Security Minister Rodríguez presents crime data at Friday morning's press conference.
Homicides decreased 5.5% in January compared to the same month of 2020 but increased 7.7% with respect to December, according to data presented by Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez on Friday.
There were 2,831 victims of homicide last month, 165 fewer than January last year but 204 more than December.
Speaking at President López Obrador’s morning press conference, Rodríguez asserted that the government’s security strategy has been successful in containing homicide levels, although they remain very high.
Guanajuato retained its unenviable title of most violent state in the country with 335 homicide victims in January. Baja California ranked second with 284 victims followed by Jalisco, Michoacán, Chihuahua and México state.
Just under 50% of all homicides in Mexico last month occurred in those six states.
Almost 28% of the homicides were committed in 15 highly violent municipalities where the government is implementing localized security strategies and rolling out social programs to try to combat the violence.
Rodríguez highlighted that there were fewer homicides in 10 of them in January compared to the same month last year. They were Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Celaya, Culiacán, Guadalajara, Acapulco, Cancún, Irapuato, Iztapalapa and Salamanca.
However, homicides increased in Cajeme, León, Morelia, Chihuahua city and Tlaquepaque.
The security minister also presented data that showed that femicides – the killing of women and girls on account of their gender – declined 10.6% in January compared to the same month last year and 14.1% with respect to December. There were 67 victims of the hate crime last month.
The Muse, a statue by 19th-century French sculptor Antoine Durenne, still welcomes the rare intrepid visitor to the ruins of Jalisco’s Casa La Florida.
Last year, members of the Guadalajara-based group Jalisco Desconocido located and explored the remains of the abandoned Hacienda de Ibarra, hidden deep inside a canyon at the north end of the city. More recently, the team was able to visit isolated and hard-to-reach La Florida, one of Mexico’s most elegant casonas (mansions) and one of the favorite haunts of president Porfirio Díaz.
La Florida, first known as Villa Aloha, is in the little town of Atequiza, Jalisco, just 10 kilometers north of Lake Chapala. It is said to have been constructed around 1876 by the powerful Cuesta-Gallardo family.
“For them,” said columnist “El Duque de Tlaquepaque” in the newspaper El Informador many years ago, “this was just a country house, but today we might catalog it as a sort of combination palace and pavilion. It served as a luxury rest stop where Porfirio Díaz and Carmelita and their elegant entourage could tarry for a few days before continuing their journey from the capital to the paradisiacal Lake of Chapala, which, at the end of the 1800s was très a la mode as the place to vacation during Semana Santa (Holy Week), thus inaugurating in Mexico (and of course it had to happen in Jalisco!) that phenomenon which today is known as TOURISM.”
The entrance to the two-story Casa La Florida was graced by a stunning statue popularly known as The Muse, cast by French sculptor Antoine Durenne, and all the walls were covered with beautiful murals. It is also said that the place was furnished with imported materials like Czechoslovakian stained glass, a French floor and Austrian crystal.
In 1896, La Florida was one of the few sites chosen by Lumière cinematographers Bon Bernard and Gabriel Veyre to film several of the first movies ever made in Mexico.
Luis Abarca preparing to photograph the ruins of La Florida.
Jalisco Desconocido’s visit to La Florida is presented in a well-made video clip on YouTube. I recently caught up with the filmmaker, Luis Abarca, and asked him to tell me more about his latest adventure.
“I heard about this resplendent casa as a child,” Abarca said, “but only recently did I make an effort to visit it. The first thing I learned was that the place is situated on private land, so it looked like it would be impossible to go there, but I found out there’s an irrigation canal right next to the old building. Well, in Mexico all rivers, lakes and even canals are public property, so it was just a case of following the canal …”
Having arrived at Atequiza, Abarca’s group studied the layout of the area and soon discovered that the canal they sought was only some 500 meters from the Teatro (theater), another elegant building commissioned by the Cuesta-Gallardo family and now used as the local casa de cultura (municipal culture building). Jalisco Desconocido’s story, told by Abarca, follows:
“We started walking, and soon we found the canal, which was full of water. We could see there was a trail alongside it, but the trail was on the other side, so we divided ourselves into three groups to go look for some way to cross over. Finally we found a place where a tree had fallen across it. We could hardly see that log because it was hidden by lots of weeds! Well, the first guy to cross this “bridge” was really agile, and he just zipped over it like it was nothing. Then it was my turn. Bueno, I only took two steps, and I slipped because the bark covering that old log was rotting and coated with slimy fungus. The only way I could get across was by sitting and sliding along, like riding a horse,” Abarca said.
“So I got to the other side, but the next one to try was a lady who started walking and got halfway across. She panicked and almost fell off the log. ¡Híjole! There she was with her arms around the tree, hanging from it like a monkey, her feet dangling above the water! So I went back to rescue her,” he said. “Now, the water was ice cold, but it wasn’t deep, maybe one meter at the most. Still, there were all sorts of brush in and above the water, and if you fell, you would get tangled up in it. So I helped her get back on the log, and then we made it to the other side.”
The trail was between the canal and a chain-link fence that, the group had been told, had a hole in it at some point.
Men and oranges: colorized version of a photo taken at La Florida in 1908. Courtesy of INAH
“So we walked along, and sure enough we found a rusty, broken place where you could get through,” he said. “Next we came to a curious area. It was all flat and looked as if it had once been a lawn, but today the grass is really high. I’m 1.8 meters tall, and it was way over my head! So we couldn’t see a thing, and we started to come to trails going in different directions. All I could do was keep trying to head where my GPS said the old mansion had to be.”
The grass was growing so incredibly high because the Santiago River was nearby and its water had partially flooded the area. What this meant was that they were soon walking through a sort of swamp, up to their knees in mud.
“After about 10 minutes of this, we came to another fence, which we followed for a while until we came to another hole,” he said. “Once we got through that, there we were, in front of Casa La Florida, right at the main entrance. Here, you go up some stone stairs and you are on the porch that you see in all the old photos, the place where the statue of The Muse once stood, the place where you see Porfirio Díaz and personalities of the day posing. Back in those days, there was an orchard of orange trees in front of the house, and it was those orange blossoms that gave the villa its name: La Florida, the flowery place.”
According to Abarca, most abandoned haciendas have been stripped of everything that could possibly be carried away, but not La Florida.
“Here you can see doors and gates and learn about little things like the kinds of locks and keys they used. Everywhere on the walls, you can see the remains of what look like paintings originally made on cloth that had been fixed to the walls,” he said. “The second floor has no rooms, only a big terraza illuminated by oval windows. This house is among the best-preserved I’ve ever seen, and by far it is the most beautiful!”
Another visitor to La Florida who was smitten by her beauty was that flamboyant Informador columnist, who apparently got to see the place while it still retained some of its old splendor:
How the porch in the previous picture looks now.
“Yes, el Presidente received the royal treatment in those sumptuous salons of La Florida, whose elegance, even after 100 years, remains unscathed and fills us with nostalgia for bygone days. The first time I entered the grand salon, I felt I had walked into Palazzo Gangi, where the immortal Luchino Visconti directed his most celebrated film, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), where we were carried away by an ethereal waltz, along with the charisma of Burt Lancaster, the good looks of Alain Delon and the sensuality of Claudia Cardinale. Yes, it was that captivating and unforgettable scene that overpowered me as I stood within the aging walls of La Florida …”
Today, La Florida lies neglected and literally disintegrating, even though concerned citizens in the municipality of Ixtlahuácan de Membrillo have been battling for over five years to save this extraordinary house from the elements and the encroaching tendrils of nature.
But, says the newspaper Milenio, the old building is now the property of a company dedicated to making chemical solvents and explosives, whose owners apparently have not yet heard the sound of that ethereal waltz echoing from the walls of the venerable Casa La Florida.
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco for 31 years and is the author of A Guide to West Mexico’s Guachimontones and Surrounding Area and co-author of Outdoors in Western Mexico. More of his writing can be found on his website.
The land border between the United States and Mexico will remain closed to nonessential travel at least until March 21, which will be the one-year anniversary of the travel ban’s original declaration.
The crossing ban, which has been in place by mutual agreement between the two countries since March 21, 2020, was set to expire Sunday.
The 30-day renewal comes as the White House has been holding meetings about potentially tightening requirements for crossing into the U.S. from both its northern and southern borders, reported the Reuters news agency.
With the United States still recording a seven-day average of over 72,000 Covid-19 cases and Mexico officially recording over 9,000, it is no surprise that the ban was extended.
According to U.S. officials, individuals with reasons deemed essential will still be allowed to cross. This includes people with medical, educational, employment and business reasons, people returning home as U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, members of the armed forces and government workers on official business.
Travelers who fly between Mexico and the U.S. are not subject to the ban, although rules declared by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in January now require airline passengers planning to enter the U.S. to present negative Covid-19 test results before they are allowed to board their flight.
Mexico’s real coronavirus case tally is at least nine times higher than the total officially reported and could be up to 26 times higher, according to National Autonomous University (UNAM) estimates.
The official accumulated case tally rose to 2.02 million on Thursday but according to estimates on the UNAM Covid-19 Geographic Information Platform, there have been a minimum of 17.81 million cases since the virus was first detected here almost a year ago and a maximum of 53.43 million.
The minimum estimate assumes a fatality rate of 1% and that the official Covid-19 death toll – 178,108 as of Thursday – includes all fatalities from the infectious disease.
The maximum estimate assumes a fatality rate of 0.5% and that there have really been 1.5 Covid-19 deaths for every one officially registered.
Mexico’s case tally is widely considered a significant undercount because of the low Covid-19 testing rate. The health system has focused on testing people with serious symptoms of the disease, meaning that the vast majority of mild and asymptomatic cases don’t show up in official statistics.
The Health Ministry acknowledges that many cases go undetected and said early in the pandemic that its epidemiological surveillance system suggested that there were about eight undetected cases for each reported one.
However, for several months its case number estimates have been only slightly higher than the official tally. The Health Ministry currently estimates that there have been just under 2.22 million cases since the start of the pandemic, a figure only 1.1 times, or 10%, higher than the official tally.
Malaquías López, a public health professor at UNAM and spokesperson for the university’s Covid-19 commission, said the ministry’s estimated case numbers don’t square with a serological testing survey conducted between August and November last year that found that about a quarter of the population had developed antibodies against the coronavirus as a result of having it.
The National Institute of Public Health estimated that about 31 million Mexicans had been infected with the virus, a number that could have risen significantly given that December and January were the two worst months of the pandemic.
UNAM’s active case estimates are also much higher than those of the Health Ministry. The university estimates that there are currently a minimum of 455,577 active cases and a maximum of 1.36 million.
According to the Health Ministry, there are just 56,981 active cases, a figure that has decreased significantly this month after rising above 110,000 in late January.
UNAM’s figures suggest that the coronavirus is still running rampant, although health authorities contend that the situation has improved considerably compared to January, and declining hospital occupancy levels back up that claim.
But while the average number of cases reported daily in the first 18 days of February declined 38% compared to the average in January, average daily Covid-19 deaths increased 3% to 1,087, evidence that Mexico is still paying a heavy price for the Christmas-New Year’s gatherings and parties that fueled the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s vaccination efforts are gathering speed after shipments of AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines arrived early this week. As of Thursday night, almost 1.32 million vaccine doses had been administered, mainly to health workers and seniors.
A multiple homicide on Thursday in Guadalajara’s metropolitan area (ZMG), the third in just over a week, has left five people dead.
The murders, which took place in a home in San Pedro Tlaquepaque, were discovered by municipal police after a 911 call around 5:50 p.m. reported gunshots being fired.
The incident follows on the heels of another multiple homicide in Guadalajara early Wednesday morning, where three men and a woman were shot and killed in a park in the Lomas de Polanco neighborhood.
At the site in Tlaquepaque, officers found bodies both inside and outside the home.
Police also found a man and a woman outside who were still alive but seriously injured. They both died hours later at a nearby hospital.
The incident is the second multiple homicide in the Magical Town in the last eight days.
On February 10, five people were killed and one seriously injured when unknown assailants entered a makeshift building that police said was known as a site of criminal activity and shot at the six people inside.
President López Obrador is facing severe backlash after using a colloquial phrase to silence criticism of his defense of a ruling party candidate for governor who is accused of rape.
The president has defended former senator Félix Salgado Macedonio’s right to contest the June 6 election for governor of Guerrero even though he is under investigation for allegedly raping a teenage girl in 1998 and a woman in 2016, claiming that the accusations are politically motivated and a product of the electoral season.
Clearly annoyed with being asked about his support for Salgado at his press conference on Thursday – and already facing widespread criticism for not dumping the candidate – López Obrador used the phrase ¡Ya chole!, or enough already!, to try to shut down the line of questioning.
“I’m not trying to downplay the importance of the [sexual assault] complaint [but] you always have to ask who’s making it? … What’s behind it? … I exist because I doubt. So, enough [questions about the issue], as some people say, ya chole!” he said.
His remark triggered a flood of condemnation, with thousands of Mexicans, including numerous politicians, taking to social media to make it clear to the president that there are things they are fed up with too.
Irritated by questions, the president declares, ‘Ya chole.’
Male chauvinism, the patriarchy, violence, kidnappings, medicine shortages, impunity, the ruling Morena party, the defense of criminals, the president’s morning press conferences, the federal government and López Obrador himself, among many other things, all got the ya chole treatment online.
“#YaChole with 10 femicides a day, #YaChole with six of 10 women suffering violence, #YaChole with impunity, #YaChole with the misogyny from the National Palace,” Xóchitl Gálvez, a National Action Party (PAN) senator, wrote on Facebook.
“Ya Chole of macho accomplices of rapists, ya chole of violence towards women, ya chole of impunity, ya chole of incompetent authorities that don’t put a stop to femicides,” Martha Tagle, a deputy with the Citizens Movement party, said on Twitter.
Ricardo Anaya, a former PAN lawmaker and candidate in the 2018 presidential election, also took to Twitter to offer a ya chole to the president’s use of the term.
“Ya chole with Salgado Macedonio? That’s the president’s message to victims? That’s precisely the root of the problem: those who, like AMLO, minimize [the actions of] and cover up for abusers instead of listening to and supporting victims, investigating thoroughly and acting firmly,” said Anaya, who appears to be positioning himself for another run at the presidency in 2024.
Some social media users, including Democratic Revolution Party Deputy Verónica Juárez, used the hashtag #NingúnVioladorSeráGobernador (No Rapist Will be Governor) in conjunction with #YaChole to denounce Salgado and the president’s support of him.
Senator Gina Andrea Cruz is fed up with the lack of medications.
Women who protested against Salgado’s candidacy in Chilapancingo, the capital of Guerrero, on Thursday also pledged that they will not allow an (alleged) rapist to become the governor of their state.
The phrase ya chole has been part of colloquial Mexican Spanish for years but its usage increased after it was used by the previous federal government in a television commercial that defended its 2013-2014 structural reforms.
Snow has been falling in the north and more is expected.
The official death toll from the cold snap in northern Mexico has risen to 20 after two states reported six more deaths.
Most of the fatalities occurred in Tamaulipas and were either from exposure or from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by heaters. One death was reported in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where a man died on the street from exposure.
Low temperatures accompanying cold front No. 35 prompted the state of Chihuahua on Thursday and Friday to begin distributing 13 tonnes of basic foodstuffs as well as cash payments to families, senior citizens and people with disabilities in various cities and towns.
According to the state’s Ministry of Social Development, Governor Javier Corral instructed the department to empty completely all its stores of provisions to help those in need.
“… It won’t be easy, but everything we have, we’re going to use immediately,” the ministry’s Ramón Galindo Noriega told the newspaper Milenio.
According to the national weather service, there’s more cold weather on the way.
Cold front No. 36 and Mexico’s 10th winter storm are delivering a new polar air mass that will result in snow or sleet in areas of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Sonora.
Temperatures will drop to lows of -10 to -15 C in parts of Coahuila, while areas of Chihuahua, Durango, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas will see lows of -5 to -10 C.
The front currently extends into the Valley of México, where higher altitudes in México state will see temperatures drop to -5 to -10 C. In Mexico City, forecast lows are 0 to -5 C.
The front is forecast to move over the west and southeast of the country and gradually move into the west side of the Yucatán Peninsula.
A pipeline that delivers natural gas from the US to Mexico.
The federal government and the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) must shoulder part of the blame for the natural gas shortage that has plagued the country this week and caused a major power outage in northern Mexico on Monday, according to two energy sector analysts.
The government’s decision to halt projects planned by the previous administration along with its ignorance of the need for greater gas storage capacity and its failure to increase electricity transmission capacity contributed to the blackout that left some 4.7 million residents without power on Monday, said two analysts who spoke to the business news website El CEO.
The government and the CFE have attributed the blackout to the extreme cold snap in the United States that froze pipes and caused gas prices to soar but the analysts argue that Mexico should have been better prepared for the possibility of supply interruptions.
“There is a series of self-inflicted problems,” Rosanety Barrios said. “There was a large-scale natural gas storage project and they canceled it. The five-year plan that the National Gas Control Center [Cenagas] presented [in 2018] … was rejected.”
One of the canceled projects was a floating storage regasification unit planned for Pajaritos, Veracruz. Pemex issued an international invitation to tender for the project in 2018 and was due to select a winner in February 2019. But under the current federal government, which took office in December 2018, Cenagas was given responsibility for the project and promptly canceled it.
Had it gone ahead, Mexico would have had additional daily storage capacity of 600 million cubic feet of gas since the start of last year, the newspaper Reforma reported. That capacity could have helped to alleviate the gas shortages Mexico has faced this week.
Another 10-billion-cubic-feet-per-day gas storage project slated for Veracruz was canceled in May 2020.
The government’s cancelation of new rounds of oil and gas block auctions initiated by its predecessor was another of the self-inflicted problems cited by Barrios. The auctions were designed to reduce Mexico’s dependence on natural gas imports by selling off blocks to private companies but the government nevertheless stopped them, she said.
President López Obrador is determined to cut Mexico’s reliance on fuel imports but he wants state-owned companies, not private ones, to take the lead.
Barrios noted that the previous government created conditions that allowed renewable energy companies to make a greater contribution to Mexico’s energy mix but the López Obrador administration has adopted a hostile attitude toward the sector and is seeking to sideline it in favor of the CFE.
“They’ve been blocking the [different] options that Mexico has, especially with this preferential initiative that seeks to block private investment,” the analyst said.
Barrios: natural gas auctions were designed to reduce Mexico’s dependence on natural gas imports. But the government scrapped them.
She questioned why the government is blocking such investment when it doesn’t have money of its own to invest in the electricity sector.
“It’s clear that the government doesn’t have resources to invest in the Mexican electricity system. It’s not me saying it, the federal budget says it,” Barrios said.
Víctor Ramírez, another energy analyst, said that greater transmission capacity in the national grid could have provided greater resilience in the electricity system when the gas supply interruption began. He added that a lack of transmission capacity is a longstanding problem.
“There has been a lack of transmission development. Some of the lines that had problems due to overflow in the early hours [of Monday] are lines that should have been reinforced. It’s something that this government neglected to do as well as the previous government,” Ramírez said.
However, Mexico remains vulnerable to further major outages while it continues to depend heavily on natural gas imports, which are used to generate a large percentage of the country’s energy and supply private manufacturing companies, some of which were forced to halt production this week.
For now, natural gas flows from Texas appear to be normalizing even though Texas Governor Greg Abbott placed a temporary ban on the fuel leaving the state to ensure power generators there have sufficient supplies amid the cold weather the state is experiencing.
The website Natural Gas Intelligence reported that scheduled deliveries of piped gas from Texas to Mexico increased to 1.6 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) on Thursday from 1.3 Bcf/d on Wednesday and 1.1 Bcf/d on Tuesday. Export volumes from Texas to Mexico typically exceed 2 Bcf/d.
Although shipments have declined this week “there are still significant gas flows into Mexico,” said Matthew Lewis, senior director of research at East Daley Capital Advisors, a Colorado based provider of oil sector data.
Their latest sentence is for the murder of a 13-year-old girl in 2012.
A couple known as the “monsters of Ecatepec” — they admitted to killing at least 20 women in México state — have been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a 13-year-old girl in 2012.
Juan Carlos Hernández Bejar and Patricia Martínez Bernal, arrested in Ecatepec, México state, in October 2018 while wheeling a baby carriage containing human remains, have now been sentenced for 10 crimes including nine femicides.
A district court judge in Ecatepec, a sprawling municipality that is notorious for crime, agreed that evidence presented by the México state Attorney General’s Office was sufficient to prove their guilt in the murder of the girl, a neighbor of the couple.
Hernández and Martínez were also issued with a fine of 311,650 pesos (US $15,250). The victim was lured into the couple’s home on April 12, 2012 and Hernández attacked her with a sharp object, causing her death.
He then mutilated the girl’s body and together with Martínez placed the various parts in plastic bags and a sack that were dumped on a vacant lot.
In May 2019, they were given an additional 4 1/2 years in jail for human trafficking, namely the selling of the baby to another couple.
The couple were given several separate prison sentences between June and October 2019 for the murder of seven woman and a child. The sentences added up collectively to more than 300 years in jail.
An additional 40 years were added to the couple’s jail time in March 2020 for another femicide while the latest life imprisonment ruling was handed down on Wednesday.
Investigators found that Hernández, a self-declared misogynist, and Martínez lured women to their apartment on the pretext of selling used clothes and other items. Some of the women were sexually abused before they were killed and Hérnandez maintained a relationship with one of his victims before Martínez grew jealous and ordered her murder.
The former was found to have both psychotic and personality disorders while the latter has suffered from mental retardation since birth and also presented signs of delirium. Both, however, know the difference between right and wrong, the testing determined.
Romero is a department chief at the refinery in Tula, Hidalgo.
He resigned as secretary general of the Pemex worker’s union in late 2019 amid accusations of corruption but Carlos Romero Deschamps remains on the state oil company’s payroll.
Romero, a former Institutional Revolutionary Party senator and deputy who was at the helm of the Pemex union for 26 years, earned just over 1.2 million pesos (about US $60,000) last year in salaries and benefits, according to a declaration of assets publicly available on the federal government’s payroll transparency website.
The 77-year-old, named by Forbes magazine in 2013 as one of the 10 most corrupt politicians in Mexico, is apparently employed as a department chief at the Pemex refinery in Tula, Hidalgo.
The news website Sin Embargo asked the Public Administration Ministry, which manages the payroll website, about Romero’s employment at Pemex and was told that the online platform “only loads information that [government] departments send.”
Pemex didn’t respond to the news outlet’s request for comment. Sin Embargo said that Romero’s ongoing employment at the company is linked to a favorable collective agreement signed in mid-2019 that remains current and allows him to collect a salary even though he is under criminal investigation and ostensibly left the company. The same agreement stipulates that Pemex must pay the legal costs of any worker accused of committing a crime while on the job.
Federal authorities have opened 12 investigations into the former union boss for crimes including fraud, embezzlement, illicit enrichment, influence peddling and money laundering. But only three investigations remain open, according to a report by the newspaper El País.
The three ongoing probes were launched by the government’s Financial Intelligence Unit. No warrants for Romero’s arrest have been issued.
Víctor Manuel Jacobo Domínguez, a Pemex employee who is part of a dissident workers’ group that has long accused Romero of corruption, told Sin Embargo that the government reached deals with the longtime union boss that ensure he will never be brought to justice.
Sergio Carlos Morales Quintana, chief of the National Petroleum Front, said in a recent interview that Romero is still involved in corrupt activity at Pemex, even though President López Obrador has pledged to rid the state company – and the entire government – of corruption.
“He continues to manage the threads of corruption within Petróleos Mexicanos,” he said.
Another high-profile Pemex figure, former CEO Emilio Lozoya, is also under investigation by federal authorities for alleged corruption but scant progress has been made in his case more than a year after he was arrested in Spain.
