Reynosa isn't safe for visitors, city's economic secretary says

MISSION – Reynosa cannot guarantee the safety of its visitors amid recent fighting between the military and drug smuggling groups, an official from the Mexican city said Thursday.

“We don’t have the access or the resources,” Armando Zertuche Zuani, Reynosa’s secretary of economic development and employment, said in Spanish.

“(Mexican President Felipe) Calderón put us in a war for which the citizens were not trained to respond. We are prepared to respond to flooding or hurricane emergencies but not a war.”

Zertuche Zuani’s statements came during the Mission Chamber of Commerce’s Economic Summit 2010, in which he touted Reynosa’s economic accomplishments like creating more jobs in the city’s maquiladoras.

“What I want the people (to know) is that we are working in an organized way -- with a project -- that (has given) us good results,” he said.

Despite recent violence, the city’s economy is in a better position than others in Tamaulipas due to growing industries and restaurant sector, he said.

But the effects of drug violence are undeniable. The city’s burgeoning medical industry is only working at 25 percent of its capacity.

 “With this impact (the violence) everything went down to half,” Zertuche Zuani said. “If nationwide the growth went down to zero, we (Reynosa) went from seven to three.”

The secretary also criticized Calderón’s strategy in fighting his nation’s entrenched drug cartels by deploying the military across states like Tamaulipas.

“There are other methods,” he said. “In the U.S., they do not fight it like that.”

While economic progress may be slowing in Reynosa now, the city will welcome new visitors once the violence dies down, Zertuche Zuani said.