Progress
or Ruin?
By Sandra Dibble
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
May 19, 2002
SANTA ROSALIITA, Mexico – For 50 years, Mexico's government
mostly ignored this cluster of fishermen's houses battered
by wind and sand. To this day, there is no electric plant,
no water well, not a single gasoline pump.
Then with little warning a black-topped road began working
its way through the desert toward the little bay. Explosions
rang out from a nearby hillside. Trucks rumbled from
the quarry past fishermen's pangas, carrying boulders
for a
$3 million barrier against the crashing surf.
Here on this lonely stretch of Baja California coastline,
the first step of a bold and controversial proposal is
taking shape: La Escalera Nautica, or the Nautical Staircase.
By 2014, the Mexican government envisions linking 24
ports in four states, luring tourists with lavish hotels,
condominiums
and golf courses set amid dramatic desert landscapes
and starkly beautiful shorelines. The idea is to draw
more
than 50,000 boats and 1 million visitors annually, most
of them
from the western United States.
President Vicente Fox's administration is billing the
Escalera as the most ambitious tourist development the
country has
seen and a way to save the region's fragile environment
through planned growth. His government has committed
$220 million
to the project and hopes to entice $1.7 billion in private
investment.
Critics see the plan as the beginning of the region's
destruction, as a poorly conceived project that will
deplete scarce
water supplies and foment land speculation, money laundering,
pollution
and coastal erosion. They point to abandoned government
trailer parks and gas stations on the peninsula as proof
that grand
government plans can't be trusted.
The project's crown jewel is the richly diverse Sea of
Cortes, prized by travelers, fishermen, scientists and
nature-lovers.
Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau dubbed it the world's
aquarium. Others compare it with Ecuador's Galapagos
Islands for
its hundreds of small islands teeming with endemic plant
and
animal species.
"
There's no other place on the planet like it," said
Serge Dedina, co-director of the Imperial Beach-based
conservation group Wildcoast.
The Escalera plan is ambitious: to link ports spaced
no more than 120 nautical miles apart, so boaters are
never
more
than a day's sail from fuel, communications and repair
facilities. For those who want to avoid the arduous seven-to
10-day voyage
around the peninsula, there will be an 80-mile "land
bridge," allowing boats to be towed in about three
hours between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortes.
Mexican environmental officials say the Escalera offers
an alternative to the often-unregulated, hodgepodge collection
of settlements that have sprouted up in recent decades.
They
argue that revenues could be used to protect the region's
natural resources.
"
The way it is now, we're not protecting anything," Victor
Lichtinger, Mexico's environmental minister, said during
a recent visit to Baja California. "What we have
is poorly organized tourism, with no long-term vision
and no
environmental protection."
What worries many is the project's immense scale and
its environmental effect on vast regions largely untouched
by man. Any mistakes made here, they warn, are likely
to
last
forever.
"
The concept is a good one, but the way it's drawn up leaves
so many loopholes," said Enrique Hambleton, a soft-drink
distributor and environmental activist from La Paz, the capital
of Baja California Sur and one of the Escalera's stops. "There
are no clear rules of engagement. People are doing
things right and left claiming to be part of Escalera
Nautica."
The Escalera's critics include influential groups from
both sides of the border, among them an environmental
organization, Grupo de los Cien, led by Mexican poet
Homero Aridjis.
Two
years ago, environmental groups helped to defeat a proposal
for a massive salt evaporation project on the peninsula
at Laguna San Ignacio, a breeding ground for gray whales.
Now
the environmental groups are determined to defeat the
even larger Escalera project.
Proponents point out that Mexico has 40 million people
living in poverty and desperately needs the economic
development the Escalera will bring. That development
can be achieved,
they insist, while taking the environment into account.
"
It's not like before," said Baja California Gov. Eugenio
Elorduy Walther. "You can't just bring the Caterpillar
and build and build and build, and then ask later where
does the sewage go, where do you put worker housing,
what about
the dust? It has to be very well-planned so everyone
comes out ahead."
Carefully done, the Escalera can benefit people who live
far from the crowded border, Elorduy said.
"
We have a responsibility to offer opportunity for the people
living there," he said. "Their life is very
circumscribed, and that is causing their children to
leave these places."
Starting from scratch
Most afternoons, a cool
Pacific breeze sweeps
through Santa Rosaliita,
a collection of 50-odd
houses scattered
on the
beach. Dogs wander on a dirt road past the concrete-block
structure where the Murillo Gaxiola family can sit
and watch as gray whales
leap from the ocean on
their way
south every
winter.
In Santa Rosaliita, the Escalera elicits mixed feelings.
With no fresh water supply, residents pay high prices
for trucked-in water and would welcome a desalination
plant.
Their solar panels barely power a 12-watt light bulb,
so they're eager for a reliable electricity supply.
They would
welcome the paved road, but also fear what it might
bring to their tightknit, crime-free community.
They have other concerns. "
What's going to happen with our children, with young people,
with fishing?" said Leobardo Murillo, 51, looking out
on the Pacific Ocean where he catches lobster, mussels and
abalone. "If the boats come and discharge fuel,
that's the end of our product."
Santa Rosaliita will be one of the smallest stops
of the Escalera, which includes Mazatlan, Ensenada
and other
established
ports. Tourists who stop here will find basic amenities,
not fancy hotels. Still, the community anticipates
big changes, because Santa Rosaliita is planned as
the western
terminus
of the Escalera's linchpin, the $42 million land
bridge across the Baja California peninsula. "
The road is what's going to spark the project," said
Alejandro Rodríguez Mirelles, a former investment
banker in charge of the Escalera project for Fonatur.
Fonatur is the tourism development agency that launched
such popular resorts as Cancun, on Mexico's Carribean
coast. Cancun
is an economic success but an ecological disaster,
Mexican environmental officials say. Fonatur officials
insist
they are not trying to duplicate Cancun, and officials
at Semarnat,
as Mexico's environmental ministry is known, insist
they will uphold environmental standards.
"
Some ... have decided that Escalera Nautica is a bad project,
even before they know what it is," said Francisco Székely,
Semarnat's subsecretary and a respected specialist on environmental
management responsible for the ministry's review. "They
take a fundamentalist position and say 'zero use of
the environment.' We are not of that position. We believe
we can make use of
our natural resources without destroying them."
'Dreams on paper'
Eighty miles east of Santa Rosaliita, at the other
end of the proposed land bridge, the Escalera is
raising more doubts
than hopes in the town of Bahía de los Angeles.
To make the land crossing today, drivers must submit
to seven miles of bone-rattling dirt road until
they reach
a silky-smooth
section already paved for the Escalera project.
Heading north on the Transpeninsular Highway, they
reach
another turnoff – a
38-mile paved road pocked with potholes.
Then, around a curve, a dramatic tableau appears:
Bahía
de los Angeles, its waters almost violet, its small
islands struck by a golden light.
When Fonatur officials came here to present the
plan in October, they spoke of an 1,800-boat marina,
a
27-hole golf course
and 49 acres of hotels and condominiums. Critics
quickly cried out that the development would overwhelm
the town
of 800 and the fragile environment that surrounds
it.
"
A project of this magnitude can't be sensitive," said
Dr. Abraham Vázquez, the town's only licensed physician
and owner of a beachside trailer park, Campo Gecko. "These
are projects that are created inside an office in Mexico
City. They're dreams on paper, without any basis in
reality."
Fonatur's Rodriguez said recently the project has
been drastically scaled back, that only 100 boat
slips are
now being considered
and that the location may shift, too.
"
For sure it's not going to be exactly in Bahía de
Los Angeles, but close by," he said.
Ambiguities and changing numbers have fueled the
doubts of those suspicious of the project.
"
We don't know what they're going to do. One day they
tell us one thing, and the next day they tell us something
else," said
Roberto Enríquez Andráde, a researcher
in marine economy at the Autonomous University
of Baja California in
Ensenada. Enríquez and others argue that
smaller-scale "eco-tourism" is
far more in tune with the Baja California peninsula.
Conservation groups are especially protective of
Bahía
de los Angeles, a launching point for fishermen
and scientists to the central Sea of Cortes.
Five species
of sea turtles,
plus whale sharks, dolphins and a wide range
of bird species, feed in the cool, nutrient-rich
waters.
"
Of all the sites they're proposing, it is the most biologically
significant," said Wildcoast's Dedina.
Wildcoast is working with the Mexican conservation
organization, Pronatura, to create a vast marine
park where visitors
would be charged admission. Revenues would be
used to protect its
natural resources.
The final word on how much of the Escalera Nautica
becomes reality will come from Semarnat. As a
first step, the
ministry is completing a long-term land-use plan
for the region,
which it expects to present at public hearings
this year.
"
The idea is to know exactly where nature can accept the construction
of a hotel and where it cannot, where we can build the road
and where we can't," Lichtinger said.
It seems that not all government agencies have
heard the message.
Mexico's Communications and Transportation Ministry
didn't conduct an environmental review in October
2000 before
it began building the road between Santa Rosaliita
and the Transpeninsular
Highway. The road slices through the Valle de
los Cirios, a protected desert that covers the
central
part of the
peninsula.
Semarnat halted construction of the road soon
after Fox was sworn into office in December 2000.
A transportation
ministry
employee said recently that a permit was later
granted for the stretch between Santa Rosaliita
and the Transpeninsular
Highway, but that there's no money for the project
in
this year's budget.
Today, it is an incongruous sight: less than
three miles of fresh blacktop in the middle of
the desert
that abruptly
gives way to rocks and sand.
'Fashionable places'
Environmental questions aside, the Escalera's
economic success depends largely on whether
it captures
the fancy of U.S.
boaters. Fonatur's target market of six western
U.S. states includes approximately 520,000
boats that
measure longer
than 16 feet. By drawing on this population
of boaters, Fonatur calculates that by 2014
it can
increase the
number of yearly
boat visits to the region from 8,000 to 50,000.
This estimate draws both skepticism and support
from U.S. boaters.
"
I fear these numbers are pure fantasy," said Richard
Spindler, publisher of Latitude 38 in Northern California,
a magazine geared to sailboat owners. "What
they really need to do is merely add on to
places where
they currently
have marinas."
Others say the Escalera's land bridge will
bring to the Sea of Cortes those boaters
whose vessels
are too small
to make
the long Pacific Ocean journey around the
peninsula's tip.
"
A lot of people would use it," said Chris Frost, owner
of Downwind Marine, a boating supply store in Point Loma
that serves yacht owners. "There will
be a whole new class of power boats that
used to
not be able to
get there
that will now."
Fonatur says commitments from private investors
are already flowing into the region, especially
to Loreto,
a colonial
town of 17,000 that Fonatur hopes to make
the capital of the Escalera project. Fonatur
officials say they already have $200 million in commitments
from outside investors
to build
two five-star hotels, a smaller "boutique" hotel
and two golf courses.
"
Golfers like to go to fashionable places. They spend a lot,
$200 to $250 per green fee, and they don't worry about the
cost of the hotel," Rodríguez Mirelles said. "That's
the kind of person that we want."
For all the talk surrounding the project,
it is those who live in the region who have
the
most
to gain – and
lose. In Bahía de los Angeles, longtime
residents are watching, and listening carefully,
and hoping they
will be taken into account.
"
The town has to grow. We can't avoid it," said Eduardo
Smith, a 37-year-old fisherman whose grandfather came to
prospect for gold in the 1930s. "If
it's not now, with this Escalera Nautica,
it will
be some other way.
We've just
got to be careful, so that we don't drastically
affect the environment."
Escalera Project....
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