The Long and Winding Road to Expat Happiness in Mexico
Chapter 36: Our Mexico journey finale—well, almost
Hola Amigos! You’ve followed me on my long tale of falling in love with Mexico, moving to it, and opening a bookstore. We’re nearing the end of my serialized memoir and I appreciate you taking the time to reminisce with me. If you’ve missed previous chapters from Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, please go to menu at the top.
Alma Libre Libros grew and prospered that year, our second in business. We met more people, read more books, enjoyed weekend trips to Merida, Valladolid or Coba. Occasionally when driving south towards Playa del Carmen we’d notice Alejandro’s land and think about what might have been.
Whatever became of Alejandro’s grandiose project? For years he tried to find more investors. Some came, some went. Shortly after Casa Maya was built, we contacted him and asked if it might be possible to recoup our costs. He told us serious development was still a long way off, but he’d had an influx of new investors and he could return our money for the lot we had tried to purchase.
Soon afterwards we received a cashier’s check from him—no paperwork—since we’d never held title on the property. At last, the land deal with Alejandro was no longer unfinished business but a fait accompli.
We called to say thanks and he wished us luck in our venture and gave us an update on his large-scale, eight hundred hectare project. Since the property was so enormous, he was constantly fighting development costs, he explained, so he was still looking for large investment investors.
More years passed and Cancun continued to grow into a tourist metropolis. As the city gained a worldwide reputation, the Tulum Corridor (south of Cancun) was renamed the Riviera Maya, and all-inclusive resorts began to spring up, many of them Spanish-owned. Rumors began to circulate that some of the resorts were dynamiting limestone shelves in the Caribbean to create more bays and inlets. Slowly, environmental restrictions emerged for the Riviera Maya. In retrospect it was a matter of too little, too late.
In 2001, Presidente Vicente Fox’s Environmental and Natural Resources Minister, Victor Lichtinger, said, “Tourism must be based on the protection of Mexico’s beauty . . . environmental laws which have been used selectively or ignored, will now be enforced. In the past, not only here (Quintana Roo) but in all of Mexico, we’ve been very discretionary in the application of the law.”
During former Quintana Roo Governor Mario Villanueva’s reign, 1the damage had been done. Eventually extradited to the US and charged with crimes of money laundering and aiding and abetting Mexico cartels, Villanueva’s environmental crimes paled in comparison, and he skated on the travesties he’d brought to the pristine, natural beauty of Mexico’s 31st state.
With corruption at the top, many mega-resorts followed suit and played the governor’s game, one being to submit design and development plans to the planning commission with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed. For example, a two-story maximum height limit was considered the legal limit on oceanfront properties (whimsically determined by the height of a palm tree), so new resorts submitted two-story structural drawings to their respective planning departments.
What they would build, however, would be three-story hotels. (For starters). Near Akumal, one hotel had been warned to stop filling in mangroves as the new environmental laws deemed their destruction illegal. Rumor had it an official planned a visit to the site, to declare an end to the project. Two days before his arrival, bulldozers worked through the night, illuminating their way with mercury vapor lights, to land fill as much as possible before the official arrived and ordered a work stoppage in the morning.
Puerto Morelos, too, was experiencing growing pains—not enough open land but plenty of mangroves. Spanish hotel chains had taken note not only of its rustic beauty, but also its convenient proximity to both the airport and Cancun, our wide white sand beaches, our reduced population.
Dump trucks continuously roared down the narrow sascab road south of town— the undeveloped part of Puerto Morelos—but they weren’t filled with dirt, concrete blocks or building materials. Instead, they were crammed with albińeros—laborers—many from out of state who had come to make their fortune in the construction trade in Cancun. It always filled my heart with a sadness I can’t describe every time I saw one of these trucks. The men—standing up right, side by side, packed in like sardines—looked forlorn, disengaged, abject. They were like zombies, staring straight ahead, a glazed look in their eyes, seeing nothing. Here we were in the twenty-first century, but it felt like we were living in another era. These men were nearly chattel.
As time passed and the Riviera Maya constructed more international brand hotels, tent camps were set up to house the workers. They were shameful places alongside Highway 307, where the men were deposited after long workdays, with barely water to drink, a few strung lightbulbs for electricity, dirt floors, no kitchen facilities or toilets. Every six months or so there would be walk-outs, with the workers storming Highway 307, stopping traffic. Then management would shut the men out of the camps, forcing their leave, departing empty handed for at least a portion of unpaid wages. New hires would show up like clockwork a week or so later. And more trucks. Though the Caste War of Yucatán was long over, another unspoken class war had begun in Quintana Roo.
In 2001, with 22,000 hotel rooms already in Cancun, the Riviera Maya tallied 13,000 rooms, with plans to double that figure by 2006. At first Lichtinger made a promise to build “cabañas, aimed at people who like to be surrounded by nature. We are not gong to continue to build huge resorts (in the southern half of the Costa Maya).” Now in retrospect, those words are laughable.
Regarding Puerto Morelos’ mangroves, an editor friend, aligned with the environmental group Lu’um Ka’naab, heard about mangroves being filled where a marina was being built south of town. A duplicate of the mangrove filling at Akumal. She arrived at midnight, hoping to catch the contractors in the act, only to find padlocked chainlink fences and the soft glow of mercury vapor lights a quarter mile in the distance along with the reverberating drone of bulldozers, and men, at work.
On another drive to Playa del Carmen we noticed Alejandro’s frontage land had been cleared and an impressive landscaping job was underway. The next time we passed we noticed the finishing touches on a grandiose project—a sweeping entrance had been completed for an eco-park named Tres Rios. Alejandro had pulled it off.
We pulled into the wide driveway, parked the car and walked to the entrance. We were greeted by a young Maya man who led us to the administrative palapa. We were curious to know if Alejandro was involved in this burgeoning development.
“What activities does Tres Rios offer?” I asked as an opener.
“The park has three natural rivers, very unusual in the Yucatán. Our guests can kayak or canoe down the rivers to the ocean, where there’s a cenote. If you don’t want to row or kayak, we have bicycles and bike paths. The snorkeling is good, plus we have a nice beach and good restaurant where you can have lunch.
“An all-day pass is $20 USD. This is an eco-park so we’ve kept everything ecologically sound, in all natural surroundings. There are wild orchids and bromeliads in the park growing alongside the mangroves. It’s a nature preserve.”
“We know this land. We’ve been down to one of the rivers, to the cenote,” Paul said. “We know the owner, or we assume he’s still the owner. Alejandro?”
“Alejandro. Yes, he’s leased the land to Hacienda Tres Rios—a group of investors— for 99 years. He wanted to build a hotel or condos but now there are environmental restrictions. To create an infrastructure, he needed to fill the mangroves and that’s no longer legal.
“Mangroves here are protected by law. They work as a natural filter for the ocean and as a nursery for marine life. If the mangroves die, the coral reefs will start to deteriorate, as they feed off each other.”
“Yes, we know. We live in Puerto Morelos,” I said, “and the mangroves there are also protected by law, at least for now.” But sometimes even that doesn’t save them, I thought.
“Thanks for the information, “ Paul said. “Maybe we’ll come back sometime and use your park.”
We waved goodbye and walked back to the parking lot.
“Well, it was a good thing we followed Plan B,” I said as we neared the car. “Alejandro wouldn’t have been able to build here after all. Too many environmental restrictions now. It took him so long to get it together with investors that the laws changed before he could activate his master plan.”
“If we’d waited these last eight years for him to find investors, which he obviously has,” Paul continued, “we’d have lost all that time. As it is, Casa Maya has been built for nearly a decade.”
“You’re right. What if we’d waited, only to discover the new laws restricted what could or couldn’t be built on the property?”
“Well, it all worked out for the best, for all of us. He returned our money for the land, that was fair enough. We gambled, he threw the dice. It was all just luck.”
“I’m glad something finally happened and he’s gotten his money back. I still think he was set back at the very beginning when the state grabbed his original Playa del Carmen land by eminent domain to build a new car ferry dock. That certainly never materialized—just a ploy. Someone wanted that primo land to build Playacar 2. He sat on this property for a long, long time.”
“I’d have never had the patience. Well, it worked out well for us. We built Casa Maya and we’re right next to his original property, where we first set foot in Puerto Morelos, all those many years ago. How incredible is that?”
Press Release/Department of Justice, US Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York. “Former Governor Of Mexican State Sentenced In Manhattan Federal Court To 131 Months In Prison for Money Laundering in Connection with Narcotics Bribes.” (June 28, 2013).
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MY BACKSTORY—Puerto Morelos sits 100 miles from four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. Living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland made it easy to pyramid hop on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids and the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’m still enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here on Mexico Soul.
Thanks for restack @Bernardette Hernández
It really IS incredible. It’s been a pleasure to walk this road with you; thank you for inviting us into your world and sharing the highs, the hurdles, and the history so generously.