Mexico – Inhabit Your Dreams

A few weeks ago, I published a personal experience article, “Is It Safe To Visit Mexico?“. Being a very “hot topic,” it received thousands of hits and some lively comments, mostly appreciating the balanced picture I presented. Here, In his “Notes from the Field,” (March 8, 2011), Simon Black, the international business-savvy “Sovereign Man”, dives deeper into the topic in his report from Merida, Mexico. I have a great deal of respect for Simon’s insights and opinions. You can read this article and many more by Sovereign Man at: http://www.sovereignman.com/expat/mexicos-biggest-problem-is-the-us-government/

I’m leaving Mexico.

No, it’s not because I’ve been robbed, beaten, or kidnapped by the drug cartels. And it’s not because some corrupt policias tried to shake me down, because I contracted swine flu, or that beheaded bodies were left in the street outside of my hotel.

Honestly, I’m really enjoying it down here and would like to stay, but I have some important meetings in New York later this week, so I will unfortunately be headed north to brave the cold weather and even colder reception at US immigration.

Before I leave Mexico, though, I want to address the elephant in the room: Mexico’s infamous drug war, probably the most sensationalized, misunderstood issues played out in North American media, right between Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan.

The bottom line is that two governments decided long ago that drugs are a problem and that they need to do something about it. On one hand, the Mexican government expects the US to reduce demand, and on the other hand, the US government expects Mexico to curtail supply.

There are three major problems with this logic.

First is that the governments think they can force the reduction of something that literally grows on trees. Marijuana and cocaine are more easily grown than Ben Bernanke’s balance sheet– they’d have better luck reducing the supply of stupidity and hypocrisy in Washington.

What most people don’t realize is that they’ve carpet-bombed half of Colombia with herbicides so nasty (thank you, Monsanto) that they make Agent Orange look like a stick of deodorant. And yet, the cartels still find plenty of land to increase their productive capacity.

Fighting a multi-decade war against plants is just a dumb idea, ranking up there with other such gems as spending our way out of recession, borrowing our way out of debt, and invading other countries to reduce hatred against America.

The second problem is that these governments actually expect to be able to suppress demand. This is nonsense.

There will always be certain personalities who will seek out the high of recreational drugs despite the consequences. Similarly, there are certain personalities who will gamble despite the losses, seek adrenaline rushes despite the risks, or eat Big Macs despite what the bathroom scale says.

To those personalities, their desires are as natural as the instinct to breathe.

There’s no great mystery in the world about the effects of recreational drugs. As dealers say, ‘drugs sell themselves’. Drug users accept the risks because they think the benefits are greater, or they’re psychologically and/or chemically addicted to the product.

This is no different than people who’ve become addicted to aspartame (Diet Coke), prescription pills, sex, booze, exercise, cigarettes, work, shopping, anger, pain, video games, junk food, etc. The chemical and psychological dependencies don’t vanish just because the government decrees it.

The third problem is that the governments even began with the false premise that recreational drugs are a problem and should be prohibited. This is intellectually dishonest: governments sanction all sorts of drug use.

The US government says, for example, that nicotine, high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, alcohol, Viagra, aspartame, Prozac, and Yellow #5 are OK, but raw milk, Cuban cigars, marijuana, human growth hormone, and chocolate Kinder eggs are not OK.

Look, I’m not trying to be anti-alcohol or pro-Kinder egg, but the notion that government agencies should be able to choose which substances we grown adults are and are not allowed to buy and ingest is rather anachronistic. And they do a horrible job at it anyhow.

The FDA is constantly having to recall products that it had approved, frequently reversing its own GRAS (generally regarded as safe) decisions. Remember Vioxx? Stevia? Avastin? Ephedra?

The agency is filled with pencil-pushing bureaucrats who endlessly circulate position papers, dragging on the approval process for potentially life-saving drugs so that someone who’s already dying of cancer won’t have an adverse reaction.

It’s a fundamental injustice when a corrupt bureaucracy swayed by powerful lobby groups is able to decide what we can put in our own bodies, and then fails miserably at enforcing its own vacuous regulations.

The end result of this fallacy has been playing out in Mexico. Yes, there is violence and crime in Mexico related to the business of transporting and distributing recreational drugs. The violence is often portrayed in the media as ‘turf wars’ between competing cartels.

This sounds good, but it’s not really true. There are far more customers out there than the cartels can possibly supply. Fighting for demand is not the issue… it’s getting supply to the customers.

As such, cartels are either duking it out with each other over key supply routes (which is why most of the violence is in the border towns), or they’re battling the government forces trying to interdict them.

Funny thing, Pfizer and Lily don’t shoot it out in the streets over shelf space for Viagra vs. Cialis. War is bad for business; it’s prohibition that induces armed defense of logistics hubs and production facilities.

The real scourge on Mexican society isn’t ‘turf war’ shoot outs, but the de facto police state that now exists.

In daily life, the chances of the average Mexican coming into contact with drug-related crime or violence is very low. The chances of being harassed or disrupted by government paramilitaries brandishing automatic weapons in full combat gear is extremely high.

To give you an example, I woke up at our beach home in Tulum last week to a squad of Mexican military patrolling the beach in formation, their weapons ‘at the ready.’ Later in the day they set up check points on the road to harass anyone who wasn’t white.

Airports are even worse– multiple baggage searches, pat downs, drug dogs, roving infantry squads… all making it more difficult for tourists and legitimate travelers to get in and out of the country.

This is the fundamental issue in Mexico– billions of dollars from the US are fueling a war on plants and human nature fuels violence and creates a police state.

The violence (mostly localized in border towns) will continue until these countries finally go broke, capitulate, and begin the embarrassing process of reexamining their policies.

Simon Black
Senior Editor, SovereignMan.com

first published at the group travel blog Your Life Is A Trip

San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico

“Aren’t you afraid?” and “Isn’t it dangerous?” These were the consistent questions posed by friends and family upon hearing I had booked a trip to Mexico. From my standpoint, it was a matter of avoiding winter’s cold, pursuing Spanish language studies and visiting American friends in San Miguel de Allende, a picturesque colonial city located in Mexico’s central state of Guanajuato.

Without any fear I flew from Albuquerque to Leon-Guanajuato Airport, via Houston, avoiding any border violence issues, and a 90-minute shuttle bus ride delivered me to this established and renowned cultural enclave of ex-pats and snowbirds. But the question of danger and safety in Mexico is not an easy or simple one to answer.

There is violence in Mexico, as everywhere. I recall an Australian friend who, landing in L.A. for his first trip to the U.S., called to ask if he should buy a gun – a reasonable question given the FBI estimate of over 200 million privately-owned firearms.

Americans – with our recent history of internal terrorism (Oklahoma City), external terrorism (September 11th), intentional public shootings (Tucson supermarket), serial murderers, drive-by shootings, rapes and other domestic violence; with handgun murders a daily occurrence in U.S. cities, and the largest prison population in the world – are hardly in a position to point fingers at the dangers abroad.

However, there is something different happening in Mexico. At the core are not just anger, political intolerance, insanity and psychopathic behavior, but money and turf war power, with illegal drugs as the medium.

Thirty years ago, when I lived and traveled in Mexico for six months, handguns were illegal and even the police were gunless. At that time, Mexico was an extremely safe place in regard to violent crime. Corruption, usually in the form of bribes to officials, was a known, accepted and non-violent interaction. That was two generations ago and the world has changed in countless ways.

Like violence, drugs have always been a part of the human story. But it is economic policy that is driving the chaos and fear created by the narcotrafficantes, who are controlled by powerful drug lord families, or “organizations”. It is akin to the days of Prohibition and the likes of Al Capone. While most of the violence is between warring gangs, innocent people can get caught in the crossfire and, recently, it is believed that the first U.S. officials and their families have been targeted and murdered. But even this is not a complete picture of the spreading lawlessness that is gripping parts of Mexico.

An estimated 30,000 people have been killed in this drug-related violence since 2006; 6,000 in Ciudad Juarez alone. According to author and journalist Charles Bowden, “There is no serious War on Drugs. Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs.”

Fear begets fear and, with high employment and steeply rising prices of essential goods, it is understandable that many young men are drawn to the possibility of ensuring the well being of their families through enlisting in one army or another of this drug war. They have nothing else to do, nothing to lose, and there is the hope of money being made.

For the past few weeks, while comfortably residing in the friendly, culturally-rich enclave of San Miguel de Allende’s 10,000 ex-pats and snowbird visitors (in a city of about 80,000), I’ve tried to grasp the dangers and concerns, real or imagined. Here, long-time American and Canadian residents continue to feel safe from the drug war. The now regular cases of vandalism, assaults and robberies have engendered a greater degree of cautiousness and common sense measures but, overall, the smaller cities and villages in central Mexico have not seen evidence of drug war violence.

Clearly this is not the case along the border – Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Nogales, and Matamoros, in the states of Nuevo Leon, Guerrero, Sinaloa, Michoacan, and Durango. According to the U.S. State Department, “Other metropolitan areas have lower, but still serious, levels of crime. The low rates of apprehension and conviction of criminals also contribute to Mexico’s high crime rate… The Mexican government makes a considerable effort to protect U.S. citizens and other visitors traveling to major tourist destinations.”

Indeed, tourism is among Mexico’s top three economic generators, along with oil exports and Mexicans working abroad who send home billions of dollars each year to their families, although that has been diminishing with issues of legality and far fewer jobs abroad.

Mexico, the 11th largest economy in the world and about three times the size of Texas, is a vast and complex country, therefore lumping together all places is absurd. As a tourist to major destinations, you would not likely encounter any evidence of the drug wars, and such violence is primarily between the criminal elements. Like elsewhere in the world, most people are decent, law abiding and peaceful citizens who want nothing of this madness in their communities but are, for now, helpless to counteract the organized crime and violence.

For example, a young man living in San Miguel Allende told me that his parents, in Mexico’s wealthiest and second largest city of Monterrey, have increased security measures. They stopped going out at night, instead entertaining friends at home in their upper-middle class suburb. They, and many of their neighbors, have traded late-model SUVs for less conspicuous cars. Even so, there have been incidents of large trucks, commandeered by narcotrafficos, that block streets, ransack stores, sometimes take hostages for ransom, and otherwise terrorize residents.

As military efforts have resulted in nothing but escalated violence, the Mexican government is seriously considering decriminalization and legalization for marijuana. However, like many logical solutions, there are enormous economic and political factors at play and the future of such initiatives remains uncertain.

Is it safe to visit the resorts and popular tourists destinations, like Puerto Vallarta, Ixtapa, Playa del Carmen, San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato? Probably as safe as it has ever been. The decent, kind-hearted Mexicans, who know the value of tourism, welcome you.

My advice? Avoid driving anywhere near the borders and never drive at night; stay in tourist-populated areas; do not count on police protection (I am told they can be targets themselves, or related to the bad guys); steer clear of any demonstrations or dubious situations; do not carry large sums of money and always have change in local currency for taxi rides and small purchases; be aware of your surroundings, as you should no matter where; and continue to visit and enjoy the diverse scenery, culture, food, climate and genuine hospitality of Mexico.

Aysha Griffin is a travel writer, editor and business/relationship coach. Her blog is: www.InhabitYourDreams.com.

Posts tagged Mexico

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