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Comment by egusa | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising to hear that this happened in Playa del Carmen (which has always been a popular area for tourists).

The cartels don't generally care about tourists.

Meanwhile, the journalist in the article had just published about their extortion racket.

I've lived in Mexico for a long time and I'm about to book a ticket across the country to visit a friend in Playa del Carmen soon. It's just not something that affects me. I'm more worried about getting maimed by a car hopping a curb in the scheme of life, and I still walk with my back to cars.

Reminds me of the sad story of the teacher who was just traveling through mid-northern Mexico a year or two ago and went to a bar and started asking the wrong kind of questions. Cartel caught wind of it and killed him, likely because they thought he was DEA

Poked into my memory a bit more and it was this guy: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Internationa...

>Cartel caught wind of it and killed him, likely because they thought he was DEA

I thought cartel didn't kill DEA? Source: Narcos

Finish the season of Narcos: Mexico first

So what you’re saying is that if the journalist wouldn’t ask questions and let things go (like you do), everything would be fine.

Yes, the tourists don't do that and they are fine.

If you want to visit Mexico and don't plan on trying to unearth and publish cartel activity, you'll likely have a great time as well.

Snark isn't very effective rhetoric.

I visit Mexico yearly (Married to a Mexican, from Monterrey) for a couple of weeks to a month. I never felt unsafe and greatly enjoy being there.

When my in-laws visit us (Europe) they were more worried about a terrorist attack than I am about cartels.

Mexico has a lot of violence in those cartel communities. But it mostly stays within those communities.

This demonstrates how much media controls our fears. Terrorist attacks in Europe happen rarely when they do happen they are in the news for weeks. While Mexico is being one of the most dangerous countries, people get kidnapped, killed, buried on a daily basis and they barely report the number of people killed properly in local newspapers, it doesn't even make it to national news.

Yup Indeed. Both sides (EU) and Mexico are pretty safe for the average person though.

So what do you suggest people do who hate violence, murdering, everything about the cartels? The world is complicated, maybe it could be that by doing certain tourist activities or traveling to certain places that I'm supporting them.

> let things go

From everything I have read, challenging the cartels in Mexico is suicide for individuals, and often even for governments (at least it is for politicians). I would "let things go" if I lived there too.

The Netherlands is currently at risk of turning into the Mexico of Europe but nobody is willing to let it go because nobody wants the country to end up like Mexico.

Its really insidious. Everyone has a price and drugs brings in billions of €. Honestly if someone offered me 50 thousand to look the other way I would be tempted.

> The Netherlands is currently at risk of turning into the Mexico of Europe

Perhaps I misunderstood, but what are you basing this on? The Netherlands has one of the lowest rates of intentional homicide in the world (0.5/100.000)[0] and ranks fourth in World Press Freedom Index by Reporters without Borders[1].

With having Europe‘s largest port (Rotterdam), The Netherlands does serve as a gateway for South American drugs, cocaine in particular. The vast amount of global MDMA is also manufactured here[2], but the fallout in the form of violence is nowhere near that of Mexico?

0. https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/intentional-homicide-victims

1. https://rsf.org/en/ranking

2. http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/publications/2473/T... (p. 5)

Yes. So unless your great plan is to bring down the cartels and become a hero/martyr in the process, it's solid advice, and empirically true.

And it's easy to snark about it ("oh, what cowardish" etc) when you don't live there.

Murder and crime have been growing fast in Quintana Roo since the new state government started in late 2016 or so.

I lived there in 2017-2018. Cancun now has a murder rate above the national average. There are shootings weekly, even in the zona hotelera. A couple of months ago someone threw a grenade into a bar. It’s getting ugly.

Between the spike in homicides and frequent drugging of women within resorts I'm amazed people still go down there.

Largest hackathon in the world is in Guadalajara Mexico.

*Saudi’s Hajj Hackathon

Which one is it?

Probably Campus Party. Cool event.

What's the name of the event?

There's also a very active community called "HF Guadalajara" ("Hackers & Founders") which holds regular events.

Many people are smart enough not to be swayed by fear based news. You’re 100x more likely to die in a car accident on your commute tomorrow than by a cartel member in Mexico as a tourist.

The murder rate in Mexico is >20 per 100K per year. The car crash death rate in the US is around 11 per 100K per year. So you're almost certainly not x100 likely to die in your commute tomorrow. I've been to Mexico and I felt reasonably safe but it's a lot less safe these days and it's just not the safest place in general.

Thanks, but I meant as a foreigner you are less likely to be murdered. It is in their best interest to keep tourists safe and happy.

In whose best interests? Because it's really only the cartels that matter since the law has no grip on them. And the cartel doesn't care about keeping tourists safe and happy.

Of course they care. Every tourist killed brings more attention to them than needed, if the person was high profile enough it can bring enough international pressure for the government to take them down.

Could you break down the murder rate by places people actually visit? I don't look at homicides in Chicago (19 per 100k) when planning a trip to Austin.

I don't think many people worry about the homicide rate in Chicago when planning a trip to Chicago. Similar thing to Mexico, the homicides are contained within a pretty specific subpopulation.

What's the murder rate per 100K tourists per year?

What's the mortality rate per 100K of "good drivers" per year?

True Scotsman have a very low mortality rate.

To be fair, I think qualifying as a tourist is much less subjective than being called "good". As non-native to Mexico, I really am more interested in the probability "being murdered in Mexico given you're a a tourist", P(m|t), than "being murdered in Mexico", P(m).

> As non-native to Mexico, I really am more interested in the probability "being murdered in Mexico given you're a tourist"...

I think a more meaningful metric for tourists is the probability of getting murdered as a tourist in Mexico vs the probability of getting murdered while on vacation in another country X.

I agree.

> True Scotsman have a very low mortality rate.

Haha, I like this sentence :-)

Well, good drivers can still die by bad drivers hitting their car. And far more people believe they are a "good driver" than those that actually are.

I don't understand the downvotes. If we're talking about tourists doesn't it make sense to look at... tourists?

EDIT: to be clear, my hypothesis was the murder rate of tourists was lower than the overall murder rate, which could plausibly make the "You’re 100x more likely to die in a car accident" statement correct. See hsitz's comment and my response. 100x is likely an exaggeration but you still are probably "more likely to die in a car accident on your commute tomorrow than by a cartel member in Mexico as a tourist".

Mexico has somewhere around 18 million tourists per year, about half of whom are Americans [1]. I can't remember any being murdered, but I suppose a handful have. U.S. media loves to publicize these kinds of things so I'm pretty sure I'd be well aware if it were more than a handful, certainly if it was more than a handful being killed by cartels, who commit most of the murders in Mexico.

So say, 10 tourists get murdered in Mexico each year. That's (very roughly) 10 per 18 million, or 1 per 1.8 million, or 0.06 per 100k.

BTW, adding "per year" to the metric would be misleading, add nothing, because it falls out of the unit analysis in the calculation, which is done based on

                      10 tourists      10 tourists
     1 year            murdered         murdered
 ---------------  x -------------- =   ---------------
 18 mil tourists        1 year         18 mil tourists

This is not that helpful, because tourists stay just a short time, not a full year like local residents. If you want to somehow compare this to a metric of inhabitants murdered per 100k per year then you probably want to do more. Assume the average tourist stays 1 week. Then we need to multiply by 52 to get the number of tourists murdered per year of tourist time in Mexico, which yields result of around 3 (0.06 x 52) per 100k of tourist-years. This is significantly less than the U.S. average of 5 murders/100k per year. So it could be that U.S. tourists are safer in Mexico than they are at home. ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Mexico#Statistics

Right, I was suggesting the murder rate for tourists might be lower than the overall murder rate, which could make the "You’re 100x more likely to die in a car accident on your commute tomorrow than by a cartel member in Mexico as a tourist" statement correct.

0.06 is indeed 100x less than 11, but to compare to the car crash death rate above you'd need to estimate the amount of time tourists spend in the country per year. If you say 1 week per year that brings it up to 3.12 per 100k per year, so still less than the risk of dying in a car accident (in the US), but not 100x less.

Also, technically the statement was "by a cartel member", so you'd have to know how many of those murders were by cartel members.

Exactly, I think I was editing to add that as you wrote this. Also, my guesstimate of 10 tourist murders/year may be way off. I'm guessing it's lower, certainly if only by cartel members, but not sure.

>The murder rate in Mexico is >20 per 100K per year. The car crash death rate in the US is around 11 per 100K per year. So you're almost certainly not x100 likely to die in your commute tomorrow

That would be relevant if the murder rate was randomly distributed across the population, and didn't concern cartel members and their explicit targets primarily. Not to mention that Mexico is a big place, and the murder rate in tourist areas is not the same as in cartel land...

Still not as bad as schools in the US. Those places are scary according to the news.

How frequent are the druggings? What percent? I'm curious how it compares to the US and if it's actually dangerous.

I'm guessing they are talking about

A) steal your kidney B) sex slave/rape type thing C) both A and B

Type of druggings

I would say they likely avoid them altogether. Start killing enough Americans and there's likely to be an invasion.

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