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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | April 2005 
State Gov't Admits To Insecurity In Cancun
 Wire services
| | The U.S. government advised its citizens that taxi drivers in Cancun were charging excessive fares. |
Cancun - The Quintana Roo state government acknowledged Thursday a "lack of oversight" of police in Cancun, the country's main tourist attraction, just pointed to by the U.S. State Department as a place where cops' extortion of visitors is on the rise.
"Yes, there is a lack of oversight and, yes, there is insecurity," the new head of the Quintana Roo Tourism Secretariat, Gabriela Rodríguez Galvez, admitted Thursday at a press conference.
She announced that corrections will be made in the police to restore order to Cancun's law enforcement forces, and she said she was confident that the new municipal authorities would confront the problem and find a solution.
Recently-elected new authorities are to take office in four days.
The State Department issued a public announcement to U.S. citizens advising them of extortion practiced by some Cancun police due to the "persistent shortage of municipal funds to pay for police and public services."
The head of the state Hotels Association, José Chapur Zahoul, also called attention to the increase in complaints at U.S. consulates about local police officers' abuse and extortion of tourists.
Among other irregularities, the U.S. government denounced corrupt police for collecting apparently bogus traffic fines from tourists driving rental cars, and it advised its citizens that taxi drivers in Cancun were charging excessive fares.
Chapur Zahoul said that a lack of municipal resources had led to the increase in crimes such as robbery and extortion by law enforcement officers.
The director of the city's Convention Center, Guillermo Martínez Flores, said that if the problem persisted for another three months, irreversible damage would be done to the local economy since travel agencies would seek new, more secure tourist destinations for their customers.
The U.S. government's announcement was the second time in the past 10 months that it had issued a security advisory for tourists due to recurrent problems, including violence and the climate of insecurity, at the popular vacation destination on the nation's Caribbean coast. |
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