THE GUARDIAN: Fortunes of the country’s 22 billionaires doubled in last five years, reaching unprecedented collective wealth of $219bn
Scrunched between luxury apartment buildings and a lush gated community, the neighborhood of Santa Lucía Reacomodo in Mexico City is a working-class pocket of real estate. Electrical wires tangle above cinder-block houses, stray cats slink down narrow streets, debris piles up on the pavement.
María del Socorro Corona, 79, arrived here decades ago, back when it was just a cactus-covered hillside. The two-bedroom turquoise house she built with her now-deceased husband is crammed with bags of clothes and knick-knacks she sells at a weekly market.
“I have to make money,” she said, “or I won’t eat.”
While most people built their homes here in the 80s and 90s, the area really started to change about 20 years ago, Corona said, when the government constructed a bridge connecting Mexico City to the high-end business district of Santa Fe nearby. Foreigners came wanting to buy up their land, but none of the neighbors wanted to sell.
“So now the rich are over there,” she said, pointing at one of the looming luxury apartment buildings: row upon row of glass balconies with carefully manicured hedges. “And the poor are over here.”
The stark contrast in this little enclave of the capital is a microcosm of a problem that has plagued Mexico for decades: rampant income inequality, with a small slice of the population living in opulence while millions of families languish in poverty.
“Mexico is unbelievably unequal – it’s almost inconceivable,” said Viri Ríos, a public policy expert and director of Mexico Decoded. “Inequality in our country has been around for centuries: we’ve just grown accustomed to living this way.” » | Oscar Lopez in Mexico City | Thursday, March 12, 2026
