"Narco-tours" a new kind
of traffic
March 2, 2009 - The Seattle Times
Although Mazatlan markets
itself as a seaside paradise in which the roughest thing one might
encounter are ocean swells, it is a beach resort with a dark side — one
that many enterprising taxi drivers are exploiting with unauthorized
"narco-tours."
MAZATLAN, Mexico — The tour
guide's voice dropped to a whisper as he pointed out the left side of
his open-air taxi and said conspiratorially: "See that house? It
belongs to Chapo."
The guide recovered his normal tone around the corner, well out of
earshot of anyone who might be inside what he claimed was one of the
beachfront hideaways of Mexico's most-wanted drug trafficker, Joaquin
Guzman Loera, who is known universally by the nickname El Chapo, or
Shorty.
Although Mazatlan markets itself as a seaside paradise in which the
roughest thing one might encounter are ocean swells, it is a beach
resort with a dark side — one that many enterprising taxi drivers are
exploiting with unauthorized "narco-tours."
Mexicans are fed up with their country's unprecedented level of
bloodshed as rival drug cartels clash with the authorities and among
themselves for drug profits. But the outrage is tinged by a fascination
with the colorful lives of the outlaws.
Ballads extolling the traffickers' exploits, known as narcocorridos,
are hugely popular, especially among the young. And it seems that quite
a few Mexican tourists are curious enough about the country's most
notorious criminals to pay for a glimpse of their vacation homes and
favorite hangouts, not to mention the spots where some of their lives
came to a sudden end.
Mazatlan is not the only narco-tour destination.
In Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, visitors are
taken to the spot where the cartel leader Osiel Cardenas was arrested
in 2003 after a shootout with soldiers.
In Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state and the center of Mexico's
drug trade, a popular visiting spot is the shrine to Jesus Malverde,
the mustachioed bandit hanged in 1909 and now considered the patron
saint of the underworld.
Mazatlan has long been known as one of the Sinaloa cartel's favored
vacation spots.
One of the stops in the narco-tours is the oceanfront disco Frankie Oh,
which in the 1980s was without equal as a place to dance the night
away. Until the government shut it years ago, it was owned by Francisco
Arellano Felix, one of the brothers of the family that runs the Tijuana
cartel. Now in disrepair, the dance club is partly blocked by
billboards that local officials put up to hide the past.
"Tourism officials don't want to promote the narco-culture," Silvestre
Flores, a Sinaloa academic who has written about Mazatlan's drug tours,
said. "They see it as something that damages the image of the place."
Flores views the underground tours as not unlike the guided visits that
stop at Ground Zero in New York or the favorite haunts of Al Capone in
Chicago. People are intrigued by crime and death, he said.
Official tours of Mazatlan stick to more family-friendly activities,
like a visit to the hilltop lighthouse said to be among the world's
highest, or to the sea-lion shows at the city aquarium.
When a song was released last year that mentioned one of Mazatlan's
most famous hotels, El Cid, and rhapsodized about sniffing cocaine all
night in a suite there, officials persuaded local radio stations to
drop it.
Juan, a taxi driver who offers drug tours, describes them as no more
damaging than reading Mexican newspapers, which are filled with
drug-related articles. He gives several narco-tours a day, he said, but
only when tourists ask for them.
The tours, for which Juan charges about $15 an hour, are usually taken
while passengers sip Pacifico beer, which is brewed nearby, and sway to
norteno music, which he puts on at full blast.
As he cruised along the main tourist district on a recent morning, Juan
suddenly stopped his taxi, one of the many oversize golf carts known as
pulmonias that circulate in tourist areas.
He got out and began the tale of a notorious shootout that took place
there seven years before. It was not clear that Juan was present during
Mazatlan's most infamous murder, but he certainly made it seem that way.
"Boom, boom, boom," he said, getting out of the taxi and dodging and
weaving on the sidewalk as he recounted the automatic gunfire that rang
out.
Both his hands were in the shape of pistols as he told how Ramon
Arellano Felix, a brother of the disco owner and co-leader of the
family cartel, showed up to kill his rival Ismael Zambada, known as "El
Mayo," but, instead, was killed himself.
The scene of the crime is just a busy sidewalk.
Occasionally, though, a bouquet of flowers will appear at the very spot
of the killing, left by an admirer, a sign the cartels still have a
hold on Mexico's imagination.
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