Below is a great article that was posted on the Travel board on The Nest by a poster who lived in one of the border towns in Mexico until recently as an expat. It's great insight as to what is really going on in Mexico, and how when traveling to the Riviera Maya or Cabo San Lucas you're much safer there than in most big cities in the U.S.
If you're having any second thoughts on honeymooning or vacationing in Mexico this is a great article to read:
I can't even remember when I last experienced the beheading of a close friend. Everyone assumes it must be a weekly, or even a daily event: after all, I live in Mexico. The truth, however, is that you are as likely to have your head removed against your will in my town -- Oaxaca -- as you are to be murdered by roving, machete-crazed gangs in Martha's Vineyard.
You protest: slavering butchers are thin on the ground in Martha's Vineyard. Ah, but we do not have beheadings in Oaxaca. To be honest, they're unconscionably lax about slaughtering tourists in this city. It just doesn't happen. There are whole great swaths of Mexico -- some 95% of the country -- that are untouched by the drug war. In these places, tourists are annoyingly safe.
Take out a map. Mexico is rather large. To avoid all of Mexico because you fear drug violence, is like cancelling your trip to the Napa Valley because you hear that people are flying airplanes into towers in New York City. (I'm sure a lot of Europeans did just that.)
The homicide rate in most Mexican cities is simply not very exciting. People who read newspapers -- they are legion -- will tell you that Mexico City is Elm Street on steroids. No way they're taking their family anywhere near the Mexican capital. Yet these same people do not think twice about hauling their beloved brood to Disney World.
Disney World is in Orlando. Orlando, Florida.
What, you're not trembling? The rate of violent crime in Orlando is really something. At the theme park itself you might not encounter drooling gangs with machetes, but the likelihood of getting slaughtered is much higher in the city of Orlando than it is in Mexico City. The homicide rate in Mexico City is sub-terrifying: 8.3 out of 100,000. The rate in Orlando? Honey, you don't want to know.
If you're truly bent on living dangerously, hit the French Quarter for a shot of faux absinthe. New Orleans is leveling humans at a rate of 58 per 100,000. To be fair, that's an improvement upon the homicide record set in 1994: an awe-inspiring 85.8...
Oh, you do want to know that Orlando statistic? That would be 11.7
(28 homicides, in a population of 238,300). Which is better than New
Orleans or Baghdad, but way higher than Mexico City...The internet too offers exquisite advice regarding Orlando. Somehow, I suspect this is hyperbole: "Don't be surprised if your sleeping child has been taken right out of their hotel bed in the wee hours of the morning." I mean, come on. You have my permission to be surprised.In fact, the capital of America is a much more dangerous place than the capital of Mexico: You are 10 times more likely to get beheaded on a school trip to the Lincoln Memorial than you are strolling through downtown Mexico City.Okay, I'm lying. You are ten times more likely to be murdered in a drug-related crime. (The rate of actual beheadings is suppressed by travel agents on both sides of the border.)People ask me, regularly, how they can travel safely to Mexico. Here I have impeccable advice: follow this, and you're pretty much guaranteed to keep your head. Taking notes? Good.
Do not, under any circumstances, take a job with a major drug cartel. Just say no. You do not want to be a hit man, or a mule, or even middle management -- that's how people get killed.I mean it: that is how people get killed. Sunbathing, on the other hand, is oddly uneventful. Yes, there are a few places in Mexico that I would avoid, unless I were applying for that gig (which I urge you to reconsider). Most border towns are not the destination of choice, except I suppose when brothel-hopping, in which case I'm told a soupçon of danger is bracing (and well-deserved). Acapulco too has declined. It was once a town in which you had a good chance of having a bad time. It is now a town in which you have no chance of having a good time...
[However], "Of 2,500 municipalities (what we call counties), only 80, or fewer than five per cent, have been affected by the drug war..."
Graphic anecdotes are hard to ignore, by design, but they are useless when trying to grasp the nature of a country that is not simply vast, but immeasurably diverse. You know how Los Angeles doesn't have a whole lot in common with an Amish community in Pennsylvania? Well, multiply that difference a thousand-fold when comparing Ciudad Juarez (a genuinely dangerous place) to a Maya village in the state of Yucatán...
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/douglas-anthony-cooper/canada-attack-resort_b_1232486.html