“Informal Alcohol: 36 Times More Profitable Than the Budget for Addiction Prevention”
La Razón reports:
“In Mexico, the informal market for the wine and spirits industry is worth around 55.688 billion pesos – 36.4 times the budget allocated to Mental Health Care and Addiction Prevention Services, which was 1.527 billion pesos for 2026 – according to the Commission for the Wine and Spirits Industry (CIVyL).”
Other Articles on the Same Topic
- Four in Ten Bottles Sold in Mexico Are Fake: CIVyL (El Financiero)
- 36% of Alcohol Consumed in Mexico Is Informal: Euromonitor (El Financiero)
Assessment
This is the illicit-alcohol scare tactic, and Movendi has documented the same playbook before: an industry body publicises a large “illicit” or “fake” alcohol figure, then uses it to argue that higher alcohol taxes would only feed the illegal market. The figures are not independent data – they come from Euromonitor “informal alcohol” studies commissioned by the industry, issued in successive editions for more than a decade and recirculated whenever alcohol taxes come up. When the source is named at all, it is Euromonitor.
CIVyL is an alcohol industry front group for Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Bacardi and Beam Suntory, among others; its board is made up of those companies’ executives. Elevating illicit trade as the central problem – and pairing it with the message that the answer is “traceability, not taxes” – is its standard position, deployed whenever alcohol taxation is on the table.
The evidence points the other way. The most effective responses to alcohol harm are the WHO “best buys” – higher alcohol taxes, limits on marketing, and controls on availability. And the illicit-trade argument does not hold: the WHO technical manual on alcohol tax policy treats a possible illicit market as something to be managed through enforcement alongside tax increases, not as a reason to keep alcohol cheap. Where governments have acted, this bears out. After Lithuania raised alcohol excise in 2017, alcohol-attributable deaths fell by 22% between 2016 and 2018 and tax revenue rose, with no measurable increase in illicit alcohol.