Tijuana Tourism Rebounds as Violence Subsides Matthew Clayfield - Football Federation Australia
go to original December 13, 2014

Federal Police officer stands guard outside a bar during an operation at the Zona Norte area in Tijuana, Mexico in 2009. (AAP)

Tijuana is experiencing a slow but steady increase in tourists numbers, which are inching towards a level not seen since late last decade. At that time, like so many other places in Mexico - “So far from God, so close to the United States,” as former president Porfirio Díaz once put it - the city was embroiled in a wave of cartel violence and kidnappings that discouraged all but the most intrepid of thrill-seekers.

When the number of homicides in Baja California eventually fell - from 1,528 in 2010 to 584 in 2012, according to Mexico’s National Statistics and Geography Institute - the number of people heading south again began steadily to climb. In 2013, foreigners accounted for more than 45 per cent of all visitors to the city after their numbers bottomed out at less than 25 per cent just a few years earlier.

The police presence today is comparatively and noticeably light. The Federales who do occasionally cruise by tend to be unmasked and not especially heavily-armed.

...In addition to the most lascivious of gringos, Mexicans, too, are beginning to return. But where drunken day-trippers see an alluring den of sin, locals see an increasingly sophisticated, cosmopolitan city that rivals anything north of the border for confidence and culture.

Indeed, where Tijuana’s visual arts scene once consisted of a donkey painted to look like a zebra, it today thrives in the old arcades off Revolución, the pasajes, where small galleries have popped up in their dozens. The strip’s long-abandoned bus station has been converted by savvy tech types into Hub Stn, which houses a number of small, innovative start-ups. Tijuana’s Opera in the Street Festival attracts nearly 10,000 people every year.

In other words, whatever the headlines say - and it is true that the city’s homicide rate has increased again in the past twelve months - the fact remains that most people here are simply trying to get on with it and are succeeding admirably.

Read the whole story at SBS.com

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