Cancun Rethinks Its Role as a Mecca for 'los Spring Breakers'

By LEE ROMNEY

March 11, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CANCUN, Mexico — It’s a Tuesday night and time for the “Booze Cruise,” an all-you-can-drink extravaganza billed as “the wildest party in the Caribbean. . . . If you can remember, it’s sure to be a night you will not soon forget!!!”

After wet T-shirt and “hot body” contests at the island destination, organizers call out for a pair of men’s underpants. Jeremy Ross, 21, complies, stripping naked. This is the first spring break visit here for the student from Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island, and it’s all about the party.

“It was hot,” said Ross, who was lured to Cancun by MTV’s coverage of the sex-and-sand vacation packages.

With a drinking age of 18 and plenty of free booze promotionals, Cancun blatantly bills itself as an alcohol lover’s paradise. The promotions have paid off: Cancun, where the worst of Mexican and U.S. cultures arguably collide, ranks as the No. 1 destination for U.S. students on spring break, surpassing Jamaica and once-popular Florida spots, according to leading student travel brokers.

Talk to officials here, however, and you might think that Cancun was the capital of the mixed message. Responding largely to excesses of years past, the Office of Tourism has stepped up a campaign to plaster hotel rooms, discos and bars with English-language posters and placards asking that students “Be Cool While in Cancun.”

Students also are asked to sign a code of conduct when they land at the airport. “I received the warning note from the local authorities,” it says. “Now I know the rules.” Those include: No public sex or nudity. No drinking or urinating in the street. No free rides on public transport. And no rudeness or disruptions of public order.

The campaign is not new. But city officials--increasingly stung by the mixed reputation that the seasonal bash bestows on Cancun--have vowed to enforce rules more aggressively this year. Reports of crime targeting U.S. students on spring break also are on the rise as Cancun’s population swells to serve the booming tourist industry. The incidents have prompted warnings from the State Department, which also advises students to obey Mexican laws of decency.

The result for Cancun: a delicate effort to castigate wild behavior while welcoming the dollars that students bring.

“They come to have fun and they are welcome here, but they have to maintain a certain conduct,” said Manuel Escalante Sosa, director of special projects for the local Office of Tourism, who is heading efforts to tone down the celebration. “We don’t want to tarnish the image of Cancun.”

Rachel Sater, a marketing coordinator for Los Angeles-based STA Travel, which bills itself as the world’s largest student travel agency, puts it more bluntly.

“I feel sorry for the Mexican government,” she said. “I’m sure they don’t want people throwing up in the streets and taking their clothes off, but they want the revenue.”

Six-Week Bacchanal

The dance of excess, offense and capitalism plays out each year in this Caribbean theme park at the northeastern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. As many as 100,000 college students descend on Cancun each year in a six-week bacchanal that begins in late February and peaks this weekend. Baltimore-based Student Travel Services, the main supplier of spring break packages to STA Travel and smaller agencies, is sending 9,000 students this weekend alone.

An elongated strip of 142 hotels, Cancun exists purely on tourist dollars. Some industry sectors, such as bars and discotheques, earn as much as 70% of their annual revenue from the travelers dubbed “los spring breakers,” said Julian Balbuena, general manager of Best Day Tours, which organizes the Booze Cruise and tamer tourist events.

The students fill about 15% of Cancun’s more than 25,000 hotel rooms weekly during the season, pushing overall occupancy to 90%, Escalante said. That means fully 75% are filled with older tourists, in some of the most elegant hotels in the Americas. But the college crowd is most noticeable.

And while the students may not be staying in top-notch hotels, their consumption habits are too good for many merchants to pass up.

“A honeymoon couple is not going to eat 10 pizzas or go for an all-you-can-drink event for 10 hours every night of the week,” said Student Travel Services general manager Robert Baranoski. “The secondary operators really want the spring break to continue, but the upper-scale hotels aren’t so sure. People getting up on stage and getting . . . naked--it’s just not the image you want to create for your tourist destination.”

Some hotels--such as the Melia Cancun and Cancun Palace--are rejecting the spring breakers outright this year because of the damage they cause. Most others require a $100-a-person damage deposit.

For Cancun residents, reactions range from bemusement to disgust.

“I’ve never been to the U.S., but I hear it’s nothing like it is here,” said Alejandra Rojas, a 29-year-old waitress at Tequila Boom, a spring break dance spot. “People have sex under the tables and in the phone booths.”

For Rojas, the job pays well, and night work allows her to spend more time with her 8-year-old daughter. But she said not all the locals can stomach the raunchy contests and behavior.

“They come here and feel like kings of the world,” she said of the students. “Sometimes they create disasters and break things.”

The disrespect is mutual. Some spring breakers complain of being overcharged and mistreated. “They won’t serve you your free drinks unless you tip them, and they’re so mean,” said 19-year-old Marla Beck, a Johnson & Wales student who said she unwittingly paid the equivalent of $50 for a drink and wasn’t offered change.

Even Mexicans concede that the U.S. students are sometimes gouged. “In reality, they’re robbed,” said Primitivo Garcia Balderas, a waiter at a relatively upscale restaurant that does not attract too many spring break revelers.

Some spring breakers allege far worse: “They stole my clothes. They drugged me. They called me a whore, and then they kicked me out of the hotel,” said a 19-year-old American student who believes that her drink was spiked and that she was then sexually assaulted at her hotel pool by a local.

She did not call police out of fear, she said, nor did she notify the U.S. consular representative in Cancun. Instead, she racked up $1,000 in long-distance calls to her mom, who helped place her in a different hotel.

“I’m so done with Cancun, it’s not even funny,” she said.

The consular office in Cancun referred calls about spring break troubles to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. A spokesman there would not provide data on complaints or crime reports but noted that the State Department Fact Sheet on spring break in Cancun, released Feb. 22, refers to “increasing reports of crime.”

It advises travelers that such crimes as rape “sometimes involve alcohol and the discotheque environment” and that belongings should not be left on the beach unattended.

Escalante and others said they believe that reports of crime--and of alcohol-related problems--are exaggerated. But they are nevertheless responding.

During the first half of the 1990s, before Cancun made its name as an upscale destination for honeymooners and older couples, March and April were painfully slow months. Spring break filled that gap. Now, some hotel operators and civic boosters are questioning whether it’s worth it.

“Everyone’s getting very hard on spring break,” said the manager at nightspot Fat Tuesday’s, who declined to give his name. “Out of 90,000 people we get, we might have 40 problems. That’s very good.”

Still, city officials are tightening restrictions. Meetings with law enforcement and transportation officials, as well as members of the hotel, bar and discotheque associations, began last September in preparation for this season, Escalante said. Volunteer Mexican students are staffing the airport on weekends to hand out and explain the code of conduct.

And tour brokers have been asked to send a particularly clear message to students to clean up their act.

Tighter Rules for Bars

A few rules also have changed: Bars must now stop serving alcohol at 4 a.m. and close by 5 a.m., whereas some previously kept the drinks flowing until 8 a.m. And officials have promised to penalize establishments that let spring breakers wander into the streets with their cups, serve alcohol to minors or serve those who are already drunk.

Spring breakers scoff at the notion.

“We were already drunk when we got on the boat. They gave us as much as we could drink, and then they gave us some more,” Beck said of the Booze Cruise. “I think it’s too much to handle.”

Still, Cancun officials and tour operators say problems are far from representative. The vast majority of tourists are older than 18, they add, and legally responsible for their behavior.

“They are adults,” Best Day’s Balbuena said. “They ask for these events, and we offer them.”