposing a tyrant after 30 years.
    For years, ROGAZ, SOS Bahia and other citizen groups have raised their voices against existing or proposed projects to transform the bay, including a SCT plan for a new cruise ship pier terminal.
    Gaytan told that FONATUR has no intention of building a new pier, but underscored his agency will improve the existing dock and cruise ship boat transfer services to better serve the traveling public, including handicapped persons.
    In April, a new Mexican-owned cruise ship line with a home port in Acapulco, Ocean Star Cruises, plans to begin weekly visits to Zihuatanejo and several other Pacific ports. The Ocean Star will have a restaurant, a night-club, beauty salon, an Irish pub and a casino. The new cruise ship line has begun advertising on Mexican televsion.
FONATUR comes to the local docks with a decidely mixed reputation. 
    Established to develop Mexico’s blossoming tourism industry in the early 1970s, FONATUR first came to Zihutanejo after the Echeverria administration decreed the expropriation of three collectively-owned land units called ejidos and encharged the federal tourism agency with developing the new mega-resort of Ixtapa a few miles away from Zihuatanejo Bay.
    As stipulated in the expropriation decree, the federal government agreed to reserve two small lots of land for each ejido member in addition to paying the ejidos 20 percent of the profits derived from land sold for hotel and other tourist developments, says Jose Chavez, the current president of the Zihuatanejo Ejido. Non-ejido residents of Zihuatanejo were forced to re-purchase from the federal government land they already had been living upon, he adds.
    Nearly 40 years after the 1972 expropriation, the 105 members of the Zihuatanejo ejido are still waiting to get paid by FONATUR for almost 1,250 acres of lands expropriated for the Ixtapa development. Ten years ago, ejido members filed suit against the federal agency, Chavez says.
    A similar, long-running dispute with FIBAZI, another government agency responsible for selling local lands expropriated for tourism development, was settled to the ejido’s satisfaction four years ago, Chavez says.
    Although the FONATUR case counts a decade collecting dust in an Acapulco agrarian legal tribunal, Chavez says he is “confident” a settlement can be reached to the ejido’s satisfaction. Meantime, it’s been business as usual in Ixtapa, he adds. “The development of Ixtapa has continued, and it hasn’t been shut down by our legal demands.”
    Indeed, many locals praise FONATUR’s development of Ixtapa, where smartly-paved boulevards and efficient water and wastewater services are the norm. Ixtapa’s beaches are considered cleaner than Zihuatanejo’s, and the only nationally-certified clean beach in the area, El Palmar, is located  the international resort just up the hill from its neighbor.
    In contrast, many residents criticize the decrepit or non-existent wastewater treatment in Zihuatanejo, which is the legal responsibility of the municipal government, as well as the frequent water shortages in neighborhoods outside the downtown area.
            Like Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta, Zihuatanejo’s urban development has been characterized by the unplanned-and illegal-settlement of outlying and hillside neighborhoods that shelter the working class of the tour ist trade, in this instance the workers of Ixtapa.
   A long-time member of the Zihuatanejo ejido and the owner of a small dress shop, Lupita Bravo is a passionate advocate for the people, history and culture of her town. Bravo says that only popular resistance to FONATUR and the federal government prevented the eviction of a close-knit community of small fishermen and farmers. Bravo recalls traveling in a protest caravan to the Mexican capital to protest the expropriation in the early 1970s.
   She says FONATUR could help out in cleaning up bay pollution and maintaining order along the dock, but is still “deeply concerned” about the terms of the concession. “I’m very interested in seeing a clean bay,” Bravo adds. “But what does it serve if it is in private hands?”
   For former school-teacher Balderas, the FONATUR concession issue boils down to a fundamental one of democracy, in which Mexican municipalities enjoy the constitutional right to govern themselves and reject outside projects that are unacceptable to the local people.
   “We just finished the struggle over the (cruise-ship) pier and now we’re in this, which is bigger,” Balderas says.
   Insisting he has an open door, FONATUR’s Fernando Gaytan is reaching out to small groups of people in a bid to win support for his agency’s presence.  Anti-concession activists, however, are demanding that the SCT revoke the 25-year agreement. Marches, petitions and possible legal demands are among the actions brewing in the community.
Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Author

Kent Paterson