Bella

So I am back in the United States. I was in Mexico this past week but for obvious reasons did not want to post publicly about it. One thing I will note is that a lot of the social media panic early in the week did not translate to reality on the ground in Mexico for American tourists. There was a clear effort to reassure tourists with a lot of military personnel. And even in Puerto Vallarta, I was told that the cartel was very careful about avoiding tourists during their retaliation. I asked several people why they thought the cartel was so wary of harming Americans given American intel clearly played a role in taking out El Mencho and had several people directly say some version of "they are afraid of Trump". I have plenty of disagreements with Trump on domestic and foreign policy, but there is no doubt for me that the perception of Trump as someone who is willing to use force and a little crazy has the affect of helping keep Americans safer abroad. Even from relatively violent actors.