More than half of employment in Mexico is informal, millions of people are dedicated to selling in the streets and street markets where you can find everything, food, clothing and footwear, technology, china, flowers, perfumes, jewelry or shoelaces. shoes, anything you can think of and even more if you have imagination. Virtually all of them are extorted by crime or local bosses, who force them to pay “the floor” for their commercial activity. It is common in the news to say that a motorcyclist approaches one of these vendors and, without removing his helmet, pulls out his gun and kills him. Everyone knows the reason: the unfortunate man refused or was unable to pay the criminal tax that, perhaps, that same motorist comes to collect every week. In recent times, polleros have been the target of bullets. In the market of Toluca, the capital of the State of Mexico, they have hired private security because they are fed up with extortions and kidnappings that the authorities cannot stop. Harassed for decades by drug trafficking, organized crime has been penetrating other activities and leaving behind its usual trail of murders. From time to time, a market burns down, merchandise warehouses leave visible smoke throughout the city, shootings. And fatigue, which translates into more bullets.
Organized crime long ago found a lucrative business in these informal taxes that rob the Mexican economy of billions of pesos by extorting the poorest. The matter has been getting worse. “It is an expanding dynamic. 10 or 15 years ago, the floor fee at the national level had nothing to do with what it is today,” says Romain le Cour, senior expert at the Global Initiative (GI-TOC), who has been studying violence in Mexico for years. “The Familia Michoacana cartel, far from ending this practice as it promised when it conquered territories, has institutionalized and bureaucratized it. It is no longer just commerce, it has extended to industrial activities, it is their signature of territorial domain,” he assures. “It is the same pattern as the mafias in Italy.” The criminals force the merchant to pay a fee per square meter of business, and another to protect him from other cartels, but they themselves are the ones who carry out violence if they do not receive their payment.
Among common crimes, extortion occupies third place in Mexico, behind fraud and theft, according to citizens in a survey by the statistics institute (Inegi). It accounts for 17% and is the crime that is least reported, due to fear of aggressors or distrust of the police, largely in collusion with crime. The omerta Mexican. 92% of the total of these crimes remain unreported or uninvestigated, this is what they call a black figure. In a country of 126 million inhabitants, around 20 million victims of these crimes are counted each year. Kidnappings reached 77,825 people in 2022 and 49% were only missing for one day, just enough to scare people and collect what they want.
In the capital of Mexico there is an area called Tepito, governed by a criminal cartel of the same name. Entering Tepito, very central, is an adventure, dozens of tented streets converted into a market, a fascinating city, a labyrinthine souk of narrow corridors that leaves the most intrepid tourists stupefied, those who go where they are told it is dangerous. There they are supplied by those who will later go out to sell throughout the city on an itinerant basis. Army trucks patrol through that impassable anthill of screams and whistles where the boys with the merchandise forklifts run over you if you don't care. The police are also present, but nothing prevents criminals from entering punctually every Saturday and Sunday to collect their fee, in full view of everyone, stall by stall. “Four or five arrive, one is placed on each corner and another comes to collect. And you have to give them. We are already fed up, but the Government does nothing,” says a clothing store owner, who estimates that she is spending 15% on this that she could add to her profits.
They've been like this for decades. Like in the movie The Godfather, it all started with the illegality of their street stalls that the police wanted to build. The neighborhood chief negotiated with the agents and asked the merchants for a fee to protect their businesses. When thousands of streets were filled with sales stalls, the mafias came in to claim their share. Today, everyone gets their share of it. “Normally, it is 30 pesos per week per square meter, now at Christmas up to 800, plus another 100 for the supposed protection they give us,” says a girl who sells movies. “But another group also charges us, 300, and the same thing, we have to pay them.” Later, the chief will come to ask for his share for cleaning the place and the one who rents the warehouse to store the merchandise at night, and the one who rents the stall. So the poor remain poor and woe to the one who opens his mouth or gives his name for a report like this. Woe also to those who do not pay. “When the markets burn they say they are short circuits, what's wrong, they burn them,” says the clothing store, and asks: “How can the mafias be organized so well and the government so badly?”
In effect, those who are dedicated to these taxes have become an entire parallel administration where the collection flows as the public treasuries would like. “The collection of the flat is born and develops in silence, like the omerta of the Italian mafia. But citizens are fed up, they see that they cannot turn to the authorities and everything ends in violence,” says Le Cour. “Police? “You should see the police greeting those who come to collect money on the weekend, they bump fists with camaraderie,” gestures the clothes shopkeeper, already tired of the fact that “they're all the same crap.” “The police are more dedicated to searching poor kids who don't have marijuana and they even take their cell phones,” she criticizes. The corruption of poorly paid local agents prevents us from getting out of this economic and criminal hole. Le Cour agrees: “We are seeing only the tip of the iceberg, a tiny part of the floor collection, which has developed greatly due to the omission or ineffectiveness of public authorities, or complicity, which sometimes reaches even the prosecutor's offices.”
The absence of the State in security issues as shown by judicial statistics is fertile ground for mafias. If a City Council wants to collect the commercial activity tax from those who sell flowers in Acapulco, to mention a real example, the merchants rebel. If the criminals are already charging them and no one gets rid of them, they are not going to pay another legal tax, they said at the time. The rulers look the other way in the face of a stubborn reality.
Criminals are experts at reinventing themselves. If the Government carries out a coup here, they will go the other way. “When the huachicol was firmly persecuted [la gasolina pirata], they began to collect taxes from merchants, even those who sell tortillas,” says Raúl Benítez Manaut, researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “The price of lemon and avocado is also determined by the mafias. When governments hit their strong businesses, they go to the smaller ones. But it does not happen in the entire country,” says this Security expert. “In the North it doesn't happen as much, in Sinaloa, for example, they don't attack the little ones, they rely on businessmen to launder money,” he explains. Some experts maintain that imprisoning the big bosses of these mafias leaves the hitmen without a government and they dedicate themselves to their own businesses, more at street level.
Now, says Manaut, migration is big business. The refrigerated trucks that go down with merchandise come up loaded wi
th migrants. That, which was stopped during the covid pandemic, has now exploded in hundreds of thousands of people who cross Mexico on their way to the United States and the extortions are fierce against them. “There are calculations that maintain that it is a more lucrative and less persecuted business, which also has the corruption of the local police,” he says.
The versatility of the cartels to combine their businesses has fed up with the poorest population and the sources of violence take over the streets without the rulers being able to stop it. The rest of the population remains numb to these crimes that occur far from their homes, but the entire population contributes with their purchases to finance drug traffickers, whether they are socks or a kilo of guavas purchased at a market. Everyone pays the apartment.
In Tepito, the shopkeeper twists her mouth to say quietly: “Don't turn around, that motorcycle that just stopped there at that stand, do you see it? Don't turn around… that's someone who's coming to collect.” Without getting off, without taking off his helmet, the motorcyclist receives his fee and leaves. 200 meters away, the police officer is still inside his car looking at his cell phone.
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