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ACAPULCO, Mexico — Before Hurricane Otis tore through this once-famed Pacific Coast resort, the Las Olas luxury condominium complex was already expecting a dismal turnout for this Día de los Muertos weekend.
The wealthy owners of the oceanfront vacation homes were too afraid to visit.
Not long ago, condominiums here might have expected 30 to 40 percent occupancy on a typical long weekend. That was far less than during Acapulco’s heyday decades ago, but it was something.
Heading into this weekend, administrator Karla Navarrete said, the complex was expecting only 5 to 10 percent occupancy. Many would-be visitors, she said, feared being robbed or kidnapped on the highway in.
Then came Otis. The most powerful storm recorded in the eastern Pacific smashed into Acapulco on Oct. 25, ripping chunks out of the 16-floor building and exposing a skeleton of girders, rods and cables. Forty-six people are dead and 56 are missing, authorities said Friday; people here believe both numbers are likely significantly higher.
But the Category 5 hurricane was only the latest calamity to hit Acapulco. The coronavirus pandemic kept visitors away. And organized criminal groups have made the city a battleground.
From the 1940s to the 1970s, Acapulco was Mexico’s pearl of the Pacific, the glitzy resort where John and Jacqueline Kennedy honeymooned and Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant vacationed.
Now at least 16 crime syndicates are active in Guerrero state, according to Defense Ministry documents cited by the Mexican newspaper Milenio, trafficking drugs, extorting businesses and conducting kidnappings. They exert such control that when two alleged drug traffickers were arrested in July, thousands of people besieged Chilpancingo, the state capital, to demand their release.
In August, at the height of the summer vacation season, armed men set fire to at least a dozen cars in Acapulco, blocking roads and causing chaos. The city’s hotels reported around 7,500 cancellations amid a wave of violence.
Last month, a dozen police officers and a local security supervisor were killed in a brazen ambush in Coyuca de Benítez, 20 miles outside Acapulco.
The resort city has suffered a long, slow decline for decades. As it became one of Mexico’s most dangerous cities, international tourism plummeted. The U.S. State Department advises U.S. citizens against traveling to Guerrero state, a warning it shares with Haiti, Somalia and North Korea, among others. The U.S. government forbids its employees from visiting Acapulco.
The number of foreign visitors to the resort dropped 63 percent from 2012 to 2017. Then the pandemic paralyzed tourism. And now Hurricane Otis has just about wiped out business altogether.
How Acapulco became Mexico’s murder capital
About 95 percent of Acapulco’s 280 hotels are damaged or destroyed, according to the city’s hotel association. Virtually all of the condominiums in the Zona Diamante — the touristic Diamond District — are ruined. Eighty percent of restaurants were devastated by the storm.
Businesses that weren’t wrecked by the hurricane were ruined by looters. Leticia Anzaldo and her husband, Mario Alberto González, are still paying off the ice cream machines in their year-old shop that were carried off last week.
The costs of rebuilding and lost business will be at least $10 billion, estimated Steve Bowen, chief science officer for the global reinsurance broker Gallagher Re. “It will be one of the costliest natural catastrophe events on record for Mexico,” he said.
Santos Ramírez Cuevas, the secretary of tourism for Guerrero, said merely rebuilding hotel rooms will cost nearly $2.3 billion.
In a city where 57,000 people are employed by hotels and restaurants, the hurricane’s attack could be a death blow.
But government officials and tourism industry leaders are expressing hope that reconstruction will offer an opportunity to update and even rebrand Acapulco as the premier tourist destination it once was.
“This leaves us with a great opportunity,” said Alejandro Domínguez, president of the Association of Hotels and Tourist Companies of Acapulco. “After this, we will have an Acapulco that is more competitive. … We need to clean up house, we need to remodel and then we need to start aggressively campaigning to promote this destination.”
Ramírez, the tourism secretary, said the city is prioritizing setting up a center to hire and train workers in skills such as plumbing, construction and electrical installation for the recovery.
Germán González, president of the National Chamber of the Restaurant and Seasoned Food Industry, said it could also be time to establish better security infrastructure, with improved cameras, intelligence and policing. “It’s a good moment to rethink how we do things in Acapulco,” he said.
Analysts say reconstruction could also offer opportunities to organized criminal groups.
He rode out Hurricane Otis on his boat. He hasn’t been seen since.
In the short term, International Crisis Group analyst Falko Ernst says, organized criminal groups could take advantage of a government vacuum to attract supporters with food handouts and other assistance. In the medium term, he tweeted, unemployment could push more people into illegal activities. And in the long term, the influx of cash for reconstruction could present a “golden opportunity” to launder and invest money.
Ezequiel Flores, a journalist from Guerrero who fled threats for his work four years ago, said Acapulco’s place as a “golden-egg goose” ended in 2009, when “a narco state formed in Guerrero” and criminal organizations began fighting for control of the cocaine trade. The tourism industry, he said, offers a front for those operations to take place.
Now, he said, the tourists who come to Acapulco, many of them Mexicans, have less purchasing power. Those most affected by the violence are not the tourists in Zona Diamante or the major hotel owners.
“It’s tortilla sellers, public transportation drivers, working class people,” he said. He fears pressing need will drive young men to join criminal organizations even younger.
Ten days after the storm, desperation is growing. Many residents still have no power or running water. On a highway Wednesday, families waved to passing cars with signs that read “water.”
Aid in the more remote neighborhoods of Acapulco remains limited. Those who aren’t scrambling for basic supplies are working to clean up debris.
At 9 a.m. Wednesday, about 50 people from across Acapulco waited in line to start their cleaning shift at Mundo Imperial hotel. Among them was Felipe Baltazar, a 22-year-old medical student, and his friends. With classes canceled since the storm, they needed to work to support their families. “We need money and help,” Baltazar said. “Our house was destroyed.”
At the Las Olas condominiums, employees had already cleared a path through the debris. On the ground covering the pool, the furnishings of 141 units lay scattered in piles.
The complex will likely take two years and $45 million to build back from Otis. For now, its 95 employees are out of work.
“Everyone is afraid of losing their jobs,” Navarrete said. “There will be cuts.”
After the storm, Navarrete mobilized three “brigades” to start the recovery: a cleaning crew, a cooking crew and a crew that sorts donations of water bottles, toilet paper and other supplies. Of the 95 employees, only 35 have reported in to help clean.
Navarrete hasn’t heard from the others. She knows at least five lost their homes in the storm.
Hurricane Otis death toll rises to 45; dozens still missing
With public transportation idled, some employees walked hours in scorching heat to work. In the first days after the hurricane, Griselda Hernández, 65, and her daughter Ana Grisel Hernández trekked through broken glass and pooled water to help grill shrimp for the workers. The cooks used whatever food they could salvage from the refrigerators in the units.
Ana Grisel Hernández’s home was badly damaged. She said she can’t bear to sit at home, in the dark, without drinking water.
Besides, she said, “there’s more need here.”
“This is our place of work. This is our Acapulco.”
Schmidt reported from Bogotá, Colombia. Mary Beth Sheridan in Mexico City, Dan Stillman in Washington and Diana Durán in Bogotá contributed to this report.