Officials Targeting Border Bar Scene

The clubs on famed Avenida Revolucion have changed names and marketing ploys over the years, but you could always count on a dance party that pulsed until dawn.

On the eve of a holiday weekend sure to bring crowds of U.S. revelers, however, the tradition of the all-night disco appears to be going the way of, well, disco.

Tijuana officials, seeking to bring order to a tourist strip where drinking by visitors is often an extreme sport and sidewalk bedlam common, have ordered the 30 or so clubs on “La Revu” to turn off the strobe lights and close down by 3 a.m.

Tijuana joins two other party hubs on the Mexican side of the border, Ciudad Juarez (opposite El Paso) and Mexicali, where bars are closing earlier as an answer to excessive drinking and mischief-making by U.S. youths.

Municipal officials in Tijuana for now have stopped issuing permits that kept the discos thumping until 5 a.m. and are writing a permanent policy for bar closing times citywide. While meetings are underway between authorities and the strip’s displeased bar owners, officials say it is unlikely that Avenida Revolucion--a magnet for U.S. collegians, sailors and Marines, gang-bangers and gawkers--will ever party that late again.

“We’re going to have a general reordering of Avenida Revolucion,” said Roberto Lau Urquides, head of the city agency that regulates bars.

The earlier closing time, imposed on a temporary basis this month, follows two years of work by U.S. activists to curtail binge drinking by young Californians who flock south by the thousands to take advantage of Mexico’s legal drinking age of 18 and all-you-can-drink specials. The minimum age to drink in California is 21.

Changes in either drinking age are unlikely, but authorities in San Diego and Tijuana have joined forces to block underage drinking.

Although Tijuana police check the ages of young people in their city’s bars, their San Diego counterparts monitor youths preparing to enter Mexico, enforcing a California law that bars minors from crossing the border without a parent or parental permission.

Police in Imperial County and El Paso have conducted similar checks as part of a growing movement by officials on both sides of the 2,000-mile border to rein in the revelry by U.S. citizens in Mexico.

The discussion gained steam in El Paso after five people, ages 18 to 20, died last month in a car crash there after a night out in Juarez.

Patricio Martinez, governor of Chihuahua state, in which Juarez is located, favors denying drinks to U.S. residents under 21. Last year, he ordered dance clubs selling liquor to close by 2 a.m. Authorities on both sides of the border and bar owners recently agreed on a series of modest steps to curb excessive drinking.

“There’s a realization across the U.S-Mexican border that this is a problem that all border communities have,” said El Paso Mayor Carlos Ramirez. “We need to find a solution.”

A closing time of 3 a.m. for bars on Avenida Revolucion--one hour after San Diego’s bars close--may not seem a big change. But the U.S. activists say the new restriction will cut excessive drinking and deter all-night bar-hopping in Tijuana by San Diegans.

Tijuana officials concerned with the city’s image say it is a key step in “dignifying” the city’s best-known tourist zone and drawing more G-rated tourism from the U.S. and Mexico to the restaurants, souvenir shops and craft stalls that share the street. Tijuana’s young and hip, who years ago reveled with U.S. clubgoers on Avenida Revolucion, eschew that strip in favor of discos in the city’s Rio Zone.

The new closing time is meeting resistance from bar owners and managers who say they might lay off employees if reduced hours mean lost business. One owner estimated that closing earlier could cut his sales by 15%. Since much of the Avenida Revolucion party set doesn’t show up until midnight, those people might opt not to make the trip for revelry that is two hours shorter, bar owners say.

Alejandro Aguilar, who owns El Torito Pub, a second-floor restaurant and bar in the heart of the district, favors a 4 a.m. closing time. He said blame for excessive drinking rests not with establishments such as his, where $2 beers are pricey by Avenida Revolucion standards, but with the handful of discos offering limitless drinks for a fixed price of $5 to $7. “It’s immoral and wrong,” he said.

On this score Aguilar agrees with the U.S. activists, who have tried to persuade Tijuana club owners to drop such gimmicks and train bartenders not to serve drunken clients. Tijuana officials have begun cracking down on the barkers who tout discounts to passersby. Now barkers cannot venture onto the sidewalk.

The National City-based Institute for Health Advocacy favors a 2 a.m. closing time. The group maintains that the earlier closings for bars in Juarez, where discos used to stay open until 4 a.m., markedly reduced post-midnight border crossings from El Paso. A survey found a 90% drop in the number of legally drunk border crossers who intended to drive, the group says.

Teams of El Paso police patrol the main footbridge into Mexico to deter underage drinking, rounding up teenagers under 17 breaking the city’s 11 p.m. curfew and nabbing adults on charges of public intoxication and failure to show identification.

A similar effort has been under way in Brownsville, Texas, where officials devoted a special allotment of federal crime funds to combat cross-border drinking by youths.

Following the model developed in San Diego, authorities in Imperial County sporadically set up checkpoints, called Operation Turnaround, at three crossing points into Mexicali and Los Algodones to enforce the parental permission law.

Imperial County Chief Deputy James Burns said overtime costs prohibit conducting the checkpoints often. And, he noted, attempts to rein in youths venturing across the border are hardly unprecedented. He came upon an Imperial County resolution supporting a crackdown on minors crossing into Mexico. It was dated 1967.