posted May 16, 2002 10:13            

The $1.9-billion project calls for marinas and a road to haul boats between coasts. But Baja has a history of shattering dreams.

By KENNETH R. WEISS
LA TIMES STAFF WRITER

May 14 2002

VALLEY OF THE BOOJUMS, Mexico -- It's the best road in Baja, as far as it goes. It unfurls for two miles and then quits in the middle of the peninsula, a long way from either of the two coasts it is supposed to bridge.

Is this, as Mexico's tourism promoters say, a road to the future that will attract hoards of American visitors and launch sleepy, rural Baja California into the 21st century?

Or is the road destined to be a dead end here in the boojum forest, one more Baja development scheme as fantastic as these giant trees, which resemble upside-down carrots and got their name from Lewis Carroll's whimsical poem, "The Hunting of the Snark"? The road is a centerpiece of the Mexican government's $1.9-billion project to establish a necklace of marinas around Baja, 20 airports, and dozens of hotels, condos and golf courses.

Backed by Mexican President Vicente Fox, the project would be the biggest tourist development since Mexico turned the isolated fishing village of Cancun into a strip of high-rise hotels and swim-up bars.

The concept behind Escalera Nautica, literally Nautical Ladder, is that yacht owners, mostly from California, could put ashore at any of the two dozen new or improved marinas to be spaced roughly 120 miles apart.

The promoters of the project figure the biggest obstacle is the sheer length of the peninsula which, at 820 miles, is longer than Italy.

That's where the new road, or "land bridge," comes in.

Boat owners would turn over their lovingly waxed and polished yachts and cabin cruisers to a local hauling service, which would load them onto flatbeds and trailer them across the desert through the boojum forest.

The idea is that the new belt of blacktop across Baja's midriff would attract thousands of boaters from the Pacific delighted to find a shortcut to the Sea of Cortes and its 900 islands.

But Baja has a history of shattering the grand dreams it inspires.

The Sea of Cortes already has one largely empty port near Loreto built by the same government tourism agency now proposing to build or upgrade 23 more.

Baja's main highway is littered with abandoned recreational vehicle parks, cafeterias and gas stations built a generation ago to attract U.S. tourists. Weeds and rusting hulks of junked cars fill the spots once slated for American RVs.

Conservationists worry about history repeating itself with the new string of ports: If Mexico builds it, they won't come. Yacht owners seem less than eager for such an expansion of marinas, fueling questions about whether pristine coastline is being defaced for uncertain gain.

Homero Aridjis, one of Mexico's leading environmentalists, fears that even if it succeeds, the Nautical Ladder will despoil Baja's stark beauty and displace its rare wildlife. At worse, he says, the project will set off an orgy of land speculation, causing outbreaks of "chaotic development" all along the peninsula.

Baja owes much of its charm to its stubbornly primitive nature, rooted in makeshift fishing villages, empty wind-swept beaches and isolated desert ranchos.

Backward Baja has its aficionados. American and European tourists seem perfectly willing to endure kidney-jarring roads and basic accommodations to fish, surf and kayak in clean, clear waters; to rub the head of baby gray whales in deserted Pacific Coast bays; or just to unfold a beach chair on an empty stretch of sand and do nothing.

Now, as crews wrestle giant boulders to build the first new harbor and mow down rare boojum trees to make way for a road, the proposed mega-development is pitting one vision of Baja against another.

"We have a wonderful way to dramatically change the way of life in an entire region of Mexico," said John McCarthy, director of FONATUR, Mexico's tourist development agency.

According to FONATUR's projections, the new amenities would entice about 76,000 yachts from the United States to make the passage every year, bringing with them 860,000 "nautical" tourists.

This surge in tourism would, in turn, create 50,000 direct and 200,000 indirect jobs.

Impressed by such figures, President Fox has embraced the project. It's an appealing notion for a head of state who dreams of opening the border with the United States, but knows he must generate enough jobs at least to slow down the northward migration of Mexican workers.

Tourism now stands as Mexico's third most important economic enterprise behind manufacturing and oil, and from Mexico City, Baja looks ideal for a new jobs program.

Despite urban sprawl in the Tijuana-Ensenada corridor and the enclave of resorts spreading out from Cabo San Lucas at land's end, Baja contains less than 3% of Mexico's population of nearly 100 million.

Much of this arid peninsula with 2,000 miles of coastline remains unspoiled--a testament to what bad roads and scant water can do for a place.

Now conservationists on both sides of the border are pushing to preserve Baja much as it is.

Two years ago, the fledgling Mexican conservation movement--with the help of U.S. environmentalists--halted the construction of an industrial salt plant in southern Baja next to a gray whale nursery in San Ignacio Lagoon.

Now these groups are challenging the Nautical Ladder as another ill-conceived mega-project. They fear it will ruin wetlands, beaches, spawning and feeding grounds for birds, fish, whales and sea turtles.

"We learned from San Ignacio we could be the huge rock in the shoe," said Patricia Martinez, administrative director of Pro Estero, a wetlands protection group in Ensenada.

The Mexican conservation movement scored a victory earlier this year when it persuaded the government to conduct an environmental study on the Nautical Ladder project and, in particular, the road.

Mexico has rigorous environmental laws, which sometimes require more stringent ecological assessments than U.S. law, said Mark J. Spalding of UC San Diego's Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.

"When it works, it's great. It also is frequently shelved and ignored," Spalding said.

That's what happened when the government began to build the new road a year ago, clearing a wide swath through the Valley of the Boojums, or Valle de los Cirios, a nature reserve for the bizarre trees, which are found nowhere else on Earth.

The roadwork stopped--leaving the first, two-mile stretch isolated in the wilderness--after conservationists raised Cain.

"If you do anything in a protected area, you have to do a study," said Adrian Aguirre, director of the protected valley. "They didn't have the permit to do it."

FONATUR'S McCarthy and his staff said every aspect of the project--as well as the concept as a whole--will face rigorous ecological analysis.

Meanwhile, construction is underway on the first new marina in the tiny Pacific Coast fishing village of Santa Rosalillita. FONATUR estimates that 140 boats a day will someday use the yet-to-be-built boat ramp to begin the road trip across the desert to Bahia de los Angeles on the Sea of Cortes.

New roads, marinas and golf courses also would be carved out of other wildlife reserves: the Upper Gulf Biosphere Reserve, the Loreto Bay National Park, the Sea of Cortes Islands Wildlife Refuge and the Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which was instrumental in stopping the saltworks project in San Ignacio Lagoon, is now gearing up to fight a breakwater for a new marina at Punta Abreojos just up the coast from the gray whale nursery.

The environmental group Surfrider also has joined the fight, partly because five of the proposed marinas could destroy top surf spots at Santa Rosalillita, Puerto Canoas, Punta Abreojos, Magdalena Bay and Bahia San Juanico, a place surfers all over the globe know as Scorpion Bay.

"It could be devastating," said Ruben Andrews, who co-owns a surf camp at Scorpion Bay. Surfing tourism, he points out, is second only to fishing as a source of income for these villages.

McCarthy recognizes environmental opposition rising on both sides of the border. But he notes that Mexico is in desperate need of jobs and that tourism treads far more lightly on sensitive land than does agriculture or industrial development.

"We agree with them that this is a highly sensitive area of Mexico," McCarthy said. "If we don't do it right, we could destroy what we set out to protect."

Many residents are skeptical of environmental and economic promises from Mexico City.

Fishermen aren't eager to become servants of the tourist trade. The owners of small businesses worry about being marginalized by a new economy.

In Bahia de los Angeles, for instance, businessman Guillermo Galvan is concerned enough about the proposed 1,800-slip marina that he wrote to President Fox. He urged that the marina be built small and in town to benefit the locals, not displacing them by building a large marina-hotel complex on the outskirts.

If the government wants to help the town of 800 people, he wrote, how about building a sewage treatment plant, rather than a golf course or high-rise hotel?

"Electricity is on from 7 to 11 p.m. We only have water once a week," Galvan said in an interview. "How the hell can we manage that fancy stuff?"

Moreover, town leaders join conservationists in worrying that this project will be built and then abandoned like the last time FONATUR came to central Baja, when it built the RV parks.

"The government should know better not to waste money in projects that don't make sense," said Antonio Resendiz, who uses part of an abandoned RV park in Bahia de los Angeles as a sea turtle research station.

The toughest sell may be to the people the project is supposed to attract.

Experienced Baja sailers already bemoan the tedium involved in checking into a Mexican port--finding the port captain, dealing with immigration, paying fees at a bank and then going back to the port captain so he can check the paperwork.

As a result, the goal of many boat owners is to avoid anchoring in any Mexican ports.

The idea of putting their boats in the hands of local truck drivers for a trip across the desert would be funny if it weren't horrifying.

"Would I put my boat on a Mexican truck to go up and down a mountain to get to the other side? No way," said Nancy Dillman, who just returned to San Diego from two years cruising Baja.

Boating experts say FONATUR has completely misread the market in its projections. For 76,000 recreational boats to sail to Baja would mean cleaning out every slip in every harbor from San Diego to Sausalito, said Richard Spindler, executive editor of Latitude 38, a California-based sailing magazine.

Most of these boat owners couldn't, or shouldn't, tackle the cold, windy seas that stretch two-thirds of the way down the Pacific side of the peninsula, Spindler said.

Boat captains have a nickname for these conditions: The Baja Bash.

Moreover, yacht owners worry the proposed development will ruin what now attracts them to the peninsula.

"There are so many terrific natural anchorages, nobody needs these marinas," said Spindler, who has made an annual voyage with about 100 other boats to Cabo for the past 21 years.

"For selfish reasons, we want Baja pristine," he added. "We don't want hotels. We don't want golf courses. We don't want marinas."

posted May 19, 2002 21:37            

By Sandra Dibble
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

May 19, 2002

SANTA ROSALIITA, Mexico – For 50 years, Mexico's government mostly ignored this cluster of fishermen's houses battered by wind and sand. To this day, there is no electric plant, no water well, not a single gasoline pump.

Then with little warning a black-topped road began working its way through the desert toward the little bay. Explosions rang out from a nearby hillside. Trucks rumbled from the quarry past fishermen's pangas, carrying boulders for a $3 million barrier against the crashing surf.

Here on this lonely stretch of Baja California coastline, the first step of a bold and controversial proposal is taking shape: La Escalera Nautica, or the Nautical Staircase.

By 2014, the Mexican government envisions linking 24 ports in four states, luring tourists with lavish hotels, condominiums and golf courses set amid dramatic desert landscapes and starkly beautiful shorelines. The idea is to draw more than 50,000 boats and 1 million visitors annually, most of them from the western United States.

President Vicente Fox's administration is billing the Escalera as the most ambitious tourist development the country has seen and a way to save the region's fragile environment through planned growth. His government has committed $220 million to the project and hopes to entice $1.7 billion in private investment.

Critics see the plan as the beginning of the region's destruction, as a poorly conceived project that will deplete scarce water supplies and foment land speculation, money laundering, pollution and coastal erosion. They point to abandoned government trailer parks and gas stations on the peninsula as proof that grand government plans can't be trusted.

The project's crown jewel is the richly diverse Sea of Cortes, prized by travelers, fishermen, scientists and nature-lovers. Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau dubbed it the world's aquarium. Others compare it with Ecuador's Galapagos Islands for its hundreds of small islands teeming with endemic plant and animal species.

"There's no other place on the planet like it," said Serge Dedina, co-director of the Imperial Beach-based conservation group Wildcoast.

The Escalera plan is ambitious: to link ports spaced no more than 120 nautical miles apart, so boaters are never more than a day's sail from fuel, communications and repair facilities. For those who want to avoid the arduous seven-to 10-day voyage around the peninsula, there will be an 80-mile "land bridge," allowing boats to be towed in about three hours between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortes.

Mexican environmental officials say the Escalera offers an alternative to the often-unregulated, hodgepodge collection of settlements that have sprouted up in recent decades. They argue that revenues could be used to protect the region's natural resources.

"The way it is now, we're not protecting anything," Victor Lichtinger, Mexico's environmental minister, said during a recent visit to Baja California. "What we have is poorly organized tourism, with no long-term vision and no environmental protection."

What worries many is the project's immense scale and its environmental effect on vast regions largely untouched by man. Any mistakes made here, they warn, are likely to last forever.

"The concept is a good one, but the way it's drawn up leaves so many loopholes," said Enrique Hambleton, a soft-drink distributor and environmental activist from La Paz, the capital of Baja California Sur and one of the Escalera's stops. "There are no clear rules of engagement. People are doing things right and left claiming to be part of Escalera Nautica."

The Escalera's critics include influential groups from both sides of the border, among them an environmental organization, Grupo de los Cien, led by Mexican poet Homero Aridjis. Two years ago, environmental groups helped to defeat a proposal for a massive salt evaporation project on the peninsula at Laguna San Ignacio, a breeding ground for gray whales. Now the environmental groups are determined to defeat the even larger Escalera project.

Proponents point out that Mexico has 40 million people living in poverty and desperately needs the economic development the Escalera will bring. That development can be achieved, they insist, while taking the environment into account.

"It's not like before," said Baja California Gov. Eugenio Elorduy Walther. "You can't just bring the Caterpillar and build and build and build, and then ask later where does the sewage go, where do you put worker housing, what about the dust? It has to be very well-planned so everyone comes out ahead."

Carefully done, the Escalera can benefit people who live far from the crowded border, Elorduy said.

"We have a responsibility to offer opportunity for the people living there," he said. "Their life is very circumscribed, and that is causing their children to leave these places."

Starting from scratch

Most afternoons, a cool Pacific breeze sweeps through Santa Rosaliita, a collection of 50-odd houses scattered on the beach. Dogs wander on a dirt road past the concrete-block structure where the Murillo Gaxiola family can sit and watch as gray whales leap from the ocean on their way south every winter.

In Santa Rosaliita, the Escalera elicits mixed feelings.

With no fresh water supply, residents pay high prices for trucked-in water and would welcome a desalination plant. Their solar panels barely power a 12-watt light bulb, so they're eager for a reliable electricity supply. They would welcome the paved road, but also fear what it might bring to their tightknit, crime-free community.

They have other concerns.

"What's going to happen with our children, with young people, with fishing?" said Leobardo Murillo, 51, looking out on the Pacific Ocean where he catches lobster, mussels and abalone. "If the boats come and discharge fuel, that's the end of our product."

Santa Rosaliita will be one of the smallest stops of the Escalera, which includes Mazatlan, Ensenada and other established ports. Tourists who stop here will find basic amenities, not fancy hotels. Still, the community anticipates big changes, because Santa Rosaliita is planned as the western terminus of the Escalera's linchpin, the $42 million land bridge across the Baja California peninsula.

"The road is what's going to spark the project," said Alejandro Rodríguez Mirelles, a former investment banker in charge of the Escalera project for Fonatur.

Fonatur is the tourism development agency that launched such popular resorts as Cancun, on Mexico's Carribean coast. Cancun is an economic success but an ecological disaster, Mexican environmental officials say. Fonatur officials insist they are not trying to duplicate Cancun, and officials at Semarnat, as Mexico's environmental ministry is known, insist they will uphold environmental standards.

"Some ... have decided that Escalera Nautica is a bad project, even before they know what it is," said Francisco Székely, Semarnat's subsecretary and a respected specialist on environmental management responsible for the ministry's review. "They take a fundamentalist position and say 'zero use of the environment.' We are not of that position. We believe we can make use of our natural resources without destroying them."

'Dreams on paper'

Eighty miles east of Santa Rosaliita, at the other end of the proposed land bridge, the Escalera is raising more doubts than hopes in the town of Bahía de los Angeles.

To make the land crossing today, drivers must submit to seven miles of bone-rattling dirt road until they reach a silky-smooth section already paved for the Escalera project. Heading north on the Transpeninsular Highway, they reach another turnoff – a 38-mile paved road pocked with potholes.

Then, around a curve, a dramatic tableau appears: Bahía de los Angeles, its waters almost violet, its small islands struck by a golden light.

When Fonatur officials came here to present the plan in October, they spoke of an 1,800-boat marina, a 27-hole golf course and 49 acres of hotels and condominiums. Critics quickly cried out that the development would overwhelm the town of 800 and the fragile environment that surrounds it.

"A project of this magnitude can't be sensitive," said Dr. Abraham Vázquez, the town's only licensed physician and owner of a beachside trailer park, Campo Gecko. "These are projects that are created inside an office in Mexico City. They're dreams on paper, without any basis in reality."

Fonatur's Rodriguez said recently the project has been drastically scaled back, that only 100 boat slips are now being considered and that the location may shift, too.

"For sure it's not going to be exactly in Bahía de Los Angeles, but close by," he said.

Ambiguities and changing numbers have fueled the doubts of those suspicious of the project.

"We don't know what they're going to do. One day they tell us one thing, and the next day they tell us something else," said Roberto Enríquez Andráde, a researcher in marine economy at the Autonomous University of Baja California in Ensenada.

Enríquez and others argue that smaller-scale "eco-tourism" is far more in tune with the Baja California peninsula.

Conservation groups are especially protective of Bahía de los Angeles, a launching point for fishermen and scientists to the central Sea of Cortes. Five species of sea turtles, plus whale sharks, dolphins and a wide range of bird species, feed in the cool, nutrient-rich waters.

"Of all the sites they're proposing, it is the most biologically significant," said Wildcoast's Dedina.

Wildcoast is working with the Mexican conservation organization, Pronatura, to create a vast marine park where visitors would be charged admission. Revenues would be used to protect its natural resources.

The final word on how much of the Escalera Nautica becomes reality will come from Semarnat. As a first step, the ministry is completing a long-term land-use plan for the region, which it expects to present at public hearings this year.

"The idea is to know exactly where nature can accept the construction of a hotel and where it cannot, where we can build the road and where we can't," Lichtinger said.

It seems that not all government agencies have heard the message.

Mexico's Communications and Transportation Ministry didn't conduct an environmental review in October 2000 before it began building the road between Santa Rosaliita and the Transpeninsular Highway. The road slices through the Valle de los Cirios, a protected desert that covers the central part of the peninsula.

Semarnat halted construction of the road soon after Fox was sworn into office in December 2000. A transportation ministry employee said recently that a permit was later granted for the stretch between Santa Rosaliita and the Transpeninsular Highway, but that there's no money for the project in this year's budget.

Today, it is an incongruous sight: less than three miles of fresh blacktop in the middle of the desert that abruptly gives way to rocks and sand.

'Fashionable places'

Environmental questions aside, the Escalera's economic success depends largely on whether it captures the fancy of U.S. boaters. Fonatur's target market of six western U.S. states includes approximately 520,000 boats that measure longer than 16 feet. By drawing on this population of boaters, Fonatur calculates that by 2014 it can increase the number of yearly boat visits to the region from 8,000 to 50,000.

This estimate draws both skepticism and support from U.S. boaters.

"I fear these numbers are pure fantasy," said Richard Spindler, publisher of Latitude 38 in Northern California, a magazine geared to sailboat owners. "What they really need to do is merely add on to places where they currently have marinas."

Others say the Escalera's land bridge will bring to the Sea of Cortes those boaters whose vessels are too small to make the long Pacific Ocean journey around the peninsula's tip.

"A lot of people would use it," said Chris Frost, owner of Downwind Marine, a boating supply store in Point Loma that serves yacht owners. "There will be a whole new class of power boats that used to not be able to get there that will now."

Fonatur says commitments from private investors are already flowing into the region, especially to Loreto, a colonial town of 17,000 that Fonatur hopes to make the capital of the Escalera project.

Fonatur officials say they already have $200 million in commitments from outside investors to build two five-star hotels, a smaller "boutique" hotel and two golf courses.

"Golfers like to go to fashionable places. They spend a lot, $200 to $250 per green fee, and they don't worry about the cost of the hotel," Rodríguez Mirelles said. "That's the kind of person that we want."

For all the talk surrounding the project, it is those who live in the region who have the most to gain – and lose. In Bahía de los Angeles, longtime residents are watching, and listening carefully, and hoping they will be taken into account.

"The town has to grow. We can't avoid it," said Eduardo Smith, a 37-year-old fisherman whose grandfather came to prospect for gold in the 1930s. "If it's not now, with this Escalera Nautica, it will be some other way. We've just got to be careful, so that we don't drastically affect the environment."