For the second straight year, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has issued a travel warning to Mexico for college students considering spending their spring break there.
And for the second straight year, the Mexico Tourism Board is not pleased about it.
"This warning is exceptionally aggressive,” said Rodolfo Lopez Negrete, chief operating officer of the Mexico Tourism Board, in a written statement. “To paint Mexico with such a massively broad brush stroke is simply outrageous.”
According to MyFoxAustin.com, the Texas DPS has issued a travel warning to college students on spring break, urging them not to travel to Mexico. Authorities are pointing to several recent incidents of drug-related violence in the country, including the murders of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent and two El Paso boys last month.
Since last year’s warning, the Mexico Tourism Board has had several meetings with Texas DPS officials with hopes of convincing them that the country was a safe place for spring breakers to travel to.
In June of last year, the Mexico Tourist Board concluded its second face-to-face meeting with the Secretary of State of Texas to discuss better communication methods between the two destinations with hopes of avoiding another future travel warning.
“We basically presented them with all of the facts and figures in Cancun and in Mexico to show them that it was in fact very safe, as you know, to visit Mexico and that the warning was unfair because it was not specific enough,” Alfonso Sumano, director of tourism, North America for the Mexico Tourism Board, told Travel Agent at the time. “We basically said that they need to be very specific when talking about incidents in Mexico because a lot of people don’t truly understand how far away a lot of the tourist destinations are from the areas where these incidents have occurred.”
But either those meetings fell on deaf ears or Texas became unconvinced following severals updated travel warnings by the U.S. Department of the State, the most recent of which was issued on Feb. 8.
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