Again the US media wants to exagerate the risk of a regular guy traveling to Mexico. Carjackings against visitors to Baja is virtually nil. In the month of March in San Diego right across the border there were 2 "reported" carjackings and a trail going on for a man accused of torturing a Australian tourist.
Lets put this in perspective. Why is the US not issuing travel warnings for San Diego. I heard a news comentator for KFI los Angeles yesterday say that 3 to 4 bodies turn up each day in LA that dont even make the news. Why is there a such a singular effort to put Mexico in the forefront. Yes Mexico has a serious problem with the cartels fueled mainly by US dollars.. Without consumers the money would dry up and the business would disappear. Lets not constantly criticize our neighbor for having to deal with problems that we create. This month over month bashings seems more like politics than news.
Does anyone report good news about the area? Aout the boys and girls club opening this week in Tijuana. With Ana Kourkian being at the grand opening. This was on the 16th of April.
http://www.heybrewer.com/2008/04/16/anna-kournikova-visits-tijuana/ Today Rosarito is having a bike race with over 6500 contestants heading to Ensenada.. What a great story.
Probably wont make the news as it does not scare people.. Remember good news is new too.
Crime Crackdown
Mexico's president is sending in the military to fight drug cartels and corrupt police. An on-scene report from a frontline city.
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The signs of the beefed-up military presence are everywhere. At the airport, freshly deployed soldiers in camouflage uniforms closely scrutinize passengers and their bags. On the road, a taxi driver says he is pleased that the arrival of the troops has curtailed the shootouts, arrests and round-the-clock raids enough to allow residents out on the streets again. "Look," he points with relief as a truck carrying about 20 soldiers drives by. "They're here."
No, this is not Baghdad.
Rather, this war is being waged just across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas, in Ciudad Juarez. Some 30,000 soldiers and federal police have now been deployed to a dozen states throughout Mexico as part of President Felipe Calderon's war on drug cartels and organized crime, and Juarez is just the latest front. On March 28, after the murder toll here rose to more than 200 in just three months--a more than tenfold increase compared to the same period in 2007--Calderon sent in 2,500 soldiers as part of Joint Operation Chihuahua, named for the state in which Juarez is located.
Juarez may be just another front in the broader war, but it's a front Calderon needs to win. All along the U.S. border, in cities like Tijuana, Reynosa and Matamoros, organized-crime-related violence continues apace. Earlier this week, the U.S. State Department issued a travel alert regarding these cities, as well as Juarez, warning that drug traffickers, Mexican police, justice officials, journalists, foreign visitors and residents--in effect, pretty much everyone--have been victims of attacks and homicides.
Perhaps more important for the Mexican government's war on drugs, the difficulties faced by the Army are becoming apparent. The military has made strong gains since Calderon took office in December 2006, seizing record amounts of cocaine and extraditing 73 suspected drug traffickers to the United States for trial in 2007, but there is growing reason to believe the drug cartels are outfoxing the Army or, at the very least, outlasting its efforts. And many soldiers are losing the will to fight: in 2007, more than 18,000 soldiers deserted, and reports of deserters joining the drug cartels as "zetas," or hired guns, are growing.
Military successes, where they do occur, seem short lived. After Calderon sent soldiers into his home state of Michoacan, crime levels dropped. But this year they're up again, and seem set to surpass 2006 levels. The same goes for Tijuana, where soldiers were once again deployed in January 2007, after a daytime shootout between a gang of kidnappers and local police forced the evacuation of three nearby schools. Just over a year earlier, mission supposedly accomplished, the Army left Tijuana. It had to come back, forcing crime down again, but experts doubt the peace will last. Across the country last year, some 2,500 people were killed in organized-crime-related violence. Not even four months into the new year, unofficial tallies are as high as 850.
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