Quintana Roo
From Politica en Mexico
Marcos’ New Politics Nears Mexico’s Newest State: Quintana Roo - January 14, 2006
...When Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos rolls toward the coastal Caribbean state of Quintana Roo on Saturday, January 14, he’ll be making a pilgrimage that most of the more than 800,000 citizens of this young state – or their parents – made over the past three decades. The majority of the people in this state are migrants. Previously a sparsely populated territory of the Mexican Republic – home to Maya indigenous, farmers and fishermen – a population explosion began the 1970s when the national government decided to turn a sleepy coconut plantation into the international tourist Mecca of Cancún, and converted Quintana Roo into the 31st state. Back then, Cancún counted with 173 citizens. Today the city’s population is half a million plus 27,000 hotel rooms. Those resorts, the shopping malls, restaurants and nightclubs, were constructed and staffed by immigrants from throughout southern Mexico... (more)
Urban Zapatismo vs. Party Politics
The construction boom along Riviera Maya south of Cancún began with the reconstruction from the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Gilbert in September 1988 [verification needed] , which, until Hurricane Wilma arrived last October, had been strongest hurricane ever to hit the Atlantic. Speculators and developers took advantage of the displacement caused by the storm and the Riviera Maya went up brick by brick. Construction workers came from throughout southern Mexico and many ended up staying in the region. By the mid-1990s, the number of migrants without homes or land grew to crisis proportions.
Thus was born Colonia Colosio, a mostly unpaved barrio where half of Playa del Carmen’s residents now live. It was named named for the Mexican presidential candidate of the then-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, in its Spanish initials), Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was assassinated in 1994 while on the campaign trail in Tijuana. In April of 1994, more than a thousand migrant workers, encouraged by then-governor Mario Villanueva Madrid (also a PRI member, today in prison awaiting a trial-that-never-seems-to-begin almost four years after he was busted on drug trafficking charges), invaded 40 hectares and began building cinder-block homes. The population of the colony grew exponentially over the next decade. Julio Macossay calls it “the fastest growing neighborhood all in Latin America,” with an estimated 70,000 residents today... (more)
...“Where exploitation exists, where humiliation exists, where discrimination exists,” explained Ocampo, “there you will find a Zapatista.”
“The Zapatistas aren’t only those in the jungle,” echoed Cortés of the Other Campaign down the coast in Chetumal. “They are also everyone who doesn’t have a place to sleep, who have nothing to eat, who have nothing to cure themselves with, these are also Zapatistas.”...
