The U.S. State Department’s new travel advisory warning Americans about the risks of traveling to Cancun and Los Cabos should not be taken too seriously. Compared to some crime-ridden U.S. cities — or the deaths from recent U.S. mass shootings — these Mexican resorts look like safe havens.
The Aug. 22 U.S. travel advisory added the two Mexican tourism resorts, which get millions of foreign tourists a year, to their list of dangerous places around the world. Quintana Roo and Baja California Sur, the states where Cancun and Los Cabos are respectively located, have seen a surge of shootings between rival criminal groups in recent months.
In both cases, the State Department advisory says that “while most of these homicides appeared to be targeted, criminal organizations (and) turf battles between criminal groups have resulted in violent crime in areas frequented by U.S. citizens. Shooting incidents, in which innocent bystanders have been injured or killed, have occurred.”
