This will really help the tourism..... :(

To say that the hotel zone is safe is a relative statement, of course: no place is completely safe, as we all know. However, the only death of a tourist under suspicious circumstances that I'm aware of occurring in the year I've been here was of a lady in her late thirties, apparently from Florida, whose body was discovered by passer byes at seaside, on Delfines Beach, at around 1 AM. They summoned the police.

The coroner said her actual cause of death was drowning, suggesting that she was still alive, but perhaps unconscious, when placed in the water; and, that she'd been dead about two hours when discovered. Her body had apparently been weighed down by rocks placed in her backpack, but the shallowness of the water, coupled with the tide going out, revealed her presence. Other than the rocks in her backpack, there was no evidence of foul play: she still had money and other personal effects on her person, indicating she hadn't been robbed. Although reported in detail in the newspaper, I never heard whether anyone had been accused in her death.

 

Humm.. I don't recall hearing about that story... "rocks" in a backpack.....? I wonder if perhaps those "rocks' may have been coral or something... sounds (no pun intended) a little fishy... and obviously it must not have been too much weight or she would not have "washed up"....

But as I'm sure you realize, families almost always scream "cover up" and "murder" rather than admit their loved one may have been doing something foolish/dangerous.

I'm constantly amazed that more tourists don't meet their end's here given the combination of booze, surf, and inhibition.

 

Well, you were right to question the amount of rocks in the backpack, and the thoroughness with which the body was hidden, if it was a case of foul play.

Also, our posts crossed as I was amending the detail about "washing up", as I recalled it had more to do with the shallowness of the water there that the body was revealed. (Whether it was a moon lit night, and other factors that might come into play in interpreting how the body came to be discovered, I'll leave up to the "Monks" among us.)

 

It happens here, all the time. It just doesn't hit the papers much.

Immigration has to see the bodies out of the country, so they keep records of all tourist deaths here. The rate is about 1 a week or 1 every 5 or 6 days, I think. They die from drowning, drinking, heart attacks, etc. There are a lot of deaths here by choking on your own vomit...eww. There are also an alarming number of tourist deaths from car accidents...tourist vans crashing on the highway to Tulum. And there are the falls from balconies, those usually make it into the paper, it seems.

 

I remember this story, and I think it happened while on one of my trips here last year, so January or March....it was early in the year. But your details about it are what I heard as well...and also the relation to drug trafficing or prostitution. They have to label the victim in some negative light, as nothing is just random here when it comes to murder....from what I gather.

 

Still amazing to me... 1 a week out of how many millions per year...? is that for the whole of the Riviera Maya area or ONLY Cancun?

 

I remember there was a big hoopla about the couple that was killed a few years back while here for a wedding.. I think in the end most agreed that it was other wedding guests who did it, but there was a HUGE effort to place blame on Mexico/Mexicans... don't know what ever became of it.. but it was played up big time in the press.. and they kept saying "Cancun" the whole time and it wasn't even in Cancun as I recall but further South!

 

That's the foreigners who died here and whose bodies departed Mexico via the Cancun airport. So that's the vast majority of tourist deaths in Cancun and Riviera Maya.

And some of those people would have had that heart attack sooner or later anyway.

I agree. It's a low number, I think. Being a tourist here isn't dangerous. But it gets a little more dangerous if you ride in a car, get drunk or go swimming...and drunken swimming is especially dangerous from the data I've seen.

One interesting aside in this is that a number of people have told me that Mexico doesn't embalm bodies. It seems really common here to hold the funeral the next day after someone dies, and if you don't do embalming, then that makes sense.

Yet these bodies of foreigners are embalmed (or cremated) before going on the plane (the embalming certs are attached to the rest of the death docs). So embalming does happen here all the time, it's just somehow not common among Mexicans...or maybe they just don't want to pay for it... Creepy, but I thought it was interesting.

 

Thanks RiverGirl.. that is a really low number if its for the whole area...


As for the embalming thing.. it think its a cost issue more than anything for locals, and really only needed if you want an open casket funeral weeks after the death, which then requires storage/refrigeration and all of that.. which is more expensive.

Personally.. if I were in the US and someone died here.. I think I would insist that we all travel to the tropical vacation spot to hold the service.. rather than bring the body back :aetsch011:. When its all said and done, I'd bet its cheaper anyway given the US costs for services...and you get a mini holiday out of it.... :biggrinbandit:

 

I don't know about the costs. But grieving people tend to make decisions they might not otherwise make, and they probably aren't in the mood for a vacation. Seems to me that cremation is the best because then there's no cargo fee for the airline, and no casket to buy.