All quiet on the Baja front

Rosarito Beach, Mexico

As an economy major, Vince Barile has a head for numbers, so when the San Diego State student walked into the biggest spring break bar here and found barely two dozen revelers, he made a quick calculation. He ordered two beers to better get his personal party started.

The dejected 23-year-old offered an instant thesis, too, to explain the limp scene: “The war. The economy. The weather.” Indeed, on the latter, the winds gusting off the deserted beach ensured that his beers would stay cold, so with a shrug he accepted a third frosty bottle from the barkeep at Papas & Beer, the famed party bar. Spring break in wartime requires certain adjustments, and Barile’s attitude represented a fitting theme for this year’s revelry: Escape as best you can and keep your expectations limited to what’s sitting right in front of you.

Spring break, of course, is the recess for colleges and universities spread out over the five weeks leading up to Easter Sunday, and it’s often a raunchy, boozy rite in resort towns like this one, where the economy, the night life and civic patience have been tailored to college-age hedonism. The 2003 edition of the party south of the border, though, has been chilled somewhat, and not just by the blustery Baja weather.

“A lot of [students] are just going home for spring break. A lot are heading for Vegas or someplace inside the U.S.,” Barile said as he sat last week in the sparse crowd. “I heard all these rumors that if you came down here without a passport, you wouldn’t be able to get back in the country. And a lot of parents probably didn’t want their kids leaving the U.S. with everything going on.”

The leading spring break destinations in the U.S., including Panama City Beach, Fla., report business as usual this season, but the war with Iraq prompted many students to nix their flights to Jamaica or distant Cancun, Mexico. “Since Sept. 11, the destinations that would require air flight have taken a hit, and with the war now, I’m sure that’s a factor,” said Jayna Leach, director of sales and marketing for the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau.

About 95% of the 425,000 college students who stream into Panama City arrive by car, and this year the early indications are that 2003 will match the previous year. There has been one difference, Leach said: “I’m not sure if it’s the war or if it’s an awareness campaign we have going about responsible behavior, but it has not been as rowdy as past years. It’s been busy but a little more subdued.”

In Rosarito and Ensenada, two well-known Mexican beach towns that can be reached quickly by car from Southern California, this year’s spring break has been an uneven affair. The organized tours are still taking busloads of students to town, but business in bars has been off 30% or so, according to informal estimates by glum locals. Still, for the students who have ventured out, the horrors of CNN reality back home only primed them for intense diversions.

Many of the students stay at the Hotel Corona Plaza, a gleaming gold and white beachfront tower where the music of Eminem and Nelly blasts in the sunny lobby at nightclub volume. On an afternoon last week, awaiting their bus back to Cal State Fullerton, many of the groggy students flopped on couches or flipped through the new scrapbooks provided by their digital cameras. One of them, a thoughtful 21-year-old exchange student from England named Sara Kerley, was asked about the war. She smiled wanly.

“It’s great not to have it there. It’s been wonderful, I honestly haven’t thought about it for four days, until today.” Kerley is in Fullerton’s American studies program, and before Rosarito, her days had been packed with CNN, calls home and lectures that veered again and again to Baghdad and Basra. “I’m doing a course on architecture, and we still seem to mention it every single day. You can’t seem to escape it even in courses that seem completely unrelated.”

Outside, the idling bus that would take Kerley back to Fullerton and CNN and reports of collateral damage was waiting. The coach’s driver, Dave Rock, rubbed his unshaven jaw when asked if the desert war 8,000 miles away matters at all -- or even should matter -- to young people seeking the beaches of Rosarito. Rock was a Cal State Fullerton student himself in wartime. He left the campus in 1967 to join the Army and expected to see combat in Vietnam during his two-year stint but never did. At the time he was disappointed.

“These kids, they’re the same age as the troops,” Rock said. “They talk about the war on the bus; I hear them on the way down and back. They’re interested, but it doesn’t concern them as much as it did us. There’s no draft. They talk about the war, but I don’t know if they really think about it. “

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‘Not the place’

Rosarito Beach, about 18 miles south of the border, has a population of 63,000, and its economic fortunes largely rely on the waves of tourists that come for the beach and the bars along the city’s main artery, Boulevard Benito Juarez. Walking into the clubs, where music is thunderous even if the bar is deserted, and approaching random American students or Mexican bartenders to ask what they think about the concept of spring break in wartime is an odd exercise. It’s like trying to discuss electric cars with fans in the grandstands at the Indianapolis 500: If they can hear you at all, they look at you as if you’re an idiot or a zealot.

“This is not the place where people worry about the war,” screamed a DJ at a place called Club Tequila, as “California Love” by 2Pac in the background seemed to say the same thing. A bartender named Mario at Rock and Roll Taco put a finer point on the matter. Despite a quizzical look, he agreed to tune one of the bar’s televisions to CNN but shrugged knowingly when none of the customers watched it. “They come here for a good time,” he said. “Business continues, the fun continues.”

Asked what Mexicans think of the war, Mario declined to answer, despite his nation’s well-documented stance against the military action. “My economy, my money, my life: It’s all Americans.”

Hedonism in wartime is hardly new or surprising. Be it the cabarets of Berlin in the 1930s or the streets of 1960s San Francisco, partying is a familiar exercise in anxious times. If the young people in Rosarito thought about the war, in fact, it might have inspired them to pick up the pace of their nightlife.

“We’ve had some of our friends die,” said Esheta Badruzzman, 21, another Cal State Fullerton student, with a catch in her throat. “For me, riding horses and sitting in the sun, it’s a really good escape.” John Bernal, also from Fullerton, said one of his best friends is a Marine in Iraq, but that made this vacation all the more timely.

“It’s hard to conceive that we’re at war,” he said. “But being on spring break, it’s definitely a good relief. There’s too much tension in the States. We feel it at school, we have protests at school, we watch it on TV, it’s in the papers. It’s constantly everywhere. My personal view, I’m not going to go there. I’m not for war, but I’m for our troops, obviously.”

Even the most adamant antiwar students interviewed among the spring break crowd here spoke again and again of “supporting the troops,” a now-familiar refrain for this generation. Their view of the war seemed far more clinical than, say, the Vietnam-era students, and many of them candidly said the economy and looming job searches were probably more pressing concerns than a war that appeared to be moving at a brisk pace. Some seemed exasperated with hand-wringing about the battles in Baghdad.

“I’m in full support of the war, and I feel relieved that we are finally in war,” said Sean Love, 21. “We had all this tension leading up to it, and I’m relieved that’s it’s here. I think the country should support it. All this protest on the campus.... I think it’s ironic that people are at a state-funded school and would protest the war. They should support it.”

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Feast or famine

This year, Playboy magazine named Rosarito a spring break hot spot, which is the prestige equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal when it comes to Jello shots and wet T-shirt contests. Most of the partygoers are bused in by a Tustin-based company called SWAT (Spring Winter Action Tours), which has been conducting organized spring break tours since mid-March. The tours book exclusive parties for the students in a different club each night and, because the SWAT tours were really the only show in town this season, there was usually one Rosarito Beach hot spot that was packed on any given night and dozens all but empty. It’s more feast or famine then it is ebb and flow.

Papas & Beer, for instance, had more than 1,000 students jammed into the sandy, open-air venue (the motif is like an MTV hip-hop show based on “Gilligan’s Island”) on Wednesday night. The next night, there were hardly any young people among the thatched huts and faux boulders. One of the DJs, Paulie Parente: “If it wasn’t for the SWAT, it would be slow, very slow. They had 3,500 kids into town last weekend. Without them, there wouldn’t be a lot going on.”

Tourism is still better than it was in the months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the southbound stream of U.S. tourists shrank to a trickle because of heightened security measures at the border and general unease.

By local reports, the tourism in Rosarito and nearby Ensenada before the spring break season was bleak. Hotel occupancy in Rosarito and Ensenada was less than 50%, far below seasonal averages. For spring break, the hotel occupancy in Rosarito climbed to 69%, according a survey released this week by the Baja secretary of tourism, but that was still a 9% decline from last year and well below the rates before the Sept. 11 attacks. Nearby San Felipe, where SWAT does not ferry in students, saw a 40% decline.

At the Hotel Corona Plaza in Rosarito, the flow of American students is lifeblood. The manager, Luis Alberto Camacho, can tell how business is by his own fatigue: He lives on the fifth floor of the 11-story resort, and if the rowdy students keep him up all night, he’s happy. The hotel opened in September 1999, and its early fortunes were hobbled two years later by the terrorist attacks. Its staggered opening was delayed, and today only 188 of its planned 326 rooms are open. Upon completion, it will be by far the largest resort in Rosarito Beach.

The 40-year-old Camacho began working at Baja resorts as a teenager and he says he loves the American youths who travel south, in some ways, to bid farewell to youth in song and drink whether it is wartime or not. “That war, it is a million miles away,” Camacho said. “I think they don’t know about the war. They don’t think about the war, not here. Maybe when they get back home, but here, they try to have a good time. That means I have a good time. I love my job and I love them for coming here.”