“In Cancún there is no economic activity other than tourism,” said Mr. González. “For many, it’s like the end of the world.”
The global tourism downturn that has accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic hit airlines and hotel chains and hurt hospitality workers around the world.
But it is being felt most acutely in the world’s less-developed nations, such as Mexico, where tourism is an important driver of economic development.
From Rio de Janeiro to Venice to the Maldives, the global tourism industry is expected to lose more than 100 million jobs, or about one in three tourism jobs world-wide, according to estimates from the trade group World Travel & Tourism Council, or WTTC.
Latin America and the Caribbean are among the regions most dependent on tourism. Small islands are particularly vulnerable.
For Aruba, tourism represents nearly 85% of economic output, according to estimates from the Inter-American Development Bank.
For the Maldives in South Asia it is more than 66%. The Bahamas ranks fifth world-wide at more than 59%, IDB’s data shows.
Destinations that rely heavily on cruise ships, like Nassau in the Bahamas or Cozumel in Mexico, also are in dire shape.
Most of their regular customers are Americans, and cruise lines have suspended operations from U.S. ports until November.
Many tourism-dependent countries tend not to be diversified and import everything from food to manufactured goods.
With their large pools of unskilled workers, these countries have few hard-currency cushions besides tourism and remittances, says Henry Mooney, an IDB economist.
“Instead of oil, these countries sell sun and sand,” Mr. Mooney said.
Tourism has fewer monopolies and tends to foster entrepreneurship and social mobility, generating jobs for everyone from cabbies to housekeepers to tour guides and inn owners, economists say.
Over the past two decades, hundreds of millions of people reached the middle class in places like India and China and began traveling abroad.
Tourism has grown so fast in the past two decades that one in five global jobs created during that time were in the industry, according to the WTTC.
“Like cellphones in the 90s, it used to be very expensive to go on vacation abroad,” said Alex Zozaya, the group’s vice chairman. “Now it’s a commodity.”
Mexico’s central bank, at the government’s direction, founded Cancún five decades ago to help diversify the country’s oil-dependent economy.
The construction of an international airport, roads and megahotels along the string of untouched beaches helped propel the country into the world’s No. 7 tourist destination by number of visitors.
“Cancún was a paradise. There was plenty of food, turtles and lobsters. It was the Mexican version of the American dream,” said Manuel Polanco, who migrated here from a neighboring state in 1973 and spent his first night in a hammock.
He worked in a car workshop repairing alternators for trucks, then moonlighted as a cabbie, a job that eventually propelled him to become the owner of cab and intercity bus fleets and a public-transport pioneer in the region.
“Anyone who came at that time and got their act together was king,” said Mr. Polanco, who never finished elementary school but whose three children all got university degrees. “If you sold rocks, people would buy them.”
Today, tourism’s contribution to the Mexican economy surpasses 15%. About 24 million foreign tourists visited Mexico last year, spending some $21 billion, government data shows.
The Cancún Hotel Association estimates that the Mayan Riviera, as this region is known, captures 65% of foreign-tourist activity.
The tourism boom wasn’t an unqualified blessing. Corruption flourished in the 1990s and organized crime followed.
Five-star hotels sit a few miles from shantytowns filled with those who hope to follow Mr. Polanco’s footsteps into the middle class.
At the moment, that seems a distant prospect. Tourist arrivals to Mexico plunged 87% in June, with spending falling to $148 million from $1.7 billion a year before.