Tourism has genuinely added jobs in Bahía, she says — enough that a fair number of people now make a living from it. But she's wary of overstating its role. Plenty of what's changed here has more to do with El Niño and the earthquake than with any tourist arriving with a suitcase. Even Bahía's reputation as the cleanest town in the country traces back to an initiative from a former president that had nothing to do with tourism at all.
What frustrates her is concentration. Four large tour operators and four hotel owners effectively dominate the whole sector, and neither she nor her community has any real say in how it develops. Her school was consulted once, on paper — asked for input that, in the end, wasn't used. There have been gestures toward involving residents in municipal decision-making around tourism. None of them, so far, have led anywhere.
It would be nice if more people could be involved and take part in tourism — both the inhabitants and the tourists should be better informed.
The jobs themselves aren't especially good, outside the priciest hotels: badly paid, poorly organised, with little proper training. Investment in the sector is thin, and because most workers treat tourism income as a supplement rather than a livelihood, there's little pressure from below to demand better — if anything, it makes people more passive about it, not less.
She'd like to see the government tax tourism income, something it currently doesn't do, and channel some of what's earned back toward the people actually doing the work. Culturally, she doesn't think tourism has reshaped Bahía much — most of its visitors are Ecuadorian, and national tourism slots comfortably into structures that already existed. International visitors, though, are the ones she'd rather see more of; they simply spend more.
Not a complaint about tourism itself, she's careful to say — just about how little say anyone but four families has had in shaping it.