SUN, SAND AND SENSE
MEXICAN RESORT AREAS ARE LIKELY SAFER THAN MOST NORTH AMERICAN CITIES.’
My recent Mexican vacation was fabulous — endless sunshine, beer, fresh seafood, delectable fruit, the dependable hospitality of friendly and polite locals, and more beer.
Not a single headless torso washed up on the beach or got dumped on the street.
The recent murder of two Canadians near Huatulco and Manzanillo won’t keep me away. I’ve been to Mexico often and would go back in a heartbeat.
You can meet violence or get caught in crossfire anywhere. Just ask Jose Neto, the Brazilian exchange student who lost his sight after taking a stray bullet while walking in downtown Calgary one evening in 2008, or the friends and family of Keni Su’a, the bystander killed in the 2009 New Year’s Day gang assassination at Calgary’s Bolsa restaurant.
On Thursday, the decomposed bodies of Mexicanborn Canadian Ximena Osegueda, a 39-year-old University of British Columbia PHD candidate, and her Mexican boyfriend were found partially buried at a beach in Huatulco. Two days earlier, Saltspring Island resident Robin Wood was killed while trying to stop a home invasion at a friend’s house in the Pacific coast town of Melaque, north of Manzanillo.
Osegueda was a found on a beach known to be used as a burial site for victims of organized crime, although friends and family said she was not involved in drugs. Wood was killed at 1 a.m. in a central area of Melaque, close to a favourite Canadian vacation haunt where friends of mine have residences near Barra de Navidad. Melaque, they tell me, is not a place they walk around at night.
Do these killings frighten me? Not any more than Calgary, where I am statistically more likely to get murdered than a Canadian in Mexico.
According to the Department of Foreign Affairs, five Canadians were murdered in Mexico last year out of 1.6 million Canadians who travelled there. Calgary, with a population of just over one million, had eight murders in 2011 and a record number of 86 home invasions in 2010. Although all of Calgary’s murders last year were targeted rather than random, one-third of the 2010 home invasions did not involve people in highrisk lifestyles.
Among those killed in Mexico last year was Leonard Schell, a 62-year-old Canadian father of two originally from Penticton, who was stabbed 25 times and robbed of $13,000 cash at his home in Puerto Vallarta. A year ago, another Penticton man, 69-year-old Mike Di Lorenzo, was wounded in the leg from a stray bul- let in an apparent gang hit while walking from his hotel to a local plaza while on vacation in Mazatlan.
These are horrible stories. But five Canadians out of 1.6 million travellers to Mexico last year is better odds than Edmonton, which recorded 47 homicides in 2011, where no one theme, such as drugs, is pinpointed as a dominant cause.
In the last five years, more than five million Canadians have travelled to Mexico, out of whom 16 have been murdered. Another 100 have met violent deaths, including three Albertans killed in a natural gas explosion at a resort at Playa del Carmen near Cancun. Natural gas line explosions occur here, too, the deadliest of which involved seven people killed at a strip mall in 2003 in Etobicoke, Ont.
Although I wouldn’t go for a stroll in Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Mexican resort areas are likely safer than most North American cities. For an urban perspective, Mexico City’s crime rate is lower than Miami or Chicago. Take precautions, be aware of your surroundings, and your chances of encountering violence are rare.
Don’t even get me started on matters of the bowel. I had a bad stomach for one day in Mexico, but it was nothing compared to the three violent cases of food poisoning I’ve had in my life, all in Alberta — one in Banff, one in Edmonton, and one in Calgary.
Admittedly, Mexico is hardly a traveller’s ShangriLa. The Foreign Affairs travel report warns that “Canadians travelling to Mexico should exercise a high degree of caution due to a deteriorating security situation in many parts of the country,” specifically in the northern border regions where the department advises against non-essential travel due to violence linked to organized crime.
“Crime is commonplace,” the travel advisory says. “Arrest and detention rates are low and contribute to high levels of criminality.”
Should you encounter trouble, there’s also no denying the systemic Mexican police corruption and the propensity to blame the victim. An unusually high number of Canadian deaths in Mexico are attributed to drunken gringos falling off balconies, a scenario a tad too convenient for the local policia.
Ordinary Mexicans are upset about the violence. A Mexico City doctor and his wife told me they saw soldiers with guns drawn on suspects on the highway to Ixtapa, where I met them on the beach.
But, as Mexico’s Secretary of Tourism, Gloria Guevara, pointed out in a recent interview with a U.S. wire service, “Asking if Mexico is safe is a little like asking if something happens in Atlanta, is it safe to go to Seattle?”