Mexican President Felipe Calderon is figuratively going out on a limb — and literally down a sinkhole, up a river (with a paddle) and over the top of a few pyramids — in an attempt to boost Mexico’s flagging tourism industry.
The balding, 49-year-old leader is personally trying to change his country’s violent reputation by appearing as a sort of adventure tour guide in a series of TV programs to be broadcast starting next month on Public Broadcasting Service stations in the US.
The president dons an Indiana Jones-style hat and a harness and descends a rope into the 375m Sotano de las Golondrinas cavern, accompanied by Peter Greenberg, host of the The Royal Tour TV series. Calderon also straps on scuba tanks to lead Greenberg into a sinkhole lake known as a cenote in Yucatan. And he helps a Lacandon Indian paddle a boat down a river in a jungle in southern Chiapas State.
In the 30-minute videos, Calderon breaks from his image as a lawyerly policy wonk best known for launching a bloody, controversial offensive against drug cartels. He plans to attend the show’s premiere in New York next month, an aide said.
“I have other duties that are more dangerous,” Calderon jokes, dangling midair in a cavern as a rope lowers him 100m to the bottom. The site is in the Gulf coast region of Mexico known as the Huasteca, which is covered in jungle and dotted with caverns, waterfalls and crystalline pools.
Calderon swaps the explorer hat for a helmet with a headlamp for the descent into the Golondrinas cave, named for the huge flocks of birds that live inside. Calderon also appears in underwater footage from the stalactite-studded cenote in Yucatan, where he flashes the camera an “OK” signal from behind his dive mask.
Analysts say the videos represent a distinct break from the solemn treatment that has long characterized the Mexican presidency, but fit in with Calderon, who has emphasized using the media to get his message across, and who has sought to project a forceful image.
“That’s always been his objective, the whole macho thing,” said John Ackerman, of the legal research institute at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.
In 2007, soon after putting the army on the front line of his offensive against drug cartels, Calderon departed from presidential tradition by putting on an olive-green army jacket that was a few sizes too big for his short frame, an image that has been widely lampooned in newspaper cartoons ever since.
“From the very beginning, using the military uniforms and saluting, it’s always been his kind of thing,” Ackerman said. “It doesn’t quite fit with his physical appearance.”
Drawing criticism, Calderon’s administration took the image-building a step further this year by funding a privately produced TV miniseries glorifying the federal police, which was broadcast by the country’s largest network. On Friday, the navy told local news media that it was letting private producers use navy locations to make a miniseries about the force, but that the navy was not financing any of the production.
Calderon’s message in the latest videos is that Mexico is safe for tourists.
“This is part of a strategy to promote the country abroad,” Mexican Tourism Department spokesman Roberto Martinez said.
Nobody argues that Mexico’s tourism needs a boost.
According to the country’s central bank, overall foreign tourism last year, not including border-area visitors, was still 6.3 percent below 2008 levels, and the first half of this year saw a 2 percent decline from the same period last year.
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