Mexico City (AP) – started with a phone call to a men’s clothing store in the heart of the historic center of Mexico City. “I need you to collect 10,000 peso ($ 500) for me a week, otherwise we’ll have to do something,” said the voice.
The owner closed and did not respond to the phone again for days. But when the next week comes another call, in a tide of courage and outrage, the owner told the calling that he would not pay that the money required would be half the daily income of the store. “Well, prepare to face the consequences,” the voice said.
For several years, escalating threats, visits from chase and armed robbery, while the owner of the store, who demanded anonymity, as he was still afraid of revenge, decided to close the store that his grandfather discovered in 1936.
Extraction is a strangulation of business in Mexico. Many, but not all of it are related to the powerful organized criminal groups in Mexico. While some bigger companies eat it as the cost of doing business, much less are forced to close.
The Mexican Employers Association, Coparmex, says the blackmail costs the business around $ 1.3 billion in 2023. And this year, while other major crimes are coming down, extortion continues to increase by 10% nationally in the first quarter compared to the same period last year.
In Mexico City, the number of evidence reported has almost doubled in the first five months from 2025 to 498, compared to 249 for the same period last year. This is the highest amount at this point in the year in the last six years, according to federal crimes.
Report to the police does not go anywhere
After the first call in 2019, the store owner made his employees stop answering the phone for eight months. Things subsided, but in early 2020, two men came to the store and asked for payment. The owner pretended to be a buyer and got out.
In 2021, weekly calls requiring money in exchange for Security resumed. Under the advice of his lawyers, the owner eventually stopped entering the store instead of managing everything remotely.
In one of several robberies, his employees were held under firing, tied and locked in Banya, while the robbers took money from the cashier.
Finally, after two years of threats and robberies, he told him to the authorities. Investigators demanded proof from him that he could not provide because the threats were always verbal, he said. The investigation did not go anywhere.
Reported only cases of extortion of parts
The reported cases of extortion are only a small part of reality.
Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography estimated that about 97% of extortion cases were not reported in 2023.
Reporting is low due to a combination of fear and skepticism that the authorities will do something.
Mexico Police Chief Pablo Vasquez Kamacho said in an interview with AP that police were receiving more blackmail messages, but admitted that they had not heard much more. “We can’t solve something we don’t even see or are not reported,” Vasquez said.
The problem, said Vicente Gutierrez Camposeko, President of the Chamber of Commerce of Mexico, has “strengthened” in Mexico, and especially the capital in recent years.
Daniel Bernardi, whose family has run a Popsicle store in the historic center for 85 years, has been reconciled in the situation. “There’s nothing to do,” he said. “You pay when you have to pay.”
Last month, the Mexico City prosecutor’s office announced that he was setting up a special prosecutor’s office to investigate and pursue extortion.
Pay or die
In July, President Claudia Shainbaum said he would propose legislation to give the government more power to pursue the blackmail.
This week, her administration has also announced a national strategy to deal with blackmail. There will be an anonymous blackmail reporting number; the force for immediate cancellation of telephone numbers related to blackmail calls; Local units against exports to investigate the cases and the participation of the Financial Intelligence Division in Mexico for freezing bank accounts related to blackmail.
On a national scale, the cases of blackmail are over 6% for the year.
The rapid expansion of blackmail is related to the significant amounts it generates for organized crime, attracting the most powerful drug cartels in the country, among others. The cartels for the new generation of Sinaloa and Jalisco have made a blackmail one of the units of their criminal portfolios, “said security analyst David Saudedo.
Even with the cartels involved, small crooks take advantage of fear and manage their own small extortion rockets, pretending to be related to larger organized crime groups.
The owner of the men’s store in Mexico City did not know who was blackmailing him. But without help from the authorities, he felt alone and exposed. The threats intensified and now they said they would kill him if he did not pay.
The owner recalled that a nearby restaurant, which opened at the same time as his own store, had closed himself after his owner was killed, supposedly after not paying demands for blackmail.
So in December 2023 he saw no other option but to close. Little by little, he watched old furniture conducted by the store that his father betrayed him while his grandfather handed it to his father.
“When I closed myself, I felt very sad. And then I made me so crazy that I think I could still continue, but because of fear I couldn’t,” he said. “You work your whole life to destroy it.”