Mexico: A Safety Update From the Travel Office

In the American media, the flow of bad news out of Mexico doesn’t seem to stop. Amid all the sensationalism, the latest update to the American government’s Travel Warning barely registered as news. From the tourist’s perspective, the report is as notable for what it leaves out as much as for what it warns against. Rather than issuing a blanket Travel Warning for all of Mexico, it describes which states have no travel advisories and which do: -- The Yucatán Peninsula, including Cancún and the Riviera Maya, has no travel advisory. -- The southern half of the Baja Peninsula, including Cabo San Lucas, has no travel advisory. -- Mexico City has no travel advisory. -- Colonial cities such as San Miguel de Allende, Léon and Guanajuato have no travel advisories. -- Historic Oaxaca has no travel advisory. Almost any area of interest to tourists is free of travel advisories. We compared the statistics, and Americans are about five times safer (or more) in the regions listed above than in cities such as Chicago and New York. Certain Mexican states listed in the Travel Warning should clearly be avoided, just as certain neighborhoods of Los Angeles or London merit caution. That said, however safe a region may be, this is your vacation. It should be relaxing. If you feel threatened in a certain destination, it doesn’t matter what the statistics say — you should travel elsewhere. But if you do manage to tune out the media histrionics for a moment, you’ll find, like the millions of other Americans (and Andrew Harper employees) who travel to Mexico each year, that it’s simply a fantastic destination.