Obscene.This was the word on everybody’s lips as we rode along the hotel strip on Kukulcan Boulevard in Cancun. The display of wealth is hard to put into words as pseudo Mayan pyramids and resort castles basically occupy every available inch of beach along the strip.

It is hard to believe that the strip, which separates a laguna from the Gulf of Mexico, was built less than 20 years ago when the Mexican government, wanting a third tourist centre to go along with Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta, decided to open Cancun for development.

There are plenty of lagoons in Mexico and no shortage of corporations to “develop” them the way Cancun was developed. But they face a major hurdle in their lust for more American-style malls with fake Mexican restaurants: the tenacity of the Mayan people to keep their way of life. And in its way, the local Mayan struggle is emblematic of the whole activist struggle to withstand a now wholly discredited agenda on display last week at the fifth ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization.

Shirley Lord, a Manitoba activist and member of the Council of Canadians board, was one of 20 observers from Global Exchange invited to spend five days in Chiapas to visit the real Mexico.

The last day of their trip was spent in Tihusuco, a Mayan community of 709 families living in an ejidal about 200 kilometres to the southwest of Cancun. The ejidal is a legacy of the Zapatistas’ struggle, the land that is communally owned by the people.

Here, there is no fence, no title, and no plot belonging to a single landowner. It is not rich farmland, more like a rocky terrain that challenges the skills of even the toughest peasants. Year in and year out, however, it yields enough maize, squash and beans to feed the community.

The Mexican government and the tourism industry are very much interested in the Tihusuco ejidal. They would love to erect “tourist factories” near the underground rivers called cenote. Powerful as they are, however, they cannot buy title to land for which there is no title.

Thus, both government and industry are pressuring the Tihusucans to divide their land into individual plots, promising each wealth and prosperity beyond their dreams. Anyway, that’s the economic textbook idea.

The lure of wealth is, of course, tempting, so tempting in fact that divisions are now apparent within the community. But the majority still see what would be lost by selling out: as communal land, belonging to everyone and no one, the local Mayans manage, collectively, to live fairly well. They’re not prosperous, but they arenâe(TM)t reduced to starving either.

Should the land be titled and divided into individual plots, the sustainability of the community will be near impossible. Industry will approach some owners and will obtain the best lands, leading to the creation of tourist factories.

The undesired plots will go unsold, and those who used to work with and within the community, will count only on themselves to develop their own rocky parcel of land.

An elderly woman belongs to the group opposed to the privatization. She is living up to what her own grandmother once told her: “You never want to be on your knees before bosses again.” She would much prefer the government to provide the development tools that could improve the welfare of the community, such as a stone crusher, so that they could make cement to build their houses rather than using raw stones.

Some Tihusucans know about Cancun. They know that “development” hasn’t really brought much to Cancun. Hotel and store staffs are composed of outsiders, many of them rural farmers who have been thrown off their lands. They are paid next to nothing in this bubble of wealth where prices compete with those of large Canadian and American cities.

They know that downtown Cancun is a quite different world, a world where half of the 300,000 inhabitants have unreliable access to electricity and poor quality water.

But more importantly, they know that buying into the government and industry scheme would mean the end of their community and a centuries-old way of life that works.

It’s a tale well worth being listened to by the political elites who gathered last week in the great ivory tower of the Cancun Convention Centre.