The Los Angeles Times reported today:

U.S. State Department officials have issued a travel alert prompted by drug violence in the north of Mexico, warning that victims have included foreign visitors and residents.

American visitors are advised to be especially alert about their safety in the border region, and to avoid areas where there are high levels of drug dealing and prostitution.

“Violent criminal activity fueled by a war between criminal organizations struggling for control of the lucrative narcotics trade continues along the U.S.-Mexico border,” said the warning, dated Monday. “Attacks are aimed primarily at members of drug-trafficking organizations, Mexican police forces, criminal justice officials and journalists. However, foreign visitors and residents, including Americans, have been among the victims of homicides and kidnappings in the border region.”

American Ambassador Antonio O. Garza Jr. said in a statement that the alert reflected the current reality in Mexico: “These conditions are widely known here in Mexico from watching the news every day, but many tourists are simply not as aware of what goes on in other countries as they are in their own.”

In February, The Times reported that Tijuana was a ghost of its former self. At the time, more than 50 people had been killed in the onetime party town since the beginning of the year.

Other reports have counted scores of drug-related slayings so far this year in another border town, Ciudad Juarez. Mexico’s drug wars killed more than 2,500 people in 2007.

This caught my eye in part because 30 people (high school kids and adult sponsors) I know just returned from a trip down to Tijuana to help build houses. What this article only implies at is how this violence is affecting regular working Mexicans like the people I know down there.

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A vacation can be stressful enough without adding masked gunman to the equation. But a rising crime in the Baja California of Mexico is apparently making that a more common occurrence.

Assaults on American tourists have brought hard times to hotels and restaurants that dot Mexican beaches just south of the border from San Diego.

Surfers and kayakers are frightened to hit the waters of the northern stretch of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, long popular as a weekend destination for U.S. tourists. Weddings have been canceled. Lobster joints a few steps from the Pacific were almost empty on the usually busy New Year’s weekend.

Americans have long tolerated shakedowns by police who boost salaries by pulling over motorists for alleged traffic violations, and tourists know parts of Baja are a hotbed of drug-related violence. But a handful of attacks since summer by masked, armed bandits — some of whom used flashing lights to appear like police — marks a new extreme that has spooked even longtime visitors.

Lori Hoffman, a San Diego-area emergency room nurse, said she was sexually assaulted Oct. 23 by two masked men in front of her boyfriend, San Diego Surfing Academy owner Pat Weber, who was forced to kneel at gunpoint for 45 minutes. They were at a campground with about 30 tents, some 200 miles south of the border.

The men shot out windows of the couple’s trailer and forced their way inside, ransacked the cupboards and left with about $7,000 worth of gear, including computers, video equipment and a guitar.

Weber, who has taught dozens of students in Mexico over the last 10 years, plans to surf in Costa Rica or New Zealand. “No more Mexico,” said Hoffman, who reported the attack to Mexican police. No arrests have been made.

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