For at least a generation, millions of families in Mexico survived – sometimes until they prospered – with the money that children, daughters, siblings and sisters sent of the USA.

In 2007, those remittances increased for more of US$ 26 billion – almost the double of the amount generated a year for the solid section of Mexican tourism. Today, however, the remittances are falling faster than had been foreseen. The 12 million estimated Mexicans in the USA are having difficulties to find work that before was abundant and relatively paid well.

In any part the devastating effects of that fall are as visible as in Michoacán, a big State, primarily rural, to west of Mexico City, that traditionally is that more receives remittances of the USA.

In Comanja, city close to Tarejero, Guillermo Juarez Sees, the priest, says that the contributions during the mass fell about 25% since the Lehman Brothers‘s collapse, in the second half of last year. In Tlalpujahua of Ryón, city of the end east of the State of Michoacán, Edgardo Arqueta says that the sales of medicines and cosmetics in his drugstore fell down.. The ones that bought antibiotics, today they use plants”, says him.

The reduction of jobs in the USA also means less people leaving the villages, what presses the local market job, it increases the unemployment, the violence and it reduces the income of the families.

Via: Financial Times.