Fifty years ago, Cancún was little more than a hurricane-battered fishing outpost, but it mushroomed into a tourist mecca thanks to massive government investment – and by the 1980s it was firmly established as the crown jewel of Mexico’s tourist industry.
Millions of tourists from around the world descend annually on the destination and the Riviera Maya, which unfolds to the south.
But success has brought other, less welcome visitors, too. Criminal groups run extortion rackets and peddle drugs. And its location on the eastern side of the Yucatán peninsula makes an ideal way station for drug runners moving cocaine out of Central and South America.
I have never held a desire to visit the narco-state.
