A body was found wrapped in a tarp in Tonalá on Thursday.
A human limb led police to more human remains in the Guadalajara metropolitan area this week: nearby were 18 garbage bags containing human remains.
Municipal officers on patrol saw the limb and began a search, finding the bags among the weeds in a ravine in Zapopan. The bodies were taken to state forensic officials for analysis.
It was the fourth find of dumped or buried bodies in the greater Guadalajara area in a month: on January 13, police found 17 bags of human remains on two farms in Tlajomulco and a clandestine grave on a farm in another neighborhood in the same municipality.
The discovery of the remains on Thursday closes out a violent week in the metropolitan area that saw the shooting deaths of 10 people in three separate incidents in San Pedro Tlaquepaque, Zapopan and Guadalajara.
In addition, police on Thursday located a body wrapped in a tarp in the city of Tonalá, also part of the metropolitan area. Social media users speculated that the body was that of the man kidnapped from a Zapopan restaurant on Monday. However, police denied those rumors and said the body had had yet to be identified.
First it was plastic shopping bags. Then straws and cups. Now the latest victims to fall under Mexico City’s drive against single-use plastics are tampons — and the capital’s women.
Since the beginning of the year, the capital has banned the sale of the menstrual products until their plastic applicators are replaced by more environmentally-friendly materials. The city government said the decision was a key part of the green agenda it has pursued since taking office two years ago. But it has nonetheless taken many of its 5 million female residents by surprise as the sanitary products disappeared from shelves this week.
“This is punishing women,” said Chiara Gómez, a student. “I didn’t know they were going to do this — a lot of people depend on them. And it’s a bit strange that they are starting with tampons when there are other things that use a lot of plastic, like unnecessary packaging.”
Mexico City’s ubiquitous juice stands now urge customers to bring their own containers or buy plastic bottles, but many markets in the capital still use plastic bags or serve food with plastic forks and coffee shops still often put plastic lids on takeaway beverages.
Pharmacies and supermarkets this week displayed sanitary towels and menstrual cups, but no tampons. Applicator-less tampons are not generally available or used: they can be purchased online, via sites such as Mercado Libre and Amazon, but prices as high as US $3.40 per tampon put them out of reach of many in a country where women work more but earn less than men and are more often employed in informal jobs.
Lillian Gigue: ‘We all have to do our bit.’
One pharmacist in the capital laid out the official ruling to explain why tampons had vanished from shelves — “We’re not allowed to display tampons” — before quietly offering to sell some under-the-counter “while stocks last.”
Feminist organizations, which are separately pushing to make sanitary protection free of value added tax, say the government should have taken a more gradual approach before imposing the ban.
“Of course we understand the environmental side of this,” said Anahí Rodríguez, spokeswoman for Menstruación Digna (Dignified Menstruation), an NGO. “It’s the government’s responsibility to take steps to protect the environment. But they should have made sure there were tampons available with applicators that used an alternative to plastic, at an accessible price, before they withdrew them.”
Men also criticized the move. “As if women didn’t have enough problems, now the government has given them another: no tampons,” Carlos Elizondo, a political science professor at Tec de Monterrey university, wrote on Twitter. “In other countries, they have zero VAT. Here, they are banned — and in the middle of a pandemic too.”
Lillian Guigue, director-general for impact regulation and environmental regulation at the city’s environment ministry, insisted the ban had been announced long in advance as part of the green policy agenda of Claudia Sheinbaum, the city’s first woman mayor and a climate change scientist.
Guigue said she had been negotiating with producers but Covid-19 was slowing down their ability to reformulate applicators without using plastic. Until then, “we all have to do our bit . . . if we don’t make an effort with the products we consume, we are destroying not only our future but that of all generations after us,” she told the Financial Times.
For many, especially young women, that means reusable menstrual cups. Michelle Schad, a student, said these were safer and she applauded the move to ban plastic tampon applicators “because they contaminate a lot and do a lot of damage.”
But in a country where the coronavirus pandemic has pushed an estimated 10 million more people into poverty, some cannot afford them and, in any case, 260,000 homes in Mexico City lack running water.
Dignified menstruation “becomes a privilege, not a right, with these measures,” said Rodríguez.
Her NGO has been fighting to have Mexico’s 16% sales tax waived from sanitary protection — a move backed by Olga Sánchez Cordero, Mexico’s interior minister. Legislators refused last year, but the Supreme Court this month agreed to review whether the tax was unconstitutional.
In the meantime, Guigue urged women to “rally behind the cause” for the sake of the planet. “It’s not about stopping having the products we need,” she said. “It’s about making better choices.”
Cyber crime specialists developed system to fleece cash from ATMs.
A Romanian criminal group that allegedly runs one of the largest bank card skimming operations in the world collaborated with Mexican hackers, Venezuelan cyber crime experts and a Quintana Roo cartel boss to aid its criminal activities in Mexico.
According to a report by the newspaper Milenio based on Mexican and United States intelligence, a Romanian mafia led by Florian “The Shark” Tudor forged criminal alliances to maintain its operations in Mexico and facilitate its cloning of bank cards, hacking of ATMs and money laundering activities.
In March 2017, the criminal organization stole 150 million pesos (US $7.5 million at today’s exchange rate) in a period of just 24 hours from ATMs in the Riviera Maya of Quintana Roo, Mexico City and México state. More on that later.
Among the Mexican hackers that worked with the Romanian group were members of an organization known as Bandidos Revolution Team, which was dismantled in 2019 when eight people, including the gang’s leader Héctor Ortiz Solares, were arrested in León, Guanajuato.
That hacking group is accused of stealing more than 400 million pesos (US $20 million) from accounts with several financial institutions including Banorte and Inbursa. In addition to arresting the eight bandidos, authorities seized 27 luxury vehicles, motorcycles, more than 20 million pesos in cash, drugs and weapons.
According to a federal security cabinet intelligence report, Tudor also entered into alliances with at least three Venezuelan cyber crime specialists, or hackers. The Venezuelans are accused of developing the method used by the Romanian mafia to fleece cash from ATMs.
An international and Mexican investigation published last June found that the Romanian crime syndicate has been operating in Mexico since 2014, when the gang formed a front company, Top Life Servicios, and persuaded the Mexican bank Multiva to allow them to install their Intacash brand of cash machines.
A separate investigation found that that Bluetooth devices had been placed inside the ATMs to clone the cards and that members of the mafia needed only to walk up to the tampered cash machines with a cell phone to download the stolen data.
That investigation, conducted by United States journalist Bryan Krebs, found compromised bank machines in several Quintana Roo locations including Cancún, Playa del Carmen and Tulum.
Another person who collaborated with the Romanians, according to Mexican and U.S. authorities, was Leticia Rodríguez Lara, a crime boss known as Doña Lety who was arrested in August 2017. Law enforcement sources told Milenio that Doña Lety, who was allegedly the leader of the Pacific Cartel in Cancún, and The Shark had a business relationship and were also personal friends.
Rodríguez, whose criminal group seized control of Cancún and Playa del Carmen from Los Zetas, allowed the Romanians to conduct their illicit activities on the turf where she held sway.
Alleged gang leader Tudor and suspected Quintana Roo cartel boss Doña Lety.
In November 2017, federal authorities seized two safes containing 2,000 fraudulent cards that were allegedly used by the Romanian mafia as well as Rodríguez and her son to illegally withdraw cash from ATMs.
Eight months earlier, in a 24-hour period between March 16 and 17, 2017, the Romanians used cloned cards to steal 150 million pesos from BBVA Bancomer ATMs in Quintana Roo, Mexico City and México state.
Intelligence documents reveal that the criminal group used just 11 cards to complete the audacious heist, which was supported by one of the Venezuelan hackers. Milenio said that the cards were modified in such a way that enabled them to be used for limitless withdrawals. As a result, the Romanian mafia was able to withdraw an average of 6.25 million pesos (US $312,000) an hour or about 104,000 pesos (US $5,200) per minute.
A federal security cabinet document obtained by Milenio indicates that the Romanian mafia also stole similarly large amounts from Citibanamex, Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and TD Bank ATMs. It is unclear where those heists occurred.
Security cabinet documents also allege that a network of politicians from several parties as well as officials at the Quintana Roo Attorney General’s Office have protected and collaborated with the Romanians. An investigation by journalist Héctor de Mauleón found that the Romanians have also been protected by police and judges in Cancún.
One of the alleged co-conspirators is Remberto Estrada, a former mayor of Benito Juárez, the Quintana Roo municipality that includes Cancún.
He told Milenio that he has never had any dealings with members of the Romanian crime organization, which is believed to be responsible for about 10% of all card skimming activity worldwide.
“I don’t know them, I’ve never met any person of that nationality in my entire life,” Estrada said. The ex-mayor, in office between 2016 and 2018, added that he knew nothing of the Romanians’ card cloning activities and ATM thefts until he read about them in the media.
The Romanians engaged in money laundering to “clean” their ill-gotten cash, according to United States and Mexican investigations. The FBI asked the Mexican government’s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) to investigate the group’s money laundering activities and 79 bank accounts were blocked as a result.
Tudor – who has repeatedly denied that he engages in criminal activity, claiming he is only a businessman – and most of his alleged accomplices remain at large. However, about 100 Romanian citizens were detained for four days at Cancún International Airport last week before the majority were allowed to enter the country. Milenio suggested that the Romanians were detained as a result of travel alerts that may have been related to cyber fraud and bank card cloning but Mexican authorities didn’t confirm that information.
According to the UIF, the Romanian criminal syndicate has now expanded to other tourists destinations in Mexico, including the Riviera Nayarit, Los Cabos and Puerto Vallarta.
Residents of two communities in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca detained two employees of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) on Tuesday to protest against the state-owned company’s decision to cut their power.
Accompanied by members of the National Guard, CFE personnel cut electricity supply in Cerro Grande and Reforma Agraria Integral, located in the municipality of San Francisco Ixhuatán, early Monday morning because both communities have unpaid electricity bills.
San Francisco Ixhuatán Mayor Florencio de la Cruz acknowledged that the two communities owe the CFE 210,000 pesos (US $10,500) and 20,000 pesos (US $1,000) respectively, but denounced the manner in which company workers acted.
“They came in like thieves in the night and by cutting off the power they cut the drinking water service as well. There was no prior notification,” he said.
Annoyed at having their power cut, about 50 residents from both communities traveled to CFE offices in the town of Santo Domingo Zanatepec on Tuesday to complain, and detained two employees for eight hours in the process.
Another group of people protested the same day at CFE offices in the Isthmus municipality of Matías Romero. Their protest was against what they described as excessively high electricity rates.
In light of the power cuts, about a dozen social organizations from Isthmus communities in Oaxaca, Veracruz and Chiapas declared they are on alert to prevent further disconnections. Some residents refuse to pay their electricity bills and insist that access to power and water are human rights that must be respected by the government, the newspaper El Universal said.
The social organizations issued a joint statement that called for an end to what they called an attack on their human rights.
“We publicly denounce the campaign of repression that the Federal Electricity Commission, with the participation of the National Guard, has unleashed against hundreds of Isthmus families who are fighting against the abuses and poor service of aforesaid company,” it said.
CFE representatives are due to meet with residents and officials in San Francisco Ixhuatán on Friday and locals, according to the mayor, will ask to be given a “clean slate” with regard to their debt, as has occurred for more than 600,000 customers in Tabasco.
Its founders see Mexico City’s Mujeres Incendiarias not just as a store but also as a place where women can collaborate and learn from each other.
“I believe that the one thing that has helped me during the most painful and difficult moments of my life as a woman has been other women,” says Regina Gómez Iturribarria, founder of Mujeres Incendiarias (Incendiary Women). “So, with this project, what could be better than being surrounded by talented women?”
The Mujeres Incendiarias home base — simultaneously a shop, a collaborative space, and a lecture center — sits on a normally bustling residential street in Mexico City’s Juárez neighborhood. It’s currently shuttered because of the city’s Covid-19 lockdown. On a recent Thursday afternoon, however, Gómez and her partner Irene Pedrós Bretos are organizing inventory and gearing up to open as soon as restrictions are lifted.
Birthed from the pandemic, Mujeres Incendiarias was originally one woman’s anonymous siren song to the world during lockdown. Gómez started sharing personal texts about femininity and womanhood on the Mujeres Incendiarias Instagram page that she started at the beginning of 2020, as well as working with female illustrators to give her writings some visual context.
The project started to expand beyond Gómez’s musings when she hosted her first workshop on feminist theory for some friends interested in the topic. Pedrós participated virtually from across the ocean in Spain and reached out to her friend afterward, insisting that she should start a space for workshops and other women-led events in Mexico City. Gómez had plans to come back to Mexico for work and wanted to be involved.
“If it hadn’t been for the pandemic, it’s totally possible that both of us would be somewhere else,” Gómez says. “Irene might be working in a bank. I would be working on my master’s research. Our lives would be totally different. We had the great privilege to have time to think, to say, ‘OK, it would be really beautiful to give literally all my energy to this project.'”
All items for sale at the store were made by women.
The pandemic did hit hard, but the project’s momentum was already unstoppable. Gómez and Pedrós wanted to create a real physical space where women could gather and then imagined filling it with books by female authors and art by female artists. That list expanded to include the 80-plus women-owned brands displayed in the store now.
The simple wood and iron shelves of Mujeres Incendiarias contain one-of-a-kind illustrations, craft beer, handmade ceramic vaginas, women’s clothing, jewelry, curio boxes, journals and beer steins shaped like the naked top half of a woman. The cozy lecture space at the back of the store is currently home to an art exposition from Casa Equis, an art gallery that went mobile when the pandemic forced them to close their permanent space. This roving art exhibit is all the work of female artists.
“It’s really difficult to maintain a space, pay the rent, deal with all that implies — taxes, a thousand things. They are things that all our lives we were told were not for women, that we shouldn’t try to do as women,” Gómez says. “It’s a challenge, even more so in a pandemic, but it has meant so much to me that there are so many of us involved.”
Mujeres Incendiarias’ workshops and lectures have gone online during lockdown, bringing women together virtually for topics as wide-ranging as traditional herbal medicine, tattooing, an academic analysis of romantic love. Their shop is also online these days, with the women of the various brands represented at the space helping with the heavy lifting of publicizing the website and the project.
“We have done surprisingly well. Our store is open for pickups and by appointment, and the workshops online have drawn tons of participants,” Gómez says.
In a country known for its violence against women, a safe space for women to be together, to share their experiences and learn from one another is fundamental, she says.
Collage art piece on display in the store.
“When you find a safe place, where you can share the things that have happened to you, the things that hurt you, what makes you vulnerable, where you can empty yourself out and tell your story and talk with other women, it’s just really beautiful … to feel accompanied,” she says.
Gómez and Pedrós have also been able to support their sister artists and artisans in another concrete way — by teaching them the ins and outs of business through their own trial and error.
“As women —the idea of starting a something, a business — they never teach us that we can do that too. It’s been a huge challenge for Irene and me: we had to register with the SAT [Mexico’s income tax agency] and provide receipts. Honestly, one day we just cried because it was like ‘I have no idea,’ and no one had ever actually explained this to us. I was frustrated and afraid to pay taxes, thinking that they were going to take all my money,” Gómez says.
But now the two laugh at how a Spanish immigrant is teaching Mexicans how the tax system works in Mexico, and in their attempts to support the development of other women in business they’re also encouraging the women they work with to price their products appropriately and fight for their brands.
“I tell them, ‘It’s your work, it’s your idea, it’s the time it took you to do it! Don’t put it at 50 pesos!’” Gómez says.
In a year when so many of us have felt cut off from each other, a beautiful community has blossomed among the women of the Mujeres Incendiarias that was unexpected even by its founders. As the world gets back to some semblance of normal, Regina, Irene and the women they work with all have high hopes of how this project will evolve post-pandemic.
Lydia Carey is a regular contributor to Mexico News Daily.
Business magnate Elon Musk’s venture to provide the world with satellite internet service is expanding into Mexico.
Starlink, operated by Musk’s SpaceX, says it is planning to offer high-speed broadband in parts of the country by the middle of 2021.
The company has ambitious plans to continue expanding to “near-global coverage of the populated world in 2021.” Service is currently available in parts of the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
When complete, Starlink’s network will be connected by 42,000 SpaceX satellites in low-Earth orbit, although as of late January it had just surpassed the 1,000-satellite mark. SpaceX continues to launch more satellites regularly. The next 120 Starlink satellites will leave Cape Canaveral, Florida, on February 13 and 16.
Getting service in Mexico depends on where you live. The company is currently taking orders on a first-come, first-serve basis with payment of a US $99 refundable deposit. Service will also require the purchase of a Starlink hardware kit, which will cost $499 plus shipping. The service will cost $99 monthly.
The company is promising a 50–150 Mbps data transfer rate with a latency of 20–40 milliseconds. The website warns that initially there will be brief periods of no connectivity at all. However, it said latency and uptime will improve as the company continues to launch more satellites, install ground stations and improve software.
The meat of Starlink’s big promises comes from the fact that its satellites are 60 times closer to Earth than ones used by competitors. Due to the satellites’ greater proximity to Earth, latency — the time it takes a signal to travel from your device to the server, or vice versa — will be much lower (i.e. a shorter amount of time). SpaceX promises it will provide speeds able to accommodate bandwidth-heavy computing activities such as gaming and video conferencing.
Besides Musk’s personal wealth, SpaceX will be able to draw upon funding from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to expand Starlink’s network in the United States, which could help the company have more funds available for infrastructure in places like Mexico.
On December 7, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission granted SpaceX $885.51 million in broadband subsidies over 10 years via the $9.2-billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund in exchange for providing broadband service to over 640,000 rural homes and businesses in 35 states. However, the award process has come under fire from competitors, as well as from FCC acting chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.
In a post on his personal Twitter account this week, Musk said that SpaceX needs to pass through a deep chasm of negative cash flow over the next year or so to make Starlink financially viable.
“Every new satellite constellation in history has gone bankrupt,” he said. “We hope to be the first that does not.”
Six journalists have spoken out against the federal government’s plan to dismantle the national transparency watchdog, warning it would make accessing public information more difficult and pose a threat to their profession.
President López Obrador said in January that his government intends to incorporate autonomous organizations such as the National Institute for Transparency and Access to Information (INAI) into federal ministries and departments.
The plan was widely denounced as an attempt by López Obrador to concentrate power further in the executive but the president countered that INAI is not needed because the federal government maintains “permanent communication” with citizens and guarantees the right to information.
Six investigative journalists who spoke with the newspaper El Economista take a very different view.
Nayeli Roldán, one of three journalists who wrote an exposé detailing a government embezzlement scheme that operated during the 2012-2018 administration led by former president Enrique Peña Nieto, said that a “complete institutional framework to guarantee access to information as a right” was built over the preceding decades but is now at risk.
After explaining that the so-called “Master Fraud” exposé – which led to an investigation that resulted in the arrest of former cabinet minister Rosario Robles – depended heavily on responses to freedom of information requests, Roldán said that instead of disbanding it, the government should give INAI “more teeth” and “more powers.”
The transparency watchdog needs to be strengthened, not eliminated, she said.
“It’s a tool that works, if not to eliminate corruption, to discover it and … demand accountability of politicians, which benefits society.”
Zorayda Gallegos, a former winner of the National Journalism Prize, said getting rid of INAI would be a “silly thing to do” and a backward step for journalism and society in general. “Hopefully the president will reconsider his proposal,” she said.
Daniel Lizárraga, a veteran journalist who lobbied for the creation of INAI, said López Obrador’s plan to dismantle it “lacks vision” and demonstrates that he doesn’t understand what accountability means.
The journalist, co-author of a book on the so-called white house scandal in which Peña Nieto’s former wife purchased a mansion built by a favored government contractor, said that if INAI is eliminated few people will have the means to file a legal challenge to fight for access to information the government doesn’t want to release.
Nayeli Roldán co-authored an expose of an embezzlement scheme using information obtained through the transparency watchdog.
“How many normal people can pay for an injunction? It costs a lot of money,” Lizárraga said.
Raúl Olmos, author of a book about Brazilian company Odebrecht’s history of corruption in Mexico, said the disappearance of INAI will hamper access to government information and could leave people with no other option than to take legal action in an attempt to obtain the information they want.
“That worries me because I have personally resorted to litigation … when I’ve been denied information and it’s been a torturous process that has taken months and months,” he said.
Under López Obrador’s plan, the government itself – not an autonomous body – would decide whether information should be made public, Olmosa said, claiming that would create a “tricky” situation.
Rivelino Rueda, who won an INAI journalism award last December, said elimination of the transparency watchdog would “completely close the right to access information” as protected by the constitution, adding that both journalists and citizens in general would be adversely affected.
Like Roldán, Rueda said that INAI should be given “more teeth,” asserting that it should have the power to sanction government officials who refuse to hand over information. Government departments will continue hiding information if that doesn’t occur, he said.
Blanche Petrich, a veteran journalist with ample experience reporting from abroad, said that if INAI is absorbed into the Ministry of Public Administration (SFP), as López Obrador said could happen, information will become very difficult to access.
The SFP, which is leading the federal government’s fight against corruption, won’t have much interest in listening to members of civil society and the press, she opined.
Petrich said that secrecy often characterizes government departments, adding “in a democracy it’s very important that the press and society have the resources to break down those barriers of secrecy.”
The slow rollout of Covid-19 vaccines in Mexico and international travel restrictions announced by the United States, Canada and other countries will hinder the tourism recovery, according to three experts, two of whom said that the sector could have a worse year in 2021 than in 2020.
The number of international tourists who came to Mexico last year slumped 46% to 24.3 million as the pandemic and associated restrictions ravaged the global tourism industry. Tourism revenue crashed even harder, plummeting 55% compared to 2019 to just over US $11 billion.
Still, Mexico fared better than many other countries where tourism makes an important contribution to the overall economy, largely because it didn’t close its borders or place any onerous restrictions on incoming travelers. The Ministry of Tourism (Sectur) expects that data will show that Mexico ranked third for international visitors in 2020 behind only France and Italy.
But a rise in the global tourism rankings is cold comfort for the millions of Mexicans who rely directly or indirectly on the arrival of tourists in the various destinations around the country. Many tourism workers suddenly found themselves unemployed when coronavirus restrictions were first imposed in Mexico last March while others kept their jobs but saw their wages or income slashed.
Almost a year later, a full recovery of the tourism sector, which before the pandemic contributed to almost 10% of GDP, still appears a long way off.
Pablo Álvarez Icaza, a professor at the National Polytechnic Institute’s School of Tourism, told the newspaper El Universal that the international travel rules recently announced by countries including the United States and Canada, – Mexico’s top two sources for international visitors – will ensure that 2021 is a complicated year for tourism.
He added that a recovery will depend on a widespread application of vaccines among the Mexican population but noted they are being distributed slowly.
Indeed, Mexico’s vaccination program has not yet progressed to stage 2 – the inoculation of seniors – although it is expected to reach that phase next week.
The slow rollout to date is “closing the doors to the rest of the world,” said Álvarez, a former Sectur official.
Armando Bojórquez, president of the Latin America Culture and Tourism Association, acknowledged that Mexico’s tourism industry benefited from the government’s decision to keep the borders open to international tourists but noted that there were also health consequences because coronavirus cases were imported and helped fuel the pandemic.
He told El Universal that the application of vaccines will help the tourism sector recovery but won’t function as a “magic wand” and suddenly make everything better.
el universal
This year “may be the same as or worse than 2020, with the vaccines and everything,” Bojórquez said.
He asserted that countries that manage to vaccinate the majority of their population quickly will be in a better position to attract tourists than nations where the rollout is slower, such as Mexico. Bojórquez said that government support for the Mexican tourism sector is needed, pointing out that average hotel occupancy was below 30% in January and that many hotels were forced to slash prices to attract guests.
According to Humberto Molina, an economist at the consultancy firm Gemes who specializes in tourism, new international travel rules, including requirements to present negative Covid-19 tests before flying and go into mandatory quarantine, will undermine the advantage the Mexican tourism sector enjoyed last year as a result of the country’s open borders.
“Tourism will not recover automatically this year – 2021 could be worse than 2020 if there is not progress in controlling the pandemic across the whole world,” Molina said.
Echoing Bojórquez’s remarks, he said that if Mexico doesn’t roll out vaccines quickly and bring the pandemic under control, the country won’t be seen as an attractive tourism destination. However, Molina noted that 70% of the United States population is expected to be vaccinated by September and 90% by the end of the year, asserting that Americans will be more confident about traveling abroad as a result and Mexico could benefit.
“There is a repressed demand [for travel] that can be exploited,“ he said.
The Ministry of Tourism is also somewhat pessimistic about the outlook for tourism in 2021. It said last month that international tourist numbers will increase 33.7% in 2021 compared to last year in a best-case scenario. However, even if that prediction – made before Canada announced the flight suspension – comes true, a total of 33.1 million visitors will represent a decline of 26% compared to the record 45 million who flocked to Mexico in 2019.
In a worst-case scenario, only 25.2 million international tourists will come to Mexico this year, Sectur said.
That would represent only a minimal increase in arrivals compared to 2020 that would be better described as a continuation of the suffering the tourism sector endured last year rather than the real recovery it desperately craves.
The latest crime scene in Guadalajara, where five people were killed.
A multiple homicide on Wednesday afternoon that left five people dead and one person hospitalized brings to 10 the number of people have been killed in Guadalajara’s metropolitan area in only a week.
The three different incidents also left six people injured while another person was kidnapped during one of them.
The latest killing occurred at a makeshift building in San Pedro Tlaquepaque, a municipality that is part of the metropolitan area, where armed civilians entered and opened fire on six people, authorities said.
When police arrived, they found four bodies and two people still alive but with serious injuries, said Tlaquepaque police supervisor Israel García.
The injured man and woman who survived were taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, but the man died before arriving, García said.
The building where the shooting took place had a history of criminal activity, he said, as the site of an auto-theft-for-parts operation and a place where people would gather to consume drugs and alcohol.
It was just the latest violent incident in the area: on Monday, a restaurant in an exclusive Zapopan neighborhood was the site of an armed confrontation between civilians that left one person dead, at least three injured, and one person kidnapped, authorities said.
The incident was captured on video by numerous bystanders in nearby buildings.
On February 4, the National Guard pursued an armed group in a truck in Guadalajara, ending in a confrontation that left four suspects dead and two Guardsmen injured.
Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro said in January that the violence in the area is due to organized crime groups seeking to sow fear.
“This city is so much more than those who want it to sink into fear and unease,” he said, adding that state security officials were working with local police and Zapopan Mayor Pablo Lemus to investigate the incidents.
In January, Alfaro pointed to a report by state officials that said homicides have come down 16% in the metropolitan area over the last two years.
But it doesn’t always feel that way. Tlaquepaque, the location of Wednesday’s killings and a magical town long known for its artisan pottery, has seen frequent violence since homicides shot up between 2017 and 2018 from 167 to 375 according to Jalisco’s Forensic Sciences Institute.
Eleven violent deaths have been reported so far this year.
The dance that was held during the King's Day fiesta in the Oaxaca municipality of Santiago Choápam.
A town in the Papaloapan region of Oaxaca has found out the hard way what can happen when restrictions are eased too soon amid a deadly pandemic: more than 400 people became infected with Covid-19 and at least 14 died after a large fiesta was held to celebrate Three Kings Day.
San Juan del Río, a town in the municipality of Santiago Choápam, went ahead with its annual fiesta in honor of the baby Jesus and the three wise men on January 5 even though Oaxaca was high risk orange on the coronavirus stoplight map and a statewide ban on large events and gatherings was in place.
About 200 people attended the event, according to local media, and the majority didn’t wear face masks or respect social distancing recommendations. Livened up by a band called Costa Brava de Veracruz, the fiesta ran late into the night as townsfolk let their hair down, danced in close proximity to each other and generally behaved as if they were living in a pre-pandemic world.
Not long after, some of those who attended the event began developing symptoms of Covid-19 and over the following days and weeks, the coronavirus spread virtually unchecked through San Juan, eventually infecting about one-third of the town’s 1,200 residents.
The situation had become so serious by January 28 that Santiago Choápam Mayor Evergisto Gamboa wrote to President López Obrador, Oaxaca Governor Alejandro Murat and federal and state health officials to ask for help and an “immediate intervention” to stop the spread of the virus.
San Juan del Río is a ghost town as residents isolate to avoid further contagion.
The mayor asked for Covid-19 vaccines, oxygen tanks, face masks and other personal protective equipment, disinfectants and provisions to be sent to San Juan. He called for medical personnel to be dispatched because various local health workers were among the sick.
Gamboa also issued a threat, saying that if there wasn’t an immediate response to his requests, all of the town residents sick with Covid would be transported to the center of Oaxaca city to die in “abandonment.”
Shortly after, the Oaxaca Health Ministry sent three brigades of health workers to the town as well as some of the items the mayor had requested. Health authorities in the municipality of Tuxtepec also sent supplies, including face masks, medical gowns and two gallons of hand sanitizer.
Now, almost two weeks after the mayor issued his plea for help, San Juan has the appearance of a virtual ghost town as the vast majority of residents remain in isolation at home, either still recovering from their illness or making sure they stay virus-free.
In addition to the 14 people, mainly seniors, who lost their lives to Covid-19, there are 14 coronavirus patients currently hospitalized, the newspaper El Universal reported.
“In a moment of carelessness, tragedy came” to San Juan, a local farmer identified only as Jaime told El Universal. “Now who knows how things will end up. … [The spread of the virus] was ferocious, it stopped for a while but then started up again.”
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Jaime said that people’s lives, and the life of San Juan, have come to a virtual standstill, explaining that only a few campesinos are currently leaving their homes to work in the fields.
“Now you don’t see any people in the town – it’s closed, the stores are closed. They don’t want anyone to walk around without a face mask because that complicates things,” he said.
Jaime said he lost family members to the recent outbreak of the coronavirus, including his aunt just a week ago. Most of the 14 people who died from Covid-19 in San Juan were elderly, he said.
They didn’t attend the January 5 fiesta but nevertheless became victims of it because their family members inadvertently exposed them to the virus.
Jaime acknowledged that the state government sent medicines and other supplies to the town but they were insufficient for the number of people who fell ill.
“There are people who are still sick,” he added. “Hopefully they save them because when one person dies someone else does too.”
