My cousin is married to a woman from Mexico.
Her family lives in an “unsafe” are in the interior of the country. They occasional visit and have to drive to the end destination. They occasionally drive past heavily armed non uniformed trucks of “soldiers” who she says are cartel people. Also, if cartel people want something you have that they perceive as valuable to them, they just take it from you and there’s nothing to be done about it.
Our “good” neighbor to the South.
Never in a million years would I go there. I think the Mexican people and We would be better off if the US annexed Mexico as an existential threat to us and ferociously, rithlessly eliminated the cartels. Then garrison it with bilingual speakers and start over in a non corrupt manner of managing with Capitalism down to the individual villages.
We couldn’t do worse than we did in Iraq and Afghanistan and this is our problem in that it affects us daily here.
My students would come back from Christmas break in Mexico telling tales of such.