The outrageous thing is how incompetent, corrupt and lazy our Mexican government is. That this radioactive material was used for construction. And there ARE still radioactive houses all around the country. And of course nobody is responsible. It was just due to the USA intervention that the stupid Mexican government did something (albeit half asses).
My country is a joke.
Just look at how badly most of the world has handled COVID-19.
Look at the International Atomic Energy Agency's report of the incident in Georgia(the country) where lumberjacks found an abandoned radioactive source in a forest - Georgia alone would have never had the resources to deal with it, but because they followed the international protocol the entire operation was done under supervision, cleaned up properly and affected people given top-class help in foreign hospitals:
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81...
My point is - all that the Mexican government had to do was to swallow some pride and work with an agency like IAEA to clean it up properly.
It’s what depressed me most about COVID. Every large country has engaged in various forms of cooking its books related to deaths or hospitalizations, or saving face, with almost no exceptions. China, US, Russia, Japan, Brazil - all of them massaging the counting (and/or restricting publication) so that accurate information is impossible to obtain.
What’s wrong with simply publishing the facts, straight, and telling people how it is? Are governments and those within them so terrified of the weaponization of narrative that the best game-theoretic optimal choice is to lie by default?
Is this really the best we can do?
The difference is that, it is in those everyday life decisions/situations that my fellow countrymen just make bad and stupid decisions. It is the lack of "do things right" mentality. From my experience visiting the US often, that's what "saves" it, everyday people still have a certain judgement bar of what's right and what's wrong. Here in Mexico... it is just not there, people just rush through things to get freed from the chore. As a podcast I linked said: When the authorities come to interview you about what you saw, a lot of people will just say they did not see anything, mainly so that they don't have to deal with any follow up. You don't see that in the USA for example when an accident happens, or a robery: People usually standup and stay to help.
It's in Spanish . But if you can understand it, it is really good.