Tourists shouldn't give up on travel to Mexico vacation, violence, outside, travel

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Tourists shouldn't give up on travel to Mexico
Yes, there's violence - but most Canadians stay in safe areas
Over the noon hour, 13 people stood in front of the Marlin Travel store in Edmonton's City Centre Mall looking at vacation ads. The varied group was so large it interrupted and rerouted the pedestrian traffic.

It was cool outside Monday and the sky was grey. After a warm and dry September a spirit of inevitability had set in: winter is coming.

The flyers advertised various warm destinations.

One woman said loudly to her friend, "I don't even bother looking at the Mexican ones."

"Why?" said her friend. "You think I want to get my head cut off? They're cutting people's heads off now."

Her friend didn't seem to know whether to laugh or grimace, so she did both.

They focused their attention on all-inclusive holidays in Cuba. People might be getting their heads cut off in Cuba, but without a free press, it's unlikely we'd ever know about it.

But lovely beaches. I don't want to make any unfair assumptions about the woman's knowledge of geopolitical affairs. In recent months I've heard members of Canada's political and intellectual establishment make similar declarations about Mexico: why would anyone take a trip to Mexico?

Since President Felipe Calderon decided to end a long-standing truce between the federal government and powerful drug cartels in 2006, Mexico has become a much more dangerous place for gang members and soldiers, crusading politicians and journalists, social activists and police.

Recently, there was a shootout at a liquor store in Mazatlan, in the state of Sinaloa, home of the country's largest drug cartel. A couple of severed heads were left outside the Defence Ministry in Mexico City on Monday. More than 40,000 people have been killed in Mexico since the new war on drugs began.

A few Canadians have been killed. Others have been mistreated. It would be unwise and insensitive to treat them as anything less than tragedies. Every violent death is a tragedy, no matter the circumstances.

But out of more than a million Canadian visitors a year, many of them on a seven-day beer-and-tequila binge in the hot sun, they are statistical anomalies. The same statistical anomalies that inspired Air Canada, in an internal memo last week, to suggest downtown hotels in Winnipeg are too dangerous for its staff.

Most Canadians escaping to Mexico this winter will visit overwhelmingly safe areas such as Puerto Vallarta, Cancun and the Mayan Riviera, Huatulco and Los Cabos. We might visit the cultural treasures of Guadalajara, Mexico City or Guanajuato. Few of us would consider visiting the northern half of border states, where most of the violence has occurred. A quick scan of vacations on sale suggests Mazatlan and Acapulco, where there has been some violence, have been taken off the lists of most Canadian tour operators.

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The Canadian government's travel advisory for Mexico is one level higher than the baseline: "exercise normal security precautions." Today, the government advises "a high degree of caution," which is probably a good idea whether we're in downtown Winnipeg, Vancouver, Edmonton, Berlin or Mexico City. Don't get drunk, for example, and hoot at women and get into fistfights.

Any war on drugs, here in Canada, in the U.S., in Mexico or anywhere else, is doomed to fail. All it can do is escalate into a police state or a real war, and - eventually, in the case of Mexico - transform one of the world's richest and most sophisticated cultures into a travel alert.

Ultimately, the people we're hurting, if we choose not to go to Mexico - apart from our chiles en nogada and Mariachi-loving selves - are the 99.9 per cent of Mexicans who have nothing to do with the narcotics or defence industries.

Alberta exported almost $1 billion to Mexico in 2009; we share common interests like energy and agriculture, and we've had a twinning arrangement with the very safe state of Jalisco, the Alberta of Mexico, since 1999. In the not-so-distant future, Mexico will be an oil importer. A growing Mexican middle-class might be inclined to see business opportunities and snowboard vacations in Alberta.

When our oldest daughter was 11 months old we took her to a resort on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, an hour and a half north of Puerto Vallarta. It wasn't a five-star hotel filled with Albertans and Minnesotans. Our family and our friends were the only gringos in the complex. Everyone else was Mexican, mostly from Guadalajara and its various suburbs.

On the night of the weekly fiesta, we sat at long plastic tables among our short-term Mexican neighbours. At that time, our daughter had only a thin wisp of blond, almost white, hair. Her head was too big for her body. She was, in short, an exotic creature.

One of the servers snatched our daughter from us without asking permission, and soon she was being passed from table to table, mother to mother, arm to arm. She received a hundred kisses that night. We were nervous new parents but there was something about this warm moment that pervades most of my experiences in Mexico: an uncommon warmth that I would hate to have missed because I had been spooked by something awful I had seen on the Internet.

The Mexican Tourism Board didn't respond to my calls and emails this week.

I phoned Marlin Travel's head office for a comment on Canadian travel to Mexico, and listened to some rather unpleasant music as I waited on hold for 16 minutes.

It isn't an easy story - the story of why Canadians should consider visiting their friends in Mexico this winter, despite what they've read - but someone ought to be telling it.

tiffiant

A visitor walks past thundering surf on the scenic beach of Todos Santos, Mexico.

The people we're hurting, if we choose not to go to Mexico - apart from our chiles en nogada and Mariachi-loving selves - are the 99.9 per cent of Mexicans who have nothing to do with the narcotics or defence industries.

Tourists on a Cancun beach