Tulum to Clean Private Beaches at Public Cost

Tulum, Mexico — As the most severe sargassum season in the history of Quintana Roo begins to recede, the municipal government of Tulum, led by Mayor Diego Castañón, has initiated a beach cleaning effort. The initiative is notable for its plan to deploy municipal personnel to clean beaches that are under private concession.

According to a report by Grupo Pirámide, the Tulum city government will assign municipal personnel to clean these concessioned beaches, which are legally obligated to be maintained by the private entities that hold the concessions. In exchange for this cleaning, the hotels and concession holders would allow public access to the "federal land," despite existing regulations that establish the nation's beaches as public patrimony, to which citizens have a right of access.

The core issue identified is the use of public resources: the payment of municipal employees to perform work that should be financed by the owners of the concessions. In other municipalities facing the same problem, authorities have dedicated personnel and resources exclusively to cleaning public beaches.

A History of Private Gain at Public Expense

Historically, the hotel sector's formula has been for the state to pay for everything, in exchange for generating often poorly paid jobs—mostly with 12-hour workdays—tax exemptions, and, periodically, beach restoration, all at the expense of the public treasury.

Regarding promotion, it was President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) who decided to suppress these resources, which were previously delivered through a trust fund, for a sector that has not shared its benefits in recent years. This is cited as a reason for a worker deficit, attributed to labor and wage precarity. To all this, the benefit of now having municipal personnel for cleaning is added, creating what is characterized as a "rounded-off business."

The destination has suffered in recent years from the ravages of extreme violence, real estate fraud, and the precarity of basic services, leading to one of the worst tourist seasons in Tulum's history, with occupancy rates that have triggered alarms.

The political opposition, which is described as non-existent, has not spoken out on this point or many others, leading to the perspective that the situation will remain unchanged.