Citizens in Cuernavaca, Mexico have organized to stop Costco from ruining a historic piece of property known as The Casino de la Selva, the Casino in the Woods. Here are excerpts from their report: ” Though legally a private property, the Casino had been used publicly since the thirties. A gambling house in the mid thirties, it had become a hotel, a convention hall, a place for exhibitions, ballet and concerts as well as a resort with sport facilities. Its numerous halls and corridors had been decorated by the major exponents of the “muralist” movement: J.Reyes Mesa, the Spaniard refugee Jos?? Renau, Siqueiros, Icaza, Messeguer among other. The buildings were designed by leading architects of the early modernist movement: J. Marti, F.Cadela. The site on which the Casino de la Selva was erected is also the abode of one of the first proto-urban, that is FORMATIVE cultures of Mexico’s highlands, an Olmec-like civilization that thrived 3200 ago, and it has been occupied constantly since then, leaving layer after layer of still greatly unexplored archeological traces. The “Casino de la Selva” land is an ecological wonder: in it springs the well from which Cuernavaca drank until the 1920. The hotel went bankrupt about ten years ago and the property lay unoccupied and abandonned till last May, when it was sold to an American-Mexican consortium formed by CostCo and Comercial Mexicana who want to use the 30 acre land to build a “Price Club”, d covering the site with cement, creating one more “heat islands” for our city’s already threatened ecology . Witnesses report that about half of the wall paintings have been intentionally destroyed. The indignation of the citizenship finally led the authorities to provisonally suspend the demolition. As Citizens we organized a Frente Civico to defend the Casino de la Selva.”
If you want to help the citizens defense groups please send messages to Consejo Ciudadano at: [email protected] or to Frente Ciudadano at [email protected]. Say in your message “Casino Si, Costco No!” Save the Casino de la Selva!
