According to the think tank México Evalúa, the federal Attorney General's Office's poor results are due to 'deficiencies and omissions in its institutional design.'
Impunity in Mexico remains rampant, according to a new study by a public policy think tank.
Two years after the federal government created a new, supposedly more autonomous federal Attorney General’s office (FGR), 95.1% of federal cases still go unpunished, México Evalúa said in its report entitled “Observatorio de la transición 2020” (2020 Transition Observatory).
Only 4.9% of cases investigated by the FGR are resolved with a prison sentence or other punishment, the think tank said.
Other studies have detected similarly high levels of impunity and just last month the United States Department of State cited impunity as a major problem in Mexico in a human rights report.
México Evalúa found that more than 70% of FGR investigations are running behind schedule. It also determined that the FGR, headed by Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero – a veteran lawman and ally of President López Obrador, has gone backward in five of six “transformation” areas in which it was assessed.
In its 2019 report, the think tank said the FGR’s progress toward autonomy was 27.7% complete. However, the new report said progress was now only 20.1% complete. The FGR also went backward in the areas of institutional development, normative development, pace of transformation and resolution effectiveness.
The only area in which it improved was “citizens’ confidence,” with 25% of people now trusting the FGR, according to the study, up from 21.4% a year ago.
México Evalúa also said that the FGR’s coordination and collaboration with other government institutions are declining.
“The Attorney General’s Office and its head have interpreted the autonomy of the institution as an open invitation to operate without transparency, in an isolated way, … turning its back on other institutions, citizens and especially victims,” said México Evalúa director Edna Jaime during the presentation of the study on Wednesday.
The think tank said the poor results are due to “deficiencies and omissions in its institutional design,” problems that also plagued its predecessor, known as the PGR.
México Evalúa noted that the FGR has not yet established a citizens’ participation committee, although it should have done so two years ago. Input from citizens is “almost nonexistent,” it said.
In addition, it doesn’t have budgetary or administrative autonomy nor a “criminal prosecution plan built hand in hand with citizens,” the think tank said. Such a plan, it added, would allow the FGR to know which crimes to prioritize for investigation.
México Evalúa also evaluated the progress made in the “institutional transformation” of the new Mexico City Attorney General’s Office (FGJ) and gave it a comparatively glowing assessment, even though impunity levels are also extremely high in the capital — 97.7% in 2019.
The think tank praised the FGJ’s “effective incorporation of citizens’ participation in the drawing up of a criminal prosecution plan” and its “effective supervision and control mechanisms.”
The process of the transformation of the FJG, headed by Attorney General Ernestina Godoy, offers a “clear example” for the transformation of other state-based Attorney General’s offices, México Evalúa said.
Upon coming to Mexico, the writer learned for the first time to appreciate the social perks of sharing an alcoholic beverage with others. Giovanna Gomes unsplash.com
I was 20, a month away from 21, when I first came to Mexico on an exchange program.
Living in a college dorm room for the previous three years over 1,000 miles from my family had already given me a taste of quite a few new freedoms. But attending college on a small “dry” campus in a town with only one bar, drinking was not one of them.
Not that the desire was on my radar in any kind of serious way. I grew up in a family where pretty much nobody drank, ever. It’s not that they were alcoholics and working to abstain. Alcohol just was never a part of the picture, those kinds of vices being something for far more troubled types — the kinds of people who screamed at their kids in front of everybody in grocery stores or obnoxiously kept the neighbors awake with whoops and hollers at 2 a.m.
The implication of this understanding was that where alcohol was involved, any manner of terrible things could and did happen. Nobody would be safe if there were drunk people around.
Imagine my surprise and low-grade degree of alarm (that I tried very hard to hide), then, when I arrived in Mexico and saw both my teachers and classmates order beer to drink with their regular meals — and often — like it was nothing.
Oh no.
Fortunately, the scary, maniacal behavior that I was somehow prepared to expect never materialized. Eventually, I thought to myself, Well, when in Rome … and started ordering alcoholic drinks myself every once in a while. I found that I enjoyed the pleasant buzz and suddenly easier conversation, a boon for someone who was naturally reserved and easily prone to embarrassment like me.
It took me a while to like beer, though. Granted, at the time, I didn’t know any better and drank a lot of Sol and Corona. They are what they are, and many people like and appreciate them.
Since that year of learning to enjoy as well as moderate alcohol (after a bit of trial and error, of course), both my puritanical assumptions and my palate have changed quite a bit.
One thing that I don’t think most Mexicans realize about the United States is that it’s actually a much more socially conservative place, on average, than entertainment or Spring Break exports would have them believe. After all, I wasn’t part of a commune or super-religious community. I can’t have been the only kid that grew up with those assumptions about alcohol.
And while I don’t have the numbers to back me up on this, my own observations from living in Mexico for the past 19 years have made it clear to me that moderate, social, casual alcohol consumption is not considered the deviant behavior that it was where I come from. Kids are sent to the store to fetch more caguamas (liter bottles of beer) during family gatherings; drinks seem to be present at every party, something special to be shared.
And while I don’t encourage people to get totally wasted, it’s refreshing not to see worried glances across the room when alcohol is served.
The value put on alcohol here was made especially clear to me when, during quarantine, owners of small businesses argued that beer was actually an essential product. The later sometimes-dry laws and limits on consumption were frustrating, and black market sales reached fairly ridiculous heights during those first few months of the pandemic.
Thankfully, after a while of limiting the purchase of any kind of alcohol to certain days and times — which felt like a halfway prohibition on top of everything else — it’s back on the collective table.
And now that it is, I’m not taking it for granted. Over the past year, I’ve especially come to love and appreciate rather high-end artisanal beer, and it’s become quite an innovative industry that is growing just as much in my city of Xalapa as in other more established brewing areas of Mexico. We’ve got several delicious homegrown brews now, and it seems that more are frequently being added.
Heartening too is the growth of women-owned breweries across the country. I’ve thought about them a lot lately as I myself have recently turned from beer fan to beer fan and beer brewer (involving a blackberry English porter that is just lovely and that I am very proud of). Might I one day join their ranks?
As my partner likes to say, beer is noble. It gives back to you what you put in. And when something is truly special, a deepening understanding of its complexity will inevitably lead to a deepening love and appreciation as well.
Granted, it might also lead to increased levels of snobbish attitudes — it certainly has in my own case — but it’s to be expected: once you’ve read Isabel Allende, after all, it’s hard to look at the Twilight series in the same light.
For now, I’m just glad I have so many delicious, local and innovative choices, as well as the possibility of creating brand-new recipes. Because even when the world is falling apart, we’re called to appreciate beauty and be creative.
So, this week, let’s take a break from politics, the economy, the coronavirus. The problems we have matter, but I’d be willing to bet that even Angela Merkel kicks back with a celebrity magazine and something bubbly once in a while.
Let’s not forget to do the same; it’s been a rough year, and we’ve earned the right to let ourselves experience a little magic once in a while.
Salud, my friends.
Sarah DeVries is a writer and translator based in Xalapa, Veracruz. She can be reached through her website, sdevrieswritingandtranslating.com.
A Morena and Labor Party candidate for mayor of Huetamo, Michoacán, is wanted by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which describes him as armed and dangerous.
Rogelio Portillo Jaramillo, 41, appears on the DEA’s Most Wanted Fugitives list for conspiracy to distribute narcotics in the United States.
Portillo denied that he is wanted by the DEA and said it was part of a “dirty war” cooked up by his opponents to obstruct the political movement he is leading.
He claimed he personally called the DEA to ask if he was a wanted man, and was told that he was not.
However, the DEA has confirmed that Portillo is indeed the person on the most wanted list, and that there are no doubts over his identity.
The information on the DEA website.
The DEA lists Portillo as white, male, brown haired, green eyed, with a height of 170 centimeters, a weight of 68 kilograms, a last known address in Houston, Texas, and says he is wanted for conspiracy to distribute, manufacture, or dispense a controlled substance.
Marcelino Portillo Mendoza, Rogelio Portillo’s uncle, is also on the DEA’s fugitives list. Another uncle, Gregorio Portillo Mendoza, offered to help mediate cartel violence in Guerrero in 2019.
These mezcal makers plug the hole at the top of their oven with a cross to give thanks for the agave harvest. all photos by Joseph Sorrentino
Braulio García Lezama is patiently trying to explain how a maestro mezcalero — a mezcal master — knows when the heart of an agave, called a piña, is ready to be cut and used to make mezcal.
“The shape of the piña changes when it is ready,” he said. “One needs to look. It takes two to three [years] for a person to learn when they are ready.”
I mention that some piñas are small, maybe 10 pounds, while others easily top 100 pounds.
“It is the maturation, not the size,” he continued. “The size does not matter. A maestro can tell from 100 meters that piñas are ready.”
When it’s clear that no amount of explaining can make me understand, he simply says, “One just knows.”
Braulio García.
San Diego de la Mesa Tochimiltzingo, Puebla, where García lives, is a small pueblo tucked into the Sierra Mixteca, a mountain range shared by Puebla and Oaxaca. He’s a maestro who’s been making mezcal for 40 years and is the head of the cooperative Productores Unidos de Agave Tochimiltzingo. Virtually everyone in the pueblo is involved in making mezcal, an arduous task.
Juice from agave (also called maguey) has been used to make pulque — a fermented, slightly alcoholic drink — for almost 2,000 years; Los Bebedores, an 1,800-year-old mural in Cholula, Puebla, depicts people drinking pulque. It was used during celebrations and in religious ceremonies.
Mezcal, made from the same plant, is made by distilling the juice, which increases its alcohol content. There’s some debate as to whether the Aztecs and other indigenous groups distilled the juice, and it’s generally accepted that distillation was introduced by the Spanish, who had been distilling liquors since sometime in the eighth century.
While the exact date when the process was begun in Mexico may be uncertain, mezcal is known to be the first distilled liquor made in the Americas.
It’s only supposed to only be made in one of nine states: Durango, Guerrero, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Puebla, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas and Zacatecas. This regulation, however, isn’t always followed.
San Diego de la Mesa didn’t start mezcal production until sometime in the 19th century.
The mezcal distillate’s bubbles, or perlas, are checked for quality.
“Some people think it was first made in 1864,” said Silvistre Reyes, a mezcalero.
García put it this way. “I learned from my father, who learned from his father, who learned from his. After that, who knows?”
While tequila can only be made from blue agave, mezcal can be made from many different types.
“There are four types of agave used in San Diego de la Mesa,” said García. “But Papalometl Tobolo and Espadín Angustifolia are considered best for mezcal because they are sweeter. Here, Papalometl is considered the best.”
Papalometl has small piñas and large, broad leaves while Espadín has large piñas and narrow, tall leaves.
It takes an agave plant six to 10 years to mature. Once a maestro determines that the piñas are ready, they’re harvested weekly from December to June in San Diego de la Mesa.
Tossing the cooked agave hearts.
“Older maguey are sweeter; smaller ones much less sweet,” said Reyes. “Different soils and different magueys yield different flavors.”
Inside a small concrete building, volcanic rocks that have been placed on blazing firewood have been heating for hours. Mezcaleros call this el horno — the oven.
“I cannot say what the temperature is,” said García. “We look at the flame. It must be between yellow and blue, then it is ready. One maestro may say, ‘Not yet,’ another, ‘It is ready.’ When everyone agrees, it is ready.”
Once that happens, the piñas are stacked around them.
The mound is first covered with palm mats and then dirt. When that’s done, a young man climbs atop the pile and is handed buckets of water, which he slowly pours through a hole in the top. Steam envelopes him. When he’s done, he’s handed a small wooden cross which he uses to plug the hole.
“The cross is put on the top to show our belief in God,” said García. “To give thanks for the harvest of agave.”
Covering the mezcal oven.
The piñas are cooked for four days — a step that gives the mezcal its intense, smoky flavor —and then left to cool for a day. When cooked, the piñas turn a dark brown. The air is filled with the smell of burned sugar.
The pile is dismantled — the piñas are tossed through the air to waiting young men — and collected in wheelbarrows. They’re chopped into small pieces, which are placed in large wooden tubs.
“Wood is better than plastic,” said García. “It gives the mezcal a better flavor. We use either pine or oak.”
Each tub contains about a tonne of maguey hearts and will yield around 80 liters of mezcal. Water, which is snow melt from Popocatépetl that has been collected in a large, deep well, is added.
“Agave and water,” said Reyes. “Nothing more.”
Large rocks placed on top — this is called a tepacite — weigh down the mixture, and it’s left to ferment for about a week.
A young man pours water onto the oven’s flames.
A maestro determines when the fermented liquid is ready to be distilled. A small amount of the liquid, which is dark brown at this stage, is removed with a thin tube and poured into a cup. A maestro will sip some, spit it out and be able to tell if it is ready.
“A maestro looks for the flavor,” said García. “It must be sweet and bitter. Sour is no good.”
Mezcal, like tequila, is distilled twice. The fermented liquid first is placed in a large still, an alambique, and heated. The vapor goes up a pipe, cools and is collected, drop by drop, in plastic containers. A smaller alambique is used for the second distillation.
To check for quality, a maestro uses a long tube to take a sample of the distillate. He’ll pour that into a small wooden cup and study the bubbles, which they call perlas — pearls.
“We check the perlas to know when it is ready,” said García. That is when the mezcal can finally be bottled.
Most mezcal in San Diego de la Mesa is white, i.e., not aged, although a three-year-old (añejo) is sometimes available. It’s strong, 75 to 100 proof (or more), and it’s best sipped slowly and in moderation, although all of the mezcal drinkers I spoke with assured me that drinking mezcal, even to excess, doesn’t cause hangovers (crudas in Mexico).
“It is drinking it with other alcohol like beer or rum that causes a cruda,” one man told me. I’m not so sure and have no desire to test the theory.
Mezcal production, like most artisanal processes in Mexico, is more art than science, dependent on knowledge handed down through generations. Every step is done under the direction of a maestro.
“It takes at least 10 years to become a maestro,” said García. “One has to know everything, from planting, when an agave is mature, the entire process through distillation. A person starts with something simple, like planting, chopping. Much later, they will learn about elhorno and fermentation. These two are the most difficult.”
There’s no test to determine when a person’s ready to be called a maestro.
“One is a maestro,” García explained, “when one does not have to ask questions.”
Álvarez, left, told an interviewer that he had to negotiate his brother’s release from kidnappers days before a scheduled fight in New York.
Mexican boxer Canelo Álvarez has revealed that he personally negotiated the successful release of his kidnapped brother in 2018 and that he is spending less time in Mexico due to security concerns.
In an interview with United States journalist Graham Bensinger, the unified super middleweight world champion recounted his experience negotiating the release of his brother just days before a fight in New York.
“Over the phone, I negotiated everything for his release,” Álvarez said.
“For three days, I negotiated with those assholes so that they would let him go. And after I negotiated, I was still thinking, imagine if this had been my daughter, my mother, my father. For me, it would have been even more difficult. And on top of that, I had to fight on Saturday and do a thousand interviews and everything, and no one knew anything,” he said.
“… They see me up there and they say, ‘Wow, it’s very easy.’ But nothing is easy in this life. Everything is difficult.”
Canelo Alvarez’s Guadalajara mansion tour (EXCLUSIVE)
Álvarez gives Bensinger a tour of his Guadalajara mansion during an interview that will air this weekend.
The boxer, a Jalisco native whose full name is Santos Saúl Álvarez Barragán, said he couldn’t ask the police for help because he suspected they were involved in the kidnapping. He said he was thankful that his brother survived the ordeal because kidnapping victims are often killed.
Álvarez, one of the world’s best paid athletes, told Bensinger during an interview at his Guadalajara mansion that he has his own security concerns in Mexico.
“I have security here because of people who can be greedy, those who steal at stoplights. There’s a lot of insecurity, too much insecurity. This is why I’m not here in Mexico much anymore, because it’s not safe,” he said.
“It’s worse still for me and for my family. … And the government is not concerned about this. They’re concerned about other things,” Álvarez added.
“… I think they [the government] should be more concerned about people’s safety, and I think they should have a very strict law for those who steal, for those who kidnap.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Álvarez also discussed his childhood struggles — including being bullied for having red hair, his recent bout with Covid-19, murder allegations his brother faced in 2012, his 2013 fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. and his disdain for Oscar De La Hoya, whose company, Golden Boy Promotions, formerly represented him.
Mexican boxer Canelo Álvarez speaking during his interview with Graham Bensinger, to be broadcast this weekend. screen capture
He also revealed that he plans to open a chain of 90 to 100 gas stations in Mexico to be called Canelo Energy.
A blockade at Oaxaca city’s airport has caused major flight disruptions and threatened to jeopardize Covid-19 vaccine supplies, while a separate blockade on the Oaxaca coastal highway in Puerto Escondido has been lifted.
At the airport, where teachers in training are protesting, 70 flights had been canceled by Wednesday morning. Earlier in the day, National Guardsmen were prevented from accessing Covid-19 vaccines destined for 117,000 state education workers but an agreement was negotiated with the protesters to allow access to the medication.
The teaching students are demanding that all graduates be given automatic job placements.
They appropriated public transit vehicles yesterday, and were expected to protest at vaccination centers today, where educational workers are receiving their shots.
During the last two weeks they have set fire to the offices of the state education authority, hijacked transit buses and blockaded roads and highways.
The airport blockade began Sunday but there were signs Wednesday morning that a settlement was imminent. State education representatives and students met for nine hours, wrapping up at 7:00 a.m. Wednesday with high expectations that the impasse would soon be over.
On the coast, meanwhile, a four-day blockade in a territorial dispute that paralyzed access to Puerto Escondido ended Tuesday night after Governor Alejandro Murat addressed protesting municipal authorities and residents.
The mayor of Santa María Colotepec installed a protest camp on Highway 200 on Friday over a decades old dispute with neighboring San Pedro Mixtepec over land within the city of Puerto Escondido.
Officials in Colotepec accused their counterparts in Mixtepec of influencing an agrarian court in underhanded fashion, which began when they presented a constitutional argument before the court in 2018.
Murat called on protesters to trust in authorities adjudicating the agrarian dispute, and also proposed a new peace agreement between the two communities.
Ex-US ambassador Landau: cartels have effective control over large parts of the country.
President López Obrador sees combating cartels as a distraction from his political agenda and has adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward them, according to former ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau.
Speaking at a roundtable event organized by the Council of American Ambassadors, Landau said that cartels are a “big problem in Mexico,” adding that they have effective control over large parts of the country.
“The estimates go anywhere from 35–40% of the country,” said the former ambassador, who served in Mexico for about 1 1/2 years before leaving the position in January due to the change of government in the United States.
“… President López Obrador … has a very ambitious domestic agenda, which is mostly about social programs; it’s kind of like he wants his great society in Mexico,” Landau said, comparing the government’s agenda to the “Great Society” agenda pursued by former U.S. president Lyndon Johnson.
“He sees the cartels, … to continue the analogy, as his Vietnam, which it has been for some of his predecessors, and so I think … he sees that as a distraction from focusing on his agenda,” he said.
“So he has basically adopted a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards them, which is troubling to our government, obviously. I think it’s a big problem for Mexico.”
“… There had never been a brazen attack like that in the heart of Mexico City, and somewhat to my shock, the Mexican central government basically did nothing,” he said.
“They didn’t say ‘Enough is enough; we can’t put up with this.’ AMLO is very insistent on trying to avoid that kind of conflict,” Landau said, referring to the president by his nickname.
“They don’t really have much of a great police force in Mexico, so a lot of actions are done by the Mexican military, even domestic actions. They kind of sent a military SWAT team in … and they had captured him [Ovidio Guzmán] and then, almost within minutes, his organization had surrounded the perimeter of the area and taken hostages, and basically the Mexican government backed down and let him go because they didn’t want to have more widespread bloodshed in Culiacán,” Landau said.
Mission Mexico: A Roundtable with Ambassador Christopher Landau
The former ambassador went on to say that Mexican cartels are a “real menace” to both Mexico and the United States but the U.S. can’t solve the problem on its own “in somebody else’s sovereign country.”
“The Mexicans are very nationalistic; they’re not going to let the Americans in to take care of the cartels. Believe me, President Trump literally offered that point-blank to President López Obrador. He says, ‘Listen, I’ll send our people down whenever you give me the green light, and we will take out the cartels.’ I’m not sure it’s that easy because I think if you cut the head off the snake, the snake has five heads all of a sudden,” Landau said.
“But I do think that there is more that we have to do in both countries to try to weaken these organizations, particularly on the money front.”
Later in the virtual roundtable, Landau said that López Obrador triumphed at the 2018 election because the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for much of the 20th century and between 2012 and 2018, and the National Action Party, which was in office from 2000 to 2012, brought no “substantial change” to Mexico.
“AMLO is totally a creature of Mexican domestic politics. Trump had nothing to do with AMLO’s rise to power. It was basically a failure of the two parties, … there was no substantial change, and the average Mexican was fed up with corruption and turned to AMLO, who was kind of one of these perennial candidates … but he offered real change, and he’s giving them some pretty significant change,” he said.
The former ambassador, who became something of a social media celebrity during his time in Mexico due to his frequent Twitter posts about his love of the country, also told last week’s roundtable that the first time he met with López Obrador the president told him that he was a “domestic president” and “not really interested in international affairs.”
“[He said] ‘I think the best foreign policy is domestic policy,’ and I think he’s been very true to that. … Whatever AMLO’s flaws, he’s certainly not looking to play a big role on the international stage, unlike a [Hugo] Chávez, who always wanted to do that,” Landau said.
Asked about Landau’s comments during Wednesday’s press conference, López Obrador said Mexico and the U. S. have distinct conceptions of how to deal with organized crime. He suggested that the U.S. might prefer to destroy them by “extermination or massacre.”
“[But] not us. Our government is humanist and we want to obtain peace through justice.”
López Obrador also rejected Landau’s claim that cartels control up to 40% of the country. “It’s an exaggeration. With all respect, that’s not the case.”
A 2.5-tonne fentanyl seizure in Sinaloa in February.
Sitting on a dirty sidewalk in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, Patrick Bejarano cradles a syringe in his hand, getting ready to shoot up a mixture of white powder and water.
“It’s fentanyl,” he grins. “Heroin no longer gets me high and this is much stronger and cheaper. Fentanyl is pure rush and that’s what we look for.”
For more than half a century, Tijuana has been a manufacturing hub — churning out electronics, medical devices and components for aircraft and cars from factories on the doorstep of the U.S. But Bejarano is a link in a newer cross-border supply chain: synthetic drugs.
“For the cartels in Mexico, the biggest profits now come from methamphetamines and fentanyl,” says Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
U.S. authorities say Mexico is already the source of 90% of the illicit drugs crossing the border. As Mexico prepares to legalize marijuana, analysts say the lucrative trade in fentanyl will continue to boom, posing a headache for new U.S. President Joe Biden as deaths from synthetic opioids, and drugs laced with them, continue to rise.
Like rival carmakers, Mexico’s two most powerful drug cartels — Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation — compete to import raw materials, transform them in their factories and export the finished product to the U.S.
Their target market is not people such as Bejarano in Mexico. But, in the same way that Mexicans began buying lots of television sets after the country became a world-leading TV maker, booming domestic use is another sign of how big the fentanyl trade has become in Latin America’s second-biggest economy.
“Security forces say you can calculate drug production from the size of seizures,” says Anabel Hernández, an investigative reporter and author who writes about drug trafficking and organized crime. “The amounts confiscated represent about 10 to 15% of real production.”
On that basis, the trend is worrying. While U.N. data show a 10-fold plunge in marijuana seizures in Mexico in less than a decade — from 2.3 million kilograms in 2010 to 231,000 in 2018 — fentanyl seizures rose nearly 500% last year to 1.3 million kilos, according to Mexico’s defense minister.
Drug cartels have adapted to meet changing demand and have been able to make use of the supply routes into the U.S. that they built up to traffic marijuana, heroin and cocaine.
“Cocaine is still very lucrative,” says Steven Dudley, co-director of Insight Crime, which tracks and analyzes the narcotics trade in the Americas. “But marijuana is yesterday’s news. Fentanyl is today’s news.”
Fentanyl pills seized in the US, product of Mexico.
Pot legalization will not wipe out the illicit cannabis trade but synthetics, which are simpler to produce and transport and far more lucrative, “have changed the business incentives,” says Hernández.
Mexico has impounded growing volumes of precursor chemicals and fentanyl pills at airports. Late last year, its authorities also discovered a laboratory in Mexico City with vats two stories tall containing chemicals.
Shipments are increasing, too. Since October 2020 alone, U.S. border officials seized 2,234 kilos of fentanyl — 3% more than they found in the October 2019-September 2020 fiscal year. Fentanyl is also finding its way into heroin and other drugs, making them more addictive and more deadly.
According to the DEA, “since the initial disruption of Covid-19, Mexican cartels have reinforced supplies of precursor materials, increased production and are sending larger fentanyl and methamphetamine loads into the U.S.”
Vigil explains that the cartels dispatch so-called Marco Polos to China to buy precursor chemicals and also the finished fentanyl product. India has emerged as another supplier.
A kilo of fentanyl can be bought online in China for about US $9,000, Vigil says. “Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. You can cut that and make a lot of kilos. That investment of a little over $9,000 would net you $2 million,” he said.
On the streets of Tijuana, a dose of fentanyl goes for $2.40. One user, Armando, says he does not know if the “China white” — as powdered heroin is known — that he mixes with crystal meth is laced with fentanyl. His body apparently does: in the past couple of months he has overdosed six times. “I’m surprised I’m still here,” he says.
Mexican fentanyl supplies to the U.S. have been increasing since 2019 while the supply of the drug directly to the U.S. from China has “decreased substantially,” according to the DEA.
Once across the border “Mexican traffickers have an advantage: they can mass-produce and undercut even the most wily and entrepreneurial distributors in the U.S.,” Dudley says, using their experience and connections from methamphetamine trafficking.
With Covid-19 and a migrant emergency at the border, drugs have not yet loomed large in bilateral U.S.-Mexico relations since President Biden took over. “But I think the perception in the U.S. is that Mexico isn’t paying enough attention to fentanyl production,” says Cecilia Farfán Méndez, an expert on drug trafficking organizations at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego.
Bilateral relations remain strained after a row last year over the brief arrest in the U.S. of Salvador Cienfuegos, Mexico’s former defence minister, and a law that experts say will hamper the intelligence-sharing that is crucial to counter-narcotics efforts.
Mexico destroyed 175 laboratories last year, up by 92% on 2019, but Dudley says more needs to be done on both sides. “All these things are pointing in the wrong direction if you think your only solution is to stop supply,” he says. “It has to be supply and demand.”
Guerrero would-be gubernatorial candidate Félix Salgado blamed the Morena party for not submitting his precampaign expenses by the deadline, the reason his candidacy was disallowed.
The Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF) has confirmed that two Morena party candidates cannot contest the upcoming elections for governor in Guerrero and Michoacán.
At a virtual session on Tuesday, the court upheld the National Electoral Institute’s (INE) decision to strip Félix Salgado and Raúl Morón of their candidacies because they failed to report their precampaign expenses. Its decision came after the two candidates challenged the INE’s ruling.
Six of seven judges voted in favor of barring Salgado from contesting the June 6 election in Guerrero, while Morón was blocked from running in Michoacán by a 5–2 vote.
Morena, Mexico’s ruling party, was given a period of 48 hours to nominate new candidates for governor in the two states.
Salgado, a federal senator on leave who has been accused of rape by several women and faced widespread opposition to his candidacy, appeared before the TEPJF on Monday to plead his case in a closed session that lasted almost five hours. He said on Twitter that he spoke in the “name of everyone” with a “cool head” and a “warm heart.”
“Our voice was heard, and we place trust in the decision … the judges will have to give,” Salgado wrote.
At a press conference on Monday, Salgado, a former mayor of Acapulco, blamed Morena for not submitting the report of his precampaign expenses to the INE. He said he had reported those expenses to Morena on January 9 but it failed to pass the information on to the electoral authorities by the January 11 deadline.
He said the INE failed to notify him that his expenses hadn’t been reported before it canceled his registration as a candidate on March 25. “That’s serious,” Salgado said. “The INE committed grave violations.”
In a video message posted to social media on Tuesday night, Morón called the TEPJF’s decision “unconstitutional, illegal and arbitrary.” He said he remained committed to the “fourth transformation,” a nickname for the federal government and the Morena movement more broadly, and he expressed confidence that the party would win the gubernatorial election in Michoacán.
President López Obrador, Morena’s founder, earlier this month called INE’s decision to bar Salgado and Morón from running an “attack on democracy.”
On Wednesday, he described the electoral court’s decision as a “blow” to the “fledgling Mexican democracy.”
The ruling to strip Salgado and Morón of their candidacies for not reporting their precampaign expenses — less than 20,000 pesos (US $1,000) in both cases — “has no justification,” López Obrador said, charging that the TEPJF and the INE failed to take the view of everyday citizens into account.
“I think that it is excessive but also antidemocratic. That’s why I say that it was a blow to democracy because democracy is to respect the will of the people; in democracy it’s the people who decide, it’s the people who are in charge,” he said.
The president announced that all Mexico's seniors were offered inoculation against Covid-19, although 4 million of them elected not to be vaccinated.
All of Mexico’s approximately 15 million seniors have now had the opportunity to be vaccinated against Covid-19, but some 4 million decided not to get a shot.
President López Obrador said Tuesday that just over 11 million people aged 60 and over had received at least one dose of a vaccine. Seniors who haven’t yet had their second required dose will receive it in the coming weeks and months.
“The commitment to vaccinate all adults over 60 in the country in April was met,” López Obrador said. “Today [Tuesday] it is reported that all seniors in all municipalities were vaccinated.”
The president clarified that not all seniors chose to be inoculated, adding that those who decided not to get a shot will be encouraged to do so when vaccines are again available in the place they live.
“At [the national statistics agency] Inegi, it’s estimated that there are 15 million [seniors], and the number vaccinated is just over 11 million. What’s happening? There are those who haven’t wanted to get vaccinated, and we’re going to persuade them. … We’re going to seek that the highest number possible are vaccinated,” López Obrador said.
He said that vaccines were given to seniors in all of Mexico’s 2,456 municipalities and that only 14 communities decided not to join the vaccination program.
With seniors having had the opportunity to get a shot, the national vaccination program will extend to people aged 50–59 in the first week of May, the government said Tuesday without providing specific details about dates or where the rollout will begin.
People in that age bracket can register starting Wednesday on the government’s registration website. To do so, people will be required to enter their CURP identity number, the state and municipality where they live, their postal code, their telephone number and an email address.
At the Health Ministry’s coronavirus press briefing on Tuesday night, health promotion chief Ricardo Cortés said that people can now use Google Maps to find the location of vaccination centers in the place they live. The federal Health Ministry and state health authorities provided details of vaccination center locations to Google, which added the information to its maps site, he said.
By entering search terms on Google Maps such as “Covid vaccine near me” or “Covid vaccination in (the city or town I live)” in English or Spanish, people can find the location of their nearest vaccination center.
The federal government expects to receive at least 12.4 million additional vaccine doses in May, a figure just under the approximately 12.7 million people aged 50–59 in Mexico. However, apparently recognizing that not everyone in that age bracket will want to get vaccinated, health official Ruy López said Tuesday that the goal is to inoculate just over 9.1 million people aged 50–59.
As of Tuesday night, just under 16.7 million vaccine doses had been administered in Mexico, mainly to seniors and health workers.
Mexico’s accumulated coronavirus case tally is currently 2.33 million, while the official Covid-19 death toll is 215,547, although the government has acknowledged that the real number of fatalities is much higher.
