La Paz and traffic tickets

It pays to be prepared. Good story.

PS: You weren´t speeding, were you?

In summer 2013 I was driving along a bypass in Mexico City when I arrived at a multi lane roundabout connecting to the toll road D150 eastward. A traffic police hailed me to stop. Then he just hopped in beside me and told to drive the innermost lane. He wrote pretty figures on his pad of paper. First 10,000. Then 5,000. Then he told me to pull over. He left the car. I drove away. An absurd scene? Yes it was and yet not necessarily most unconventional as long as Mexico is concerned.

Thank you for providing your La Paz experience. My wife and I just returned from a 6 week trip down the Baja. We had absolutely no issues through 12 Federal checkpoints and the hundreds of police we saw and passed. That is until we were leaving La Paz, also on the way to Loredo, and were pulled over by a Municipal Police officer who stated we were speeding. He took my drivers license and stated the same conditions about getting it back at the police station. It was a Sunday. He never got the chance to ask for peso's because I demanded to speak to a supervisor or his captain. He asked if I was a friend of his supervisor and I said I was and grabbed my cell phone to start dialing at which he immediately gave me my license back and told me to keep my speed down, then left. We had never had this kind of experience with police in Mexico and am glad for the information about the local tourism office. We will stop by and pick up a brochure to make any future stops less stressful and ensure above board handling of it. As an aside, our car was only searched one time at a Federal checkpoint and it was a very easy, brief and professional process.

Were you speeding?

Mclarjh, I can't tell you if I was or not but I was driving with the flow of traffic. This was still in town and there was quite a lot of traffic around us. The bottom line was the entire procedure the officer followed was not official or appropriate and had he just written me a ticket there would have been no worries and accepted as my fault completely. If you break the law at home or abroad it doesn't matter, expect to pay the price. As a side note, when I told the story to the owner of the bed and breakfast we stayed at in Meluge she just shook her head in an all too knowing gesture and related another similar story, in La Paz as well, where the week before one of her guests paid an officer $400. Having spent over 20 years traveling and driving in Mexico our experience is that the vast majority of authority figures are on the up and up but knowing proper procedure and being able to respond with a little bite is the key to interacting with these few individuals who try and take advantage of naive travelers.

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