| | |  Travel & Outdoors | November 2009 
Staying Safe in Mexico
 Christopher Reynolds - Los Angeles Times
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November 29, 2009
| | Bilingual tourist police help visitors in some Mexican cities. (Terry Ketron/AP) | |
Mexico's drug war is entering its fourth year. Its H1N1 flu outbreak began with dozens of deaths and global headlines in the spring.
This leaves travelers with at least two reasons to study up before booking that Mexico trip.
But it doesn't necessarily mean staying home.
Mexico's drug-war death toll reached more than 9,900 between January 2007 and early October 2009, by the count of the University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute. Many of the deaths have occurred near the U.S. border and far from the resorts and cities that draw thousands of Americans every year.
Robert Reid, who has contributed to Lonely Planet's Mexico volumes and serves as the New York-based U.S. travel editor for the guidebook publisher, likes to remind people Mexico is about the size of France, Spain, Germany and Italy — combined.
Before you let trouble in one corner affect your travel to another corner, he said, "Imagine a shootout in Sicily forcing a canceled vacation in Germany."
Also, as Mexican officials are quick to note, most drug-war victims have been drug traffickers or law-enforcement officials.
Charles Pope, interim director of the Trans-Border Institute, visits Tijuana and Mexicali up to four times a month, traveling as he did in the years before President Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug traffickers in 2006.
Pope dines out, drives at night and said he wouldn't hesitate to go to a baseball game, a "lucha libre" (professional wrestling match) or an event at the Tijuana Cultural Center.
Still, there has been plenty of trouble in Mexico, and since August the U.S. State Department has urged Americans to delay unnecessary travel to parts of the states of Michoacan (capital: Morelia) and Chihuahua (which includes the cities of Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez on the Texas border).
Mexican authorities say that in the first half of 2009, more than 1,000 killings took place in Ciudad Juárez, which is across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.
Although U.S. citizens have been killed in Mexico, apparently including four whose bodies were discovered in Tijuana in May, those deaths make up a small fraction of those slain in the drug-related violence.
If you set flu aside, said Edward Hasbrouck, author of "The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World," the biggest danger for a law-abiding traveler in Mexico is probably "the same as the big danger in the U.S. — road crashes. Almost everything else is negligible by comparison."
But Hasbrouck said, "You have to evaluate not only 'Is it safe?' but also 'Will I be so frightened that I won't enjoy my trip?' "
Practical precautions
For details on the geography of Mexico's troubles, check the State Department's Web site, especially the Mexico security travel alert, at www.travel.state.gov/travel/
Wherever you go in Mexico, the State Department recommends you stay on the beaten path, carry a working cellphone and tell others where you're going.
On the swine-flu front, Mexico drew worldwide attention in April and May when H1N1 was blamed for dozens of deaths. But lately, the U.S. and Mexico are in the same position, jointly leading the world in cases. |
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