When people ask us whether it's possible for communities in the Southern Pacific of BCS to have their own municipality, our answer is always the same: not only is it possible — it has already happened, many times, in communities very much like ours.
Over the past several months, we researched six real cases of Mexican communities that made that choice over the last forty years. We studied their reasons, their process, and what happened afterward. What we found is consistent and clear: when a community controls its own resources and its own decisions, outcomes improve. Not eventually — demonstrably, measurably, and in ways that residents feel in their daily lives.
This is the first installment of a three-part series. Today we share the first two stories — both right here in Baja California Sur, one of which you almost certainly know well, and one that might surprise you.
Case 1: Los Cabos, Baja California Sur — 1981
Most people who visit Los Cabos today have no idea what it looked like fifty years ago. With the exception of some fishermen from California who discovered the teeming waters off the cape for deep-sea sport fishing just after World War II, the area remained rural and undeveloped — a remote stretch of desert coastline where the Pacific meets the Gulf, far from the attention of any government, near or far.
That began to change in the early 1970s. The Mexican federal government, through FONATUR, recognized the region's extraordinary natural potential and began investing in infrastructure — including the Transpeninsular Highway, which for the first time connected the southern tip of the peninsula to the rest of the country by land. The airport followed, and with it came the first wave of international tourism.
But there was a structural problem that no amount of federal investment could fix on its own: the entire region was still governed from La Paz, more than 200 kilometers away. Every permit, every service request, every municipal decision — all of it flowed through a city that had almost nothing in common with the fishing and tourism community growing at the southern tip of the peninsula. The people making decisions about Los Cabos did not live there. They did not fish there. They did not walk its streets or feel its growing pains. Investment was arriving, but the administrative capacity to channel it effectively simply did not exist locally.
By the late 1970s, the tension between the region's rapid growth and its distant administration had become impossible to ignore. Tourism was arriving. Investment was arriving. People were arriving. And La Paz, 200 kilometers away, was supposed to manage all of it.
In 1981, the State Congress approved the creation of the municipality of Los Cabos — the fourth municipality of Baja California Sur. San José del Cabo was designated the municipal seat. For the first time in decades, the southern tip of the peninsula had its own local government with actual authority over its own affairs.
What happened next?
The transformation is difficult to overstate. Population grew from approximately 5,000 residents in 1981 to over 351,000 in 2024 — representing a 47% increase from 2010 alone, driven by tourism employment and real estate development. Los Cabos now comprises roughly 44% of all of Baja California Sur's inhabitants.
Tourism became the dominant economic engine, drawing more than 2 million international visitors every year. Today, Los Cabos stands alongside Cancún and Puerto Vallarta as one of Mexico's three most recognized tourism destinations globally, and its economy represents approximately 70% of the entire state of Baja California Sur's tourism GDP.
It is worth being honest about what this growth also brought: rapid development came with real costs — pressure on water resources, urban sprawl, inequality between the tourism zone and the communities that serve it. These are real challenges that Los Cabos continues to grapple with today. But here is the crucial point: those are challenges that a local government, elected by and accountable to the people of Los Cabos, now manages. For better or worse, those decisions belong to the community. That is what self-governance means.
None of the growth — and none of the capacity to respond to its consequences — would have been possible with a government sitting in La Paz, 200 kilometers away, managing the southern tip of the peninsula as a distant afterthought.
Case 2: Loreto, Baja California Sur — 1992
Loreto's story is different from Los Cabos in almost every way — and that difference is precisely the point.
Loreto was founded on October 25, 1697, by the Jesuit missionary Juan María de Salvatierra. It was the first permanent Spanish settlement on the Baja California Peninsula and served as the colonial capital of Las Californias — the administrative center for what would eventually become California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of several other U.S. states. The mission church that Salvatierra built still stands in the center of town today, the oldest on the peninsula, a physical reminder that Loreto was once the most important city in a territory larger than most countries.
By the late 20th century, the political importance had faded, but the cultural and historical identity had not. Loretanos are deeply connected to their town's heritage — the mission, the Gulf, the islands, the fishing traditions, the unhurried pace of a small coastal community with a very long memory. This identity is what makes Loreto, Loreto.
Yet for decades, the people making decisions about Loreto's streets, coastal access, historical preservation, and tourism strategy were sitting in Ciudad Insurgentes — the agricultural seat of the municipality of Comondú, with no particular connection to any of those things. Comondú's priorities were oriented toward farming and entirely alien to Loreto's coastal, historical, and tourism-oriented character. FONATUR had identified Loreto as a priority tourism development zone since the 1970s, yet the municipal government responsible for stewarding that development had neither the proximity nor the incentive to do so effectively.
In 1992, the Congress of Baja California Sur approved the creation of the municipality of Loreto. Alfredo García Green became the first municipal president, taking office in April 1993.
What happened next?
Here is where Loreto's story diverges most sharply from Los Cabos — and why it may be the more instructive of the two cases.
Loreto did not become a mass tourism destination. It did not build a corridor of international resort hotels. It did not multiply its population tenfold in a generation. And that was a choice — a deliberate, locally-made decision about what kind of community Loreto wanted to be.
With its own government finally in place, the community developed its own tourism identity: ecotourism, sport fishing, whale watching, kayaking among the islands, and the deep historical character of the town center. Bahía de Loreto National Park was established in 1996 with active municipal participation — protecting the extraordinary marine ecosystem of the Gulf of California from the kind of overdevelopment that a more distant, less invested government might have permitted. The international airport was developed with direct connections to California, bringing exactly the kind of visitor Loreto had decided to attract.
Loreto is today a Pueblo Mágico, a sport fishing destination of global reputation, a UNESCO-adjacent heritage zone, and a community that has managed to grow on its own terms — slowly, intentionally, protecting the things that make it worth visiting in the first place.
That last phrase is the one that matters: on its own terms.
The lesson that connects both stories
Los Cabos and Loreto made very different choices about what kind of communities they wanted to become. One chose rapid, large-scale development. The other chose slow, intentional, identity-driven growth. Both choices were made possible by the same thing: a local government with the actual authority to make them.
That is what self-governance gives a community. Not a guarantee of perfect outcomes — but the ability to look at your own land, your own people, your own resources, and decide for yourselves what the future looks like.
Next week: Playa del Carmen, Tulum, and Bacalar — three Caribbean communities that wrote their own stories.