Chicago is under review.
Via KSL:
The U.S. government on Friday barred its employees from traveling to the Mexican resort city of Acapulco, where a rise in homicides attributed to drug gangs has made it one of the world’s deadliest cities in recent years.
The new travel guidelines posted online by the State Department extended a ban that already covered nearly the entire state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located and which has been a flashpoint of drug violence.
American government employees previously could go to Acapulco as long as they traveled by air instead of land. They are still allowed to visit the Guerrero state resorts of Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo if they fly.
Later Friday, the Mexican foreign affairs ministry said in a statement that travel warnings should include precise and contextualized information, but did not address the details of the U.S. travel alert.
Famous in decades past as a playground for Hollywood stars and other American tourists, Acapulco, a Pacific Coast city of about 700,000 residents, registered 902 homicides last year, according to government statistics. For all of Guerrero, there were 2,106 killings, a 33 percent increase over the previous year.
The violence peaked around summer in Acapulco, but murder rates continue to be high and have even become common in tourist zones near the beach.
Last month, on Good Friday, the dismembered bodies of two men were discovered in plastic bags and an ice chest in neighborhoods along the city’s seaside boulevard.