Confidential File

Ensenada's Brooding About Tijuana's Sins

For natives of Ensenada there's a long, lean summer ahead.

The gaiety picked up a little over the Cuatro de Julio* weekend, but so far this year, the Baja California resort city has been suffering from more than the heat.

Its problem is one of economics.

Ensenada
was conceived and weaned on the Mexican peso, but it grew city-big on
the American dollar. And it's been the American dollar which has
supported its relative prosperity in the last few decades of its
phenomenal growth.

Specifically, the American tourist dollar.

But now, I'm informed, the economy is hurting badly.

Visitors
from north of the border — once as reliable as San Juan Capistrano's
swallows — suddenly aren't reliable any more. In fact, they're
avoiding Ensenada this summer like they're unaware that the overgrown seaside village exists at all.

The reason they are, in case you can't guess, is that they're afraid.

 Not
afraid in the cowardly sense. It's just that they'd rather not take
unnecessary chances on the strange brand of justice which too
frequently is meted out by Baja California courts and police.

The
atrocious treatment accorded visitors in the border town of Tijuana and
the publicity it received in recent months have influenced an awful lot
of people to change any Baja California vacation plans which might have been formulating in their minds.

Now that the pocketbook pinch is on, I'm told that the merchants of Ensenada are beginning to wake up to the fact that some terrible things have been happening to tourists in Tijuana.

They're outright shocked, I'm told.

They're stunned by the inhumane treatment being doled out to prospective paying customers.

Now they're adding their voices to the cry of clean up Tijuana.

And while I'm sad that the current economic squeeze might be hurting some of the small, decent individuals in Ensenada, I'm glad that the businessmen there are finally "aware" of conditions in the sin city 72 miles to their north.

I'm glad, even if their compassion is inspired by the dollar signs.