A random dude on Facebook (probably a baby boomer) says Mexico is dangerous for Americans. I found an article on Forbes talking about just how dangerous it is. It will scare you and make you never want to go to Mexico. In 2016, 31 million Americans visited Mexico and 75 were murdered.

Now, we don’t know what those 75 were doing. Were they getting involved in the drug business? I don’t know. Let’s assume they’re all just innocent little, white people hanging out on the beach. We want to know the murder rate for American tourists per 100,000. So 31 million tourists is 310 x 100,000. And so, we divide 75 by 310 100,000s, and we get a murder rate of American tourists in Mexico of 0.24/100,000. I’m not minimizing the seriousness of that. That’s 75 too many. But, the murder rate of American tourists in all other countries, according to the article is 0.14/100,000. That’s not a huge difference.

What’s the murder rate in America? Well, let’s just say you’re much better off in Mexico than in some notoriously dangerous cities like Chicago, Baltimore and St. Louis. The murder rates in those cities is 18.26, 58.27 and 64.5/100,000 respectively. So, you’re about 268 times safer in Mexico than in St. Louis. Here’s a good list of American murder rates.

But surely those examples are of extremely dangerous American cities, right? It’s true that it’s not that dangerous everywhere. Cities like Fort Lauderdale, Florida or Oklahoma City can’t be that much worse than Mexico, right? Sorry, both of those cities are over 11 murders per 100,000 people. Much more dangerous than Mexico.

Why would the US State Department try to falsely scare Americans about Mexico? If the government can convince us that this is the freest and safest country, we’ll be much more likely to put up with their abuse before trying to get out of our dysfunctional relationship.

You probably just shuddered at the thought of ending your relationship with the USSA. But it needs to be an option on the table for more people or they really will just keep abusing us more and more. Some people leave the country to become “perpetual travelers”. Foreign countries treat them with more respect as foreigners. And you’re out of the range of the abuse of your own country where they look at you as just a tax slave.

Listening to the State Department criticize Mexico is like listening to the marketing department at Target talk about Wal-Mart. If Target can bad mouth Wal-Mart and make their own customers a little more loyal, maybe they can raise their prices a little and get away with it before their customers jump ship.