Mexico: Bombs On The Beach

MEXICO

Bombs on the Beach

Spring breakers were avoiding Playa del Carmen in Mexico after the US State Department issued a security warning about the popular Caribbean resort.

“Passengers are definitely steering away and concerned,” Olga Ramudo, who runs a Florida travel agency, told USA Today.

Mexican tourism officials said the warning – which has since been lifted – was overblown. But American authorities issued the alert after a ferry exploded in February, injuring 25 people, and police found undetonated devices on another tourist boat.

Bombs on the beach are the last thing that Mexico needs these days.

Politically and economically, the country is facing twin threats, MarketWatch explained.

From without, negotiations with the US and Canada over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) could destabilize its economy.

From within, crime and corruption are major issues. Read this fascinating BBC story about Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a Mexico City suburb that is the most densely populated place in the country, to see the enormity of the problem.

Mexico and Canada have stuck to their guns in NAFTA negotiations, securing exemptions from US President Donald Trump’s recently imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum so as not to muddle one trade issue with the other, wrote Bloomberg.

But those changes also came amid what the New York Times described as a “marked increase in hostility from Washington” toward Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The multiple currents are likely to come to a head in July, when Mexican voters elect a new president.

Leftwing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the four-year-old National Regeneration Movement is currently in the lead – polling at 42 percent compared with 24 percent for former finance minister Jose Antonio Meade, the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Reuters reported. Many American pundits describe his potential victory as a populist nightmare, but according to the New York Review of Books, those threats are imagined.

PRI and President Enrique Peña Nieto, who cannot seek reelection because of term limits, have delivered economic failures and scandals.

As Reuters reported, Mexico’s attorney general, a PRI member, recently released a video that was clearly designed to besmirch Ricardo Anaya, a presidential candidate with the main opposition National Action Party (PAN). In the video, Anaya or someone in his campaign calls law enforcement officials “sons of bitches.” He dropped four percentage points to 23 percent in recent polls, Reuters noted.

But polls also indicated the video made the PRI candidate Meade look bad, too. People wondered why the attorney general possessed the footage in the first place, Bloomberg said.

That could turn the election into a contest between López Obrador and Anaya, meaning a PRI candidate would not be a serious contender for the first time in Mexico’s modern history.

It’s clear Mexicans want change. Once they secure it, maybe they and those north of the border will be able to more easily enjoy a margarita together.