The Baja Boom

Mexico has embarked on an ambitious plan to transform Baja California from 800 miles of dusty peninsula into the new Riviera. Sleepy villages are giving way to luxury resorts; fishermen are becoming tourist guides; farmers are now waiters. With the changes come a welcome prosperity--and the bittersweet sense that Baja will never be the same.

Independence Eve, 1986, in Baja California Sur, the state occupying the southern half of the peninsula extending 800 miles below the California-Mexico border. The September heat notwithstanding, 25,000 gather in La Paz, the capital, to feast on paper platefuls of fried-fish tacos in the plaza estatal . One hundred seventy-six years earlier, over in what Baja Californians call el interior , a priest more faithful to politics than catechism clanged church bells to wake the town of Dolores. “Death to the Spaniards!” roared Padre Miguel Hidalgo from the belfry as his sleepy parishioners assembled. Hidalgo--who kept a mistress, gambled and made wine--now became a soldier as well.

The Spaniards soon transplanted his head onto a stake, but 12 bloody years later, Mexico had its own government. Ever since, Hidalgo’s call for independence has been re-enacted by presidents, governors and mayors from the balconies of civic buildings on its anniversary.

Tonight, La Paz is no exception, even though an editorial in this morning’s paper noted that “these days, we love Spaniards but want (our) government dead.” Like webs of huge, patriotic spiders, strings of green, red and white lights drape from the cornices of the blocky concrete capital, and streamers brighten its blank, rectangular facade. Beer is going for 25 cents (U.S.), but the mob is neither drunk nor unruly. This is a family affair, and people politely excuse themselves as they crane for glimpses of sequined ranchera singers and mariachis on the portable stage.

Ten o’clock approaches, the moment when Gov. Alberto Alvarado Aramburo will appear for the sixth and final year to wave the flag and repeat Hidalgo’s Grito de Dolores . On either side of the square, skeletal wooden structures rise into the black sky, wrapped with flash-powder-drenched vines. Ramparts of skyrockets connect them to Roman candles, flaming curtains, pinwheels of tricolor fire and a sizzling caricature of Padre Hidalgo.

A unit of La Paz’s Heroic Corps of Firemen stands ready at a cherry-red 1957 Crown Fire Coach equipped with brass fixtures and polished oak ladders--a recent donation from La Paz’s North American sister city, Los Angeles. La Paz’s once famous pearls have vanished from its bay, and protectionism has ruined the city’s former status as the duty-free market to the rest of Mexico. But the city grows on: The fire department has quadrupled in the 12 years since Baja California Sur achieved statehood.

The music ceases. The governor, flanked by family and functionaries, approaches the window. With the country’s economic crisis dragging on so long, the crowd applauds his rendition of the Grito with less enthusiasm than in previous years, but almost wistfully it echoes his exhortations of “Long live Mexico!” At that moment, fireman Jose Cruz holds a lit cigarette to a dangling fuse. “ Ahi va !” children shout, and the sky fills with color and pyrotechnic racket.

After nearly half an hour, one wooden spire remains. The spark reaches its base, and two hot whirlwinds burn red, then green, then white as they race upward. Just beneath the pinnacle they merge, showering the throng with stars. Through the smoke, a flaming ring disengages from the exhausted scaffolding and lifts into the sky. Higher it spins, spitting comets, fixing the crowd’s gaze until it hovers above them.

Suddenly it falls. There is nowhere to run from its path. Helpless, all follow it as it lands . . . in front of the Heroic Fire Coach crew, waiting to reduce it to a harmless hiss. “Ah,” everyone exhales. A benevolent omen. Shortly, the governor will unveil his successor, who will set the course for their state until 1992. These days, Mexico will take every auspicious portent the heavens can muster.

“Not that things are so bad here,” Cruz says, waving to the folks from aboard the gleaming red engine. His ancestors were ranchers in the mountains outside of town, a venerable Baja occupation that has nearly disappeared in recent drought years. This summer alone, thousands of cattle starved, but that is no longer a major disaster here. “As long as the caravans keep coming,” he figures, “there’s plenty for everyone.”

The caravans: Since 1974, processions of campers have journeyed over a narrow, paved road running the length--slightly longer than Italy--of the dry, spiny Lower California peninsula. Tourists are nothing new in Mexico, but until the highway was built, Baja California was more isolated from the rest of its country than Alaska is from the contiguous United States. Twenty-five years ago, recreational visitors were as rare as rainfall. Now, fledgling tourist developments account for more than a third of the state’s income. With only 250,000 inhabitants, Baja California Sur is the least populated Mexican state--but it suddenly has the most international airports. Except for isolated pockets, unemployment is rare, a condition unimaginable nearly anywhere else in the country.

The reason, Mexicans agree, is coastlines and California. Barely 150 miles wide at its maximum girth, Baja California separates the warm Gulf of California (also known as the Sea of Cortez) from the colder Pacific. Between the two, an astonishing variety of aquatic organisms enraptures both commercial and sportfishermen. Most of the latter (and other related tourist species) arrive from nearby California--which is also Baja’s major market for seafood.

Since the highway and airports appeared, the unblemished stillness of palm-thatch villages has been replaced by clattering armadas of cement trucks. One former fishing camp has more lumberyards than the entire state did a decade ago. A hundred resorts are blooming; families are pouring in from el interior for construction jobs for papa and chambermaid positions for mama, and Baja is still short-handed.

“Prosperity,” muses curly-haired Santana Aramburo, with some amazement. He is working in the airport at the tip of the peninsula, where private and government tourism projects are locked in profitable combat. Aramburo came here from the state of Sonora, where he’d studied economics. Grateful to have employment, he still can’t help noticing the exceptional circumstances that have brought it about.

Supine under a palmetto ramada just beyond the string of hotels at San Jose del Cabo, Aramburo observes that his Sunday drinking companions here were once shark fishermen. Now, they either take tourists out to catch marlin, or sell tuna and cabrilla to wholesalers who ship it to the United States. The nearby San Jose River once was lined with orchards and fields of corn, chiles and beans. But agriculture has largely been abandoned, and dense palms now grow where the crops once grew.

“Farmers’ sons now are waiters in the restaurants. This state could probably grow enough to support itself, but even where there’s still agriculture, it’s mainly wheat, safflower--whatever is good for export.”

A fisherman passes Aramburo a liter of beer; it’s windy, and no tourists are going out today. “These were self-sufficient villages. Today, everything here is for the gringo--crops, fish, housing and tourism.”

Aramburo’s companions, who now make $30 a day plus tips working sportfishing boats, grin and offer a toast. “To the gringos!” Aramburo agrees. “If the United States got mad at Mexico over drugs or immigration or oil prices, a tourism boycott would be catastrophic.” Shuddering at the prospect, the fishermen open another bottle of Pacifico. “But it will probably never happen. This country has so much. The United States hasn’t even begun to exploit our potential. It can’t stay away from her,pxso it will always solve its problems with Mexico.”

He takes a long pull on the circulating refreshment. “Unless,” he adds, winking, “we become the 51st star in the spangled banner.”

That joke, half serious, is ubiquitous in Baja California Sur: The United States will forgive Mexico’s awesome debt in exchange for the peninsula. This offends the sense of national pride that the government inculcates early on with textbooks that portray the U.S. role in Mexican history with more venom than most North Americans realize. Ever since 1853, when James Gadsden’s purchase added southern New Mexico and Arizona to everything else Mexico lost in the 1846-48 Mexican-American War, Mexico’s constitutions have forbidden relinquishing sovereign territory. When American filibusterer William Walker invaded La Paz in 1853 and declared himself lord of the peninsula, undermanned but proud forces ran him off. But with today’s pervasive North American presence in the hotels and luxury homes appearing along the shores, many just shrug, observing that, piece by piece, the United States is buying Baja California.

Two years ago, an alternate route along the Pacific side was added to the last 100 miles of the trans-peninsular highway. At one point an artesian spring surfaces, watering a coastal oasis known as Todos Santos. Mango, avocado and papaya orchards fill the seams between hills where a village perches, its houses made from woven and plastered palo de arco sticks.

The beaches here are white and open, fine for surfing but offering boats no protection. Todos Santos thus isn’t likely to be developed as a resort. Nor is it included in the state’s projected “tourist staircase”--a series of marina facilities in natural harbors every few hundred kilometers, where yachts from California will be able to spend the night or make repairs on the way down to the cape. (Mexico is budgeting a similar staircase for the gulf side, and another is planned down the mainland’s western coast.)

So Todos Santos may miss the brunt of tourist developments, but the highway has brought Americans anyhow. These include iconoclastic writers, painters and a Vietnam veteran or two, existing on monthly disability pensions mailed from the United States, passing time spearfishing red snapper and diving for lobster. Margarita Sepulveda, who has lived here all her 46 years, thinks their presence is fine. “They spend. We earn.”

But it hasn’t been that simple. Many Americans aren’t content just to rent a place for a few hundred dollars a year. They want to own. “It’s funny,” it occurs to Sepulveda. “Mexicans want to live in America, and now Americans want to move here.”

Technically, foreigners cannot own land within 100 kilometers of a Mexican coastline, which eliminates this entire peninsula. For those who want property here, Mexico has devised the fideicomiso , a 30-year bank trust. In major resort towns, the fideicomiso is widely accepted; although no such trust has yet come to term, it is understood that after 30 years a trustee will either be able to negotiate an extension or be indemnified in the unlikely event the government should reclaim its real estate. But in Todos Santos, a more common method is one that the fideicomiso was designed to eliminate: putting ownership in the name of a prestanombre --a Mexican name lender.

Sepulveda, a round woman with only an occasional tooth remaining, explains how that works. “If I loan my name to an American, then he’ll hire me to be his cook and to clean and wash for him. When he and his wife die, I get the house.”

And she has done that, but so far she hasn’t inherited any houses, because there have been children who are also heirs. It has not occurred to Sepulveda that she is not getting the fairest of treatment--any more than it has occurred to her that, as legal owner of the house, she could kick the gringos out whenever she chooses. “If I refused to lend my name,” she says, “they wouldn’t hire me. There are many other prestanombres they can choose from.” And that, she adds, is where the problems begin. “People have become jealous in this pueblo.”

Once she ironed and cooked for a nice American, but a lying stonemason told the gringo that she was stealing from him, so he got to be the prestanombre instead. When authorities took the American away because he planted marijuana in his date grove, the stonemason ended up with the house. He now rents it out to an American writer. But Sepulveda is ever hopeful: She’s started working for some Americans who have opened a bed-and-breakfast place. More gringos will be arriving and staying.

Below Todos Santos, the new pavement crosses the Tropic of Cancer, a latitude remote from winter storms and moisture-bearing summer westerlies. The road passes an experimental forestry project that is testing jojoba and pasture grasses, but cardoncacti, pitahaya , elephant trees and palo verdeare what do best in this dry yellowness. In the nearby mountains, the state of Baja California Sur is building a series of dams to catch runoff from hurricanes. The plan is to enhance agriculture, but even more important, it is ensuring adequate water supplies for the growing tourist cities of Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo.

In Manuel Diaz’s garden office at Pedregal, the opulent Cabo San Lucas residential development that has become a tourist attraction in its own right, he examines a vast set of architectural plans. The single dwelling that they outline, the future castle to a Los Angeles couple, will run 20,000 square feet. Yet, its construction will cost less than $900,000, which is part of the appeal here. The rest is the setting: Pedregal’s hand-paved roads of locally quarried stone meander up a granite palisade at Baja California’s apex that overlooks the yacht-filled harbor, then cross the ridge and sweep toward the beaches on the Pacific side.

Since Diaz’s family moved here from Mexico City in 1977 and began developing, three-fourths of the 400 lots have been sold, mainly to Americans. Except for one who put his house in the name of a local boatman, all have used the fideicomiso. When Diaz--whose tall, breezy good looks seem designed for sailboats and marinas--first arrived, barely 250 people lived on the sandy cape. Many worked in a rather fragrant tuna cannery that, since tourism, has been moved up the coast. Its former employees are now pouring concrete and hammering crossbeams on Pedregal’s hillside and at its new condominium project below. “If the water holds out,” Diaz predicts, “in 15 years I can see 60,000 living in this town.”

But another limiting resource worries his friend Luis Coppola, who owns the nearby five-star Hotel Finisterra. The Coppolas are among three families that began hotels here back when the only guests were fishermen arriving in Cessnas on dirt airstrips. Aggressive promotion now attracts the sunbathing set, but sportfishing still lures 80% of Baja California Sur’s tourists. “About 40,000 marlin are caught here a year,” says Coppola, a fair-skinned man in a dark cotton shirt and white pants. “But for how long?”

Last year, a Japanese vessel with an ailing engine put in at Cabo San Lucas. Coppola got a look into its freezers and discovered tons of marlin. Now, from his desk he produces a sheaf of photocopied registration papers from the Ministry of Fisheries. They support his contention that Japanese and Korean flagships, and Mexican boats with Japanese crews, are getting permits for marlin, sailfish and swordfish--species supposedly reserved for sportfishing. More papers appear--photographs and documents suggesting that fisheries officials look the other way when foreign boats violate the limits Mexico has set to protect its coastal waters.

Coppola, author of a scathing book on government corruption, has been snarling at politicians from La Paz to Mexico City. “If they took the casinos out of Las Vegas, it would fold overnight. What happens here when their 70 miles of hook-lines take all our fish?”

Commercial fishing in Baja California Sur earns as many pesos as tourism, and Coppola has no argument with that. But with the appearance of Japanese rigs sporting sonic fishing lures and onboard processing plants, suspicion grows that Mexico is bending the rules for Japan because so much of its debt is owed there.

At night, on a lighted outdoor basketball court, a group of Cabo San Lucas primary and secondary schoolteachers sweat off other frustrations. Evidence of abundant money covers the hills, lies at anchor in the marina, speaks in English in bars like the Giggling Marlin--where dish antennae pipe MTV into six color televisions--and dines on shellfish in restaurants along moonlit Rafas Beach. But the teachers’ classrooms have no windows; there is no library, and there are not enough textbooks or benches.

Jesus Quintero (who asks that his real name not be used) refuses to give up teaching, though his brother makes more in an hour carrying bait to fishing boats than he earns in a day. Like most of his colleagues, he is descended from the whalers, ranchers and lighthouse keepers who were the original settlers here. “But look at this pueblo. The government sticks up a huge flagpole to remind us we’re Mexicans. But the signs are all in English. Kids come to school dressing like Americans and using English words they overhear. Anyone who has property is looking to sell it to an American, because they pay in dollars. It’s three times as expensive here as in La Paz, because prices are inflated for tourists. We can’t afford to eat our own fish because it’s priced for export.”

To stretch their salaries, teachers drive taxis in the evenings. “The government gives tourism classes to teach people to love gringos because they’re good for Mexico. But where’s all the money going? Everything here is for Americans. We’re becoming a nation of servants, waiting on rich foreigners. This helps Mexico?”

It does, believes Angel Cota, branch manager of Banamex, the state-run bank. He, too, is beleaguered, by interest rates that have topped 100%, devastating domestic investment, and by the knowledge that many prefer to smuggle money to the United States or keep it in mattresses before trusting the bank these days. “We have to accept,” he says, “that tourism will soon be our No. 1 industry. If we sacrifice some of our life style for the benefit of our country, it’s worth it. Things are more expensive, but we are living better. That’s the proof. So what if we are Americanized? We have houses. Food. Employment.”

“Besides,” says waiter Efrain Mejia (who also does not want his real name used), counting his tips at the Rafas Beach restaurant where he’s found good work after languishing the better part of his life on the mainland, “we can always kick the gringo out if he acts too stupid.” Invoking memories of the 1930s, when Mexico nationalized its oil and reclaimed farmland from American owners, he says, “Mexico’s done it before.”

The highway rolls along the bottom of the peninsula, past cliffs and beaches, past gran turismo hotels, such as the Twin Dolphin, that cater to the upper limits of Hollywood wealth. After 30 kilometers, it arrives at San Jose del Cabo, and part of the mystery of Cabo San Lucas’ plight is cleared up. San Jose is the county seat, and tax revenues end up here. Unlike Cabo San Lucas with its sandy, uncharted streets, San Jose is a showpiece Mexican pueblo, with tile-roofed pastel buildings, ornamental street lamps and precisely marked avenues. Stores and restaurants are owned by families named Green, Collins and Robinson, reflecting not newly arrived Americans but a heritage of English pirates who preyed on the Manila-Acapulco galleons that passed by here in colonial times.

Today, San Jose figures significantly in the plans of FONATUR, Mexico’s bureau of tourism development. While private money has built Cabo San Lucas, the government is concentrating its own efforts here. Americans have favored the former for its mystique of being Baja’s farthest extreme, but everyone agrees that the hills overlooking the ocean that FONATUR has cleared at San Jose, relocating entire neighborhoods in the process, will soon be covered with posh gringo homes.

Mexico’s multibillion-peso investment in tourism during its frightening financial crisis reveals how seriously it counts on tourism to attract foreign currency. The enormously successful Cancun has become an icon, and FONATUR is bent on recreating its image in the rest of Mexico’s perfect paradises. This includes a hotel-condominium-marina project for Cabo San Lucas, two major resorts up the coast at Loreto, another at Bahias de Huatulco in the state of Oaxaca on the mainland, the three yacht staircases, and plans to enlarge several existing sites.

“Our hope,” says Ignacio Lopez, FONATUR general manager in San Jose, “is that Los Cabos will be as big as Puerto Vallarta in five years or so.”

His words reflect the assumption on which Mexico’s costly plans depend: that the United States represents sufficient demand to fill all these new beds--and a large share of the 270,000 Mexican hotel rooms that already exist.

“ Ojala ,” he says. God willing.

The pavement turns north at Cabo San Lucas, heading inland over the sierra toward La Paz. But an ancient dirt trail, recently re-scraped, continues up the gulf coast. Gullies regularly obliterate it; yet vehicles struggle through, hauling building materials for new houses for those who like their luxury even more remote. Three hours and 40 kilometers up from San Jose, the old fishing camp of Los Frailes is covered with bulldozer treads and stacks of PVC drainage pipe: A California builder has begun a 150-parcel development.

Twelve years earlier, at Cabo Pulmo a few kilometers north, a tuna boat capsized. A local fishing family named Minjares set out in skiffs and saved the crew, and over the years salvaged the usable parts of the boat as well. Its former mast holds up the thatched roof of the family’s little restaurant, and its portholes serve as windows and picture frames.

At a table on the dirt floor near the doorway, Edmundo Minjares and Lalo Macias dine on soup made from a sea turtle snared the day before and watch the orange moon rise over the gulf. If its illumination reveals a band of low clouds to the southeast, there will be wind again tomorrow, and heading out in Macias’ boat to dive for conch may be out of the question.

Seven families live at Cabo Pulmo, fishing and guiding scuba-equipped tourists to see one of the few living coral reefs remaining between Alaska and Chile. Thus far, no major development is scheduled, but the Minjareses and their neighbors, the Castros, fear that it’s only a matter of time. A few Americans have built beach homes on land that Jesus Castro believes is rightfully his, fencing the property so locals have to walk around. That, Castro protests, is against the law. For 20 meters in from the highest tide mark, the Mexican shoreline belongs to the federal government, but the gringos have Mexico City lawyers who always seem to win. “With Americans,” says Castro’s son Juan, “what can you do? They’re millionaires. You can’t move them.”

Cabo Pulmo fishermen have discovered damage that Americans have done to the reef--chunks they have broken off as they illegally pursued exotic tropical fish for stateside pet stores. This past year, signs have gone up along the beach designating a protected zone reaching three kilometers into the sea. SEDUE, Mexico’s Ministry of Ecology and Urban Development, hopes to save the unusual reef, and although no one is actually patrolling yet, fishing and anchoring in the preserve are forbidden. Juan Castro does not mind: If development has to take place, a national park that wouldn’t destroy the tranquillity would be nice. But he doubts that will happen. A La Paz attorney was sniffing about recently, trying to determine who claimed what property. When Castro told him that this was a reserve and that no one could build here, he was informed that what was protected was the sea bottom--not the land.

And a few days later, Tito Minjares emerged from the shade of the restaurant, puzzled by strange noises, and discovered a large helicopter descending. From it popped the brother of a recent ex-president of Mexico, asking the same questions as the lawyer. Grimly, Tito regards the peaceful sea. Once presidential money is involved, he says, “you can bet something’s up for Cabo Pulmo.”

The future of Baja California Sur has now become an international pursuit. State technicians recently spent seven months in Israel, learning how to make the most of their desert. “We were chosen,” says state planning director Jorge Gutierrez, “because our land and climate resemble Israel’s. Also, there was a historic precedent. During the ‘30s,” Gutierrez says, “Baja California was being mentioned as an alternative for a Jewish homeland.”

Mulege, an oasis on the gulf side with a two-kilometer-long, palm-lined river, will be the prototype based on the Israeli model. Water-saving root-injection systems will irrigate low-moisture crops such as pistachios and peaches. Goats will be ensconced on hillsides, and sheep, whose milk will be used for a Roquefort-type cheese, will be introduced in the valley below. The dry areas will be planted in grapes--”the Israelis,” Gutierrez explains, “brought us delicious brandy to try. We can make it, too, they said.”

To take advantage of the sea, Israeli aquaculture experts suggest culturing clams, oysters and abalone for export. Such notions are received favorably, but locals are waiting to see whether anything will really happen. Everyone here knows that Mulege, with its superior water source and proximity to the fabulous, island-flecked Bahia de Concepcion, was passed over by FONATUR in favor of Loreto, because the governor’s wife was from Loreto. And 10 years ago, when the government decided to line Mulege’s irrigation canals with cement, the result was that whenever the water table dropped, the canal could no longer be deepened, and all the crops died. Mulege has yet to believe that it will become the new Negev.

In Vizcaino and Santo Domingo, Baja California Sur’s two small agricultural valleys, thirsty crops such as long-staple cotton have already been replaced by water-efficient Israeli strains of citrus and apples, and carnations and chrysanthemums for export are next. Santo Domingo’s new garbanzo beans are coveted for their flavor in Mediterranean countries, whose ships load up at Baja’s tiny Pacific port of San Carlos amid spawning gray whales. The crops have resuscitated farming, once in danger of drying up here, but many former pickers and cotton gin employees have been forced to migrate to the fields of the United States for work.

Yet, chickpeas, wine, table grapes and flowers are all secondary to the two impulsos Baja California Sur will count on for three-fourths of its economic future. Mexico’s longest aqueduct, now under construction, will extend from Vizcaino to the Pacific coast, piping water to a chain of Pacific fishing cooperatives that now depend on expensive diesel-fired desalinization plants. West Germans have been experimenting with solar-powered desalinization at La Paz, but Mexico can’t afford to wait for the results. The fishing villages there are its most isolated but most productive, and they need to grow because fishing brings dollars.

As does tourism. On the gulf side just below Loreto, the most extravagant project of all is under way on one of the world’s most perfectly sheltered harbors. According to construction director Ramon Trabadello, Puerto Escondido will suffer no delays due to the economic crisis, because FONATUR has designated it a priority--and because it is an investment with French partners. Trabadello, a French engineer who until recently lived in Mexico City, is bringing a complete Mediterranean seaport to Baja. By 1989, five-star Spanish colonial hotels, deluxe private homes, condominiums, shops and a fitness center--designed by the creator of Port-Grimaud at Saint-Tropez--will be elegantly situated here on artificial islands. Pueblo-adobe-style apartments will rise on the hills above. More than a mile of docks will provide moorings for 300 yachts, and a new Mexican law will allow them to remain in the country five years at a time.

“Of course,” Trabadello notes, “fishermen and trailer owners have been Baja California’s tourists until now. The concept will need to widen to include upper classes who want to live on a ‘Riviera.’ ”

The French selected this site after studying the entire country, vindicating Mexico’s sometimes criticized decision to develop the Loreto area. Fifteen minutes north, the El Presidente Hotel stands half empty amid a FONATUR development called Nopolo, which is all streets, electric utilities and Latin America’s only Decoturf II tennis center (complete with John McEnroe as touring pro)--but almost no houses yet.

“The trouble,” explains El Presidente room manager Marc Denis, another transplanted Frenchman, “is a vicious circle. So far, there’s only the 250 rooms in this hotel, and an airline wants to see 1,000 new rooms before it adds flights. But without flights, no one will invest in new hotels. So only Aeromexico flies here, and only from Los Angeles in the United States, with a stop in Tijuana. Aeromexico sometimes does crazy things, like two days before last Fourth of July, when it decided to cancel Thursday flights; 140 people stuck in the L.A. airport never made it here.”

Carmen Gorraez, FONATUR’s sales director in Nopolo, agrees that silence still rivals the sea and mountains at Nopolo. But she isn’t particularly worried. “Cancun and Ixtapa didn’t happen overnight, either. With Puerto Escondido coming, people are getting interested. It just takes one investor. The others always follow.”

And there’s one more compelling reason for this project to succeed: “We are the closest foreign luxury resort to Los Angeles. Once they really discover we’re less than two hours away, they’ll be here.”

Five minutes away, in the little pueblo of Loreto, more FONATUR lots with built-in utilities wait to be occupied by the employees who will one day serve the tourists. Loreto, the site of the peninsula’s first mission, was the capital for both upper and lower California during the 1700s. The Jesuits complained about the local inhabitants’ laziness, and that opinion is still expressed. FONATUR’s employees often are from the mainland--”people here are used to picking fruit off trees or pulling a fish out of the ocean,” Marc Denis says. “If you live in the Garden of Eden, why work?”

But all over Baja California Sur, the garden is being developed. And its two biggest hopes are at odds with each other. From the patio of the El Presidente, Denis cringes as his guests watch shrimpers clearing their nets of tons of drowned yellowtail and dorado that tourists spend thousands of dollars to catch. In old Loreto, Lisa Ramirez straps on an oxygen tank and prepares to dive into the brilliantly clear Gulf of California that every year has fewer fish in it. Around her neck is a pendant in the shape of the state, a gift from her family the year she was Miss Baja California Sur. A pearl marks Loreto--her father, Alfredo, found it, one of the last taken from the sea there. Alfredo Ramirez’s sportfishing boat operation provides employment to 35 families, and he is worried.

“There used to be mackerel here. Gone. All fished out. Squid: The Japanese sucked them up.” He assumes that these are part of the food chain and suspects that this is why he no longer sees acre-long boils of yellowtail in a feeding frenzy as he once did.

For 10 years he has raged at the Ministry of Fisheries about gill nets and drag lines that kill 10 tons of fish for one ton of shrimp. “There are plenty of species for everyone,” replies Humberto Larrinaga, Loreto’s fisheries representative, but Ramirez doesn’t believe that.

Finally, this fall, a joint state committee was formed to resolve the tension between fishing and tourism. “We have to hope that they mean it,” he says.

Jacques Cousteau has been here, and the people of Loreto heard the frightening predictions of what could happen to the sea--and how soon--if reasonable conservation isn’t applied. “Ten years,” Lisa says. “My children wouldn’t even get to see what a fish is like.” She would like to see the state she once represented start lobbying for national parks before it is too late. There have to be some things that will attract tourists other than gold and discos.

In La Paz, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party announces its candidate for Baja California Sur’s new governor. Newspapers explode with full-page ads--congratulating the PRI’s Victor Liceaga Ruibal--paid for by unions, beer distributors, clothing factories, farmers’ and cattlemen’s unions, grocery wholesalers and various branches of the government itself. Liceaga, a congressman who has lived for the last 10 years in Mexico City, returns home to energetic, PRI-orchestrated demonstrations. Streets are transfigured in themes of red, white and green. Organizations of public workers and campesinos take turns venerating the governor-to-be with speeches, placards and enough banners to rival last week’s independence celebrations.

In a state that is overflowing with jobs, Liceaga will have little problem getting elected; political opposition here is practically invisible. The civil unrest that has scared off tourism elsewhere is non-existent in benign, booming Baja California Sur. Nevertheless, as is expected, his campaigning matches the exuberance of his reception, and every hour he is somewhere else. At 8:30 on a Sunday morning he makes an appearance at a dirt futbol field in a new La Paz barrio to inaugurate a soccer tournament. Amid the flapping of painted sheets proclaiming Futbolistas por Victor , Liceaga lauds sports as a healthy activity for pure-minded Baja California youth.

Around him rise hills covered with ragged colonias , neighborhoods that did not exist a few years ago. New arrivals sit in the stubble of their yards, listening to Liceaga and other dignitaries pledge themselves to Baja California’s future. The candidate believes he is prepared. His predecessor paid most of his attention to building schools and dams, but Liceaga, an economist, has other specialties. In congress, he served on committees for both fisheries and tourism and represented Mexico in joint parliamentary discussions on those topics with the United States.

“We will try very hard,” he says, “to support the development of fishing and tourism, activities that have much importance for California, the principal market in the United States. Our motive is to provide employment and foreign exchange for our country.”

The heavy-set, clean-shaven candidate wears a blue guayabera with the left sleeve tucked into a side pocket. Toward the end of the Mexican Revolution, Gen. Alvaro Obregon lost an arm in battle but later won the presidency. Liceaga lost his to a propeller as he hurried to wave to President Miguel de la Madrid on a Mexico City runway.

Liceaga’s sacrifice may have been less romantic, but it reflects the politics of the times, as much as Obregon’s revolution once did. Thus, Liceaga may prove an appropriate leader here. With its hopes now measured in foreign currency, the once remote and mysterious Mexican state of Baja California Sur has surely joined its country and the times.