From Glamour to Gunfire: The Tourist City of Acapulco Torn Apart by Violence Nathaniel Parish Flannery - The Guardian
go to original December 13, 2016

Mayor Velázquez speaks to the press (Nathaniel Parish Flannery)

As the photographers crowd together, mayor Evodio Velázquez joins the squad of tourist police handing out green coconuts to the visitors arriving on the avenue. “Welcome to Acapulco,” he says warmly.

The 38-year-old politician from the leftist PRD party is respected as a local leader who thinks deeply about public policy and isn’t afraid to get out in the streets and talk to his city’s residents. He’s working to improve Acapulco, but it often seems like he faces impossible odds.

The state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located, is considered one of the least developed, poorest and most problematic states in Mexico. Seven out of every 10 of the state’s 3.4 million residents eke out a living in the informal economy, in precarious self-employed jobs that don’t provide benefits. Around two-thirds of the state’s population lives in poverty.

Guerrero gained international attention after the disappearance – and alleged murder – of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in 2014, but has continued to struggle through a constant barrage of unrelated but similarly terrifying incidents over the subsequent years. Mexico’s federal government has sent in trucks full of police and soldiers to patrol the beach, and maintains the narrative that the generalised violence in the mountain towns away from the coast doesn’t affect tourism along the beach front. In 2016, however, that fiction has started to unravel.

Although it remains true that most gangs in the area focus on retail drug distribution and extorting small businesses, on multiple occasions throughout the year gunmen shot and killed people in front of visitors on popular beaches.

...“The perceptions are there – but what I’ve learned in politics is to keep going forward,” Velázquez says.

Read the rest at The Guardian

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