Mexico -- Cozumel Pier Debate: Cruise Ships Or Coral?

SAN MIGUEL DE COZUMEL, Mexico - To hear the scuba divers tell it, a massacre is raging beneath the placid, azure waters that lap the beaches of this popular resort island: Cruise ship anchors are beheading brain coral, the backwash of giant propellers is choking delicate fan coral and thousands of sea creatures are being evicted from their underwater habitat.

Ashore, the political carnage is just as bruising: cruise liners and big money vs. divers and environmentalists. At issue is a giant pier now being built near an undersea ridge of rainbow-colored corals and neon-brilliant fish made world famous more than two decades ago by the television documentaries of underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau.

The Frenchman's son is among celebrities who have traveled here to wage verbal combat on behalf of Paradise Reef.

This ecological skirmish is the first test of a three-nation commission set up to referee international environmental feuds in the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - which some critics argued would push countries to circumvent environmental laws to attract new development.

Perhaps because the debate has become a hemispheric test case, it has focused less on brain coral and electric-blue fish than on power and politics, corruption and self-interests - and, above all, money.

The story of Paradise Reef is far muddier than any of the waters stirred by the propellers of the mammoth white vessels that churn the coastal waters of this island just off the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.

In the wake of Cousteau's undersea-adventure documentaries, the reefs off the western beaches of Cozumel became one of the hottest diving and snorkeling sites on the globe. Some diving magazines rate Paradise Reef second in popularity only to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia.

While Cozumel was attracting the frugal, outdoorsy diver types who frequented the island's pizza joints and margarita bars, its big sister on the mainland, Cancun, was building luxury hotels to lure high-spending tourists into jewelry shops and fancy restaurants.

To bulk up Cozumel's share of the tourist dollars, Mexican authorities decided to draw the cruise-ship business to the island. The massive floating hotels send ashore their well-heeled guests, who spend an average of $100 per daylong stop.

The cruise-line business became so successful - with 674 ships anchoring off Cozumel last year - that it quickly outgrew the island's small downtown pier and the cruise-line wharf just outside San Miguel de Cozumel, the only town.

In 1993, amid a movement toward privatization of public facilities, the Mexican government awarded a private developer the contract to build a new, 1,820-foot dock with the capacity for much larger cruise liners - along with permits allowing the company to build a $230 million restaurant, shopping mall, hotel complex and golf course in the grasslands that fronted the pier.

Developers say they have completed about 70 percent of the dock, but work has not begun on the remainder of the development.

Outraged environmentalists and divers took underwater film footage to show the damage they say is being done by the five to six ships that now anchor offshore each day.

"Why are they building it over the reef when the reef is our Number One tourist draw?" asked Isaac Uribe, 46, who operates a small hotel and bicycle and dive shop.

The Mexican government's analysis concluded that the portion of the reef directly beneath the pier had been destroyed by a hurricane in the late 1980s, and construction of the new wharf would damage only 2.9 percent of the remainder.

Consortium H, the developer - under pressure to appear environmentally friendly - hired biologists to remove an estimated 23,000 sponges, coral and other organisms in the path of the pier and transplant them to man-made concrete reefs several hundred feet from the wharf. Environmentalists say such a massive transplanting of undersea species has never proved successful.

Dora Uribe, 39, an attorney and sister of Isaac, is leading the environmental effort to fight the government and the developer.

In petitions to the NAFTA Commission for Environmental Co-operation, she has argued that the government circumvented its own environmental laws in allowing the construction in the area.

But the commission, which is scheduled to decide June 10 whether to launch a full, tri-country inquiry, is only advisory.