For
over 100 years, the people of the United States have visited Tijuana
for its charms. Door after door along Tijuana’s Avenida
Revolucion is filled with laughter and odd smells that some say
are even intoxicating.
Everywhere
in Tijuana there are Tijuana policeman. The city is of course,
absolutely safe. Guns are outlawed in Mexico so crime must be
nonexistent. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has reported
that even 80 percent of police officers, prosecutors and judges
in Tijuana and in the state of Baja California are on a drug cartel
payroll.
“Crime”
is a bad word in Mexico and only the mean spirited would utter
such a word in the same sentence as “Tijuana.” There
are, however, whispers about kidnappings of hundreds of people
a year in the city and the quiet exchanges of huge bundles of
cash.
Body
guards look good but you can’t always be surrounded by six
of them. Sanyo discovered this when their local manager, Mamoru
Konno, was suddenly vacuumed from a Tijuana street. He was held
for ten days by local taxi drivers until Sanyo paid the $2 million.
His adventure reached the media only because the kidnapping had
been orchestrated by rank amateurs.
Mexican
singer Vicente Fernandez moved his entire family from Mexico to
San Antonio, Texas, after paying off the kidnappers to get most
of his son back in one piece. The other piece had been sent earlier
to prove that the kidnappers actually had the child. "Artists"
are not the only people escaping the violence. In Tijuana, it's
become a survival strategy to live in the USA.
Spain
now warns its citizens about traveling to Mexico after eight of
its citizens were kidnapped and six of them died.
Of
course, then when is “kidnapping” really kidnapping?
Here in Tijuana being trapped in a taxi for hours, beaten nearly
to death, and your credit cards and ATM cards used while you are
so claustrophobically ensconced isn’t kidnapping. They let
you go.
Kidnapping
is a quick cash generator for many in the city and so it is best
to only travel on local toll roads and not the “romantic
close-to-the-people dusty roads” with the temporary blockades
and torches (torches only after sundown). The U.S. Embassy keeps
lists of such incidents and they include robbery, kidnapping,
and even the murder of an Egyptian diplomat.
The
U.S. Embassy advises U.S. citizens not to hitchhike or accept
rides
from
or offer rides to strangers here because it vastly complicates
their work day and the shipping of bodies back to the United States
requires a lot of paperwork.
Sometimes
all this action spatters northwards over the border. Thanks to
the double barrrier along much of the local urban border area
the cross-border spatterings are limited.
