INAH still guards Tulum's ruins. An Army company keeps the money at the gate

Artisans, paramedics and food vendors working inside Tulum's Parque del Jaguar have until 6 p.m. Friday to sit for a photograph that puts them on the state's new register of park providers.

Registration opened Thursday at the Grupo Mundo Maya hotel in Tulum and runs in two blocks, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Governor Mara Lezama Espinosa announced it as part of Tulum Renace.

The list is the easy part. What the state has attached to it is a training and certification plan for everyone who deals with visitors inside the park, and the count arrives seven weeks after the money taken at the gate stopped going to the National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Color photograph, white background, five megabytes maximum

The photograph is the one requirement the state has spelled out. Color, white background, JPG or PNG, five megabytes at most. Providers who cannot reach the hotel can email the file to tulumrenace@sectur.gob.mx.

The rest is thinner than the instruction. The announcement lists no document beyond the image, sets no closing date for the email option, and says nothing about what happens to a provider who does not appear on the register.

'If you are a tourism service provider, show up'

Governor Lezama put it that way when she called providers to the hotel, and the invitation is intentionally narrow. It reaches artisans, food and beverage workers, paramedics and medical staff, and other tourism providers, provided they operate within the park.

Those categories cover most of the direct contact a visitor has inside the park. Someone sells the crafts and serves the food. Someone is there when a visitor goes down in the midday heat.

That boundary extends beyond the ruins everyone photographs. It includes the Tulum National Park, declared in 1981; the Jaguar flora and fauna protection area, declared in 2022; and the Tulum-Tancah archaeological monuments zone, recognized in 1993. Three legal figures, one entrance.

Grupo Mundo Maya is both host and cashier

The hotel that takes the photographs is named Grupo Mundo Maya, the commercial arm of Grupo Aeroportuario, Ferroviario y de Servicios Auxiliares Olmeca-Maya-Mexica, the state-owned, army-run company known as GAFSACOMM. Quintana Roo lists it among the institutions coordinating the register, beside the federal Tourism Ministry, the national protected areas commission CONANP, INAH and the state government itself.

Tulum Renace is the frame around all of it. The Tourism Ministry presented the strategy in November 2025 as a package of 128 interinstitutional actions, then returned to it on July 17, when Tourism Secretary Josefina Rodríguez Zamora announced ten agreements for the destination at the president's morning conference, held that day in Tulum. That round of measures scrapped the entrance fee for Mexican visitors to the Parque del Jaguar and set the park's electric shuttle fare at 20 pesos.

The Parque del Jaguar ticket window changed hands on July 27

A presidential decree published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on July 17 set the access tariffs for the Parque del Jaguar and handed collection to GAFSACOMM. The decree established a single unified payment covering the national park and the archaeological monuments zone, 80 pesos for Mexican visitors from Monday to Saturday and 165 pesos for foreign visitors.

Ten days later, it reached the booths. In official letter 401.5C.7-2026/888, the director of the INAH Center in Quintana Roo, Margarito Molina Rendón, told the director of the Tulum archaeological zone that ticket printing and electronic sales were suspended for institute personnel from Monday, July 27, and would run through the company's points of sale. INAH staff stayed at the windows and kept responsibility for the site.

The revenue did not stay with them.

Mexico's culture workers' union calls it a privatization

The Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Cultura, the national union of culture workers, said in a public statement that the transfer amounts to a form of privatization and that archaeological zones are not theme parks or tourist attractions to be managed by a private company. The union also circulated the INAH letter.

Bolfy Cottom, who reviewed the decree, noted that it also lets GAFSACOMM carry out "cultural services", a phrase the text leaves undefined. Writing this week, the analyst Rubén Aguilar Valenzuela read the Tulum decision as the start of something wider, with Maya sites drawn into the tourism complex that the military company already runs in the southeast, one that includes the Maya Train, hotels, restaurants and airports.

SECTUR has not published a date for the certification stage or the standard that providers must meet to pass it. What the state has set so far is a white background, a 5-megabyte limit, and a deadline of 6 p.m. Friday. The artisans who sat for the camera on Thursday went back to work inside a park whose entrance money ends up somewhere it did not in June.

Should the people who work inside the Parque del Jaguar have a say in how the park is run and who collects at its gate? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.