The Mexican Chernobyl Nobody Knows About

What President Sheinbaum’s flagship housing program can teach us about policy-made disasters.

Just fourteen miles from La Americana —the Mexican neighborhood that Time Out recently crowned “the coolest in the world”— lies a very different kind of urban landmark: Lomas del Mirador, better known by locals as Mexico’s own Chernobyl.

Mexico’s Chernobyl isn’t radioactive, but it feels just as desolate: endless rows of abandoned apartment blocks, scarred by graffiti and swallowed by weeds. A vast graveyard of concrete blocks where silence is only broken by organized crime, which long ago claimed the empty homes as safe houses and secret graves for their victims.

Yet, this Mexican Chernobyl was not born from a natural disaster, but from policy.