Car insurance claims in Mexico

Mexico splits the question in two, and the split is the first thing to understand. The Código Civil Federal governs only federal matters — «Las disposiciones de este Código regirán en toda la República en asuntos del orden federal» (art. 1º) — so the ordinary law of who pays for a crash is the civil code of the state where it happened, and there are thirty-two of them. What is genuinely federal is the insurance contract itself, governed by the Ley sobre el Contrato de Seguro, and the duty to be insured when driving on a federal road. Under art. 63 Bis of the Ley de Caminos, Puentes y Autotransporte Federal every vehicle using federal roads, bridges and highways must carry cover for damage caused to third parties in their property and their persons; buying it is the owner’s responsibility, and no one may be forced to buy it from a named insurer. Driving without it on a federal road carries a fine of twenty to forty days’ minimum wage, and the owner has forty-five calendar days to buy a policy and have the ticket cancelled (art. 74 Bis fr. II). A wider voluntary motor policy satisfies the duty (art. 63 Ter).

On the federal side the liability rules are short and sharp. Whoever acts unlawfully or against good morals and causes harm must repair it, unless he proves the harm followed from the victim’s own inexcusable fault or negligence (art. 1910). More to the point for vehicles, art. 1913 makes a person answerable for harm caused by mechanisms dangerous in themselves or by the speed they develop even where he does not act unlawfully, subject to the same inexcusable-negligence escape — which is all or nothing on the face of the text, not a percentage reduction. Reparation is the victim’s choice between restoring the previous situation and paying damages, and where death or incapacity results the grade of reparation is set by reference to the Ley Federal del Trabajo, calculated on the Unidad de Medida y Actualización (art. 1915). The action to demand that reparation prescribes in two years from the day the damage was caused (art. 1934).

Two clocks then run against the insurer, and they are different clocks. The claim under the policy falls due thirty days after the insurer has received the documents and information that let it know the basis of the claim (art. 71) — the period starts from complete documentation, not from the crash and not from the notice — and a clause making the debt payable only once the insurer has acknowledged it or a court has proved it is void. Notice itself is due as soon as the insured or beneficiary knows of the loss, with a maximum of five days, in writing unless the contract says otherwise (art. 66). Actions deriving from an insurance contract prescribe in two years from the event that gave rise to them (art. 81) and, where the loss is concerned, from the day the interested parties learned of it, which they must prove (art. 82); no clause may shorten or lengthen that (art. 83).

The injured third party is not a stranger to this: liability insurance gives him the right to the indemnity directly, as a beneficiary from the moment of the accident (art. 147), and a compulsory liability policy cannot be cancelled or terminated before its term runs out (art. 150 Bis). If the insurer will not pay, the complaint goes to CONDUSEF — the Comisión Nacional para la Protección y Defensa de los Usuarios de Servicios Financieros — within two years of the event or of the insurer’s refusal (Ley de Protección y Defensa al Usuario de Servicios Financieros, arts. 63 and 65); supervision of insurers themselves belongs to the Comisión Nacional de Seguros y Fianzas, named in art. 63 Bis. The CONDUSEF address linked here is the one the compulsory policy wording must print (ACUERDO 07/2014, Anexo 1); neither regulator’s own site could be opened this round, so no regulator page is cited as read. Whether the Secretaría de Hacienda has since revised the 2014 minimum sums under the annual review power it reserved, the treatment of diminished value, cover for uninsured drivers, and the shared-fault rule of any state civil code have not yet been verified against a primary text and are not stated here.