Turtles in Xcacel

We should call it the dirge of the species. It is a sound known in every corner of the world. Silence. Silence on a summer night, when only memory can bring back the sound of a hundred June bugs crashing against the windowpane. Rainforests disappearing and taking with them whole worlds of living things. Mangroves melting into hotels, golf courses, and shrimp farms. E.O. Wilson calls it the "silent hemorrhaging of biological diversity." Everywhere you look there is less to look at. In Mexico, two of the world's seven surviving species of marine turtles, Atlantic green and loggerhead turtles, might quietly disappear for the sake of a hotel.

A stretch of beach seventy miles south of Cancun was sold to a Spanish company that plans to build what they call "a 450-room Paradisus Tulum All-Inclusive Beach Resort." This particular beach, in a place called Xcacel (pronounced shkah-SELL), was a federal reserve until 1992, when control was passed to the state government. The Governor of Quintana Roo, Mario Villanueva, turned around and sold the property to the Spanish corporation, Sol Melia, for $2.2 million. A paltry sum that points to kickbacks and payoffs for the folks vociferously defending the development, the governor and his cronies in Chetumal. There is no proof at hand except for the warm bed and the rumpled sheets.

It was a federal reserve because it is one of the few places on the blue-green shores of the Atlantic ocean that the green and loggerhead turtles nest. From May to September these turtles, some as big as 400 pounds, pull themselves on shore and lay their eggs. One in 100 of the baby sea turtles will live to adulthood. Most die on the journey from the nest to the ocean. Baby turtles use the phosphorus glow of ocean waves to direct them to the water. Any other light, even a flashlight, distracts them, sending them the wrong way. The adult females are also disoriented by light, making development on the shoreline antithetical to the turtles' survival.

ReSource has been building composting toilets in Quintana Roo since 1993. We know that 5 people move to the area for every hotel room built. Tremendous ecological strain resulting from habitat destruction and skyrocketing demand for workers' housing and related basic services have been created by Quintana Roo's burgeoning tourism industry.

Nearly everything built on the coastline is touted as "eco" tourism. Some facilities are and some are not. But no one seems to build a hotel without a "green" spin. Mario Villanueva has put his spin on the Xcacel development, declaring 100 yards of beach a "natural protected area." It's like calling the 100 yards between you and the bullet fired from a 20mm bolt action sniper rifle "a safe area." The bullet can't read signs and the person pulling the trigger never violates the space. The lights, sounds, and tourists from the Sol Melia beach resort might play by Villanueva's rules, but they will kill the turtles anyway.

A handful of people, like Araceli Dominguez and Eduardo Rodriguez , directors of a regional environmental organization called GEMA, are working to protect the turtles. They have the support of neither the federal nor the state government, the only entities that can stop the desecration of the nesting area.

The turtles won't go anywhere else. Even if they could break the genetically encoded signals that send them to Xcacel each year to lay their eggs, there is virtually no beach left from Cancun to Tulum that hasn't been sold to developers.

People and turtles cannot live harmoniously in Xcacel. Three thousand tourists at an "all-inclusive resort" have nothing to do with harmony. Build the complex and the turtles will die. All tourism is local. It's repercussions are silent to the tourist. But in a place like Xcacel, long after you go home, silence rips the place apart.

Laura Orlando

If you would like to help protect the turtles, contact Araceli Dominguez. She speaks English. If you prefer, write or call me at the ReSource Institute in Boston.

Araceli Dominguez, GEMA
Hotel El Rey del Caribe
Av Uxmal, esq. Nader, S.M. 2-A, Cancun, Mexico
Tel 011 52 98 84 69 44
Fax 011 52 98 84 98 57
reycarib@cancun.rce.com.mx

Laura Orlando
ReSource
179 Boylston Street, 4th Floor
Boston, MA 02130
Tel 617 524-7258
Fax 617 522-0690
orlando@riles.org

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