<p>Well I did some more on-line investigating and I’m still allowing my D to go on her mission/service trip to Merida. There are no travel warnings for any of the Yucatan states other than the usual tourist warnings. They’ll be staying in a hostel near the city square and working in an orphanage. They’re taking one day to go to Chichen Itza, and I couldn’t find anyone discouraging visiting there either. She’ll be with a group of about 12 students and a priest, and going to Mass every morning, so I kind of doubt we have to worry about her staggering about the city drunk.</p>
<p>Newtothismom, visiting Juarez not being worth the trip from El Paso is correct, but for a number of reasons. The danger from looming physical violence might not be as big as an issue as the city not being “as” attractive anymore. </p>
<p>The reasons to “have” to make a trip over the bridges have eroded, and the mere crossing has become a ridiculous affair with the US and Mexican authorities competing for the title of least efficient and most clueless. While there used to extremely long lines to enter the US, now it has become common to have huge delays to pass the customs officers on the way to Mexico.</p>
<p>Simply stated, crossing to Juarez for having a good time on the cheap is becoming ancient history. Teenagers are no longer allowed to cross on the weekdays to discover the debauchery that their young age makes illegal. Not necessarily a great loss! What remains is that most crossings have become a matter of necessity over simple desire. People cross because of professional activities or for visiting friends and family. </p>
<p>Although it was never a big thing in Juarez, the tourism is dead. Short of a new era of prohibition, it will never come back. On the other hand, the industrial and commercial success of the city will rebound ultimately.</p>
<p>I have been reading CC for years, but have never felt the strong urge to post until now. Xiggi, I don’t know where you live, but I live in El Paso. And I don’t get all of my news on the situation from the local TV networks. There are reliable sources around if you know where to look. </p>
<p>I have family in Juarez who have relocated because of the violence, and we don’t even know where they are at this point in time. And no, they are not connected to the drug cartel. Over the last couple of years, 3 kids from my daughters’ high school have been shot and killed while attending birthday parties/family events at different times in Ciudad Juarez. And no, none of their families were not connected either. These kids each happened to be walking into a home from their family’s vehicle and got caught in the crossfire of the “intended targets” on the street. As far as I am concerned, one innocent child’s death is one too many. Why on earth would anyone take the risk of crossing the border at this point in time?</p>
<p>Let me tell you how thrilled I was to see this thread knowing that my son and his girlfriend flew into Mexico City last night. 
They promised me that they would stay in the city except for a trip to the pyramids. Since I don’t know where the pyramids are, I don’t know whether or not to be concerned…</p>
<p>The pyramids are worth seeing and it is quite safe there.</p>
<p>Just to clarify, the two cases cited in the article I linked were adults, not spring break kids. The woman who was brutally beaten, three weeks ago, was in an elevator in her hotel in a five star resort when it happened. She hadn’t ventured off the property. Same with the murders mentioned. The couple, in their 50s, were in their hotel room when attacked, also inside a five star resort. So, it’s not just people who are guilty of risky behavior, wandering into dangerous areas, who are having issues.</p>
<p>excluding talltex3, i get the feeling that the same people who are blah-blah-blah-ing about not going to mexico on this thread would send their kids (or go themselves) to greece in a heartbeat.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>65° is much better than possible 40’s and 50’s you can’t be guaranteed to escape along the Gulf of Mexico that the states have.</p>
<p>Yes, because Greece is experiencing an economic depression and is in a little bit of civil turmoil, not an all out narc war. DOS doesn’t hand out travel warnings for ****s and giggles, people SHOULD be concerned about the implications of traveling to some parts of Mexico</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I will address your comment about living in El Paso and the information above. Assuming your daughter does not attend an all-male high school or the local university, I will assume that the news of three students attending El Paso high schools did not get the attention it deserved. </p>
<p>Rather than trading commentaries, I am sure you should have few problems to provide links to such horrific stories of being killed by crossfire while walking from a family vehicle to a birthday party. After all, the news of american students killed in Juarez travels on the news wires. </p>
<p>Then again, it is always possible you happen to know stories that were kept from the public at large. Possible but improbable!</p>
<p>Yes…just a bit of websurfing…there are plenty of news articles. Do you think people are just making this up???..unbelievable.</p>
<p>[Teens</a> from Texas school killed in Mexico - World news - Americas - msnbc.com](<a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41469218/ns/world_news-americas/t/teens-texas-school-killed-mexico/]Teens”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41469218/ns/world_news-americas/t/teens-texas-school-killed-mexico/)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yeah, a bit of websurfing is what it EXACTLY is. </p>
<p>What is it that is so unbelievable? Did you even my comment? Had you read it with a grain of attention you would have noticed that I mentioned an all-male school and a local university, and I asked about a link to the story about students from a high school who were gunned down in a crossfire walking to their car. </p>
<p>It should be obvious that the story you linked to has nothing to do with the account by the El Paso poster. Just as it obvious that this person knows very little about the victims of February 2011, and the circumstances of the homicides.</p>
<p>Indeed, unbelievable is an accurate term that describes stories that are weaved together.</p>
<p>oldfort, post #65, thank you for the reassurance! :)</p>
<p>There are lots of parts of Mexico that are not problematic (and I believe this includes the Yucatan). We just had a lovely trip to Baja California Sur. We flew to San Jose del Cabo, rented a car and drove to Los Barriles. We drove to a couple of areas for hiking and thermal pools. Nary a hint of problems. I suspect the probability of a problem in that area is lower than if we had spent the week in New Orleans.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the border cities are a horrible problem. I wouldn’t consider going there. </p>
<p>I’m likely to go to Mexico City later this year. I’ve been there a number of times and just handle myself carefully. I hire a driver for the duration of my trip who works with/is known by my clients.</p>
<p>I think the President of Mexico, for whom I have tremendous respect, made a mistake with respect to fighting the drug lords in the way he has. I think that he should have said, “Look. The drug problem is the US’s problem. If they can’t control demand, we shouldn’t have to police for them and destroy our society in the process. So, I’m going to give drug dealers a free corridor from Central America to the US. As long as they stay in that corridor and don’t bother my people (no selling drugs), I won’t touch them. Let the US take care of the demand and there will be no supply.” Corruption would have declined substantially – there would be no need for it. And they wouldn’t have been fighting battles with the drug lords henchman. But, that’s probably why they don’t elect me president of any country.</p>
<p>As is typical of many topics on here, people who’s minds are already made up won’t change base on the discussion. While some have implied that others are ‘fabricating’ examples of violence against innocent people, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to search the web and find any number of news media articles.</p>
<p>If you are already convinced there is no problem traveling to Mexico, then this thread won’t change that.</p>
<p>@shawbridge: That seems like a practical solution, but it would be a diplomatic nightmare. The repercussions from the US for such an action would be devastating. Certainly economic sanctions would be involved for allowing this to happen. And the cartels would fight for control of the corridor, putting us back at square one. And controlling demand would be an EXTREMELY difficult goal. Major destinations for Mexican drugs like Los Angeles have already devoted a large portion of their police force and millions of dollars to drug enforcement. Even if this was tripled, it couldn’t slow down demand enough to end cartels. And besides, while the US is a major destination, Mexico itself is a market, so the cartels would be unlike to agree to this, especially when they already have so much influence over police and the government.</p>
<p>DavidSSabb94, you are undoubtedly correct, and no doubt in the extreme form I painted it, it would be tough to do. But, I think the Mexicans are suffering too much because we have massive demands for drugs. To the extent that we had to take responsibility for our drug problem, we’d have to come up with something a lot more effective than interdiction, which just makes the cartels incredibly rich. Maybe an implicit strategy by the Mexicans to do this would force a serious rather than a puritanical approach to the demand-side problem.</p>
<p>If I were in Mexico, I’d probably not be so unhappy when the cartels were killing each other, as long as they were not killing innocent bystanders. [I don’t know if this is actually feasible]. Let’s pave a nice highway for them. The need to corrupt officials would go way down and maybe corruption would decline over time. </p>
<p>If I were designing a policy response in Mexico, the way I’d advise to do things would respond to the diplomatic problem as well.</p>
<p>The fact that much of the violence is in the border region is not a surprise, when the major destination for the cartels is in the US, not to mention that thanks to the loose gun rules in much of the US, guns flow into mexico from north of the border that doesn’t help things. </p>
<p>That said, it is also more then a bit disingenuous to make the argument that the violence and such is totally the fault of the US. What that post leaves out is something that has been well known for a long time, that Mexico has serious issues that are highlighted by what is going on with the cartels. Drug cartels like that flourish in a vacuum, the kind of over the top activity we see now in Mexico, or in places like Colombia 20 years ago, indicate total power vacuums.
And yes, it has happened in the US, during the crack epidemic years in NYC 2500 people a year were murdered, a lot of it drug dealers fighting over turf, or innocent victims like children, much as you see in Mexico today. The crack epidemic was obviously fueled by demand, but it also happened because of a gigantic power vacuum in the city, thanks to the financial crisis of the 70’s and also quite honestly corrupt police in some cases, it was out of hand…the difference was there was a structure to bring it back into line, NYC the past several years, even in these rotten times, has been running murder rates lower then it had 50 years ago.</p>
<p>What the issue of the cartels and their bloody business leaves out is that one of the reasons Mexico has the problems it does is the government, and especially the police forces local and national, are corrupt, pure and simple. Read accounts of NEA agents (or in my case, talk to an ex NEA agent directly who operated in Mexico) and one of the things they all say is you don’t know who to trust, that police, law enforcement and prosecutors have been so co-opted either by money or fear that you can’t trust many of them…</p>
<p>Does that mean all of Mexico is dangerous? No, it doesn’t, and usually as people point out a lot of the killing you are talking about is bad guys killing others and that is true. I lived in NYC during the crack epidemic, I lived in the NE Bronx and commuted to a second shift job downtown, and I was coming home at 2am on the subway, riding through some of the worst neighborhoods in the Bronx and nothing happened to me, and if you look at the demographics of who was killed, it was either bad guys or people who lived in those neighborhoods (I am not saying those who died didn’t make it a horrendous situation)…point being that if you were a tourist in NYC, if you didn’t go to Bushwick or East New York or Melrose, you prob wouldn’t see or experience anything. Big tourist areas, like Cancun and the like, know their lifeblood is tourism and even as corrupt as the government and cops are, they aren’t going to allow that to be killed off, much as in NYC in the 1980’s the main tourist areas of the cities were some of the safest places to be…</p>
<p>It doesn’t mean there aren’t concerns, and even in the tourist areas there are people looking to rip off tourists, such as the fake (or maybe real) police scams, muggings and so forth, so things happen, and yes, people can get murdered in hotels and such, but that happens in the US, too. If you are in the big tourist destinations, your odds of having problems are prob the same as they are in most big US cities, I won’t argue that. If you go outside those areas, you have to be careful, because a lot of Mexico is poor (interestingly, their GDP is actually not that bad, but they have a huge pool of poor people and a small pool of well off people that take a large percentage of the GDP).What worries me about college kids, remembering how stupid I was at times, is that they may be tempted to go out of the tourist areas, meet the wrong people and end up in trouble, especially as they probably have been drinking. Kids that age think they are immortal and don’t often think with their heads, as I can recall from my own trip through that time. </p>
<p>The government warnings are not BS, any more then the government warnings to foreign citizens travelling to the US to places like NYC to stay out of certain areas and such were, they are indicating real risk and people are wise to heed them. </p>
<p>What does concern me is the situation in Mexico is getting worse, not better, and it is spreading and it may impact the US a lot more then it already has, the drug cartels, for example, think nothing of killing cops and prosecutors in their way, it is their SOP (even the crack gangs, as violent as they were, wouldn’t go there in the US), and that could spread into the US, but that is another story…I could make an argument that the US should place sanctions on Mexico, stop US citizens from going there as tourists (like we did with Cuba) and so forth, that hopefully that would force the government to act and get at the root of problems, like cops and federales are not well paid and to use real force to go after the drug cartels (I am talking special forces, in effect military action), but it would just hurt a lot of innocent people in Mexico who depend on tourists. My guess is eventually it will get bad enough that tourism will be hurt, companies who located to the border region will start pulling out, and then maybe something will happen…</p>
<p>BTW, the situation in Mexico is not all that different then resorts located in other poor countries, if you leave the resort areas in Jamaica or the Dominican republic you can have trouble, same with spots all over the world <em>shrug</em>, when you have the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, things like that happen.</p>
<p>Strawbridge-
I could make the argument that the answer to this is to make drugs legal and have the government handle the distribution (it has been done many times before), you take out the illicit aspect and you end up taking the criminals out of it (a la prohibition, which was directly the same thing as we see in Mexico, during the prohibition era there were more murders in the big cities proportionally or outright, then there are today). Plus the drugs would be in controlled quality, to boot, not the crap that is on the street (and yes, others have made this argument before). My take on legalizing it is it also makes interdiction and treatment easier, people using drugs today have reason to fear going to jail, even for small amounts of drugs, which doesn’t work, and the jails are full of people in need of drug rehab and such…the resources otherwise spent on stopping illegal drugs could be used on serious campaign to keep people from using drugs and also in helping them kick them, kind of like has happened with smoking (I am amazed at the rapid change with smoking in the US; when I was growing up people smoked everywhere and the numbers were much higher; in the last 25 years the numbers smoking has plummeted, and in many places smoking is not so casual any more, it has been socially jaundiced), that might be the model, make it legal but then put the full court press to take out demand. Among other things, drugs being illegal puts a major cachet on it among young people, and it isn’t just the poor.</p>
<p>
The problem is that a tourist usually isn’t aware of the problems - until it hits them. There have been many people from El Paso who have visited Juarez without a problem - likely including the ones mentioned earlier in the thread - until the point in time when they happened to get hit in the crossfire.</p>
<p>It’s true that there are sections of some US cities that it would be unwise to venture in as well. That doesn’t make it any less dangerous in Mexico.</p>
<p>A corridor for the drug criminals to the US because it’s a US problem? - This wouldn’t work. Although I agree that much of the problem is due to the segment of people in the US who decide to support the illegal drug industry for their own self-absorbed gratification, these drug smugglers are criminals who are fighting not just with the government but also among each other. There’s too much money at stake and if smuggler ‘A’ can take over the business of smuggler ‘B’ then they’ll do it. A lot of the violence, probably most of it, is between the criminals with law enforcement and innocents getting caught in the middle.</p>
<p>The real solution to the problem is to have Johnny and Susie, people who are our kids’ peers, perhaps even the kids of many of you you’re spending the huge bucks to support at college, and maybe some of you yourselves, quit supporting the illegal drug trade. It’d be a win/win all around. The idea that it’s somehow justified to support the illegal drug trade just because you don’t agree that it s/b illegal doesn’t help solve the problem and in fact exacerbates it. As long as it’s illegal, don’t do the drugs. If you feel strongly that the drug shouldn’t be illegal then campaign within the law to get it legalized and ‘after’ it is then have a blast doing your drugs if that’s what you feel you need to do.</p>