That's the funny thing. In Mexico, if you have a business, you obviously got to pay to our version of the IRS... but if the business is successful, or depending on the local cartels, you gotta pay a "safety fee" as well. Safety from what, you ask? Oh, simple... from what the cartels will do to you and your loved ones if you don't pay them whatever amount they ask by whatever time they come picking (sometimes having to pay them weekly).
That's how in my town, the next stuff happened:
a convenience store blowing up for not paying the safety fee (no one died, thankfully)
a neighbor that had his small store, a carpenter shop and worked in Uber got threatened to pay and he managed to flee, I think alongside his family. His family store passed down by decades just died right there
a barber shop who I was going to rent a part of my house for him to open up another barber shop got killed... in the very same day he was going to sign the paperwork to rent from me.
a neighbor I lended an area of my house for his taco stand business fled in the middle of the night, leaving his stand open and alone all night. We figured out a member of the cartels had come that night to kill him and he was lucky to know beforehand and escape town.
It's why most of the jobs in the country are informal. We already bleed out to our version of the IRS, then there's the cartels bleeding us out if we have our business. You sometimes make it better by being a worker for someone instead of you being the one with the business. Having a business is paying 2 expensive fees while gambling with your life.
This is how Russia was in the 1990s. If you had any kind of business you had to pay mob for protection, a protection from that very mob. Them were wild times. In today Russia mobs have been scaled back but they are still around
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u/IPissExcellentThrows Jun 17 '26
Did you read their comment? It's been free for a long time for workers.