Fear of Forums

Some people might think that because I like skydiving and storm chasing that I am a risk taker. I am not at all. I am actually a very cautious person. I never do anything without analyzing and carefully weighing the risks. For example, before I jumped out of the plane I knew that I was less likely to die doing that than on the drive to the airstrip to so it. Adventure Travel is no different. Before I travel anywhere I do research: I want to know what risks there are in an area before I go. I monitor news daily, have an earthquake app on my phone, check out airline safety records before I fly, get my shots, and I always register my travel plans with the government of Canada. This is encouraged by the government so that if there is a natural disaster and they have to evacuate Canadians, they know where you are.

This morning I received an email from the Canadian Government notifying me of a travel warning for Playa del Carmen, where we are headed on March 17. Playa is a favored tourist location – loved for its beautiful beaches. (It is also a place my husband and I wanted to spend some time in to check out as a possible place to live.) Interestingly, the government notice was not that they (the Canadian government) had issued an advisory for Playa del Carmen, but that the United States had. So, I checked out the American advisory, and discovered that not only did they issue a travel advisory for Playa del Carmen, stating that no American government employee is allowed to travel there, but they also made the extraordinary move of shutting down the consul in Playa del Carmen. So, what is going on?

Well, as I have mentioned in a previous post, there are drug wars going on all over Mexico right now, and the Cancun/Playa/Tulum areas are currently being fought over between the Jalisco New Generation cartel and the Gulf cartel. Sadly, on Feb 21 there was a bombing on a tourist ferry here (the one that goes between Cozumel and Play del Carmen), and then on Mar 01, they found another bomb on another ferry of the same company. The cartels are not targeting tourists – it just turns out the ferry company is owned by someone the cartel is targeting. Shortly after these events, the American government issued an advisory restricting government employees from using the tourist ferries in Playa del Carmen. That advisory was understandable, but this new one issued today struck me as odd. It cannot just be about cartel violence because there were 60 cartel murders this week alone in Guadalajara and the consular office there is still open. And it cannot be just because of the ferry bombings, because that advisory was already in place. So why did the US government suddenly shut down the consul in Playa today and make the entire city off limits? That’s the sort of thing they do in Yemen, or Syria – but Playa del Carmen? Really? It’s got my spidy sense going…

So I did a little research, and it turns out the warning is because yesterday, on March 7th, information was received by the US embassy in Mexico City that there was a “credible threat” in Playa. This warning has nothing to do with the ferry bombings. There is a new threat, one big enough to shut down the consul there. (By the way, in the last hour, the Canadian and Australian governments also issued warnings for Playa del Carmen.) At any rate, the email I got from the government of Canada stated, “Please share the following important information with other Canadian nationals in your area.” So, I immediately posted a copy of the government advisory on the Playa del Carmen expat forum, and asked for people’s thoughts. Well, what I got was certainly not expected.

Over the course of the next few hours, hundreds of people commented on my post – and most were not very nice. In fact many were hostile. I was called a “fear monger” by the xpats living in Playa and accused of “fake news.” It was bizarre and left me feeling like I must be missing something. Maybe we will never know what the threat was, but this experience has been fruitful because I now know that Playa del Carmen is definitely not the place I want to live. Strangely, this is not because I fear increasing violence and cartel crime, but because I fear a community of people that is clearly more interested in sticking their heads in the sand about what is going on here than they are about public safety.