Mexican President Calderon Maintains Mexico is Safe for Tourists to Visit

Mexican President Calderon Maintains Mexico is Safe for Tourists to Visit

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, interviewed by travel journalist Peter Greenberg last week during a session at the World Travel & Tourism’s Global Travel & Tourism Summit in Las Vegas, took the opportunity to reiterate that Mexico is safe destination for tourists despite the perception in the market about drug wars and violence in the country.

“We are working very hard prosecuting criminals, building our local and federal police force, building a community and working in the community,” Calderon said. “We are advancing a new institutional framework for Mexico. But the crime itself is not affecting international tourists.”

Calderon said Mexico had received more than 23 million tourists last year without any incidents affecting them. He also pointed out a statistic that he has used in the past, noting that Mexico had only 13 homicides per 100,000 people, a rate that is much lower than such cities in the U.S. as Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, and, he said, lower than Puerto Rico as well.

Calderon also pointed out that the area where most of the drug violence is occurring is thousands of miles away from the main tourist zones of Mexico. “We are a very diverse country with rainforests, desert, coastline....and the most beautiful in the world,” he said. The Mexican president also said he was working together with the U.S. to a better and safer border, reinforcing the police, getting more cooperation from American authorities, getting more training for police and obtaining state of the art technology to secure the borders and fight the drug cartels.

Calderon also said one of the country’s challenges is that the drug gangs can buy guns from United States. “We have seized more than 100,000 weapons in four years, 85 percent bought in U.S.,” he said “I'm sure all those weapons are not going into hands of good American citizens. The point is if you want to analyze the source of the violence, it started at the moment when the assault weapons ban expired [in the U.S.]. The criminals started to get more powerful. We are dealing with them…but that is part of the problem. I told President Obama about this and he realized how important it is to address this problem.”

At the same time, Calderon said Mexico is making progress against the drug gangs. “My government published a list of the 37 most wanted criminals,” he said. “In the last two years we put in jail or killed 20 of them…we are building legal institutions in order to have best institutions in Mexico. We are rebuilding the federal police into a professional, state of the art force of engineers, attorneys, lawyers. My goal is to do the same in all the 32 states in the country.”

Calderon said Mexico has made 2011 the year of tourism. Mexico is investing $50 billion in infrastructure, including new highways throughout the country that allow better access to tourism sites, as well as new and expanded airports. For example, a second runway has been built in Cancun and a new airport will open in the Riviera Maya. Mexico also is promoting tourism services at both the federal and local government levels, as well as the private sector.

Despite the perception of violence caused by the war against the drug gangs, Calderon said tourism actually increased 6 percent in 2010. Indeed, tourism from the U.S. increase 10 percent. Mexico’s goal, according to Calderon, is to be among the top five destinations in the world by 2020. “There are very few cases of crime and violence,” the president reiterated. “Mexico is a safe place to visit. We have problems but we are dealing with it.”