Drug violence, political unrest in Mexican tourist spots make many rethink trips

By Mark Stevenson

ASSOCIATED PRESS

10:11 a.m. August 3, 2006

MEXICO CITY – A human head washes up on an Acapulco beach. Protesters hassle visitors at makeshift checkpoints in the once-quaint colonial city of Oaxaca. And in Mexico City, leftist demonstrators turn much of the elegant Reforma Avenue and Zocalo plaza into a sprawling, ragtag protest camp.

Mexico's growing political unrest and drug violence are making foreigners think twice about trips to Mexico, where tourism is the country's third-largest source of income, after oil exports and remittances sent home by migrants living in the United States. The country was already struggling after Hurricane Wilma hit the country's biggest tourist moneymaker, Cancun, last fall. The famous beach resort is still recovering.

Protesters who have taken the cultural hearts of southern Oaxaca city and the capital are angry with politicians, not tourists. The same goes for drug gangs in the Pacific resort of Acapulco, where human heads have been dumped in front of government offices and even in the glittering resort's famous bay.

But visitors are still caught in the middle, and hotels are being hit by cancellations of thousands of reservations.