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Where Do They Get These Ideas?

In an earlier article ("Mixed Messages From Home"), I said the U.S. government talks out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand it encourages the Mexican government to invest millions of pesos in advertising and infrastructure to lure U.S. citizens to Mexico for vacations, and on the other hand it undermines the Mexican efforts by issuing inaccurate reports that declare the tourist center of Mexico City to be a danger zone. It seemed to me at the time to be hypocritical and unfair, and I think I was right, but I now understand that I missed an important point. I was reminded of it today, when I walked the streets of San Francisco.

San Francisco, like Mexico, is one of the world's great cities. Like Mexico, it is an international destination, boasting food, music, culture and art from all over the world. Like Mexico, it is overcrowded, dismayingly expensive, and polluted. It is in fact a good deal less polluted than Mexico, or Los Angeles, but polluted nonetheless.

What caught my eye was how many homeless and rootless (with transient quarters but having no apparent purpose or place to be) people there are in San Francisco. The sidewalks of Market Street teem with them. In Mexico, throngs of workers and tourists walk around the beggars, but in San Francisco, the occasional worker or tourist carefully threads a path through them. There is little attempt to keep the "non-violent" disturbed people off the streets. Being shouted at by three menacing but harmless citizens talking to their bad dreams in broad daylight in the space of two blocks can be unnerving. For an elderly person, it can seem a legitimate reason not to leave one's living room.

Now, this is not about "mainstreaming", or the rights of differently abled citizens. Others are writing on both sides of these issues, and I don't feel qualified to weigh in either way. Rather, this is about reality, appearance, and media manipulation.

I get many letters from readers asking about "safety" issues. People going to Mexico are nervous about traveling alone or in small groups. They have all heard stories about US tourists who were robbed, raped, or jailed unfairly in Mexico. They are afraid that the starving masses of Mexicans, unable to cross the border to obtain work, will turn to robbing "rich" US tourists. Their fears are both justified and fanciful. Sometimes, they are played upon by travel agents who encourage them to buy "safe" package tours that insulate them from the people in guarded hotels and special buses.

Our government is the single greatest source of misinformation on Mexico. This is a result of the general hypocrisy with which it operates with regard to human rights, both here and abroad. Mexico is not in any real sense a Democracy. It is an oligarchy in which a few families make the rules.

The US government likes dealing with oligarchies and other forms of dictatorships because they need lots of military assistance to keep their people in line, and are willing to make one-sided deals to keep the supplies coming (along with the money for their Swiss bank accounts). Sometimes, in spite of the US armaments and anti insurgency training, the people in these client states get so agitated that they rise up against their government. Most of the time these uprisings are put down fast and hard by the armed forces of the dictators. When this happens, it tends to be very upsetting for the US tourists who experience it. Kind of like the shootings at Kent State, or Viet Nam in your living room. Remember how those things motivated a whole lot of folks to challenge - and change - the policies of our government?

When the ambulantes (wandering street peddlers) were resisting police efforts to turn them out of the center of Mexico, our embassy issued a travelers warning. This was because the sight of bleeding peasants might have motivated some tourists to question why we supply military equipment to the forces of oppression in Mexico. Out of sight out of mind.

Tourists do get raped and robbed in Mexico, but probably at a lesser rate than they do in many US cities. The difference is, we know where we shouldn't go, at home, and are ignorant of the same info when we cross the border. The solution is to read your guidebooks, ask questions in the various travel forums, and take the same precautions you would if you were home: don't walk in strange neighborhoods alone at night, don't take a lot of money with you; and one precaution you may not be used to: don't assume that the cop you see is there to help you.

Which brings us to the other side of the coin: scapegoating. This is the practice of pointing the finger at the other guy before anyone can point the finger at you. It requires a loud voice, so that your shouts drown out everyone else's. For example, if tourists are being used for target practice in Miami, plant a lot of articles in US papers about similar occurrences in Mexico, or Egypt.

I am not saying that the very real trauma suffered every day by some of the US citizens who visit Mexico is trivial, or acceptable. I am saying that we are in no position to point any fingers, mired as we are in the mean-spirited, hypocritical and socially disastrous treatment of our own less fortunate paisanos; and that if we really want a de-escalation of violence in the poor places we like to visit as bargain vacation spots, then we ought to stop arming the repressive governments that cause it.

With the money we save, we could clean up some of our own mess. Personally, I would be delighted to feel as safe walking the streets of San Francisco at 2 am as I do at home in Oaxaca.

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