Sinaloa, the northern Mexican state that spawned the country’s most fearsome drug cartel, hopes to lure tourists to rustic cabins in a rugged area infamous for opium fields and violent kingpins.
Few outsiders venture outside the state capital of Culiacan, but Sinaloa’s tourism minister Antonio Ibarra said the “El Perico” cabins, in a pine forested mountain area known for its rich wildlife, could attract adventure tourists who like outdoor activities.
In Sinaloa alone, about 600 people die each year in drug-related violence. Ibarra said the bloodshed should not affect tourism because the cartels were fighting each other, not the public.
Send me a postcard and let me know how you enjoy your vacation. I, uh, won’t be joining you.
…and good luck getting back in when you go to the border crossing. The guys hopping the fence are going to have an easier time than the morons that go to this place.
I think I would be willing to risk it just so I would be guaranteed not to be around other American tourists.
Most Americans I have met overseas are an embarassment.
You could also vacation in Iraq, Southern Lebanon, Afghanistan or Darfur. I wouldn’t advise it though.
I believe the guy. Having lived in South Florida for many years, despite all the press and the crime stats about the bloody violence of cocaine cowboys and the Marielitos, I never saw gunfight one. I did find a corpse floating in Biscayne Bay one morning, though, within eyeshot of Watson Island (where Crocket’s boat was docked on Miami Vice). Turned out he was a fisherman who had a heart attack and fell in.
I suspect that if you avoid a certain few areas which shouldn’t be too hard to identify, Sinaloa is probably nice – being relatively tourist-free and all. It’s true most such places; if you’re not in the drug trade and you don’t wander blindly into obviously dangerous areas, your life expectancy is not gonna go down enough to be a concern. When you hear about American tourist getting victimized, it’s usually a foregone conclusion that the victim in question did something typically American-style stupid.
What a great idea. An annual tourist invasion should have the drug lords outta there in no time. Cartels are no match for the Team Bel-tone tour bus filled with Golden Girls, 1000s of families with screaming kids and jacuzzi defiling young lovers. Just to speed up the process they could build several outlet malls. Making sure highway construction lags behind other growth so that it takes the kingpins 6 hours to drive to the local convenience store and back, should help also. For more detail see the link below.
http://www.dollywood.com/
You guys on this blog really hate Mexico and Mexicans, don’t you?
A corrupt, poverty- and crime-infested country that’s an economic drain on middle-class American taxpayers (tho not upper-class investors), I mean, what’s not to love.
Or maybe we should pretend that it’s indistinguishable from Switzerland, would that do it for you?
One of the more charming aspects of the house we own in Mexico, besides the beach in the front yard, is the nightly sport of watching, from the rear balcony, as the drug runners eerily make their way across the tidel basin behind the property to avoid the Federales on the main roads.
When my brother bought his place a couple blocks down the beach from ours, he kept having problems with the place being broken into and totally trashed. Also, in the middle of the night, creepy looking guys would appear out of the tidal basin and knock on his door. After saying something to the Mayor one day at lunch, he found out the former owner was an Architect from Mexico City, who had a sideline of being a halway house hideaway for drug runners. The trashing was being done by Federal agents(Mexico’s) that didn’t realize he no longer owned the property and the nightly visits were by runners who also didn’t know he had moved on. He was in prison for drug dealing, but had been arrested by local police and the Feds weren’t aware.
After the luch conversation my brother never had a problem again….no trashings or nightly visits…..which shows the even handedness of the local politico’s.
Sounds like Thailand or West Marin County
My Guatemalan wife and I have lived in Costa Rica for more than 35 years. We would both like to thank you for bringinng this beautiful Mexican state to our attention. We will be including Sinaloa in our 2008 gala Mexican itinerary. We’ll send you the link to the video. 🙂
#6 is probably a troll for the DNC.
#6…Stefan….I love the hell out of Mexico, one of the most beautiful places on Earth. And I was raised with Mexicans, went to University with Mexicans blah, blah.
My problem is that not enough Mexicans love Mexico as much as I do, and stay home to fight for a better life.