Let caution be your guide

Mexico City —  BUSINESSMEN kidnapped off the streets of Tijuana. Grenade attacks against police in the popular West Coast beach resort area of Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo. Bomb attacks in Mexico City. Vigilante shootings and trash-strewn plazas in the once postcard-perfect southern city of Oaxaca.

It’s been a tough year in Mexico, but does that mean it’s a bad time to be a tourist here?

Not necessarily. Still, visitors should choose their destinations carefully, especially those away from the major tourist zones.

Traveling in Mexico always has required a certain prudence beyond the obligatory caveats about not drinking the tap water. Visitors should avoid interstate highways and rural back roads late at night. They shouldn’t hail taxis off the street in Mexico City. And it’s wise to preface any request with por favor. Simple courtesy counts for a lot here.

But a spate of killings and kidnappings, political crises and the aftershock of Hurricane Wilma (see story below) over the last few months have combined to make 2006 the Year of Traveling Cautiously south of the border.

The hardest-hit region has been the city of Oaxaca, capital of Oaxaca state, about 230 miles southeast of Mexico City.

Oaxaca, famed for its rich native cuisine and drink (mole, mescal), vibrant indigenous art (rugs, black pottery, whimsical carved figurines) and superb archeological sites at Monte Alban and elsewhere, has been caught since May in a bitter political showdown pitting 70,000 striking teachers and their supporters against the state’s governor, Ulises Ruiz.

For several months, the teachers and their allies occupied the city’s zocalo, or central plaza, erecting tents and tarps and sealing off many surrounding streets with rock and sheet-metal barricades. On June 14, Ruiz sent police, sparking a bloody melee.

Violence escalated in the weeks that followed as the protesters dug in behind their roadblocks. The annual Guelaguetza festival in July, one of Mexico’s most spectacular regional cultural showcases, was canceled. Roving bands of vigilantes supporting the governor allegedly took part in drive-by shootings against the demonstrators. At least a dozen people have been killed in the conflict, including a U.S. activist who was working there as a journalist.

At the end of October, Mexican President Vicente Fox sent about 4,000 federal police into Oaxaca to remove the barricades and try to retake control of the city. As of the Travel section’s deadline Tuesday, protesters and police were still battling.

Meanwhile, central Oaxaca has been turned into a virtual combat zone, covered with graffiti and debris and filled with the hulks of burned-out cars and buses. Many local businesses, restaurants and hotels have shut down as the tourist economy has tumbled. On Oct. 30, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico updated its warning to U.S. citizens to “avoid any travel to Oaxaca City, and if they must travel there, they should exercise caution throughout the state of Oaxaca.” The U.S. State Department made a similar announcement the same day. Canada’s corresponding agency, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, and the embassies of Britain, France and Germany also have issued advisories against all travel to Oaxaca.

Even if the standoff is resolved soon, it probably will take some time for Oaxaca to return to tranquillity.

On Nov. 1, Zapatista rebels, who led a peasant uprising that stunned the world in the mid-1990s, began occupying and shutting down highways in the southern state of Chiapas, which borders Oaxaca.

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Border problems

ALMOST equally chaotic conditions exist in spots along the U.S. border. Among the most notorious are Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas, and Tijuana. Both have been plagued by violence, most of it attributed to an ongoing power struggle between rival Pacific Coast and Gulf of Mexico drug cartels.

There also have been incidents of drug-related violence in Acapulco and the western states of Michoacan, Sinaloa and Guerrero. In one especially gruesome occurrence, gunmen stormed a nightclub in Uruapan, Michoacan state, and tossed body parts onto the dance floor.

Finally, a question mark hovers over Mexico City. During the summer, the capital’s massive central plaza and one of its major thoroughfares, Reforma Avenue, were occupied for weeks by supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who lost a disputed presidential contest to Felipe Calderon. The demonstrations, which were peaceful, have ended, but there is speculation that they may return in some form in the days leading up to Calderon’s inauguration Dec. 1.

If that happens, and/or if the Oaxaca violence mutates, the ripple effects could be significant. On Monday, Mexico City was shaken by bomb attacks on the nation’s highest electoral court, a political party’s headquarters and a bank. The early-morning attacks shattered windows and inflicted other damage on the three buildings but didn’t cause any injuries.

Fortunately for many U.S. travel agents and cruise-ship operators, these aren’t the places their clients tend to flock to. “Our clients mostly are going to Cabo, they’re going to Puerto Vallarta, they’re going to Cancun and Cozumel,” said Ada Brown, owner of Seaside Travel in Long Beach. “If someone came through my door and asked for Oaxaca

As Brown indicates, if you’re headed by plane or ship for one of the popular mega-resort areas, you probably don’t have much to worry about (aside from U.S. college kids on spring break who have been knocking back tequila shots).

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a more authentically Mexican encounter, away from the climate-controlled conveniences of the big chain hotels, you may want to consider one of the many charming towns that dot the country’s south-central interior, such as San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato or Xalapa, a beautiful university town in the highlands of the Atlantic Coast state of Veracruz.

Marisa Ramos Abascal, a member of the Center for Tourism Investigation at Anahuac University near Mexico City, thinks Mexico’s domestic tourists are responding differently from foreign tourists to the current problems. Mexican tourists, she believes, are redirecting their travel plans to safer parts of the country. But foreigners who hear about the troubles in, say, Oaxaca, and who may not know it is relatively isolated from the rest of Mexico, may decide it’s easier just to skip the country.

In fact, she says, many areas of Oaxaca state are a comfortable distance from Oaxaca city, such as the popular beach area of Huatulco, which is separated from the state capital by a long, steep mountain range.

Although she can’t predict how the situation in Oaxaca will shake out, Ramos Abascal says Oaxaquenos know the value of tourism and have strong economic incentives to resolve their dispute as quickly as possible.

It’s even possible, in the long run, that the negative publicity surrounding Oaxaca may translate into increased tourism, she says. The unrest in Chiapas several years ago stirred the imagination of Europeans who had never heard of the place and have since visited.

A similar phenomenon seems to be occurring in parts of the Indian Ocean region devastated by a tsunami nearly two years ago.

“Tourists,” Ramos Abascal says, “have short memories.”

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reed.johnson@latimes.com