Chinese-Mexican Megabuck Development to Allegedly Threaten Cabo Pulmo Marine Park
Cabo Pulmo, one of the rarest and environmentally sensitive land and sea ecosystems in the western Pacific is under threat by this mega-development, the Huffington Post reported this week.
Punta Arena (Sand Point), on the edge of Cabo Pulmo Marine Park – a UNESCO World Heritage site protecting the only hard finger coral reef on the North American Continent and just 60 miles north of the resort corridor of Cabo San Lucas on the East Cape of Baja Sur, Mexico – has successfully fought two previous mega-resorts, most notoriously Cabo Cortes, named for the Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes who discovered the Baja Peninsula.
East Cape of Baja Sur, detail of Punta Arena & Cabo Pulmo Marine Park/UNESCO World Heritage Site
In 2012, the Mexican Ministry of Environment revoked Cabo Cortes’s provisional development permits, “due to unresolved management judgment” regarding its impact on the Cabo Pulmo Coral Reef. But the developers refused to give up and re-organized.
Now, in a deal spearheaded by former Mexican President Vicente Fox and brokered by Altavista Partners, also known as Leisure Partners, with Chinese real estate consortium, Sansong Beijing International Trade Group, Cabo Cortes has become Cabo Dorado.
Altavista/Leisure Partners, headed by John McCarthy, former Director of the Mexican National Tourism Promotion Fund (FONATUR) during Fox’s Administration and Gustavo Ripol, formerly in charge of promotion for “the Cabo Cortes tourism real estate mega-complex”, has made a deal with Paul Zhang, CEO of Sansong Beijing International Trade Group and what appears to be a shell company, Glorious Earth Group, LLC, (incorporated by Zhang in Irvine, California in 2012), acting in Mexico under the name The BCS Rivera Development Company.
Due to unethical practices, the World Bank has blacklisted two of the construction companies associated with Zhang, China State Construction Company and China Communications Construction Company until 2015 and 2017, respectively.
According to Greenpeace, Cabo Dorado has rights to pump more than four million cubic meters annually from the aquifer. (Over the past decade, the supply of water per resident in the nearby Los Cabos municipality has dropped by half.)
Greenpeace also reports that the Santiago aquifer is the last remaining water reserve of consequence in Baja California Sur, estimating that the amount of water consumed only by Cabo Dorado’s proposed hotels – without considering water demands from any other infrastructure – would seriously compromise the communities that depend on it.
