During the last weeks, I’ve received many chain-style emails, unsigned, which stated that several evictions had been taking place in Tilcara in the last weeks. The email said that people who had been living for a long time in Tilcara and who were part of the original communities of the area, were being displaced from their land, for the purpose of building touristic enterprises in the site. The topic grabbed my attention, of course, and the first thing I did was write to some media of the argentinean province of Jujuy to verify the information. The answer I got was that they knew about the email, but there was no source that certified the truthfulness of the version, so there was no news.

But since the subject seemed interesting for this blog -you know, here we’re quite far from spreading out the vision of “everything in tourism is positive”- I kept sending some emails around, to find out more about this. The issue gained even more potential when I came across an article in the Salta Libre site (spanish). There, some of the eviction situations were told citing names and last names. And it states the following:

“Men and women, who have taken care of the land and its animals for centuries, have been dispossesed of everything they own by unsensitive death merchants. They are being kicked out without compassion for lacking the papers that today the law remembers to demand from them; of course it’s late now, their land, the one they’ve cultivated sowing corn, watching for their goats, their lambs, their chicken, already have new owners in papers, land owners avid of increasing their fortune, occasion pirates that glanced at the business oportunity, corrupt officers that sign buy and sale papers within a week; the land is being literally “cleaned” to build new houses, hotels, and everything that helps to the modernization of the worldly patrimony of humanity in tilcaran land, its legitimate owners are abandoned to their fate in disgraceful huts, and soon will become slaves of their own land.”

These days, I’ve sent several consults to diverse sources to check the veracity of the information, and to see what’s the relation between this situation and the important growth tourism is having in this area. If anyone has more information, leave your contribution in the comments area. If you prefer to contact me, privately, to hand me more information, you can do so at jorgegobbi@gmail.com. As long as I recollect new information, I will publish it here.

The World Tourism Organisation issued today a communicate about the european regional conference of Communication about Tourism. The debate topic was how to accomplish to get this area to stop losing tourists to asian destinations. But there was a paragraph of the communicate that grabbed my attention (I’ll cite it textually, without changing any punctuation marks):

Answering questions from delegates who argued that some, mainly western media try to impose unethical methods of promoting their destinations, Richard Baerug, marketing director of the Riga Convention Bureau said that “Companies and destinations should only deal with media that make a clear border line between advertising and journalism

I wonder: what are unethical methods? what to they pretend? that they invite them everywhere and provide them money to publish notes that in fact have only a commercial and not an informative interest? There’s a lot of that, at least in this part of the world, the south side. Anyways, I can’t disagree that it’s necessary, once and for all, to have the informative content of tourism notes clearly separated from advertisement. Otherwise, we’ll still be reading very few interesting articles and many ad-notes.

A note by Brecha magazine deals with the topic of the growing night life of Ciudad Vieja, the district where Montevideo was born, long ago. I have already talked about this in this blog around march 2004 (spanish only), in an entry where I stated my surprise for the vitality of a zone that seems to deteriorate every time more. Keeping the magazine’s tone, a traditional representative of a good sector of Uruguay’s left sector, the note emphasizes on the initiatives of the authorities and vendors of the zone, who want to increase the security and eliminate those “small beggars” that go around asking for money. This is not new; as long as the zone becomes popular and even gains touristic status, the topic of “security” starts growing more and more. But the topic goes beyond simple thefts and goes to other many common topics in Rio de la Plata. Items such as “car watchers” -people who demand tip in exchange of keeping an eye on your car, absolutely informal, and who will probably damage it if you don’t give them anything- fit into this problem.

As time goes by, it seems more clear that Ciudad Vieja, a zone that for many decades has been one of the poorests of Montevideo, acquires certain particular characteristics of enclave. But, as in La Boca in Buenos Aires, the work here is complex for the “touristificators”: they have to make the zone attractive and safe, and for this they have to put a limit to poverty, which is right there, across the street. Obviously, the proposed solution is usually repression and control. About social policies to improve the zone, we better not even talk about…

And while the growth of the life in Ciudad Vieja has caused more than one security problem, Montevideo is still much safer than most of the big latin american cities. While I haven’t been there since june of 2004, I always loved walking around its streets, even in Ciudad Vieja, late at night.

The note can be found at Brecha (spanish only). Benito from Fuck You, Tiger gives his native, montevidean opinion on the subject (spanish only too).

Death is also part of processes of esthetization. If the Pope’s death has provoked a sensible raise in the price of hotels and restaurants in Rome, now Cambodia’s authorities have privatized one of the main “killing fields”, one of the places where Khmer Rouge murdered almost two millions people through a sistematic use of torture.

The note can be found at this page. But, in the end, this news is not as surprising. Even in a very respectful frame, Auschwitz has long ago become a part of Polland’s tours. The debate, of course, is under what conditions can certain locations historically related to exermination processes be incorporated to the tourism field.

By the way, we already had talked about a very similar topic at the entry dedicated to the commercialization of the Ground Zero area, the place where terrorist attacks took place in New York in 2001.

Spammers have literally exploited every point of the Internet where they can put their publicity, is something we know long ago. They flood the comments in blogs, abuse of trackback and a long list of etceteras. Now, they have also dedicated to manipulate Technorati’s tags, a good idea that is being torn apart by spammers. For example, if you look at the Tourism tag, you’ll see that almost all of the results that show up belong to a spam blog simply called 1TravelBlog. The only idea of this kind of publications is simply to show more ads. If they don’t fix it, the idea of tags in Technorati will soon be useless as is already happening at Topic Exchange.

A very particular assotiation between the church, the local government of Lujan, in the argentinean Buenos Aires province, and private groups -some of them with a history that relate them to the menemism “party”- are promoting a project of touristic exploitation of Lujan, surely one of the most popular destinations of religious peregrination in Argentina. The idea is to create a joint venture that would control 45 hectares of the city and its surroundings, and to guarantee the subject of city planning as a touristic destination. In this case, it’s clear that a good part of the profits from a touristic business depend on the space control where they operate -the other topic is, of course, the control of the tourists time. And in this case, the form of space dominion that surely guarantees profitability: monopoly. Since this project would give this partnership the right to manage this touristic space in Lujan for 99 years, the monopolic intentions are even more evident.

You can read more about this topic in this interesting note published by argentinean Pagina/12 newspaper (in spanish).

There’s a huge scandal going on in Peru about some video being shown during Lan airlines -of chilean capital- flights. You can see a capture of these videos at this page of the Lima newspaper La Republica. I don’t see what the big deal is, while it’s true that some images don’t leave Lima looking at its best, the images belong to an old Lonely Planet -actually known as Globetrekker- episode. At least, that’s what I think, I will take a look to the video later.

In the show, filmed in the 90s, the peruvian capital seems quite dirty and chaotic, a situation that has improved considerably in the latest years. While the traffic is still complicated, it’s less wild than some years ago.

Of course, some peruvian polititians say that these images, considered as “denigrant”, were shown on purpose by Lan. To me, it seems only a matter of business: Lan bought the videos package that, for being so old, came cheaper. Besides, this show has repeatedly been shown in cable television and nothing happened. It’s clear, anyways, that it wasn’t appropiate to show it during a flight to Peru; but that only speaks about how bad Lan selects their in flight video material and doesn’t prove a conspiration attempt to give Peru a bad reputation.

By the way, this scandal explains itself for historic reasons. There are old issues between Peru and Chile, recently brought up by an incident in Cuzco, when a chilean citizen damaged historic Inca monuments. Obviously, this video came out in a very bad timing. But one thing is to be amateur and another conspiring.

The note by La Republica about the topic can be found here. I will check the link tomorrow because this newspaper has the awful habit of changing links from one day to the next one.

Update: I just saw the episode again. It was made in 1997, when the show was called Lonely Planet -today is known as Globetrekker. One has to admit that what they portray about Lima does nothing to favor this city, which seems dirty and careless. But the rest of the destinations, particularly Cuzco and Puno, appear in a pretty positive way. The program is no big deal: Iquitos, for example, only appears because there’s forest, but from the city there isn’t a single take -and the amazonica night life is famous for its vitality. There aren’t either many references to the wonderful peruvian food, except for a few street vendors who sell boiled corn and grilled pork meat.

Again, the big problem is the obvious mistake of Lan by showing this video, with all the history of resentment existing between Peru and Chile. The topic is still covered today in a note of La Republica, where they refer to a “pseudocumentary” that aggravates Peru. It seems to me that they’re overreacting, since the only city in the video shown in an unfavorable way is Lima. Anyways, is not new that many touristic products made for the american and european market usually portrays Latin America in a very derogatory manner, as you can see in the case of Argentina guides analyzed by Cecilia Palacios in her graduate thesis (in spanish only). But in this case one can’t miss the fact that this scandal is also explained by a matter of intern politics from Peru as well as its relations with Chile. More than a touristic problem here, we have a problem of nationalism.

Airlines and regulatory organisms in the US and european airflights sector are discussing the possibility of eliminating the current prohibition of using mobile phones during a flight. Currently, the use of mobile phone is not allowed during flights because it would affect the aircraft’s communication. Now, a survey made by the United States Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) found that most of the passengers prefer the prohibition to go on, but this time not to be disturbed during the flight. Apparently, not everyone cares about the “freedom of always being communicated”.

Obviously, airlines are putting a lot of money to make aircrafts handle several standards of wireless communication, and the prohibition will be eliminated to allow the sale of more added value services. And quite possibly we will begin to see this during the next year (originally seen in Globalivity. The original note can be found at PCW Interactive).

A while ago, Natalia Delfino, who a few days ago published an article in Blog de Viajes, passed me this link from the argentinean newspaper La Nacion. The article was very interesting: according to a survey made by the american magazine Condé Nas Traveler, Buenos Aires appears fifth as one of the most attractive cities in the world “for the kindness of its inhabitants, for the environment in the streets, for the rich cultural agenda, for the good restaurants, for the comfort of the hotels and the wide supply of products at shopping time, according to the voted categories”.
Obviously, the first thing I did was to visit Concierge.com, the site of Condé Nast Traveler in the web, and consulted the Gold List 2004.

The problem is that I couldn’t find the ranking of cities and, instead, what I found was a ranking list of hotels, selected by categories such as food, service, etc.

Unfortunately, the edition of La Nacion doesn’t include a website address where to corroborate the information stated in the article, and only says that “the results of the survey have been published in the website and the past 4th of this month, those who obtained the first positions, received their awards in a glamorous ceremony conducted by the model Cindy Crawford, in New York City.”

At least for now, the ranking of cities does not appear in the Gold List published on the Internet. I Checked in Google News, the only media that publishes the story in spanish is La Nacion. In english, I still haven’t found anything.

I appeal to good will of my lectors: if someone finds this ranking of cities in the pages of Concierge.com or any other publication of Condé Nest Traveler, please let me know.

Some years ago, Martín Caparrós said in his book Larga Distancia (long distance) how the figure of Che Guevara was mixed -without much trouble- with Jesus and the Virgin Mary in the bolivian town of La Higuera. Of course: it’s about a location where Guevara was executed. Now the subject returns, with a note made by the newspaper Miami Herald, that talkd about the projects being held by the ngo CARE to promote Che tourism. This iniciative includes the construction of a backpacker’s lodge, reinforcement of infrastructure and pavement of the road that leads to the town. The investment would be of $300 000 and the money would be provided by the english government.

The note of the Miami Herald is frankly a horror in journalistic terms. They talk about Guevara as “the Bin Laden of the cold war” (???!!!) (originally seen in Guillibility isn’t in the dictionary).