Mexico – Is it Worth It?
“U.S. citizens residing and traveling in Mexico should exercise caution
when in unfamiliar areas and be aware of their surroundings at all times.”
- US Department of State
If you were to investigate the most dangerous place for a Canadian to travel you would come up with enough enough facts to point to our NAFTA neighbor Mexico. Last Thursday 29-year-old Bouabal Bounthavorn was fatally shot after he opened the door of his room at the Hotel Riu and argued briefly with a man. His girlfriend was shot in the foot. This is just a month after a Canadian was run down and killed in a hit-and-run in Acapulco.
Now, this could be a drug deal gone south but this comes on the heels of the Brenda Martin case, Canadian woman held without formal charges in a Mexican jail for over 2 years. The fact that she may be guilty is overshadowed by the lack of due process in Mexico. There you are guilty until proven innocent. She has since been released to Canadian authorities and is now free in Canada. Now, if she was involved in bilking people out of money then she should pay. But in Mexico there’s no way to find this out because people rot in jails without receiiving a trial, fair or not.
The biggest murder case in the past few years is the murders of Dominic Ianiero, 59, and his wife Nancy, 55, of Woodbridge, Ont, in a five-star resort near Playa del Carmen on Feb. 20, 2006. Their throats were slashed, hardly a speedy death. Edward Greenspan, a prominent Canadian attorney, described Mexican attorney-general Bello Melchor Rodriguez as “arrogant, pompous and downright rude.”
Mexico is the worst possible outcome of NAFTA. If Canada had not been a British colony it might have suffered through the graft, corruption and pure poverty of Mexico. Because it seems like living south of the U.S. is no great perk and the U.S., who wants Iraq to be a pure democracy, keeps forgetting to look south to fix this rich country with all the wealth at the top. If they truly wanted stop illegals into the country I would suggest they start with the Mexican government. Their elections are as bad as those anywhere in the world.
And Canada is definitely not the only country whose citizens have been hurt. In the last few years dozens of U.S. citizens have been kidnapped and a lot of these incidents remain unresolved. As well, new cases of disappearances and kidnap-for-ransom go on all the time and now one can be considered safe from kidnapping regardless of occupation, nationality or race.
When there are so many safe places going to Mexico is like playing Russian roulette. And their legal system doesn’t want to do anything about it.
Leave a comment!