Luis Rubio
Spain embarked upon the conformation of an integral strategy of tourism development in the cultural ambit when it identified, as an opportunity for attracting that type of visitor, the development of small counties and towns. That was how the national network of state-owned hotels, known as “paradores,” in many cases installed on the premises of ancient forts, palaces and monasteries, started, but whose objective it was to deliver content and viability to tourist development in places on occasion remotely located. Later would come first-class highways and high-speed trains, followed by an enormous proliferation of shops, cafés, restaurants and an interminable determination of the townspeople to convert tourism into a source of progress. The number of tourists that visit that nation every year far supersedes its total population and a big chunk of the income it provides stems from its cultural side.
The concept –towns with huge potential attraction for tourism- is obvious, thus it should not be surprising that Mexico has attempted to imitate this. In this manner was born the “Magical Villages”, described as “places with symbolism, legends, history, important events, day-to-day life, in other words, “magic” in their social and cultural manifestations, as great opportunities for tourism.” With that criterion, the Mexican Government has denominated 111 localities as “Magical Villages” along the entire length and breadth of the country. A great idea, but constructed Mexican style: pure rhetoric and no content.
The contrast with the Spanish experience could not be greater. There they began with the infrastructure -the hotels, followed by highways- supplying content and fundamentals to an integral strategy. It was a great vision rooted in real investments (not always profitable), which were followed by private investments complete with all of the accoutrements that tourists demand. In Mexico, hand-outs were printed up that read “Magic Village” and with that we attempted to attract a thriving tourism. It reminds me of the way that a few decades ago the urban capacity of Mexico City was expanded: the capacity of the Viaducto freeway surrounding the city’s periphery was increased by 50% with a traffic lane delineated with a bucket of paint. The problem is that doing things on the cheap turns out expensive.
Before anything else, what is mostly heard about the Magical Villages is the lack of infrastructure: they are difficult to get to, there is no parking, there are certainly no hotels and, once there, there are no cafés, shops or other tourist attractions. What’s more, the towns have not been organized to attract tourism, as they could be by preparing old buildings, churches, convents and other constructions for these to be visitor-worthy. The strategy has been limited to emitting decrees (or declarations), not to building the project. No one should be surprised by its poor results.
In second place, lack of the most minimal infrastructure is in addition to the fact that many of the so-called “Magical Villages” are found in highly violent regions, if not in frank narcoterritories, the result being a fiasco. A good idea ended up disrupted to the extent that it became a perversion and, probably, the beginning of the end of massive potential. Once a family visits one of these villages and leaves frustrated or, worse yet, after being held up, word gets around and no one wants to hear anything about the place again.
The case of the magical villages is not unusual. It is, in fact, the way we are: as the Russian saying goes, first we break the eggs and then we look for the frying pan. That is how laws are made, how Fronts are organized and how pacts are pieced together. Great announcements are made without a moment’s thought of the consequences and implications. Legislators do not read the content of the legal initiatives that they approve, which leads to their being fought over when the time arrives to implement them. The same thing happened with the Pact that led to the approval of the reforms driven by the present government: unless some of the Pact’s authors had an ulterior Machiavellian strategy in mind, it is clear that at least the PAN and the PRD did not weigh the consequences of themselves being identified with governmental corruption. These examples are the norm, not the exception: it is our way of doing things.
The building of the new Mexico City airport undoubtedly comes under the same logic: the costs have exceeded any budget surely because of corruption, but also because it was not taken into account that the land of that area is muddy and that this requires a much more expensive and complex foundation than budgeted for (that is, those who planned the airport did not know that the Lake Texcoco lakebed was there because this is newly created…). We first break the eggs and then look for the frying pan…
But above all, the failure of the Magical Villages program reveals a total incapacity on the part of the government to understand how important the security of the population is. It is obvious that narcotrafficking has a great deal to do with this matter, but the fact that security has not comprised a priority of the government manifests itself in all that it touches. It is impossible to build a better future with foundations made out of clay.
@lrubiof