¡México!
Mexico, oh I love Mexico. The stunning landscape, the spicy food, the cheap beer. Most of all, though, the people: despite the tourist invasion in many parts of the country, Mexicans are the most hospitable, most friendly and most gracious bunch I have ever met. After three and a half years it was high time to go back, if only to see my friends.
Coming back, though, was a weird experience. It was a little bit like seeing a nephew that you last saw as a cute ten year old boy and finding him a troubled teenager: broke, juvenile delincuent, a drug addiction and a serious disease on top. Mexicans acutely feel the impact of their triple crisis: the worldwide economic crisis, the swine flu scare and the raging drug wars.
As a country whose economy depends hugely on tourism and manufacturing for export, the current economic crisis has hit Mexico particularly hard. People loose their jobs en masse and they do not have much of a social safety net to fall back on. And after a close friend and traveling companion came down with flu symptoms, it became impossible to simply write off that scare like most Mexicans do. In any case, even if the disease were not real, its economic effects on the tourism industry definitely are.
What most shocked me, though, was the incredible level of violence that has swamped the entire country within the last couple of years. When I left, Mexico had a few hotspots of trouble along the border and in Mexico City but was otherwise a safe and civil country. Today, it is ravaged by what at time seems like full-out war: soldiers and federal police, armed to their teeth, in every city; shoot-outs in the middle of the city, even in tourist areas, for example in Veracruz just a few days before we passed through — a cabby told us about his colleague who was riddled by bullets despite being an innocent bystander; the friends who tell stories of a shooting in the very house next door; reading in the newspaper about clans actively killing off any witnesses who dare speak up against commonplace extortion of small and medium-sized businesses; the people who put off the purchase of a new car for fear of appearing a worthwhile kidnapping target. And this is not isolated to any particular area: with few exceptions and varying degrees of intensity, this affects the entire country.
Now, I do not want to discourage anyone from visiting this amazing country. Mexico is very well worth your time and money! As a tourist, you are very unlikely to be affected directly by any of these problems. But as soon as you start speaking to the locals, it’s impossible not to notice this extremely troubling development. I don’t have any easy solutions and, as it seems, neither does anyone else. But I do know that Mexico finds itself on a slippery slope. I hope they can stop their slide.
