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CENTRAL AMERICA: Alternative Tourism Seeks to Overcome Obstacles

Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 24 2011 (IPS) - Most of the countries of Central America are lagging behind the rest of the tourist destinations in Latin America, despite their impressive natural and archaeological treasures. To turn this situation around, the area is increasingly focusing on alternatives like rural tourism.

“Tourism has become the main livelihood of families here,” Olga Cholotío of the Rupalaj K’istalin community association of eco-tourism guides in San Juan La Laguna in the northwestern Guatemalan province of Sololá, told IPS.

The association, run by the Mayan Tzutuhil indigenous people, works in the area around Lake Atitlán, one of the region’s main tourist attractions, offering tours of rural areas and villages where visitors see traditional weavers making colourful textiles, watch small-scale fishers plying their trade, take in traditional music and dance performances, and go on nature walks.

The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2011, released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) this month, says there are two distinct realities in Central America in terms of tourism development. While El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua are in the last places in the ranking in Latin America, Costa Rica and Panama are at the head of the region.

Guatemala is ranked 86th, out of the 139 countries included in the report, followed by Honduras (88), El Salvador (96) and Nicaragua (100).

Of this group, Nicaragua moved up eight spots and El Salvador two, from the last ranking by the Switzerland-based WEF. But Honduras fell nine places, and Guatemala dropped back 13.

Costa Rica, on the other hand, is ranked second in Latin America and 44th overall, while Panama is fourth in the region and in 56th place overall.

The top-ranking Latin American country is Mexico, which is 43rd overall, and Brazil is third in the region and 52nd overall.

Switzerland, Germany and France are in the top slots in the global ranking, according to the report.

The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report, produced every year since 2007 except 2010, seeks to measure the factors and policies making countries attractive for developing the travel and tourism industry. The index includes three main subcategories: regulatory framework; business environment and infrastructure; and human, cultural, and natural resources.

Cholotío is not familiar with the report. But she has no doubt that Guatemala’s high crime rates have a negative impact on tourism and keep it from fully becoming an engine of development for communities like hers.

In 2010, revenues from tourism, the country’s third-largest source of foreign exchange, fell 14.5 percent from 2009, to just under 986 million dollars, according to Guatemala’s central bank.

But the Central American countries that are lagging in tourism are working hard to innovate, and to bolster the participation of marginalised, vulnerable or remote population groups so they can capitalise on tourism to improve local living conditions.

Rural indigenous communities, for example, are in a unique position to reach out to the growing niche of tourists seeking alternative travel experiences, such as hiking, ecotourism or adventure, rural or community tourism.

Edgardo Valenzuela, president of the Salvadoran Association of Tourism Operators (ASOTUR), told IPS that in his country, the tourism industry is helping drive development, mainly at the level of small and medium-sized businesses in rural areas.

“Tourism brings opportunities in those areas to restaurants, small hotels, hostels, or people with small farms who turn them into agrotourism establishments” where visitors come into direct contact with traditional rural activities, he explained.

“It is immediate, fresh money that generates progress and the emergence of small or large hubs of development,” Valenzuela said.

But he lamented the lack of a strategic plan to foment tourism in El Salvador.

“Central America is an extremely important region in terms of tourism opportunities,” he said. “We have so many attractions: history, culture, nature, the Mayan world, two oceans that are not far apart from each other, and volcanoes.”

In an area of just 523,000 square kilometres, the seven countries of Central America – Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama – offer endless opportunities to tourists, including the Route of the Maya, featuring impressive archaeological sites hemmed in by dense jungle.

The isthmus, which has numerous high mountain peaks, volcanoes, rivers and lakes, is bathed by the Caribbean Sea on one side and by the Pacific Ocean on the other.

Despite its tourist treasures, the so-called “industry without smokestacks” has failed to take off in most of the countries of the region, due to different hurdles.

In Honduras, for example, “The June 2009 coup d’état (that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya) set us back a great deal in all areas, including tourism, because the country’s foreign image was damaged,” Iveth Lagos, with JM Tours of Honduras, told IPS.

Tourism is the country’s second-largest source of foreign exchange, after remittances sent home by Hondurans living abroad, she pointed out. In 2010, the Honduran Institute of Tourism reported that revenues in the industry amounted to 660 million dollars, five percent up from the previous year.

Lagos stressed the importance of tourism as a source of significant income for the rural population, in its various forms, like ecotourism, hiking and other options linked to nature and rustic or traditional ways of life.

“Many cultures receive support for the development of their communities through visits by tourists, while visitors to our parks and ecological reserves force us to take better care of them,” she said.

One major obstacle to tourism faced by the three countries of what is known as the Northern Triangle of Central America – El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala – is that they have “the highest homicide rates in the world,” according to the 2010 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The study says the average murder rate for the 2003-2008 period was 61 per 100,000 population in Honduras, 52 per 100,000 in El Salvador and 49 per 100,000 in Guatemala, compared to 12 per 100,000 in Mexico.