Casinos for Chiapas - Mexico eyes gambling industry

Progressive, The, March, 1997 by Chip Mitchell

Calumet has failed to win significant Mexican indigenous support, but not for lack of trying. Gilbert and Means have been meeting for months with Indian leaders. And in December they met with indigenous leaders in the southern state of Oaxaca. "When it comes time to negotiate with the government, we'll have indigenous people at our sides," Gilbert insists.

"It's possible," agrees Rodriguez. "The Mexican government has always had economic and political relations with indigenous people to try to buy them off and to divide and confuse people at a community level."

It seems only a matter of time before the Mexican legislature throws out a 1936 ban on casinos, despite staunch opposition from the Catholic Church and factions of all three major political parties. The government already allows public lotteries, racetrack betting, and rural cockfights. And a casino bill submitted by the federal tourism department last year generated widespread interest. The legislature finally tabled the measure, but is expected to consider casinos again this year.

The bill aimed to attract more U.S. visitors, who comprised 87 percent of Mexico's foreign tourists in 1995. Tourism, the nation's third-largest industry, accounts for 12 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. A Harrah's Entertainment study predicts that casinos will bring $5 billion a year and 129,000 jobs to the country over a five-year period. The U.S. casino experience, however, suggests that even if Mexican gaming were limited to tourist areas, it would inevitably attract some of the people who can least afford to plug coins in a slot machine.

Sniffing the imminent booty, Nevada interests have descended on the capital. Last May, they funded an International Gaming Summit that Gilbert and Means attended in Mexico City. And homegrown casino backers include nice guys like Enrique Molina, the billionaire owner of Cancun's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, who, according to Mexican press reports, has been investigated for alleged drug-trafficking ties. Gilbert says not to worry. "We decided to ensure that, if and when Mexico institutes gaming, the Indian people receive some benefit," Gilbert says.

The Zapatistas' Rodriguez isn't counting on it. "Indigenous people in Mexico are not organized into reservations like in the United States," she says. "They're negotiating for autonomy that was never known in the United States. It's like trying to apply NAFTA to communities that don't have roads, sewers, or services.".

Chip Mitchell is editor of Connection to the Americas, the monthly magazine of the Minneapolis-based Resource Center of the Americas.