CANCUN, Mexico -- To get to the 1,000-year-old Temple of the Scorpion on the clear blue Caribbean Sea, an ordinary Mexican has to find one of the rare public access paths to the beach and hike about a mile.
A foreign tourist need only step out of one of the luxury hotels that surround the temple.Needless to say, almost all visitors are foreign. On a recent afternoon, the only Mexican at the temple was groundskeeper Eduardo Hernandez, who was repairing a drainage ditch.
"Nobody comes here," he said. "There's no access. They (the hotels) don't let you walk through their property."
Mexicans are increasingly being cut off from their own Caribbean coast. This year, the Quintana Roo state government sold off 2.6 miles of the last 3 miles of public beaches to hotel developers, or concessioned them off to theme park operators who charge prices few Mexicans can pay.
Along the 80 miles of sand that stretch between Cancun and Tulum, an area known as the Mayan Riviera, there are perhaps two public beaches. On the rest, private owners are building, or hoping to build, exclusive luxury hotels.
Of the 550-mile Caribbean coast down to Belize, almost every inch is privately owned, in large part by foreigners.
Perhaps the most open part is Cancun itself -- where the Temple of the Scorpion stands. Although most hotels have security guards who keep undesirables from crossing their property to get to the beach, a half-dozen small, unkempt public access paths squeeze between the resorts.
"You can go through the hotels if you're a blue-eyed gringo, but the darker-skinned you are the less chance they will let you through," said Araceli Dominguez, a member of a local ecologist group.
Even environmentally sensitive areas are being sold off. Sixty miles south of Cancun, Spanish hotel developer Grupo Sol Melia this year bought the sea-turtle nesting ground at Xcacel beach. The beach was a regular stop for schoolchildren on field trips.
Sol Melia has blocked off the access road and begun cutting palm trees, but its executives refused to say what kind of hotel they plan to build.
Jose Luis Perez Quintal, the government official who oversaw the land sales, didn't flinch as he said what Xcacel and the surrounding coast will become: "An exclusive zone for people with high incomes."
Critics accuse the government officials of selling out their nation.
"It appears there is nothing they won't sell to private investors," said Greenpeace Mexico activist Juan Carlos Cantu.
Added opposition-party activist Tulio Arroyo: "They think land is under-used if there's no restaurant on it."
Gov. Mario Villanueva knows that Mexicans face discrimination on their own coast. As mayor of Cancun in the early 1990s, he temporarily closed a discotheque and a beach resort for denying entry to Mexicans.
He conceded that there are problems with the development, but defended the state's privatization plan.