With its vibrant, colourful street life, rich culture, sunny climes, white-sand beaches, and succulent, spicy food, Mexico is – or at least should be – a perfect holiday destination. Yet these days, whenever I tell friends, family or colleagues back in Europe that I’m visiting Mexico, a hushed silence inevitably follows, as if I’d told them I were embarking on a week-long cultural tour of Syria, followed by a few days’ backpacking in the Afghan outback.
‘What about narcos, violence, kidnappings, robberies?’ they inevitably ask, as though that were all Mexico had to offer. You can hardly blame them: after all, that has been the dominant narrative of the last few years, packaged and sold in all its gory detail by our mainstream press. The inevitable result is that millions of foreign tourists have been discouraged from visiting the country out of fear of falling victim to crime. And millions, if not billions, of dollars have been lost along the way.
Mexican Tourism: An Essential Life Line Now Under Threat
For Mexico, a strong tourist sector is vital to its economy. According to one report, Mexico was the tenth most visited country on the planet in 2013. Its tourism industry is the third largest ‘official’ (i.e. non-criminal) source of revenues, behind oil and remittances, accounting for close to 9% of GDP and providing more than 2.5 million domestic jobs.
In the last couple of years, the sector’s prospects have – or at least had – begun to brighten as the international media’s ever-simplistic narrative shifted 180 degrees from one of total despair to one of unprecedented hope. Instead of bloody corpses hogging the limelight, all the talk was of the new President Enrique Pea Nieto’sambitious reform program to transform Mexico into a thriving, highly liberalised market economy.
This post was published at Wolf Street on January 1, 2015.
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