Warning Issued on Spring Break in Mexico

SAN DIEGO —  Health advocates who have crusaded against binge drinking by young Americans in Tijuana are now taking aim farther south in Rosarito, spurred by a plug in Playboy magazine calling it one of the top spots for collegians on spring break.

Rosarito, still aglow in cinematic celebrity as the filming site for “Titanic,” is listed as a “Superhot Spot” amid a review of better-known spring party destinations, such as Cancun, Mexico, and Daytona Beach, Fla. That designation--plus the magazine’s mention of the 18-year-old legal drinking age as a top reason to visit Mexico--has drawn fire from health activists and Rosarito officials bracing for the annual cross-border tide of vacationing U.S. students.

Health experts are seizing on the publicity to renew warnings about underage drinking south of the border and to call for earlier bar closing times and a 21-year-old drinking age for foreigners visiting Baja California.

“There’s a lot of bad behaving kids from Southern California who come down there and have been encouraged in the past to bring your condoms and let it all loose in Rosarito,” said James Baker, executive director of the National City-based Institute for Health Advocacy. “Over the past couple years, Rosarito’s been a problem spot.”

Partygoers last year ran roughshod over ill-prepared Rosarito police. Public drinking, fighting and other offenses led to the arrests of 1,200 people, said Police Chief Ignacio Garcia.

Officials expect 20,000 to 25,000 young revelers over the final weekend in March, the height of spring break. This year police plan to be ready. Garcia said he will assign about 125 officers to the compact tourist zone, which stretches only a few blocks next to the beach.

“Rosarito is a nice place to come and have fun,” Garcia said. “The only thing we can say, energetically, is if you come, you have to obey the law.”

Rosarito made the most of the worldwide hoopla surrounding the movie “Titanic,” which was filmed in a seaside studio south of town. But the newest publicity has city officials juggling mixed emotions. They were flattered to be mentioned alongside tropical meccas like Montego Bay, but queasy with the anything-goes billing.

“Rosarito is not a cantina. It is a destination with a lot of other attractions,” said Hector Reyes, the state tourism agency’s representative in Rosarito. “It’s good to be included with these other destinations in a magazine that is so widely read, but we’d like it to emphasize other features.”

In fact, the magazine emphasized exactly none of Rosarito’s features. The 10-page spring break “review,” brimming with photos of bare-topped revelers and such helpful travel tips as “bar to barf on,” includes nary a snapshot identifiable as Rosarito. As for what constitutes a “Superhot Spot,” that’s left to the imagination.

Some find it amusing to consider Rosarito, where the temperature in recent days has barely crawled above 60, among the fun in the sun springtime boomtowns. Visitors tend to be locals driving from the San Diego area, and in far smaller numbers than the hordes descending on more celebrated spots.

“The most common local reaction [to the designation] was laughter,” said Baker. “It was . . . silly to name Rosarito Beach, which is not a major North American spring break destination.”

Playboy spokesman Bill Farley said that the magazine was reporting fact, not advocating behavior. “We have a great deal of faith in the intelligence of our readers and don’t believe they derive their basic standards of conduct from Playboy or any other magazine,” he said in a prepared statement.