It’s evident even in the resort areas of Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas. You venture beyond the tourist zones at your own risk.
I watched a Bull fight in 1950s Monterrey Mexico as a young lad, between the bull fights and the grotesque looking starving dogs with their ribs showing and terrified of all humans, the broken glass lining the tops of the walls around houses that also had bars on the windows, and the begging street urchins and paying the layabout men to “watch” your car when you parked at the curb, and the bar length urinal that was also the foot rest as you leaned on the bar to drink a beer in full sight of everyone as you could pee without moving or setting down your drink, and my travel through tiny remote 1950s villages, the casual bribing of federal and local law enforcement, and near death experiences and narrow escapes through the 60s and 70s and 80s, from both bad guys and law enforcement, I know Mexico well enough to know how ugly it is, in every way, in regards to it’s people and what they create.
Mexico has always been a failure, a place of passivity and sudden mindless violence, twisted and misdirected passions and dishonesty and apathy, a disastrous pit of human failings, all while bordering on the greatest, freest, most independent minded nation ever created.