What the planners did next was to peel off their pin‐striped bankers’ suits, turn off the computers and head into the boondocks to check out those areas in Mexico which, according to the printouts, had all the necessary ingredients. The thing to do now was to personally check the swimming, the beaches, the actual living conditions at various places along Mexico's 6,000 miles of coastline and compare each site with the data that the computers had produced.

“This is where the human element comes in,” Enriquez continued. “When we told one old fisherman that we had computerized hurricane statistics from 1880 to the present and found that the ‘eye’ had never passed through his particular area, he cocked a wary eye skyward And said, “Si, Senor, but still, one never knows—the hurricane, she does not have a rudder.”

Taking no chances, the team checked out its findings again, even going so far as to reproduce hurricanes in a University of Mexico laboratory, with hotels built to scale and waves two inches high. It then had architects study the results—and they ruled that hotels would have to be built to withstand the worst possible assault by the weather.

Scuba gear notwithstanding, the Infratur people were not exactly resorthopping. The trips were, in fact, pretty hectic, since almost every beachfront jungle community in Mexico was competing for the dubious honor of becoming another Acapulco overnight. The word, in short, was out that under former President Miguel Aleman— he is now head of the Mexican National Tourist Council—Mexico had received credits totaling $100‐million from the World Bank and the Inter‐American Bank to develop tourism.

“We were constantly on the move, Enriquez said. “Out of a total of 46 members of the Infratur staff—archltects, lawyers, engineers, economists—there were usually four or five of us on each of these inspection trips, and we checked out hundreds of sites in roughly two years. They ranged from established resorts, like Acapulco on the Pacific Coast, to uninhabited Cancun on the Caribbean.

In one place, sharks meant an immediate negative vote; in another, cannibal ants moving down from the mountains and devouring everything in their path sent the investigators scurrying. One thing the inspectors did have was mobility. The Banco de Mexico placed its fleet of five airplanes at the team's disposal. The planes normally are used to distribute newly printed currency throughout the country, but whenever one was free, it was pressed into service with the “peso petrol,” as the Infratur people came to be known.

Enrlquez said, “We finally narrowed the choice down to 25 sites and then gave preference to those areas where the people were extremely poor—as long as all the other attributes were present, a labor supply, for example. The Yucatan Peninsula and Cancun Island proved to be ideal in this regard. There is great poverty and no industry—since sisal has been replaced by plastics—and yet the area has all the ingredients to attract to tourism: sun, sea and good weather the year round, plus easy access to some of the world's greatest archeological treasures, the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza and Tulum, for example.