>That's fair. And I think my comment was unintentionally misleading. I was not saying that Mexico is a safer country than the United States. I was trying to exp

>That's fair. And I think my comment was unintentionally misleading. I was not saying that Mexico is a safer country than the United States. I was trying to explain my perspective. Fair enough, and I'm sorry if I came across as harsh in my own counterargument, but after all these years here, I've grown tired of some expats trying to whitewash how Mexico often is out of misguided political correctness or politeness towards the country. Politeness is fine as long as it doesn't paint dangerously false pictures. >Even when I've interacted with police. Because a cop potentially wanting a bribe is more predictable/understandable to me than a buzz cut guy with an assault rifle who could kill me like its nothing and get away with it. That's what the police are like in the United States. There are many examples of U.S police getting away with legal immunity against killing people who turned out to not be threats, but more often, they at least may face legal consequences if they commit a blatant murder or act of violence, and at least in many cases civil settlements happen that don't often get reported. Your take on Mexican police is almost certainly tainted by how they treat you as a foreigner and particularly in one of the safest cities in Mexico's single safest state, Yucatan. Police in Mexico are more generally very dangerous under the wrong circumstances and have been implicated in more murders and disappearances than I can even number off the top of my head. And victims of their frequent violence can forget things like legal proceedings or civil settlements in all but the most unusual media-hyped cases. I'm sorry, but i'd say there's just no comparison. I'd suggest being more careful in making assumptions about Mexican police when you deal with them in the future. Where I live (a small city close to Puebla), municipal, state and federal police have been implicated in numerous murders, beatings, torture cases and so forth. All this aside from an endless stream of petty abuses that are openly, outright corrupt. As for Merida, as I said above, known to be one of the absolute safest large cities in Mexico. Lovely place too, if you don't mind the heat. Mexico City has a fairly safe central part of it, a sort of bubble of reasonably moderate crime rates and few attacks against foreigners in particular, but remember that a vast other majority of the city is much more dangerous than that, and especially if you try entering the outer urban regions to the east and south of the city, or further out, entering Estado de Mexico. With all that said, I continue to love this country after all these years.