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My family used to holiday in Mexico: Puerta Vallarta, Cozumel, Mexico City, Cancun, etc. The weather was great, the people were friendly, the price was right. Not anymore. Actually, I lie. The weather, folks and prices are still great. It’s a small matter of gun battles, torture, decapitation and a general sense that large swathes of the country are a war zone. Which they are, thanks to America’s insatiable appetite for illegal drugs. The danger zone isn’t just “off the beaten path” drug mule routes. Fun in Acapulco doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Or it does right until it doesn’t. And yet, laht.com reports that Mexico’s tourism industry is going great guns . . .
Mexico’s tourism activity grew 3.9 percent in the first quarter of this year, compared to the same period in 2011 . . . A total of 38.2 million foreign tourists visited the country during the first six months of the year. Tourism accounts for about 8 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product (GDP) and is the third-largest generator of foreign exchange, trailing only oil and remittances.
Really? Yankee narcodollars are pumping an estimated $1B per week into the Mexican economy. Anyway, the majority of Mexican tourism now arrives in the country via cruise ship.
A total of 38.2 million foreign tourists visited the country during the first six months of the year, with border tourists and cruise ship passengers accounting for 26.6 million of these visitors and international tourists accounting for 11.6 million, the Bank of Mexico said.
So, all it will take is an attack on cruise ship day trippers and the Mexican tourist industry will collapse. Sherman set the way-back machine for khou.com, February 2012.
So make that a deadly attack. Meanwhile, are you planning on holidaying in Mexico?
I just got back from Cozumel from a Diving Trip. I fly directly into their airport, take a taxi directly to the resort, take a taxi directly back to the airport and fly directly home. Cruise ships dock there daily. The Island, itself, is so small you can walk to most major areas, but taxis are everywhere. I saw absolutely no hint whatsoever of any drugs, gang wars, cartels . . . nada. I felt completely safe. That is not to say that Cozumel is 100% safe, and I am sure there are some bad areas, but I just don’t go walking around at night. Been going there yearly for the past 5 or 6 years and never had any problems.
I used to visit Cozumel six weeks a year –except when I spent two of those weeks at the Playa del Carmen. I loved Mexico, its fanstastic people and its culture, and I still do. But I’m not going back any time soon.
FYI, once you get away from Carlos & Charlie’s and onto the back streets of Cozumel, there are a lot of small homes that serve the best food to tourists. And I never had a problem with Montezuma’s Revenge.
It’s not America’s appetite for drugs that’s causing the problem. People always will want and will always get drugs to indulge in. It’s been this way since the dawn of time, when I imagine some caveman probably ate a magic mushroom and had a nice little trip. Or maybe he somehow drank some fermented juice, got drunk, and decided he rather liked it because it made his plain jane cavewoman look more attractive.
It’s our government keeping the trade in the black market and their futile attempts at eradicating it by force that’s the problem. End prohibition and the gangs will lose a lot of power and money. Legitimate companies can then form and not have to rely on a crude form of private security (gangs) for protection from competitors. They can use the legal system like Merck, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Marlboro, Jack Daniels, etc. do.
Right cause after Prohibition was repealed all moonshine production ceased?
What major gangs/organized crime outfits currently profit from moonshine?
And what’s your point, anyway?
My point is that legalizing it didn’t get rid of it all. Whenever something is regulated by the government there will always be some amount of regulation & control where there will be an illegal trade.
Prescription drugs are legal, yet there’s a black market for them.
The mafia still makes a lot of money in distributing alchololic beverages in this country.
Organized crime existied and controled gambling, alcholol, prostitution and drugs when they have been both legal and illegal. You ought to become familiar with the history of organzied crime in America. It was first controled by the WASPs, then the Irish, followed by the Italians and Jews, and now by Russians, Mexicans, Central Americans and Columbians. I am sure some other group will challenge the new guys in town when they become fat and soft.
Whenever there is a changing of the guard bloodshed ensues. Prohibition was not the cause of gangland bloodshed in the 1920s and early thirties. The shooting was the sound of the Irish being supplanted by the Italio-Jewish mob.
There was little drug related violence before the 1980s. About that time the Feds finally won their war against the Mafia. Once again the drug related shooting was the sound of the old Mafia being displaced by the upstarts from Russia and South America. When you reduce the power of the entrenched order someone else steps up to take control.
Murder rates are way down from the peak of the cocaine wars because there have been winners and losers. Most of the violence that you think is drug related has very little to do with who controls trafficking. If drugs were causing the violence then poor Hispanic neighborhoods would be just as bad as poor black neighborhoods.
Elliotte, when was the last time a whiskey distributor gunned down another whiskey distributor over who would have rights over a territory?
It used to happen all the time during Prohibition, and it happens all the time now over illegal drugs. It pretty much never happens in legal markets.
You have a terrible argument when being against law is that criminals exploit it or the cost of enforcing it.
Its a simple answer, why tell people what they can and cannot consume?
We spent a week in Acapulco five years ago, and the city was already starting to slide downhill. Trucks full of Kevlar-armored soldiers zoomed around the city ignoring traffic signals, and black-clad Federales stood in squads with full-auto assault rifles.
That was five years ago, which is now apparently looked back on as ‘the good old days’ before headless corpses and pitched battles between narcos and the military/police. I cannot imagine traveling there now without a complement of carefully-vetted armed security.
Follow the money.
International Banks, sadly including the Vatican Bank (one of the top 10 money laundering banks) ……http://www.vaticanbankclaims.com/vatpr.html
HBSC……..http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/25/us-hsbc-probe-idUSTRE80O1FH20120125
(There are others)
And in my opinion National Governments. If just pot were legalized we could: stop this insane un-winable war on drugs (and they say Vietnam was a lost cause), dry up the gangsters main income, stop funding the majority of the prison industrial complex while finding space for the criminals of violence and theft, cut our crime rate considerably, cut the DEA by 66%, and on and on. Oh yea, tax it nominally and start to lower both taxes and the deficit.
The craziness in Mexico is exactly the reason that I will never visit there. And it saddens me because there are many lovely places that I would love to visit in Mexico.
I doubt I would visit Mexico even if I could carry down there.
We have family in Mexico. We haven’t been able to visit them in years. They just say, “Don’t come. It isn’t safe.”
i believe the tourist all suffer from that most human of malady’s” it can’t happen to me” until it does. then of course it;s to late to rethink your plans.
YEAH, what Michael B. & Sammy said!
Just got back from Cabo…the locals said Cabo was only one of two (can’t remember the other place he said), pretty much 99% “safe” places left to vacation. Why? The criminals and cartels won’t go there because of simple geography, they simply have no place to run from the non-corrupt Federali’s if need be. Downtown Cabo felt dead. We pretty much just stayed at our resort…will not be going back there any time soon. That country (outside of the plush resorts) SUCKS.
US getting involved .. ? This popped up today ..
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2188558/Is-U-S-sending-Seal-Team-Six-capture-drug-cartel-kingpin-American-military-plotting-military-operation-similar-bin-Laden-mission.html
I remember being in various areas of Mexico. Small towns off the beaten path. It was beautiful and breath taking. Now I will not set foot there. I am sure some of the resorts are ok, don’t get me wrong, but traveling unescorted is not really in the cards anymore which is sad.
So it appears that being a tourist in Mexico today represents a form of Darwinian selection?
I’m not sure if what happened in Rocky Point (Mexico) on July 19th and 20th in 2012 has anything to do with the Fast and Furious guns or not. But on July 19th five dead bodies were found on the main street of Rocky Point. It was assumed that they were gang or cartel members because on July 20th seven bodies of a different gang or cartels members were found on the main street of Rocky Point. You don’t hear about this on the news.
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