One US Journalist’s nonconformist view of Mexico
By Linda Ellerbee, Guadalajara Reporter June 29, 2010

Sometimes I've been called a maverick because I don't always agree with my colleagues, but then, only dead fish swim with the stream all the time. The stream here is Mexico.

You would have to be living on another planet to avoid hearing how dangerous Mexico has become, and, yes, it's true drug wars have escalated violence in Mexico, causing collateral damage, a phrase I hate. Collateral damage is a cheap way of saying that innocent people, some of them tourists, have been robbed, hurt or killed.

But that's not the whole story. Neither is this. This is my story.

I'm a journalist who lives in New York City, but has spent considerable time in Mexico, specifically Puerto Vallarta, for the last four years. I'm in Vallarta now. And despite what I'm getting from the U.S. media, the 24-hour news networks in particular, I feel as safe here as I do at home in New York, possibly safer.

I walk the streets of my Vallarta neighborhood alone day or night. And I don't live in a gated community, or any other All-Gringo neighborhood. I live in Mexico. Among Mexicans. I go where I want (which does not happen to include bars where prostitution and drugs are the basic products), and take no more precautions than I would at home in New York; which is to say I don't wave money around, I don't act the Ugly American, I do keep my eyes open, I'm aware of my surroundings, and I try not to behave like a fool.

I've not always been successful at that last one. One evening a friend left the house I was renting in Vallarta at that time, and, unbeknownst to me, did not slam the automatically-locking door on her way out. Sure enough, less than an hour later a stranger did come into my house. A burglar? Robber? Kidnapper? Killer? Drug lord?

No, it was a local police officer, the "beat cop" for our neighborhood, who, on seeing my unlatched door, entered to make sure everything (including me) was okay. He insisted on walking with me around the house, opening closets, looking behind doors and, yes, even under beds, to be certain no one else had wandered in, and that nothing was missing. He was polite, smart and kind, but before he left, he lectured me on having not checked to see that my friend had locked the door behind her. In other words, he told me to use my common sense.

Do bad things happen here? Of course they do. Bad things happen everywhere, but the murder rate here is much lower than, say, New Orleans, and if there are bars on many of the ground floor windows of houses here, well, the same is true where I live, in Greenwich Village, which is considered a swell neighborhood - house prices start at about $4 million (including the bars on the ground floor windows.)

There are good reasons thousands of people from the United States are moving to Mexico every month, and it's not just the lower cost of living, a hefty tax break and less snow to shovel. Mexico is a beautiful country, a special place.

The climate varies, but is plentifully mild, the culture is ancient and revered, the young are loved unconditionally, the old are respected, and I have yet to hear anyone mention Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or Madonna's attempt to adopt a second African child, even though, with such a late start, she cannot possibly begin to keep up with Angelina Jolie.

And then there are the people. Generalization is risky, but- in general - Mexicans are warm, friendly, generous and welcoming. If you smile at them, they smile back. If you greet a passing stranger on the street, they greet you back. If you try to speak even a little Spanish, they tend to treat you as though you were fluent. Or at least not an idiot.

I have had taxi drivers track me down after leaving my wallet or cell phone in their cab. I have had someone run out of a store to catch me because I have overpaid by twenty cents. I have been introduced to and come to love a people who celebrate a day dedicated to the dead as a recognition of the cycles of birth and death and birth - and the 15th birthday of a girl, an important rite in becoming a woman - with the same joy.

Too much of the noise you're hearing about how dangerous it is to come to Mexico is just that - noise. But the media love noise, and too many journalists currently making it don't live here. Some have never even been here. They just like to be photographed at night, standing near a spotlighted border crossing, pointing across the line to some imaginary country from hell. It looks good on TV.

Another thing. The U.S. media tend to lump all of Mexico into one big bad bowl. Talking about drug violence in Mexico without naming a state or city where this is taking place is rather like looking at the horror of Katrina and saying, "Damn. Did you know the U.S. is under water?" or reporting on the shootings at Columbine or the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City by saying that kids all over the U.S. are shooting their classmates and all the grownups are blowing up buildings. The recent rise in violence in Mexico has mostly occurred in a few states, and especially along the border. It is real, but it does not describe an entire country.

It would be nice if we could put what's going on in Mexico in perspective, geographically and emotionally. It would be nice if we could remember that, as has been noted more than once, these drug wars wouldn't be going on if people in the United States didn't want the drugs, or if other people in the United States weren't selling Mexican drug lords the guns.

Most of all, it would be nice if more people in the United States actually came to this part of America (Mexico is also America, you will recall) to see for themselves what a fine place Mexico really is, and how good a vacation (or a life) here can be.

So come on down and get to know your southern neighbors. I think you'll like it here. Especially the people.
Linda Ellerbee is a distinguished U.S. print and television journalist, perhaps most widely known as the former co-anchor of NBC NewsOvernight. She has also worked for ABC, the Associated Press, CNN and Nick News.
__________________________________________________

Mexico: safer than Canada

Aug 27th 2010, 14:36 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY

OK, so the headline is a bit of a fib. But a report on Mexico’s security situation has painted a more detailed picture than the one we hear about in the news most of the time. When I told friends I was moving to Mexico City, some asked if I would be provided with a bodyguard (no). Business travellers are thinking twice about coming, according to chambers of commerce here. But a detailed breakdown of violence released this week shows that, if you pick your state, you’re as safe—or safer—than in any other North American country.

Mexico’s overall homicide rate is 14 per 100,000 inhabitants: fearsomely high (and possibly an underestimate, given the drugs cartels' habit of hiding bodies in old mines), but quite a lot lower than its great Latin rival Brazil, whose rate is more like 25. As the chart below shows, Mexico’s death rate is bumped up by extraordinarily high levels of violence in four states: Chihuahua (home of Ciudad Juárez, widely labeled the world’s most murderous city), Durango, Sinaloa and Guerrero (see p.29 of this document). Of the rest, some are blissfully serene: Yucatán, where tourists flock to swim with whale sharks and clamber over Chichen Itzá, has a murder rate of 1.7—slightly lower than Canada’s average of 2.1.

Before I am buried an avalanche of polite Canadian emails, I should acknowledge that comparing an entire country with one quiet state is hardly fair: there are no doubt parts of Canada where no-one has been so much as kicked in the shin for decades. But Mexico’s predicament is worth highlighting, because the extreme violence around its border with the United States colors people’s view of the rest of the country, though much of it is pretty quiet. A third of Mexico’s states hover around 5 murders per 100,000, about the same rate as the United States. Another third are around 8 per 100,000, similar to Thailand, for instance. A handful of states have rates in the teens—like Russia, say—and a couple are in the low twenties, a little lower than Brazil’s average. Then you have the chaos of the four very violent states, which sends the average soaring.

The carnage in Mexico’s badlands is not to be underestimated, and nor does it seem to be getting any better. Business travelers should certainly watch out in places such as Juárez and, these days, even in cities such as Monterrey. But people doing business south of the Rio Grande should remember that, even on average, Mexico is a less murderous country than places such as Brazil, and that once you avoid the hotspots, it’s downright safe.

Mexico's big hope: get 5 million U.S. retirees

BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER (April 17, 2010)

aoppenheimer@MiamiHerald.com

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico is silently working on proposals aimed at drawing millions of U.S. retirees to this country, which could eventually lead to the most ambitious U.S.-Mexican project since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.

President Felipe Calderón is likely to propose the first steps toward expanding U.S. retirement benefits and medical tourism to Mexico when he goes to Washington on an official visit May 19, according to well-placed officials here. If not then, he will raise the issue later this year, they say.

``It's one of the pillars of our plans to trigger economic and social well-being in both countries,'' Mexico's ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhan told me. ``We will be seeking to increasingly discuss this issue in coming months and years.''

Calderón brought it up during a U.S.-Canada-Mexico summit in Guadalajara in August last year, but President Barack Obama asked him to shelve the idea until he was able to pass healthcare reform, another official told me.

Now that Congress has passed healthcare reform, Calderón is preparing to charge ahead.

Laura Cohn, Associate Editor interviewed Akaisha for this article.

From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, July 2010

The Wall Street Journal: “Big Investors Call: Buy Mexico”

U.S. Investors Go South, Seek Safe Place for Cash in Real Estate

Mexico City
By Joel Millman

War Anxieties abroad, sluggish returns at home and Mexico’s recent recognition as investment-grade by all three major U.S. credit-rating agencies are behind the surge of U.S. institutional cash seeking a haven in Mexican real estate. According to industry analysts in both countries, more than $1 billion has washed into Mexico from U.S. institutional investors over the past eight months, and a lot more is on the way.

The Torre Mayor, a $250 million office tower built by Canada’s Reichman clan, is about to open just west of the Polanco-Palmas district. Latin America’s tallest office building at 55 stories, about a fourth of its 850,000 square feet has already been leased to Deloitte & Touche LLC. Other top players include the leasing arm of GE Capital and top real-estate investment trust like San Francisco’s AMB Property Corp. and Denver’s Prologis, have quietly built portfolios totaling billions in loads and equity holdings. GE Mexico, with $1.3 billion in the market, is now the biggest player in local real estate. "We’re still in the early innings in Mexico," says Gary Garrabrant of Chicago-based Equity International Properties, part of the Sam Zell family of real-estate operators. The privately held Equity International Properties unit various Mexican ventures since 2001, investing $75 million with Spain’s NH Hoteles in a chain of business-oriented hotels, acquiring a $30 million stake in Desarrolladora Homex, a builder of low-cost housing, and putting another $100 million into a joint venture called Corporate Properties of the Americas with Denver-based Black Creek Capital to develop industrial parks.

1. This week, Corporate Properties of the Americans closed a sale of a $300 million equity position to the Washington State Investment Board, the first U.S. public employees fund to invest directly in Mexican real estate.

With concern that a U.S. real-estate bubble may be moving toward its bursting point, investing south of the border may seem unnecessarily risky to some. Yet developers like Black Creek Capital’s Jim Mulvihill See Mexico as a hedge against U.S. volatility. The commercial and industrial real-estate markets are so underdeveloped in Mexico, Mr. Mulvihill says, "you can still buy quality. In the U.S., all the quality deals are gone."

The kinds of deals his company is structuring are tailor made for U.S. institutional investors, the developer explains, because they’re dollar-denominated and, in the case of industrial parks, guaranteed by the prime tenant. Even during the recent slowdown, with many electronics manufacturers-decamping to lower-cost sites in Asia, rents are paid in full. "Companies take a write-down," Mr. Mulvhill says, but his revenue stream remains uninterrupted.

Something for Title Insurers

Another attraction: U.S. title insurers can now operate in Mexico, and tenants feel confident that leases and construction contracts signed south of the border are enforceable under Mexican civil law. Compared with China, where private land ownership is still a controversial concept in some circles, investing even in a cooling Mexican manufacturing sector offers a return adequately balanced with risk. U.S. institutions are earning premiums of as much as 5% over similar real-estate investments at home, developers say.

In addition to its industrial real-estate partnership with the Zell group, Black Creek Capital has a second Mexico operation, Mexico Retail Partners that develops sites for American "big box" retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp. and Home Depot Inc. Black Creek expects to open as many as 10 Home Depot stores a year in Mexico, as the Atlanta based retailer increases its presence south of the border.

With each new project representing a $50 million transaction, Black Creek will complete upward of $500 million in contracts in each of the next three years, the company’s chairman says, and will seek additional capital from U.S. institutions this year.

Hines, and international real-estate firm, is also raising capital to increase its activity in Mexico. Two real-estate funds launched by the Houston firm in the mid-1990s dedicated to emerging markets now have about 30% of their assets in Mexico, or about $200 million, raised mainly from insurance companies and private investment pools. A third fund, with assets of around $400 million, is being contemplated for later this year.

Last week Hines chased out on investments the company mad in 1997, selling the Torredel Angel office tower on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma and two industrial parks in Queretaro and Guadalajara. The package, a total of $110 million, represented the largest commercial real-estate transaction ever completed in Mexico. The proceeds will likely be rolled into Hines’s new fund. Luis Gutierrez, G. Accionâ’s chief executive officer, says the decision last year by Standard & Poor’s to grant an investment grade rating on Mexico’s sovereign debt, two years after both Fitch and Moody’s Investors Service issued similar upgrades, freed a lot of institutions to increase their exposure to Mexico. "of course, the situation in the U.S., with its soft markets and excess liquidity, helps us, too," says Mr. Gutierrez.

The best indicator of real estate’s may be the behavior of high-worth Mexicans, who usually park their money offshore. Local capital is moving back into the market, says Sandor Valner of merchant bank Valor Consultores. His group launched two funds, totaling $100 million, last year to invest in new hotel construction and hotel sale-leasebacks, tapping Mexico City’s country-club set for investors.

The Mexico They Never Left

by Roger Toll, former Editor of Mexico City News (Delta Sky Magazine, February 2006)

Near Guadalajara, the lakeside town of Ajijic has proven irresistible to many Americans. Here's why.

If the cherished ideals of human unity and harmony between cultures remain hard to achieve, maybe we'd best look to a basic biological concept for a solution. Symbiosis, the dictionary says, is the life association of two dissimilar organisms for mutual benefit. I thought of this on a recent visit to Ajijic (pronounced "ah-HEE-heek"), the prettiest of several towns laced together by a two-lane highway running along the northwest shore of Mexico's largest lake, Chapala, 45 minutes south of Guadalajara. It is midsummer, the rainy season, where the air is soft and the surrounding mountains turn an exuberant tropical green. The setting is bucolic, Old World, with a rustic church and peaceful plaza, and a gazebo waiting for a band to arrive. Cobblestone streets slow traffic to a genteel crawl, and people come and go, murmuring a polite "buenos dias" as they amble by. more ...

Travel Destination

Charming Central Mexico

June 14, 2008 - Article and photos courtesy of Brian Kahler

For many of us gringos pronouncing the village's name Ajijic (A-HEE-HEEK) is almost as difficult as getting there. Nestled on the northern shore of Lake Chapala, Mexico's largest body of fresh water, the historic Mexican village of Ajijic is experiencing an unprecedented surge of los touristas. They're coming for the weather, the affordability, the culture and the warm hospitality of the residents of this 400+ year old village. more...