MEXICO CITY (news agencies) — It started with a phone call to a men’s clothing store in the heart of Mexico City’s historic center. “I need you to put together 10,000 pesos ($500) for me weekly, or else we’ll have to do something,” the voice said.
The owner hung up and didn’t answer the phone again for days. But when another call came the following week, in a surge of courage and indignation the owner told the caller he wouldn’t pay, that the money demanded would have been half the store’s daily income. “Well, prepare to face the consequences,” the voice said.
Several years of escalating threats, visits from goons and armed robberies followed until the shop owner, who requested anonymity because he still fears retaliation, decided to close the store his grandfather had opened in 1936.
Extortion is strangling businesses in Mexico. Much, but not all, of it is linked to Mexico powerful organized crime groups. While some larger companies eat it as the cost of doing business, many smaller ones are forced to close.
The Mexican Employers’ Association, Coparmex, says extortion cost businesses some $1.3 billion in 2023. And this year, while other major crimes are descending, extortion continues to rise, up 10% nationally in the first quarter compared to the same period last year.
In Mexico City, the number of reported extortion cases nearly doubled in the first five months of 2025 to 498, up from 249 for the same period last year. It’s the highest total at this point in the year in the past six years, according to federal crime data.
After the first call in 2019, the store owner had his employees stop answering the phone for eight months. Things quieted, but in early 2020, two men came to the shop and demanded payment. The owner pretended to be a shopper and slipped out.
In 2021, the weekly calls demanding money in exchange for “security” resumed. Under advice of his attorneys, eventually stopped going into the shop, instead managing everything remotely.
In one of several robberies, his employees were held at gunpoint, tied up and locked in a bathroom, while the thieves took money from the cash register.
Finally, after two years of threats and robberies, he reported it to authorities. Investigators demanded proof from him that he couldn’t provide because the threats were always verbal, he said. The investigation went nowhere.
Reported extortion cases are only a small fraction of the reality.
Mexico’s National Institute for Statistics and Geography estimated that some 97% of extortion cases were not reported in 2023.
Reporting is low because of a combination of fear and skepticism that authorities will do something.
Mexico City police chief Pablo Vásquez Camacho said in an interview with news agencies that police were receiving more reports of extortion, but recognized that they still weren’t hearing about many more. “We can’t solve something that we’re not even seeing or that isn’t being reported,” Vásquez said.
The problem, said Vicente Gutiérrez Camposeco, president of the Mexico City Chamber of Commerce, “has become entrenched” in Mexico and especially the capital in recent years.
