FEATURE - Mexico's fledgling ecotourism struggles to survive
Date: 26-Apr-02
Country: MEXICO
Author: Elizabeth Fullerton
Visitors to the San Ignacio lagoon, surrounded by barren desert dotted with tabletop plateaus and volcanos, watch the whales cavort, lunging out of the water with amazing agility and diving under boatloads of thrilled tourists.
The colossal creatures are surprisingly friendly, given they were twice brought close to extinction from hunting in the past two centuries. Newborn calves approach the small tourist boats and allow their barnacled, rubbery skin to be scratched.
But the idyll is a precarious one. Resentment from the community of San Ignacio village, a two hour's drive away, and attempts by the government to tax whale-watching as a luxury activity could jeopardize the future of resorts like Kuyima.
Locals resent the moderate success of the ecologically conscious Kuyima, which receives around 1,200 visitors to the lagoon every year, most paying $150 a night - a small fortune in the impoverished region that depends on fishing revenues.
A controversial government project two years ago to build a salt plant in the lagoon further divided the area.
While locals saw the plant as a potential source of jobs, resorts like Kuyima joined a massive Mexican and international protest warning of risks to the gray whales that migrate south to breed from January to April in the warm-water bay.
The project was put on hold, compounding the unpopularity of the ecoresorts on the lagoon among locals.
And now the federal government is threatening to slap a series of crippling taxes on whale boats to raise revenues, which could kill the eco-tourism industry in its infancy.
"We have received a lot of blows," said Raul Lopez, a guide and operative coordinator at Kuyima and president of the local association of tourism service providers.
"People want to say we are monopolizing the regional economy. We're just a group that is vocal and dedicated to the environment and don't let ourselves be manipulated," he added.
FRIENDLY WHALES
Up to 17,000 gray whales are believed to migrate more than 5,000 miles (8,333 km) south from the Bering Straits every year, many stopping to breed in Mexico's warm-water lagoons, like San Ignacio, a designated World Heritage Site.
Until the 1970s, local fishermen kept their distance from the whales, fearing they might attack given man's historical brutality toward them. But one day a curious whale approached Francisco Mayoral out fishing and refused to be scared away.
Seeing how friendly the creatures were, Mayoral began the first whale watching tours in the lagoon shortly thereafter.
Lopez, a fisherman from northern Sinaloa state, and several others followed suit, forming Kuyima in 1993 as a community project and then registering it formally as a business.
The resort, which employs 50 mainly local people, according to Lopez, was inspired by hopes of pioneering environmentally friendly tourism in Mexico.
"When we started we targeted the national tourist market but soon realized it was one of the most expensive destinations in Mexico." Lopez said. From Mexico City, airfares to Guerrero Negro, two hours away by bus, are $700 compared with around $350 to Cancun. "Increasingly our natural market is the U.S."
With its arid deserts, dense jungle, rocky mountains and teeming coastlines, opportunities for eco-tourism in Mexico are vast but expensive since state and federal governments tend to invest in big glitzy resorts like Acapulco and Cancun over infrastructure for off-the-beaten-track resorts.
"There's a lack of understanding" of eco-tourism, said Jorge Belmonte, subdirector of alternative tourism in the tourism ministry. "The perception is that it's very elitist and that logically harms the development of eco-tourism at a national level." But that's changing, he said.
Mexico's tourism ministry this year signed a deal with various government ministries and agencies to invest $250 million in eco-tourism, compared to just $50 million last year.
The number of operators of