The guy I respect is Pablo Bush,
Akumal has existed for a long damn time, although the population used to be somewhat different than it is now. It was a Mayan community. The Mayans were offered too good of a deal to pass up. Who'd want to live on Half Moon Bay, when you could easily move to Akumal Pueblo in all it's squalor?
I have a different view of Pablo Bush Romero than you two.
First, he did nothing to promote Cozumel or its reefs. Nor did he “discover” the island. He only came to Cozumel after it was brought to his attention in 1958 by Bob Marx. Marx was illegally excavating the wreck
Matanceros near Akumal while he was living on Cozumel between early 1957 and late 1959. The Mexican government got wind of it and stopped him. Bush heard about the incident and formed a nonprofit “scientific” diving club (CEDAM) with which he was able to use to get permission from the government to salvage the wreck in late 1959. That’s when he first came to Cozumel and to Akumal; two years
after Marx already had started his dive shop (based in the old Hotel Playa) on Cozumel.
Akumal in 1959 was part of a long strip (12 kilometers) of
cocales (coconut groves) along the coast, belonging to Argimiro Argüelles. There were no towns or villages located in this property, only a very few scattered temporary huts of the coconut workers. Bush bought the property from Argüelles, but did not register it properly. The land’s title has been in dispute ever since. The people who now live in the “shanty town” off the outskirts of Akumal were workers who came to work on the construction of Akumel’s hotel in the 1960s and stayed to work there after it was constructed. None of those families were living in or near Akumal before Bush bought the property in 1959. They were
not forced to leave area around the bay; they never lived there in the first place. They began (and continue) to try to wrest title for their small plots from Bush and later administrators, but since he didn’t have clear title, they couldn’t get one either. It has been a simmering mess for decades.
Problems over this land started in 1972, when the government cast a covetous eye on Bush's Akumal property. That’s when they told him that even though he bought the property from the original landholder, he didn’t have clear title. The president then was Luis Echevarría. You may or may not remember him from his “Mexico Pride” movement. He was the one that promoted pride in being Mexican and the idea of being proud of
“mestizaje,” the blending of the Spanish and indigenous Mexican races. Remember the little gold and black “Made in Mexico” stickers with the Aztec eagle symbol? That was established during his presidency.
Echevarría’s government began a campaign promoting “mestizaje pride” that included government subsidies to artists and writers to produce works that glorified this idea. Poets were paid to write poems about it, artists were commissioned to create statues commemorating it, and newspapers were paid to publish articles about it.
The false narrative of Gonzalo Guerrero was created during this period by hacks paid by the government. Most of it came from the pen of a reporter for the Mexico City newspaper
El Universal in 1974. Mario Aguirre Rosas published what he described as Gonzalo Guerrero’s diary, supposedly written on deerskin velum and sheets of 16th century paper. No one was able to examine the original manuscript, as Rosas said it belonged to a private collector and only he was allowed to see it. This purported autobiography of Gonzalo was full of fabricated details, which have been repeated
ad nauseam by uninformed, amateur historians who read the mendacious tale and believed it to be authentic. It is in this fairy-tale invented by Aguirre that the myth Gonzalo’s wife was a princess named Zazil was first started, as well as many other details about the man that are patently false. In 1975, two thousand copies of
Gonzalo de Guerrero: Padre del mestizaje iberoamericano by Aguirre were printed in Mexico City by Editorial Jus. The book was simply a rehash of his newspaper articles about his spurious autobiographical document of Gonzalo Guerrero.
When Pablo Bush saw how much the president was pleased by the effects of the poems, statues and newspaper articles, he decided to offer up something along those lines in an attempt to curry favor with the president and perhaps hold onto his land at Akumal. To that end, he commissioned a statue of Gonzalo Guerrero be made and erected at Akumal by the artist Raúl Ayala Arellano in 1974. Bush also gifted a copy of the statue to the federal government. Another copy is here in Cozumel and a fourth in Merida.
This was not the only time Bush paid for a monument to be erected to a fictionalized character. Read in my book,
The True History of Cozumel, about how Bush erected a statue to Jean Laffite in Dzilam de Bravo, falsely claiming the pirate had died in that locale, when actually it was his brother, Pierre Lafitte, who died near there.