Thread: Sin city Tijuana parties despite crime crackdown

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070107/wl_ ... tijuana_dc

Sin city Tijuana parties despite crime crackdown By Noel Randewich
32 minutes ago

U.S. sailors and high school students cruised bars and nightclubs in Mexico's racy Tijuana border city at the weekend, undaunted by a crackdown on violent drug gangs by thousands of Mexican security forces.

Dance music of Shakira and other Latin pop stars pumped out of clubs on Tijuana's tawdry Avenida de la Revolucion as federal forces in combat fatigues and armed with automatic weapons patrolled in pick-up trucks.

More than 4,000 soldiers, marines, federal and state police poured into Tijuana, a long-time favorite destination for U.S. revelers, last week as part of new President Felipe Calderon's war on organized crime and drug cartels.

But the military presence did little to dampen the mood among Americans who crossed the border from San Diego to live it up in Tijuana's tequila-fueled raucous nightlife.

"If you're not doing anything wrong, why should they mess with you?" said Kaytee Trice, 27, a musician based in San Diego who visits Tijuana for the dance clubs.

It was business as usual in La Coahuila, Tijuana's red light district, lined with table dance bars, bordellos and prostitutes shivering in the evening cold.

"People who come for a good time and to have a drink will keep coming," said Miguel Angel Rodriguez, a 39-year-old bouncer at the entrance of one cabaret. "It's the dodgy people who are going to be scared."

U.S. underage drinkers flock to the city just south of San Diego at the weekend for cheap alcohol. Mexico's legal drinking age is 18, as opposed to 21 in California, and the law is often loosely applied south of the border.

In addition, shopowners aggressively hawk Viagra, the antibiotic Cipro and muscle relaxants to U.S. residents, who do not need a prescription to stock up.

Tijuana's fame as a sin city is enhanced by oddities unseen in the United States.

Visitors can pose for photographs in the street beside donkeys painted black and white to look like zebras, or pay for a shot at "el toque," an electric shock administered from a small battery by a street vendor to mostly drunken revelers.

DARK SIDE

But the city has a much darker side.

It is home to major Mexican drug traffickers and has become caught up in a conflict between rival drugs gangs that killed some 2,000 people throughout Mexico last year.

Tijuana records a murder almost every day and two kidnappings a week on average.

Local police are often accused of working for the drug lords and federal forces took the municipal police's weapons from them last week to test if any of the guns have been used in narco killings.

Shootouts between police and rival gangs, armed with assault rifles and grenades are frequent. In dusty hillside neighborhoods, residents living in sheet metal homes often admire wealthy drug smugglers driving shiny SUVs.

Street pushers offered small amounts of cocaine and marijuana to tourists at the weekend, unfazed by the federal operation aimed at netting bigger drug smugglers and cutting drug violence.

Prohibition in the United States in the 1920s led to an explosion of Tijuana's entertainment industry as Americans crowded across the border to drink and gamble in newly built casinos and hotels.

Charlie Chaplin and gangster Al Capone were regular visitors to the growing vice town. Around that time, the Caesar salad was allegedly invented in Tijuana, named after the city's once fashionable Hotel Caesar which still exists.

In the 1940s, U.S. sailors stationed in San Diego hit the Tijuana's bars and brothels before sailing to war.

Chris Williams, a 24-year-old submarine officer in the U.S. Navy who was making his way from bar to bar under green and red neon lights, sympathized with Calderon.

"I can understand the reason for this battle," he said. "You don't want your people corrupted in the street."

I don't think a lot of Americans understand what is happening on the border right now, and this article proves it.