Cruising to Destruction: Why the Leisure Industry Isn't all Fun and Games

Environmental and community activists in the Mexican Pacific resort of Zihuatanejo recently celebrated the cancellation of a cruise ship terminal that would have accommodated two thousand-foot "floating hotels" at once. Opponents feared a large pier on the town's main beach would contribute to bay pollution and ruin the quirky, small-town atmosphere that attracts return visitors year after year. For months, the People in Defense of the Bay coalition had staged protest rallies, posted online petitions and fired off letters to government officials -- including planners at the federal Ministry of Communications and Transportation (SCT).

Set on Zihuatanejo's main beach, the multi-story Casa Marina was a hotbed of activism. Banners and signs opposing a new pier draped the building that houses locally owned businesses as well as the Humane Society, where scraggly street cats and spooked pelicans are nursed back to health. Inside the edifice, merchant and green activist Natalia Rodriguez Krebs runs a store that offers eye-grabbing indigenous art, crafts and clothing.

Rodriguez and other locals have long received the cruise ships that anchor inside the bay one at a time, and shuttle passengers in small boats (known as tenders) to the existing pier where they run a gauntlet of day-tour operators. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Mexican marines guarding the municipal pier have joined the throng.

That is not the only influence that Washington's "war on terror" has exerted on this small Mexican town. Since international regulations drafted in the wake of 9/11 mandate that other boats maintain a fixed distance from the cruise ships, industry expansions imply an increasing privatization of public waterways. Hosting ever-bigger cruise ships also means transforming the natural environment and reallocating local resources. Bays are dredged, local water supplies tapped and garbage unloaded. At terminals, walkways are fenced off, access roads expanded for day-tour buses and local businesses sometimes threatened with relocation. Invasive species hitchhiking on the cruise ships can alter local ecosystems.

"To allow the construction of a marine terminal in the middle of Zihuatanejo Bay means the collapse of the town," declared environmentalist Silvestre Pacheco, project director for the SOS Bahia group.

The Business of Cruising

The dynamic that boiled over in Zihuatanejo is simmering in coastal communities across Mexico, the world's numero uno cruise destination. The number of ship passengers visiting Mexican waters doubled from about 3.2 million in 2000 to 6.4 million in 2007, according to the Florida Caribbean Cruise Association (FCCA), a trade industry group. Some 22 Mexican ports now host cruise ships, and federal officials plan to make the cruise business even bigger. Sailing to Mexico on vessels departing from California and Florida ports, U.S. and Canadian nationals comprise the vast majority of cruise ship tourists. In recent years, cruise vacations have become trendy. Even readers of the liberal Nation magazine and listeners to Air America are pitched cruises hosted by their favorite corporate-bashing celebrities. In fact, in a prematurely triumphant mood, the center-left radio network plans a three nation Obama victory cruise after the U.S. presidential election in November to Belize, Mexico and Guatemala.

Earmarking tens of millions of tax dollars for infrastructure development, the Mexican government justifies its investment splurge as classic, trickle-down economics: More tourists mean more money, hence more jobs. The question is at what cost and to whose benefit?

According to Mexico's National Tourism Ministry (Sectur), income from the industry rose from $201.3 million to $487.5 million between 2000 and 2007. Using bigger numbers than Mexico's federal government, the FCCA estimated that cruise ships contributed $565 million and created 16,000 jobs in Mexico during 2006.