The last canvas that Mexican artist Flora Guerrero had time to paint, eighteen months ago, is titled Virgin Mother Earth. It shows a serene figure in white robes, young and cinnamon-skinned, dark braids looped like earrings. She balances atop clouds in a cobalt night sky, toes pointed, feet bare.

Guerrero, who lives in Cuernavaca, less than an hour’s drive from Mexico City, hasn’t done much painting in the past year. Lately, she is no sooner settled in her studio, paintbrush in hand, classical music in the background, when her cellphone rings. Usually it is more bad news about a revered local former hotel site and green space: another historic mural has vanished; another tree is gone.

The murals and trees were at a place called Casino de la Selva, or, literally, Jungle Casino. It’s an odd name for a hotel that never received its gambling licence when it was built in the early 20th century, but it went on to become a world-famous lodging and the setting for Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano.

Guerrero, in a telephone interview, described the downtown hotel site as a place of “a million marvels”. Among its unusual buildings, some designed by Spanish architect Felipe Candela, was a Hall of Murals, now demolished. It featured wall and ceiling paintings of Mexican historical scenes by Spanish artist Josep Renau and Mexican artists such as José Reyes Meza and Benito Messeguer. The “jungle” consisted of 9.5 forested hectares surrounding the dilapidated hotel and its hodgepodge of buildings and swimming pools. The site, according to Guerrero, contained 938 trees, some of them a century-and-a-half old, as well as 46 plant species and 100 bird species, six of which are endangered. It was a green lung in the heart of Cuernavaca’s congested downtown, a meeting place for friends, an urban sanctuary for wildlife, woods for people to wander through without leaving the city.

Last year, the U.S. company Costco Wholesale Corp. and its Mexican partner Controladora Comercial Mexicana bought the Casino de la Selva from the Mexican government, which had seized the land for nonpayment of taxes. The former owners owed US$63 million in taxes; Costco and Comercial purchased the site for US$10 million.

Guerrero learned the hotel would be knocked down to build a 146,300-square-foot Costco warehouse, a 141,500-square-foot Comercial supermarket, and one of Comercial’s “California” chain restaurants. Its tangle of vegetation was to be paved to accommodate 1,156 parking spots for Costco alone.

“This is a joke, an irony,” said Guerrero, reached at the home she shares with her husband, Charlie Goff, director of a Spanish language school. “A transnational corporation is destroying our art, our environment, our archaeological treasures, to put up a megastore. And when we defended it, they [the police] hit us and put us in jail. It was terrible. We cannot accept this…it’s about more than art and trees. We are trying to defend our dignity, our humanity, our right to decide in our city, our country, our world, what we want.”

Guerrero helped form a group called the Civic Front for the Defense of the Casino de la Selva. Known as the Civic Front, it includes artists, writers, professionals, workers, housewives, and students. For two months, the group maintained a picket line at the site. On August 21, 2002, police arrested Guerrero, Goff, and 31 others on charges that included sabotage and trespassing (the sabotage charges were later dropped). Their arrests led 15,000 people to march in protest through the streets of Cuernavaca.

Guerrero was released on US$5,000 bail and Goff for US$10,000. Charges have not been heard, but the arrestees must report weekly to Cuernavaca’s jail. “We can’t leave the country. We can’t vote; we are like criminals,” Guerrero said. “But we are only environmentalists defending our city.”

On January 28, Guerrero and seven others began a sit-in at the state government offices. They refuse to leave until the government agrees to buy back the property and convert it into a cultural centre and park. They are also demanding an investigation into the terms of the property’s sale.

Joel Benoliel, a Costco senior vice-president and legal counsel, said the site was purchased through public auction with a minimum bid set by the Mexican government. Costco was the only bidder. “This property has never been a public park, never been accessible to people legally,” Benoliel said in a telephone interview from Issaquah, Washington.

Benoliel said Costco had the legal right to raze the entire site. When protesters alerted the company to the murals, Benoliel said, Costco took the costly step of trucking the art to Mexico City for restoration. He said some murals were not salvageable because, prior to the property’s purchase, they were badly damaged by vandals and exposure to the elements. But many will be returned to the site later this year for public display in an “exact replica” of the original Hall of Murals, already bulldozed to make way for Costco. The hall will form part of Costco’s “cultural centre,” which will include a two-storey museum and open-air theatre.

But the Civic Front, along with the environmental group Guardians of the Trees and the Citizen’s Council for Culture and the Arts, based in the state of Morelos, refuse to concede the Casino’s treasures. “We cannot accept the fact that our art, our history, our roots, are reduced to the back patio of a megastore and fast-food restaurant,” Guerrero said.

Guerrero sees Costco’s arrival in downtown Cuernavaca as a symbol of an increasingly homogenized world, one in which Mexicans are pulled into the U.S. cultural and economic sphere. Will small, family-owned stores be able to compete with Costco, the largest wholesale-club operator in the U.S. and Mexico’s second-largest retailer after Wal-Mart, she asked? Will Costco import much of its food, hurting Mexican farmers who cannot compete with American subsidies?

“What is going on in Cuernavaca is an X-ray of what is happening all over the world. Globalization is a big octopus with miles of tentacles everywhere. One of these tentacles is Costco in the Casino de la Selva.”

Cuernavaca has long called itself the “city of eternal spring.” With a Costco in its middle and five Wal-Marts around its outskirts, the city could soon be known as the city of eternal shopping. Or the city of eternal sprawl.