Deputy Victoria Gutiérrez Pérez sparked a controversy in the Veracruz state Congress by suggesting that outer space could smell like Veracruz coffee.

While participating in a discussion of draft bills to support coffee growing and coffee producers in Veracruz, Gutiérrez claimed that scientists in Veracruz have created a spacecraft that could allow “outer space to smell like coffee.”

Gutiérrez — a member of the Morena party that controls the state Congress, holding 30 of the 50 seats — chairs the Special Committee for the Attention, Monitoring and Development of Coffee Growing in Veracruz.

The 71-year-old Gutiérrez proposed boosting the spread of Veracruz coffee by using the apocryphal spacecraft — which she said is capable of traveling to Mars — to carry its aroma beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

“Don’t you know coffee is also drunk in space?” she said, adding that she has asked the scientists to demonstrate how the aroma of Veracruz coffee could also be present in space as part of the state’s International Coffee Day commemoration on Oct. 1.

Her statements, presumably delivered in earnest, sparked a backlash in Congress, led to questions about her educational qualifications and prompted mockery on social media (here, here and here).

Deputy María Elena Córdoba, a member of the Citizen’s Movement Party, said Gutiérrez’s proposal “lacks all seriousness”  

Córdoba told the newspaper La Jornada that unserious proposals for International Coffee Day had come from other Morena lawmakers as well, citing suggested images depicting “astronauts in space,” “families at table,” “sleepless students” and even “a wake,” where participants drink coffee.

Such marketing images, effective or not, are hardly in the same category as launching a rocketship to spread the aroma of coffee into space.

Still, said Córdoba, “It is truly painful and worrisome that instead of addressing the true needs of the sector, this committee is considering ideas that do little or nothing to resolve the underlying problems” Instead, she said, attention is being diverted from the real debate about the incentives the sector actually requires.

Opposition lawmakers insist the state’s more than 90,000 coffee producers — and the more than 200,000 Veracruzanos that depend directly on coffee cultivation — have been severely affected by a recent fall in international prices, as well as climate change, and the state must take steps to support them. 

Veracruz is the second-largest coffee producing state in Mexico, according to the Agriculture and Rural Development Ministry (Sader). With more than 145,000 hectares dedicated to coffee cultivation in 2024, the Gulf Coast state produces roughly one-quarter of the nation’s coffee beans.

With reports from La Jornada, El Financiero, Aristegui Noticias and Diario de Xalapa