Rival criminal gangs have hijacked this glitzy-but-faded Pacific resort, where the Hollywood Rat Pack once sipped martinis, Elvis filmed a musical comedy, Elizabeth Taylor wed (again) and starlets danced the night away.
Acapulco's newest arrivals are drug lords, and residents now cower from shootouts and keep a watch out for severed heads. Some visitors to the city simply vanish. Gunmen seized 20 Mexican men in broad daylight on Sept. 30. They haven't been seen since.
Occupancy rates have plummeted along the ghostly boulevard of beachfront hotels. Restaurants sit empty -- or shuttered up.
The mayhem hasn't dulled the beauty of Acapulco, set on a semicircular bay flanked by mountains alive with bougainvillea, a stunning backdrop that made it the nation's oldest and best-known resort, ``the pearl of the Pacific.''
Violence has cast a dark cloud on many of the city's 800,000 residents, however.
``Everybody seems to be armed,'' said Areli Garcia Santana, a 22-year-old orthodontics student. ``There are gunfights all over.''
BANDS' DISPUTE
At least three narcotics bands dispute power over Acapulco's strategic port: remnants of the Beltran Leyva cartel, Los Zetas and the Familia Michoacana.
In a brazen broad-daylight shootout on April 14, gunmen killed six people and wounded five others along the landscaped main boulevard in the tourist district, shattering hotel windows and triggering a chain of auto accidents with the blaze of automatic weapons fire. Among the victims were a woman and her 8-year-old daughter, the apparent targets.
Drug gang henchmen frequently use police or military uniforms, heightening a sense of insecurity. On Sept. 25, drug enforcers dressed in camouflage uniforms typical of marines threw grenades at a safe house that belonged to a rival group, then entered and executed seven men.
The same week, henchmen killed two nephews of the deputy city transit director, severing their heads and displaying them on a street. A sign accused the city official of being in the pocket of the Beltran Leyva cartel.
It was the daylight abduction, though, of a group of 20 men near a church on Sept. 30 that truly laid bare some of the crosscurrents of violence that rack the city.
INFLUENCE
The men, ranging in age from 17 to 47, were from the state of Michoacan, where drug lords' influence is vast. Many locals dismissed the vehement claims of family members that the victims were tourists, suggesting instead that they were hit men deployed for the battles raging in the city. The underlying message: Good riddance.
``Acapulco society does not believe that they were tourists,'' said Javier Saldivar, the head of the National Chamber of Commerce in Acapulco.
While it may offer consolation that tourists aren't vanishing, the arrival of vehicles filled with cartel hit men can't help Acapulco burnish a faded image as the former glamour resort of Mexico.
It takes only a stroll around the walkways and lobbies of hotels such as Los Flamingos and Villa Vera to discern how far Acapulco has fallen.
If the sweet bungalows of the Villa Vera could whisper their secrets, Frank Sinatra probably would be singing in the background. After all, it was here that The Voice romanced Ava Gardner. Regular visitors included Gina Lollobrigida, Rita Hayworth and, of course, Elizabeth Taylor, who gazed into the eyes of producer Mike Todd, making him the third of her eight marital conquests.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/20/1881767/once-posh-acapulco-overrun-by.html#ixzz12tnXnaVA
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