SAFETY IN LATIN AMERICA
PART 1: HOW SECURITY, OR THE LACK OF SECURITY, IMPACTS THE TOURISM INDUSTRY’S ECONOMY
Chicago is one of the great U.S. cities, famous for its Magnificent Mile, beautiful lakefront, many museums, and fine dining. Chicago attracts both leisure and business travelers, and it has a thriving convention business.
Unfortunately, Chicago also has its darker side. In the 1920s, this city was home to illegal establishments to consume alcoholic beverages, called speak- easies, and was famous for its gangster, rum-runner culture. The entertain- ment industry has enshrined the city’s sordid past with the play Chicago.
There is no doubt that Chicago’s dark past has become part of its tourism product. There are different definitions for the term “dark tourism.”Baran (2012), writing in an article forTravel Weekly, notes: “It can be morbid. It’s always a bit voyeuristic. But it seems like a fundamental human urge. Like drivers slowing to gawk at a gruesome accident, tourists often feel a pro- found need to see the aftermath of disaster and devastation wherever in the world they strike. The result is a form of travel increasingly coming to be known as ‘dark tourism’” (para. 1–2).
Dark tourism then is a place where death and destruction have turned into tourism attractions. These “places that silently speak out to us” may be cemeteries, places where crimes have been committed, and/or reminders of a past best forgotten. As Baran (2012) writes: “From ground zero in New York and Katrina’s destructive force in New Orleans to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and the Killing Fields in Cambodia, witnes- sing places where horrific deaths have occurred has for many become an integral part of experiencing a destination” (para. 3).
Within dark tourism we find a range of options. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Chicago’s checkered past can serve as a tourism draw.
Recently, Chicago’s violent past turned into its violent present. Although most of Chicago’s current inflation in crime (2012–2013) has nothing to
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do with bootlegging, and as of the writing of this chapter, the violence has not touched the city’s tourism districts, there is the fear that the city’s neg- ative crime wave may be impacting the city’s tourism industry. In fact, Bergen (2012)wrote the following in theChicago Tribune:
Chicago's extensive efforts to reinvigorate its convention and tourism industries could be damaged unless the city quickly defuses the violent crime wave that has exploded in its neighborhoods and nicked the downtown, the city's top con- vention and tourism official said Wednesday.
“We hope this sunsets quickly because all the good work we're doing regionally, nationally and internationally, if this is not contained in a reasonable period of time, it will have an impact,”Don Welsh, president and chief executive of Choose Chicago, said in a morning meeting with theChicago Tribune's editorial board.
(Business section, p. 1)
The impact of Welch’s words was felt immediately. The next day the Huffington Postnoted that Welsh had had to retract his words, claiming that they were taken out of context, due to a deluge of inquiries regarding Chicago safety. The following day, theHuffington Postwrote:
Welsh then revealed that his office has been receiving inquiries from meeting planners questioning whether the Second City is a safe destination, particularly as reports of so-called“mob-style”attacks in and near the city's Magnificent Mile shopping district and the city's surging homicide rate have gone national.
Welsh later Wednesday claimed in an interview with theChicago Sun-Times that his comments were“taken out of context,”though he did acknowledge that Choose Chicago has fielded“five or six”calls over a period of just over a month from meeting planners anxious about crime in the city.
“They’re asking if these issues are taking place in the downtown area or near McCormick Place and the answer we’ve given them is an emphatic,‘No,’”Welsh told theSun-Times.
Welsh went on to call a“mob-style”attack near Michigan Avenue last month an“isolated incident”and maintained that Chicago is“the safest big city in the world.”Last week, 11 youths attacked a man leaving the Fourth of July fireworks show in the city's River North neighborhood.
“The shootings we have seen have been almost 100% isolated to neighbor- hoods outside the downtown core of Chicago where tourists and visitors from around the world frequent,”Welsh told the paper.
(“Chicago crime impacting tourism?,”para. 3–7)
The Chicago example is not unique. For example, in the early part of 2013, Las Vegas found itself in the ironic situation that its crime rate had fallen but due to a few highly publicized crimes, people’s confidence in their safety had also fallen. For example, one headline from theLas Vegas Sunstated that “Las Vegas seen as dangerous even as crime drops” (Dreier, 2013). The article goes on to state that the perception of crime is enough to keep people away,
thereby transforming a negative perception into a negative economy. Vaca- tions have traditionally been a means by which people attempt to escape from the stress and rigors of everyday life. However, what once served as a way to repair body and soul has now become a new area for victimization.
The perception that travel may result in bodily harm, loss of property, or even death is a threat to one of the country’s largest industries. Events such as the bombing of New York’s World Trade Center, the Los Angeles riots with its subsequent loss of billions of dollars, and attacks on foreign tourists in various locations throughout the United States have once again made travel/
visitor officials realize how sensitive their industry’s economy is to security issues.
Questions of violence directly impact the travel industry’s ability to pro- mote a safe and worry-free experience and can result in major economic losses. Vacationers traditionally have viewed their trips as an escape from the world’s problems and from the worries of everyday life. While on tour, the last thing vacationers want to be concerned about is being a victim of crime. Business travelers, being more cognizant of safety issues, may also shy away from high-risk locales. Although no locale can provide a perfect security environment, by developing a cooperative relationship between the law enforcement and tourism industries, the risk factor of private security concerns can be substantially reduced. This new relationship is a means for law enforcement to emphasize its commitment to public service and dem- onstrate its importance to a community’s economic viability.
Consequently, toward the end of 2008 major tourism centers and small towns felt an economic meltdown whose impact has lasted for at least 5 years after. The economic meltdown was also a sign that tourism is/was very much connected to the global economy. In this new world, no indus- try, nation, or economy is an island unto itself. Tourism is, to a great extent, in the forefront of these economic changes and challenges. How the travel and tourism industry adapts to this new environment teaches us a great deal about what may lie ahead.
The relationship between tourism security and economics is essential.
This is especially true during periods when the economy is weak and people may fear to spend expendable income on what they perceive to be a luxury commodity. To begin to understand these issues, we need to ask, “Whose security?” Do we mean the security of:
• the local community caused by an increase in acts of violence due to eco- nomic constrictions;
• the tourist community faced with greater threats by the locals;
• the middle and upper classes of a community;
• the poorer and disenfranchised classes;
• specific districts, such as a downtown areas, that possibly see greater levels of crime as tourism constricts in those neighborhoods?
Such questions, especially in challenging economic cycles, are critical as the allocation of resources often depends on our sociogeographic definition of what constitutes a tourism crime.Table 2.1demonstrates the advantages and disadvantages of resource allocation and some of what it may signify for a hypothetical tourism locale.
Table 2.2provides a sense of who wins and who loses during challenging economic periods.
Economic difficulties within a tourism locale may inspire at least four categories of potential crimes:
Table 2.1 Advantages and Disadvantages of Resource Allocation
Group Advantages Disadvantages
Total community Safe city
Higher level of economic growth
Positive environmental impact
Higher tax revenue
Major investment Requires tight coordination between the political, judicial, and police
Political price to pay in the beginning
Tourism sectors Easier to control Less expensive
Creates an illusion of safety
Must keep tourists in
“ghetto”
Criminals will slip into the tourist zone Media problems Wealthier areas of
town
Easy to patrol
Less expensive than total city
The middle and upper classes tend to vote and control the political arena
Ghettos and segregation form along
neighborhood lines Criminals will slip into the upper-class zones Media problems Poor and
disenfranchised
Gives them a chance to raise their level of life
All people deserve protection May lower crime throughout the city Permits concentration of police in highest crime areas
Expensive
Political problems from both poor and middle class
Police may fall into reactive patterns of solving crimes rather than preventing crimes
1. Crimes by locals against tourists 2. Crimes by tourists against locals
3. Crimes by locals against other locals that create a negative image 4. Crimes by tourists against other tourists
To complicate our problem further, the challenges faced by the tourism industry are not only different from those being faced by the local popula- tion, but they may also be in conflict with the local population’s needs. From the perspective of the traveler, periods of economic decline may present both advantages and disadvantages.
This chapter looks at the interrelationship between tourism security and economics from a double perspective. The first part of the chapter looks at how security or the lack of security impacts the tourism industry’s economy.
The second half of the chapter looks at how tourism security must face the issues of shrinking budgets and how security personnel must do more with less.
Assumptions about Crime and Economic Viability
Before either of these two major themes can be addressed, we must first look at some assumptions within the world of crime and terrorism and question if these assumptions are valid or not.
The first assumption that must be examined is that terrorism is a form of crime. Although it is beyond the scope of this book to enter into the many reasons for criminal and terrorist acts, for the most part, and from the
Table 2.2 Winners and Losers During Challenging Economic Periods Whose
challenge Winners Losers
Tourists Those from more affluent areas may see locale as now affordable
Tourists from weaker economies will have to be more careful or will travel less
Tourism industry
Better service must be given and innovations and creativity will be needed
A lot of people may lose their jobs, adding to the unemployment base and possible crime by those who know tourism best The local
population
Less crowded streets May have more opportunities to use local facilities Prices may fall
Possible hike in taxes
Less money for city services when they are needed most May lose jobs, causing some to turn to crime
perspective of tourism, this book rejects this assumption. The one area where the issue of crime and terrorism do merge is in the illegal drug trade.
In this case, terrorists often engage in the selling of illegal narcotics for the purposes of raising money for terrorism acts. However, in most other cases, we distinguish crime issues from terrorism issues. The reason for this distinc- tion is that crime issues are often tied to a successful tourism industry. In other words, tourism criminals need tourists if they are to have a steady sup- ply of victims. Furthermore, from the tourism perspective, there are two types of criminal acts that impact tourism. As noted, one side of the crime issue is crimes committed against tourists, and these are specific crimes that target visitors. From the criminal’s perspective, these people have a parasitic business relationship with the tourism industry; that is to say that without tourists/visitors, there can be no crimes against tourists. From this perspec- tive, the criminal needs the tourism industry to succeed. In simple terms, where there are no tourists there can be no tourism crimes. On the other side of the criminal coin arecollateral crimes. These are local crimes that have nothing to do directly with tourism, but spill over into the tourism industry.
This spillover effect may either be due to a tourist or visitor being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the crime giving the impression that a locale is not safe and thus discouraging visitor or convention business.
Terrorism presents the tourism official and security specialist with a differ- ent situation. Terrorism is often interlocked with the desire to destroy a local economy. Tourism is a big business. An attack on a tourism industry can cause loss of life and negative publicity; in addition, it can provoke a major eco- nomic downturn. “Terrorists are not out for profits, but for a cause. As such they seek the macro destruction of the tourism industry as a way to hurt or destroy a particular nation’s economy. Terrorists rarely seek profit, but instead determine success by the quantity of dead bodies and by the loss of economic opportunities” (Tarlow, 2005a; 2005b, p. 39). Terrorists may cause either direct or indirect damage to a tourism industry, but in all cases, terrorists will judge the economic downturn caused by their actions to be a success.
Table 2.3then places these four different actions into perspective.
The second major assumption that must be addressed is the belief that declining economies produce an increase in crime (and perhaps in terror- ism). This assumption is based on a theoretical Marxist perspective. Marxism divides the world into good and bad and tends to see the proletariat as good and the bourgeois as bad. Thus, classical Marxist theory tends to justify cer- tain criminal acts as necessary in order for inherently good members of the proletariat to survive in economically hard times. From this perspective,
people do not steal due to a lack of morality (often defined by Marxists as bourgeois morality), but rather for the need to survive.Chambliss, Mankoff, Pearce, and Snider (2000)summarize the Marxist theory on crime (a per- spective often assumed to be true by a large proportion of the media) as
“The idea that the poor are driven to commit crime strongly underpins the theories of those criminologists who have taken Marx’s work further. . .” (Basic Beliefs section, para. 1).
Marxists assume that deviance is caused by economic disparity within a society. This unequal distribution of goods and wealth produces jealousy or envy resulting in crime. Thus, the criminal is not at fault, but rather the capitalist who provokes the criminal with an ostentatious show of wealth.
Furthermore, the Marxist argues that crime arises due to people being forced into demeaning work that exacerbates the already unstable economic situ- ation. Marxists further argue that laws are promulgated to serve the ruling class, so even when a member of the ruling class breaks the law, he or she has good access to a lawyer (e.g., “money buys protection”). Marxist analysis then leads to the assumption that tourism is dependent on those clas- ses that have expendable income. To have expendable income means that the visitor is not part of the proletariat and therefore may have provoked the crime of which he or she is the victim.
The belief that tourism crimes rise during difficult economic times may well be predicated on a “Robin Hood” scenario. In this scenario, good poor people are driven to crimes due to the ostentatious behavior of rich tourists.
Yet, one’s proclivity toward crime may well be determined more by morals than by economics. There are few people who cannot think of “good” poor people who simply do not rob, and of “bad” rich people who do rob. Ethics may be a far greater determining factor in our tendency to commit crimes than is the size of our bank account.
To a certain extent, the same concept is found in classical literature. For example, the “Robin Hood” syndrome of the “good guy” who steals from
Table 2.3 Effects of Acts of Crime Versus Acts of Terrorism on Tourism
Tourism crime Hurts individual tourist but not aimed at industry as a whole Local crimes with
tourism collateral damage
Not aimed at tourist or visitor. The victim was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time
Direct terrorist attack
Aimed at tourism industry for the purpose of causing economic pain, negative publicity, and death Terrorist attack at
nontourism site
Negative economic fallout along with negative publicity
the rich to give to the poor is found in much of Western literature. It is assumed in this scenario that the poor are “good” and the rich are “bad.”
Furthermore, Spanish literature reflects this same notion in the “Picarro.”
In the sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque novelLazarillo de Tormes, the hero stops just short of illegal behavior. The novel presents the “pı´carro”
(loosely translated as “rogue”) in endearing terms, leading the antihero to become the hero. American cinema is also not stranger to this glorification of the criminal as a man of the people. In the movieOcean’s Eleven, the villain is the casino owner, while the thieves are presented as the heroes.
TheNew York Timesreflected this Marxist viewpoint in an article titled
“Keeping Wary Eye on Crime as Economy Sinks.” Despite the fact that the article quotes New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly as saying,
“he did not subscribe to the idea that there was a strong connection between a city’s financial fortunes and its safety,” the article begins with the words: “It is the question on the minds of New Yorkers, once they stop pondering the fate of their 401(k)’s: If the city’s economy sinks to depths not seen in de- cades, will crime return with a vengeance?” (Baker & Hauser, 2008, para. 1).
The article’s theme is that there is a relationship between a tumbling economy and rising crime rates.
The causality of crime then is intertwined with economics and tourism.
For example, in the classic bookThe Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen (1963)writes: “It has already been remarked that the term ‘leisure’
as used here does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is nonproductive consumption of time. Time is consumed nonproductively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work and (2) as an evi- dence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness” (p. 46). Mills, writing about Veblen, quotes Veblen as stating, “the accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale.” Veblen tended to assume that the pie was a certain size, and that the wealthy class withdraws from the lower class “as much as it may of the means of substance. . .” (p. xiv). The same point is made many years later when Eric P. Baumer and Richard Rosenfeld from the College of Crimi- nology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University wrote:
The most recent of these economic downturns has stimulated renewed interest in, and speculation about, a possible link between economic conditions and crime rates. Numerous media reports in the first months of the most recent recession sug- gested possible links between increased crime rates and the foreclosure crisis, rising unemployment, mass layoffs, and depressed wages. Many accounts speculated