COLLEGES WARN STUDENTS ABOUT MEXICO TRAVEL

PHOENIX - The U.S. State Department and universities around the
country are warning college students headed for Mexico for some
spring-break partying of a surge in drug-related murder and mayhem
south of the border.

"We're not necessarily telling students not to go, but we're going to
certainly alert them," said Tom Dougan, vice president for student
affairs at the University of Rhode Island. "There have been Americans
kidnapped, and if you go you need to be very aware and very alert to
this fact."

More than 100,000 high school- and college-age Americans travel to
Mexican resort areas during spring break each year. Much of the drug
violence is happening in border towns, and tourists have generally not
been targeted, though there have been killings in the big spring-break
resorts of Acapulco and Cancun, well away from the border.

The University of Arizona in Tucson is urging its approximately 37,000
students not to go to Mexico. Other universities -- in the Southwest
and far beyond, including Penn State, Notre Dame, the University of
Colorado and the University at Buffalo -- said they would call
students' attention to the travel warning issued Feb. 20 by the State
Department.

The State Department stopped short of warning spring breakers not to
go to Mexico, but advised them to avoid areas of prostitution and
drug-dealing and take other commonsense precautions.

"Sage advice," said Tom Mangan, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "We have had documented
violence, attacks, killings, shootouts with the drug cartels involving
not only the military but law enforcement personnel. It is
indiscriminate violence, and certainly innocent people have been
caught up in that collateral damage."

Mexico's drug cartels are waging a bloody fight among themselves for
smuggling routes and against government forces, carrying out massacres
and dumping beheaded bodies in the streets. More than 6,000 people
were killed in drug violence in Mexico last year.