A Political Storm Strikes Sunny Cancun

Despite its gleaming hotel towers, luxuriant golf courses and free-spending foreign tourists, resort haven Cancun has gone broke.

What’s hard to sort out is whether its financial crisis is due to its mayor’s mismanagement, a plot to discredit him or the city falling victim to its population boom.

Political analysts were aghast at the decision by Quintana Roo state over the weekend to fire Cancun Mayor Juan Ignacio Garcia Zalvidea. It is believed to have been the first such action by a state against a mayor and, some say, represents a blow to Mexico’s efforts to strengthen democratic institutions in the wake of seven decades of single-party rule.

“This was a coup d’etat and an injustice. I will fight this in the nation’s Supreme Court this week. My lawyers are already in Mexico City preparing the case,” Garcia said in an interview.

On Monday, Quintana Roo announced that Cancun would get $30 million to pay back wages and other bills. The state ordered an audit of the city’s books to find out how tens of millions of dollars were spent. It also appointed an interim “citizens council” to take over management of the city, whose official name is Benito Juarez.

With near unanimity, the city’s business community called Garcia an incompetent administrator whose firing was long overdue. Workers weren’t being paid and hundreds of suppliers were owed millions of dollars for goods and for services rendered to the city, said Ruben Mora Fuentes, president of Cancun’s Chamber of Commerce.

“Cancun citizens have struggled for many years to create a stable and vigorous city, and we can’t let 30 years of hard work go down the drain because of this mayor’s bad administration,” Mora Fuentes said.

Under Garcia, debt quadrupled to more than $90 million, far beyond the city’s ability to pay.

City officials were quick to declare this week that the crisis has not hurt Cancun’s tourism industry, the Caribbean’s largest. Police, fire and emergency health services have not been interrupted.

But business leaders fear that Cancun’s appeal could dim if the root causes of the problem are not addressed.

The state fired Garcia after 1,400 unionized municipal employees marched on City Hall on Friday after not receiving their full semimonthly wages.

In an interview, the head of the union said employees have received only part of their salaries and benefits since December. They went on strike for a few days this month after the city failed to pay up.

Friday’s demonstration turned violent after some marchers, reportedly including people who are not employed by the city but were sent by Garcia’s political opponents, broke shop windows and police responded with tear gas. Eleven of the 16 City Council members resigned Friday in sympathy with the marchers.

Garcia, a populist and member of the Green Party, said the city is short of cash because state Gov. Joaquin Hendricks of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has withheld $50 million that would ordinarily be earmarked for paying salaries and building infrastructure.

The governor’s objective, the mayor has told reporters, is to damage Garcia’s reputation and eliminate him as a PRI opponent in next year’s elections.

The governor has denied the allegation. “The man wants to blame the state government when the city has complete autonomy. The governor never intervenes in a city’s budget, much less does he take money away,” said Hendricks’ spokesman, Victoriano Robles Cruz.

Critics say Garcia has fattened city payrolls and overspent on social projects, disbursing money the city doesn’t have for such items as children’s school supplies and food for the poor.

“The truth is, no one knows what Cancun’s financial situation is. Garcia hasn’t provided anyone with any information, not even his own party members on the council,” said Arturo Escaip, an economics professor at Cancun’s La Salle University.

Garcia said his administration has focused on alleviating inequalities in a city where hotel towers are bordered by slums with no running water. He acknowledged that he increased the payroll to 5,700 workers from 3,500 but said that was required to meet rising demand for services created by the city’s growth rate.

Newspaper columnists, including Sergio Sarmiento of the Mexico City daily Reforma, said the state’s intervention to unseat an elected mayor was “anti-democratic.”

“We had a mayor there who was democratically chosen. You might like him or not, but he was freely elected. If you want to impeach him, there are ways to do it, but not by sending thugs to threaten members of the town council and the mayor himself,” Sarmiento said, making a reference to Friday’s demonstration.

Cancun’s financial woes are shared by many Mexican cities that cannot keep pace with population growth.

Cancun became Mexico’s fastest-growing city as poor migrants flocked there for jobs in the booming tourism business during the last 20 years. A fishing village of shacks in 1972, the city now has 700,000 residents.