Security to Be Tightened at Mexican Port to Woo Back Tourists

Latin American Herald Tribune
March 9, 2011

MEXICO CITY – Authorities in the western Mexican state of Sinaloa announced plans to ramp up security in the Pacific port of Mazatlan to prevent a further decline in tourism, an industry battered this year by cruise cancellations.

Sinaloa’s Tourism Secretariat said in a statement Friday that cruise lines “want to come back” to Mazatlan, a port removed from many companies’ itineraries due to heightened concerns about organized crime-related violence.

The state’s tourism secretary, Oralia Rice, said the Sinaloa Public Safety Secretariat will invest more than five million pesos ($413,223) “to protect tourists” and “restore the confidence of the cruise lines.”

Mazatlan has lost $16.8 million in tourism revenue thus far this year as a result of cruise ship cancellations, the official acknowledged.

Carnival Splendor, Norwegian Star and Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas are among the cruise ships that have canceled calls to Mazatlan this year.

According to the secretariat’s figures, cruise ship passengers spend an average of 1,209 pesos (about $100) a day when they disembark at that Mexican port, which is visited primarily by U.S. and Canadian tourists.

For his part, Sinaloa Public Safety Secretary Francisco Cordova said in the statement that cruise company executives have conditioned their return to Mazatlan on authorities’ coming up with a plan to reduce levels of violence and, above all, preventing the security situation from deteriorating further.

Cordova therefore pledged that the local police force will permanently patrol and monitor the city’s tourist areas, deploy more officers and install “panic buttons” every 150 meters (yards) to make it easier to alert police about potentially dangerous situations.

He added that authorities will create a tourist office staffed by bilingual agents from the local prosecutor’s office to address visitors’ concerns.

“We’re going to bolster security at the port and if that requires investing we’re going to seek out the necessary funds,” Cordova said.

On Jan. 31, Sinaloa authorities reached an agreement with Carnival Cruise Lines, which operates a fleet of 89 ships, to create a Tourist Police force in the Mexican port city.

Sinaloa, the birthplace of Mexico’s first generation of drug lords, is among the states hardest hit by a conflict pitting cartels against each other and the security forces that has claimed more than 35,000 lives nationwide in the past four years.

The state is the bastion of the Sinaloa cartel, whose leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman, remains at large more than a decade after escaping from a maximum-security prison

In 2010, a total of 1,815 people were killed in organized crime-related violence in Sinaloa and 320 were murdered in Mazatlan, according to official figures.

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