My friend Tony bought a stainless steel cart, suitable for selling tacos from.
Tony lives in Juarez. Selling tacos is an honest job in Juarez. You can hit the streets after your day job, and make some extra scratch to give your family a leg up.
And selling tacos off a cart isn’t a bad job. You’re outside. You get to talk to lots of people, and you’re performing an honest service.
Starting a business is like raising a child. You get to watch it grow, and develop, and you can take pride in its development.
The barriers to entry for a taco cart are low. You need a city license, and a health inspection, but in Juarez you don’t need a handwash sink, like you would in El Paso. The street food in Juarez isn’t, for the most part, dangerous. Street vendors in Juarez can’t afford to keep a lot of inventory, so the food is usually fresh. If a taco vendor ends up with too much taco meat at the end of the day, he can take it home and feed it to his family, or his neighbor’s family.
No, the financial risk of owning a taco cart in Juarez is minimal. But almost every week you read about some taquero getting shot to death on the streets of Juarez.
The problem is the cuota. Taco vendors, like the guys who drive taxis, are expected to pay protection money to local thugs or face the consequences.
I asked my cabbie last Friday how much he paid in cuota.
“About 500 pesos a week,” he said. About thirty-five bucks. I don’t know what the taco vendors pay, but I suspect that it’s similar. Thirty-five bucks a week seems like it would be a lot of money for a guy selling tacos off a cart.
The derecho de piso or cuota is the most regressive of taxes. Only the people on the front lines of commerce come face to face (or ear to phone) with the extortionists. The employees of the wealthy may face the immediate threat of physical violence, but the rich, mostly, live behind walled compounds or gated communities. The rich, too, can leave. They can move to El Paso, or to one of the scarce safer cities in Mexico.
The poor have fewer options.
If they are extorted, the rich are also likely to be asked for a lower percentage of their income. If the wealthy were asked to pay as much as the poor, I suspect that the government would deal with it.
For now, Tony’s stainless steel taco stand sits under a tarp in what passes for his garage. Maybe things in Juarez will change, and Tony will someday be out on the street, hawking tacos. At least stainless steel lasts forever.