Mexican gov't statistics agency says it had to pay gangs to enter some towns to do census

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico's government statistics agency has acknowledged it had to pay gangs to enter some towns to do census work last year.

National Statistics Institute Assistant Director Susana Pérez Cadena told a congressional committee Thursday that workers also were forced to hire criminals in order to carry out some census interviews.

One census taker was kidnapped while trying to do that work, Pérez Cadena said.

She said the problem was worse in rural Mexico, and that the institute had to employ various methods to be able to operate in those regions.

“There are a lot of different strategies, including in some cases, paying in order to enter,” she said.

“Another very important one is to hire people from the area who know the local inhabitants very well in the area being surveyed, and who are very well known to the locals as people may be involved in crime.”

In north-central Mexico, where drug turf wars and migration are problems, census workers found abandoned farming communities with no one left to survey.

The institute is government funded but enjoys near complete autonomy to ensure statistics aren't altered by politicians.

Security analyst David Saucedo said Friday that drug cartels and gangs target census workers, polling firms and marketing researchers in some parts of Mexico for a myriad of reasons.

“There are cases in which organised crime groups extort money from survey workers and their supervisors in order to do polls. It is pure and simple extortion,” Saucedo said.

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