No alcohol may be sold when the ley seca, or dry law, is in effect.
Many states will be alcohol-free on both Saturday and Sunday, a longstanding practice used to maintain order during elections.
With election day coming up on Sunday, here’s a rundown of where alcohol sales will be banned and when, according to various sources gathered by Mexico News Daily.
Campeche, Chiapas, Coahuila, Durango, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Morelos, Nuevo León, Mexico City, México state, Oaxaca, Puebla, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas, Veracruz and Zacatecas: the sale of alcohol will be banned both Saturday and Sunday. (In Mexico City and México state, restaurants will still be permitted to serve alcohol as long as it is accompanied by food).
Aguascalientes: sales will be banned on Sunday.
Baja California: municipalities will decide whether to enact alcohol bans.
Baja California Sur: municipalities will decide whether to enact alcohol bans.
Chihuahua: no alcohol sales all day Sunday and up to 9 a.m. on Monday.
Colima: a ban will begin Friday at 12 a.m. and end Sunday at 12 p.m. in the municipalities of Colima and Villa de Álvarez.
Guanajuato: a state-imposed alcohol ban will begin at 10 p.m. Saturday and extend all day Sunday.
Jalisco: each municipality will decide whether alcohol sales will be permitted.
Michoacán: as of Friday afternoon three municipalities had confirmed bans on sales. They are Morelia, Zitácuaro and Maravatío.
Nayarit: state law mandates that no alcohol is sold the day before or the day of the elections.
Querétaro: the state has not enacted a ban but municipalities have the authority to do so.
Quintana Roo: state law decrees that alcohol sales will be banned the day of the election and 24 hours leading up to it, with an exception for tourist areas.
Sinaloa: the alcohol restrictions will start at 2 a.m. Sunday and continue until 9 a.m. Monday. Restaurants are exempt from the ban, and may serve alcohol with food.
Sonora: the sale of alcohol will be prohibited all day Sunday. Restaurants will be exempt, and may serve alcohol if it is accompanied by food.
Tabasco: the state has banned the sale of alcohol starting Friday and ending midnight Sunday.
Tlaxcala: alcohol sales will be prohibited between 9 a.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. Monday.
Yucatán: state law mandates that no alcohol is sold the day before or the day of the elections.
The donated Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines will be used in northern states to accelerate the reopening of the border.
One million single-shot Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines donated to Mexico by the United States will be used to inoculate people aged 18 to 40 in northern border municipalities, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Friday.
President López Obrador said Thursday that Vice President Kamala Harris had informed him that the U.S. would send the doses to Mexico but didn’t say when they were expected to arrive.
Speaking at López Obrador’s news conference on Friday, Ebrard said that “on the instructions of the president” the Johnson & Johnson doses will be used to vaccinate those between 18 and 40 in Mexico’s border area with the United States.
“This area comprises 39 municipalities,” he added.
The foreign minister said the 1 million doses will be sufficient to inoculate one-third of the people in that age bracket, adding that the government will obtain additional doses in order to cover 100% of the cohort.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard appeared to rule out the use of the donated vaccines in tourist destinations like Canún and Los Cabos.
Ebrard said the aim of vaccinating that sector of the population is to “accelerate the reopening of activities at the border between Mexico and the United States.”
Goods and people have continued to flow across the border during the pandemic, but the United States has restricted nonessential cross-border travel since early last year as part of efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus, a policy that has caused economic damage to U.S. businesses that count large numbers of Mexican daytrippers among their customers.
Mexico did the same until April, when it began allowing nonessential travel into the country via border states that are low-risk green or medium-risk yellow on the federal government’s stoplight map.
Ebrard’s remarks on where the Johnson & Johnson vaccines will be deployed came after Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Thursday night that the donated doses could also be used in resort cities such as Cancún and Los Cabos.
Ebrard said Friday that universal vaccination in tourist destinations remained a priority but appeared to rule out the possibility of using the donated shots in such places.
He said López Obrador had instructed him to obtain vaccines to guarantee supply in tourist destinations but emphasized that they don’t have to be Johnson & Johnson shots.
“For key tourism areas of Mexico, essentially Quintana Roo, Baja California Sur, they can be other vaccines,” Ebrard said, adding that other popular destinations such as Jalisco, where Puerto Vallarta is located, and the coast of Nayarit will also be considered for early vaccination of people aged 40 and under.
Quintana Roo, and especially Cancún, is currently facing a worsening coronavirus outbreak, which prompted the governor to tighten restrictions in the state this week, while other states that depend heavily on tourism revenue, such as Yucatán and Baja California Sur, have also seen recent spikes in case numbers.
The government to date has used the Pfizer, AstraZeneca, CanSino, Sputnik V and SinoVac vaccines to inoculate the population, meaning that the Johnson & Johnson shot will be the sixth to be used in Mexico.
As of Thursday night, Mexico had received 42.3 million doses of the first five vaccines and administered almost 32.9 million of them. Almost one in five people – 18% – have received at least one shot, data shows, although that doesn’t include Mexicans who have traveled to the United States to get vaccinated.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated case tally stands at 2.42 million while the official Covid-19 death toll is 228,362, a figure considered a vast undercount, mainly due to a lack of testing.
María Amparo of Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity was happy to hear the US will continue international funding to fight corruption.
An anti-graft group that has been labeled a political adversary by President López Obrador has welcomed the United States’ announcement that it intends to increase support to international partners committed to the elimination of corruption.
The White House published a memorandum on Thursday that established the fight against corruption as a core national security interest of the United States.
“The Biden-Harris administration is committed to tackling corruption as an economic and national security priority and has pledged to lead international efforts to bring transparency to the global financial system and close loopholes that undermine democracy,” the White House said.
It said the U.S. government is “committed to taking new steps to hold accountable corrupt individuals, transnational criminal organizations, and other actors engaged in illicit activity.”
That commitment includes “increasing support to grow the capacity of civil society, the media, state and local bodies, international partners, and other oversight and accountability actors,” the White House said.
Amparo suggested that the president was happy to accept 1 million free Covid vaccine doses from the US but not so much about funding for groups that are ‘keeping an eye’ on where public money is spent.
The publication of the memorandum came almost a month after the Mexican government sent a diplomatic note to the United States to ask it to explain why it has provided funding to Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI), a civil society organization that has been critical of President López Obrador and exposed corruption in his government as well as that led by his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto.
López Obrador has characterized funding organizations such as MCCI and the press freedom group Article 19 as “interference and intervention” in internal affairs that are the exclusive domain of Mexicans. He has repeatedly asserted that the practice violates Mexico’s constitution and called on the United States to stop providing resources to what he says are political groups opposed to his administration.
Thursday’s memorandum didn’t mention Mexico, but MCCI president María Amparo Casar agreed in a radio interview that it could be considered “an indirect response” to the federal government.
She told W Radio that the memorandum gave her “a lot of hope” that the United States would continue funding the MCCI and other organizations committed to exposing corruption and promoting government transparency.
“I’m happy and I hope — and I have no reason to doubt it — that this translates into more support in the future,” Amparo said.
She added, perhaps somewhat tongue in cheek, that López Obrador should also be happy about the United States government’s announcement of its firm commitment to combatting corruption because he too — as he frequently reminds Mexicans — is fully committed to eradicating it.
“This announcement should come like a ring to the finger [fit like a glove] for Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to use one of his expressions,” Amparo said.
The president should be “very grateful,” she said, to which journalist Carlos Loret de Mola responded, “I feel not,” prompting laughter from the MCCI chief.
“… He likes being given 1 million vaccines [from the U.S. government], as was announced [Thursday], but he doesn’t like [the United States] funding those of us who keep an eye on where public resources are going,” Amparo said.
She said she was proud that MCCI, which has received funding from the United States Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy, has been recognized by the U.S. as being among the civil society organizations committed to the fight against corruption in Mexico.
In addition to corruption, “the deteriorations that Mexico is suffering in matters of democracy” are a topic of public discussion in the United States, Amparo said a week after the newspaper The Economistasserted in an editorial that López Obrador is “a danger to Mexican democracy.”
‘… it’s not a memorandum about Mexico,’ Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said at the president’s news conference on Friday.
Asked at López Obrador’s Friday news conference about the U.S. statement, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard — who gave instructions for last month’s diplomatic note to be drawn up — responded, “First of all, it’s not a memorandum about Mexico, it’s a memorandum about their entire [anti-corruption] policy.”
“What Mexico is proposing is that the internal political environment [of a sovereign country] must be respected; that’s also in the laws of the United States. Mexico couldn’t pay organizations to politically influence [the affairs of another country].
“What is being proposed is that the same standard — that organizations can’t intervene in or influence the political process — [be applied in Mexico] … This case that we’ve presented about MCCI, which seeks to influence Mexican politics, is one issue, and that of the United States memorandum is different.”
Most attacks against politicians and candidates during the period leading up to this Sunday’s elections were not related to the electoral process, Interior Minister Olga Sánchez Cordero said Thursday.
This electoral season, which officially began last September, has been the most violent on record with 782 acts of aggression against politicians and candidates, including 89 murders, according to the risk analysis firm Etellekt, which tracks election campaign violence.
But Sánchez claimed that few of the acts of aggression — among which were threats, homicides, attempted murders, assaults and kidnappings — were related to the June 6 municipal, state and federal elections.
“They’re reprehensible incidents, their perpetrators must be punished with all the rigor of the law, but as far as we know they don’t have an electoral motive,” she said during a virtual meeting with state election officials.
“The incidents that have occurred, affecting candidates of all parties, are not related to the electoral process in the vast majority of cases,” Sánchez clarified.
The interior minister said she was aware of three main motives for the attacks against political figures.
“… The ministry I’m in charge of can identify [three] clearly differentiated motives. Firstly, conflicts that are the product of old social demands, mainly in rural areas and indigenous communities, in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Nayarit and Michoacán, for example,” Sánchez said. She did not give examples of what she meant by social demands but was likely referring to localized demands for infrastructure and services or those related to land disputes.
“Secondly, there are union, farmer, popular and student organizations that use the electoral circumstances to exert pressure, sometimes violently, for the satisfaction of their demands; it has nothing to do with the elections,” she said.
“… And thirdly, criminal actions, which especially affect the municipal realm. That’s why I’ve said that the weak link in the chain of governability is in some municipalities,” she said.
Three-quarters of the candidates attacked during the electoral season were seeking municipal positions such as mayor or councilor, according to Etellekt. In addition, three-quarters of the total number of politicians or aspirants who were victims of aggression were opponents of the party in power in the state where the act of aggression against them occurred.
Sánchez asserted that citizens will be able to vote in peace at this Sunday’s elections, which will be the largest in Mexico’s history.
“The problems we face are … isolated. They affect very few municipalities and very few polling booths. In no case do these acts [of aggression] or incidents place the validity of a district or state election at risk,” she said.
“The cases in which a municipal election could be affected are limited. To count them, I believe that the fingers on one’s hands are more than enough. Of course, all aggression against candidates, no matter which party [they belong to], is a violation of democratic governability,” Sánchez said.
More than 22,000 elected positions will be up for grabs on Sunday, most of which are municipal and state positions. At the federal level, voters will elect 500 lower house deputies, while the governorships of 15 states, including Nuevo León, Baja California, Michoacán and Guerrero, will also be decided.
The president's Morena party is expected to cement its place as Mexico’s most popular political force.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s name will not be on the ballot when voters pick state governors, deputies to the lower house, mayors and thousands of other local positions on Sunday in what both he and his critics agree will be a watershed vote.
Even so, the populist president, elected in a landslide in 2018 on the back of widespread disgust at endemic corruption, still has plenty riding on the election, with it being widely seen as an unofficial referendum on his leadership.
For López Obrador, the midterms are a chance to prove “that things are changing, that there’s a transformation [under way],” as the 67-year-old nationalist said this week. For critics, the changes so far have not been for the better — and could become worse.
“This is not a routine election,” said Alfonso Zárate, a consultant and former presidential spin-doctor who recently published a book about López Obrador entitled The One Man Country. “We’re facing the possibility of hurtling toward disaster.”
Over the past three years, López Obrador has presided over murder rates that remain near record highs, no obvious reduction in corruption, one of the world’s biggest Covid-19 death tolls, and economic growth still well below pre-pandemic levels.
Even so, largely thanks to a fragmented opposition and high personal popularity ratings that stand at about 59%, polls indicate he will emerge, if not strengthened, then emboldened from the election — a rare feat in midterms, when incumbents usually suffer losses.
His Morena party is expected to cement its place as Mexico’s most popular political force. Alongside its allies, Morena is forecast to hold 322 seats in the 500-seat chamber of deputies, just shy of its current 334 seats, which it needs for a supermajority to pass constitutional changes.
The vote is for all 500 lower house deputies, 15 state governorships, almost 2,000 mayors and thousands of other local positions.
As for Mexico’s powerful state governorships, Morena currently has six and could win seven or more, pollsters say, potentially commanding almost half of Mexico’s 32 states. No seats in the Senate, where the ruling coalition lacks a constitutional majority, are in play.
For critics, the prospect of these results makes the poll a pivotal moment. López Obrador has always said he would use the first half of his six-year term to lay the foundations for a national transformation as epoch-making as independence from Spain, 19th-century reforms or the Mexican Revolution — and then get down to reforms in earnest in his last three years.
“Security is the worst we’ve seen, there’s the pandemic, economic decline and a rise in poverty … and yet we’re going to get the same vote totals as [the election] three years ago,” said Federico Estévez, a political science professor at Mexico’s ITAM university.
One concern among investors is that the president will meddle with the Bank of México.
One reason for what otherwise might seem a counter-intuitive result is Mexico’s Covid-19 vaccination drive, in which one in four adults have had at least one shot. As a result, the government is not expected to lose much electoral support, despite the high levels of insecurity that have led to the murder of 35 candidates during the campaign.
“It’s a bit like the Trump election,” said Joy Langston, a professor of political science at CIDE university. “No matter how bad the president is, you still have people who love him literally no matter what.”
Three scenarios worry investors if López Obrador and his party do as well as expected.
The first is if he meddles with Mexico’s respected central bank, which the president has said should be run by a “moral” economist. The second is changing the Supreme Court, where López Obrador has already backed a controversial two-year extension to its chief judge’s term — a move that critics warn could set a precedent for him to try to prolong his own presidential mandate.
And the third is if he finally kills off Mexico’s energy reform, passed by the previous government and which allowed private ownership in the sector, via a public consultation process. López Obrador has already scrapped Mexico City’s partially built airport after such a “people’s poll.”
Some of those fears may be overdone. Brokerage Grupo Bursátil Mexicano believes López Obrador had already rattled through almost three-quarters of the reforms he floated in his book-cum-manifesto The Way Out, published before the 2018 election.
“Most of the aggressive actions that were meant to go against the status quo and the market sentiment have already happened,” it wrote.
In fact, given the close governorship races in many states and the president’s constant attacks on his political opponents, for many the bigger immediate fear is that López Obrador challenges unfavourable results or even tries to scrap the electoral authority, INE, which he has said he does not trust.
That is why businessman Javier Olavarrieta hopes for just one thing at Sunday’s election: unequivocal results. “Let’s hope there’s a big difference between the winners and losers,” he said.
Flights to the Riviera Nayarit are picking up, with an average of 363 flights per week to Puerto Vallarta, thanks to the opening up of travel in Canada and an increase in flights from the United States. A total of 1,452 flights are projected for this month.
Starting June 5, WestJet will start flying again with a weekly route between Calgary and Puerto Vallarta. American Airlines will restart its flights from Charlotte and Chicago and double its flights from Dallas. Flights from Phoenix and Los Angeles will continue, making for a total of 28 flights a week.
Delta Airlines and Southwest will continue with 28 flights per week, while Alaska Airlines has 22, six fewer than last month. United Airlines continues to have the most connections to the Riviera Nayarit region, with 67 flights from Houston, Chicago, Newark, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Canadian airline Air Transat will reinitiate its Riviera Nayarit flights in mid-June.
Domestic airline TAR Aerolíneas will offer 25 flights to the region, seven more than were available in May, while Aeroméxico and Aerolitoral will offer 54 flights in total.
During the first four months of 2021, Mexico has seen the lowest the levels of tourism since the same period in 2008. Of those tourists, 75% were from the United States. The second largest group of tourists this year hailed from Colombia, making up 3% of the total.
Mayoral candidate Briones after Wednesday's attack.
Authorities have arrested 15 people in connection with Wednesday’s attack on mayoral candidate Erika Briones in Villa de Reyes, San Luis Potosí.
The investigation has been turned over to the federal Attorney General’s Office, said Government Secretary Jorge Daniel Hernández. The state has also established a new strategy to strengthen security in the municipality, he said.
Briones, a candidate for the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), released a tearful video after gunmen attacked her and her family on Wednesday. She accused the National Guard of doing nothing to stop the attack and hinted that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was responsible.
“These are dirty games … the PRI has to recognize that they lost Villa de Reyes, that the people don’t want them. They hate them,” Briones said.
Hernández, however, said there was no indication that party leaders played a role in the attack. The real problem, he said, was that supporters on both sides were committing reprehensible acts like the attack against Briones.
He added that due to the level of animosity in this year’s race, the state will continue to monitor the situation.
In a viral video from 2019, a Mexico City cop doing a routine stop was recorded telling a driver, "I'll nail you" if the motorist didn't pay him an on-the-spot 500-peso bribe.
On a Sunday the day before Mother’s Day in Mexico, my Mexican wife and I were pulled over by the Mexican transit police. If you are unfamiliar with Mexico, these guys are somewhere between meter maids and real cops. Their sole purpose is to hand out traffic citations — technically speaking.
If you’ve driven in Mexico, you know the only thing they do is ask citizens for bribes.
We live in a small town in the state of Morelos. My wife is from Mexico City, and her parents still live there.
A Sunday visit with the kids — four dogs and a cat — was our plan for the day. We made the 1 1/2-hour drive only to have the police stop beside us at a light a few minutes away from our final destination. The officer told me that I didn’t have a front license plate.
I didn’t panic and simply told him my truck was registered in Florida. The license plate obviously says that, so I explained further to him that in Florida, they only give us one license plate that we put it on the back of the car.
Transit police in Mexican cities deal exclusively with traffic-related infractions.
I’m not sure if it was my rough Spanish or that I was talking through a mask, but he just repeated that I needed a front license plate.
My wife then explained things a bit more clearly. I believe he must have been caught off guard by the fact she was Mexican because he didn’t really respond.
So when the light turned green, we carried on.
We drove through the light and were ready to get out of the truck after our long drive. We had to pee. We were hungry. And the dogs were ready for a walk. We had made it to the street where my wife’s parents live when the same two officers come and park on both sides of us to block us in.
It was a bit shocking and extreme to be blocked in by the police as if we were criminals, but we stayed calm. They asked for my papers. I gave them everything: Mexican car insurance, importation papers, driver’s license, car title and Florida registration.
They looked at them and talked among themselves for a bit. Then they looked at us again.
“You don’t have a front license plate.”
It felt like a bad joke.
Their joke wasn’t as dry as their humor, however, as they no longer were police officers informing a foreigner of local laws; they were getting ugly and threatening.
Being from somewhere where traffic violations usually result in a warning or, at worst, a ticket to pay online later, I didn’t understand this sudden ugliness, especially when you consider how people in Mexico drive:
Red lights mean five more cars may pass. Headlights at night? Maybe just one parking light works for half the cars. Stopping in the middle of the street to buy tacos while everybody behind is blocked? That’s done by the police themselves.
Just a general attitude of selfishness and entitlement like “I always have the right of way” is carried by almost everyone.
The writer’s plan was for a road trip from Morelos to Mexico City for a peaceful Mother’s Day lunch with his wife and her family.
Of all the legitimate traffic dangers going on in this city, were they threatening me over an alleged missing license plate? I could see if I had no license plate. But just a copy of the plate for the front warranted such hostile nastiness?
But we knew what they wanted; they wanted to extort us. We didn’t actually have any cash, but I probably would have just given it to them.
My wife is normally a bit nervous and anxious in these sorts of situations, more for my sake than hers, to keep me out of Mexican prison. She always just says, “Be nice, and let’s drive away from this.”
Not this time. I think she was already a bit hangry.
Whatever the case, she was ready to stand her ground; I was too. Bad guys are part of the world. I get that. But this was a level of disrespect I couldn’t comprehend.
Disrespect is never correct, and for such a minor infraction, it was far from necessary. These dirty cops didn’t deserve supper on innocent civilians. Not from us. Not tonight.
Perhaps it was our resistance to simply bowing down to their threats and attempts at callous intimidation, but they went further.
“We’re calling a truck to impound your car,” one told me.
Now, I do realize this is legal in Mexico. A parking violation can result in being impounded. I’m not talking about thousands of dollars of unpaid parking fines either. Just one. First-time offender and boom — incarceration for your vehicle.
In my mind, all I heard was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life: You only have one license plate, so we are going to take your whole damn car.
I was stunned. You’re going to take my car as if I’m a danger to society?
Almost on cue, our dogs started barking. I won’t lie, it felt good.
Police have an often deservedly terrible reputation among Mexicans. This demonstrator’s poster says, “They don’t protect me, they violate me.”
My wife’s panic-induced anger had her out of the car and pacing while trying to call for help. I was trying to keep the dogs calm while these two “servants of society” were calling their truck to come impound our car. I would still be laughing about how ridiculous this concept is hours after the event was over.
This, for me, is when human decency comes into play. You are a human being. You see a foreigner isn’t quite within the local regulations. Do you:
Try to inform this new person of the country of your local ways?
Try to ruin Mother’s Day and take his car from him right in front of his family?
They chose the latter.
My wife then got through to a family lawyer, whom she put on speakerphone to speak to the transit officers. The lawyer explained to them that they have no right to take the car.
I’m not going to lie. I was a bit nervous that perhaps I was in the wrong. Not on purpose, of course. I looked up all the laws as best I could before driving to this country and did my best to stay within them.
There is a lot of great information online but nothing about this particular law. Even more so, our car had Mexican insurance and legal importation papers. Surely, if we had done anything illegal, we would have been told by now.
Thankfully, the transit officers didn’t have the legal right to take our car, and I could see that they didn’t like this. Somehow, the whole situation became personal. They wanted to hurt us.
I could see in their faces that they were on the ropes and swinging blindly, more for pride than for a bribe at this point. They started to shake their heads, and their bad joke became a broken record.
“You don’t have a front license plate.”
“That’s the law,” the leader between the two of them said. The other was a bit nervous at this point.
The lawyer explained it to him: “The law for the front license plate only applies to cars registered in the city.”
What the cops had almost certainly wanted in the first place. deposit photos
The officer puffed up his chest and pretended to have international ticket-giving authority, so the lawyer asked him to show us the law that gives him the right to determine how many license plates an imported car registered in the U.S. state of Florida should have.
He pulled out his handbook and pointed to a law that basically said what the lawyer had already said: cars of Mexico City should have a front license plate. The man knew he was wrong, but rather than being a man and admitting his fault, he went back to broken-record mode.
At this point, my wife’s parents came down to the street. They spoke kindly to the officer, but he wasn’t budging.
Then the lawyer told them he was going to call internal affairs.
Boom.
The next thing we know, the transit officers were saying that we were good to go but only because my wife’s father was a nice guy.
My question is this: was all of this necessary?
Mexico is famous for having corrupt police. It’s part of life here. But one thing I have never understood is a lack of human decency. The way he spoke to us was as if we were the worst people alive for not having a front license plate.
I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a touch of racism involved. Perhaps not as bad as a black man being pulled over in Mississippi in the ‘50s, but still racism along the lines of I’m going to take advantage of this gringo.
It almost makes one sick to have to be involved in such events. It is an ugly world. I get it. I’ve been to war, for fuck’s sake.
Yet, you don’t expect such ugliness at home when all you want to do is drive safely to your wife’s parents’ house for comida and quality family time on a Sunday.
I see, feel and understand now the outrageous distaste the Mexican people have towards their police. When the people that are supposed to protect you are the ones you fear, there is something seriously wrong with a society.
The writer now feels he understands much better the fear and anger Mexicans have toward police.
We never give an injustice notice unless it happens to us. This event wasn’t that scarring or traumatic, but it still points to a very important problem that underlies most problems we face in the world today — not just in Mexico or America or with police or whatever but everywhere.
Human decency. Where is it? What is wrong with us that we can’t just be decent to each other? We are all going to die in the end. Isn’t that reason enough to just be kind to each other until then?
Put more simply: when dealing with another human, be human. It really should be that plain, that obvious.
As far as Mexican police — especially these meter maids — even knowing the law better than them isn’t enough. Keep ready the number for a local lawyer and internal affairs, the Unidad de Contacto del Secretario SSCCDMX, 55 5208 9895, in case something like this happens to you. It may not save you, but it is an extra layer of protection in a system that needs as much protection as possible for its citizens and residents.
It doesn’t hurt to have a camera as well.
The police are meant to serve the people. It is up to us to remind them of that. Voting for the least corrupt politician isn’t going to change this country, as is evident.
I love this country for its freedom. Yet, after this incident, I sincerely felt that I am only free enough to realize that I am still in a cage, not free enough to always fly out of it.
After all this was said and done, my wife’s parents tried to tell us how to handle these types of situations — flatter them and bribe them.
My wife, still in fury, responded, “That’s the reason we still have to deal with it today!”
She was right. But I understood why her parents had always done things that way.
Yet, the world is changing. The Mexican police may be trying to hang on to their old ways, but thanks to smartphones and the internet they are being forced from outside of their internal structure to become more transparent.
They would never have taken a bribe because we were recording them whenever they started getting ugly. That technique always calmed them. We also took their badge numbers just in case things got too dicey.
Transit police, asserts the writer, should not have the kind of power that they do that allows them to harass civilians. deposit photos
It feels whiny and juvenile to me to record the police abusing their power, but today I believe that, in combination with a lawyer, it is what saved us from lots of unnecessary paperwork and fees and trouble — or, who knows, maybe worse.
This is one thing to do in the moment. But if Mexico really wants to get rid of corruption, it must get rid of the laws that allow politicians to sell favors and for these police officers to threaten civilians.
A traffic cop especially should not have this much leverage and power. They should hand out tickets for violations, and only in extreme cases of immediate and very real danger should they separate someone from their vehicle.
Good luck, Mexico. Good luck to the immigrants who love Mexico and its people and want to call this place home.
S.W. Stribling describes himself as “a literary pianist who writes fiction with teeth.” An Iraq War veteran and former French Foreign Legion parachutist, he is also the author of the booksSin and ZenandAnger and Hope. Follow him on hiswebsite, onFacebookand onInstagramfor giveaways, clever quotes and photos of his four dogs and cat.
Subway cars of Mexico City's Metro Line 12 crashed on May 3 when girders gave way on an overpass near the Los Olivos station, killing 26 people.
Paola García (Shutterstock)
The Mexico City government is providing educational scholarships and jobs to family members of people who were killed or injured in last month’s subway disaster that claimed 26 lives.
The head of the government’s Executive Commission for Attention to Victims (CEAVI) announced that 153 children and young people from 95 families affected by the May 3 train crash will receive monthly scholarship payments.
Armando Ocampo Zambrano told a press conference that the recipients will be able to access the payments via digital debit cards. He didn’t say how much the scholarships were worth.
Ocampo revealed that CEAVI has found jobs in the Mexico City government and the private sector for 145 family members of people killed or injured in the accident, which was caused by the collapse of an overpass on Line 12 of the Metro system.
The government is seeking to find positions for 76 others, he said. The official also said that CEAVI has provided a range of other support to victims and their families.
Many will be eligible for one-off payments to cover medical costs and other expenses incurred. Some could receive ongoing pension payments because they lost a spouse or were orphaned by the accident.
Investigators, including a Norwegian company contracted to conduct an independent probe, are still working to determine why the overpass collapsed on the subway’s newest line.
Marilú Martínez has been reported safe but no further details have been released.
A candidate for mayor in Guerrero and her family reappeared Wednesday after being abducted the day before.
Marilú Martínez Núñez, the Citizens’ Movement candidate for Cutzamala de Pinzón, was kidnapped with her family by approximately 10 armed men on Tuesday night.
The party’s candidate for governor in the state, Ruth Zavaleta, announced Núñez’s safe return on Twitter. “We have learned that the candidate and her family are well, fortunately. We are waiting for her to explain what happened …” the message read.
Before the reappearance, the head of the Citizens’ Movement in Guerrero, Adrián Wences Carrasco, had claimed that outgoing mayor Timoteo Arce Solís could be behind the abduction. Solís’ wife, Rosa Jaimes, is running against Núñez.
Meanwhile, another candidate reappeared in Puebla on Tuesday. Dr. Porfirio Eusebio Lima, a Green Party candidate for mayor of Acajete, admitted to faking his own abduction, but has yet to reveal his reason for doing so.
