Habla Bien de Aca: Accentuating Acapulco's Positives in a Time of Negatives Richard Fausset - The Los Angeles Times
go to original February 17, 2013

Photo: Erick De Santiago, president of the nonprofit group Habla Bien de Aca, or Speak Well of Acapulco, wants to counter the bad news about the Mexican resort city with the good. (Richard FaussetLos Angeles Times) Video: Habla Bien de Aca promo (http://www.youtube.com/user/hablabiendeaca)

ACAPULCO — Four days after the rapes of six Spanish tourists here, Erick De Santiago sat at his beachfront bar, with its commanding view of the blue expanse of Acapulco Bay, and posted a question on Facebook.

If you could describe Acapulco in one word, what would it be?

The responses came rolling in from his followers, as contradictory and tragic as modern Mexico itself:

"Paradise." "Sadness." "Magic." "Terror." "Hope." "Death."

De Santiago, a gregarious bar owner and nightclub manager, is also the president of Habla Bien de Aca, or Speak Well of Acapulco, a 2-year-old group of local business owners trying to balance the city's litany of harrowing drug-war headlines with reminders of its enduring charms.

That has been a particularly complicated task since the Feb. 4 violence, which generated headlines around the globe. After considering the first 33 Facebook responses, De Santiago, ever the optimist, posted a second time, with the best spin that he could muster:

"The positive comments predominate," he wrote. "That's the important thing."

The rapes occurred in a beachfront rental home a few miles out of town. Officials announced Wednesday that they had arrested six suspects, with a seventh still at large, but the case has raised questions about Mexico's ability to protect its tourists from the violence that plagues so many residents here. And the city of 700,000, which lives and dies on tourism, was still reeling from the latest blow.

Online travel sites had slashed prices at the top resorts. The streets were rife with unsubstantiated rumors about the victims and their attackers. And all along the sun-kissed shore, taxi drivers, waiters and strolling musicians braced for days of empty hotels and empty wallets.

De Santiago, meanwhile, was meeting with worried restaurateurs, refining the wording of an advertisement that he planned to run in the national papers, and soldiering on with his upbeat social networking campaign, dominated, as usual, by quotable bromides, civic cheerleading and snapshots of stunning Acapulco sunsets.

"That's life. Life is designed for good and bad," De Santiago, 43, mused Tuesday morning from his office, set above a vast and nearly empty cantina. "But what is our job? It's not that we deny the bad. It's that we overtake the bad with the good. We have to value the good."

Read the whole story at The Los Angeles Times

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