Tijuana Strip Turns Ghostly In Wake of Drug Violence

As Tourists Increasingly Shun Mexico's Border Cities, Many Businesses Can't Survive

TIJUANA, Mexico -- A shop on Avenida Revolucion was once considered a surefire gold mine.

Day trippers poured over America's busiest border crossing, just south of San Diego, and bought mountains of jewelry, crafts and leather goods. Mexican families schemed to own -- or lease -- a piece of an eight-block stretch of the avenue, generally thought to be the most lucrative shopping district along the Mexican side of the border.

But when Gloria Flores retires at the end of this month, her art shop on Avenida Revolucion will go dark. None of her children want it, nor does anyone else. Soon it will be another vacancy among the abandoned businesses and for-rent signs on an avenue whose decline illustrates the corrosive and mushrooming effect of drug violence on Mexico's legal economy.

Daylight gun battles, beheadings and kidnappings have scared away tourists, forced layoffs and turned some areas of once-vibrant Mexican border cities into virtual ghost towns. The drug wars, which have killed more than 6,000 people in the past 2 1/2 years, have accelerated a decline that merchants also blame on the U.S. economic slowdown and delays at the border because of increased enforcement.

In Tijuana, where at least 200 people have been killed in drug violence this year, merchants say tourism is down as much as 90 percent compared with 2005, when an estimated 4 million people visited. Half of the downtown businesses -- more than 2,400 -- are shuttered. Farther east along the border, empty markets have become the norm in Ciudad Juarez, where fighting between rival cartels has killed 200 people this year. In Nuevo Laredo, five hotels have shut down.

"We're touching bottom," said Andrés Méndez, an Avenida Revolucion shop owner. "This is the barometer for what can happen in the rest of our city and the rest of our country."

There have been robberies and assaults of tourists, but no reports of tourists being killed, Baja California Tourism Secretary Oscar Escobedo Carignan said in an interview. But the few Americans who come across the border now are often startled by the sight of heavily armed Mexican soldiers, patrolling streets in armored vehicles to confront drug traffickers.

"I wouldn't come down here if it wasn't safe," Richard Brown, a longtime tour bus driver, said while waiting for his small group of passengers on Avenida Revolucion. "But when the passengers see these soldiers coming down the streets pointing machine guns, it kind of leaves a black mark."

Mexico's beach resorts, though not immune from drug violence, seem to be faring well because they are not as closely associated with it in the eyes of most foreigners, tour operators say. Even Acapulco, where five severed heads were rolled onto a nightclub floor two years ago, has managed to maintain a strong flow of vacationers.

But in stores along Avenida Revolucion, entire days can go by without a single sale. Flores, who has run her business for more than 30 years, could once count on taking in at least $6,000 a month. The tiny shop, which sells handicrafts, paid for three of her children to go to college and sustained the family after her husband's sudden death.

But now, she seldom records more than $300 in monthly sales. The sons she had hoped would inherit her lease have moved to the United States to look for work.

"No one thought this would have happened," she said one recent afternoon as the hours passed with no customers.