This story begins with the abandonment and destruction of one of Mexico’s fine old hotels, the Casino de la Selva (“the casino in the forest”) once on the outskirts of the city of Cuernavaca and then, as the city grew, incorporated into its center. It continues with the struggle to protect the land on which the hotel once stood and to preserve the impressive artwork that adorned its interior walls. It ends—at least for now—with the emergence of a dynamic civic movement within the city (the good news) and with the ability of two corporate giants, the U.S. warehouse chain Costco and the Mexican retailer Comercial Mexicana (CM) to construct a huge mall on environmentally sensitive land in the city center (the bad news).
The Casino de la Selva was built as an elegant hotel and gambling house in 1932 by a group supported by then-President Abelardo Rodríguez, and for a few years it was a luxurious hideaway for the political elite that emerged in the years following the Mexican Revolution. Its story is the stuff of which minor legends are made. One of Cuernavaca’s local historians, Julián Manuel Salazar Cruz, recounts with relish one version of its origins: “In the 1930s, a great problem appears in Mexico City. It was a very small city then, and the great politicians were immediately recognized wherever they went. They became known for their attire, their bodyguards and of course for their romantic affairs. Because of this, President Rodríguez gave permission for a casino to be established in nearby Cuernavaca where he and other notables could come to gamble, drink daiquiries and be anonymous.”
President Lázaro Cárdenas outlawed all casinos in 1935, and the hotel was briefly closed. A year later it was acquired by self-made millionaire Manuel Suárez—owner of the construction company that had built it—reportedly in lieu of what was still owed him for the construction. A Spanish immigrant who had arrived in the country as a teenager in 1910, Suárez had become a savvy entrepreneur and a patron of the arts. In the late 1930s, he asked three prominent muralists—Mexicans Jorge Flores and José Reyes Meza, and the Catalan exile Josep Renau—to adorn the inner walls of the Casino with murals depicting, among other things, the pre-conquest history of Mexico. Later, he hired another Catalan exile, architect Félix Candela, to design a number of new buildings to be added to the Casino complex. Over the next four decades, muralists Dr. Atl, Benito Messeguer and Francisco Icaza, among others, added their work to the walls of the Casino. Suárez owned the hotel for a half century, until his death in 1987.
From the late 1930s to the mid 1980s, the Casino was an artistic and architectural work in progress, a home to visiting artists and writers, a center for music and theater, and home to one of Cuernavaca’s finest art galleries. Surrounded by some 24 acres of trees and foliage, a part of the ecologically fragile Amanalco Forest, the hotel complex provided an important set of “lungs” for a rapidly growing city.
Use and ownership of land is no small matter in the living memory of the surrounding region. Cuernavaca, about 60 miles from Mexico City, is the capital of the state of Morelos, birthplace of Emiliano Zapata and cradle of his agrarian revolution of 1910-1917. Zapata, it is said, fought for the land—not for parcels of land, but for the dignity and importance of the land itself. We belong to the land, said the Zapatistas, and the land belongs to those who work it. Zapata’s memory permeates every political struggle, especially if that struggle deals with the ownership, use or loss of the land, even urban land.
At the time the hotel was built, Cuernavaca was also home to a small community of U.S. and European expatriates. Over the decade of the 1930s it would become safe harbor for a wide variety of international refugees, many with political backgrounds. Europeans fleeing the advance of fascism began arriving in the mid 1930s; by 1939, with the fall of the Spanish Republic, they were joined by large numbers of Spanish refugees. After the Second World War, the community saw the arrival of a sizable number of U.S. leftists fleeing McCarthyism, and by the 1960s and 1970s, the city’s radical Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo was welcoming Latin Americans fleeing the region’s various dictatorships.
As the city’s small international culture grew and blended (or simply coexisted) with native Zapatismo, Cuernavaca developed a unique, cosmopolitan political culture. It was a culture open to experimentation in the arts and in politics, a culture that attracted artists, writers and political activists, both Mexican and foreign, who visited and settled in the city.
One of those visiting writers was English novelist Malcolm Lowry, who in his classic Under the Volcano described the hotel and its surroundings. Casino de la Selva, he wrote, “is built far back from the main highway and surrounded by gardens and terraces which command a spacious view in every direction. Palatial, a certain air of desolate splendour pervades it….”
More than half a century later, a visitor to the site of the splendid old hotel encounters two enormous blocks of concrete, one called MEGA, a branch of the Comercial Mexicana (CM) supermarket chain, the other called Costco, a branch of the U.S. chain of discount warehouses. Accompanying the two blocks of concrete are a large U.S. style diner called, appropriately enough, California, and signs announcing a soon-to-be-constructed “cultural center”—slated to house an art gallery, museum and amphitheater. Instead of the old forest, the structures are surrounded by an enormous parking lot featuring thin rows of recently planted tropical trees that separate the parking lanes. The promised cultural center is the unique addition to the standard commercial mall. It is Costco-CM’s concessionary response to the animosity engendered by the apparent destruction of the old hotel’s many works of art.
The stores and the parking lot were not built without a struggle. A group called the Frente Cívico Pro Defensa del Casino de la Selva (Civic Front for the Defense of the Casino de la Selva) emerged to do battle with the bi-national corporate partnership—Costco and Comercial Mexicana—that had purchased the land under what the Frente claims were highly dubious circumstances.
In 1994, seven years after the death of Manuel Suárez, the Casino de la Selva was acquired from his debt-laden heirs by a Guadalajara-based hotel chain. In 1996 the new owners also succumbed to debt and defaulted on a tax bill of US$63.7 million. Mexico’s Treasury Department then seized the property. The Treasury transferred ownership to the government agency charged with auctioning seized properties, the Trusteeship for Liquidations. The hotel and its 24 acres were put up for bids in May 2001 and sold a month later for US$10.4 million to the sole bidder, Costco-CM. The protests of the Frente Cívico managed to keep Costco-CM’s construction on hold for a year, but the felling of the trees and the demolition of the old buildings began immediately with the authorization of Cuernavaca’s municipal government.
Concerned about the reported destruction of the artwork as the buildings were being demolished, a group calling itself Citizens Council for Culture and the Arts, began to protest, asking for the intervention of federal agencies to save the murals. One of the surviving muralists, Reyes Meza, filed a lawsuit demanding restitution for the apparent destruction of his murals. A group of environmentalists, realizing that the trees, the “lungs of the city,” would soon be cut down, joined the artist in protesting the wholesale destruction of the complex. Some independent merchants and Cuernavaca residents also came around and by July 2001 they had formed the Frente Cívico.
A year later, in August 2002, the first confrontation took place. “When we learned they were planning to cut down the [remaining] trees,” recounts Frente Cívico activist Flora Guerrero, a founder of a group called Guardians of the Trees, “we decided to hold a sit-in at the gates of the site. Costco had guaranteed that they would replace every tree they cut down, so we demanded that we be allowed to count them. They called in the police to block our access and began cutting down the trees in front of us—a cruel, cruel act. Six or seven hours after the sit-in began, the municipal and state police surrounded us and created a ‘state of siege,’ blocking access to all the roads out of the center of Cuernavaca. We were about 100 people, isolated by the police action. At about 7:30 p.m. some 500 riot police started to march toward us. They were especially brutal toward the women.” The group, says Guerrero, tried to pressure Costco to build on the outskirts of the city and pressured federal organizations at first, to save the murals, and later, to stop the project entirely. Costco, she says, replied “that they had rescued the art and, what’s more, they would create a center for art. They offered us 7,000 square meters [1.7 acres] for a cultural center. We said no; we couldn’t accept that our culture and our historical memory be relegated to the backyard of a mega-store. So we continued the struggle.”
What happened to the murals still remains a mystery, but it is certain that many have been destroyed, some by time and the weather, others by deliberate vandalism. A freelance video filmmaker and a photojournalist, shooting in March and April 2001, captured the relatively good condition of the murals on those dates. Another photographer, employed by the government, shooting two months later in June, documented the destruction of a number of valuable murals. The author of the destruction remains unknown—or at least in dispute. The remaining murals are now hidden, under the protection of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) as they are being restored, or perhaps repainted. Neither the Frente Cívico, nor the public, nor the artists themselves can see what’s happening to the paintings.
At the August 2002 sit-in—a defining moment for the nascent movement—state and municipal police detained 33 demonstrators. They took everyone to the office of the state Attorney General and kept them for 48 hours before transferring them to maximum security cells. The demonstrators all claim to have been beaten, claims made credible by video coverage of police violence. The detainees were accused of the crimes of sabotage, armed assault, disobedience, resisting arrest, encouraging others to commit a crime, attacks against the routes of communication and means of transportation, mutiny and injuries. Bail was set at 20,000 pesos (about US$2,000) for most of them, 50,000 pesos for four individuals considered to be leaders, and 100,000 pesos for the one U.S. citizen gathered up in the police sweep. Everyone refused bail and within a few hours of their refusal, all were transferred to a maximum security prison.
On August 27, the day after the arrested demonstrators decided they would all bail themselves out of jail—with the help of some generous donors including the workers of the Boing soft drink cooperative—some 15,000 people marched through downtown Cuernavaca in support of the political prisoners. The arrest and maltreatment of 33 nonviolent demonstrators, more than anything, energized the movement, and may have assisted in the birth of a long-term struggle for urban preservation and popular participation in Cuernavaca.
The Frente is currently negotiating with the state of Morelos to drop all charges against the demonstrators. “We are not asking for a pardon,” Guerrero told a reporter, “but that the charges be dropped because they are baseless. There is nothing to pardon because we are innocent of all the charges against us.” In the meantime, Costco, MEGA and the California diner had been built and were open to the public by August 2003. The Frente www.procasino.org is calling for an international boycott of all three chains.
While there is no hard evidence of any major corruption in the process by which Costco-CM came to own the property, the entire course of events, beginning with the tax default of the previous owners and ending with the actual sale to the transnational partnership, is regarded by many as suspicious. Many questions find no satisfactory answers.
Costco, for example, had been in the process of negotiating for land on the outskirts of the city with a higher price per square meter. How is it, even not-usually-skeptical observers have asked, that this more central, valuable land became suddenly available at a considerably lower price? Why was the public tender published in only one newspaper for only one day? Why were there no other bidders for a property that sold for less than half the price of similar properties in the center of the city? And why, asks the international environmental group observing the process, the Ombudsman Center for Environment and Development (OmCED), did the government decide to sell this historic site “instead of preserving it and proceeding with its registry, protection and restoration?”
Nor do the curious family dynamics of the previous owners, the Suárez clan, clear the air: Manuel Suárez reportedly fathered 18 children with several wives over some three decades. The family does not appear to have acted as one in this transaction. Don Manuel’s daughter Lilia, who managed Casino de la Selva for some 25 years, told a La Jornada reporter that she was mystified by the sale to Costco-CM. She insisted that her father had carefully “registered” the murals with the appropriate federal agencies, assuring that they would be protected in any future sale. At her father’s death, she told the reporter, the hotel “remained with my brothers Marcos Manuel and Alfredo, both as owners. They sold the Casino, though we don’t know under what conditions. Neither do we know where the document of sale is, nor what it says about the interiors of the buildings.” As happens in Mexico, all this has led to speculation about whose pockets were lined, which accounts were settled, what really went on.
In fact, there may have been no arcane shenanigans here, just a normal combination of private self-interest and public irresponsibility. Perhaps the key issue here is not petty corruption but the larger question of the model of urban development implied by the purchase and sale of Casino de la Selva.
“The situation of Costco in Cuernavaca is part of the process of globalization and the re-adaptation of domestic markets,” says Guillermo López Ruvalcaba, a Morelos parliamentary deputy of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), an occasional ally of the Frente. “The problem with Costco and CM,” he told us, “is above all a problem of urban disorder. It is not a problem that arose with Costco but with the lack of any real planning within the city. In looking to the future we have to understand that the lack of planning—the lack of vision—is the problem here. The government had the opportunity to do something visionary with the property when it came into its possession. But it failed. That’s the problem.”
Frente member Javier Sicilia takes this a step further. “The fundamental problem is the destruction of the bonds of mutual support among those who live in the city, and the economic depression this generates.” According to Sicilia, the transnationals (Costco-CM) “buy supplies in distant markets, invest their profits outside the city and country, hire workers who circulate from one branch of the company to another, and the jobs they offer to the inhabitants of the city reduce [local workers] to packers and checkout clerks.”
Meanwhile, the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) has announced that the repair and restoration of the murals and of at least one of Candela’s structures is going on—in private—under its direction. The murals are being worked on in Mexico City and the Candela-inspired structure that will house the cultural center is due to be built in a corner of the mall complex. (The California diner is also roughly modeled on the maestro’s designs.) The work of the muralists has been removed two square meters at a time by an Italian technique called strappo, and then adhered to a new surface where it is being either “restored” or “repainted,” depending on how optimistic one is about the process. The surviving artists have expressed doubt that their work is actually being rescued and restored. The results have yet to be seen by the public or by the artists. Costco-CM spokespeople have also announced that in addition to the “restorations,” the cultural center will house—on a five-year loan—a significant collection of Mexican art, including works by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
For the Frente, none of this makes up for Costco’s destruction of the property, but it is worth noting that little if any repair would have taken place without the group’s persistent protests. The Frente’s struggle against Costco, drawing on the many strands of Cuernavaca’s social and political consciousness, may have also given rise to a new civic movement that has made the city itself—the land and the community—the issue.
“Our fight,” Frente activist Pietro Ameglio recently told a gathering of nonviolent activists in Mexico City, “is not against the supermarkets but against their refusal to respect the last green lung in the heart of Cuernavaca. We are defending the city: its art, its history, the small businesspeople, the environment, and struggling against the traffic and chaos provoked by the installation of these supermarkets. We are a relatively small group that, through nonviolent action, creativity, audacity, rigorous documentation, has succeeded in accumulating sufficient moral force to seriously confront this project of urban destruction.”
The mall is built but the struggle continues. And it may be that through intelligent and persistent civic activism, Frente Cívico and its allies have won some major victories. It is still too early to tell.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Fred Rosen is a reporter and contributing editor to NACLA based in Mexico City.
Irene Ortiz is a writer and activist based in Cuernavaca.
