Is It Safe to Go to Mexico?
Teresa Bitler thought about spending Easter this year lounging on the beach in Puerto Penasco, Mexico, with her husband and two daughters. Then she changed her mind.
"We heard about the drug violence down there," says Ms. Bitler, who lives near Phoenix. She envisioned the 4½-hour drive, much of it through vast stretches of empty Mexican desert. Instead, the family is going to Disneyland this weekend.
Just a few months ago, American travel to Mexico was booming. Despite the economic downturn in the U.S., Mexico reported a 14% increase in visitors in January over the previous year, spurred by a strong U.S. dollar against the Mexican peso and a wave of American tourists who wanted to stay close to home. Eighty million Americans visited Mexico last year alone, according to the Mexico Tourism Board, making tourism a $13.2 billion industry, and Mexico's third-highest revenue stream.
By February, news was breaking daily about growing grisly violence between warring factions of Mexico's drug cartels. Beheadings, kidnappings and torture dominated headlines. The U.S. State Department issued a travel alert for Mexico in late February, updating one issued in October, citing "increased violence near the U.S. border" and cautioning that "dozens" of Americans have been kidnapped across Mexico in recent years. George J. Tenet, the former Central Intelligence Agency director, urged his college-age son to cancel a spring-break trip to Acapulco, based on news reports he'd read; an exaggerated email about the exchange quickly made the rounds at college campuses.
All of this has many travelers wondering: Is Mexico still safe for tourists?
Despite the travel alert, "we are not advising people not to go to Mexico," says Heide Bronke Fulton, a State Department spokeswoman. She adds that the main areas of concern are cities and towns near the U.S. border. Travel alerts, which can caution against everything from cyclone season to terrorism threats, are far less severe than the State Department's "warnings," in place for countries like Iraq and Sudan, which essentially advise against traveling to a country altogether.
Security experts say tourists can safely travel to Mexico — if they stay within known resort areas, avoid traveling to Mexico by road and steer clear of U.S. border areas. Mike Ackerman, president of the Ackerman Group, an investigative security firm, says most of the drug-trade crime within Mexico is "narco on narco" violence or violence against police. Kidnapping, another growing problem in Mexico, almost always targets wealthy Mexicans, not Americans or other foreigners.
To counteract rising fears about travel south of the border, Mexico's tourism industry has gone on a public-relations offensive. Hotels are offering discounts. Resort areas have beefed up security. They're trying to spread a key message: Mexico is a large, diverse country, and not every area has been affected by the increase in drug violence. Most of the tourist and resort areas are separated by hundreds of miles from the volatile battlegrounds of the drug war. Staying away from Puerto Vallarta because of what's going on in Ciudad Juárez would be like not traveling to Nebraska because of something happening in New York City, tourism officials say.
Source:
travel.msn.com
By Candace Jackson, The Wall Street Journal
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