| | |  Travel & Outdoors | October 2008 
Americans Cautioned About Visits to Mexico Because of Drug War Violence
 Ken Ellingwood - The Los Angeles Times
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 |  | A State Department travel alert urges Americans to be especially alert to safety and security concerns because of border violence. |  | | | |
Last month's deadly grenade attack in colonial-era Morelia heightened doubts for would-be travelers about the safety of travel in Mexico.
The U.S. government isn't telling Americans to avoid the country, but it is urging caution.
Mexico's spiraling drug wars, with beheadings, gangland shootings and bodies found in gruesome heaps, have produced a drumbeat of alarming news.
In August, armed men killed 13 Mexican residents of a town in northern Mexico that tourists use to reach the scenic Copper Canyon region. Two weeks later, the decapitated bodies of 11 men were found piled in the Yucatán peninsula, 75 miles from the famed Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzá.
Shootings have erupted in coastal Mazatlán and are regular events on the U.S. border. The grenade attack, in Morelia's postcard-pretty downtown, killed eight residents.
A State Department travel alert, in effect until Wednesday, urges Americans to be "especially alert to safety and security concerns" because of border violence. But it does not advise them to keep out.
"The vast majority of the thousands of U.S. citizens who cross the border by car or fly into Mexico's airports each day do so safely," U.S. Ambassador Antonio O. Garza said.
About 12 million Americans visit Mexico each year. U.S. tourists are not known to have been specifically targeted in the escalating violence.
Karen Ingram, a pharmacy technician in Jackson, Calif., wants to return with her husband in March to a village near Puerto Vallarta. But the latest violence gives her pause. Ingram said she was investigating whether there will be military checkpoints, which she would find "unnerving."
"We're still kind of on the fence," she said. |
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