Violence in tourist hotspots threatens Mexican industry
Visitors fall prey to blasts, accidents, bad liquor, dishonest police
PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico – Tourists taking the ferry from this tourist town to the island of Cozumel now walk down a wharf lined with police, heavily armed soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs.
Those safeguards came after a Feb. 21 explosion ripped through one of the ferries, injuring 24 people, including five Americans.
Explosives were later found on another ferry owned by the same company.
“It’s something that makes you feel safer,” Roberto Cintrón, president of the Cancún hotel owners’ association, said about the soldiers and security after a recent ferry ride to Cozumel. “It’s the complete opposite situation of the insecurity many people think of.”
Incidents causing concern in Cancún and outlying Quintana Roo state range from bars allegedly serving adulterated liquor to unsuspecting tourists to police targeting visitors in rental cars for bribes.
A vacationing Iowa family of four was found dead March 23 in a condo in Tulum on the Caribbean coast. Authorities suspect the cause was a gas leak from a faulty water heater.
Violence in resort cities such as Cancún, Playa del Carmen (in Quintana Roo state) and Los Cabos resembles the rest of the country, but it threatens Mexico’s lucrative tourism industry. Mexico welcomed nearly 40 million foreign visitors in 2017, and tourism accounts for 8 percent of the country’s GDP.
“The common thread in Los Cabos and Quintana Roo is the public security system had been totally dismantled,” said Francisco Rivas, director of the National Citizen Observatory, which monitors security issues in Mexico. “There were prosecutor’s offices that didn’t investigate and police that couldn’t prevent or react to crime.”
Mexico had the most murders on record in 2017, with 29,158 homicides. The homicide rate in the first two months of 2018 was already up 21 percent over the same period last year.
The U.S. State Department in January issued a strict travel advisory for five Mexican states, including Guerrero, home to Acapulco and Ixtapa. The “do not travel to” advisory put the states of Sinaloa, Colima, Michoacán, Guerrero and Tamaulipas (on the Texas border) on the same level as war-torn countries like Syria.
Mexico’s Tourism Secretariat said the advisory was based on crime statistics and atrocities “not related to incidents that directly affected foreign visitors.”
The secretariat noted the list did not include Mexico’s five biggest tourist destinations: Cancún, the Mayan Riviera, Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta-Riviera Nayarit and Mexico City.