MEDC’s question: How to change the RGV image?
Tue, 2016-03-22 22:07
News Staff
By G. Romero Wendorf
As they say, timing is everything. On March 4th, a Friday, the McAllen Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) took a 52-passenger bus trip to Reynosa to show community leaders, along with some local news reporters, how safe the city now is; how the level of drug-cartel-related violence has subsided. It was also an attempt to showcase Reynosa’s burgeoning maquiladora industry.
Nine days later, however, a widespread gunfight broke out in the very same city between government forces and cartel gunmen.
The MEDC bus excursion was accompanied by a Mexican jeep following behind that had a machine gun mounted on its rear, according to a news reporter I spoke to who went on the bus ride. That tidbit never made it into any news report I saw pass by in local media outlets that published stories about the Reynosa trip, which extolled mention of how the Reynosa mayor wasn’t even accompanied by any personal security as the bus toured maquiladoras, tourist locales, and stopped for lunch at La Fogata.