Mexico City: expensive, heavily fortified, and no paradise without a 4x4

Mexico City and Central America: expensive, fortified and with impossible roads

What does a Spaniard travelling through Mexico City and Central America with an analyst's eye find? A region that dismantles clichés through contrasts: friendly, welcoming people, yes, but also brutal inequality, security that is bought with electric fences, and prices that in several countries approach or exceed European standards.

Fortification as urban policy

The most striking antiestéticature is not poverty, but how it is protected: razor wire, cameras, bars even on chimneys. Houses look prepared for a siege, and schools display more security perimeter than the Rota naval base. Insecurity, according to the account, is far more pronounced in cities than in the countryside. Some argue that a society with little trust in others is doomed to fail. Costa Rica emerges as the exception: safer than the rest of the region.

European prices with transport from another century

The second surprise is the cost of living: countries that are expensive even for a European wallet. And yet the setting is privileged: mountain climate, tropics, beaches, rivers and well-preserved jungles. The comparison with the Canary Islands does not flatter the latter. But transport spoils it: dismal infrastructure and routes that can only be completed in a 4x4. The police in Panama close the journey with an impression nobody dares to finish.

Asked which country to choose for retiring on a pension, the account remains split between Uruguay and Paraguay. The only consensus: the region is nothing like what the brochures say. Nor like what the official story claimed. The cheap paradise, it turns out, has electric fences. And that, deep down, is quite a statement of intent.