Extortion in Mexico, a crime that is advancing
The State of Mexico is the entity with the highest number of extortions
In Mexico, an extortion is committed every hour, only considering those that are reported, because the black figure exceeds 90% of cases that never reach the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
At the end of November, the randsomhub hacktivist group stole millions of files from the Legal Counsel of the Government of Mexico and threatened to make them public if the Presidency of the Republic did not pay. The government did not pay the extortion and on November 25, the cyber pirates released 210 gigabytes of confidential information.
Not even the Mexican government has been immune to the crime of extortion, the only one that the authorities recognize has not decreased in recent years.
From January 1 to September 30, 2024, 7,664 extortions were reported in the country, according to the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System.
April was the month with the highest number of reported cases, with 936.
Abel Carreón Mora, a criminal lawyer, explains that “much of this is due to the feeling of insecurity that exists, due to organized crime groups, drug trafficking, which has caused the crime of extortion to increase.”
While Alberto Guerrero Baena, a consultant in Security, Police, Justice and Social Movements, highlights that “the problem with this crime is the daily nature of it, because extortion can be carried out by companies and corporations and can even be linked to citizens afterwards, and these citizens are so simple that they will not report them, because many of them are already part of it.”
In the last six years, there has been a progressive increase in extortion cases each year, with only a decrease in 2020, the worst year of the Covid 19 pandemic, but from 2018 to 2024 there have been more than 57 thousand complaints for this crime.
The State of Mexico accounts for 35.2% of extortions; that is, one in three are committed in this state.
Veracruz is in second place with 4,785 complaints, followed by Nuevo Leon, Jalisco and Mexico City.
At the other extreme is Tlaxcala, which in six years reported only 19 cases of extortion, and Yucatan with only 37.
According to a survey carried out by the Confederation of National Chambers of Commerce among its members, extortion represents one of the biggest security issues, affecting their income and impacting their consumer prices, given the inability of the authorities to prevent the crime.
Adrián Regino, a criminal lawyer, points out, “that is, you have to pay me a certain amount or else I will burn down the place where you are, I will generate certain actions and this is the coercion that carries out this crime.”
Source: meganoticias
