Vacationers in Mexico notice little of the drug war going on

By Franz Smets Jul 12, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Mexico City - Mexican President Felipe Calderon for some time now has been concerned about his country's image. The war between drug gangs and cartels, resulting in many people being gunned to death in grisly killings, is damaging the tourism sector.

At a travel industry fair in Las Vegas recently, Calderon tried to convince American tour operators that tourists were not in danger in Mexico.

'I have seen thousands of young American tourists in Mexico and how they were having a good time,' he said. 'As far as I could see, the only shots they were receiving were tequila shots.'

The playful reference to the consumption of alcohol by American vacationers was not taken well by the Mexican public up and down the country.

Tourists are, as a rule, just as safe from becoming victims in the drug war in Mexico as they are at home. But no travel operator, especially one in the United States, would dare to try to play down the possible dangers with such a comment.

The drug war is a fact and the number of US visitors is declining. Tour company Travel Impressions, of the American Express company, reports that in 2010 it handled more than 100,000 tourists in Mexico. This year it's expecting 15 per cent fewer.

And yet the Mexican president is largely right. Those affected by the drug war are above all in the regions in the north of the country. But the conflict also involves areas where drugs are grown, where they are smuggled by migrants and also where they are consumed.

The marketplaces for drug consumption are also the tourism centres. For a good year now, the resort town of Acapulco on the Pacific coast has been in the news. There, three crime gangs are battling for supremacy.

'The pearl has become smeared with blood,' the magazine Proceso commented recently about Acapulco. Each day there are shoot-outs and people are killed. 'The once-thriving nightlife scene has virtually been silenced,' it added.

Visitors who don't look at the newspapers with their photographs of bloody corpses notice very little of this. The beaches are still filled with people.

'Tourism has been absolutely untouched by the clashes,' says Lee Kraft, German honorary consul in the Acapulco district of Guerrero. 'It is really sad - the negative headlines make people forget that the Mexicans are full of life, show great hospitality and are very likable. Nothing about this has changed.'

The drug cartels are also active in Mexico's most important tourism resort, Cancun on the Caribbean coast. But there as well, tourists normally don't come into any contact with organized crime. In Cancun, the honorary consuls of many countries have banded together and set up a common 'Casa Consular' in the city's hotel district.

The office, which is also supported by the mayor of Cancun city and by the state of Cancun, is located in a building housing the police and public prosecutor's office and is the place to go for tourists if they run into any problems with the authorities.