How bad is organized crime in Mexico in 2023?
The Mexican government is admitting that they had to pay off criminal gangs and cartels in certain cities to allow census workers in.
The government is paying mob protection money to gangs that run certain cities.
National Statistics Institute Assistant Director Susana Pérez Cadena told a congressional committee Thursday that workers also were forced to hire criminals in order to carry out some census interviews.
One census taker was kidnapped while trying to do that work, Pérez Cadena said. She said the problem was worse in rural Mexico, and that the institute had to employ various methods to be able to operate in those regions.
In some regions, they paid protection money. In other places, it was so dangerous that the government just straight hired criminals to do the census work for them.
This is a government that has completely lost entire regions to criminal warlords.
(We have BIG problems south of the border, folks.)
In north-central Mexico, where drug turf wars and migration are problems, census workers found abandoned farming communities with no one left to survey.
Entire communities turned into ghost towns after being raided by Mexican drug lords. Those who weren't wiped out either fled to safer regions of Mexico or, quite possibly, went north of the border.
