According to US-based newspaper The Economist, on Saturday, Feb. 20th, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared: “We are living a stellar moment,” and just a little over two years after he took office, it is hard to find evidence of that.
Even by the standards of a covid-ravaged world, the country is doing poorly. Mexico has the fourth-highest number of excess deaths as a share of the population since the pandemic’s onset. Its economy was in recession before the pandemic arrived.
The poverty rate probably rose more than in Latin America’s other big economies. Almost half of Mexico’s 126m people could not afford to eat properly at the end of 2020, according to official figures.
Whereas murder rates have dropped sharply in some violent Latin American countries during the pandemic, in Mexico, the decline has been tiny.
