Human Rights and the Environment: A Synopsis and Some Predictions

Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, Spring 2004 by Hill, Barry E, Wolfson, Steve, Targ, Nicholas

2. The Case of Cancun, Mexico

The growth of these megacities is, generally speaking, fueled by the prospect of better employment and educational opportunities, access to comprehensive health care services, and better sanitation services and drinking water. These cities continue to grow because of the perception of people in rural areas that they will provide greater economic and social benefits as compared to rural areas. These perceived "benefits of urbanization," however, do not extend invariably to the poor who tend to cluster on the outskirts of these megacities in shanty towns.

Cancun, Mexico, for example, is a beach resort of 100 luxury hotels that has become one of the major destinations for tourists from the United States. There are also more than 700,000 Mexicans who live in and around Cancun, many of whom work in these luxury hotels. As a result, one author recently stated that "[a] de facto economic and social apartheid keeps the two worlds of Cancun - the served and the server - quite distant except when conducting necessary business."20 In describing the "other Cancun," this author wrote that:

The gritty downtown sits immediately adjacent to the hotel zone . . . . The inner rings of the city consists of graffiti-covered tenements - incubators of a robust coca-driven youth-gang culture. This is Cancan's Soweto, the ghetto dormitories that house many of the tourist industry's impoverished workers. Behind most of the grim cinder-block houses stand cramped, low-ceiling, add-on structures with tin roofs, wood-slat walls and earthen or concrete floors. Little more than human stalls, these cuarterias - little rooms - are illegally rented out by the day or month to the 40,000 or so mostly Mayan construction and hotel workers who commute into Cancun from their rural villages and go back home on weekends or once a month.

The water system was privatized a decade ago, but with deference to the tourist hotels; many in Benito Juaraz have running water only three or four hours a day. . . . Today, about half of the residents are not connected to the sewer system, and local groundwater has turned toxic.21

Nevertheless, the prospects of a better life in Cancun will continue to attract job-seeking subsistence farmers whose livelihoods have collapsed, and who "have flooded Cancun, accelerating what was already explosive and chaotic growth."22

In Mexico, "[a]uthorities with the Ministry for Social Development (SEDESOL) have projected that by 2030, the population will surpass 127 million inhabitants, 70 percent of whom will live in cities. Growth of urban centers will tax existing drinking water and sanitation services. Experts warn that if these resources are not provided to the population, poverty and disease will spread."23 Cancun is not the only city in Mexico suffering from rapid population growth. In Mexico City itself the situation appears to be getting worse. Rodolfo Tuiran, Mexico's Under secretary for Urban Development, recently reported that:

The nation's capital is one of the most seriously threatened. Continued population growth, lack of water treatment facilities, and a rapidly depleting aquifer have led metropolitan officials to predict a dire water shortage within 10 years. In the capital, per capita consumption of water stands at 350 liters a day, a number inflated by widespread leaks spilling over a third of the water pumped from the aquifer beneath the Valley of Mexico.24