May 29

Written by: host
5/29/2009 11:19 AM 

 

Last month I took a trip up to Los Angeles to visit my mother in the hospital. She was recovering from surgery and I spent an afternoon with her. My wife, my daughter and I spent the night with my father at my childhood home. I woke up the next morning, made coffee and turned on ABC channel 7 morning news. The chain of reports that proceeded was horrifying. There were three separate stories regarding local drive by shootings, mass shootings in public places and the shooting of children while they waited for a bus. There was a story about another murder in Beverly Hills and another about a woman found frozen in dry ice in a posh Newport Beach hotel.

All of this was shocking to me… As an American living in Baja what came next shocked me even more. The next story was a 15 second blurb that basically said the following:

“Americans are being kidnapped, and murdered in México”. It proclaimed that the US embassy had released a “Travel Warning” regarding this situation to warn tourist. As a person who lives in the area and being very tuned into what is going on in Baja I was shocked and perplexed by this. I know of no such kidnappings or murders of Americans or tourist. I was pretty certain that this was a gross misrepresentation of the truth. I decided to try to verify this story.

Newsless Reports

On the Wednesday after Super-Tuesday, a day not lacking for news, a report that provided no real news but rather purported that “kidnappings of US citizens is on the rise” was published in the San Diego Union Tribune. The report went on to talk about 26 residents who were kidnapped last year. As it turns out none of these were US citizens but rather Mexican nationals who owned a residence in the US. On the same day a woman was brutally murdered for her wallet in the parking structure at Nordstrom’s in fashion Valley, San Diego. Yet this story only made one paragraph on the third page.

If you look into all the reported kidnapping incidents along the US-México border the overwhelming majority of victims are clearly involved in the drug trade, related businesses or are not US citizens. None are American tourists. In one story they were talking about this poor man from Tennessee who was kidnapped and brought into México. The incident was in El Paso, Texas and the poor man from Tennessee was a 27 year old who was a soldier for the El Paso Barrio Azteca gang. He was involved in the drug trade

Several reports have been claiming that kidnapping of US tourist in Baja is on the rise. They site a Tijuana US Embassy issued “TRAVEL WARNING” as their source. This is simply NOT TRUE. There was no Travel Warning issued. Travel Warnings are a specific type of admonition, issued by the state department, for places of grave danger. Go to the state department site and you will see there is no Travel Warning for México:

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_1764.html