Claiming that false information had been published by the newspaper Reforma, President López Obrador asserted that the state’s beaches are clear of sargassum, which washes up on Mexico’s Caribbean coast every year, usually between March and September.
“Fortunately there is no sargassum, the beaches are clean; the Caribbean is a paradise with its turquoise blue water. We’re now managing to reduce contagion [of the coronavirus], there are now green light states [on the coronavirus risk map] and tourist activity will recover soon,” he told reporters at his morning news conference with his usual dose of optimism.
Deputy Navy Minister Eduardo Redondo Arámburo confirmed the president’s statement, claiming that seagrass had been mistaken for the macroalgae.
“There is no sargassum currently [on beaches]; there are small patches very far [out at sea],” the admiral said, explaining that the navy has been making flyovers of the Caribbean Sea since the start of the year.
One of the navy’s sargassum removal vessels.
“… I can assure you that the Caribbean Sea beaches are clean and ready for tourists to go to them to swim and enjoy our Mexican Caribbean,” Redondo said. “The Ministry of the Navy will continue working hand in hand with other institutions to keep the beaches clean.”
Redondo said the navy has nine shallow-water sargassum removal vessels and they are already at sea. He also said that a deep-water vessel will be deployed in the coming days and that sargassum barriers are being installed in Tulum, one of several Quintana Roo destinations expected to see an influx of visitors over the Easter vacation period.
But numerous hoteliers and tourists today rejected the government’s claims that there was no sargassum, posting photos and videos to social media that showed masses of the seaweed washed up on the coastline. Akumal Sur, Mahahual and Playa del Carmen were among the locations affected.
In addition, the Cancún sargassum monitoring network published a new map on Wednesday that showed that there are moderate amounts of the weed at 26 beaches and abundant quantities at three beaches on the northeastern coast of Cozumel, a small island off the coast of Playa del Carmen. An additional 36 Quintana Roo beaches have very low quantities of sargassum, while only 15 are completely untainted by the brown seaweed.
Various experts also confirmed that there is indeed sargassum in the state. Alejandro Bravo, an oceanographer and member of the Quintana Roo government’s sargassum committee, told the newspaper Milenio that there has been a “significant presence” of the seaweed on beaches for the past month. He said sargassum actually began arriving in January, surprising members of the committee because it doesn’t normally reach Quintana Roo until later in the year.
“It hasn’t arrived in overwhelming quantities but its presence is significant,” Bravo said.
Brigitta Ine van Tussenbroek, a scientist at the National Autonomous University’s Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology and another committee member, said that sargassum has arrived in recent weeks, although not in “catastrophic quantities.”
Greater quantities could arrive later in the season depending on the behavior of ocean currents, she said.
Joel González Chiñas, an oceanographer and biologist who has been researching the sargassum problem since 2015, told Reforma that it appeared that the government has “other information” – a phrase frequently used by López Obrador when confronted with information he doesn’t agree with – because “there are moderate and manageable arrivals” of the weed on Quintana Roo beaches.
“There are photographs and maps [of the sargassum], it’s not something we’re hiding. There are people who walk on the beach and send photos. In hotels there are daily cleaning brigades …” he said.
President López Obrador: 'I can't be an accomplice to robbery.'
President López Obrador threatened Wednesday to send a bill to Congress to change the constitution if a new electricity law that prioritizes the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) over private companies is deemed unconstitutional.
The new Electricity Industry Law, which gives CFE-generated power priority on the national grid over that produced by private and renewable energy companies, took effect last week but was promptly suspended by a judge who ruled that it could harm competition and cause irreparable damage to the environment. A second judge ruled against the law on Tuesday in response to 11 injunction requests filed by private companies.
Speaking at his regular news conference, López Obrador said he was certain the law was not unconstitutional before indicating that he would seek to change the constitution if judges, including the Supreme Court, rule that it is.
“If judges, magistrates, justices determine it is unconstitutional and it can’t continue, I would send an initiative to reform the constitution because I cannot be an accomplice to robbery,” the president said, reaffirming his claim that the previous government, which ended a long-held state monopoly in the energy sector, allowed private and foreign companies to loot and steal.
The news agency Reuters reported that some lawyers do not believe that the law – which is seen as a barrier to investment and could trigger clashes with the United States – will be ruled unconstitutional if the government can provide sufficient guarantees to companies with existing energy sector investments in Mexico.
López Obrador didn’t indicate the exact nature of the constitutional change he would pursue but expressed confidence that his government would be able to enact one.
“What do we need? Two-thirds [of the Congress]? … It’s good that the elections are coming, … they [the opposition parties] are betting that we won’t get a majority in the Chamber of Deputies so they can continue maintaining privileges and continue maintaining the regime of corruption. But the people are wise,” he said.
The president’s Morena party and its allies the Social Encounter and Labor parties don’t currently have the votes among them to get the two-thirds majority required.
The president said he was unconcerned about the accumulation of rulings against the electricity law but reiterated that the judges that hand them down should be investigated.
“Public life has to be more and more public, transparency is a golden rule of democracy and there shouldn’t be untouchables. The president of Mexico has no immunity [from prosecution] now, he can be investigated for any crime, that didn’t happen before. If that’s the way it is with the president, why not with other public servants,” López Obrador said.
The president wrote last week to Supreme Court Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar to ask that the judge who ruled against the electricity law be investigated.
Chief Justice Zaldívar: an investigation will proceed if there’s evidence.
López Obrador said Monday he had asked the Federal Judiciary Council (CJF) to determine whether the court in which the judge sits – an administrative court that specializes in economic competition, broadcasting and telecommunications matters – has the authority to suspend the law.
He said an investigation into the judge is necessary because there are “people, organizations and companies” that are close to the old political regime.
“[They] act based on their well-known economic and political interests [and] use corruption and influence peddling as their modus operandi,” López Obrador said.
He specifically cited Spanish energy firm Iberdrola, for which former president Felipe Calderón and his energy minister Georgina Kessel have worked.
Zaldívar responded to the president’s request for an investigation in his own letter, which the CJF made public on Monday afternoon, in which he made it clear that an investigation would only proceed if there was evidence of wrongdoing.
“As is appropriate in these cases your complaint will be sent to the relevant area of the Federal Judiciary Council so that an investigation is opened if there is evidence for that [to occur],” he wrote.
Zaldívar added that democracy and the rule of law are built on judges’ capacity to make decisions within “a framework of autonomy and independence.”
The chief justice told the president that it’s the job of the Federal Judiciary Council to ensure that judges can freely do that while making certain that they act in accordance with the law and with “honesty, honor and complete impartiality.”
“We will continue to fulfill this mandate,” Zaldívar concluded.
A woman receives a Covid-19 vaccine in Querétaro in December.
Last Saturday in Xalapa, Veracruz, was the first day that regular citizens (over the age of 60) were able to get Covid-19 vaccines.
The city set up about 26 modules so that those whose last names started with the letters A–E could go receive their first shots. Several of my friends either have been or will be getting vaccinated this week.
Saturday was the first day of a week-long campaign for this age group. People waited in line for hours; one friend of mine waited for over six. Yet another acquaintance paid someone else to stand in line for him, which was not a terrible idea. For the age group being served, with a little more organization we might have arranged for something like that for lots of people; surely there’d have been plenty goodwill to spread around.
Subsequent days have seen much shorter lines, though we’re not quite sure why. Much of it probably has to do with workers having learned on the first day where their logistical shortfalls were and fixing them. Some also speculate (correctly, most likely), that lots of people with last names not at the beginning of the alphabet got in line incorrectly on the first day.
After what happened with Oaxaca’s roll-out, after all, confidence that there would be enough doses was likely not high. Thankfully, things seem to have gone smoothly so far here, and the weather has been mercifully nice as well.
It’s been a long, hard year, and so often it felt like we would never get to this point. To be sure, we’re not out of the woods, but we can at least see a light at the end of the tunnel now, and that’s something.
And with our stoplight system leaning more toward green than red right now, one can almost imagine that we’ll be able to achieve some semblance of normality by summer. On a personal level, my biggest hope is that my daughter and other children can finally go back to in-person classes.
Saturday is also the day that I read both about the Hidalgo woman who died after receiving her vaccine and about the fact that the AstraZeneca vaccine has been suspended in several European countries on suspicion that it might be linked to cases of thrombosis (basically, blood clots).
Uh-oh.
This news isn’t going to help a situation in which many people seem to be much warier of the vaccine than of the virus itself. It’s a stance that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but the nature of fear is that it’s not always logical; it doesn’t look at and evaluate statistics first.
Think of all the people who are afraid to fly even though they’re exponentially more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport, or how parents are terrified that someone will snatch their children in the street when a tumble down the unguarded stairs in the house is actually a much bigger threat.
When it comes to fears and assumptions about whether something is likely to happen, statistics have very little to do with the way our hearts jump into our throats.
Back to the Hidalgo woman. According to authorities, at 75, she had other health problems, and her death has not been linked to the vaccine. But for those already suspicious of their safety, it serves as “proof” that they’re correct in their wariness.
Someone’s death soon after the vaccine was bound to happen, whether it was related to the vaccine or not. If a handful of people were dropping dead at every vaccination site, I’d say, “All right, let’s stop; something’s not right.” But that is not the case, and I worry about people refusing to take the vaccine as a result and then becoming seriously ill or dying of the virus instead.
I don’t know anyone who’s had a serious reaction to the vaccine, but boy, do I know a lot of people who have died.
I’ll admit, though, that the news about the AstraZeneca vaccine gave me more pause. Deputy Health Minister López-Gatell reminds us that correlation does not equal causation, but the adamancy with which he assured us about this during his press conference was surely cold comfort to some.
The fact that there have been no such cases in Mexico makes me feel more at ease, but a glance at the current most-read stories list of this paper shows that readers at least of Mexico News Daily are paying a lot of attention to those two stories (for an excellent, easily-understandable and up-to-date Q&A about what we know so far about the AstraZeneca vaccine and its effects, see the New York Times).
I am often alerted that my most recent article has been published because I get emails from strangers about them. Two weeks ago, I received many more not-very-nice emails than usual about the piece I did on vaccines, many calling me naïve, some calling me corrupt (I swear, no vaccine companies have paid me to write things in their favor; I’m not saying I’m above it — I could use the cash — but it’s just not happening). When it comes to vaccines, a lot of people have a lot to say about them.
People are wary and scared. They think the vaccines came out too soon, skipping the appropriate testing (they didn’t skip — it was truly a scientific marvel that combined urgency with our modern technology and knowledge).
I pray that as more people become vaccinated and as fewer people become seriously ill from the coronavirus that at least some of the holdouts will come around and get vaccinated too.
I’ll also be hoping when I get my own vaccine that the gods won’t decide it would be a hilarious joke if I died right after of thrombosis.
Especially if I get the AstraZeneca one.
Sarah DeVries is a writer and translator based in Xalapa, Veracruz. She can be reached through her website, sdevrieswritingandtranslating.com.
Maya Train construction under way in the southeast.
Up to 12 solar energy plants could be built in the next three years to power the Maya Train, according to the head of the National Tourism Promotion Fund (Fonatur), which is managing the ambitious rail project in Mexico’s southeast.
Rogelio Jiménez Pons told the newspaper Milenio that Fonatur has a master plan that proposes the construction of that number of solar farms in different parts of the country.
He said solar plants would be built in San José del Cabo and Loreto in Baja California; Tulum and Cozumel in Quintana Roo; Palenque, Chiapas; Calakmul, Campeche; Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo, Guerrero; and Huatulco, Oaxaca.
Jiménez said solar plants could also be built at airports operated by the government-owned corporation Aeropuertos y Servicios Auxiliares.
The Fonatur chief said energy generated at the plants would be used for the electrification of the Maya Train, which will transport passengers along 1,500 kilometers of tracks in Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán, Quintana Roo and Chiapas.
Fonatur chief Jiménez.
That revelation comes nine months after the federal government said it had decided that the Maya Train would be powered by diesel rather than electricity in order to keep operating costs down.
Jiménez said solar plants in San José del Cabo, Tulum and Cozumel would be the first to be built, with construction to start this year after a tendering process in September.
The investment for those three projects will be US $187 million, he said, explaining that Fonatur will provide 20% of the money and the other 80% will come from two state-owned banks, Nacional Financiera and Bancomext.
The San José del Cabo, Tulum and Cozumel plants will have a combined output of 110 megawatts, Jiménez said, adding that the Maya Train will require 200 megawatts to operate. That quantity of power will be reached after additional new solar plants come on line in 2022, he said.
The US $8-billion Maya Train railroad, currently under construction, is expected to start operations in 2023.
Jiménez said that all of the Maya Train solar plants will have battery storage so that they continue to supply power at night.
The Fonatur chief also told Milenio that profits from the Cozumel plant will be used for the establishment of a free ferry service between the island, located off the coast of Playa del Carmen, and Cancún. He said the navy will be responsible for building the ferry and operating the Cozumel-Cancún service.
Profits from other solar plants will go to the ministries of the Environment and Culture for a range of programs. Jiménez emphasized that more energy needs to be generated in Mexico but not by private companies that send profits out of the country.
The Fonatur director said in a separate interview that all of the profits generated by the operation of the Maya Train railroad, on which freight trains will also run, will go directly to the Ministry of National Defense.
The couple wait for their shots at a Celaya vaccination center.
Determined to have his wife vaccinated against Covid-19, a 75-year-old Celaya resident transported the 83-year-old woman with a tricycle cart to a vaccination center where health authorities were immunizing seniors in the Guanajuato city.
Although the couple live near the auditorium where immunizations were taking place, state officials said, Hernández delivered his wife because she has Parkinson’s disease and cannot move on her own, according to the newspaper Milenio.
Seferino Hernández Hurtado and Galina Uribe Estrada arrived at the center around 5 a.m., where they waited for a while before receiving their shots.
The couple, who have been married for more than 50 years, were among Celaya’s first residents to be vaccinated.
The story triggered both news stories and social media posts, with some people reacting to the story as evidence of the power and endurance of true love, and others responding negatively, commenting that the couple’s story was an example of the alleged lack of organization of the Covid-19 vaccination process.
Some commenters online decried the amount of time that seniors had to wait to be immunized and the fact that the couple had to leave their house at all to be vaccinated.
“They are incapable of guaranteeing proper access to health to the people of Guanajuato, and even more to people like [the couple],” said one Facebook user. “How many hours did they have to be waiting in line to be the first [to be vaccinated]? And with their age and in their condition! You are romanticizing ineptitude!”
As of Tuesday, 3.7 million of Mexico’s seniors had received one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to Health Ministry data. President López Obrador predicted on Monday that all the nation’s seniors will have received at least one dose by the end of April.
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell also announced Monday that starting in April, the government will immunize up to 600,000 of the nation’s 15 million seniors per day, based on expectations that the number of doses arriving weekly will about double starting next month.
Mexico has to date received almost 7.2 million doses after a shipment of 667,875 Pfizer shots arrived in Mexico City Tuesday morning.
Carlos Romero, who retired this week with a pension equal to his full salary.
Former Pemex workers’ union boss Carlos Romero Deschamps, an ex-lawmaker once named one of Mexico’s most corrupt politicians, has retired after 62 years service at the state oil company.
President López Obrador announced Tuesday that the 77-year-old former Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) deputy and senator had left the company.
“I want to inform the people of Mexico that … Mr. Romero Deschamps has already presented his resignation; in other words he ceases to be an active worker at Pemex. He did this of his own volition and also because of a request we made,” López Obrador said, adding that while the former union chief’s ongoing employment at Pemex was legal, the government considered it “immoral.”
According to a declaration of assets publicly available on the federal government’s payroll transparency website, Romero earned more than 1.2 million pesos (about US $58,000) last year in salaries and benefits, although whether he was really working for Pemex is unclear.
The newspaper Milenio reported that the former union chief, who started working for Pemex in 1959 at the age of 15, would retire on his full salary of 100,736 pesos (US $4,860) per month.
According to a collective labor agreement that took effect in 2019, Romero will also receive a range of generous benefits during his retirement. They include free medical care and medicines for him and his family, an allowance to cover gas expenses at his home and gasoline expenses for his vehicles, an annual bonus payment known as an aguinaldo, an allowance to cover the cost of purchasing basic food items and a funeral package.
Federal authorities have opened 12 investigations into the former union boss for crimes including fraud, embezzlement, illicit enrichment, influence peddling and money laundering. However, only three investigations remained open as of February. No warrants have ever been issued for Romero’s arrest.
Víctor Manuel Jacobo Domínguez, a Pemex employee who is part of a dissident workers’ group that has long accused Romero of corruption, claimed last month that the government had reached deals with the longtime union boss that ensure he will never be brought to justice.
Romero, who coordinated political campaigns for the PRI in his native Tamaulipas in addition to serving in the Congress and running the Pemex workers’ union for 26 years, has long been suspected of corruption.
He was implicated in various scandals including the so-called Pemexgate case in which the union was found to have diverted 500 million pesos to the 2000 presidential campaign of PRI candidate Francisco Labastida.
Romero has also been criticized for his ostentatious lifestyle, including giving a limited-edition Ferrari to his son and picking up the tab for the lavish wedding of his daughter in 2017. He was named by Forbes magazine in 2013 as one of the 10 most corrupt politicians in Mexico.
The deputy health minister announced an ambitious ramp-up of vaccinations.
Starting in April, up to 600,000 seniors per day will be vaccinated against Covid-19, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Monday.
Appearing in person at the Health Ministry’s nightly coronavirus press briefing for the first time since recovering from his own bout with Covid-19, López-Gatell said vaccinations will accelerate because Mexico will begin receiving greater quantities of vaccines at the start of next month.
“Starting in April we’re going to have practically double the [current] weekly or monthly supply of vaccines,” the coronavirus point man said, adding that the government’s vaccination brigades will focus on inoculating people in the country’s large cities.
“We’re going to be able to include the state capitals [in the vaccination program] – cities that have one, two, three or five million people; we’re going to be able to go into them and cover a whole city in the course of eight days,” López-Gatell said, referring to universal vaccination of seniors, not the entire adult population.
The application of 600,000 doses per day would allow the inoculation of 18 million people, meaning that the government would achieve its new goal of giving at least one shot to the nation’s approximately 15 million seniors by the end of next month.
President López Obrador said Monday that all of Mexico’s seniors will receive at least one dose by the end of April, a target that has shifted several times. The initial promise was that seniors over 60 would be fully vaccinated by the end of March.
The new goal is still ambitious considering that only 2.95 million seniors have so far received a dose, according to Health Ministry data presented Monday night. To inoculate 15 million by April 30, an average of about 260,000 doses will have to be administered each and every day until the end of next month. It appears that the lion’s share of the work will occur next month.
Only 52,228 doses were administered on Monday, according to preliminary Health Ministry data, lifting the total number of shots given to just over 4.4 million.
In addition to the 2.9 million seniors, about 829,000 health workers have been inoculated, including more than 590,000 who have received two vaccine doses, and over 17,000 teachers are fully vaccinated. Mexico has now received almost 7.2 million doses after a shipment of 667,875 Pfizer shots arrived in Mexico City Tuesday morning.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Tuesday that the United States will provide information on Friday about sending AstraZeneca vaccines – of which the U.S. has stocks but is not using it to inoculate citizens – to Mexico.
“We’re going to have a response on Friday and we’ll provide details that day,” Ebrard said, adding that “good progress” has been made in discussions with the U.S.
Vaccine efficacy rates as provided by their manufacturers. el economista
He didn’t reveal how many AstraZeneca shots Mexico might receive or how much it would pay for them, but the government has asked for as many as possible. López Obrador said Sunday that he was confident that the U.S. would supply Covid-19 vaccines to Mexico as China, Russia and India have already done.
Unlike the U.S., Mexico has approved the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine and López-Gatell said last week that it would continue to be used here despite several European countries temporarily suspending its use while the development of blood clots among a small number of recipients is investigated.
He predicted Monday that the World Health Organization (WHO) would soon issue a report ruling out links between the vaccine and thrombosis.
WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday that the thrombosis cases are not necessarily linked to vaccination, but it’s routine practice to investigate them.
“So far it doesn’t look like there are more cases than would be expected for the period in the general population,” said WHO assistant director general Mariângela Batista Galvão Simão.
Mexico has so far only received one shipment of 870,000 AstraZeneca shots that were manufactured by the Serum Institute of India. It will receive another shipment of more than 1 million doses from India and also has an agreement to purchase more than 40 million shots that will be manufactured in Argentina and bottled here.
The Pfizer, Sinovac and Sputnik V shots have also been used in Mexico while China’s single-jab CanSino vaccine has been approved by the federal health regulator but has not yet been administered.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated case tally rose by just 1,439 on Monday to just under 2.17 million. It was the lowest single-day case tally since May 11 last year when 1,305 cases were reported.
The official Covid-19 death toll increased to 194,944 with 234 additional fatalities. It was just the third time this year that the daily reported death toll was below 300 after 220 fatalities were registered on Sunday and 247 were added the same day a week earlier.
Even before Covid-19 wreaked havoc on wait times for many governmental transactions, standing in long lines to get them done was a fact of life in Mexico.
Coyotes are intelligent hunters, known for their ability to survive in a wide variety of habitats. Their numbers fluctuate with the ebb and flow of their food source, a built-in population control for both prey and predator. However, the term coyote can also apply to a clever Mexican expediter who can handle complex government transactions for the bureaucratically challenged.
These two-legged coyotes are also in tune with their environment of endless queues, institutional architecture, mind-numbing requirements and vague suppositions. Natural systems are predisposed to balance and prosper when left unmolested, and the two-legged coyotes are thriving in Mexico.
For the average expat or snowbird, life can mostly be a slow-paced and easygoing affair until you have to deal with Mexican bureaucracy. Those of us from the so-called first-world countries have been lulled into complacency after a lifetime of dealing with government services that are run in a perspicuous and somewhat efficient manner.
My first experience with a two-legged coyote was when I needed a Mexican driver’s license, about 10 years ago. I started by talking with a gringo friend who had gone through the process and was willing to help. I was told that I needed to be at the licensing facility by 7 a.m. to get a good place in the line; when the place opened at 8 a.m., only the first 50 people in line would be allowed into the building.
After a bit of thought, my friend suggested that 7 a.m. might be too late to be one of the first 50 people, and that 6:30 a.m. would be a better bet.
The four-legged variety of coyote. The ones with two legs save many Mexicans time and headaches at government offices, processing paperwork much more efficiently.
I am retired, and anything which requires a predawn wake-up I find to be pestiferously repugnant.
I was told I would also need to provide an original blood test to establish my blood type, along with a residence card, a passport and a recent utility bill.
“A recent utility bill?” I queried.
The utility bill was to establish my place of residence. Since I was renting at the time, I pointed out that my landlord’s name was on the bill, not mine. Augh.
Under those circumstances, the situation would require a signed and notarized statement, with a photocopy of my landlord’s identification. Since my landlord lived in Mexico City, the process of obtaining a driver’s license was becoming significantly more arduous than I had anticipated.
I further learned that there is a 30-minute class, in rapid Spanish, on the rules of the road. Having driven extensively in Mexico, I was quite surprised to learn Mexico actually had rules governing a driver’s behavior, let alone enough rules that would require a 30-minute dissertation.
I also learned that a written quiz — in Spanish, of course — followed the lecture, and then there would be the driving test. If all went well, I would be given a piece of paper with lots of colored stamps to be taken to another complex of government buildings. I would then stand in a line and relinquish this piece of paper to the clerk behind the counter. Once my colorfully stamped document was handed in, I would get into another line for the taking of my picture, and then to the final counter, where I would receive my license.
I was told to expect the testing process to be between four and six hours — that is, if there were no problems along the way. The process of actually having the license issued could take another two to three hours.
At this point, I contemplated the ramifications of being caught driving with an expired license from the United States; this option was looking better all the time.
A week or so later, I was whining to a Mexican friend about the laborious process of obtaining my driver’s license. I asked if he would accompany me to el edificio tránsito. He laughed and told me he’s never gone through the full process, not when a coyote can get it done in less than an hour.
I had only been in the country for a couple of years at that time and immediately thought about that time I paid someone to take my SATs.
After some inquiry, I learned that using a coyote seemed to be a quasi-legal method of obtaining a driver’s license, one of those unwritten workarounds common in this culture. It seems that the process is so complicated that the motor vehicle authorities realized some percentage of the population would never be able to navigate the bureaucratic obstacle course without help; voilà,coyotes!
Doing some quick math with my aged and addled mind, I counted five different queues in three different buildings that could easily squander a full day of my dwindling life. It was time to meet the man who would surmount the labyrinthine colossus that stood between me and the peace of mind of being a legal driver in the state of Sinaloa.
I met Jesús at the entry of el edificio tránsito at 10 a.m. I gave him my resident card, passport and the utility bill without my name on it. He asked my blood type and told me to wait a few minutes. Since we met at the main processing facility, I assumed Jesús was forging the required document with all the colored stamps.
I was stunned at the throngs of people both milling about and standing in a line. The service counter was similar to that of a bank with four windows at which clerks were processing paperwork. The line of people who were waiting their turn numbered 62. It stretched out the door and down a long hall. Behind the four clerks, in an out-of-the-way corner, there were hundreds of old file folders that were bundled and wrapped with string and stacked about a meter high.
As I was contemplating this haphazard archive of official documents, Jesús found me. He led me to a building across the street. We entered a waiting area that was standing room only, and he ushered me through a door marked fotografía.
After my photo was taken, it was hand-delivered to one of three clerks who were affixing photos and laminating finished licenses. About four minutes later, I was walking out with Jesús and my new driver’s license.
The total process, from my handshake with Jesús to admiring my new license, took about 20 minutes and cost 1,000 pesos total.
I will always remember the day I was saved by Jesús.
The writer describes himself as a very middle-aged man who lives full-time in Mazatlán with a captured tourist woman and the ghost of a half-wild dog. He can be reached at [email protected].
Cool Papa Bell slides into third during a game in Washington D.C. on Negro League opening day in May 1943. He was renowned for his speed.
In 1940, Mexican League baseball player James “Cool Papa” Bell had a season to remember.
Playing for the champion Azules of Veracruz, Bell became the first player in league history to achieve a feat called the Triple Crown — leading all players in three separate statistical categories: batting average, home runs and runs batted in (RBIs).
A few seasons earlier, Bell had come to Mexico as a highly successful player in his home country, the United States. Yet, his career there had been limited because of his race. Through an unofficial color barrier, the American major leagues banned Black players, who found an alternative in the Negro Leagues.
Many Negro League stars, including Bell, were described as being as good as, if not better than, their celebrated white major league counterparts. The Mexican League gave Bell and fellow Negro Leaguers a chance to play on integrated teams.
Bell’s narrative, including his years in Mexico, is receiving more attention through a new biography, The Bona Fide Legend of Cool Papa Bell: Speed, Grace, and the Negro Leagues, by Lonnie Wheeler. Poignantly, Wheeler died before the book was published, and some of the Black baseball stars he previously profiled have also passed away recently, including home-run king Hank Aaron.
Bell (second from right) photographed during his time in the Mexican League. Courtesy of Abrams Press
March 7 marked the 30th anniversary of Bell’s death in 1991.
Bell was part of seven Negro League championship teams. Before coming to Mexico, he won a championship for the team of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. The 1940 Azules team featured six Negro Leaguers who would eventually be inducted into the United States National Baseball Hall of Fame — including Bell, who was inducted in 1974.
Bell has a cinematic link to another Mexican championship squad through the film The Perfect Game, a fictionalized portrayal of the 1957 Little League World Series champs from Monterrey; Bell was played by Oscar-winning actor Lou Gossett Jr.
As for the real-life Bell, “His speed was legendary,” said Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. “He is still believed to be the fastest man to ever play the game.”
Kendrick cites an anecdote from another Negro Leaguer who played in Mexico, Hall of Famer Buck O’Neil. According to O’Neil, Bell’s speedrunning around the bases so stunned an opposing Mexican team that its players halted the game, convinced he had cheated.
His equally famous Negro League teammate, pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige, once reportedly witnessed his roommate Bell turning off their hotel room’s light switch and making it into bed before the light went out. Kendrick said this is a true story and attributed Bell’s achievement to both his speed and to a short circuit. “You’d flip the light switch off and there was a delay before it would go completely off,” Kendrick explained.
Sportswriter Lonnie Wheeler’s biography of James “Cool Papa” Bell was published last month, nearly a year after Wheeler’s death from cardiac arrest. Courtesy of Abrams Press
Ever after, Kendrick noted, “Satch would always say, ‘Cool is so fast. He can walk into a room, turn off the light, get in bed and pull up the covers before the room went dark.'”
Fans remembered his nickname as well as his speed.
“’Cool Papa’ is, I think, the greatest nickname in baseball players’ history, bar none,” Kendrick said. “It fit him. I tell people all the time, Cool was really cool. He was a snazzy dresser. He was so laid back. He never came to be rattled.”
The story of Bell in the Mexican League is rooted in its inclusionary approach toward Negro League stars. Over 150 players crossed the border south for better-paying jobs on integrated teams. The hospitality they received was similar to their experience playing elsewhere in Latin America, and much different from the U.S.
“Like a lot of players from the Negro Leagues who would go to Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, [Bell was] celebrated, treated with such great respect and dignity away from home,” Kendrick said. “I think Cool immensely enjoyed his time playing in Mexico.”
In contrast, Kendrick said, “the U.S. actually enforced racist laws — Jim Crow. It was not only a mindset, it was the law — separate restrooms, separate water fountains. There were places that did not even serve you, [where] you would not go in if you were Black.”
Bell headed south for better pay and integration.
The book’s foreword describes how different the situation was in Mexico: in 1936, Bell and his Negro League team at the time, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, traveled to Mexico City to play a series against white Major League all-stars — something professionally prohibited in the U.S.
A year earlier, in 1935, Bell and the Crawfords won the championship. That squad is widely considered the greatest Negro League team ever. In Mexico City, future Hall of Famers were well represented among the Crawfords and their white opponents. Bell made an amazing defensive play against one of them, the great Rogers Hornsby, in the final game.
With the Negro Leagues rocked by the Great Depression, Bell began playing professionally in Latin America. First, he joined Paige and other Negro Leaguers in the Dominican Republic for a pressure-packed season on Trujillo’s team. Although the team won the championship, the newcomers feared the potential consequences if they lost, Kendrick said.
Mexico proved more welcoming when Bell followed Paige there in 1938 and began learning Spanish. With his first team, the Alijadores of Tampico, he could make as much as US $450 a month. That was five times what he made with his first Negro League team, the St. Louis Stars, according to Kendrick. The downside was the fact that railroad tracks ran through the Alijadores stadium.
Bell played two seasons for Tampico before becoming part of the powerhouse Azules, a new team, in 1940. Team owner Jorge Pasquel was also the head of the Mexican League.
No matter where he played, Bell dominated. He won the Triple Crown in 1940 with a .437 batting average, 12 home runs and 79 RBIs. He also led the league in triples and runs scored. A Mexican postcard in his honor called him “The Great Batter of the Mexican League.”
The late Lonnie Wheeler wrote biographies of baseball Hall of Famers Hank Aaron and Mike Piazza, as well as one of Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young. Courtesy of Martie Wheeler
“His years in the Mexican League, they mirror a lot of things he did in the U.S.,” said Leslie Heaphy, an associate professor of history at Kent State University at Stark and an expert in the Negro Leagues. “He was often in the top in the batting title, often in the top or near the top in stolen bases.”
Bell played one more season in Mexico for Monterrey in 1941. Heaphy attributed his return to the U.S. to several factors, including his increasing age; a desire to go home by both Bell and his wife, Clara Belle; and interest from a team in the U.S., the Chicago American Giants.
“Bell was often a sought-after player,” Heaphy said. “Many of the players came back after a few years. Even though Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic were great places to play, they were not home in the same sense. Bell [followed] a similar path to many of the others who played for years down south and came back.”
The book describes the 1940s as a dramatic era for the Mexican League. Pasquel courted new talent while in New York, shopping with his wife, the famed actress María Félix; players were smuggled across the border in the trunks of cars, and the league sought to make inroads among white stars in the U.S. with varying success.
Kendrick sees Pasquel’s efforts to add American star power to the Mexican League as having increased pressure in the U.S. to integrate professional baseball.
“[The Mexican League was] not only signing Negro Leaguers,” Kendrick said. “You start to see [white] major leaguers coming into Mexico too. It’s very clear that Black and white players can play together … Now all the stars of the Negro Leagues and major leagues head down there. There’s the possibility of so much talent getting lost from major league baseball … There’s a lot of pressure on major league baseball and the commissioner to look at integration of the game.”
A period Mexican souvenir postcard featuring American Negro League star James Bell’s image when he played on Mexican teams during the 1940s. Courtesy of Abrams Press
In 1947, the American major leagues ended their longstanding color ban when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Bell gave Robinson some coaching to help prepare him for the historic opportunity, but Bell himself never played for an integrated team in the United States.
“The process of integration was so slow that age put him out,” Heaphy said. “In 1945, 1946, he’s pretty much at the end of playing in the Negro Leagues. Unfortunately, he’s in his 40s by that point. Sadly, because it took so long, he did not get the chance.”
Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
David Fliss is set to advance to the quarterfinals in the Favorite Chef online competition.
After the coronavirus pandemic began early in 2020 David Fliss, like many expats who live here part-time, found himself staying way longer than planned in Mexico.
As the world rapidly went into lockdown, Fliss’s company, a consulting firm that provides support to the baking industry and depends on traveling the world to meet with clients, was forced to shut down temporarily as well. “All my contracts essentially were lost within months,” he said.
Then Fliss’s father died from Covid-19 in July, and he was unable to go to the United States for the funeral due to the pandemic.
Grieving, missing friends in his other home in Florida and unable even to distract himself with work, the 51-year-old Mexico City resident wondered how he was going to reinvent himself. “2020 was a very difficult, complicated and stressful year,” he said. “There were many times when I thought I was just going to throw in the towel.”
Then earlier this year a friend on Facebook posted that he had entered an online chef contest. The post piqued Fliss’s interest.
Fliss says he has always cooked for his family as a hobby.
An amateur chef himself who has owned a chain of bagel bakeries in Florida and worked for decades with a U.S. company that had accounts with Latin American bakery companies like Grupo Bimbo, Fliss decided to enter the Favorite Chef contest as well, after some urging from his wife, Adriana Orizaga Fliss.
Much to his surprise, he has ended up as a top contender in the online competition. He has been in first place in his group for the last two weeks and is on track to head to the quarterfinals if he maintains his position through Thursday.
“It’s taken on a life of its own,” he said. “I was always the one cooking in my family, but this was always something that was a hobby and a passion for me rather than a career. I thought this would be something to keep myself busy. I didn’t expect to make it out of the first round.”
Fliss does all his cooking in his kitchen at home, he said. Orizaga, a wedding planner whose business was also shut down for months by the pandemic, helps her husband’s cause by providing plates, cutlery and decorative items from her business in order to display Fliss’s culinary creations. She also serves as his official photographer and videographer.
The competition, which includes professional and amateur chefs among its entrants, judges contestants not by assessing their cooking and baking talents directly but through fan voting. To inspire enough interest to keep getting votes, however, it’s a necessity to keep producing daily photos and videos of your culinary output on the Favorite Chef website and on your own social networks.
Fans can vote free once a day; additional “hero” votes cost voters a fee.
One of Fliss’s culinary entries in the Favorite Chef competition.
Also to his surprise, the contest opened Fliss up to the world again: he’s ended up with followers from around the world and has learned to interact with them, asking them what they’d like to see him cook, taking ideas from their answers. Although his favorite cuisines to cook are Italian, Mexican and Mediterranean, “I’ll try anything,” he said.
“My single favorite dish to make is a seafood vongole over fresh clams and fresh homemade linguine.”
He has undoubtedly benefited in the contest from having a wide professional network to spread the word, but many of the people voting for him have never met him, having initially heard about his posts through mutual contacts.
What has kept Fliss cooking and posting, he said, besides the unexpected thrill of doing so well, is the human response to his posts that he’s gotten from people all over the world during a time when he can’t see friends or family.
“There are many professional chefs entered in this. To be honest, I didn’t think I had a chance,” he said. “But this contest, the publicity, it’s been like therapy for me. It’s been amazing.”
Recently, for example, he’s had people voting for him from as far away as India. He’s also gotten emails from people who tell him that he’s becoming a part of their daily lives even though they’ve never met.
“I had one person email me recently saying, ‘You’re the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning, and I go online to see what you’ve cooked that day.’”
The prize for the top spot will be a paid advertising spread in Bon Appétit magazine and US $50,000, but Fliss said he isn’t in it for the money. The contest is donating a portion of its income from hero votes to the U.S. food bank charity Feeding America, a fact that attracted him to enter as well, he said.
If he wins, Fliss said he plans to use the prize money to create an online cooking academy to encourage youth to explore careers in the profession.
“I don’t think that enough young adults are coming through the ranks wanting to be chefs,” he said. “It’s not a sexy industry for them. Everybody wants to be in computers, not in a hot kitchen.”
