Stay or leave a border corridor in northeast Mexico

The question that reached senior management was blunt: should we leave? The company, an export manufacturer, had two plants in a border corridor in northeast Mexico. For months, the internal debate revolved around how safe the area was and what a move would cost.

When Riskop looked at the case, the real exposure was somewhere else: in a system that shaped who got hired, which suppliers the company bought from, how materials and people moved, who represented the workers and how municipal permits got resolved.

How the surroundings were read

Riskop used its model for reading a plant’s surroundings as a system of governance, along five dimensions: territorial, economic, operational, social and institutional. With that model, the question is who decides what around the plant, and through which channel each decision reaches the operation.

That map located the channels through which pressure got in without violence, the same ones described in How criminal pressure gets into a plant in Mexico. Each channel was assigned an owner inside the company.

What changed

The result was a short document: written rules about what the company does not do under any circumstances, and an escalation path for when someone receives an offer or a “recommendation” they cannot turn down alone. Whoever receives it knows who to call, and nobody has to decide on their own.

Management then turned to how to stay, with its own intelligence about its surroundings.

Before you decide to relocate

• Separate what depends on the place (the municipality, the corridor, the local authorities) from what depends on how the company operates (hiring, procurement, transportation). The second set moves with you.
• Ask each department for a list of the times someone from outside tried to make a decision for it in the past year, even if nothing happened.
• Write a few rules nobody can negotiate, each with a concrete example. A rule of this kind reads something like “no supplier is onboarded without review by procurement and security.”
• Decide who an attempt at pressure gets escalated to, how fast, and who steps in if the person who received it is threatened.

Relocating may still be the right call. Making it with this map in hand tells you what stays behind and what travels with the company.

This work is part of Riskop’s Security service.