>The kind of horror stories you hear in Michoacan, Oaxaca, or Tamaulipas are similar to those you'd hear of Guizhou, Yunnan, or Xinjiang. C'mon this is kind of

>The kind of horror stories you hear in Michoacan, Oaxaca, or Tamaulipas are similar to those you'd hear of Guizhou, Yunnan, or Xinjiang. C'mon this is kind of assinine comparison/argument. It's fine to remind everyone that Mexico is comfortably middle income, and well beyond development indicators needed to build effective manufacturing sectors but they also have law and order problems leading to homocide rates 4x higher than US, 60x higher than PRC. Mexican dysfunction gets disproportionate reporting in US media being basically domestic news adjacent, but it's not completely unwarranted. Mexico may not be categorically an war zone like Syria or Libya but with homocide rate like Venezuela, domestic serenity is closer to failed state territory. That's what people think about when they think of Mexican 3rd world horror stories - open, persistent level of extreme violence gov can't control. Perception worsened by Mexican geography where unlike PRC where violence (especially gun) is thorougly suppressed or extreme persisent violence previously limited to largely frontiers (also now suppressed), in Mexico one is rarely ever more than a few 100 km from crazy town - it seems close everywhere. Mexico still feels like worse 90s Hunan where armed villages had homemade artillery battles. It certainly feels more dysfunctional than ASEAN barring Myanmar, including Sihanoukville Cambodia where PRC pushed triad operations. I say this as a Chinese shill who ranks Mexico city over most tier1/2 PRC cities.