The Mexican government has deployed more than 8,000 soldiers to protect tourism that is arriving in the country this Easter and which has become one of the symptoms of economic recovery after the pandemic. A significant number of troops, 4,724 soldiers, have been assigned to Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, Tulum, Mazatlán, Veracruz and Acapulco, which once again becomes a drug war zone, with eight fatalities shot so far this week. Another 3,000 soldiers control the roads that lead to the most visited States, and several hundred help the Police in the surveillance of 54 bus terminals, cruise ships and airports.
The Government of López Obrador does not want the violence that is punishing the country to break the upward trend of a business that generates more than 7.5% of the Mexican Gross Domestic Product. Citizens have already lived through the experience of losing visitor traffic during the coronavirus. It was a disaster with multiple business bankruptcies. Tourism fell 46% and the sector lost 12,800 million euros.
But that seems to belong to a tragic past because the beaches are full again. In 2022 there were 38.3 million tourists, 20% more than in 2021, and this year a substantial progression is also expected. Neither the Executive nor the businessmen of the sector want this increase to be cut by savage and brutal violence that last year ended with 39,960 murders.
In this edition, Easter also coincides with the ‘spring break’, a kind of spring break celebrated by countries such as Canada, China, Taiwan, Japan and the United States. All this translates into a flood of young people eager to party and an attractive feast for crime. From April 2 to April 10, Mexico hopes to receive eleven million passengers. Hotel occupancy is estimated at 85%, with especially high peaks in the best enclaves of Acapulco (92%) and Veracruz (90%).
Road control in Sinaloa
AFP
The national security plan tries to cover all the links in the criminal chain. And one of the most important is the journey from the airport to the hotel. The proliferation of gangs that act as highway robbers has triggered the alert for years, which has forced the National Guard and the Army to deploy abundant roadblocks and surveillance flights with helicopters. President López Obrador has assured that the “holiday period will be covered in tourist areas” by the so-called ‘ad hoc’ Tourist Security Battalion to “guarantee the population to enjoy” leisure. It is the response to messages from the United States, whose State Department has advised its compatriots to take “greater precautions”, especially at night, while they remain on the coast of Mexico.
a creepy portrait
Unlike drug traffickers, robbers seek money and valuables from tourists, whom they then abandon in unpopulated places. Kidnappings are not uncommon. The long semi-desert roads or those surrounded by vegetation facilitate their actions and make it difficult for the security forces to locate them. This Thursday, the Prosecutor’s Office reported the discovery the night before of 16 people in Guajanato who were traveling aboard a minibus and that “they were stripped of their belongings while the driver was taken away from his vehicle,” said the spokesman for the San Luis de Potosí City Council. , Miguel Cepeda Gallegos, Another 21 people are still missing in the same area.
Acapulco offers an unbeatable tourist postcard. However, it has also become the fifth most violent city in the world. The drug war left a trail of 35 homicides in the first fortnight of January alone and the number has not stopped rising, in line with the bloody graph traced by the bullets last year, in which this part of the region totaled 437 murders. It is not, however, the worst corner of Mexico. Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez… Throughout the country, since the Holy Week festivities began last weekend, there have already been more than 200 violent deaths.
They draw a creepy portrait. On Monday, in La Caleta, a group of hit men got out of a car and started shooting several merchants on the beach. It is assumed that the attackers were extortionists. Three of his victims, one of them a minor under the age of 17, died, as well as a tourist from Mexico City who was hit by bullets. On the same day, someone found a torn body in a bag. His relatives took the remains in a wheelbarrow. They did not allow the police to inspect them.
A body lies shot on an Acapulco beach
Reuters
Twenty-four hours later, someone fired two shots into the face of a taxi driver in the Amplification Emiliano Zapata neighborhood. The relatives did not allow the ambulance to take care of him either. They carried him in their arms to his house, still dying. The Police found him already lifeless lying on the kitchen table. There, as well as in the nearby Colonia Libertadores, the taxi is a risky profession. Every year several drivers are chased, shot and killed on the asphalt.
However, tourism has not turned its back on Acapulco or the rest of the ports and coastal beaches located in the Mexican cradle of sun, leisure and large hotel complexes. The businessmen admit that they are experiencing a period of prosperity, but this week they have sounded the alarm about the continuous executions that break the peace and warn of a perhaps sinister future. The crimes are part of the settling of accounts between rival organizations, of the drug trafficking disputes and the extortion of industrialists, but also of the challenge to the Government by the drug cartels. This is the only way, in his opinion, to explain why gunmen act more and more frequently in daylight and even in front of bathers. Or just like that, as an action of force and intimidation, it is possible to explain why someone is coldly executed and then their corpse is left lying on a palm tree on the beach or that the dismembered bodies have become a symbol of the gangs.