Tijuana

rikk -

Thanks for the article... Gee, I knew things were bad but I didn't realize they were this bad....

It makes the modest crime wave in my Penna hometown look like small potatoes..

Nothing new to me. I have been advising guys on here about the dangers of border town whore houses for years. Especially Chitown.TJ is probably the worst. I can remember when I was in my early 20's. A bunch of us guys would drive the 4 hours to get there. No freeways then. As innocent as we where, a couple of us still managed to get into trouble. ROBS and police. You can always buy your way out. But do you really want to chance time in a Mexican jail? Whore houses are legal in most of Mexico. I have been to a dozen cities/towns and had some great times for a very reasonable price and felt safe doing it. But not TJ or other border towns.

Interesting how the world economy and "stress" situations are more and more closely linked. Back in "the day," you could "get away" from things like your home nation being involved in a difficult foreign relations situation, by crossing a border and trying on some of the other local customs for a while, if you could afford it. Now'days, if things go bad in Iraq, then oil gets expensive, crime increases, Americans can't hide out from a bad economy by shopping in Canada, and you can't even get a safe and reliable fuck in a whore house in Tijuana any more. I hate globalization.

I'm going to get jumped on for this, but it's the truth. All the border violence is the fault of every American who thinks sitting in their home getting stoned is "harming no one" and "no one's business".

Truth is, every five dollar bag of pot you buy gives a drug dealer half a box of bullets. Every pound of pot, a gun. There are laws against illegal drugs, but this only seems to increase the lure of the drug.

I know that employers are increasing drug screenings and I have no pity, none, whatsoever for people who screw up their career because they can't get by without altering their reality.

I went to a prep school for high school. I struggled to get C's. My roomate, a stoner, graduated with high honors-and he rubbed my nose in it. Several years later, he dropped off the radar screen, completely. All that brilliance shot, gone. Pity.

It's a dumb argument. If I buy something and someone uses that money for immoral ends they are the ones responsible not me. I am not responsible for how other people spend their money. (If your logic were to be valid, we could trace your tax money to some pretty nasty ends. Are you immoral for paying taxes?)

Immoral for paying taxes? No.

Immoral, because I think a drug dealer is just trying to keep a roof over his head and provide for his/her family? Give me a break!!

If you hand a drug dealer money you are contributing to border violence, murder, corruption, rape, and oppression. Don't try to sweet talk or divert it. If you deny this statement you are a fool who has obviously ignored reality and you are ill informed about the world. You should spend some time near the border and talk to the people there about their problems.

Dudester, I don't believe for one second that people who smoke pot are guilty of contributing to violence. More likely it is this trend in thinking that if I do not have 16 cars, 4 houses and a shit load of cash there is something wrong with me. The people who belive that MTV Cribs portrays normal lives are kind of fucked up and doing the rest of us a favor by killing themselves.

The root of the problems facing border cities is that well financed drug dealers are causing havoc. Their financing comes from "recreational" American drug users. There are aggravating factors, such as hundreds of years of institutionalized corruption, and an entropy mindset of the population, but the problems rest right on the doorstep of the college student "just having fun" the suburban home owner who is "blowing off steam" and the hopelessly addicted who can't get through the day without altering their reality. If American weren't financing the drug dealers, there wouldn't be a problem, would there?

Dudester, I agree with everything you say. But I also draw a very different conclusion - I think the root cause of all that you describe is our drug laws. If we legalized drugs the way most other countries of the world do (they may not be legal but there's little enforcement effort), most of the violence would disappear because the money to be made would no longer be anywhere near as great. As you correctly point out, it's the money that causes the violence, but it's our laws that make the business so lucrative. Drug laws, like laws against prostitution, are unenforcable, which by definition means that they are bad laws.

I can only report on the basis of my last experience in TJ, which was about ten days ago. I arrived mid-afternoon on a Sunday and cross the border without incident. I checked into a nice hotel that used to be a Holiday Inn, about a half mile from the border. I then went to the red-light district, stopped in at Adelita's, the main hooker bar, and took a girl upstairs. I then walked around the Zona for a while, and got three tacos, that I ate without any ill-effect at any time. While I was getting an excellent $2 shoe shine, a street girl struck up a conversation with me, and we ended up "arriba." After that experience, I roamed the Zona for a while, and visited some bars in which I was the only gringo, with no problem. No one gave me any shit. In the last of the bars I went to, I picked up a working girl, and we went back to my hotel room, for the third encounter of the night. After a nice time, she excused herself, I retired in my hotel, and was up and across the border at 4:30 am, and on a plane home at 6:45 from San Diego.

No problems at all...no banditos accosted me, and no pinchey police shook me down. The most physical danger I was in was walking down the infamous "alley", where the street girls hang out in front of cheap hotels. As you walk by, the girls go, "tssk! tskk!" to get your attention, and grab your sleeve or jacket to get you to slow down enough to look. That was the most, and only, unwanted physical contact that I got...and that contact wasn't entirely unwanted.

I don't in any way discount any horror stories that any one may tell about TJ. I am a fairly big guy (deceptively so...I have zero athletical ability),and I am also in my mid-40s. I always walk with purpose, as opposed to acting in a way that would make someone think I was lost, or just wondering around randomly looking for sugggestions. I heard some come-ons that may have involvld drugs, but I just walked on without response or reaction. I also sip my beers, so I am never drunk while in the Zona. I think a combination of my age and sobriety keeps the policia away.

The only physical pain I experienced in connection with the trip was a couple of days after I got home, when I had pain in the muscles in my shoulders, back, and ass from all the unaccustomed use of the muscles during the repetitions of the conjugal act.

All I can say is that my three experiences in TJ over the past 18 months is virtually that of an adult Disneyland. I have scene heavily-armed SWAT-type cops in pursuit of somebody, but that was outside the red light district. The next time I am in the Zone, I might get assaulted by some bad guys and killed. But, based on my own experience, I have never seen any more danger than in the nearest big town to me, St. Louis, a place that I do not hesitate to visit.

We are remarkably hypocritical, as a nation, to both (A) fight more fervently, puritanically, the "war on drugs" thus exporting our violence to drug-lord-squabbles in third-world nations like Colombia and Pakistan; while we (B) consume more of those drugs than any other country by a wide wide margin.

I've taken one trip into Mexico, although not to TJ. I crossed the border south on San Antonio. No problems encountered. I, too, was in my 40's and also a bigger guy, such as chitownlawyer. I could not wait to get out of there, however. Sad to see little kids selling drugs and panhandling. Garbage everywhere!

Indeed, Tijuana is not Florence. You would not go there to savor the physical beauty of the place. Don't forget the sad old Indio women selling chicklets.

By the way, going to TJ has eliminated a lot of the fun I used to have in going to strip clubs. I usually go to a club looking for extras. It is difficult to go back to a US club, trying to suss out from a dancer's attitude, flirting, etc., whether she will be good in the back room, after you have been to Tijuana, where all the guesswork is taken out of the process, and you stand in a barroom crowded with latinas, some of them model-beautiful, knowing to a moral (immoral?) certainty that you can fuck any of them at will for $73.00--or, if the street girls are more your taste (totally different from street whores in the US), for a total of $30.00-40.00.