CANCUN, Mexico – Spring break has arrived in this capital of overindulgence and uninhibited youth, and the signs are everywhere: pulsating music, throbbing bodies, MTV, rap performers 50 Cent and Ludacris and Paris Hilton.
Oh, and the local cops are on strike – as are the firefighters.
“Mexico is chill,” said Hilary Blenenke, 20, a sophomore at the University of Chicago. “Who needs cops anyway?”
When spring breakers hit the white-sand beaches this weekend, they will find them patrolled by dozens of federal police officers dispatched last week by the Mexican government to this resort in the state of Quintana Roo.
About 80 federal officers, including gray-clad preventive police whose ranks include military personnel, are patrolling the main tourist zone and coastline. Toting guns and rifles, they contrast sharply with scantily clad young Americans downing beers and working on their tans.
“They’re a bunch of peeping Toms,” Suzanne Romano, 19, a freshman at Boston College, said of the patrolling officers. “This is the third time in less than an hour that they walk past me, kicking up sand. And they can’t even speak English, so I don’t know what they’re saying.”
Officials say that Cancun, strategically located on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, has become a center for Colombian cocaine, drug violence and government corruption.
Last week, federal prosecutors jailed 27 police officers here, including local, state and federal policemen charged with drug trafficking and murder.
Last fall, six federal agents were executed, victims of what U.S. officials call a simmering turf war between the Juarez and Gulf drug cartels.
Local officials have said Cancun remains safe for tourists.
Tomas Morales, a local policeman who’s moonlighting as a security guard for a money-exchange center until the strike is resolved, said about three-fourths of the 1,200 local police officers have been on strike over pay for 45 days, figures confirmed by strike leader Marco Apolonio Castillo.
In Cancun’s downtown square, striking police and firefighters pass the time playing cards, watching TV or sleeping as music blares. Some sell their official police T-shirts to perplexed tourists for 200 pesos, about $19.
As a drunken teen with a stringy blond ponytail bobbed to the music, a federal policeman, who for security reasons gave only his first name, Ernesto, said, “Cancun’s problems are right here – the demand for drugs that these poor Americans can’t shake.”
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AP-NY-03-11-05 2035EST
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