From north to south, Mexico is crossed by criminal gangs or criminals that do not appear in television series soaring through the sky with their cargo of drugs.
Without being headed by famous mafiosi, they have woven infinite networks of extortion to the small and medium economy that suffocate agriculture, commerce and even reach homes, where the citizen feels more and more disconcerted every day about the final destination of his money when fill the shopping basket or the gas tank;
when he fills up the gas in the house or has a beer;
when he purchases products at the flea market or takes care of his health at a clinic.
Behind a fire in the market or the rise in the price of tortillas or the shortage of chicken are the criminal gangs,
with a penetration in the economy so wide that it is almost impossible to find a transaction that does not benefit them, directly or indirectly.
The latest data from Inegi, for 2019, reveal that the damage to companies by these tricks was 359,000 million pesos, almost two points of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and crimes against people caused losses of 277,000 million pesos.
At gunpoint.
Gone are the days when organized crime focused on drug trafficking.
Many organizations changed their national criminal drive to get into the business of extracting social rents.
Security analyst Guillermo Valdés illustrates this drift that the drug trafficker experienced by resorting to the example of the Zetas, who did not want to settle for being the armed wing of the Gulf cartel, but rather its partner.
"My hypothesis is that they were not allowed to enter and they separated, but the Zetas controlled cities in the middle of the country, from Chiapas to Tamaulipas, and they had received training and weapons."
They captured traditional criminals and opened up new avenues of business for them in exchange for half the pie.
The extortion, the collection of the apartment, spread throughout the country.
It will do this 10 or 12 years.
And the matter has only been perfected.
The closure of the chicken shops in the central market of Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, a few weeks ago, bore the criminal stamp.
Laura Atuesta, coordinator of the CIDE Drug Policy program, ventures a reason: “Many taqueros, polleros are recruited to sell drugs at retail, they are home delivery men, they have their infrastructure.
If they refuse, they are killed,” she says.
That may be an explanation, which refers to drug traffickers and would not be disconnected from the big cartels.
But there are other examples that Atuesta cites: “Lately something has happened in Guanajuato, there are already two dead or missing fighters, they pick them up in the same arena.
It is a world of bets and a lot of money, maybe that's why."
The problem, she says, is that there is no facility to investigate, "extortions are barely known to be the tip of the iceberg."
Atuesta sees it as a war in the underworld.
The dead are a toll that does not matter to almost anyone, those who extort are poor and those who are extorted are poor.
"90% are humble people, the corner taqueria, any street stall."
The consumer never knows if they are related to the gangs or if they just suffer from their yoke.
“Not buying from them [because they pay crime, for example] would be like putting a price on their heads.”
Or give his family finances a shot, so yes, “we all contribute to maintaining that,” says Atuesta.
The solution, for this analyst, would be the strengthening of the local police.
“I am not sending the Army to the barracks, no, but if everything is committed to the military and the National Guard, the population is being unprotected,” which is getting used to illegality and crime as a way of life.
“We are leaving the neighborhoods at the mercy of crime,” he adds.
In complicated areas of Mexico City, such as Iztapalapa, many residents know who they should buy water or gas from.
Oh yes no.
Soldiers patrol a market in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, last June. Dassaev Téllez (CUARTOSCURO)
The level of this crime is so micro, so at street level, that it logically affects the poor.
Valdés mentions frightening data, such as "crimes paid at 100 pesos or extortion of Huichol indigenous people, what can they steal?"
The level is so micro that he calls it "lumpenization of crime."
He mentions, however, that the rise, albeit slight, in the level of income of Mexicans, coupled with the informality of employment, which reaches half of the work carried out in the country, has developed a specific crime.
“If someone has money and wants an iPhone cell phone, they will find it in street stalls because cell phone theft will have increased.”
The economy is suffering at all seams.
Luis Astorga, one of the great experts on Mexican criminal networks, points out another characteristic that affects it.
There are large areas in the mountains where poppies are grown and the word fentanyl is well known, for example, "where the economy is indexed to the dollar and those who do not belong to that circuit are at a disadvantage, because it ends up affecting prices."
Taxes on tortillas, chicken, Michoacan avocado or lemon, he says, distort prices for basic consumption.
He does not believe, however, this expert from the UNAM Social Research Institute, that the solution to all this is simple, even though this bloodstained economy is an open secret.
It would be a matter, he says, of political will,
but it is not easy to distinguish when criminals and politicians "are in collusion or competition."
That is, if the collection of flat, for example, competes with the State's own powers or occurs in collusion with it.
The Mexican tangle is inextricable.
It may happen that an official collects the tax and that the public coffers do not see a peso of what is collected.
It's called corruption and it's widespread.
Political parties cast a long shadow through the neighborhoods through local bosses, says Astorga.
It's called corruption and it's widespread.
Political parties cast a long shadow through the neighborhoods through local bosses, says Astorga.
It's called corruption and it's widespread.
Political parties cast a long shadow through the neighborhoods through local bosses, says Astorga.
“There is a local governance of crime that governments ignore or perhaps do not have complete information.
Nor can we expect that the local police, who don't even have enough to buy uniforms, can fight that,” says Laura Atuesta.
It is rather to be expected that they partake of the cake.
“The police act as protectors of these neighborhood gangs in many cases.
It cannot be thought that criminals would act with that freedom if it were not so," adds Valdés, who was director of the Center for Investigation and National Security, the country's Intelligence, from 2007 to 2011.
No matter how hard the police put it, crime mutates anyway.
"We're seeing a move away from extorting traders and vendors in markets to looking directly at their suppliers, which requires less labor, in this case criminal labor," says Stephen Woodman, an analyst at AIS Intelligence.
"We have seen it in Guerrero, with chicken, for example, how they go directly to the suppliers and they can dictate the prices."
In February, a report by the Laboratory for Analysis of Commerce, Economy and Business (LACEN) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico found that "organized crime has been formed as a cartel that determines prices in production, distribution and sale, in addition to to determine seasonality and volume of harvest and manufacture of goods”, according to a bulletin.
Crime has a greater presence in primary activities, such as agriculture, but it is increasingly approaching retail sales.
“Beyond their economic behavior in primary activities, represented as a percentage, the agricultural cities that suffer the most from extortion are: Irapuato with 40.3%;
Uruapan, 36.8%;
Oaxaca, 33.3%;
Xalapa, 26.7% and Coatzacoalcos, Aguascalientes and Pachuca, with similar figures”, says the report by the LACEN economists.
A self-denominated 'self-defense' group trains to protect avocado orchards in Michoacán, in April 2021. Juan José Estrada Serafín (CUARTOSCURO)
What at first seems micro, is multiplied so that the benefits operate in the same way: "This is on a large scale," explains Alejandro Schtulmann, president of the risk consultancy in emerging markets Empra, in Mexico City: "How many people consume tortillas, how many people consume chicken, meat, fish, flowers or soaps?
This is how organized crime is getting into
retail
.”
“What also happens at the local level in all governments, particularly in rural areas, is that crime already has some knowledge of the budget of local governments, so they come to the municipal president, or trustee, and tell him: 'They assigned you a budget of 750,000 pesos for this, I'm going to introduce you to the company you're going to hire'”.
The umpteenth video broadcast on Twitter shows a mototaxi stopped at a street crossing in the Euzkadi neighborhood of Mexico City.
Fed up with the extortions, the drivers had gone against the criminals, but one of them paid dearly: the hooded man approaches with his pistol and shoots him down to the ground.
And he finishes it off.
Crime has taken over every street.
Everyone wants to collect their share, which on many occasions is nothing more than the distribution of misery.
For Atuesta, there is no doubt.
Citizens, as consumers, "are financing" these criminal networks.
But everything is dark.
"There is poor quality of official information and you cannot do a good job on the ground," says Astorga.
“It is difficult to determine the correlation of forces between politics and crime.
The opacity of the governments is measured in each six-year term, in this there is a great opacity, an enormous difficulty in obtaining hard data and those that exist, the president comes out and you deny them.
And people believe him more than the Virgin of Guadalupe”, Astorga ironically.
For a citizen to know that his money is not financing illegal activities, he only has to "buy a rod and fish himself what he is going to eat."
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