“The ‘water mafia’ of Los Cabos: golf courses for tourists and neighbourhoods dying of thirst”, the Spanish daily El Pais entitles the article by Alejandro Santos Cid:
Water is being privatised in the desert city. Working-class neighbourhoods in Cabo San Lucas go weeks and months without a tap and rely on private tanker trucks, while luxury estates on the coast have overflowing swimming pools.
There is one Cabo San Lucas choking on water and another one dying of thirst. In the former, American tourists swelter under the Southern Californian sun. They rarely leave the luxurious haciendas that line the coast. Nor do they need to. All-inclusive wristbands, infinity pools, jacuzzis overlooking the sea, golf courses, green lawns, the shade of palm trees, exclusive access to deserted beaches, Baja-style seafood, cold beer, rapturous sunsets from deck chairs. They even have their own English-language newspapers, such as the Gringo Gazette or the Cabo Post, with news to suit them: sportfishing records, polo tournament reports, tips on how to buy property at a bargain price. They live with their backs to the city.
In the second, Mexican workers arrive at the haciendas early in the morning and return home late at night. They cook for the tourists, make their beds, clean up after themselves. And then they return to their barrios, built here and there, scattered over hills of cracked earth and no shade, where the tap has refused to give water for years. The once-asphalted roads have long since lost their battle with the desert, and rubbish piles up on street corners.
“It never rains in California”, at least not in Baja California Sur, a vast desert as hypnotic as only the most hostile nature can be. And here, in the south of the south, water – its scarcity, its abundance – divides the city in two, a colourful border between wealth and poverty: the green of the irrigated fields and the brown of the parched earth of the working-class colonies. In La Paz, further north but with a similar climate, there are shortages, but not on this scale. Nor in San José del Cabo, 30 kilometres away, the town that, together with Cabo San Lucas, makes up the municipality of Los Cabos. Water has been privatised. It is now a luxury.
The locals call it ‘the water mafia’.
“It’s all about business. There is plenty of water and the hotel industry is never short of it. The tourists have monopolised everything. But the working class neighbourhoods, the people who work, the people who do the work during the day, are forgotten.”