MEXICO

Mexico's crisis is inseparable from the narco reality that has reshaped the country since 2006. In states like Sinaloa, Guerrero, and Tamaulipas, young men face a binary that no government program addresses: join the cartel economy and risk death, or refuse and face poverty with no alternative. The sicario (hitman) has become a perverse masculine archetype — feared, wealthy, and dead by 25. For boys growing up without fathers, many of whom were themselves consumed by this cycle, the cartel offers the only structure, mentorship, and economic path available.

Meanwhile, millions of Mexican men live as undocumented workers in the United States, sending remittances that sustain entire towns while missing their children's lives. These men exist in a psychological no-man's-land: too proud to admit loneliness, too afraid to seek help in a country that might deport them, and too committed to the provider role to consider their own wellbeing. Back home, the men who stayed contend with an economy where the minimum wage barely covers food, and where therapy is considered a luxury for rich capitalinos, not real men from the pueblo.