The beach that turned back the commercial tide

The Guardian 27 May 08;

Robert L White reports on a how a determined group of locals in Mexico saved their paradise beach from the developers

Picture a perfect beach. From an expanse of flawless white sand, implausibly turquoise water shelves out over a stoneless seabed to a clear horizon. Overhead, pelicans wheel lazily in search of fish. One suddenly folds its wings, like a prehistoric umbrella, and hurtles downward. The splashdown is the first sound you can remember hearing for several minutes.

Now imagine a whacking great hotel plonked on all this; plus a golf course and a few jetskis, of course, just to keep the decibel levels up. This is the fate that has befallen so many of the world's idyllic places that there seems something almost inevitable about it. Thanks to a determined and organised grassroots campaign, however, it won't be happening on this particular, Mexican strand.

Balandra beach, outside the city of La Paz, state capital of Baja California Sur, has been spared from future development after residents, civil society groups and environmentalists organised themselves into a collective, amassing a petition of 18,440 signatures calling on the regional authorities to protect the area. On March 25, after a protracted struggle by the Colectivo Balandra, state officials finally designated a total of 2,131 hectares of land and sea a Natural Protected Area, in a move that could signal a shift in Mexico's approach to tourism and conservation.

Baja California is the long, bottle-opener shaped peninsula that descends for over 1,000 miles from the US border at San Diego. La Paz, and Balandra, lie in the hook-shaped bit of the opener, on the Sea of Cortéz, the narrow strip of water that separates Baja from the Mexican mainland. As the place where the marine ecologist Jacques Cousteau did much of his filming, it has a strong claim to be the real site of his Undersea World, a unique and diverse ecosystem resplendent with rare and endangered species.

Environmental issues were, naturally, one of the main planks of the collective's campaign. As the group warned on its website: "The landscapes of the rest of the beaches of La Paz have already been modified with various types of constructions and installations; Balandra is the only one that remains to us."

But there were social considerations at stake here, too, because Balandra is essentially a beach for the people of La Paz, where tourism is of the unobtrusive variety. In stark contrast to the super-rich celebrity playground of Cabo San Lucas, just down the road, this is not a place that exists to service the appetites of deck shoe-wearing management consultants from LA.

When I was there last year, the beach was full of Paceños relaxing, on the air the sound of children's laughter, distinctive Mexican Spanish and just the occasional, hunger-inducing waft of grilling sardine. It was a friendly, democratic space – albeit one, as I quickly learned from the petitions that festooned La Paz's bars and ice-cream parlours, that some very rich people were eager to make a little more hierarchical.

The threat came, specifically, from a business consortium headed by the son of a former state governor of Veracruz, whose family own land in the area. Miguel Alemán Magnani's hotel-and-golf vision involved international capital, according to the Mexican newspaper El Universal, and the group had been trying since at least 2005 to get the go-ahead for the project.

Perhaps the strength of the resistance the consortium met has something to do with geography. As a neighbour of the most powerful nation on earth, Baja has a ringside view of the caprices of trickledown economics. Every morning, its workers take the tram from Tijuana to make the beds of San Diego's hotels and toil in California's vineyards. Every holiday season, underage US fratboys head over the border to carouse. And every year, in road races such as the Baja 1000, the authorities open up the state's already rutted, potholed road system to hordes of gringo petrolheads who tear up what little remains of it and go home leaving many highways downright impassable. All for a few dollars more.

Development of Balandra would surely have brought jobs: margaritas would have had to be served, tour parties guided and pets pampered (the tourist publication Baja Traveler magazine last year, without irony, printed a picture of a waistcoated Mexican smilingly massaging a blond spaniel). As in Acapulco or Cancún, air-conditioned boutiques would have sold trophy watches while wandering hawkers flogged hand-plaited wristbands. But the people of La Paz have looked into that particular future and dared to choose another path. They have shown that it is possible to take on the inevitable - and win.