In early 2020, two American travellers were driving through Mexico’s densely forested Tabasco region towards the coastal tourist hub of Cancún when their car was stopped by men with guns.
In a dashcam video that went viral last year, the gunmen appear to question the Americans in Spanish before realising they are just tourists. “No problem, no problem,” says one gunman in English, putting a hand on the driver’s shoulder and reaching across him to shake his passenger’s hand.
The alleged incident illustrates the fraught situation facing foreigners hoping to visit Mexico. While the country’s notorious criminal gangs rarely target travellers directly, the bloody conflicts between them appear to be spreading into major tourist areas.
On Wednesday, the US State Department widened its “do not travel” warning to cover six of Mexico’s 31 states and urged Americans do “reconsider travel” to 11 more after a wave of orchestrated violence by criminal cartels across the country.
In one week, civilians were murdered and cars and buildings burned all along the US-Mexico border, including in the popular travel destination of Tijuana.
“Until recently, my advice has been that I definitely wouldn’t cancel my trip to Mexico because of reports of violence,” Ken Bombace, a former US military intelligence officer whose company Global Threat Solutions provides bodyguards for travellers, tells The Independent.
“However, it seems that the violence between cartels has been increasingly spilling into the areas most often visited by tourists… and tourists have even fallen victim to feuding gang members in areas that were often thought to be off limits to the cartels, such as hotels, resorts and restaurants.”
For foreigners, and for the millions of Mexicans who rely on tourism for their income, it raises the question of how safe it is now to be a tourist in Mexico.
Cartels wreak havoc across Mexico in week of ‘narco-terrorism’
Tourism will account for about 8.3 per cent of Mexico’s GDP in 2022, according to the Mexican federal government, contributing $35bn in US dollars. Last year around 31 million foreigners visited the country, following a steep downtown during the early Covid-19 pandemic.
A huge share of that business comes from the US, whose citizens made up 81 per cent of all arrivals in Mexico via air between January and August last year.
In the central states of Jalisco and Guanajuato, more than two dozen convenience stores and numerous cars and buses were set on fire in what
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