Gof­fredo Mar­cac­cini at his estate in Jalisco, Mex­ico, where he lives with his wife, Alix Gold­smith. They are opposed to a devel­op­ment project involv­ing two of Mexico’s most pow­er­ful families.

RON STODGHILL
The New York Times

COSTA Ale­gre, Mexico

CRUISING along the swerv­ing, moun­tain­ous roads of Mexico’s west­ern coast, past trees and vines, blue lagoons and scat­tered wild­flow­ers, Gof­fredo Mar­cac­cini stops his Jeep and thrusts his head out the win­dow. “Ahhh,” he croons, inhal­ing the morn­ing air. “The smell of the earth! Nice, like the scent of a woman!”

His reverie is short-lived. Far­ther along, he encoun­ters road­side debris, includ­ing a bright blue Pepsi can. “Mod­ern man,” he says, winc­ing, “is the can­cer of the earth. We are only here to destroy.”

Mr. Mar­cac­cini is a self-described roman­tic, a nat­u­ral­ist who waxes poetic about man­groves, giant sea tur­tles and the beauty of para­keets. He is also an heir to the late British cor­po­rate raider James Gold­smith, who once lorded over this richly vir­ginal expanse of nature as though it were his own empire.

Since Mr. Goldsmith’s death in 1997, Mr. Mar­cac­cini and his wife, Alix, the daugh­ter of Mr. Gold­smith, have man­aged the late patriarch’s most prized asset: Cuix­mala, a 2,000-acre pri­vate estate with sev­eral vil­las on the Pacific that at var­i­ous times housed Mr. Goldsmith’s three fam­i­lies, mis­tresses and high-powered vis­i­tors includ­ing Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

These days, though, there’s trou­ble brew­ing on Cuix­mala, which is nes­tled inside the 32,473-acre Chamela-Cuixmala Bios­phere Reserve, a rolling expanse of fed­er­ally pro­tected coastal land.

In an effort to expand tourism beyond des­ti­na­tions like Can­cún and Puerto Val­larta, Mex­i­can offi­cials recently autho­rized the devel­op­ment of two resorts in the area. The most con­tro­ver­sial project, called Marina Careyes — also referred to as Carey­i­tos — is backed by Roberto Hernán­dez, the pow­er­ful Mex­i­can banker and devel­oper who sold his finan­cial ser­vices firm to Cit­i­group six years ago for $12.5 bil­lion. Mr. Hernández’s minor­ity part­ners are Gian Franco Brignone and his son Gior­gio, Ital­ian real estate mag­nates who relo­cated to Mex­ico and built a series of sump­tu­ous prop­er­ties in the state of Jalisco that made it a mag­net for the super-rich.

The result is a pitched bat­tle over land rights between Mr. Goldsmith’s heirs and two of the country’s most pow­er­ful fam­i­lies — a clash that sheds light on the fault lines between tra­di­tional lux­ury resort devel­op­ers who favor golf courses, swim­ming pools and spas, and a newer breed of conservationist-entrepreneurs who cham­pion eco-resorts where guests hike and canoe for recre­ation. The stand­off smacks of a blood feud with roots going back decades to early land squab­bles involv­ing the Gold­smiths and the Brignones.

Polit­i­cal ana­lysts in Mex­ico say the rift is also one of the first tests of Pres­i­dent Felipe Calderón’s com­mit­ment to the envi­ron­ment. Elected last Novem­ber, Mr. Calderón has earned some kudos from envi­ron­men­tal groups for recently enact­ing a wildlife pro­tec­tion law, which pro­hibits activ­i­ties that may dam­age Mexico’s coastal man­groves. At the same time, ana­lysts say he is cer­tain to face pres­sure from Mexico’s pow­er­ful tourism indus­try, which gen­er­ates bil­lions of dol­lars in rev­enue for the coun­try but has also caused once-scenic coast­lines to become clot­ted with megaresorts.

“We still need time to see how com­mit­ted he his,” said Cecilia Navarro, a spokes­woman for Green­peace Mex­ico, an envi­ron­men­tal advo­cacy group. “He needs to keep firm, because we know that a busi­ness­man like Mr. Hernán­dez has a lot of power.”

How­ever the con­flict at Cuix­mala plays out, all of the par­ties involved are well aware of the influ­ence they have — or don’t have — on the out­come. “Daddy would have had so much lever­age in this,” Alix Gold­smith says. “He would have had promi­nent peo­ple in pol­i­tics, envi­ron­men­tal groups, sci­en­tists, artists sign­ing a peti­tion to the Mex­i­can pres­i­dent ask­ing for the law to be fol­lowed. But that’s why we have to be care­ful; here in Mex­ico, com­pared to a guy like Roberto Hernán­dez, we’re noth­ing. Nobody knows Gof­fredo Mar­cac­cini or Alix Goldsmith.”

Mr. Marcaccini’s assess­ment is more cyn­i­cal. “This is the clas­sic case of a civil soci­ety up against a manip­u­lat­ing gov­ern­ment,” he asserts. “Any­one who tries to speak out here in Mex­ico is crushed like a mosquito.”

Mr. Hernández’s part­ners say that they are eco­log­i­cally sen­si­tive devel­op­ers and that the first fam­ily of Cuix­mala sim­ply doesn’t want out­siders to encroach on its pri­vate enclave. Oth­ers, too, have said that Mr. Mar­cac­cini and Ms. Gold­smith might be con­cerned about some­thing other than their mangroves.

“The eco­log­i­cal poli­cies in Mex­ico are being manip­u­lated by pri­vate fam­ily inter­ests,” said Octavio González Reyes, a colum­nist who cov­ers tourism for the area’s news­pa­per, El Occi­den­tal, in Guadala­jara. “This fight is all about eco­nomic inter­ests, not the envi­ron­ment. What the Gold­smiths are inter­ested in pro­tect­ing is their own pri­vate emporium.”

ITS name inspired by the small for­mer port town of Chamela and the pow­er­ful Cuix­mala River snaking through the region, the Chamela-Cuixmala Bios­phere Reserve is one of the most stud­ied trop­i­cal dry forests in the world. Dur­ing the tran­si­tion from the dry to the rainy sea­son, its low­land for­est morphs from a muted gray to a lush green, and it attracts sci­en­tists who study its spe­cial flora and fauna. With the excep­tion of fed­er­ally owned lagoons and coasts, land within the reserve is mostly in pri­vate hands.

Mem­bers of the Brignone fam­ily own about 2,500 acres, but the reserve’s most influ­en­tial owner has been the Cuix­mala Eco­log­i­cal Foun­da­tion, which Mr. Gold­smith cre­ated in 1988 to pre­serve the area sur­round­ing his estate. Mr. Goldsmith’s fam­ily owns about 25,000 acres in and around the reserve, Mr. Mar­cac­cini said.

Marina Careyes would be about one mile from the bios­phere, a loca­tion that Mr. Mar­cac­cini, Ms. Gold­smith and their allies say raises the risk of destroy­ing the frag­ile ecosys­tem that sup­ports the area’s trop­i­cal dry for­est. The resort’s oppo­nents also say that it would vio­late gov­ern­men­tal restric­tions pro­tect­ing the area’s environment.

Mr. Mar­cac­cini spreads his accu­sa­tions more broadly, con­tend­ing that offi­cials in for­mer Pres­i­dent Vicente Fox’s admin­is­tra­tion clan­des­tinely autho­rized devel­op­ment in the wan­ing days of his admin­is­tra­tion to avoid pub­lic scrutiny. Such approvals typ­ify the cul­ture of cor­rup­tion and polit­i­cal patron­age plagu­ing Mexico’s gov­ern­ment and busi­nesses, Mr. Mar­cac­cini says, and he con­tends that Marina Careyes is another exam­ple of the problem.

Mauri­cio Limón Aguirre, a deputy direc­tor at Semar­nat, the envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tory arm of the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment, says the approval process for Marina Careyes was fair and trans­par­ent. “In order for us to know whether these alle­ga­tions are true or not, they have to prove that the autho­riza­tions were made ille­gally,” says Mr. Aguirre, whose staff also reviewed the devel­op­ment plans dur­ing the Fox admin­is­tra­tion. “Oth­er­wise we pre­sume that the act of author­ity is legal.”

The devel­op­ers of Marina Careyes have argued that their plans are mod­est. They say the 215-room hotel, 40 vil­las and nearly 200 homes will have a minor impact on the envi­ron­ment. They also say the project will bring jobs to an area sorely in need of them. For their part, the Brignones say that they are only minor­ity part­ners in the Marina Careyes project and that they have more sig­nif­i­cant hold­ings else­where. But they say they will sup­port only envi­ron­men­tally respon­si­ble resort development.

“Nowa­days, when you talk about mari­nas and golf courses, you look like a mon­ster,” Gior­gio Brignone says. “But in order to keep this coun­try alive, we need to cre­ate tourism.”

José Bosoms, the son-in-law of Mr. Hernán­dez, and gen­eral man­ager of the pro­posed resort, agrees: “This is an area of Mex­ico that still has a future. What we plan to build is not like in Can­cún, which is full of high-density projects — we are doing some­thing extremely con­ser­v­a­tive in development.”

IN Roberto Hernán­dez, the Brignones have one of Mexico’s wealth­i­est and most influ­en­tial busi­ness­men as a part­ner. After becom­ing a dom­i­nant fig­ure in Mexico’s secu­ri­ties mar­kets in the 1980s, Mr. Hernán­dez, now 65, became a lead­ing bid­der for state-owned banks that Mex­ico was privatizing.

In 1991, he and a group of fel­low investors bought a con­trol­ling stake in Banamex, the country’s biggest bank. Ten years later, Cit­i­group bought the Banacci finan­cial group, a hold­ing com­pany that con­trolled Banamex, for $12.5 bil­lion. Mex­i­can finan­cial ana­lysts said at the time that Mr. Hernán­dez and his fam­ily owned at least half of Banacci’s shares.

Marina Careyes is among sev­eral resorts that Mr. Hernán­dez has helped to develop. In the mid-1990s, Banamex became an investor in a high­fly­ing tourism com­pany, Situr, which opened a chain of glitzy hotels, beach resorts, time shares, mari­nas and golf courses through­out Latin Amer­ica and the Caribbean that later encoun­tered finan­cial trou­bles. Among its prop­er­ties was one in Puerto Val­larta: the 549-acre Marina Val­larta resort, which has a marina flanked by inter­na­tional hotels.

Mr. Hernán­dez declined to be inter­viewed, but his firm says that Marina Careyes is a minor devel­op­ment for him. His offi­cials say it will be just a small, bou­tique hotel, aimed at upscale trav­el­ers, that will have a marina for boats, beach clubs and infra­struc­ture for roads and water, drainage and sewage systems.

Still, in recent weeks, a non­profit envi­ron­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion that Mr. Mar­cac­cini leads, Con­sejo Para la Defensa de la Costa del Pací­fico, has started an aggres­sive grass-roots cam­paign against the resort. The group, founded by the Gold­smith fam­ily in 1993, says the resort will spoil an area that it says is home to 1,200 species of plants, 270 species of birds and a rich vari­ety of mam­mals, rep­tiles and amphibians.

“You cut one ring in the chain and the whole thing goes,” Mr. Mar­cac­cini says. “You don’t have to be a rocket sci­en­tist to under­stand this.”

Cuix­mala, which is on a rolling land­scape of forested cliffs three hours south of Puerto Val­larta, its pastel-hued vil­las over­look­ing the white beaches and high surf of the Pacific, was built to impress. It took Mr. Gold­smith sev­eral years to amass enough land to cre­ate his par­adise, which includes La Loma, his blue-and-gold domed retreat inspired by a maharaja’s palace, as well as the estate’s other vil­las and casitas that fam­ily and friends used.

Manned by armed secu­rity guards and employ­ing a staff of 250 work­ers that cook, clean, and tend to an organic farm that pro­duces meals for the estate, Cuix­mala func­tions with medieval pomp and effi­ciency. A few years ago, the Gold­smiths began rent­ing some of Cuixmala’s vil­las for $9,000 to $15,000 a night. Bill Gates, Madonna, Mick Jag­ger and other lumi­nar­ies have vaca­tioned there, Mr. Mar­cac­cini says.

While gaz­ing at palm trees and brush where zebras, gazelles and wild boars roam, Alix Gold­smith recalls an ear­lier time when there were no power lines and sewage sys­tems around her home and when recre­ation meant polo matches, horse­back rid­ing and par­ty­ing by bon­fires with other fam­i­lies along the beach.

“It wasn’t about tech­nol­ogy back then, or Prada hand­bags and high heels, and that’s what was so great about this area,” says Mrs. Gold­smith, 43, the daugh­ter of Mr. Goldsmith’s sec­ond wife, Ginette Lery. “Daddy used to drive 45 min­utes to make his busi­ness calls. The first time I heard a ring­ing tele­phone here, I was terrified.”

DURING the 1970s, Mr. Gold­smith was among a group of Euro­pean busi­ness moguls and roy­alty who fol­lowed the lead of the well-connected Ital­ian devel­oper Gian Franco Brignone and began vaca­tion­ing along the secluded beaches of Careyes. Nearly a decade ear­lier, Mr. Brignone, along with a group of Mex­i­can and Euro­pean part­ners, bought sev­eral thou­sand acres. In 1972, he sold a tract of land to Club Med, and later built a small lux­ury hotel and sev­eral lav­ish homes that would become a trop­i­cal back­drop for Christie Brink­ley photo shoots and Calvin Klein advertisements.

Among Mr. Brignone’s most famous prop­er­ties was Mi Ojo, which, accord­ing to the book about the his­tory of the area, “The Magic of Careyes,” pub­lished by the Brignone family’s foun­da­tion, boasted “huge guano-palm pala­pas with­out walls or win­dows, sup­ported by guaya­billo wood columns and trunks of the tallest trees in the jungle.”

“The main bed­room is shaped like a ship’s prow,” the book says. “The house also fea­tures a 70-meter swing­ing bridge that crosses high above the ocean to the sum­mit of a rocky island sur­rounded by cliffs, teem­ing with plant life and with a palm-tree tem­ple in the middle.”

The book also says that “Careyes was then what it remains today, a place inhab­ited by famous peo­ple (rep­re­sent­ing 42 dif­fer­ent nation­al­i­ties) and dom­i­nated by a patriarch.”

Among those patri­archs — and one with whom Mr. Brignone would even­tu­ally clash — was Mr. Gold­smith, who built a for­tune acquir­ing and break­ing up com­pa­nies and gained a rep­u­ta­tion as a buc­ca­neer. By the 1980s, he was using his wealth to help pio­neer what became known as green­mail­ing — the prac­tice of accu­mu­lat­ing large stakes in trou­bled com­pa­nies and sell­ing the stock back to the com­pany at a pre­mium, a strat­egy prac­ticed by other notable raiders of the day. Mr. Goldsmith’s con­tro­ver­sial raid of the Goodyear Tire and Rub­ber Com­pany in 1986 spawned Con­gres­sional hear­ings about hos­tile takeovers. Mr. Gold­smith later ven­tured into British pol­i­tics and made an unsuc­cess­ful bid for a seat in the House of Com­mons; he died in 1997.

His sybaritic side is most evi­dent in Careyes, which not only became the bully pul­pit for his work as a con­ser­va­tion­ist dur­ing the twi­light of his career, but also was the back­drop of a col­or­ful pri­vate life. Through mar­riages and affairs, he had eight chil­dren in fam­i­lies liv­ing in his British, French and Mex­i­can homes. “When you marry your lover, a new vacancy is imme­di­ately cre­ated,” he liked to say.

Mr. Mar­cac­cini says that his father-in-law “was a larger-than-life char­ac­ter,” adding: “Even after his mar­riage ended, he would still keep the woman around him. His feel­ing was: ‘Even though you are my ex, you are still the mother of my children.’ ”

Mr. Goldsmith’s first wife, the daugh­ter of a Boli­vian tin mag­nate, died when she was seven months preg­nant. Doc­tors man­aged to save the Gold­smiths’ baby, Isabel, before her mother died. Isabel’s inher­i­tances from her grand­fa­ther included Las Ala­man­das, a stretch of land north of Careyes. Later, Mr. Gold­smith built Cuix­mala nearby.

“My father-in-law had a clear idea of what he wanted, which was to find a place with clean water, clear air and good soil to build a house for his fam­ily and friends,” Mr. Mar­cac­cini says. “Then he real­ized the impor­tance of the area eco­log­i­cally and he started to buy more and more land for con­ser­va­tion purposes.”

Although Mr. Gold­smith and Mr. Brignone were once friends, the two began feud­ing shortly after Mr. Gold­smith built Cuix­mala. The rift started in the late 1980s, when Mr. Brignone began build­ing an elab­o­rate home along the beach with three tow­ers of alter­nat­ing heights that flanked a fan-shaped swim­ming pool and a liv­ing room. Mr. Gold­smith lived on the same beach and com­plained that the tow­ers blocked his sight line.

“Our house was like five miles away,” Gior­gio Brignone recalls. “When your house faces every direc­tion, of course you’re going to see some­thing in your view.”

Accord­ing to both fam­i­lies, the patri­archs did not speak for sev­eral years, and rela­tions between their fam­i­lies became strained. The sit­u­a­tion wors­ened in 1992, when Mr. Gold­smith became a vocal pro­po­nent of envi­ron­men­tal issues. Some ques­tioned whether this was a mat­ter of con­ve­nience, offer­ing him a way to ensure the pri­vacy and exclu­siv­ity of his Mex­i­can estate; oth­ers say his brother, a con­ser­va­tion­ist who pub­lishes an envi­ron­men­tal mag­a­zine, prompted Mr. Goldsmith’s conversion.

What­ever the rea­son, Mr. Gold­smith won gov­ern­ment approval in the mid-1990s to des­ig­nate the major­ity of the Chamela-Cuixmala Bios­phere as pro­tected land, a move that pre­vented fur­ther devel­op­ment near his estate.

As part of the pact, Mr. Gold­smith cre­ated the Cuix­mala Eco­log­i­cal Foun­da­tion, a non­profit group, which, along with the National Autonomous Uni­ver­sity of Mex­ico, pro­motes con­ser­va­tion of trop­i­cal ecosys­tems on the Jalisco coast. As the orig­i­nal devel­op­ers of the area and friends of the Gold­smiths, the Brignones viewed the move as a betrayal because it froze any fur­ther devel­op­ment of lands inside the reserve.

“The process of the cre­ation of the Reserve Chamela-Cuixmala was very painful for the Costa Careyes orig­i­nal and actual devel­op­ers as it affected large parts of our assets — very valu­able coastal land — with no com­pen­sa­tion or recog­ni­tion,” Gior­gio Brignone says. “But we do rec­og­nize that hav­ing a nat­ural reserve in its vicin­ity is a very impor­tant part of Careyes’s future, and we value that just as we always have.”

Mr. Brignone’s view of the dis­pute with oppo­nents is less for­giv­ing. “The com­mon feel­ing is that there are more urgent mat­ters to defend around the exist­ing coastal devel­op­ments of Mex­ico and in the area where no pos­i­tive pres­ence has been felt in more than 16 years when the last resort was devel­oped,” he says. “This area needs to evolve.”

IN a high-rise in Mex­ico City, offi­cials at Semar­nat, the Mex­i­can envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tory agency, unfurl a large map of the Jalisco coast and spread it across a desk. Mr. Aguirre, the agency offi­cial, places a fin­ger on the pro­posed site of Marina Careyes.

“As you can see, this project is not inside the area of the bios­phere reserve, which is a very impor­tant point,” he says. “There is more than a mile between the reserve and the project.”

Mr. Aguirre said that despite protests by Mr. Mar­cac­cini, Ms. Gold­smith and other oppo­nents of the Hernán­dez project, the pro­posed devel­op­ment meets reg­u­la­tory stan­dards. Under the law, tourism is allowed within the reserve in what is known as the tran­si­tion area (where the Gold­smith estate is located), but not in the reserve’s so-called nucleus zone.

“We as Semar­nat can­not eval­u­ate whether this is good for Mex­ico, or for the econ­omy of Mex­ico, but only whether this project will dis­rupt the envi­ron­ment in an accept­able way,” Mr. Aguirre says.

If Marina Careyes opens it doors, it will be the lat­est addi­tion to one of Mexico’s most lucra­tive indus­tries. Accord­ing to the country’s depart­ment of tourism, Mex­ico hauled in more than $12 bil­lion last year from 21 mil­lion visitors.

Part of the prob­lem, says Geor­gio Brignone, is that few of those dol­lars flowed into the secluded and sparsely pop­u­lated Chamela-Cuixmala region.

“Not one sin­gle vil­lage has a paved road, potable water or treat­ment plant,” he says. “This kind of stand-still sit­u­a­tion can­not be jus­ti­fied anymore.”

But some con­ser­va­tion­ists con­tend that Jalisco coast could attract low-impact, envi­ron­men­tally friendly tourism by build­ing so-called eco-resorts like the Ecolodge in Costa Rica. The Ecolodge is sit­u­ated in a 1,000-acre pri­vate nature reserve in a low­land trop­i­cal rain for­est; guests sleep in bun­ga­lows, and recre­ation — cen­tered around the rain for­est and the nearby ocean — includes hik­ing, bird watch­ing and kayaking.

Sim­i­lar lodges, increas­ingly pop­u­lar among fam­i­lies, can be found in Panama, Ecuador, Chile and Peru, said Héc­tor Ceballos-Lascuráin, an eco-tourism con­sul­tant and envi­ron­men­tal archi­tect in Mex­ico City.

“For­eign tourists are spend­ing $250 to $300 per night at these places, and they are located in or on the bor­der of pro­tected areas,” he says. “But Mex­ico is pro­mot­ing the same mass beach tourism. These pub­lic ser­vants here don’t under­stand what eco-tourism is about. I have given up on talk­ing to them.”

Mr. Mar­cac­cini says he believes that the Hernán­dez project will allow other resorts to be built near the bios­phere reserve, tip­ping the eco­log­i­cal bal­ance there. He notes that in 1992, the devel­op­ers suc­ceeded in build­ing the El Tamarindo Golf Resort, a swank ocean­side facil­ity 40 min­utes south of the reserve with a 2,000-acre golf course and sev­eral vil­las with pri­vate swim­ming pools and Jacuzzis.

Indeed, Semar­nat recently autho­rized a group of other devel­op­ers to build another golf resort, La Tamb­ora, just north of the Hernán­dez project. La Tamb­ora will spread across 1,684 acres and will fea­ture an 18-hole golf course and club­house, a 100-room bou­tique hotel, three beach clubs, a wed­ding facil­ity, a new air­plane hangar, a heli­copter pad and horse stables.

Mr. Mar­cac­cini has the same with­er­ing view of La Tamb­ora that he has of Marina Careyes: “It will be like a vam­pire suck­ing up all the resources.” And he says he believes that Marina Careyes is open­ing a door to devel­op­ment run amok in the bios­phere. “This world will become one giant garbage can one day,” he says.

Ms. Gold­smith, sit­ting by her pool, slices into a mound of fresh moz­zarella cheese from her estate’s organic farm, and opines on La Tamb­ora and Marina Careyes.

“It’s greed, greed and more greed,” she says. “This, at a time when every­body knows what’s going in the world with cli­mate change and how impor­tant it is to keep the trees. I mean, what’s more impor­tant to us, the envi­ron­ment or some stu­pid golf?”

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/yourmoney/20resort.html