The whole affair begins with a tourist in distress. El cliente acude a grupos de redes sociales porque tiene a problema: después de pasar varios días en las playas de la Riviera Maya tiene que volver a su país de origen, pero no se hizo las pruebas de detección de coronavirus que su Gobierno le pide para to recover. In less than an hour you will be contacted by an intermediary, who will give you a contact, and a laboratory will issue you a personalized document to travel from Mexico to any country. This is the new activity that has developed in the shadow of travel restrictions for international tourists: with testing apocryphal made to order and sold for 800 Mexican pesos, just under $ 40, as found by EL PAÍS.
El Cordobés, who is part of a group of expats and foreign tourists on Facebook, promises that everything will be quick and cheap. An Internet user wrote by private message that his flight to Madrid with a stopover in the United States leaves tomorrow and that paying nearly $ 250 for an urgent test is totally out of his budget. “I’m going to share my experience with you to see if you’re interested in being contacted by a lab in Cancun,” replies the intermediary, who just went on vacation to Argentina, “we traveled a group of 15 and all went perfectly. ” Pay less than a fifth of what a test This is because “you don’t do the swab or anything” and it’s also a practical option “to save yourself the bullshit of waiting so many hours,” he explains. give one last piece of advice: “tell him it’s mine because otherwise you’re not going to give the ball.”
The secretary, the laboratory contact, specifies on WhatsApp that he only needs three pieces of information: full name, date of birth and time of departure of the flight. “Since the flight is tomorrow, I won’t even offer you the option to dab because you won’t get there if you don’t,” he says. It’s Tuesday at noon, but the secretary suggests that the certificate says the sample was taken at seven in the morning to avoid problems and have a larger margin with the scales. Shortly after, he sends his card number and asks for a deposit of 800 pesos. “I send the data to the lab and ask them for priority,” he wrote, “in ten minutes they will send me your PCR.”
The document contains a folio, a customer number, a barcode and is stamped by a pharmacist at a private hospital 15 minutes from the Cancun hotel zone. “Negative” is read in bold in the center of the paper, where the results appear as if they had been validated the next morning. “There will be no problem, when you get to the airport and make the registrationThey will ask you if you have the PCR, show it to them and that’s it, ”explains the secretary, who is actually a woman, in a voice note. “I already have passengers who have flown to Madrid and France without any problem,” he adds before wishing himself a good trip.
When asking for reports like a normal client in the hospital, lab staff say there is no way to cheat on the procedure. The results take at least twelve hours to deliver, but the certificate costs over 4,000 pesos.
The program was offered to travelers of other nationalities. Journal da Band TV news report earlier this month, days after Brazil introduced the negative testing requirement, in which it is assured that false exams could be obtained in $ 200. They were issued to Canadian tourists for $ 100 and in less than an hour, according to the newspaper. The duty of Quebec. The United States on Tuesday joined nearly 20 countries requiring a negative diagnosis to enter the country from abroad, widening the potential customers of the scams. Spain will also request a test before traveling from Mexico from February 1.
A spokesperson for the Secretary of Health of the State of Quintana Roo – where Cancun, Riviera Maya and Tulum are located – assures that there is no trace of complaint for this type of fraud. The Secretary of State for Tourism has not detected any case either, but ensures that a deployment has been made to apply up to 16,000 tests and that on average 13,500 are carried out each day.
The vast majority of hoteliers offer tests for the virus, some already included in room rates and at no additional cost to tourists, with the option of offering free accommodation for up to 14 days to people who test positive. There are also test modules at the airport and more and more laboratories that go directly to accommodation so that tourists do not have to travel. “Everything has been done to ensure that those who visit us are safer,” explains Marisol Vanegas, the Tourism Manager.
“To avoid false tests, IATA [Asociación Internacional de Transporte Aéreo] it stipulated a special and obligatory format that tourists sign to be responsible for ensuring that the proof they give is absolutely genuine, ”adds Vanegas and says that anyone who lies is liable to a formal charge. “Having this, no tourist will risk it.” The state government is leading a coordinated operation with the 44 Cancun consulates and airport authorities, hoping to provide certainty and reverse a drop of nearly 13 million visitors over the past year compared to to 2019, based on preliminary data.
Despite the bump, Mexico was the third most visited destination in 2020, according to the World Tourism Organization. Out of ignorance, opportunism or laziness, the new fraud is gradually reproducing to the detriment of host countries and their communities of origin, and at the worst moment of the pandemic, with more than 150,000 confirmed deaths in the country.
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