My spanish is terrible but I get the general idea. Somebody whose spanish is a whole lot better than mine should translate.
Mirida is the old spanish colonial city near Chichin Itza, the ancient Mayan capital of Yucatan (nicknamed the Florence of the region?). It sounds like a Walmart superstore is getting put into Mirida on the preserved or restored colonial boulevard Paseo de Montejo for the stupid tourist business. It also sounds like this development along with others (mostly hotels) are in violation of various federal laws to preserve historical sites and is being ignored of course, over the protest of locals, the national fine arts commission and local museum of anthropology (caution, not too sure about any of this). It also sounds like the boulevard was possibly once part of a Mayan thorough fair that the conquistadors built over with colonial buildings, plaza and church lined up north-south on the compass points.
Well that beats the latin quarter of New Orleans by about three hundred years. Needless to say, I wish Miridians the best fight possible.
You know as a suggestion, especially for issues in Mexico it would be a good idea for somebody involved to put up a few web sites (spanish/english) in Mexico or the US that get picked up automatically by US commercial search engines (Yahoo, Alta Vista, Google, and so on), so that political issues appear in searchs along with the tourist and travel information.
This goes for Europe, Asia, the rest of Latin America too, of course. With enough of these local issue sites, then kids, tourists, and whoever else is wondering around the web, will have to come across political news that matters to local people. That would help build up the impression that US economic expansion into the rest of the world, isn't going on un-noticed, or without resistance. Forget ever getting news like this into US media.
Chuck Grimes