Inequality Turns Deadly in Mexico
MONT ER R EY, Mex i co — Viewed from above, greater Monterrey, with its corporate headquarters and golf resorts, appears as one city stretching between the mountains that surround it.
Closer up, it becomes clear that invisible walls enclose Monterrey’s wealthy core, dividing the city’s four million residents. For the people within those invisible walls, government is responsive and crime low. Those outside face rising murder rates, corruption and, activists say, police brutality.
Sergio Salas exists on both sides. He commutes between the education ministry in an affluent area downtown, where he works, and his home in the working class suburb of Juárez. Mr. Salas always assumed he was safe at his home, with the butterfly preserve he built in the backyard. Then, last year, criminals arrived at his house, tied him up and robbed him. He returned only after installing a fence and hiring a part-time guard.
His beloved town, he said, has changed. Families put up walls or decamp for more prosperous areas.
As Mexico descends into its most violent year on record, those with resources are taking matters into their own hands. Landowners, businesses and the rich are buying security by means legal and not.
Any social compact is built on the agreement that security is a public good and maintained by all. As Mexico’s rich effectively withdraw, the arrangements that hold society together are breaking down.
A rise in vigilantism, criminal impunity, police corruption and state weakness can all be traced in part to a growing security inequality.
In Juárez, neighbors would once come together against crime or a corrupt police officer. Now, Mr. Salas said, “there is a culture of not participating, of not caring.”
Between 2013 and 2015, the number of private security companies in Mexico nearly tripled, according to government statistics. Industry analysts believe the real number may be several times higher.
As powerful classes grow less reliant on the state for security, political pressure for addressing crime or reforming police has declined.
In moneyed enclaves across Mexico, the violence rarely comes up in conversation. Meanwhile, gangs and organized crime have flowed into poor neighborhoods.
The divide is stark in places like Santa Fe, an affluent neighborhood on Mexico City’s western edge. On a recent afternoon in one of the slums around it, Andres Ruiz, a sometimes-employed musician, waited for the bus that, though frequently preyed on by robbers, was his only way into town.
He squinted across the street at a stone cliff that rises six meters above the shanties: the fresh white walls of a gated neighborhood were built right up to the ledge. “Security is only for them, for the high people,” he said.
Marilena Hernandez, who sells quesadillas and tacos down the street, said it might be for the best that police ignore the robberies.
“It can be counterproductive to call them,” she said. The police were another form of private security that she could not afford. “If you have money to give the officers, maybe they’ll be more eager to help you, but otherwise they won’t.”
In a study of 2,500 towns, the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico City found that the wider a town’s gap between rich and poor, the greater the odds that vigilante militias would form.
For the rural rich, who are often landowners, hired guns can guard a business or farm that local institutions are too weak to protect. Then the militia effectively replaces the police, but rarely protects those who cannot afford to pay them.
This often prompts the poor to form their own volunteer forces.
For every percentage point increase in inequality, the murder rate rises 1.5 points, studies find.
Inequality “is one of the great issues in this country,” said Jorge Tello, a former director of the national intelligence service. As Mexicans withdraw from the social compact, he warned, problems like crime and corruption entrench.
“When you talk about these issues in Mexico, it’s said that there’s such a lack of governance,” he said. “But it’s the lack of citizenship as well.”