1 The curse of the tourism industry Marketing men put curse of tourism industry on Mayas
Box 8.1 The curse of the tourism industry Marketing men put curse of tourism industry on Mayas
Order a prawn cocktail in a hotel in Chetumal, south-east Mexico, and it will probably come smothered in ‘Mayan sauce’. A trivial example, but one that shows how the tourist industry, helped by Latin American governments, is turning a great pre-Columbian civil- isation and its present-day descendants into a marketing concept.
But critics, including Mayan organisations, claim that archaeological sites and indian villages face being turned into a giant theme park, and that the millions of indigenous inhabitants have no part in decision-making. ‘The bottom line is that they are just
13111 exploiting the resources of our people’, says Greg Cho’c of the Kekchi council of Belize. ‘Mayan people are not involved and cannot influence the project.’
The aims of the Mayan World scheme . . . include improving the quality of life of local residents, protecting the environment, and safeguarding historical and cultural heritage. But the Mexican government’s own archaeological and cultural institute, the INAH, is sceptical. ‘They have no awareness of what ecology is’, says the director of the local INAH office, Adriana Velásquez. ‘If they put up a palm-thatched hut they think it’s “ecological”.’
She cites the once-unspoilt Xcaret ruins, which have been turned into a park for day- trippers from the up-market resort of Cancún. The entrance fee is about £13, out of the reach of local people . . .
Rolando Pérez, a Quiché Maya, is one of about 30,000 Guatemalan refugees living in south-east Mexico . . . Mr. Pérez . . . believes white and mixed-race people want to elim- inate the indians. ‘They see us as an obstacle to development,’ he says. ‘They just want to build big hotels for the tourists. They’re the ones that benefit, not us.’
Local initiatives, such as a village guesthouse scheme started by Mayan villagers in Belize, have been ignored, says Stewart Krohn, managing director of Channel 5 televi- sion in Belize . . . ‘If you go to a meeting of the Mundo Maya you won’t find a Maya there, except maybe serving dinner,’ Mr. Krohn says. ‘The Mayan people are just being used as low-cost labour. If I was a Maya, I’d put sugar in their gas tank.’
Source: Gunson (1996)
it is one of the advantages of this type of tourist scheme that money for services rendered goes direct to those who render them without being ‘creamed off’ or cut down to a minimum by middlemen and agents. Although the community received considerable assistance in its early years, its tourism venture has been largely unassisted, which clas- sifies this scheme as self-mobilisation in terms of Pretty’s typology.
These two examples come from Central America, but later examples in this chapter are from Africa and the Himalayas, as well as Latin America. You might also find it useful to refer other case studies presented elsewhere in this book to Pretty’s typology.
Participatory appraisal and inquiry techniques
In their efforts to involve local populations in the planning, decision-making and oper- ating of tourist schemes, planners and academics have developed a range of techniques. Some of these techniques were listed in Box 4.9 and briefly mentioned in ‘The tools of
11111 sustainability in tourism’ (pp. 106–13). As was pointed out, techniques which allow for
218 • ‘Hosts’ and destinations