The Hindu : Two faces of globalisation

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Sep 10, 2003

International

International

Two faces of globalisation

By C. Rammanohar Reddy

CANCUN SEPT. 9. When the Government of Mexico decided to hold the 2003 ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation here it could not have chosen a better venue to advertise the virtues of globalisation. This beach resort facing the Caribbean Sea attracts more than two million well-heeled tourists from the U.S. and West Europe every year and is Mexico's single largest earner of tourism revenue.

Unfortunately for the WTO, which is often criticised for promoting destructive globalisation, there is another side to the Cancun story as well. Three decades ago, there was no place called Cancun. It did not exist on any map. In the 1960s, the Government of Mexico anxious to develop new tourist venues "discovered" miles of beaches on what was then more of a sand barrier than an island.

Tens and thousands of workers were brought in from elsewhere in Mexico to build the new town, which was called Cancun. Forests were cleared and mangroves destroyed to build the beach resort. The "hotel zone", as the resort area is called, has towering hotels, gleaming shopping malls and restaurant chains from the U.S.

Cancun has, however, only one thing Mexican about it — the people who service the tourists. It has no Mexican homes, there are no signs of local culture and it has nothing for anybody who is not a tourist. The tourist area with its single broad avenue may just as well have been located in north America. Because the kitsch beach resort shows that it has been created, Cancun has been called "Las Vegas on the beaches", for its similarity to that other and older man-made tourist attraction which was built in the desert in the U.S.

On the other side, separated from the "hotel zone" by a lagoon, is the town of the Mexicans themselves — Cancun City with a population of 500,000. This town is also economically separated from the "hotel zone". Originally created to house the workers brought in to build the beach resort, it is now home to the children of the original immigrants and the new migrants who have come to serve the tourists. While the beach resort goes dead after 10 p.m., with only the lights on in the hotels, the town has all the signs of an organic and living settlement.

While the tourists retreat into closed restaurants and night clubs in their hotel zone; the streets are bustling with life in the workers' town.

The beach resort has created hundreds of thousands of jobs, but it is an ecologically destructive and culturally sterile tourist industry that has boosted the economy.

The dual-faced nature of Cancun is on evidence during the WTO meeting as well. Agricultural workers, farmers and Mexican civil society activists are assembling, fittingly, in Cancun City.

The WTO meetings on the development agenda for world trade will be held in the sterile hotel zone, while those protesting globalisation will be confined to the workers' town.

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