The scene at a Oaxaca hospital moments after a woman gave birth.
A Oaxaca woman who gave birth standing up while waiting outside a hospital for medical attention Wednesday became the subject of a viral video after an outraged bystander recorded the incident on his phone.
State health officials later said that the incident occurred because the hospital was saturated with Covid-19 patients and staff had been trying to create a safe space for the birth.
However, the viral video told a different story, with witnesses to the birth railing at staff and decrying the woman’s treatment. The man who took the video said the baby fell onto the pavement on its head when the mother gave birth.
In the two-minute video, which starts after the birth, a female hospital staffer in scrubs who appears to be a nurse can be seen taking the 28-year-old mother inside with her baby. Behind her, a pool of blood and amniotic fluid remains on the pavement where she had been waiting.
According to the narrator, no one from the hospital arrived to help the woman even as she was in the final throes of labor.
Con la salud no se bromea @BeatrizGMuller
La mañana de este miércoles en la entrada del Hosp. de San Pablo Huixtepec, Oaxaca, una mujer tuvo que esperar por horas para ser atendida. El personal salió atenderla, cuando ya se encontraba en labor de parto.pic.twitter.com/EhijeMyhSE
— José Díaz 🇲🇽México esta de luto (@JJDiazMachuca) February 3, 2021
“We were talking a little while ago,” he said on the video. “This woman was ready to give birth and nobody came … It’s a damn injustice.”
Another upset female bystander in the video can be heard berating a different hospital staffer who came out after the woman was taken away.
“Look at how you treat her. She can’t read and write, but she’s a person, and look at how you treat her,” she said.
Oaxaca Deputy Health Minister Juan Carlos Marquez Haine later said that the hospital in question, located in San Pueblo Huixtepec, was one of 17 hospitals in the Valles Centrales region of Oaxaca saturated with Covid-19 patients.
He said hospital staff had made the woman wait because they were preparing a room for her where she and the baby would not be exposed to the coronavirus. When she arrived, no space was immediately available due to the number of intubated patients in the hospital, he said.
It was not clear how long the woman waited outside before she gave birth, although some online were claiming that she had waited two hours.
Marquez said the mother and her newborn were currently in the hospital and in good health.
Some of the Romanian travelers who were held at the airport in Cancún.
After keeping them detained for four days, Mexican immigration authorities have allowed the majority of about 100 Romanian citizens detained at Cancún International Airport to enter Mexico after the Romanian government issued a diplomatic protest.
“Following the phone conversation held on February 3 between Foreign Affairs Minister Bogdan Aurescu and his Mexican counterpart, Mexican authorities have remedied the situation of the Romanian citizens blocked at the Cancún International Airport,” the Romanian foreign ministry said. “At the same time, Mexico’s foreign affairs minister has offered his Romanian peer regrets over the negative impact of the Mexican authorities’ actions.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard said that authorities from both countries were working together with Mexico’s immigration agency to ensure that such an incident was not repeated.
“Mexico always welcomes Romanians,” he said.
According to Romanian Embassy officials, Mexico informed them that the travelers, the exact number of which was not confirmed by Mexican authorities, were detained for various reasons, including travel alerts issued by Mexican security authorities and the lack of sufficient justification for traveling in Mexico.
All the detained passengers arrived in Cancún Sunday on a Lufthansa flight.
Mexican security officials told the newspaper La Jornada that the travel alerts were issued by Mexico’s central intelligence agency (CNI). They said that airport authorities acted in accordance with security protocols regarding the entry of persons with travel alerts, who could represent a national security risk.
The newspaper Milenio suggested that the alerts may have been related to cyber fraud and a previous case in Mexico related to bank card cloning. However, Mexican authorities have not confirmed that information.
The detained passengers had their cell phones and other belongings confiscated, according to La Jornada, but managed to contact families back in Romania using an electronic tablet that one passenger had managed to hide from Mexican authorities. Not long afterward, their plight made news throughout Romania, as several of the detainees’ stories were detailed in news stories there.
Fernando Fuentes, born and bred in Mexico City, gives free historic tours so that his vast and detailed knowledge of the city’s past will live on after he dies.
Tour guide Fernando Fuentes is a bottomless well of information.
We are walking through the Roma Sur neighborhood in Mexico City, which happens to be where I live, and he is rambling off a string of names that link Mexico’s most famous president, Benito Juárez, to the architect who built the school across from us on the sidewalk. I’m not sure if I totally follow, it having to do with the president’s personal secretary, who became his son-in-law and then someone’s grandchildren. And somewhere along the way, someone was Cuban.
“I can talk to you about Colonia Buenos Aires or some other place, and you might be interested about one thing or another,” he tells me right off the bat, “but you’ll always care more when we’re talking about your own neighborhood.”
Maybe that’s also true of the guide.
Fuentes has lived in this part of the city his entire 75-plus years, and while he was born one neighborhood over from Roma Sur — in Colonia Hipódromo — he has mountains of knowledge about the entire Roma-Condesa territory that combines the five neighborhoods of Roma Norte, Roma Sur, Condesa, Hipódromo, and Hipódromo-Condesa. This part of the city was developed around the turn of the century, one of Mexico City’s first suburban areas, and has become famous for its Art Deco architecture, tree-lined parks, quaint streets — and these days — upscale eateries and hip boutiques.
An old trolley sitting on the corner of Insurgentes Avenue and Coahuila Street in Hipódromo, the neighborhood where Fuentes was born and raised.
I met Fuentes a few Saturdays ago when, in the midst of quarantine, I was itching to get out of the house and joined his mask-covered, socially distanced tour around my neighborhood.
He’s been offering tours — for free — for the past 57 years to anyone who digs local lore and history and is willing to listen to the extensive litany of facts and names that pour out of him once he starts to talk about the area’s contemporary history. When he was young, he did joint historical tours with some of the neighborhood’s old-timers. Now he’s the old-timer.
Even after writing my guidebook, Mexico City Streets: La Roma, I will admit to a continuing obsession with the neighborhood, and I am always fact-checking myself against longtime locals. I confess to going on the tour partly for that reason. I found that while he confirmed a lot of what I knew, there were other things that were new: like the fact that the Benito Juárez school we were sitting in front of had a mural painted by one of the country’s first muralists, Roberto Montenegro, and that it is quite possibly the largest primary school in the country.
With all neighborhood history, a little skepticism goes a long way. Fuentes is quick to caveat word-of-mouth info with a “so they tell me …” And while I found myself annoyed by the other neighbors on the tour that butted in to tell their own stories, he told me that he loves that part — that on every tour he learns something he didn’t know before.
This is a man who has also spent hour after hour researching the 488 blocks that make up the Roma-Condesa. As he tells it, his story began on the corner of Loreto and Amsterdam at the house of a midwife aunt where his parents went (instead of the hospital) the night he was born. He was born in the neighborhood and has never left.
Life for him as a youngster revolved around the Parque México — the heart of the Hipódromo neighborhood — and one of the area’s most beloved parks today.
Fuentes carries a folder of old photos on his tours to show how places used to look.
“Other than my family, the people I cared most about were my friends in the park,” he tells me.
He spent his days playing U.S.-style football and generally causing havoc in the ʼhood, with an ear to the ground for stories and history.
His father, a photographer, encouraged him at a young age to investigate the origins of the neighborhood’s history, prompting him with questions like “If all the streets in Roma and Hipódromo are named after Mexican cities and states, why is Amsterdam street named Amsterdam?” (His best guess: it was named the same year as the Amsterdam 1928 Olympics.)
When he was still in high school, Fuentes started collecting old neighborhood photos and started putting together what he calls monographs. These are a handful of sleeves of paper printed with black-and-white photos along with lists of street names and their significance, as well as the oldest houses still standing and short histories of the neighborhood. He used to carry these in a backpack and hand them out to passing strangers or neighbors he thought needed a lesson in local history. There is nothing that irks him more than when someone says Parque México is in Condesa and not Hipódromo, for instance.
He shows me his most recent monograph for his Hipódromo tour: random photos of the original racetrack built there and the old social security hospital are interspersed with photos of his expansive family (eight siblings), looking serious but stylish in the park. There is even one of him looking stern in his baby high-waisted pants and tiny sweater.
He points out several buildings in photos and tries to explain to me what I am looking at. I know the neighborhood well and even give my own tours, but the city looks so impossibly different than it did 50 years ago; it’s like looking at Mars. That’s why he gives the tours.
Now the Centro Médico Park in Roma Sur, the vast Benito Juárez multifamily housing complex was built from 1940-1950. The 1985 earthquake destroyed it.
“So that I don’t just give you the information [and] you have no idea what it is, we go for a walk and I explain when the school was built, who built it, what’s inside, etc.”
And there’s another reason why he does the tours. As his publicity leaflets so honestly announce, “I’ve been living in the neighborhood for 75 years, and I don’t have that much time left to tell people what I know.”
Also, his two grown children are completely uninterested in his archive. He’s afraid that they will just throw everything away when he dies, he tells us as a preamble to the tour.
“People always say to me, there’s nothing like a resident to tell you about their neighborhood,” he explains. “Other tour guides will give you general information, but a local gives you the details.”
When I ask him about writing a book, he shrugs off the idea; he doesn’t have the constitution for that kind of thing. It wasn’t until his ex-wife finally told him that he had to organize all his little scraps of paper that he even started getting serious about archiving the information.
Why not charge a little for tours, then, I ask. Surely they’re worth a small fee.
Fuentes’ 8-year-old son after a race. The interviewer is Mexican Olympic long-distance runner Enrique Aquino, who had a local radio show.
“In 1985, when the earthquake happened, I decided to put together a race for kids,” Fuentes tells me. “I organized that race for 35 years. We had categories starting from 1–2 years old to 13- and 14-year-olds. It was always free until the year 2000, but they raised the price on the trophies … So I decided I would charge 20 pesos, just to cover the costs. And after that it became a business. Suddenly we were charging, and for their 20 pesos, people expected bathrooms, bigger trophies, lots of things.”
When something is free, he says, you have zero expectations — which is not to say he won’t take a tip if you give him one.
To get in touch with Fernando Fuentes and take one of his great (Spanish-only) free tours, call 55 5264 4648. Since he’s never owned a cell phone, you will just have to catch him when he’s home and not out walking his favorite beat.
Lydia Carey is a regular contributor to Mexico News Daily.
Former Puebla governor Mario Marín was arrested in Acapulco, Guerrero, on Wednesday in connection with a 2005 case in which prominent investigative journalist Lydia Cacho was detained and tortured by Puebla police.
Marín, Institutional Revolutionary Party governor between 2005 and 2011, was taken into custody by federal agents at a home owned by his sister in the Pacific coast resort city.
He was taken to federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) facilities in Acapulco on Wednesday afternoon and later transferred to Cancún, Quintana Roo, where Cacho was arrested in December 2005 on defamation charges by Puebla police operating some 1,500 kilometers beyond their jurisdiction.
Marín is accused of ordering the arrest of Cacho, who wrote a book published in 2005 called The Demons of Eden, in which she exposed a pedophile ring in Cancún that she alleged was run by businessman Jean Succar Kuri. He was later convicted of the crime and sentenced to more than 100 years in jail.
Cacho also implicated Kamel Nacif Borge, a businessman known as “El rey de la mezclilla ” (the denim king) for his large textile empire, and he subsequently filed a defamation complaint against her that led to her arrest.
Journalist and activist Lydia Cacho.
After Cacho was detained in Cancún, police drove her more than 20 hours to Puebla, during which time they taunted and tortured her, threatened her with rape, forced a gun into her mouth and debated drowning her in the Gulf of Mexico’s Campeche Bay. She was held in custody in Puebla for two days before being released on bail.
The case became a national scandal when a tape was leaked of a conversation between Nacif and Marín in which the former is heard thanking the latter for arresting Cacho.
During the call, the then governor boasted of giving a “fucking slap in the head” to Cacho whom he called an “old bitch.”
“Here in Puebla the law is respected, here there is no impunity,” Marín told Nacif. The “denim king” told Marín, who he referred to as “my precious governor,” that he would send him two bottles of cognac to show his appreciation.
Warrants for the arrest of the ex-governor, Nacif, and former senior Puebla police officials Juan Sánchez Moreno and Hugo Adolfo Karam Beltrán were issued in April 2019. Sánchez was arrested in May 2019 but Nacif, whom Mexico is trying to have extradited from Lebanon, and Karam remain at large.
Marín went into hiding after the warrant was issued for his arrest and there were reports that he had left the country. However, it appears that he was holed up, at least for some of the past 21 months in Guerrero, which borders the state he governed for six years.
Cacho said on Twitter Wednesday night that the attorney general informed her of Marín’s arrest as soon as he was taken into custody.
“For 14 years I’ve been seeking justice for having been tortured by this accomplice of child pornography networks,” she wrote.
On Tuesday morning, Cacho posted a link to a news story that said Marín had spent the night in the same Cancún jail where Succar Kuri is detained.
“The accomplices meet again but now in very different conditions. Now there is no luxurious party nor victim girls in the hands of pedophiles. There is no toast or celebration. Journalism is the path toward justice,” she wrote.
The Sputnik V vaccine’s arrival in Mexico could help inoculate 14 million by late March, but Russia's secretiveness about it has generated mistrust.
When my daughter was born, her father and I made sure to take her to all of her health-related appointments. She had a checkup with her pediatrician every month for the first year, and we took her to our local health center promptly for each vaccine and its corresponding stamp in her social security booklet.
Like most babies, and most kids, she didn’t love getting shots. She’d cry for a few minutes, of course, but was overall easygoing in comparison to other kids I’d seen thrash about and try to escape. Her father practically cried with her for every injection, but I remained stoically unmoved by their temporary distress.
It’s not that I was cold; I’d of course comfort her and do whatever else I could to make her feel better. It’s just that I never felt even an inkling of regret about her getting those injections; in fact, I was and am grateful for them. When she was older and could speak enough to try to convince me not to take her or to put them off, I did and do reply that I would much rather her get an uncomfortable shot than die of a preventable disease.
I make sure she receives all of her vaccines for the same reason I insist that she always wear her seatbelt: because I want the most precious person in my life to be as reasonably protected as possible.
Having read about Mexico’s deal with Russia for their Sputnik V vaccine, as well as all of the secrecy surrounding it, I find myself with tilted head and narrowed eyes toward a vaccine for the first time in my life.
My reasons for wariness, I’ll admit, include things that technically have nothing to do with vaccines: proven election interference in my home country and others as well as the coordinated manipulation of countless individuals through made-up social media accounts that played the algorithms to their advantage (and away from actual facts) come to mind.
Even if you think Russia is completely innocent regarding those accusations, as they’ve repeatedly insisted that they are, or you simply think that one thing has nothing to do with the other, there are still some unanswered questions regarding the Sputnik V vaccine in Mexico.
First, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell was dispatched to Argentina to learn what he could about the Russian vaccine. While he himself claimed that he was not able to see phase 3 trial results, the Associated Press reported that he was given copies of them by his Argentine counterparts. Let that sink in: copies. Have any of you ever been able to get anything bureaucratic done with just copies of something?
The Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks (Cofepris) then all but rubber-stamped the vaccine for use in Mexico without an application for approval having first been submitted, the equivalent of a teacher giving a generous grade to an exam that hasn’t yet been taken. The application, if it ever appears, was guaranteed approval before it was even filled out.
Y’all. Have you ever heard of any Mexican bureaucratic agency saying, “Oh, just wave it on through; we can settle the paperwork later; it’s fine.”
Perhaps I am being unfair. I recognize my prejudice, and while I think my and the general scientific community’s wariness is justified, I’d like nothing more than to give the full benefit of the doubt in this case, as vaccines against Covid-19 are something we desperately need.
Perhaps approval was rushed through because Mexico didn’t want to waste time with its own formalities. Surely, they simply wanted to start vaccinating people right away with whatever vaccines they can get their hands on. This is what I’m hopefully assuming, anyway.
Add to this that the percentage the Russians give for effectiveness of their vaccine has a way of adjusting upwards to top any reports on others that come out, making me doubt the seriousness of the science behind it or at least the integrity with which those numbers are reported. The obvious bravado and one-upmanship make me leery; I’m concerned that more attention and importance is being placed on the optics rather than the actual science. Also, the global scientific community had been waiting for those final results for quite some time (as of Tuesday, they were finally released in The Lancet).
All that said, there are some things we can say in Sputnik V’s favor. First, they started using it on their own population months ago; this is something they surely wouldn’t do if they suspected it would harm them (as I typed that, I mentally stuck my fingers in my mind’s ears, singing a loud “LA-LA-LA” to drown out thoughts of the vast number of political prisoners and poisoned dissidents). So far, it’s been given to medical personnel and teachers.
The history speaks favorably of vaccine integrity as well. The former Soviet Union made vaccine development a priority, so we can’t say they don’t have experience; they do. Russian scientists also have a history of testing a vaccine on themselves, and even their children, before allowing it to be approved for others.
But I keep coming back to this: if there’s nothing to hide, what’s with the hiding?
I hope I’m wrong and that my suspicions are unwarranted because this is what we have. I’m not a purist. Though I’m naturally cautious, I don’t believe in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But I do believe in throwing caution to the wind when it’s do-or-die time.
In the end, if I’m offered a vaccine, and Sputnik V is the one I’m offered, I’ll take it, as this is no time to be picky.
Sarah DeVries is a writer and translator based in Xalapa, Veracruz. She can be reached through her website, sdevrieswritingandtranslating.com.
For thousands of citizens in Tabasco, paying the electric bill will be a new experience.
The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has agreed to cancel the debt of more than 600,000 customers in Tabasco.
Governor Adán López announced on Twitter on Tuesday that his government had signed an agreement with the CFE that eliminates the debt of 607,165 customers, some of whom haven’t paid their power bills for a quarter of a century.
He also said the CFE had agreed to charge non-business customers in Tabasco at its lowest rate throughout the entire year.
“I thank the president of the republic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, for his invaluable support to achieve the long-held desire of tabasqueños [and] the general director of the CFE, Manuel Bartlett, for his … support for the signing of this agreement. Tabasco, it’s your time!” López wrote.
After losing an election for governor of Tabasco in 1994, López Obrador, a native of the Gulf coast state, launched a civil resistance movement and called on his supporters to stop paying their CFE bills as part of a protest against alleged electoral fraud and the state-owned utility’s allegedly high power prices.
Hundreds of thousands of Tabasco residents obliged and didn’t pay their electricity bills for the next 25 years.
Governor López, who represents López Obrador’s Morena party, announced a scheme in May 2019 in which CFE customers with large debts they wished to wipe clean could go to a CFE office and enter into a new billing arrangement.
The offer applied to more than 520,000 customers who owed 11 billion pesos, or US $578 million at the time.
However, hundreds of thousands of people with debts didn’t subscribe to the “Goodbye to Your Debt” deal and simply continued to ignore their power bills.
López said the coronavirus pandemic and severe flooding in Tabasco were factors that contributed to the limited uptake of the offer. Instead of requiring customers to go to a CFE office and explicitly state they wanted their debt to be canceled, the government stepped in on their behalf and signed a deal with the state-owned power commission that eliminated that requirement.
“Starting today [Tuesday], the historic debt [of Tabasco customers] completely disappears without conditions,” said CFE communications director Luis Fernando Bravo.
He added that “all the household customers in Tabasco, except high-consumption ones,” will automatically be switched to the commission’s 1F rate within 72 hours.
However, whether the more than half a million customers who are now free of their longstanding debts will suddenly change their ways and pay their electricity bills remains to be seen.
Far from solemn, quiet affairs, religious processions in Mexico, including funerals, are accompanied by loud music provided by bands featuring brass, woodwinds, and percussion. joseph sorrentino
There’s always music in Mexico. Whether you like it or not.
You hear it as you walk down the street, spilling out from homes and blasting out from large speakers placed in front of stores. You hear it as you sit on a micro (as small buses are called), although what you usually hear in that case is just the ferociously loud thump of the bass and a healthy dose of static. You hear it long into the night when someone’s celebrating a fiesta dela quinceañera (a birthday party for a girl turning 15). And, of course, you hear it during processions, pilgrimages, recorridos and the multitude of fiestas. Even funerals. What’s often surprising to the outsider is the musical selections during these events.
Take, for instance, processions, pilgrimages and recorridos, which are religious events honoring a particular virgin or saint. Let me explain the difference between these for the uninitiated and/or confused — and I was once one of those. Processions go from one pueblo to another and, although they may take several hours, are completed in one day. Pilgrimages also go from one pueblo to another, but one that’s much farther away. Those take more than a day to complete. And recorridos are treks within a pueblo. All of these feature people with nichos — elaborate boxes with religious figures in them — strapped to their backs, and people carrying candles, banners and a number of other religious objects.
Cohetes, those ubiquitous bottle rockets loudly accompanying any number of events, are a continuous presence.
The bands accompanying these celebrations feature, at least, a couple of trumpet, trombone and clarinet players. There’s also a tuba player and a percussion section consisting of a bass, snare drum and crash cymbals. The larger the celebration, the larger — and louder — the band.
Xochimilco’s chinelo dancers are also found in México state and Morelos. joseph sorrentino
Now, being an outsider, I initially figured that events like these would be accompanied by some sort of solemn music, something you’d expect to hear in a church. But we’re in Mexico. I’m not sure what the music’s called — I’ve been told it’s simply “popular music” — but the musicians play upbeat tunes with gusto and as loudly as they possibly can. At least I think it’s as loudly as they can. If it’s not, I’d rather not be around when they really turn up the volume because as it is, it’s painful to be near them.
Most of what they play are Mexican songs, although some bands have extensive songbooks that they dip into. (Ghost) Riders in the Sky is a favorite. I admit to being more than a little surprised when I heard Another One Bites the Dust. I don’t remember which event it was played at, but it seems it would be appropriate for a funeral — yes, the same kind of music is played.
After attending a number of these events, I had a feeling that, eventually, I’d hear one particularly rollicking tune. I had to wait for some time, but I wasn’t disappointed — or surprised — when I finally heard, Roll Out The Barrel. And, yes, it was during a procession.
Processions, pilgrimages and recorridos usually have just one band playing, and if there is more than one, they generally take turns playing. But during major fiestas, things can get a little wild, such as, for instance, during the feast day of San Gregorio, the patron saint of San Gregorio Atlapulco in Mexico City. Since they’re honoring their patron saint, Chicuarotes (as residents are known) pull out all the stops. First, of course, there was a Mass that easily went on for over two hours; some priests tend to relish the spotlight. After that, the fiesta, and the chaos, begins.
During the last one I attended (pre-pandemic), there were at least six bands in the churchyard. As soon as the Mass was done, a mariachi band started playing a lovely tune, but they were soon drowned out by a nearby brass band that blasted out a song. This was either a signal or a challenge to the other bands since they all started up, each playing a different song, each playing as loudly as they possibly could. A veritable battle of the bands with religious overtones. Or undertones.
The devout in San Gregorio Atlapulco carrying nichos on their backs. joseph sorrentino
Each band had a group of chinelos, traditional dancers, dancing in front of them. Chinelos dress in colorful, flowing costumes, large hats and masks. Their dances are mostly small, shuffling steps alternating with swirls done vigorously so that their costumes billow out. After some time, the chinelos, along with people who had nichos strapped to their backs, led the bands out of the churchyard, each going slowly in a different direction, trailed by dozens of people and accompanied by the boom of cohetes exploding. Eventually, the churchyard emptied out and quieted down, leaving me mostly alone as a gentle rain began to fall.
Joseph Sorrentino, a writer and photographer, is a regular contributor to Mexico News Daily. More examples of his photographs and links to other articles may be found at www.sorrentinophotography.com He currently lives in Chipilo, Puebla.
Migrants have been targeted by organized crime and police, according to testimonies gathered by the human rights commission.
The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has covered up crimes against migrants including murder, torture, mass kidnappings and rape, according to an investigation by a digital newspaper.
Animal Político reported that between September 2019 and February 2020, the CNDH drew up 32 documents containing migrants’ testimonies of a range of crimes committed against them. Some of the victims were women, teenagers and children, said the news website,which obtained some of the documents.
According to migrants who spoke with the CNDH, members of organized crime gangs as well as state and federal police were involved in the offenses.
Animal Político said it had access to testimonies collected by the CNDH at six government-run migrant stations and 12 shelters operated by civil society organizations located in the north, south and center of the country.
CNDH officials, including commission chief Rosario Piedra Ibarra, have full knowledge of the crimes, Animal Político said.
However, the commission has not publicly disclosed or commented on the testimonies it has gathered.
“It hasn’t done so in press releases, in recommendations or in a special report,” Animal Político said. “It didn’t even make mention of a single case of the kidnapping of migrants in the first report of activities with Rosario Piedra at the head of the CNDH.”
The newspaper said the CNDH has classified some of the testimonies as “reserved” information, arguing that revealing them would place migrants’ lives at risk. However, the testimonies are anonymous – they don’t include the names or addresses of the victims or other information that could be used to identify them apart from their nationality and when and where a crime was committed against them.
“While the CNDH reserves information, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador insists that under his administration, ‘the human rights of migrants are no longer violated.’ But the testimonies kept secret by the autonomous body contradict him,” Animal Político said.
The newspaper said it has asked the CNDH on four occasions to explain why it hasn’t made details of the crimes committed against migrants public. In response the rights commission sent 44 press releases listing recommendations for the defense of migrants’ rights but didn’t explain why it hasn’t released the testimonies or publicly commented on them.
In a document sent to the news organization on Monday, the CNDH defended its work to protect migrants in Mexico and said it was conducting an analysis to “evaluate the institutional capacities of the Mexican state to comply with [their] rights.”
Rights commission chief Rosario Piedra.
However, the rights commission again failed to explain why it hasn’t disclosed the testimonies.
Animal Político did, however, publish some of the CNDH testimonies it obtained. Following are summaries of two of them.
• A Honduran woman explained that she left her home in 2019 because she was pregnant and a “gangbanger” with whom she lived had “sold” her unborn baby. She said that she reached Mexico and was passing through the San Luis Potosí municipality of Vanegas when local police boarded a truck she was traveling in and stole her money.
She said she was forced to go with a group of men in dark uniforms and was taken to a place where there were eight other women. “I knew that it was a kidnapping because they forced us to speak to our families and ask for money … [to spare] our lives,” she said.
The woman said that she and the other abductees were repeatedly raped, beaten and stabbed. “They killed some of the women in front of me. They treated us as if we were their erotic toys,” she said.
“… Because of their weapons and the codes they used to speak, I can almost guarantee that those who kidnapped me were police. I left there completely lost, humiliated, beaten, swollen and demoralized. I had to go into a victim protection program. It’s taken me a long time to recover my life. … I lived very bad experiences in Mexico. My daughter had to be born in Mexico, she was born healthy thanks to the care they gave me in the [migrant] shelter.”
The woman gave her testimony to the CNDH in October 2019 in Santa Catarina, Nuevo León.
• A Guatemalan man said that he entered Mexico via the southern border in February 2019 with 50 other migrants and a pollero, or people smuggler. He said he was traveling north in a truck that suddenly stopped in Altamira, Tamaulipas.
“They opened the doors and a lot of armed men appeared. They took us off and put us in another truck without a roof, one of those that transports cattle. There were about 70 men in mine, everyone crowded together,” he said.
They traveled for six hours to reach the northern border city of Matamoros where the migrants were stripped of their phones and money and locked up in small houses, he said.
“There were about 75 of us per house. … They told us that they were going to cross us [into the United States] but they wanted US $5,500 for each person. I think they were from the Gulf Cartel, very violent people, well armed and with bulletproof vests, caps and balaclavas,” he said.
The man said that he and the others were rescued by the navy but their captors got away. He said he was subsequently sent to a migrant detention center in Tapachula, Chiapas, where the staff welcomed him with the words “welcome to hell.”
He said he was deported to Guatemala in March 2019 but he crossed into Mexico again in September that year – three months after the federal government deployed the National Guard to stop the flow of migrants to the United States. The man said he was detained again and placed in a migrant station to await deportation.
“It’s difficult to cross Mexico. You leave a lot of money here but you still can’t get to your destination,” he said.
The man spoke to the CNDH in Huixtla, Chiapas, in September 2019.
In response to the revelation that the CNDH is concealing information, Interior Minister Olga Sánchez said Wednesday that the commission must be accountable and transparent.
“I would hope that … the CNDH, which is a very prestigious institution, continues to be transparent and doesn’t hide information,” she said, adding that it should denounce rights violations and make recommendations so the authorities can respond to them.
With regard to the migrants’ testimonies, Sánchez said: “If we don’t acknowledge that these [human rights] violations exist, … we can’t make progress on the issue. These violations of migrants’ human rights are absolutely unacceptable and any complaint … in relation to any of our migration personnel, police, or any government authorities violating human rights [must be given to the government]. We have to have the CNDH investigations in order to proceed accordingly.”
The Mixtec donkey is expected to be useful for fieldwork and equine sports.
The oft-repeated saying “as strong as an ox” may soon be amended to “as strong as a burro” thanks to a group of Mexican breeders who have created what they say is a bigger, stronger kind of donkey.
The Mexican Association of Burros and Mules has created the burro mixteco, or the Mixtec donkey, which measures between 1.3 and 1.4 meters in height, taller than most donkeys. It is about the same size as the American mammoth jackstock, which is one of the two types of donkeys crossbred to create the Mixtec variety. The other was a Mexican Creole.
The association says the new type of donkey, developed with sports and recreation in mind, has a better body structure that makes it stronger than most.
At the moment, the group is in the process of establishing a population of the new animals with 30 foundation donkeys it is breeding at fairs. The process started in December at the livestock fair of Jalisco, but it was curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Plans will go more slowly, but we have many expectations of it being a functional breed,” said David Alonso, the organization’s president. “If they reactivate the fairs, we hope to register between 100 and 150 Mixtec burros and increase exponentially.”
The group says the animal will be well suited to fieldwork, although its breeding was focused on factors such as appearance, morphology and functionality, Alonso said. It also would be a good animal for equine sports like rodeos.
To establish the new type, the group followed protocols established by Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, with assistance from geneticists at the University of Chihuahua.
National hospital occupancy has declined in last two days.
New coronavirus cases have begun to trend downwards for the first time since October, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Wednesday.
January was the worst month of the pandemic in terms of new cases with almost 440,000 reported.
But López-Gatell said preliminary data showed that case numbers had declined 20% in epidemiological week 3 of 2021 – January 17 to 23 – compared to the previous week.
He said the reduction had subsequently decreased slightly due to the addition of new cases to the week 3 data but stressed that it had remained at 19% for the past two days.
“For the first time since the upturn [in case numbers] in October, we have a sustained downward trend,” López-Gatell told reporters at the federal government’s morning press conference.
“The reduction, even though it’s coming down, is maintaining … [a similar] size. We started with a 20% reduction and we’ve been at 19% for two days, it’s consistent,” he said.
The deputy minister said there was no guarantee that the downward trend would continue.
(Mexico is currently in week 5 but data for the two most recent weeks is not considered reliable for epidemiological purposes because it may be incomplete and subject to change. It is possible that the 19% reduction in week 3 will fall further in the coming days.)
“Nothing can guarantee that this trend will be maintained, except the conduct of the public,” López-Gatell said. Still, he added, the decline in case numbers between January 17 and 23 is encouraging.
The coronavirus point man also said that the number of active cases across the country is on the wane. The Health Ministry estimates that there are currently 83,529 active cases whereas the figure was recently above 100,000.
López-Gatell highlighted that only 4% of Mexico’s accumulated case tally – 1.87 million as of Tuesday – is made up of cases that are currently active.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. milenio
He also noted that the national hospital occupancy rate for general care beds has declined for two consecutive days to its current rate of 55%. However, eight states have occupancy rates of 70% or higher and two – Mexico City and México state – have rates above 80%.
The occupancy rate in Mexico City, which has been hit harder by the pandemic than any other state in the country, has declined in recent days to its current level of 84% but Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum warned that the downward trend won’t be maintained unless people continue to follow the health rules.
There are more than 6,700 coronavirus patients in hospitals in the capital, according to Mexico City government data, but Sheinbaum highlighted Tuesday that the number had declined by 350 over the past nine days.
More than a quarter of the hospitalized patients are in serious condition in beds with ventilators.
Mexico City, one of 13 states that are currently maximum risk red on the federal coronavirus stoplight map, has recorded 483,608 confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic – 26% of the 1.87 million cases detected across the country.
Its Covid-19 death toll of 29,190 represents 18% of the 159,533 fatalities recorded across Mexico. High numbers of cases and deaths have also been recorded in México state, which includes many municipalities that are part of the greater Mexico City metropolitan area.
Another hard hit state is Nuevo Léon, where almost 8,000 people have lost their lives to Covid-19.
The northern state’s Congress approved a law Monday that makes the use of face masks mandatory in public places while the coronavirus remains a risk. Mask scofflaws could be fined up to 896 pesos (US $44), ordered to complete community work or even jailed for 36 hours.
