Freedom Lawyers of America

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Monday, October 27, 2003

LET'S GO--PACK YOUR BAGS

NOPALO, Mexico -- Slowly but surely, acre by acre, Mexico's Baja Peninsula
is becoming a U.S. colony.

"For Sale" signs are sprouting all over the 800-mile-long peninsula,
offering thousands of beachfront properties. Americans are snatching them
up. They have already created communities where the dollar is the local
currency, English the main language and Americans, the new immigrants
transforming an old culture.

"Everything's for sale, every lot you can imagine," said Alfonso Gavito,
director of a cultural institute in La Paz, the capital of Baja California
Sur, a state with 400,000 citizens and some of the last undeveloped beaches
in North America. "It's like 20 years of changes have happened in three
months."

This new land rush, involving billions of dollars, tens of thousands of
Americans and hundreds of miles of coastline, is gaining speed despite the
fact that Mexico's Constitution bars foreigners from directly owning land
by the sea.

Mexico's government wants foreign capital as much as Americans want houses
on the beach -- maybe more. So it worked around the Constitution. In 1997,
it changed the law to allow foreign ownership through locally administered
land trusts. A Mexican bank acts as trustee, the foreigner its beneficiary.

It took about four years before that new system worked smoothly. But now,,
the result has been a boom in migration, speculation and permanent vacation.

It's human greed -- it's human nature, said David Halliburton, who owns a
hotel outside Cabo San Lucas, on Baja's southern tip, where uncontrolled
growth already strains the social fabric. The amount of money coming in
here through overzealous developers and buyers is staggering.

Baja is closer by land and air to the United States than it is to the rest
of Mexico; state officials recorded more than 30 million trips by Americans
who spent well over $1 billion last year. They say they have no idea how
many Americans are living in Baja today, because a certain number are
illegal immigrants who never register their presence.

Evidence suggests that the number is more than 100,000, probably far more,
and growing fast since the Sept. 11 attacks and the souring of the economy
in the United States two years ago.

Since 2001, we have seen a boom in real estate sales, and the full-time
population of Americans is growing rapidly, said Tony Colleraine, an
American in San Felipe, about 160 miles southeast of San Diego. He said
about one-quarter of the town's roughly 30,000 residents were Americans,
many of whom want to get away from the regulations and rhetoric, and get
out of the bull's-eye in the United States.

In Rosarito, an hour's drive south of the U.S. border, about one-quarter of
the 55,000 residents are Americans.

An increasing number of Americans are moving here to escape their
government's policies and the costs of living, said Herb Kinsey, a Rosarito
resident with roots in the United States, Canada and Germany. They find a
higher standard of living and a greater degree of freedom.

At least 600,000 Americans -- again, an acknowledged undercount based on
government records -- are permanent residents of Mexico. That is by far the
largest number of U.S. citizens living in any foreign country.

Americans living throughout Baja say their new neighbors include
professionals in their 30s and 40s putting down roots, not only retirees in
recreational vehicles.

In Rosarito, the new home buyers include lawyers and members of the
military who commute across the border to San Diego, where housing costs
are about five times higher. A pleasant house by the Pacific in Rosarito
can cost less than $150,000; property taxes are about $75 a year.

Baja's future, Mexican officials say, lies in American land investment.

The government strongly promotes any kind of foreign direct investment,
which today is the only reliable source of economic growth in Mexico, where
more than half the 100 million people live in poverty.

In the empty streets of Nopalo, the future is coming on fast. A totally
American town is about to be built.

The site of a failed government-backed tourist development, Nopalo, which
means place of vipers, lies just outside the town of Loreto, founded in
1697, population 11,000. U.S. and Canadian developers plan to build 5,000
new homes for 12,000 fellow citizens.

Their master plan depicts a particularly affluent suburb, with houses
selling for up to $2 million each. The developers plan to break ground in
January. They envision a $2 billion investment over 15 years.

People will come by the hundreds of thousands to Baja, said one of the
developers, David Butterfield. Mexico gives you an opportunity to build
something you cannot build in the U.S. or Canada today. You cannot build
great things in America today. Regulations and litigation prevent change.

There are limits to change in Baja, too. They are set by nature. It rains 5
inches a year or less in many parts of the peninsula. A barrel of water
here is effectively worth more than a barrel of oil, and it takes many
millions of gallons to sustain a golf course, much less a suburb.

There is no drinking water in Loreto -- it is piped in from 16 miles away
-- and no place for thousands of construction and service workers to live.
Many Mexicans wonder if the new community will truly be the sustainable
development its backers promise.

I'm not sure there's anyplace in the modern world that's sustainable,
Butterfield said. I hope we're going to create one.

Homero Davis, Loreto's mayor, supports the project, somewhat warily. The
quality of life is a moral issue here, he said. The culture is at stake. We
don't want to be like Cabo San Lucas, where hotels and condominiums have
swamped what was once a little village.

But that scale of development is precisely what Fonatur, the federal agency
that promotes tourism in Mexico, has in mind for Loreto and the rest of Baja.

Fonatur, which conceived and built mega-resorts like Cancun, envisions
marinas for American yachts, four-star hotels and fancy golf courses
ringing the peninsula in a plan called the Escalera Nautica, or Nautical
Ladder, which involves $210 million in public money and hopes for $1.7
billion in investment from developers.

The whole premise of the Escalera Nautica is to create a land rush, and I'm
not sure that's good for anybody, said Tim Means, who has lived in La Paz
for 35 years and runs a respected ecotourism outfit called Baja Expeditions.

Baja was isolated from the outside world until the government paved a road
through the peninsula in the 1970s and 80s. The road connected Baja more
closely to the United States than to the Mexican mainland. That connection
is deepening as more and more Americans move here. So is a sense of
remoteness, of difference, from the rest of Mexico.

People on the mainland don't know we exist, said Doris Johnson, the
daughter of a Mexican mother and an American father, who runs a hotel in
Mulege. They ask, Do they speak Spanish in Baja? Do you need a passport to
go there?'

Johnson wonders what will become of Baja as it becomes more and more of an
American place. We have our own culture here, she said. But we don't have
much influence over what's changing our culture. said Doris Johnson, the
daughter of a Mexican mother and an American father, who runs a hotel in
Mulege.

They ask, Do they speak Spanish in Baja? Do you need a passport to go
there? Johnson wonders what will become of Baja as it becomes more and more
of an American place. {We have our own culture here, she said.

But we don't have much influence over what's changing our culture. said
Doris Johnson, the daughter of a Mexican mother and an American father, who
runs a hotel in Mulege. They ask, Do they speak Spanish in Baja? Do you
need a passport to go there?'

Johnson wonders what will become of Baja as it becomes more and more of an
American place. We have our own culture here, she said. But we don't have
much influence over what's changing our culture.

Sheldon (Shelly) Waxman, Writer/Lawyer
"The Black Messiah Murders," Sam Cohen #1
"Piranhas On the Loose," Sam Cohen #2
"In the Teeth of the Wind,"
"All Anybody Needs to Know About Independent Contracting"
PURCHASE AT MY WEBSITE: http://thelawyer.info/ OR Call Iuniverse toll free 1-877-823-9235

posted by FLoA # 10/27/2003 06:12:43 PM

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Monday, October 27, 2003

LET'S GO--PACK YOUR BAGS

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