ON BACALAR'S DEFENSE. COLLOQUIAL VERSION

consideration that the way in which a tourist could interpret an experience and determine a preference depends on very complex individual valuations, if we only took into consideration how human beings individually prioritize what is important to us. It is not possible to make a simplistic statement of the emotions of tourism customers, nor to have a simplistic idea of what they are looking for, given that other aspects such as their human condition, their baggage, advertising, attraction from the tourist offer, and various factors that stimulate the decisions of the tourist would have to be incorporated.

Another part of the LCA's goal was that society itself, based on tourist preferences, was going to have to build a stage with rules and abide by them.

But it was built from a flimsy and uninformed place, without knowledge of the target, with a disjointed process and with a level of tokenist participation, simulated.

Finally, he asserted that social empowerment was going to be limited to following the rules to meet the expectations of the tourist and learning to monitor the system to guarantee the tourist that he will have those experiences. What is understood is that the social empowerment promoted

by PROTUR, would consist of letting the group of close actors to whom they were invited, convened and granted the power to decide on behalf of the whole society (to simulate that it was done "in a participatory way"), was going to establish and decide on the criteria that the rest of the population was going to have to follow and monitor obligatorily; while they (with access to administer funds or direct benefits) and the rest of the community (bound by the triad's decision) guaranteed that the Lagoon would be a place where visitors would have a satisfactory experience of a cared for natural resource, regardless of what it was.

That, for the promoters of the instrument, was social empowerment and the key to the conservation of the Lagoon: Engage society, with what was decided by a group selected by themselves, with unilateral criteria, with a simulated "participatory" planning, to ensure that tourists could have a "reserved" and "protected" site that would guarantee them an experience of enjoyment of the Lagoon.

Where had been the initial justification of PROTUR? to be a solution to socioenvironmental problems and for the protection of biocultural heritage. The promoters of PROTUR, as part of the triad, believed that the passive 130