One evening a few weeks ago I was walking around Campeche, a mellow seaside city on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. The taco restaurants in the San Martin neighborhood were crowded with families. Members of a youth group played pool outside the cathedral. Teenagers made out sitting on the seawall, oblivious to passing joggers. Scenes like these are not unique. They unfold every evening in cities and towns across Mexico.
Americans could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, however. Here’s a sampling of major U.S. newspaper headlines from the last week: “Mexico violence claims another member of peace movement;” “Mexico: Gunmen Attack Ambulance, 4 Dead;” and “Despite army takeover, fear strong in Mexican town.”
It’s no wonder that when I tell even well-traveled Americans that I plan to go to Mexico these days, the first question is usually, “Is it safe?” They don’t ask that about other places where Americans seek fun in the sun, even ones with much higher homicide rates. In Mexico, 18 people out of 100,000 were murdered in 2010. That’s well behind the Dominican Republic, where the rate is 25, the Bahamas, where it’s 28, and Jamaica, where it’s a whopping 52. In fact, all three of those places have benefited from the slump in tourism to Mexico. While they still represent banana boats and swim-up bars, the Mexico of the popular American imagination has gone from tequila and sombreros to drugs and decapitations.
The second perception isn’t wrong. Violence perpetrated by warring drug cartels takes place daily, especially across the northern states, and some 40,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug violence since 2006. Some of it is horrifically imaginative. But there’s another Mexico, too.
In several days driving around the Yucatán, it was easy to forget that this was the same country that gets such a bad rap next door. In the town of Champotón, across the street from the docks, I ate shrimp tacos for breakfast while workmen loaded fresh octopus onto trucks. In the Calakmul biosphere reserve, I met teenagers with more knowledge of their own cultural and ecological heritage than most of their peers anywhere; they had studied under a government project designed to boost ecotourism and local employment. “There’s no demand for drugs around here, so there are no gangs,” said Erik, a Campeche native who guides visitors to the Mayan ruins.
Such encounters don’t represent an entire nation. But no one thing can, which is why the stories we read in the U.S. press everyday deserve a little more context.
For instance: The U.S. State Department estimates that more than a third of U.S. citizens killed in Mexico in 2010 were killed in just two cities on the U.S. border, Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. Only nine of Mexico’s 31 states account for the high rate of death due to violent crime. In the state of Yucatán, the homicide rate is two per 100,000, on par with the state of Maine’s. Just as Washington — where the homicide rate is 24 per 100,000 — is not Maine, Ciudad Juarez is not Yucatán.
Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that Mexico’s real GDP growth was 4 percent for 2011, more than double the United States’ feeble 1.7 percent. Mexico’s unemployment rate has nudged down a little since its peak of 5.8 percent in the third quarter of 2009 to 5.5 percent in the second quarter of this year. The U.S. rate has also fallen, but remains at 8.6 percent.
Indicators like these partially account for why fewer Mexicans want to leave these days. The number of Mexicans who think emigrants to the United States have a better life than those who stay home has fallen in the last two years, from 57 percent in 2009 to 44 percent this year, according to a survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project. And the number who think Mexicans who move north actually have it worse is on the rise, up from 14 percent in 2009 to 22 percent in 2011.
None of that is to ignore the fact that the Mexican government is fighting a deadly and powerful enemy in the cartels that sell illegal drugs to the American market. But it’s important to keep both Mexicos in mind.
There’s more at stake here than missing out on a nice holiday due to misplaced fear. The persistent focus on the negative also has an effect within the United States. Even as fewer Mexicans wish to leave home, U.S. immigration policy is becoming increasingly hysterical. Alabama has now achieved the dubious distinction of having the most draconian immigration law in the country, requiring proof of legal status for “any transaction between a person and the state or a political subdivision of the state,” and requiring public schools to verify the immigration status of students.
The message that Mexico is a black hole of violence, inhabited by drug lords and desperate refugees, helps make such dehumanizing proposals palatable. Which is why it’s important to witness the other side — if at all possible, firsthand.
Americans could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, however. Here’s a sampling of major U.S. newspaper headlines from the last week: “Mexico violence claims another member of peace movement;” “Mexico: Gunmen Attack Ambulance, 4 Dead;” and “Despite army takeover, fear strong in Mexican town.”
It’s no wonder that when I tell even well-traveled Americans that I plan to go to Mexico these days, the first question is usually, “Is it safe?” They don’t ask that about other places where Americans seek fun in the sun, even ones with much higher homicide rates. In Mexico, 18 people out of 100,000 were murdered in 2010. That’s well behind the Dominican Republic, where the rate is 25, the Bahamas, where it’s 28, and Jamaica, where it’s a whopping 52. In fact, all three of those places have benefited from the slump in tourism to Mexico. While they still represent banana boats and swim-up bars, the Mexico of the popular American imagination has gone from tequila and sombreros to drugs and decapitations.
The second perception isn’t wrong. Violence perpetrated by warring drug cartels takes place daily, especially across the northern states, and some 40,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug violence since 2006. Some of it is horrifically imaginative. But there’s another Mexico, too.
In several days driving around the Yucatán, it was easy to forget that this was the same country that gets such a bad rap next door. In the town of Champotón, across the street from the docks, I ate shrimp tacos for breakfast while workmen loaded fresh octopus onto trucks. In the Calakmul biosphere reserve, I met teenagers with more knowledge of their own cultural and ecological heritage than most of their peers anywhere; they had studied under a government project designed to boost ecotourism and local employment. “There’s no demand for drugs around here, so there are no gangs,” said Erik, a Campeche native who guides visitors to the Mayan ruins.
Such encounters don’t represent an entire nation. But no one thing can, which is why the stories we read in the U.S. press everyday deserve a little more context.
For instance: The U.S. State Department estimates that more than a third of U.S. citizens killed in Mexico in 2010 were killed in just two cities on the U.S. border, Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. Only nine of Mexico’s 31 states account for the high rate of death due to violent crime. In the state of Yucatán, the homicide rate is two per 100,000, on par with the state of Maine’s. Just as Washington — where the homicide rate is 24 per 100,000 — is not Maine, Ciudad Juarez is not Yucatán.
Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that Mexico’s real GDP growth was 4 percent for 2011, more than double the United States’ feeble 1.7 percent. Mexico’s unemployment rate has nudged down a little since its peak of 5.8 percent in the third quarter of 2009 to 5.5 percent in the second quarter of this year. The U.S. rate has also fallen, but remains at 8.6 percent.
Indicators like these partially account for why fewer Mexicans want to leave these days. The number of Mexicans who think emigrants to the United States have a better life than those who stay home has fallen in the last two years, from 57 percent in 2009 to 44 percent this year, according to a survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project. And the number who think Mexicans who move north actually have it worse is on the rise, up from 14 percent in 2009 to 22 percent in 2011.
None of that is to ignore the fact that the Mexican government is fighting a deadly and powerful enemy in the cartels that sell illegal drugs to the American market. But it’s important to keep both Mexicos in mind.
There’s more at stake here than missing out on a nice holiday due to misplaced fear. The persistent focus on the negative also has an effect within the United States. Even as fewer Mexicans wish to leave home, U.S. immigration policy is becoming increasingly hysterical. Alabama has now achieved the dubious distinction of having the most draconian immigration law in the country, requiring proof of legal status for “any transaction between a person and the state or a political subdivision of the state,” and requiring public schools to verify the immigration status of students.
The message that Mexico is a black hole of violence, inhabited by drug lords and desperate refugees, helps make such dehumanizing proposals palatable. Which is why it’s important to witness the other side — if at all possible, firsthand.
