by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Wal-Mart has attracted a lot of heat from its critics over the years, with accusations ranging from union-busting to locking its illegal immigrant employees inside stores overnight. Now they can add cultural vandalism.

One of the newest outlets to join the 4,300-plus stores worldwide is located in San Juan Teotihuacan, Mexico, about 45 kilometres northeast of Mexico City. According to opponents, however, the store's site is far too close to the 2,000-year-old ruins of Teotihuacan, the heart of an ancient empire that the Aztecs later adopted and named "The Place Where Men Turn Into Gods." The ruin's centrepieces are the magnificent Avenue of the Dead and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. Teotihuacan is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is protected by a presidential decree.

One of the problems with Wal-Mart's project, says Jaime Lagunez, a representative of El Frente Civico pro Defensa del Casino de la Selva, a Mexican conservation and activist group, is the general lack of transparency involved with construction jobs like this one. Lagunez was in town last weekend to confer with Michael Werbowski, the local spokesman here and a veteran of previous Mexican conservation campaigns, before going to New York to try to convince the TIAA-CREF pension fund to withdraw its $300-million investment in the company (Wal-Mart made $256-billion in sales last year).

"These kinds of companies have to be respectful of the presidential decree and the spirit of the law," he says. "I fear that the message to corporations will be that they will be allowed to continue to destroy our values with impunity."

Lagunez has seen it before. Two years ago he was thrown in jail for protesting against the construction of a Costco in Cuernavaca, southeast of Mexico City, which tore down a historic casino with stunning murals and uprooted hundreds of ancient trees. Despite widespread opposition, authorities did nothing except arrest and beat protesters. Teotihuacan has also seen its fair share of Wal-Mart opponents, and recently a group of prominent intellectuals and artists published an open letter denouncing the project.

Wal-Mart says the protesters are misguided, pointing out that the site is in a developed area and is zoned for commercial use. "We have followed the letter of the law and we've gone beyond that," says Bill Wertz, Wal-Mart's director of international corporate affairs. "The building style is compatible with the local architecture, and it blends in as much as possible." He says the local community supports the store, which will be branded under Wal-Mart's Mexican subsidiary and smaller than the gargantuan supercentres, and the roughly 150 jobs it will bring.

Lagunez isn't convinced and sees more insidious forces at work other than the population's desire for Wal-Mart's bargain prices. "They are trying to destroy our identity, our roots," he says. "This is the imposition of a new way of life, based on consumerism. I really believe this. Look, if the Spanish put churches on top of temples, why wouldn't the transnationals use the same strategy?"

The store is slated to open sometime in December.