Low cost carrier Interjet is filing for bankruptcy to reorganize financially under Mexican law, and plans to resume operations within months.
Interjet stopped flying on December 11 following three years of continuous net losses, for reasons unrelated to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The airline’s employees are currently on strike, and went seven months without payment before Interjet stopped flights in December.
Since 2013, the airline was profitable only in 2013, 2015, and 2016. Between 2017 and 2019, Interjet had a combined net loss of over US $211 million.
“The objective of this agreement is to resume operations as soon as possible while respecting the employees’ labor rights,” read an Interjet statement.
The company has previously stated that it plans to resume flights between June and July, with a starting fleet of 15 aircraft.
Mexican bankruptcy proceedings can result in financial reorganization or cessation of operations. A third of all bankruptcy processes resulted in cessation of operations between 2000 and 2020, according to government data.
Flag carrier Aeroméxico is also under bankruptcy process, but in the United States. It announced a reduced order of Boeing airplanes last week, and plans to exit from proceedings later this year.
A moment at the World Travel and Tourism global summit this year in Cancún.
Member companies of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) will invest US $2.5 billion in projects in four Mexican states, the WTTC chairman announced Monday.
Speaking at the WTTC’s global summit in Cancún, Quintana Roo, Chris Nassetta, who is also the CEO of Hilton, said the investment will go to Quintana Roo, Baja California Sur, Jalisco and Yucatán and generate more than 100,000 jobs.
About 65% of the total investment, or $1.6 billion, will go to Quintana Roo, and in excess of $250 million will go to each of Baja California Sur and Jalisco. Nassetta didn’t offer details about the projects, but much of the money is believed to be destined for the hotel sector.
The tourism news website Reportur reported that Nassetta; executives with Certares, a private equity firm and large investor in the tourism sector; and Apple Leisure Group, a travel and hospitality conglomerate, expressed interest in investing in Yucatán during meetings with Governor Mauricio Vila.
Nassetta expressed interest in the development of boutique and hacienda-style hotels in Yucatán, while Greg O’Hara, founder and senior managing director of Certares, said he was seeking to invest in projects that generate social and economic benefits and provide jobs for residents of the state.
Reportur said that O’Hara told Vila that he was very interested in learning more about beach destinations in Yucatán as well as the state’s haciendas — developed during the henequen boom – and cenotes, or natural swimmable sinkholes.
Alejandro Zozaya, CEO of Apple Leisure Group, spoke to Vila about the possibility of increasing that company’s tourism offerings in Yucatán. Zozaya and the governor discussed the nature-oriented, adventure, cultural and archaeological tourism sectors as well as the state government’s “365 days in Yucatán” tourism promotion campaign, Reportur said.
Apple Leisure Group is reactivating previously announced plans to invest $1 billion in the construction of hotels in various states of Mexico. Zozaya said that the new hotels will have a combined total of about 3,000 rooms.
Sola de Vega, where the local government has been dismissed by the state.
Ten people have been killed and at least four injured during two confrontations in agrarian conflicts between communities in Oaxaca’s Sierra Sur, 160 kilometers from Puerto Escondido.
The first clash on Friday night killed seven and left three injured. Another confrontation late Sunday night killed three and left another person with gunshot wounds.
One dispute is between San Agustín Rancho Viejo, located in the municipality of Villa Sola de Vega, and San Vicente Coatlán; another is between the community of El Guayabo, also located in Villa Sola de Vega, and the town and municipality of Santa María Sola.
The three people injured in Friday’s shooting were taken to hospital on Saturday night but armed men later entered the hospital and forcibly removed them and members of their families.
“They were taken away to an unknown destination and we were told that if we continued treating them we would have consequences, that we’d better do nothing,” said one of the nurses.
He added that the director of the hospital immediately sent everyone home and closed the facility.
In response, the Oaxaca state Congress has disbanded the local government in Villa Sola de Vega.
The writer had a simple idea to bring this and other Mexican crocodiles to television fame, but the execution of said idea was harder than expected.
Many a crazy scheme has been pondered by friends sharing a few drinks in a setting conducive to lofty aspirations.
Our crazy scheme was to bring a reality TV show to Mexico. As the bar bill mounted, so did our dreams of something truly epic, a gripping and colorful portrait of life in Mexico.
However, the multitude of impediments became frighteningly obvious in the clear light of the following day. Still, we had had fun fantasizing the previous evening, and time spent with friends is never squandered.
Three years later, we revived the conversation, and it suddenly became something with potential, something damn near viable, something that could come to pass within our lifetime.
My Hollywood friend who has been involved in reality TV (an oxymoron) was the executive producer and director of a show called Gator Boys. There are not any alligators on the west coast of Mexico, but there are plenty of crocodiles. We just needed a feasible scenario to get the ball rolling.
The theme of the Gator Boys was to capture nuisance alligators in the suburbs of Florida and release them back to the wild. Since crocodile management in this part of Mexico is handled with automatic weapons, we could make a case for the humane treatment of native wildlife.
Our first step was to create a need, so we went to the local aquarium, which has much more than fish tanks and performing seals. I knew Jorge, the director of Acuario Mazatlán, because I had earlier taken several swims in his shark tank, all for good causes.
It was my job to get a meeting with the director of the aquarium and then let the show’s producer deliver the sales pitch. At the end of an hour, we had a letter from the aquarium asking the Gator Boys for help to humanely remove problem crocs in the area.
Several years later, Jorge confided to me that at the time, he thought we were seriously delusional.
With our formal request from Mazatlán to train aquarium personnel on how to safely capture crocodiles, the show’s producer went to The Discovery Channel and pitched the project. The response was guarded but sufficiently positive to generate a “to do” list for the next step.
Because the aquarium is part of the municipality of Mazatlán, its approval was at the top of the list. My first meeting was with the deputy mayor, which went well enough that a meeting with the mayor was set up for the following week.
Would-be Mazatlán crocodile hunters.
The director of the aquarium, The Captured Tourist Woman (TCTW) and myself were ushered into the mayor’s office to explain our plan to showcase Mazatlán with great publicity at no cost to the city.
Tourism in Mazatlán had dried up during former president Felipe Calderón’s drug war. Cruise ships had stopped coming, and the only thing the foreign press emphasized about the place was the body count.
A popular TV show, which played across the globe, could help to portray the city as a tourist-friendly destination, not a war zone. The aquarium director explained to the mayor that the local solution for crocodiles was several 30-round magazines of 7.62 mm emptied into the hapless reptile. He went on to say that a humane capture program would be seen as a beneficial and ecological action created and supported by Mazatlán.
During the director’s five-minute dissertation, the mayor was smiling and nodding; it looked like it was going well. When the mayor turned and asked me what a typical scenario would be, I told him we would sandbag each end of a street in the very popular and beautiful central historic area, fill the block-long street with water (to simulate the aftermath of a hurricane), and then turn a croc loose in the block-long pool. The store owner in the middle of the block would call the aquarium, and the Gator Boys, with trainees in tow, would come to the rescue.
The mayor was not smiling any longer. In fact, he looked to be seriously pissed off. He extended his right arm, making a gun with his hand, and in a loud voice went, “tatatatatata … tatatata,” emulating the sound of a machine gun as he raked us with his finger.
“The tourists are afraid to come to Mazatlán because they think the narcos will kill them and you want to put crocodiles in the streets of Centro Histórico?” he said.
I had to admit he had a good point.
The mayor finally gave us his blessing when we agreed that all the crocs would be captured out of town.
Now that we were properly sanctioned, again with an appropriate letter, I went to No. 2 on the list, finding a batch of amenable crocs to capture.
For the show to run its standard 43 minutes, our flatland rednecks needed to make at least four captures. We would find scenic “capture” locations, plant a crocodile and then stage a capture, which would “save” a nearby village.
My instructions from the producer were to find four large crocodiles — and one needed to be a monster. It became clear in time that my Hollywood friend was promising the Discovery Channel people something named Godzilla, a monster that was eating village dogs and goats; women and children would soon be next.
The plan was for the Boys to come a week early so that we could capture several wild crocs to use in the staged scenes; I just needed to find them.
I contacted a friend who is a nationally recognized wildlife photographer. He agreed to take me to an estuary that he claimed to be full of crocodiles. The estuary is part of a shrimp farm cooperative and a government-protected habitat. The official crocodile count was above 800.
When we arrived at the estuary, I could see several dark shapes, which at first looked like partially submerged logs but were not. The road ended at a short causeway that crossed to a one-room brick structure. There were five men sitting under a covered patio.
In the center of the causeway sat an older Ford V8 engine with a pump on one end and a generator on the other. We crossed, and I explained that we needed four large crocodiles for a TV show called Gator Boys. Of course, the response was wide-eyed incredulity.
Then one of the men stepped forward and said he knew of the show. He volunteered the group to help in any way they could. When we further explained we needed to actually catch the crocs, they thought we were joking and all laughed appropriately.
We clarified that it would be the Gator Boys who would do the actual catching and that I just wanted them to show us where the armored predators took their siestas on dry land. At that point, I asked about the possibility of finding a really big crocodile and was pleasantly surprised when they all nodded their heads in unison while giving each other knowing glances. Deranged gringos are always quite entertaining to the locals.
Will we be eaten by a pack of hungry crocs? Will Godzilla pose for pictures? Will our crazy scheme actually work? These questions and more will be answered in the next chapter of The Crocodile Chronicles.
The writer describes himself as a very middle-aged man who lives full-time in Mazatlán with a captured tourist woman and the ghost of a half-wild dog. He can be reached at [email protected].
Mexico received 870,000 vaccines from India in February, but the president said he won't press the embattled nation to send the next promised shipment.
Mexico won’t push India to deliver a second pledged shipment of Covid-19 vaccines due to the dire coronavirus situation in that country, President López Obrador said Monday.
The country, which has recently been recording hundreds of thousands of new cases per day, sent a shipment of 870,000 AstraZeneca doses to Mexico in February. It was to send a second shipment of more than 1 million doses, but López Obrador said that Mexico will get by without them.
“We won’t need them, and we understand their situation, so [not demanding the shipment] is a way of expressing solidarity,” he told reporters at his regular news conference.
The president noted that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs last week expressed “our solidarity” to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
López Obrador said that Modi has acted kindly toward Mexico, adding that the prime minister even wished him well when he was sick with Covid-19 earlier this year.
Mexico has so far received 22.1 million doses of five different vaccines and had administered about 16.5 million by Monday night. Approximately 2.7 million of the doses received are AstraZeneca shots supplied by the United States under a loan scheme. The White House announced Monday that it planned to send 60 million doses of that vaccine to other countries but didn’t specify where they would go.
Meanwhile, federal health official Ruy López said Tuesday that vaccination of people aged 50–59 will commence in the first week of May. The director of the National Center for Disease Prevention and Control Programs told López Obrador’s morning press conference that the goal is to vaccinate just over 9.1 million people in that age bracket.
People aged 50–59 can register their interest in being vaccinated starting Wednesday on the government’s registration website, López said. In order to register, 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.
López Obrador said the vaccination plan is able to proceed to the next stage — the inoculation of people aged 60 and over began on February 15 and is ongoing — because the government made timely arrangements to secure vaccines.
“We established contact with laboratories that were testing vaccines, we entered into communication with them and we started to establish contracts,” he said. “… The governments of Russia, China, India and the United States have helped us a lot. So we’ve been able to have vaccine supply.”
With only 13 doses given per 100 people in Mexico, it is unlikely that vaccination has had much of an impact in stopping the spread of coronavirus. Nevertheless, new cases, Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations are all on the wane.
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Tuesday that estimated active case numbers, Covid-19 deaths and hospitalization of coronavirus patients have all declined during 14 consecutive weeks. He said estimated case numbers declined 83% over that period and that weekly Covid-19 deaths fell to 1,621 from 9,549, which is also an 83% reduction. Hospitalizations have declined by 79%, the government’s coronavirus point man said.
Mexico has avoided a spike in infections after the Easter vacation period despite fears that infection rates would rise, as occurred in January following Christmas and New Year’s celebrations.
“… The harmful effects of the pandemic are declining in the entire country,” López Obrador said. “It’s … encouraging; it’s fresh air. … We still have to take care of ourselves … but it’s good news.”
Keuana Weaver, 38, died during an operation in Tijuana.
One woman died and two others suffered serious health complications after plastic surgery operations in Tijuana, Baja California, on January 29, according to a report by the San Diego Union Tribune.
Dr. Jesús Manuel Báez López, director of Art Siluette Aesthetic Surgery, performed the ill-fated procedures.
Keuana Weaver, mother of two young children, traveled across the border with nurse Kanisha Davis for liposuction and tummy tucks. Weaver died on the operating table and Davis was hospitalized for two weeks in California after projectile vomiting and internal bleeding.
“If I hadn’t gone into the hospital when I did, I would have died … I was slowly bleeding to death. I was weak,” Davis said.
Another woman, Esmeralda Iñiguez, underwent surgery on the same day, and had to be rushed over the border to a U.S. hospital on February 3.
“He tightened my abdominal muscles too much, squishing all my organs together and cutting off blood supply to my kidneys, causing something called abdominal compartment syndrome,” said Iñiguez.
“I was so septic by the time I reached the ER in Chula Vista on February 3 I was literally hours from death. My kidneys were shutting down,” she added.
Health inspectors at the Federal Commission for Protection Against Sanitary Risks (Cofepris) closed another cosmetic clinic run by Báez in 2015.
Báez’s website does not list qualifications as a plastic surgeon, but says he obtained a master’s degree in “aesthetic surgery” in 2011 from the Institute of Higher Studies in Medicine, Xalapa, Veracruz, in 2012.
Dr. Gilberto Montfort, a plastic surgeon in Baja California and member of the Mexican Association of Plastic Surgeons, says Báez’s training does not qualify him to operate.
“[Aesthetic surgery is] not really even surgery … It’s like Botox. They advertise it as aesthetic surgery, but it’s not actually surgery,” he told the Union Tribune.
“To practice liposuction, you have to be a plastic surgeon,” Montfort added.
Baja California’s Ministry of Sustainable Tourism (SEST) estimates the cosmetic tourism industry has tripled in recent years, from 800,000 medical tourists in 2014, to 2.4 million in 2018, which generates annual revenue of more than US $1.7 billion.
It is encouraged by Mexican authorities. In 2011 a “Fast Lane” was introduced at the Tijuana border, where travelers registered with Mexican doctors were processed more quickly.
Keuana’s mother, Renee Weaver, said no one from Baja California has contacted her to collect information about her daughter’s death.
“I’m heartbroken. I want to know what happened,” she said.
“Keuana was a very independent woman; a good, loving, smart and very intelligent Black woman … That doctor took a lot from me and my family and I most definitely have to have her story out there …. I’m mostly sad this happened to my daughter because she was already so beautiful to me, inside and out, she just couldn’t see it,” she added.
A letter provided by Renee Weaver shows the clinic offered to refund the $6,700 cost of Keuana Weaver’s surgery.
Báez did not respond to multiple requests for comment nor did Baja California’s health minister.
Cosmetic tourism to Tijuana has been flagged for danger in the past. In 2019, a U.S. health authority issued a warning after 11 citizens who had weight-loss surgeries in Tijuana returned home with infections.
“We’re working very hard to make sure that doctors who are practicing without the proper credentials are immediately shut down and are investigated by the attorney general,” said Atzimba Villegas, the state director of medical tourism.
“It’s essential for the entire industry that patients feel safe and are well cared for and get the results they are looking for.
Montfort recommends that patients consult the Mexican Association of Plastic Surgeons to ensure the doctor is a member before surgery.
Mexico had languished at the bottom of the list since the inception of the rankings last November but now ranks 48th out of 53 countries that have been graded on their pandemic response on a monthly basis by the news agency.
Bloomberg said that Mexico had risen in its April rankings “as its virus testing improved.”
The news agency uses a wide range of data to assess where the pandemic is being handled most effectively with the least social and economic disruption. It scores economies of more than $200 billion on 10 indicators, including growth in virus cases, the overall mortality rate, testing capabilities, access to vaccination, the capacity of the local health system, the impact of virus-related restrictions on the economy and freedom of movement.
Singapore is at the top of the rankings for the first time, dethroning New Zealand, which had been considered the best country to be in during the pandemic since November. The southern Pacific island nation is now in second place, followed by Australia, Israel and Taiwan.
“The tiny city-state [Singapore] has gotten locally-transmitted cases down to near zero thanks to border curbs and a strict quarantine program, allowing citizens to largely go about their everyday lives, even attending concerts and going on cruises,” Bloomberg said.
“At the same time, Singapore has already administered vaccines equivalent to cover a fifth of its population, an aspect of pandemic control that other virus eliminators like New Zealand, Australia and Taiwan are lagging on.”
Brazil, which ranks second in the world after the United States for Covid-19 deaths, took Mexico’s place at the bottom of the Bloomberg rankings. Poland now ranks second-last ahead of Argentina, Colombia and Iran.
Mexico’s North American trade partners, the United States and Canada, ranked 17th and 19th respectively.
According to data collated by John Hopkins University, Mexico currently ranks 15th in the world for confirmed case numbers with just under 2.33 million as of Monday. It ranks third for Covid-19 fatalities with 215,113, although the federal government has acknowledged that the real death toll is much higher.
Countries with more than 100,000 Covid-related deaths.
Based on those figures — both case numbers and deaths are widely believed to be significant undercounts due to the low testing rate here — Mexico’s fatality rate is 9.2 per 100 cases, the highest among the 20 countries currently most affected by the pandemic, according to John Hopkins. The mortality rate in Mexico is 168.6 per 100,000 people, the 19th highest rate in the world.
Mexico’s improvement in the Bloomberg rankings comes as the coronavirus situation ameliorates here, at least based on official numbers.
The federal Health Ministry reported a daily average of 3,486 cases during the first 26 days of April, a 29% decline compared to March and a 75% drop compared to January, the worst month of the pandemic.
A daily average of 458 Covid-19 fatalities have been reported so far this month, a 19% decrease compared to March and a 56% decline compared to January.
According to Bloomberg, Mexico ranks 32nd out of the 53 major economies for vaccine coverage. As of Monday night, about 16.5 million vaccine doses had been administered in Mexico, mainly to health workers and seniors, although the number of vaccinated teachers is now rising quickly as authorities seek to reopen schools more than a year after they closed.
The federal government said in February that it expected to receive more than 100 million vaccine doses by the end of May, but that prediction now appears exceedingly unlikely to come true. Only 22.1 million doses have arrived to date.
Bloomberg said that “vaccine supply in most places around the world is grossly inadequate, with richer nations like the U.S. and Japan snapping up stock of the highly sought-after and effective mRNA shots,” namely those made by Pfizer and Moderna.
“The fate of tenuous steps toward reopening by some countries, and the race between vaccination and virus variants, will be the key focus for the Covid Resilience Ranking into May,” the news agency said.
Fighting a forest fire in Arteaga, Coahuila, in March.
Claiming that fire management policy has been “practically forgotten,” a group of environmental organizations has urged all three levels of government to allocate sufficient funds to combat the growing wildfire problem in Mexico.
“It’s clear that today, there is not the capacity or sufficient institutional resources to attend to the number of fires that are currently occurring in the country,” the organizations, among which are Greenpeace, the Mexican Civil Council for Sustainable Forestry and the Mexico Climate Initiative, said in a statement.
They claimed that Mexico this year has faced the worst forest fires in a decade.
“… The policy of fire management has been practically forgotten. The civil society organizations demand that the federal government …[develop] a comprehensive fire prevention and management strategy,” the statement said, adding that forest communities and social enterprises should be involved in the strategy.
The environmental organizations, among which are also several smaller, local groups, also demanded that federal, state and municipal authorities allocate “sufficient budget resources, personnel and material to be able to attend to the management of fire in the country in a comprehensive, systematic and preventative way.”
Forest fire in Valle de Bravo, México state, last month.
The authorities should immediately support communities affected by fire and rebuild damaged infrastructure, they added.
The organizations noted that, according to weekly National Forest Commission reports, there have been 3,735 forest fires in 2021 across 29 of Mexico’s 32 states. More than 127,000 hectares of land have been affected, they said.
“In recent years, there has been a series of catastrophic fires both at a global and national level. In 2017 in Mexico, forest fires destroyed 172,076 hectares of territory, 92,243 hectares the following year and 69,047 hectares in 2019. All these figures have been easily surpassed so far this year,” the environmental groups said.
“This problem … has worsened in recent years due to global climate change, and it’s becoming even worse in Mexico due to the dismantling of environmental institutions in charge of designing, implementing, coordinating and evaluating actions to mitigate and adapt to climate change,” they said.
A temporary employment program that hired workers to carry out fire prevention work was discontinued in 2019 and the federal government also abolished the natural disaster relief fund Fonden, which provided resources to combat forest fires.
As of Tuesday morning, there were 78 active wildfires in Mexico, according to Mexico’s forest management agency Conafor.
Mexico forestry agency Conafor said on Twitter that as of 11 a.m. Tuesday the nation was battling 78 active forest fires in 17 states. Fifteen of those fires were in Michoacán, the state with the most active fires at the moment.
The host of Tony's Travels tells of his adventure with Playa police.
A Canadian YouTuber and a friend were assaulted and robbed by police in Playa del Carmen, according to a video recounting the episode that was uploaded to the “Tony’s Travels” YouTube channel.
After a night out on Playa’s 5th Avenue, the two men were returning to their hostels in the early hours of April 22 when they were intercepted by three police officers.
An officer accused the pair of carrying drugs, which they denied. When they refused to get into the police car an officer engaged the YouTuber in a “wrestling match.”
The Canadian escaped from the officer, but his friend was subdued.
The YouTuber returned to the scene filming the officers with his cellphone, which they managed to grab, and proceeded to delete all evidence.
Robbed By The Police (In Mexico)
The police took all the cash the pair was carrying, which was 2,400 pesos (US $120) in total.
One of the two men said he believes that Playa del Carmen police work together with drug dealers on 5th Avenue, because when he arrived at his hostel he was approached by a dealer. Immediately after, police appeared and searched him.
“The Playa del Carmen police stopped us and robbed us, saying that we have drugs, that we are breaking some laws when we are not doing anything illegal, simply to steal the pesos that we have in our pockets … The police are bandits,” he said.
The YouTuber said neither he nor his friend were carrying drugs and had had no plans to buy any. He said his friend was searched another three times on the way to his accommodation. “He was not stumbling or wasted. He was just an easy target because he was alone.”
On his YouTube channel he received more than a dozen messages of support from others who had experienced similar situations in Playa del Carmen.
President López Obrador warned that Supreme Court justices voting against extending the chief justice’s term would support "the regime of corruption."
Supreme Court judges would become accomplices to corruption if they don’t approve the extension of the term of the court’s chief justice, President López Obrador said Monday.
The Congress last Friday approved a law supported by López Obrador to extend the term of Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar by two years despite the fact that the constitution clearly states that the chief justice cannot be reelected for the period immediately following his term.
Zaldívar said in a statement that it would be up to the Supreme Court itself to resolve any legal challenges to the law, which extends his term until 2024, the year López Obrador’s presidency ends.
At his regular news conference on Monday, the president agreed with a reporter who suggested that judges would become accomplices to “the corruption we so want to eradicate from Mexico” if they don’t endorse the move to increase Zaldívar’s term to six years.
López Obrador said that Supreme Court judges would be supporting the “regime of corruption” if they don’t approve the extension, which would also allow Zaldívar to remain at the head of the Federal Judiciary Council (CJF) for an additional two years.
“… In this case, what was approved were laws to reform the judicial power, and it was taken into account that these reforms will take place only if the president of the Supreme Court and the [Federal] Judiciary Council is an honorable, upright person who doesn’t belong to the same groups of economic and political power that led the country to ruin,” he said.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Arturo Saldívar. Opponents of extending his term until 2024 say the move would be unconstitutional.
The laws to overhaul the judicial power — among which are reforms designed to eliminate corruption, nepotism and harassment in the court system — would be pointless if the Supreme Court and the CJF is led by a “conservative party character” who is servile to outside interests, especially those of the “economic power that was never concerned about the people,” López Obrador said.
“What’s the point of carrying out a reform like that if it’s dead in the water?” he said.
López Obrador emphasized the need to have an honest, incorruptible person at the head of the CJF because “it’s the body in charge of ensuring the good behavior of the judges, magistrates [and] justices.”
“It’s the body that can carry out the transformation of the judicial power, watching that the judges aren’t like they are now, at the service of the rich and powerful,” he said.
The president said that institutions are important but so too are those who lead them. Independence from Spain and 19th-century liberal reforms wouldn’t have been achieved without the leadership of independence hero Miguel Hidalgo and former president Benito Juárez, López Obrador said.
He clearly sees Zaldívar — considered an ally of the president — as a key enabler of his ambition to carry out a “fourth transformation” of Mexico that he says is on par in importance with independence, the liberal reforms and the Mexican Revolution.
