Spring break may be broken for Mexico resorts

When it comes to Mexican tourism, when Ciudad Juarez sneezes, Rosarito Beach catches a cold.

Though the drug cartel-plagued city near El Paso, Texas, is 600 miles away from Southern California, what happens there sweeps across the entire border region and even down to the plush resorts on the Pacific and Caribbean.
Once again, a major Mexican city is undergoing a wave of high-profile
violence. While the focus is rightly on the victims of the crimes, the
collateral damage goes deep into the wallet of the Mexican tourism
industry.

Tourism in northern Mexico
has dipped, sharply at times, with the rise in recent years of
drug-related violence. As late as last month, officials were hoping for
a rebound from a year lost to drug violence, the H1N1 flu outbreak, and
a lousy economy north and south of the border.

Instead, things just became worse.

The U.S. State Department has slapped a travel warning — the
harshest level of caution — on its neighbor to the south. The rare move
came after the murder of two American employees of the U.S. consulate
in Ciudad Juarez,
who were shot to death while on their way home from a children’s party.
A Mexican national who worked at the U.S. consulate was gunned down in
a separate incident. Ciudad Juarez is just across the border from El Paso, Tex.

Though the warning text made sure to discriminate
between violence-plagued regions and relatively peaceful tourist areas
such as Cancun and Cabo San Lucas,
the long litany of spots experiencing shootings, corruption, robbery
and political instability just adds more fuel to the feeling of
uncertainty and anxiety about visiting Mexico.

Spring break, once a cash cow for Mexican resorts, may be broken. San Diego State
and other colleges have stepped in to urge students to stay north of
the border for spring break and some tours have been canceled. It’s a
replay of 2009 when a wave of violence just prior to spring break
slowed visits to a trickle.

This year, the mixed messages led to the odd juxtaposition of photographs out of Mexico last week showing spring breakers dancing amid the bubbles in Cancun, mixed with military-like anti-gang operations in Ciudad Juarez.

In the past, the State Department has been criticized for being both too tough and too lenient with Mexico when it came to its admonitions on travel.

Mexico was usually tagged with travel “alerts,” a lesser caution, after the latest shooting spree in Tijuana or drug violence in Ciudad Juarez.

In spring 2009, the alerts set off a round of high
volume exchanges, with some U.S. officials, including the regional head
of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, to go beyond the alerts to suggest Americans, particularly students, curtail visits to Mexico.

At the same time tourism officials in some areas of Mexico
said the warnings were too broad and lumped in relatively remote
tourist destinations with urban areas where gangs mostly operated. Some
claimed Mexico’s newly aggressive campaign against the drug cartels was punishing the tourist industry.

Tourism officials worry about a repeat of last year,
when travel advisories led to last-minute rescheduling of spring break
trips once bound for Mexico to domestic destinations like Palm Springs and the Gulf Coast of Texas. Baja Mexico officials countered with a public relations blitz and lobbying trips to cities in California that sought to separate what was happening in Ciudad Juarez — or even Tijuana — with the rest of the region.

Rosarito Beach has been particularly aggressive in trying to overcome the “bad Baja”
image problem, adding police, community outreach offices, special
events and expedited petty crime courts. It’s all touted with an
aggressive public relations campaign claiming the media has overplayed
the crime angle in Mexico, combined with savvy lobbying of political leaders north of the border.

But it’s hard for promoters to reconcile the State Department’s
language for a travel warning with a sun-and-fun image: “Travel
warnings are issued to describe long-term, protracted conditions that
make a country dangerous or unstable. A travel warning is also issued
when the U.S. Government’s ability to assist American
citizens is constrained due to the closure of an embassy or consulate
or because of a drawdown of its staff.” Dependents of federal workers
were given the option of evacuation — much as they have in other recent
warning spots such as Yemen, Haiti, Lebanon and the Palestinian-controlled West Bank.

But that is asking a lot of people looking to spend
their vacation dollars. No matter how admirable the efforts to attack
the cartels might be, the turmoil has no upside for tourism. American
tourists want to feel carefree, not just secure. With each incident,
the long hoped-for rebound stalls and another tourist season is in
danger of being lost.

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(c) 2010, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).

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