This is a selection of posts published in 2012-2013 on my blog at http://detrasdelacamera.blogspot.fr/.
On Carnival, and deleting racism from the dictionary
It's Carnival here in Uruguay, a place that clearly decided that if they couldn't beat Brazil in sequins and spectacular, they would instead trump them by having the world's longest Carnival, seven weeks of it, stretching out to the middle of March with no regard whatsoever for Lenten frugality. The setpiece though is a parade that sees teams of dancers snake their way through the city to a throbbingly heavy drumbeat pounded out until the drummers' hands bleed - a shockingly African drumbeat. I say shockingly because one could easily live here for years under the impression you were in a small town in Spain or italy several decades ago, certainly before the arrival of mass immigration; quaint restaurants selling home-made gnocchi, blustery beaches, bars that play the Beatles unironically - in short, a less exotic feeling place 6000 miles from Europe it is hard to imagine.
In the 17th century, though, Montevideo was the main entry port for African slaves trafficked to South America to till Brazilian sugar plantations or toil in Bolivian silver mines, and inevitably some stayed. About 8% of the population is considered of African descent now. Their faces are virtually absent from the city centre and swish beachside suburbs, being mostly tucked away in parts of the city you're advised not to go to alone, only allowed to stake a claim to public spaces at odd events like the carnival parade, or the festival pictured here, where believers throw fruit and flowers into the Atlantic for the African sea goddess Iemanjà.
Those faces have also made newspaper headlines here lately for less picturesque reasons - a racially motivated attack by two white girls on a black anti-racism activist outside a nightclub has caused a national bout of soul-searching about whether Uruguay is much more racist than people would like to think. Campaigners have also been grabbing column inches with a petition to get the expression "trabajar como un negro" - to work like a black man - removed from the official Spanish dictionary. If you're a native English speaker, of course, you just involuntarily gasped on reading that expression, and I feel slightly morally compromised for having even written it, but the role of dictionaries is to describe language as it is used, not prescribe - or proscribe - it.
There is a debate worth having here, though, about language, racism and political correctness. The conservative press here, while admitting the black population has suffered systemic discrimination, rails against copying the Anglophone example of policing language, socially banning certain terms and replacing them with more consensual alternatives, and many in the Anglophone press would agree. Even if reports that, say, Luton Council once banned Christmas decorations because they might offend non-Christian residents (this was repeated in an Uruguayan paper today, but I'm virtually certain it was a British tabloid invention) have been somewhat exaggerated, we all sometimes feel that in English we are treading in a linguistic minefield. Spanish is far less socially policed in this sense; does that mean, as someone argued to me last night, that Uruguay's most famous son Luis Suarez shouldn't have been suspended, whatever he said to Patrice Evra, because for him the words don't pack the same cultural punch? There is a shred of a case here - most people swear much more liberally in foreign languages because you lose the learnt sense of taboo - but I don't believe that Suarez, who has claimed the regular excoriation he gets from the British press is racially motivated, doesn't understand the taboo, even if he doesn't know much about the cultural baggage around race in Britain or Evra's native France. Does the blunt language still used about race in Spanish, then, really mean its speakers are generally more racist than Anglophones? Most people who consider themselves cosmopolitan and multilingual would say it's just a question of cultural difference, and most translators, if confronted with "trabajar como un negro" would render it into something inoffensive in English.
And yet. And yet, in Uruguay the unemployment rate for young black women is nearly double that for white ones. A scholarship scheme to help send Afro-Uruguayans to university can't find enough qualified applicants. In Mexico, one of my home countries, the indigenous population suffers systematic discrimination, to the point where people of indigenous origin living in cities do everything they can to hide that fact. They rewrite their histories and pretend they can't speak indigenous languages to fear of being classed an "indio", a word that's still almost universally used, and makes me shudder every time I hear it. Language is not just a toolkit manipulated to describe the world around us - it manipulates us, it sets the parameters within which we can express ourselves. We think we can go in any direction we choose, but in fact we have a set range of passages to choose from within the architecture built by syntax, grammar, and the vocabulary available to us. Deleting an expression from a dictionary in itself cannot help close one of those passages, but its existence is the signifier that points towards a deeper cultural problem. It will take time for mainstream Spanish usage to absorb the difference between, say, disabled people and people with disabilities, but the quicker it goes down that route, the better.ez ici pour modifier.
It's Carnival here in Uruguay, a place that clearly decided that if they couldn't beat Brazil in sequins and spectacular, they would instead trump them by having the world's longest Carnival, seven weeks of it, stretching out to the middle of March with no regard whatsoever for Lenten frugality. The setpiece though is a parade that sees teams of dancers snake their way through the city to a throbbingly heavy drumbeat pounded out until the drummers' hands bleed - a shockingly African drumbeat. I say shockingly because one could easily live here for years under the impression you were in a small town in Spain or italy several decades ago, certainly before the arrival of mass immigration; quaint restaurants selling home-made gnocchi, blustery beaches, bars that play the Beatles unironically - in short, a less exotic feeling place 6000 miles from Europe it is hard to imagine.
In the 17th century, though, Montevideo was the main entry port for African slaves trafficked to South America to till Brazilian sugar plantations or toil in Bolivian silver mines, and inevitably some stayed. About 8% of the population is considered of African descent now. Their faces are virtually absent from the city centre and swish beachside suburbs, being mostly tucked away in parts of the city you're advised not to go to alone, only allowed to stake a claim to public spaces at odd events like the carnival parade, or the festival pictured here, where believers throw fruit and flowers into the Atlantic for the African sea goddess Iemanjà.
Those faces have also made newspaper headlines here lately for less picturesque reasons - a racially motivated attack by two white girls on a black anti-racism activist outside a nightclub has caused a national bout of soul-searching about whether Uruguay is much more racist than people would like to think. Campaigners have also been grabbing column inches with a petition to get the expression "trabajar como un negro" - to work like a black man - removed from the official Spanish dictionary. If you're a native English speaker, of course, you just involuntarily gasped on reading that expression, and I feel slightly morally compromised for having even written it, but the role of dictionaries is to describe language as it is used, not prescribe - or proscribe - it.
There is a debate worth having here, though, about language, racism and political correctness. The conservative press here, while admitting the black population has suffered systemic discrimination, rails against copying the Anglophone example of policing language, socially banning certain terms and replacing them with more consensual alternatives, and many in the Anglophone press would agree. Even if reports that, say, Luton Council once banned Christmas decorations because they might offend non-Christian residents (this was repeated in an Uruguayan paper today, but I'm virtually certain it was a British tabloid invention) have been somewhat exaggerated, we all sometimes feel that in English we are treading in a linguistic minefield. Spanish is far less socially policed in this sense; does that mean, as someone argued to me last night, that Uruguay's most famous son Luis Suarez shouldn't have been suspended, whatever he said to Patrice Evra, because for him the words don't pack the same cultural punch? There is a shred of a case here - most people swear much more liberally in foreign languages because you lose the learnt sense of taboo - but I don't believe that Suarez, who has claimed the regular excoriation he gets from the British press is racially motivated, doesn't understand the taboo, even if he doesn't know much about the cultural baggage around race in Britain or Evra's native France. Does the blunt language still used about race in Spanish, then, really mean its speakers are generally more racist than Anglophones? Most people who consider themselves cosmopolitan and multilingual would say it's just a question of cultural difference, and most translators, if confronted with "trabajar como un negro" would render it into something inoffensive in English.
And yet. And yet, in Uruguay the unemployment rate for young black women is nearly double that for white ones. A scholarship scheme to help send Afro-Uruguayans to university can't find enough qualified applicants. In Mexico, one of my home countries, the indigenous population suffers systematic discrimination, to the point where people of indigenous origin living in cities do everything they can to hide that fact. They rewrite their histories and pretend they can't speak indigenous languages to fear of being classed an "indio", a word that's still almost universally used, and makes me shudder every time I hear it. Language is not just a toolkit manipulated to describe the world around us - it manipulates us, it sets the parameters within which we can express ourselves. We think we can go in any direction we choose, but in fact we have a set range of passages to choose from within the architecture built by syntax, grammar, and the vocabulary available to us. Deleting an expression from a dictionary in itself cannot help close one of those passages, but its existence is the signifier that points towards a deeper cultural problem. It will take time for mainstream Spanish usage to absorb the difference between, say, disabled people and people with disabilities, but the quicker it goes down that route, the better.ez ici pour modifier.
17 and alone in a foreign country
There are drawings of houses and families on the walls, charts of French verbs, times tables and geometry charts. There are neat rows of desks, whiteboards, old-fashioned globes and boxes of pencils. There is colourful student artwork everywhere. It could be any primary school - perhaps one that's rather short of resources - but here the students being drilled in basic French grammar are mostly 16 or 17, and they're chatting amongst themselves in Dari, Pashto and Hausa. There are hand drawn flags from around the world, and a big global map covered in pins, with particularly thick forests in Afghanistan and west Africa. They mark where the 300 or so students that take classes here have come from. This is the Maison du Jeune Refugié in northern Paris, run by the NGO France Terre d'Asile, and all these young people have found themselves alone in France, with no family here that can be traced. Most were found sleeping on the streets by the charity's teams, especially around the nearby canal where rough sleepers congregate.
Steve (all names have been changed, and faces hidden) is from Guinea-Conakry, where ethnic violence broke out after a disputed election just over a year ago, adding danger to grinding poverty. He came to France with an uncle after his parents died, but then the uncle kicked him out after a row, alone, knowing no-one else in France and with no idea of where to go. He spent two nights sleeping by the canal, not eating anything for two days, before France Terre d'Asile picked him up. That was 10 months ago, and he now has a bed in a Salvation Army shelter and is studying an apprenticeship in the building trade. He says life in France has been difficult to adapt to, especially the cold and being so far from everything he knows, but he's trying to make the best of it. He is 16.
James is from Ivory Coast, and decided to leave during the violence that followed last year's disputed presidential election there (about 3000 people died after outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo refused to hand over power). He says he's always dreamed of moving to France since he learnt about it in primary school (all these countries are of course former French colonies), because his teacher said that in France there was no conflict, and young people had the chance to become anything they liked. His father died when he was a baby, his mother last year. He travelled with another boy from the same village, paying his family savings to a trafficker for plane tickets to Morocco and false documents, and then crossing the Mediterranean on an overcrowded boat to Spain. Spain, he says, was much worse than here - he slept on a concrete floor in a cold hangar with dozens of other migrants, and was beaten up by police officers. He smuggled himself onto a train to Paris, because he hoped to find cousins here, but with no address or phone number he hasn't managed to track them down. He slept on the street for four nights, in December, and has been at France Terre d'Asile since. He too is studying, but says it's maddeningly frustrating not be able to earn his own money; he says that in Ivory Coast he had worked since he was 10. He is 17.
Omar is the most articulate and talkative in this little group playing pool in the stairwell that passes as a games room, and he too is frustrated - by the months he has been waiting for papers so he can stay legally in France. He's also from Ivory Coast and travelled here with an older man from his village who he says had promised him work and somewhere to live, and who he trusted because he had already helped lots of people he knew to come to France, but who abandoned him to sleep on the streets as soon as they arrived. Once these children have been picked up by France Terre d'Asile's teams, they are found somewhere to sleep and given schooling in French, literacy and numeracy, but they're also stuck in a legal limbo. If they are under 18, the state has a responsibility to protect them, but their age is often in doubt; the authorities apply a hundred-year old test based on the growth of certain bones that doctors admit has a margin of error of about 10 months in adolescent boys. France Terre d'Asile director Pierre Henry says the NGO is furiously campaigning for it to be replaced with something more accurate. Once they've been accepted as minors, many only have a few months before they turn 18 and can thus be eligible for deportation by the French authorities. The NGO tries to have their applications processed as quickly as possible - many are eligible to apply for refugee status - but bureaucratic delays mean many spend months waiting to find out if a judge has decided if they can stay. For Omar, this waiting is the worst part, because at least in Ivory Coast he felt he could decide what to do tomorrow, he says - now he can only wait.
The centre's director Julien Mache tells me that's probably the worst of the problems these young people have once they've been given somewhere to live; a frustration, an ennui, a sense of no longer being the actors in their own destiny, a loss of identity, he says. Many have travelled long distances alone, overland from Afghanistan for example, and developed an extraordinary maturity and capacity for resilience most of us find hard to imagine. After that experience, they resent being put in classes and treated like children, and above all they resent the wait for paperwork. That's more psychologically distressing, he says, than being separated from their families, cultural isolation or traumatic memories, and pushes his charges into depression and drug use, because they're no longer in control of their lives. Many of them have great responsibilities to fulfil; they've been sent by families who have scraped together life savings or got themselves into huge debt to send a son abroad, and they have a strong sense of duty. For some, that means needing to pay off a trafficker who can track them down in Paris; more often, it means leaving a safe haven here to continue a seemingly endless journey to meet distant relatives in Britain and Scandinavia, whom they may never be able to find. Henry tells me very few of the young people his association works with have chosen to leave home on their own, meaning they're carrying all the hopes of an extended family with them. It's no wonder they're keen to start working and earning money as soon as possible - after all, that's why they came - and they find the limbo hard to deal with.
Where does the French state stand in all this, then? Pierre Henry says local authorities don't fulfil their legal responsibilities, basically passing the buck - areas that have international airports or big cities don't see why they should have to pay for looking after all these extra children, and demand federal government help that never arrives. The charity can apply pressure to get cases processed faster, but they can't change the political climate, Henry says, and it certainly isn't one in which refugee children are a top, or an uncontroversial, spending priority. France at least doesn't try to deport children - unlike some EU countries, including the UK, who have signed up to a scheme aiming to return them to their families, with fixed annual targets for returns. Back home, of course, they may well not be welcome, if the family can be traced at all. In order to stay in France after their 18th birthday, though, they must prove they can speak French and are in education, alongside a fair amount of sheer luck in negotiating the tangled system. Henry admits that despite France Terre d'Asile's best efforts, dozens are simply lost every year, disappearing from the public record over fears they will be deported.
The energy, motivation and drive of some of the young people I met are overwhelming, though, despite the legal and practical challenges they face. I'm sure that's partly due to the support and confidence building they've had from France Terre d'Asile, but Mache says those of his charges who attend mainstream schools improve standards for the whole class because they're so motivated. He also describes the experience of being young and alone in a foreign country as 'Darwinian' - the naturally toughest and most resilient do well, weaker ones less so. What these young people - some as young as 13 - have been through is inconceivable to most of us, but France is responsible for what happens to them next, and it's time, as Pierre Henry put it to me, for France to step up to that responsibility.
There are drawings of houses and families on the walls, charts of French verbs, times tables and geometry charts. There are neat rows of desks, whiteboards, old-fashioned globes and boxes of pencils. There is colourful student artwork everywhere. It could be any primary school - perhaps one that's rather short of resources - but here the students being drilled in basic French grammar are mostly 16 or 17, and they're chatting amongst themselves in Dari, Pashto and Hausa. There are hand drawn flags from around the world, and a big global map covered in pins, with particularly thick forests in Afghanistan and west Africa. They mark where the 300 or so students that take classes here have come from. This is the Maison du Jeune Refugié in northern Paris, run by the NGO France Terre d'Asile, and all these young people have found themselves alone in France, with no family here that can be traced. Most were found sleeping on the streets by the charity's teams, especially around the nearby canal where rough sleepers congregate.
Steve (all names have been changed, and faces hidden) is from Guinea-Conakry, where ethnic violence broke out after a disputed election just over a year ago, adding danger to grinding poverty. He came to France with an uncle after his parents died, but then the uncle kicked him out after a row, alone, knowing no-one else in France and with no idea of where to go. He spent two nights sleeping by the canal, not eating anything for two days, before France Terre d'Asile picked him up. That was 10 months ago, and he now has a bed in a Salvation Army shelter and is studying an apprenticeship in the building trade. He says life in France has been difficult to adapt to, especially the cold and being so far from everything he knows, but he's trying to make the best of it. He is 16.
James is from Ivory Coast, and decided to leave during the violence that followed last year's disputed presidential election there (about 3000 people died after outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo refused to hand over power). He says he's always dreamed of moving to France since he learnt about it in primary school (all these countries are of course former French colonies), because his teacher said that in France there was no conflict, and young people had the chance to become anything they liked. His father died when he was a baby, his mother last year. He travelled with another boy from the same village, paying his family savings to a trafficker for plane tickets to Morocco and false documents, and then crossing the Mediterranean on an overcrowded boat to Spain. Spain, he says, was much worse than here - he slept on a concrete floor in a cold hangar with dozens of other migrants, and was beaten up by police officers. He smuggled himself onto a train to Paris, because he hoped to find cousins here, but with no address or phone number he hasn't managed to track them down. He slept on the street for four nights, in December, and has been at France Terre d'Asile since. He too is studying, but says it's maddeningly frustrating not be able to earn his own money; he says that in Ivory Coast he had worked since he was 10. He is 17.
Omar is the most articulate and talkative in this little group playing pool in the stairwell that passes as a games room, and he too is frustrated - by the months he has been waiting for papers so he can stay legally in France. He's also from Ivory Coast and travelled here with an older man from his village who he says had promised him work and somewhere to live, and who he trusted because he had already helped lots of people he knew to come to France, but who abandoned him to sleep on the streets as soon as they arrived. Once these children have been picked up by France Terre d'Asile's teams, they are found somewhere to sleep and given schooling in French, literacy and numeracy, but they're also stuck in a legal limbo. If they are under 18, the state has a responsibility to protect them, but their age is often in doubt; the authorities apply a hundred-year old test based on the growth of certain bones that doctors admit has a margin of error of about 10 months in adolescent boys. France Terre d'Asile director Pierre Henry says the NGO is furiously campaigning for it to be replaced with something more accurate. Once they've been accepted as minors, many only have a few months before they turn 18 and can thus be eligible for deportation by the French authorities. The NGO tries to have their applications processed as quickly as possible - many are eligible to apply for refugee status - but bureaucratic delays mean many spend months waiting to find out if a judge has decided if they can stay. For Omar, this waiting is the worst part, because at least in Ivory Coast he felt he could decide what to do tomorrow, he says - now he can only wait.
The centre's director Julien Mache tells me that's probably the worst of the problems these young people have once they've been given somewhere to live; a frustration, an ennui, a sense of no longer being the actors in their own destiny, a loss of identity, he says. Many have travelled long distances alone, overland from Afghanistan for example, and developed an extraordinary maturity and capacity for resilience most of us find hard to imagine. After that experience, they resent being put in classes and treated like children, and above all they resent the wait for paperwork. That's more psychologically distressing, he says, than being separated from their families, cultural isolation or traumatic memories, and pushes his charges into depression and drug use, because they're no longer in control of their lives. Many of them have great responsibilities to fulfil; they've been sent by families who have scraped together life savings or got themselves into huge debt to send a son abroad, and they have a strong sense of duty. For some, that means needing to pay off a trafficker who can track them down in Paris; more often, it means leaving a safe haven here to continue a seemingly endless journey to meet distant relatives in Britain and Scandinavia, whom they may never be able to find. Henry tells me very few of the young people his association works with have chosen to leave home on their own, meaning they're carrying all the hopes of an extended family with them. It's no wonder they're keen to start working and earning money as soon as possible - after all, that's why they came - and they find the limbo hard to deal with.
Where does the French state stand in all this, then? Pierre Henry says local authorities don't fulfil their legal responsibilities, basically passing the buck - areas that have international airports or big cities don't see why they should have to pay for looking after all these extra children, and demand federal government help that never arrives. The charity can apply pressure to get cases processed faster, but they can't change the political climate, Henry says, and it certainly isn't one in which refugee children are a top, or an uncontroversial, spending priority. France at least doesn't try to deport children - unlike some EU countries, including the UK, who have signed up to a scheme aiming to return them to their families, with fixed annual targets for returns. Back home, of course, they may well not be welcome, if the family can be traced at all. In order to stay in France after their 18th birthday, though, they must prove they can speak French and are in education, alongside a fair amount of sheer luck in negotiating the tangled system. Henry admits that despite France Terre d'Asile's best efforts, dozens are simply lost every year, disappearing from the public record over fears they will be deported.
The energy, motivation and drive of some of the young people I met are overwhelming, though, despite the legal and practical challenges they face. I'm sure that's partly due to the support and confidence building they've had from France Terre d'Asile, but Mache says those of his charges who attend mainstream schools improve standards for the whole class because they're so motivated. He also describes the experience of being young and alone in a foreign country as 'Darwinian' - the naturally toughest and most resilient do well, weaker ones less so. What these young people - some as young as 13 - have been through is inconceivable to most of us, but France is responsible for what happens to them next, and it's time, as Pierre Henry put it to me, for France to step up to that responsibility.
Sun, sand, sea... and corruption
Tulum in southern Mexico sits on the strip of perfect white-sand beach that runs from Cancun down to Belize. Development is spreading south down that coast pretty quickly, from the big resorts of Cancun and Playa del Carmen to what was recently uninhabited jungle. The area around Tulum was long protected by the fact that much of it is a nature reserve where most development was banned; those regulations are still in place, but the soaring tourist demand added to the Mexican ability to find loopholes in inconvenient laws means this...
could soon look like this...(this is Playa del Carmen).
Since the Mexican government realised its tourist potential and carved a resort city out of the jungle in the 70s, the coast around Cancun and Playa del Carmen has seen some of the worst enviromental degradation anywhere in Latin America, as overpopulation, poor planning and poor waste treatment have detroyed the coastal mangroves and much of the northern part of the coral reef, recognised as the world's most important after the Great Barrier. The development boom here was made possible because this was all federal government land; when it became the state of Quintana Roo in the 80s, the new local authorities were able to give the land to whomever they liked - or whoever could pay the highest price.
This, though, is entirely against Mexican land law, which requires agricultural land to be chopped up into parcels known as ejidos and farmed colectively by local people. This dates from reforms carried out by leftwing President Cardenas in the 1930s, aiming to fulfil the rural poor's centuries-old demands for land. They were significantly altered in 1992 by President Carlos Salinas (the man whose privatisation rampage gave the world NAFTA and Carlos Slim) to allow the landholders (ejidatarios) to apply for the right to turn the land into private property, if all the members of their ejido agreed, and thus sell it. This process happened long ago in most parts of the country, but Tulum is a special case because the municipality was only created in 2008, and with it the right to divide the land up into ejidos (the area is so sparsely populated, with most of it uncleared jungle, that it had been ignored by the government before the tourist boom started to reach there, and the land officially belonged to no-one). In order to become an ejidatario and thus get your slice of paradise, all one needs to do is prove that you live in the area - not too difficult for millionaire developers, when they can buy a hut in a local Mayan village for a couple of hundred dollars, and bribe locals to tell the authorities they live there. This sort of corruption is bread and butter to Mexican local politicians, but it may soon lead to the destruction of a very rare ecosystem.
Around this lake, next to the protected Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve, there are toucans, spider monkeys and jaguars - and plenty of ten-foot fences guarded by armed security men.
This (still officially collectivised) land has been put under lock and key by a consortium, including the former head of Mexico's biggest bank Banamex, and they plan to build a luxury resort, complete with golf course. Their plans have generated some protest, mostly from the foreign owners of small hotels and restaurants in Tulum, people who fell in love with the beach and stayed. Mexican law bans foreigners from owning ejidal land = so they were either duped into thinking they had legally bought it, or they 'borrowed' a Mexican's identity - and that means the new local authority can easily evict them and turn the land over to their own powerful friends. On October 31st last year, six coastal hotels were visited by police in the middle of the night, telling owners and guests to get out at once as the state was expropriating the illegally held property - although the owners say the court orders allowing them to do so were of very questionable legality themselves, not to mention the damage done to the area's repuation with tourists.
As for the Mayan villagers who live in the jungle, few of them understand the value of the land they're living on, making it easy for developers to buy up their rights cheaply. Many speak little Spanish and for them the tourist hotels a few kilometres away are in an entirely different world. That's not to say they are all living from subsistence farming - some have built up significant businesses like this chilli-growing cooperative just south of Tulum town - but if the developers from Mexico City get their way, these people will soon lose their homes and livelihoods.
Finding all this out just six months from Mexico's presidential election (of which more to follow in another post) it struck me as a neat distillation of everything that is wrong with the country - corruption, inequality and disregard for human rights - so if you visit a Mexican beach resort, have a think about how it came to be there.
Tulum in southern Mexico sits on the strip of perfect white-sand beach that runs from Cancun down to Belize. Development is spreading south down that coast pretty quickly, from the big resorts of Cancun and Playa del Carmen to what was recently uninhabited jungle. The area around Tulum was long protected by the fact that much of it is a nature reserve where most development was banned; those regulations are still in place, but the soaring tourist demand added to the Mexican ability to find loopholes in inconvenient laws means this...
could soon look like this...(this is Playa del Carmen).
Since the Mexican government realised its tourist potential and carved a resort city out of the jungle in the 70s, the coast around Cancun and Playa del Carmen has seen some of the worst enviromental degradation anywhere in Latin America, as overpopulation, poor planning and poor waste treatment have detroyed the coastal mangroves and much of the northern part of the coral reef, recognised as the world's most important after the Great Barrier. The development boom here was made possible because this was all federal government land; when it became the state of Quintana Roo in the 80s, the new local authorities were able to give the land to whomever they liked - or whoever could pay the highest price.
This, though, is entirely against Mexican land law, which requires agricultural land to be chopped up into parcels known as ejidos and farmed colectively by local people. This dates from reforms carried out by leftwing President Cardenas in the 1930s, aiming to fulfil the rural poor's centuries-old demands for land. They were significantly altered in 1992 by President Carlos Salinas (the man whose privatisation rampage gave the world NAFTA and Carlos Slim) to allow the landholders (ejidatarios) to apply for the right to turn the land into private property, if all the members of their ejido agreed, and thus sell it. This process happened long ago in most parts of the country, but Tulum is a special case because the municipality was only created in 2008, and with it the right to divide the land up into ejidos (the area is so sparsely populated, with most of it uncleared jungle, that it had been ignored by the government before the tourist boom started to reach there, and the land officially belonged to no-one). In order to become an ejidatario and thus get your slice of paradise, all one needs to do is prove that you live in the area - not too difficult for millionaire developers, when they can buy a hut in a local Mayan village for a couple of hundred dollars, and bribe locals to tell the authorities they live there. This sort of corruption is bread and butter to Mexican local politicians, but it may soon lead to the destruction of a very rare ecosystem.
Around this lake, next to the protected Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve, there are toucans, spider monkeys and jaguars - and plenty of ten-foot fences guarded by armed security men.
This (still officially collectivised) land has been put under lock and key by a consortium, including the former head of Mexico's biggest bank Banamex, and they plan to build a luxury resort, complete with golf course. Their plans have generated some protest, mostly from the foreign owners of small hotels and restaurants in Tulum, people who fell in love with the beach and stayed. Mexican law bans foreigners from owning ejidal land = so they were either duped into thinking they had legally bought it, or they 'borrowed' a Mexican's identity - and that means the new local authority can easily evict them and turn the land over to their own powerful friends. On October 31st last year, six coastal hotels were visited by police in the middle of the night, telling owners and guests to get out at once as the state was expropriating the illegally held property - although the owners say the court orders allowing them to do so were of very questionable legality themselves, not to mention the damage done to the area's repuation with tourists.
As for the Mayan villagers who live in the jungle, few of them understand the value of the land they're living on, making it easy for developers to buy up their rights cheaply. Many speak little Spanish and for them the tourist hotels a few kilometres away are in an entirely different world. That's not to say they are all living from subsistence farming - some have built up significant businesses like this chilli-growing cooperative just south of Tulum town - but if the developers from Mexico City get their way, these people will soon lose their homes and livelihoods.
Finding all this out just six months from Mexico's presidential election (of which more to follow in another post) it struck me as a neat distillation of everything that is wrong with the country - corruption, inequality and disregard for human rights - so if you visit a Mexican beach resort, have a think about how it came to be there.