Posted on 05/07/2024 8:24:48 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Maybe you've heard that two Australians and an American were murdered in Mexico recently. The three men were on a surf vacation and apparently came across a group of carjackers who had no hesitation in murdering them.
The men who were killed were Australian brothers Callum Robinson, 33, his brother Jake, 30, and their American friend Jack Carter Rhoad, 30...
The three men were on a surfing trip in Baja California and were expected to check into an Airbnb in Rosarito on April 27 but never showed up, according to Debra Robinson, Callum and Jake’s mother...
Mexican authorities have determined that the three men were killed by thieves who were looking to steal their white pickup truck in order to sell its tires...
The bodies of the victims were found about 4 miles from where they were killed, just south of the city of Ensenada. A tent the men were staying in, as well as their burned-out truck, was found nearby.
It's a tragic story for the families involved but also not a very surprising one in this part of the world. In fact, the 50 foot deep well where the bodies of the three men were found also contained another body, unrelated to this case. The situation is bad enough that last year the State Department put out a warning to Americans about visiting parts of Mexico. The warning advised that Americans not travel to six states within Mexico and reconsider travel to seven other states including Baja.
The only really surprising thing about the murdered tourists is that they were found. Kidnapping and disappearances are very common in Mexico but resolution of these cases is relatively rare. As of last November there were 113,275 people on the missing persons registry maintained by the government. But Mexican President ALMO ordered an audit which critics saw as a way to bring the numbers down without actually solving the cases.
When López Obrador came to office in 2018 as a leftist reformer promising to reduce crime and violence, the official number of disappeared was about 53,000. His administration boosted funding for the government search commission set up to help find them.
But by 2022, the total topped 100,000. López Obrador, who often cites “other data” when disputing statistics he doesn’t like, began to express doubts about the veracity of the numbers. He ordered an exhaustive new census of the disappeared...
In December, the government released the results: Of the more than 110,964 people officially listed as disappeared as of August, only about 11% could be corroborated as missing.
But the same article opens with the story of a mother whose son disappeared in 2020. She got a call from the auditors working on the list.
“We have information that your brother has appeared,” he told her. “We would like to have an interview with him.”
That was news to her. She checked with relatives, her brother’s friends, his old co-workers, the police and the hospital where he worked in the port city of Veracruz. No one had seen or heard from Osvaldo Julián García Colorado since October 2020.
“It was all a lie. My brother is still disappeared,” she said. “And everything was the same.”
Karla Quintana, the lawyer who headed the search for the missing quit her job last August. She had nothing good to say about ALMO's audit.
"The intent is, clearly and regrettably, to lower the numbers of disappeared people" without them necessarily having been found, Karla Quintana, a long-time human rights expert, said during a university seminar last week.
Quintana also said she resigned from her post as director of the search commission in August because she opposes the review and planned changes to the registry. It's unclear what those changes will be when the review is over.
The bottom line is that the real situation is probably even worse than the numbers suggest and it seems to still be growing.
In 2017, state prosecutors opened about 760 disappearance investigations in Baja California. In five years, the number jumped more than threefold, according to Elementa DDHH.
“This is an ongoing phenomenon, and it’s increasing exponentially,” said Ms. Demichelis, adding that several factors are contributing to the worsening disappearance crisis in Baja California, such as drug trafficking, internal displacement, migration and gender violence.
Most of the missing are either Mexican nationals or migrants passing through, but as of last year there were at least 558 Americans missing in Mexico. If you choose to visit parts of Mexico at this point, you are taking a real risk.
RE: More than 40 million people visit Mexico annually.
I was one of them last year. Mexico is a VERY BIG country. The most dangerous parts are those in the North, near the US border. We went to Cancun and surrounding areas ( WAY DOWN SOUTH of Mexico City, over 2,000 miles from the US border).
Didn’t feel unsafe at all.
How about we plant about a 60 mile deep minefield to keep Mexico in Mexico?
I always saw rifle toting security people at cruise ports in western Mexico. Going to visit Costa Maya and Cancun this month on a cruise.
Too late. Half of Mexico is already here.
Same deal in Baltimore, Chicago or Memphis.
Didn’t feel unsafe at all.
I went to Mexico City. I felt safer there than some of the American cities I've been to.
The murder rate in DC is quite a bit higher than in Mexico City.
In Hawaii, you can lease the land, but seldom buy it. When you can actually it outright, the process is termed “fee simple.”
We go to Mexico every year. The tourist resorts where we stay in Nuevo Vallarta and Cancun are extremely safe. In fact there is a greater chance that I will be victim of armed robbery or carjacking in my daily commute across Oakland, or perhaps assaulted walking the streets of downtown SF. There have also been random shootings on local freeways.
Mexico is a narco-state but you can largely avoid the violence by exercising some care. I would never venture into Tijuana (TJ) these days much less go camping south of Ensenada. Not blaming the victims, but this was avoidable.
I used to surf K-55 in Baja many times.....Camped on the beach.....Many many years ago
Many years ago I traveled in Mexico with no fear. There was the occasional bribe (la modridta) to make things right. I am a white boy that speaks Spanish and married to a Mexican national now an USA citizen for over 40 years. We no longer drive in Mexico as it is to dangerous. We will fly into a resort center where they have adequate security.
Do not drive into Mexico. It is dangerous.
A total toilet.
I have a friend in Mazatlan. He says, in his gated community, that it’s safe.
Maybe it is at the moment.
I used to go to Aculpoco. Now it’s a drug cartel haven.
They are already here, thanks to FJB, his comrades, and the useful idiots in the Republican party.
Amlo might be fiddling the numbers. No body, no crime. Would be amusing, but unsurprising if the guy took a direct hand, by having a goon squad from among the cartels who have him on payroll cremate or bury remains from homicide scenes, so as to keep the stats in the capital pristine.
This has spurred investigators to take a closer look at the city’s success story.
“I think it’s quite probable that lots of the people who disappeared have in reality been murdered,” said Elena Azaola, an academic and member of the citizen council for the Search Commission in Mexico City. “And these homicides are not being counted.”
Azaola’s research underlines that the official data on homicides and disappearances is so fragmented and inconsistent that it is hard to draw any conclusions with confidence.
Mexico’s forensic service, its National Geography and Statistics Institute and the National Public Security System each compile their own homicide tallies – and most years those totals differ by hundreds.
Meanwhile, every year since 2016, the cause of between 25 and 47% of violent deaths has not been identified, making it difficult to know if they were homicides, suicides or accidents. This proportion is far higher in Mexico City than anywhere else in the country, for reasons that are unclear.]
The case began when a Mexican drug lawyer working as an informant for the DEA reported in 2010 that he had participated in the meeting at which the donations were first negotiated, officials said. He reported having given most of the agreed-on funds to an operative in López Obrador’s 2006 campaign, Mauricio Soto Caballero. The informant then enticed Soto to come in on a small-time cocaine deal. DEA agents arrested Soto in McAllen, Texas, and he agreed to work undercover for the Americans to stay out of federal prison.
Ultimately, three other witnesses, including Soto, confirmed the drug lawyer’s account to the DEA, officials said. To gather more evidence for a possible corruption case, the DEA had Soto surreptitiously record two conversations with the man to whom he said he had given most of the traffickers’ money, Nicolás Mollinedo Bastar, one of López Obrador’s closest aides.
Justice Department prosecutors reviewed the tapes and found them incriminating but not decisive, people familiar with the case said. DEA agents wanted to go forward with a more elaborate sting operation inside Mexico, but DOJ officials rejected that plan in late 2011, in part over concerns that even a successful prosecution would be viewed by Mexicans as egregious American meddling in their politics.]
[I went to Mexico City. I felt safer there than some of the American cities I’ve been to.]
I’ll be making another trip with my family in July to Cancun. We stay in the hotel zone and haven’t had a problem. Not gonna venture off the tourist path. That’s where trouble could find you.
I've never understood why anyone would want to go to Mexico. Even prior to Brandon's open border, why would you spend good money to go to a country where every day large numbers of people who actually live there literally risk their lives trying to get out?
I spend the winters in the Zona Maya, in a small village. I am the only gringo. I have never ever had any problems. Quintana Roo has been off the drug trafficking maps because the drug trade is run by the police, and as long as you are just a tourist you have no problems. Tulum has been over-run with the jet set and NYC crowd, but if you get out of the Riviera Maya and go inland it is very very nice. I would rather spend a month there than Hawaii. A thousand bucks in Hawaii lasts a couple days. In Mexico it lasts a month.
We’re scheduled for a 14-day Circle Caribbean cruise in December. I’m leery when it comes to in-port tours, especially some that appear to be off the beaten path. And pirates used to be a problem, but I haven’t heard anything about that lately.
Sometimes, it’s good to just stay on board and enjoy the quieter ship and the scenery. Or walk around the shops at the port. I used to pick up antibiotics at farmacias, but with fentanyl being an issue now, I guess I won’t be doing that.
“I think I heard there is something similar in Hawaii .”
True. IIRC, it’s “land lease” vs “fee simple”, and fee simple is rare. (We left there in the ‘90s so I’m not sure how things are now.)
That can happen in the USA, too. We were close to buying a house on a pretty lake in the southern tier of NYS. My cousin who lives in the area warned us to check to see about the land. We learned that you can buy the house, but the land belongs to the Indian tribe in that area. It seemed weird to us, so we passed on the deal.
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