"US State Department Renews - And Extends - Mexico Travel Warning."

Here's an excerpt from my latest article for Homeland Security Today's Correspondents Watch:

"The last travel warning the US State Department issued for Mexico in April, 2011 sounded dire enough. It advised Americans to defer all non-essential travel to several parts of the country and detailed various violent events in different places throughout the nation. But the renewed travel warning issued Feb.8 added four more states to the ten that were identified in the previous warning, and it strengthened the cautionary language for seven of them. The warning first covers general country conditions and uses the Mexican government’s drug war death toll figure of 47,515. Several Mexican media outlets and many drug war observers believe this is a conservative estimate, placing the number closer to 53,000 drug war-related deaths. The travel advisory then points out, somewhat surprisingly, that an increasing number of innocent people are being targeted by transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), something that Mexican President Felipe Calderón generally doesn’t like to acknowledge or discuss. The number of Americans killed in Mexico has gone up, according to the State Department: “US citizens reported to the Department of State as murdered in Mexico increased from 35 in 2007 to 120 in 2011.” Those figures look somewhat alarming, however, the warning doesn’t provide any context or explanation for the steep rise in American murders during those four years." 

To read the full article at HSToday.us, please CLICK HERE!