I am a
travel agent and have sent many, many people to the Riviera Maya and other areas of Mexico (DH, myself and 4 kids go every year)---and the only complaint I hear is that they had to leave to come home! It is a very safe, beautiful country and the people are so amazing and friendly!
I will tell you the same thing I tell my clients--if you go looking for trouble of course it will find you; if you don't behave badly at home then don't do it while visiting another country; behave and act accordingly; don't go to out of the way night clubs or strip bars, stick to the tourist areas; never leave your drink unattended if in a nightclub; and most of all, be respectful of the people and their culture.
If you think about it--these rules apply everywhere in the world.
The media has a bad way of "blowing" instances up to be worse than what they are----the crimes that happen in our own countries can be just as bad, if not worse at times. The difference is the media doesn't label our entire country as unsafe.
I hope you go on a Mexican holiday and have a great time!
Make no mistake, what is going on in Mexico ought to scare the crap ought of anyone with a working brain. In Texas, we are seeing the effects of it daily, and not just on the border. In my neighborhood, we have perhaps 60-70 homes. I know less than half the families in those homes and of those, three families have fled Mexico due to the violence and kidnappings. They wanted to stay in Mexico, because they had a sweet life there, but the constant fear for the safety of their family became too much to bear.
One family was away from home when a kidnapping attempt was made on a family member (they got an employee instead by mistake) and the family never returned home. They literally left everything they owned in their house and never returned. When they came to our neighborhood, they brought what they'd had in their suitcases while on vacation. They had to buy everything. Cars, furniture, clothes, pots and pans, you name it. You don't walk away from your home, all your worldly possessions and life without a darn good reason. They are just lucky they have the money to do it. And those 3 families are just within a few streets of me. Multiply that times our whole town and then multiply it times the whole state and you get the idea. Tons of people (those who can afford it) are gettingthehellouttaDodge.
And those families are the first to admit the Mexican government is helpless against the drug cartels and kidnappers. And
that's the difference between what's going on in Mexico vs. other counties, including our own. Other countries have violence and crime, but their governments, police forces, and armed services are not crippled, outgunned and overpowered by the drug cartels. Mexico is.
That being said, the Riviera Maya is probably about the safest place you can go in Mexico. It's secuded, has minimal development, only a few hotels and really too out of the way for the drug cartels to bother with. Stay around the few hotels and you should be fine. The worst violence is near the border, but yes....it is spilling on to the resort areas slowly but surely. Acapulco has had trouble for years, but it's just now getting major news coverage. Cancun gets a decent amount, but people forget that Cancun is not a sleepy little resort town anymore. It's a pretty big city and tourist town and like any tourist town in any country on earth, tourists make easy targets when they let their guard down.
IMO, it's naive to mimimize what is going on in Mexico. The rest of the US is only just beginning to hear about what we've been hearing about for years. We've learned to have a healthy "respect" and take the danger seriously. When you're dealing with people who leave heads of local officials in coolers on the steps of city buildings and alternately chunk heads into wedding receptions and such, it's a good idea to realize you're out of your league. If they have a mind to have a show of force in a major resort city, they'll do it in a heartbeat. They are beyond control of even the federal government. They don't hesitate to wipe out the entire police force in a town that tries to stand up to them. The gangs in the US look like Boy Scouts compared to them.
I used to go to Mexico almost once a year. No more. There are other great beaches in the Caribbean. But if I did go back to Mexico, I'd stick to some place like the Riviera Maya.
