Cancun greets tourists while Mexico waits anxiously

MEXICO CITY – An irony of the coronavirus pandemic is that the idyllic Mexico beach vacation seen in the brochures really does exist now: The white sand beaches are sparkling clean and empty on the Caribbean coast, the water is clear on the Pacific Coast and the waters around the resort of Los Cabos are teeming with fish after 10 weeks with no boats going out. There are two-for-one deals and very eager staff.

It was all on display as the first excited tourists arrived at the Moon Palace beach resort near Cancun last week to the sound of mariachis and welcoming employees lined up – at a safe distance – to greet them.

“The customers all took off their masks as soon as they came into the hotel,” says Gibran Chapur, vice president of Palace Resorts. “You can’t be all covered up when you are on vacation, thinking you have to be in reclusion. If you wanted to do that, you would have stayed home.”

The Moon Palace staff kept their face masks on. With only about 300 tourists on beaches that can hold thousands, it seemed a good place to practice social distancing.

“What better place to be than someplace where there is nobody, as opposed to being in New York, where there are 500 people everywhere you look,” Chapur says.

In Quintana Roo state, where Cancun is located, tourism is the only industry, and Cancun is the only major Mexican resort to reopen. Mexico’s tourism income crashed in April, when it was only 6.3% of what it was one year ago. Hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms were closed.

Tourism provides 11 million jobs, directly or indirectly in Mexico, and many of those workers were sent home to wait it out.

The situation is so desperate that Mexico’s tourism secretary proposed making the industry one of Mexico’s “essential activities,” so it could reopen as the construction, mining and automotive industries have. Federal health officials were less enthusiastic, noting that tourism implied travel and crowds.

At the Pacific Coast resort of Huatulco, dozens of vendors who run seaside fish and curios shacks defied lockdown measures to reopen their businesses, saying their money had run out and they couldn’t take it anymore.

Other beach resorts are drawing up plans for limited reopenings as early as next week.

“It has been very difficult,” says Armida Castro, the mayor of the twin Baja California resorts of Los Cabos,

“We had a list of needy people, elderly people and disabled people” to whom the government distributed aid packages, she says.

Beach vendors, waiters and musicians who had lost work were added, and the list swelled to 50,000.

Castro said she can’t remember seeing Los Cabos, known for its beaches, deserts and sport fishing, so deserted. The normally bustling marina at Cabo San Lucas has plenty of room.

Though Los Cabos hopes for a soft reopening in June or July, with limits on hotel capacity, it’s hard not to look at this as a lost summer.