Four trillion pesos won’t halt insecurity

The cost of security in Mexico already amounted to more than four trillion pesos, and the records say that these last two years are the most violent in its history (34,681 murder victims in 2019 and 34,554 in 2020), with great impact on the ambiguous national economy.

According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, this cost is equivalent to 36,893 pesos per individual, more than three times the average monthly salary, six times higher than the amount invested in education and seven times higher than public spending on health.

Many people are afraid to go out at night, to get into a cab, to open the door to a stranger…, and they do not trust the police forces either, which are often accomplices of common criminals and the organized crime, so they actually generate more fear than security.

Homicides account for 47.4 percent of the economic impact, which is eight times the global average. The rest is fragmented into unsuccessful government investments, violent crime, private protection expenditures and a variety of other items.

Although the authorities boast with numbers that, after the brutal expansion of the Covid-19 pandemic, violent crimes on the street were reduced, they cannot deny that intra-domestic violence, which includes sexual harassment and rape, increased.

Men and women wonder why, when so much is spent on electoral campaigns and public security, kidnappings and shootings, unemployment and despair, robberies, inequality, human degradation and uncertainty are so commonplace.