What s up guys! It s Jason here and welcome to my YouTube channel, Expat Insight. We take
a break from my usual business rise and fall series and go over the country below the United
States Mexico. Mexico is one of the most dynamic, fun, and beautiful places in the world, but
if you re an American living in Mexico, you might consider moving out right now. Or if
you re thinking about moving to Mexico, here are the top 8 reasons to avoid moving to Mexico.
By the end of this video, you ll know why you should not move to Mexico or why you should
avoid Mexico. If you guys want, please let me know and I ll also make another video on
the things I love about Mexico just let me know by leaving a comment below. I ll do my
best to respond. Now, let s get started shall we?
Reason # 1 Coronavirus You know how the Q Anons don t really put
on the mask? Yeah, that s pretty much all of Mexico. Must be the weed. Or the Pope.
So yeah, if there is a zombie apocalypse after Pfizer, it will probably not hit Mexico too
bad. You do the math, amigo. The US State department has decreed that: Travelers to
Mexico may experience border closures, airport closures, travel prohibitions, stay at home
orders, business closures, and other emergency conditions within Mexico due to COVID-19.
They have also made some rules for government employees traveling to Mexico including U.S.
government employees may not travel between cities after dark, may not hail taxis on the
street, and must rely on dispatched vehicles, including from app-based services like Uber
or from regulated taxi stands. U.S. government employees may not drive from the U.S.-Mexico
border to or from the interior parts of Mexico, with the exception of daytime travel within
Baja California, between Nogales and Hermosillo on Mexican Federal Highway 15D, and between
Nuevo Laredo and Monterrey on Highway 85D. Now government employees tend to make the
simplest things difficult to do to government regulations which limit what they can and
can t do, but ask yourself this: why doesn t the US government want you to hail a taxi
in Mexico? What do they know that we don t? Reason # 2 Crime
It is not a joke. Criminal cartels are in control of many small towns and even some
small cities. They also have a huge impact on the larger cities and they are colluded
with the government, local police, state police, and even members of the federal police and
armed forces. If you are a victim of a crime in Mexico, it is very unlikely that you will
receive any kind of justice, and sadly, this is not going to change soon. Traditional justice
seems to be a bloody thing indeed, but effective to keep the peace. And then there is the USA.
The part of the drug war in Mexico that most Americans forget is that the big money is
actually made in the USA, not Mexico, so the Mexican Cartels have their tendrils deep in
most big cities of the USA like Portland, Minneapolis and of course Miami. That means
that if you do get into a scrape with a cartel for whatever reason, your family back home
is most certainly NOT safe from them. Cartels usually target their enemies' families because
it works better to intimidate them. Nobody is really safe. Most of the small and medium
sized businesses are actually controlled by the mafia in Mexico. The mafia also has numerous
businesses and properties in the USA. They have eyes everywhere.
It is also important to distinguish between rich criminals who are mostly risk averse,
and criminals who are just extremely poor and do stuff like armed robbery or breaking
and entering. For the poorer criminals, their crimes would be entirely based on opportunity.
If you are foolish enough to display your wealth in Mexico, you will definitely attract
unwanted attention from folks just trying to make a good payday with a pistola. They
are dangerous but not nearly as dangerous as the really wealthy, career criminals, many
of whom are utterly adverse to risk, but whom you must avoid at all costs. These evil masterminds
will probably be governors, mayors, high ranking police officials, or captains of industry.
They will usually go around with an escort, have girlfriends a quarter their age, and
the worst part: you can find them all over the world in the best resorts. Their children
probably go to school in Europe. These criminals will not be obvious about their activities,
they will dress well, be friendly and sociable, but will also be happy to have you eaten by
alligators in their private basement if you decide to go up against them. The danger of
these criminals is that they are extremely common, owning most of the government posts
and big companies in the country. We have this kind of monster in the USA too, but they
are a little harder to find, and they go through many loops to stay clear off the radar of
ordinary people. In Mexico, that s a different story. Americans have been killed staying
at Airbnbs in Mexico and nothing s been done about it, which brings me to the next reason
Reason # 3: Corrupt Cops Here is a common occurrence in all parts of
Mexico: you are driving down the highway when you are pulled off the road by a cop. You
sigh because you were not doing anything particularly dangerous and all your papers are in order.
Then the cop asks you to step out of the car. You do so and you give him all your documents.
He tells you that you were speeding, and he has to give you a ticket. When you shrug your
shoulders and get ready to accept your ticket, you notice he is not really wanting to write
you a ticket and he seems somehow disappointed . At this point you should know that you would
have been better off to offer a bribe. But it s too late, and suddenly, he is holding
a bag of cocaine and says he is going to take you to jail. Where did the coke come from?
Why the cop s pocket, of course, but how can you prove it? You are some poor American student
on spring break. Once you get to the station, you have to post a small fortune to post bail.
Most Americans who have lived a long time in Mexico know better. They will simply offer
the mordida , slang for bribe, which in Spanish means bite and be done with it, always saving
a little money on the speeding ticket. But as times get harder, police corruption gets
worse, and it is so utterly ingrained in the Mexican way of life, that trying to avoid
it is almost impossible. The Mordida is part and parcel of doing business in Mexico and
it works in all aspects of business and private life. You want a permit for a new taco stand
in the city? Mordida. You want to get out of a sticky legal problem? Mordida. Need to
get someone out of jail fast? Mordida. Everybody has a price, and if you can pay the right
price, you will be able to circumvent most of the tedious government rules because as
everybody knows, in Mexico, the government is the mafia. The funny thing about this system
is that most cops are actually quite decent, breaking up fights between drunks, trying
to catch murderers and rapists, you know? Doing police work. But when it comes to the
mordida, usually that comes from the higher-ranks, so it s almost a given that you won t get
away from the Mexican police if they really want to take a bite out of your wallet.
Reason # 4 Pollution Environmental regulations and Mexicans don
t get along. Just take a drive down Mexico City and you will be in one of the most polluted
cities in the world. The number one spot for most polluted is hotly contested between India
and China, but Mexico is certainly no stranger to smog, landfills, toxic rivers and an assortment
of other environmental problems. Again, the source of most of the pollution is the insane
number of vehicles in use, especially in the big cities. But the fact that most of these
vehicles would not pass even the simplest clean air standards make the smog in the big
cities dangerously venomous for the human body. There is a large amount of evidence
that associates the great amount of lead in the air of Mexico City to mental retardation,
decreased fertility, pulmonary disease and many other problems. As we discussed in other
episodes, the problem of clean water access in Mexico City is not going to go away soon.
If you live in certain parts of the city, if you turn on the faucet, you will get a
malodorous, yellowish to brown water that is not fit for human consumption, and is not
even fit for washing vegetables. Another aspect of the pollution problem in Mexico has to
do with the very low budgets destined to cleaning up cities and towns, so it s not unusual to
see garbage everywhere, and where there is garbage there is disease, rats, and cockroaches.
Reason # 5 - Human Trafficking Slavery is alive and well in Mexico. If you
are very pretty and a woman, you might want to reconsider the place you live. The sad
fact is that Mexico is one of the most dangerous places to be a woman. After weapons and drugs,
human trafficking is one of the most profitable business for the many crime cartels operating
in Mexico. Although most of the folks trafficked are usually from lower income Mexican families,
pretty girls are particularly vulnerable targets, regardless of their background. Human traffickers
are not generally violent at first. A young, handsome man will try to seduce his victim
with all manner of promises. There might be a job offer. Then, the criminal will try to
take his target to some other town, usually Mexico City where most of the serious trafficking
occurs. Once the victim is taken away from her family and friends, then the violence
begins. It s an old and nefarious formula, but it works well. Many of the girls who are
trafficked are Eastern European, Asian or even American. The cartels have a very detailed
profile for their preferred marks, usually poor, from broken families, and little education.
But again, it is important to understand that nobody is really safe. Add to this the fact
that some cartels don t really want a living human, but only their organs. There is a large
market for replacement livers, hearts, lungs Very well organized criminals will kidnap
people based on their blood-type, and the folks buying the organs will pay enormous
sums to save their own lives with a freshly extracted robbed body part.
Reason #6 - Failing Infrastructure The recent collapse of the Golden Metro line
in Mexico City brings us to another very dangerous and problematic fact about living in Mexico:
decaying or substandard infrastructure. We have already spoken about the water problems
you will face living in the city. But water is not the only victim of corrupt government
deals and lack of funding for basic services in the cities. Many bridges, roads, trains,
and other public structures are in dire need of repair, and many of them will not survive
the inevitable next earthquake, especially in Mexico City. Public transportation is non-existent
or in shambles in many cities, hospitals and schools underfunded. Some of the more critical
buildings like ports, airports, and interstate highways are right down dangerous. Many public
buildings were built with cheap materials or inadequate building codes. Of course, Mexico
is not the only country where a Metro might collapse due to lack of care or bad planning,
but not all the countries in the world are as prone to sudden earthquakes as Mexico,
and each time Mother Earth decides to dance, Mexican buildings tremble. The public roads,
especially, are especially hazardous, and when driving from one state to another, you
must be very vigilant for potholes, some of them extremely deep.
Reason # 7 Underfinanced Medical Facilities If you get sick in Mexico, going to the hospital
is actually free. But you know what they say: you get what you pay for. Lopez Obrador got
rid of the Seguro Popular which is the free medical treatment for the uninsured and replaced
it with the Instituto de Salud para el Bienestar, with an initial budget of 80 billion pesos
(about 4 billion dollars). However, the stark truth is that those funds started to come
in slowly, and in many places, not at all. So the medical treatment that thousands of
Mexicans could count on was suspended. Obrador s government had tried to make strides with
their new system, but the jury is still out, and meanwhile, many clinics were forced to
shut down. Another problem with Medical Facilities in Mexico besides being underfunded is that
many of the more specialized doctors leave Mexico to go practice medicine in the much
more profitable markets of the United States and Europe. The most skilled doctors have
no trouble getting visas to live and work outside Mexico, and the money they can earn
abroad is infinitely more than the money they can earn in Mexico.
Reason # 8 - Failing Schools Although the UNAM (Mexican University) is
actually the top Latin American University in the continent, Mexican education is still
not the greatest. Mexicans with money send their kids to Europe to study, or private
schools. But the government schools are actually terribly corrupt, underfunded, and sadly,
a huge propaganda tool for the government. Civics and History classes do not teach history
to educate Mexicans about their origins, but to convince Mexicans of the importance of
their government. For a culture which existed thousands of years before the arrival of the
Spaniards, history classes in public schools tend to overlook this part of Mexican history
and focus instead on the history that was written after the arrival of the Conquistadors.
There is a very biased and real effort to conceal certain aspects of Mexican history,
like massacres and crimes committed on indigenous populations, corrupted heroes, and of course,
the huge impact of the Church over the centuries. Mexican schools are behind the times, forcing
students to use books instead of teaching them how to use computers. Teachers are constantly
going on strike demanding better pay and working conditions, and often, children have no access
to public schools because they live too far from any city. Education is not a priority
for the government and it shows. And that brings us to today. Please don t
let us dissuade you from living in Mexico if you really love the country. Mexico is
a magical place with wonderful people and specially delicious guacamole. How can we
speak evil of the country that created guacamole? But when you decide to live in Mexico, you
must look at all sides of the story, and take care to know the disadvantages of your choice.
All countries have a bit of good and a bit of bad, but it is better to be prepared than
sorry. So with that said, thank you so much for watching
my video. There was a significant amount of research and production that went into making
this video possible. As this is a brand-new YouTube channel I just started this year - if
you enjoy videos like this, please click the subscribe button and hit that notification
bell! I respond to all comments! If you haven t seen already, check out my video on the
Top 8 Reasons that make Peru Amazing. As always, stay happy and healthy and stay tuned for
another episode of Company Insight next week.