My point exactly. More of a local issue that the rest of us could care less about and 99.9% of the time haven't a clue that it's even a local problem. So definitely "not" a reason why Zinuatanejo and Ixtapa don't get the action they once did.

No? Then why am I reading complaints about pollution, noise and crime? Why is there no money to fix the walkway between La Madera and Playa Principal? Why have so many things deteriorated or gone unattended?

Because the local politicians use the squatters and pander to them for their votes, spending what little money the city has on providing costly services to areas where it was determined decades ago it would be prohibitively costly to supply water and drainage. But their votes are apparently more important to the municipal government than the law or those of us who make up the commercial and tax-paying sector of the community.

And now more scarce resources are going to be spent to build a road directly from La Ropa to the police module on the outskirts of town so that our visitors don't have to see all the poor shanty homes on the hillsides.

Locals have no problem with providing affordable housing and helping poor families find a place to live, but we have been royally screwed by allowing the ecological zones that were our hillsides to be stolen by scammers allowed to break the law on a massive scale to serve the whims of unscrupulous politicians.

It's madness on a psychotic level, but it's our daily bread, as we say colloquially.

It is now 2014 soon to be 15, things have changed, vacation costs, our expectations etc. Etc. One thing hasn't we need to work hard to supply our needs and wants, and if one way isn't doing it we have to try another direction.

Please can we all move into the year 2015 with more optimism and an open mind!

On our vacation we intend to visit as many local vendors as our 14 days will allow us, visit the market, commercial, mega, buy fish and shrimp on the beach, ride the public transit, speak as much Spanish as we can and have some fun!!!

Maybe, just maybe have a few drinks and stagger back to the condo!!!!

"Holy crap, ZihuaRob----Zihua sounds like a horrible place now. You make me want to cancel my vacation plans..."

Well, I was actually trying to be sarcastic in my reply (above). Rob's picture of Zihua was so grim (increased pollution and crime), who wouldn't think twice about visiting?

I know it sounds alarming the way I phrased my comments, but compared to the idyllic Zihuatanejo prior to the mass land invasions fomented by politicians looking for votes, things changed drastically for us in a very brief span of time. It's all relative. I still wake up every morning grinning like a fool and feeling like I want to shout to the world how wonderful it is to be in this tropical paradise! I am still the luckiest man alive in one of the most beautiful places in the world!

Yup Stace, with all those "squatters" up there in them there hills, you should cancel your trip. I've been coming to the area since 1987 and Rob is the only local person that I've heard that is so obsessed with the poor people who have taken up residence in the hills. Oh, I'm sure there are many others who are not thrilled with it either, but I've never talked to anyone who has said they will no longer go there because of the squatters or feel that the area is no longer desirable because of them.

By the way, this is not unique to Zihua. It happens all over the world including the occupancy of city owned abandoned homes in the US in addition to bridge overpasses and government owned parklands. These aren't animals invading your turf, eating your crops or kill your livestock. They are people who get up every day, trying to survive till the next and protecting a family if they have one.

I really have to wonder why you pontificate so on things you don't understand and make such statements with the intent to disparage me? Here in Guerrero most groups of squatters aren't the poor needy people you seem to believe they are. It's a profession. Professional "organizers" manipulating poor folks along with providing proxy squatters to get their piece of the free pie. Get title, sell and move on. On lands recently titled there are now multi-story apartment buildings and even some luxury homes are being built. Where's that poor squatter? Oh, they've sent their proxy squatters to a different area to steal more land because it's an election year.

This is a major local problem that is discussed regularly by citizens everywhere and is frequently in the news, including local morning radio talk shows. Pretty much everyone except the politicians and the squatters are strongly against the theft of our hillsides. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but in the Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa area there are no squatters in Ixtapa or on ejido lands or on more easily habitable and serviceable lands off the hillsides and outside of the bay. It's a SCAM. And it happens thanks to greed, corruption, simulation and intentional bureaucratic impossibility in our government.

The 80's and part of the 90's. Were you not here then? And if you were not...for the amount of businesses and restaurants that were open then...everybody had business.

The common worker is finding it harder to take time off much less travel. Lets ship a few more jobs to China and tear apart those horrible unions. Then we can all have a right to work for less............Which it turn give us everything less......

Dave

It is the beautiful things we should be concentrating on and Zihua has many , can't wait til Feb. 27!!

Well, I was actually trying to be sarcastic in my reply (above). Rob's picture of Zihua was so grim (increased pollution and crime), who wouldn't think twice about visiting?

By the way, this is not unique to Zihua. It happens all over the world including the occupancy of city owned abandoned homes in the US in addition to bridge overpasses and government owned parklands. These aren't animals invading your turf, eating your crops or kill your livestock. They are people who get up every day, trying to survive till the next and protecting a family if they have one.

When was the heyday of zihua?

Pretty much throughout the 80's and 90's. The real decline started here about 12 or so years ago, at about the same time our then mayor decided he wasn't going to enforce the law against stealing public lands on our hillsides, and now we have tens of thousands of squatters, many of whom apparently weren't ever as poor as they pretended to be in order to get title to the land they stole. His infamous words giving a green light to land thieves were "I didn't put them up there, and I'm not going to bring them down". In the 3 years of his term the number of land thieves more than doubled, crime began to rise notably, pollution in the bay quickly became an acute problem, pretty much everything began to deteriorate at once. Oh, and of course that pretty much coincided with the period of the attacks of 9/11 when the mindset in the USA took a severe nosedive and fear & loathing took over.