Earlier this year I spent several weeks in Acapulco writing a documentary script about Mexico’s most famous nightclub, Baby’O, which opened in the mid-1970s at the height of the disco era and had been in business non-stop until then Operation was in 2021 when a criminal group burned it down. I hadn’t returned to Acapulco for many years. I found a city full of fear of violence, almost no nightlife (but some places on the Miguel Alemán coast that bombarded their speakers with tropical music as an aggressive strategy to attract their clientele), with expensive and mediocre restaurants, many abandoned buildings , and an infrastructure stopped with thumbtacks. My room at the Elcano Hotel, an elegant sixties white block, smelled of sewage. I asked to be moved. They gave me another room where the air conditioning leaked and left a permanent puddle on the floor. By the way, I noticed that a large proportion of the hotel guests were groups of Polish Catholic tourists, one per week, who celebrated mass every day before breakfast on the sand of the Bay of Santa Lucia.
Plagued by nostalgia, I went to the Princess Mundo Imperial Hotel one day to have a coffee. The taxi charged me an exorbitant price. The hotel disappointed me point by point. First of all, the huge pink carpet on which the purple seats in the lobby rested was gone. My father, who was dedicated to filming and directing documentaries to promote tourism in Mexico, had taken me there as a child. But more than the memory of this trip, it is the images from the film about Acapulco and the hotel scenes that remain in the memory: the expansive saltwater pool surrounded by lush vegetation, the bar under the waterfall, the horseback riding on the beach with the eccentric building as a background , which is reminiscent of the pyramid of Chichen Itzá.
Hours after the devastating effects of Hurricane Otis, images of the same hotel began to circulate on the networks: it had been left in the bones. We now know that this hurricane represents a novel meteorological phenomenon. As the days pass, we begin to understand how great the human and material losses are and what terrible consequences all this will have on the life of a city of almost a million inhabitants. I, who recently saw an already dilapidated and decaying tourist town, wonder if the terrible hurricane did not put the finishing touches to it, and in addition to the deaths of dozens of people and the damage to buildings and infrastructure, I also wonder about the end of Acapulco as a Mexican symbol of the 20th century, about the current reality of this symbol that, like the princess, was left empty.
Acapulco beach after Hurricane OtisALEXANDRE MENEGHINI (Portal)
This symbol has always been nourished by myths about extraordinary people and cinematic wealth. During the colonial period, the port of Acapulco was the entry and exit gate of the Spanish Empire in the East. After independence, Acapulco lost contact not only with the rest of the world, but also with the capital itself, and only in the second half of the 20th century was it reconnected to the center via a winding and eventful road. In the 1940s, in the midst of World War II, the beautiful port was surrounded by its beaches with gentle waves like Caleta and Caletilla, the postcard sunsets that could be seen from the cliffs and its bay of Santa Lucía, a perfect horseshoe shape Located on the mountains, it resembled a magnificent natural amphitheater and was the object of the vision and ambition of the PRI leaders who developed the first tourism development policy in Mexico.
First President Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–1946) and then Miguel Alemán (1946–1952) stripped the Acapulqueños of their lands, encouraged foreign investment, and in the process distributed land and investments among them and their friends. In particular, Alemán relocated the airport, planned the first subdivisions and ordered the construction of the coastal road that runs along the entire bay and bears his name. In 1947, Orson Wells filmed “The Lady from Shanghai” in Acapulco, starring him and Rita Hayworth. There is a scene that has always fascinated me. It shows a party at the Hotel Casablanca, which is located on a mountain in the Las Playas area. The men wear tuxedos and the women wear long, flowing dresses; They dance to the beat of a live orchestra. It’s the glamor of Hollywood transplanted to Acapulco.
In the mid-1950s, actors Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan), John Wayne, Red Skelton and Fred MacMurray purchased the Flamingos Hotel, built in the 1930s, and made it a favorite haunt for other actors and international celebrities. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1958 and the closure of Havana to international tourism ultimately cemented Acapulco’s success. In 1963, at the height of his fame and just before the Beatles’ performance, Elvis Presley made the film Fun in Acapulco, in which he plays a trapeze artist who, after an accident, is afraid of heights and decides to work as a singer. at a hotel in Acapulco. The film reached the top spot on the most-watched list shortly after Kennedy’s assassination. In 1964, the new international airport was completed and the port was connected to the rest of the world with direct flights to Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and even Sydney, Australia.
The story of those glory years can be told through many characters, but perhaps one of the most emblematic is Teddy Stauffer, who left behind a book of memoirs called Forever Is a Hell of a Long Time, a reprint and translation of which would make a lot of sense now . It tells a myth that fascinates us Mexicans, that of the foreigner who falls in love with our country, the opposite of the trauma of conquest. Stauffer was a Swiss-German musician with a swing band that was very famous in Berlin in the 1930s. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Stauffer emigrated to the USA, first to New York and later to Hollywood, where he composed film music. Because he had problems with his American visa, Stauffer had to travel to Mexico to arrange his re-entry into the United States, but he got stranded in Tijuana and ended up in Acapulco. He played in the main nightclubs, Ciro’s de Reforma and the Hotel Casablanca in Acapulco; He became a PR director for a few hotels and eventually a businessman.
The Villa Vera Hotel opened in the mid-1950s, nestled on a mountainside in front of Condesa Beach. It has a few bungalows, some with private pools, tennis courts and exclusive adult services. It became the vacation spot of Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minelli, Clark Gable and Brigitte Bardot, as well as the favorite spot of the wealthy classes of New York and Mexico City. In the sixties, Stauffer opened one of the first nightclubs in the world, the famous Tequila A go go (on YouTube there is this video in which you can see the Mexican actress Ana Martin dancing in the nightclub’s cage), the forerunner of a long list of world-famous nightclubs such as Armando’s Le Club, where Prince Charles of England was a guest, and finally Baby’O, which captured the disco spirit of the second half of the seventies. In any case, Stauffer was a world-renowned host and established an international standard of quality service that eventually permeated the port.
A diver jumps from the La Quebrada cliff into the sea. Nayeli Cruz (EL PAIS)
But that brilliance was marred by other realities. The forgotten Mexican chronicler Ricardo Garibay published a book about Acapulco in 1978, at a time when the city generated just over 40% of the national tourism income. Garibay set out to paint a portrait of the port, not only its beautiful places and its distinguished people, but also the poor neighborhoods that clustered on the slopes of the hills and the transition of power of its governor, Rubén Figueroa. a quaint, authoritarian politician who hosted the same Miss Universe contestants who maintained control of a state where a peasant guerrilla had risen and which was occupied by more than half the army.
What I definitely want to emphasize with this story is that for forty years Acapulco was Mexico’s true border with the world; the international face of our country. This is its great symbolic value.
The port gradually lost international tourists, in part because the Mexican state began to develop Cancún as a strategy to attract more foreign currency. In 1980, the city in the Mexican Caribbean that had emerged from nothing already had 3,000 hotel rooms; in 1984 this number doubled. Soon Cancun became the destination that attracted the most foreign visitors. By the way, many Acapulcan hoteliers in upper and middle management have emigrated to the Caribbean and passed on their hospitality and knowledge. In Acapulco, local tourists replaced foreigners. This trend increased from 1993, after the inauguration of the Autopista del Sol. Acapulco was just five hours from the capital and full of chilangos. With the premiere of Acafest, an annual music festival organized by Televisa, the port’s beaches filled with national stars, the most brilliant of whom was Luis Miguel, who purchased a house.
Luis Miguel is not only a musical phenomenon but also a cultural phenomenon and his presence in the port has ultimately given him a personality. Let’s say that Sinatra or Minelli was replaced by a beautiful Creole, a white man of European descent, the sex symbol of all Mexican women and the model of masculinity for many Mexicans. Luis Miguel was also the personal friend of Acapulco’s heirs, such as Miguel Alemán Magnani, grandson of President Alemán. He became, in short, a Mirrey, with his behavior that went beyond the rules and the world at his feet. I believe that when Luis Miguel broke up with his girlfriend Isabella Camil, the daughter of a powerful Acapulcan businessman, and left the Mexican port for Miami, the era of Acapulcan’s splendor ended.
Thanks to the research I conducted for the documentary, I learned the causes of Acapulco’s decline. In the early 2000s, a branch of the Sinaloa Cartel under the command of Arturo Beltrán Leya was consolidated in Acapulco and a cocaine trafficking corridor was established that ran along the Del Sol Highway from Mexico City to Chilpancingo via Cuernavaca and Acapulco. Many Acapulqueños remember Beltrán Leyva, but especially another member of the cartel, Edgar Valdez Villareal, La Barbie, walking the streets of the port. Valdez Villareal in particular, blonde, tall, had adopted a more open style, somewhat inspired by the Mirreys, and appeared in bars to drink with his people.
A couple in the pool of the Princess Mundo Imperial Hotel in Acapulco, on August 9, 2020 Nayeli Cruz
By the mid-2000s, there were already signs that violence had declined in Acapulco, with the first deaths resulting from clashes between rival gangs, but by 2010, months after the death of Arturo Beltrán, Acapulco was bathed in blood. Leyva and after Barbie’s arrest. In 2013, Acapulco, below San Pedro Sula in Honduras, was the most violent city in the world. Tourism disappeared. The people of Acapulco remember these years as if they had experienced a state of siege. Nobody dared to go out at night: people were locked in the house.
He hasn’t recovered since. The large criminal organizations left Acapulco and were replaced by smaller groups that kill for less money and share an ever smaller pie. In 2013, Hurricane Manuel struck, leaving the port without an airport and roads. In March 2020, a health emergency was declared due to Covid-19 and Acapulco was closed again. In September 2021, hotels, bars and restaurants began to reopen. Baby’O was just about to begin operations when a criminal gang invaded the premises and burned it down, dealing a new blow to one of Acapulco’s iconic locations.
So when I arrived at the port in March 2023, it felt like the ghost of what it had once been. Through conversations with the nightclub staff, I understood what it meant to have lived under the siege of so many disastrous years, but I also understood that if you squinted you would forget the leak in the room and the Catholic tourists, and you would look at the bay again and you’ll realize that Acapulco’s greatest asset, its geographical beauty, hasn’t disappeared. And that perhaps with a different security policy and a new injection of investment, some of the beauty and dignity of the faded diva could be restored.
Of all the stories I heard, the one that touched me the most was that of Martín, the nightclub bouncer. After the fire, Baby’O opened its doors in December 2022. The nightclub is a fascinating phenomenon because of its resilience and at the same time repulsive because it maintains its rules of exclusivity and is a reflection of the lack of mobility in Mexican society. which has been assigned places around the route for three generations. So Martín is the bastard at the entrance who has to tell the Mirreyes, Luis Miguel’s young namesakes, that they are not allowed to enter. After all kinds of attacks, his work ends around five in the morning when the doors of the nightclub are closed until the next night. Martín, a tall man who wanted to be a footballer but a knee injury prevented him from achieving this goal, goes to sleep at home only to get up a few hours later to manage a beach club, neat and well attended, a pearl in the middle of the surrounding disorder.
From Martín I learned that before the hurricane, Acapulco was actually a destination for 30 business days, long weekends, Easter holidays, some summer days and especially New Year’s Day. It also taught me that you have your roots and love your place of origin, no matter how ugly it has become, and that it is worth sleeping little and getting up to clean the beach to have a presentable place to stand on waiting for a tourist. I just hope that the spirits are not broken after the hurricane, because then Acapulco would be lost.
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