From the 1960s up into the 1990s, I’d visit northern Baja California regularly. But I stopped taking my family to Baja beaches in the 1990s because of all the hired goons with fifth-grade educations standing around waving loaded machine guns. If they were supposed to be the good guys, I really didn’t want to meet the bad guys.

A decade later they did indeed start shooting each other in vast numbers. But lately that seems to have calmed down somewhat, so I read with interest a travel advice column in the NYT by a California lady with my old perspective: it’s kind of amazing that you can just drive to a foreign country, one with a coastline that would be expensive in California:

In Ensenada, Cheap Mexican Charms Await by Freda Moon

It doesn’t sound like much has changed in the 18 years I’ve been away:

At first, entering Baja at Tijuana — a chaotic metropolis not without its own charms — can be jarring for first-time border-crossers. But just 10 minutes down the Transpeninsular, there are rocky cliffs overlooking the dark blue Pacific and an alluring, vaguely Mediterranean landscape. The drive south has moments of majesty mixed with ugly, haphazard development: oceanfront condo towers, seemingly abandoned mid-construction, and Southern California-style gated communities with names like “Baja Malibu.” On our most recent trip, we splurged on the more direct, oceanfront toll road (three tolls at $2.40 each) rather than the potholed and slightly more meandering free road. At first, our modest investment seemed to pay off: shortly after the second booth, we found ourselves the only car on a pristine stretch of newly paved, four-lane highway. The road was entirely empty. Soon, we learned why, when we dead-ended where a rockslide had closed a 20-mile stretch the previous winter. If there were cautionary signs, we’d missed them. Such is Baja.

When I was younger, Mexico’s pervasive slip-shoddiness was kind of fun. But now that my reflexes are less nimble, it seems like a drag.

A few years ago I reviewed former Mexican foreign secretary Jorge Castaneda’s book on Mexico. He pointed out that Mexico ought to be able to make a huge amount of money as a retirement destination for Americans. (48 years ago I visited an American retirement community at Lake Chapala with my parents who wanted to check it out.)

But, Castaneda noted, older Americans aren’t going to show up in large numbers if they feel like every time they venture out onto the streets they are taking their lives in their hands because there are so few traffic stoplights and the like.

From The Economist in 2011:

… every year some 24,000 people lose their lives on Mexico’s potholed roads, almost double the number that die at the hands of its drug mafias. A further 600,000 are injured. The World Health Organisation reckons that, along with mountainous Peru and misgoverned Venezuela, Mexico has the most dangerous roads in Latin America. In Mexico’s case the main problem is the drivers. Fourteen of Mexico’s 32 states, home to just over half the population, grant licences without setting a practical driving test. Three of those 14 run compulsory courses which students pass merely by attending. Five others have multiple-choice written exams, but they are not very hard. For example: “If on entering the vehicle we find the windscreen dirty”, one (incorrect) option is “to drive fast to clean it”. In six areas, including Mexico City, there is no compulsory training or test of any sort.

Castaneda argued that the kind of safety improvements that would attract American retirees would be good for Mexicans too.

But I wonder if Mexican fatalism and disorganization serves as a sort of American-repellent: that Mexicans understand that they’ve got this amazing piece of land, so they have this passive-aggressive way to keep the gringos away by failing to fix their flaws?