The residents of some neighborhoods in the west and southwest of Mexico City were quite right around April 2021, affected by the change in the approach paths to runways 05 of the Mexico City International Airport , as a result of the redesign of the airspace of the Valley of Mexico due to the construction of the new “Felipe Ángeles” airport in Santa Lucía, State of Mexico, when they complained about the noise produced by the engines of the aircraft that fly over them. Few things are as annoying and have as much of an impact on people’s physical and emotional health as increasing noise pollution, and what is worse, if it occurs at night, hours when there are also flights over the Valley of Mexico.
While there is no doubt that the aeronautical industry must continue to evolve technically, operationally and regulatory-wise to achieve ever-lower levels of noise emissions from aircraft equipment, it is also true that, at least in Mexico in 2025, the noise from increasingly quieter airplanes cannot compare with what the country’s inhabitants must endure in all their localities as a result of industries, recreational activities, engines, sirens, horns and trumpets of railroad machines, cars, motorcycles, vans and trucks, ambulances, patrol cars, rockets, and the radio receivers inside them, but especially that plague called horns that reinforce and enhance the sound emitted.
Wherever you go or wherever you head in the Mexican urban geography you will surely come across a horn doing its thing at full volume in any shop, workshop, garage, lobby or business inside or outside a building, including houses or apartments, most of the time in the middle of the street, invading you not exactly with relaxing tones or melodies, but attacking you with strident corridos of the tumbados category, which is the same as narco-corridos, in which they also praise organized crime and its younger sister violence.
I attribute the origin of this sonorous chaos to technological evolution and the accessibility of the aforementioned speakers and, it must be said, to the anarchy to which our most recent rulers, especially those of the party called Morena, have brought the rule of law and therefore all things in a Mexico in which basically everyone does what they want, whether or not it affects third parties , just as medical science shows how high noise levels impact humans and other animals.
A complex problem, without a doubt, and given the way things are in our country, I don’t see a solution other than covering our ears and rubbing a lot of “don’t give a damn” when driving around our cities.
To think that Mexicans will become aware of the harm they are doing with their noise emissions is to be naive , while daring to politely ask someone to turn down the volume of their music is dangerous in the increasingly violent social environment of the country, something that, however, does not prevent columnists like the one who signs this issue from at least denouncing the problem in their editorial spaces.
Comment and follow us on X: @GrupoT21
