That's like saying, "Based on the typical news about Miami (or Anchorage), you will get eaten by polar bears and die of hypothermia".

Mexico is not South America, and it's nowhere close to Argentina. The distance between Juarez and BA is about the same as the distance between London and Seoul. Seriously. Worlds apart.

You can't generalize South America. It's bloody ginormous, and has far more cultural diversity than North America. It's far from homogenous. There are some places in South America that are dangerous. Most aren't. Similarly, you don't judge San Francisco by Detroit.

I've travelled through Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Buenos Aires is basically Paris or Madrid, but a little run down and depressing (much better night life, though). Bolivia is mostly alpine desert in the south and jungle in the north, and almost all poor. Peru ranges from modern metropolis (Lima) to shacks on a beach (Mancora), to mountains, jungles, etc. Ecuador is the only place I ever felt unsafe, and only in parts of Quito and Guayaquil. The worst places for crime and personal safety were apparently Venezuela and parts of Brazil.

Anyways, the point is you're trying to shoehorn an entire continent with dozens of countries and hundreds of cultures into a single mental schema, and that's just a dumb thing to do. It would be like saying "Asian culture" and thinking you could fit China, North Korea, Japan, Thailand, and India in one label.