Drug insurgency kills Tijuana busnesses

Washington Post:

A shop on Avenida Revolucion was once considered a surefire gold mine.

Day trippers poured over America's busiest border crossing, just south of San Diego, and bought mountains of jewelry, crafts and leather goods. Mexican families schemed to own -- or lease -- a piece of an eight-block stretch of the avenue, generally thought to be the most lucrative shopping district along the Mexican side of the border.

But when Gloria Flores retires at the end of this month, her art shop on Avenida Revolucion will go dark. None of her children want it, nor does anyone else. Soon it will be another vacancy among the abandoned businesses and for-rent signs on an avenue whose decline illustrates the corrosive and mushrooming effect of drug violence on Mexico's legal economy.

Daylight gun battles, beheadings and kidnappings have scared away tourists, forced layoffs and turned some areas of once-vibrant Mexican border cities into virtual ghost towns. The drug wars, which have killed more than 6,000 people in the past 2 1/2 years, have accelerated a decline that merchants also blame on the U.S. economic slowdown and delays at the border because of increased enforcement.

In Tijuana, where at least 200 people have been killed in drug violence this year, merchants say tourism is down as much as 90 percent compared with 2005, when an estimated 4 million people visited. Half of the downtown businesses -- more than 2,400 -- are shuttered. Farther east along the border, empty markets have become the norm in Ciudad Juarez, where fighting between rival cartels has killed 200 people this year. In Nuevo Laredo, five hotels have shut down.

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But in stores along Avenida Revolucion, entire days can go by without a single sale. Flores, who has run her business for more than 30 years, could once count on taking in at least $6,000 a month. The tiny shop, which sells handicrafts, paid for three of her children to go to college and sustained the family after her husband's sudden death.

But now, she seldom records more than $300 in monthly sales. The sons she had hoped would inherit her lease have moved to the United States to look for work.

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This is another example of why it is in our interest to help Mexico defeat the drug insurgents.

To defeat them, Mexico is going to have to protect people like Flores and her customers. While the story says that shoppers have not been killed, several have been kidnapped in one of the drug insurgency's side businesses. It is just another aspect of the insurgency that has been copied from al Qaeda in Iraq like the beheadings. They are all forms of terrorizing compliance and frightening people to keep them from cooperating with the government.

Another point is that by helping Mexico defeat the drug insurgents, we also help protect our borders because fewer Mexicans will need to go north to get a job.