With state-led, fossil fuel-powered energy vision, Mexico on a worrying course

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February 8, 2021

electricity generation plant — Electricity generated by the CFE would take precedence over all others.

Contravening global trade deals, hurting private investment, damaging consumers and betraying climate change commitments all at once is quite something. Yet Mexico’s populist president is set to pull off this unlikely feat with his proposed law to overhaul the country’s electricity market.

A leftwing nationalist whose economic views are anchored in the 1960s, President López Obrador has a vision for energy which is state-led and fossil fuel-powered. He has ordered the building of a US $8-billion refinery in his home state of Tabasco at a time when oil majors around the world are shedding such assets amid declining demand. He has poured scarce government resources into the ailing state oil company Pemex in a quixotic attempt to boost crude production, while sidelining foreign investors who can do the job more efficiently.

Now the Mexican president is turning his guns on another of his pet hates: private sector participation in the energy market.

His proposed law would give preference to the state electricity utility CFE, sending its power to the national grid ahead of private generators, even if it is more expensive and more polluting. It would reverse parts of a pioneering 2013-2014 energy reform which obliged the Mexican grid to take the cheapest power first, benefiting consumers and lower-cost private generators, many of whom have invested in renewables.

The government argues that a leading role for the CFE would guarantee a stable, secure supply of electricity and stop what it claims are perverse hidden subsidies which benefit private operators at the expense of the state. Its claims do not stand up to scrutiny.

According to Mexico’s business lobby group CCE, the proposed law opens the door to an expropriation of the $17.6 billion of private investment in the power sector and would raise costs for consumers and business. Lawyers who have studied the text say it could violate Mexico’s trade commitments to the U.S. and Canada under the USMCA pact and contravene provisions of the CPTPP trade deal with Asian nations. Greater use of the CFE’s fossil fuel-powered generating capacity would make it even harder for Mexico to keep climate change commitments under the Paris accord.

Ominously for López Obrador, Mexico’s Supreme Court struck down this week a decree from last year which attempted to give priority to the CFE in the power market, ruling it unconstitutional. Yet the government’s response was to insist on the need for its proposed new law.

Whether or not the legislation passes — and López Obrador has a majority in Congress and has fast-tracked the bill — the proposals say a lot about the worrying direction Mexico is taking. Voters gave López Obrador and his Morena alliance an overwhelming mandate in 2018 because they wanted an end to rampant corruption, a reduction in violent crime, and a greater focus on the poor and forgotten.

What they got is a president who sets an example of personal probity with an austere lifestyle, but who has failed to reduce murders, grow the economy, respect institutions or control coronavirus effectively. Mexico now has the world’s third highest Covid-19 death toll, partly because its leader consistently played down the pandemic.

With results like these, López Obrador should be worried about the verdict of Mexican voters at midterm elections in June. In the meantime, the Biden administration should lose no time in reminding Mexico of its international obligations on trade and climate change.

Devoted teacher takes classes to students in Querétaro’s Sierra Gorda

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MND Staff

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February 8, 2021

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Class is in session in the hills of Querétaro.

The Querétaro Congress has recognized the tireless work of a primary school teacher who has continued to teach students in the state’s Sierra Gorda region during the coronavirus pandemic.

Salvador Olvera Marín, known affectionately as Maestro Chava, received a state government award last Thursday after his work teaching kids in Querétaro’s north caught the attention of officials.

With schools across the country closed due to the pandemic, Olvera, a teacher in the municipality of Pinal de Amoles, decided to install a chalkboard on the back of his pickup truck and take classes to students stuck at home without the means to study because they don’t have a television and/or a computer to access televised and online educational content.

“I didn’t expect this,” he told the newspaper El Universal, referring to the award.

“… This strengthens our work [as teachers]. It’s not about thinking that I achieved this or that or as goes the saying ‘become famous and then go to sleep.’ On the contrary, I think that more commitment is needed because there will be more eyes on our work. I’m not worried [about recognition], what interests me is that the students are making progress, improving in their learning,” Olvera said.

The teacher, a 38-year-veteran of the profession, said the parents of many children in the Sierra Gorda have low levels of education and as a result are not in a position to help their offspring with their schoolwork.

He said that if students were left to their own devices during the pandemic without the means to study, their education would stagnate.

“They need accompaniment [in their education]. It’s good to teach them how to learn to learn but not in such a drastic way as now with the health emergency,” Olvera said. “… It’s good to teach them to be autodidacts but not like this [without classes].”

Querétaro Education Minister José Carlos Arredondo Vázquez described the work of Olvera and that of another teacher whose commitment to education amid the pandemic was recognized last Thursday as “heroic.”

“Education … is like a blank canvas. Every day and every moment … we have the possibility of creating a great work of art and … [that’s what] these two extraordinary teachers are doing,” he said.

Source: El Universal (sp)

Lower house approves bill banning support for beauty contests

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Michelle Aguilar

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February 8, 2021

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beauty contest — Beauty pageants would become ineligible for public funding under new law.

Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies approved a measure this week that if approved by the Senate will characterize beauty pageants and other such gender-based competitions based on appearance as symbolic violence against women.

The lower house voted to add a provision to the General Law of Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence, adopted in 2007 and intended to combat gender-based violence. The bill was approved with two votes against and six abstentions and now goes before the Senate.

The law, which Amnesty International and other organizations have claimed has not had much effect on the prevalence of violence against women in Mexico, does not currently include “symbolic violence” as a category of such violence. It only covers physical, psychological, sexual and economic violence.

If the bill passes the Senate, contests, elections, competitions and other types of events that promote gender stereotypes and that evaluate the physical form of women or girls would be considered symbolic violence. As such, government institutions would not be allowed to distribute financial resources to nor publicize those events.

“Promoting the competition among women based on their physical attributes promotes sexist and ‘macho’ patterns that stigmatize, objectify, and minimize the role women play in our society,” says the bill’s text.

If passed, the law would not make such contests illegal but simply prohibit the government from supporting them in any way, Deputy Frida Esparza Márquez told the digital newspaper Animal Político.

“In general, these events are organized and financed by state or municipal governments supposedly to promote tourism and traditions and customs. It’s a true contradiction that the state promotes a form of symbolic violence,” she said.

As evidence of the problem, Márquez pointed out that in 2019, for example, Jalisco allocated 4 million pesos towards combatting violence against women, giving 3.85 million pesos to 11 municipalities.

Yet in the same year, she said, five Jalisco municipalities alone spent 8.48 million pesos on beauty contests.

The bill defines symbolic violence as “the expression, transmission or broadcasting by any media, whether privately or publicly, discourses, messages, or stereotypical patterns, signs, values, icons, and ideas that transmit, reproduce, justify, or normalize the subordination, inequality, discrimination, and violence against women in society.”

Also included in the bill are provisions that would target “media violence” — meaning the promotion of gender stereotypes or glorification of the exploitation, humiliation or discrimination against women via print, broadcast or digital media — as well as gender-based political violence and “obstetric violence,” in which medical professionals conduct procedures or make medical decisions for pregnant or postpartum women without consent.

Sources: El Financiero (sp), Animal Político (sp)

Opposition alliance faces criticism for recycling political ‘dinosaurs’ as candidates

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MND Staff

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February 8, 2021

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'Dinosaur' candidates, some of whom are even 'unpresentable,' according to one analyst.

Opposition parties seeking to wrest control of the lower house of Congress from the ruling Morena party are fielding candidates who are political “dinosaurs” and have nothing new to offer, according to three experts.

The National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), which have formed a three-party alliance to contest the June 6 election, have announced some of the plurinominal, or proportional representation, candidates they hope will become federal deputies in a renewed lower house in which Morena and its allies no longer have a majority.

The PAN, a conservative party that is currently the main opposition force, and the PRI, which held power for most of the 20th century as well as the six years prior to President López Obrador coming to office in late 2018, have faced the most criticism over their proposed candidates.

Among the names put forward by the former are Margarita Zavala, wife of former president Felipe Calderón, an ex-lawmaker and a 2018 presidential hopeful; Santiago Creel, interior minister in the 2000-2006 government led by former president Vicente Fox and an ex-senator; Gabriel Quadri, a minor party candidate in the 2012 presidential election; Cecilia Romero, a former lawmaker and PAN national president; and Francisco Ramírez, a former Guadalajara mayor, governor of Jalisco and interior minister in the first year of Calderón’s 2006-2012 term.

The PRI, which has a tarnished reputation due to the myriad scandals in which it has been embroiled over the years, has proposed its own list of recycled candidates. They include Alejandro Moreno, PRI national president and a former governor of Campeche; Ildefonso Guajardo, economy minister in the 2012-2018 government of former president Enrique Peña Nieto; Rubén Moreira, a former governor of Coahuila and ex-secretary general of the PRI; Carolina Viggiano, the current secretary general of the PRI; and Tereso Medina, a PRI-affiliated union leader and former deputy.

The Democratic Revolution Party looked beyond its own dinosaurs for candidates such as Edna Díaz, a former world taekwondo champion.

In contrast, the PRD has proposed more grassroots candidates without previous close ties to the party, among whom are Edna Díaz, a former taekwondo champion, and Andrea Rocha, a defense lawyer.

In addition to describing the PAN and PRI candidates as dinosaurs, political experts who spoke to the newspaper El Universal said the names put forward by the two parties are representative of cronyism, a practice of which López Obrador has long accused his political adversaries of being guilty. They also suggested the parties should have sought candidates among the wider citizenry rather than among people already well-entrenched in their ranks.

Sara Sefchovich, a renowned sociologist, writer and National Autonomous University academic, said the candidates proposed by the opposition parties don’t offer voters a viable alternative at the ballot box.

“In my opinion, the problem is that they’re only looking after themselves, guaranteeing themselves a job. … They’re not really offering an alternative, an opposition to which citizens can turn. They’re the same old people and their reputation precedes them – not in a good sense,” she said.

Sefchovich said that she would love to see Morena lose its majority in the lower house but for that to happen “respectable candidates” are needed and some of those put forward by the opposition parties don’t meet that criterion. Specifically citing Moreira, who led a Coahuila government tainted by corruption allegations, some of the candidates are “unpresentable,” she said.

The academic charged that Morena, which was founded by López Obrador and has provided a new political home for many people with previous links to other parties, is also fielding poor candidates, adding that could help the tripartite opposition bloc known as Va Por México (Go for Mexico).

“Imagine an electoral ballot on which you have to choose between a Moreira or a Noroña. It gives you the chills,” Sefchovich said, referring in the latter case to Gerardo Fernández Noroña, a controversial deputy with the Labor Party, a Morena ally.

“… That’s the way things are for citizens,” she said.

Salvador García Soto, a political scientist and columnist, contended that the PAN and the PRI are sending a very negative message with their candidate choices, asserting that they fall well short of citizens’ expectations. He said that the parties appear to be betting on the theory that political experience among its candidates will help their alliance prevail but charged that they have instead created the impression that they don’t have any new emerging leaders.

One lesson the PAN and the PRI should have learned from their respective losses at recent presidential elections is that they need to be “more open to the citizenry, young leaders and new faces in politics,” García said.

“That is … what the people demand but far from that they’re betting on the same old people who had their opportunity at their own time,” he said.

García said the candidates put forth by the PAN and PRI only serve to support López Obrador’s claim that the opposition is morally bankrupt.

Political scientist Crespo: The parties are self-absorbed with their own people.

“ [The PRI and the PAN] are not up to the level that the citizens are demanding of the opposition parties, and not up to the level that the country and democracy need, which is to find a counterweight to the presidential power … of López Obrador,” he said.

José Antonio Crespo, a political scientist at CIDE, a Mexico City university, said the candidates “don’t excite people because there’s nothing new – there are no fresh people.”

Citing recent polls, he said that Morena has an advantage going into the June 6 election and suggested that the candidates put forth by the opposition coalition won’t do anything to weaken the ruling party’s upper hand.

However, Crespo noted some people will likely vote for Morena’s rivals even though their candidates don’t inspire enthusiasm simply because they want the lower house to be an obstacle to, rather than an enabler of, the president’s agenda.

However, he predicted that Morena and its allies will prevail and maintain their majority.

“The [opposition] parties aren’t doing things right, they’re self-absorbed with their own people. … I believe they’re not sending a good message,” Crespo said.

The news website Sin Embargo described the candidates put forward by the opposition parties as “spent cartridges” and noted that the selections are not reflective of the “internal transformation” they claim to have carried out to make themselves more competitive in light of the landslide victory achieved by López Obrador and Morena at federal and state elections in 2018.

Source: El Universal (sp), Sin Embargo (sp)

Ecatepec bans use of animal-drawn carts for garbage collection

By

Michelle Aguilar

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February 8, 2021

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A new law went into effect in Ecatepec, México state, on the weekend ruling that horses and donkeys can no longer be used to haul trash, a bid to end a longstanding practice that continues to this day even in some urban neighborhoods.

Mayor Fernando Vilches Contreras said the new law aims to end the exploitation and abuse of horses and donkeys. Ecatepec will have zero tolerance for those attempting to flout the new law, which prohibits using animals to haul or carry waste of any kind. Waste hauled by animals to Ecatepec’s landfill will not be accepted, he said.

With these changes, he said, “… from this day forward, we take a vanguard step toward the protection of the rights of living beings.”

The equines have been heretofore used to haul all kinds of refuse, including household trash and landscaping waste. Their owners, known as carretoneros (haulers), number in the hundreds in Ecatepec and have been accused of overworking the animals with little regard to their care. Animal welfare organizations such as Defensoría Animal had been calling on Vilches to end the practice in his municipality since at least 2018.

Since that year, eight horses used in four neighborhoods to collect garbage have been seized by the city’s environmental office due to their maltreatment by carretoneros.

The animals were rehabilitated at municipal facilities for Ecatepec’s mounted police and at the Ehécatl Ecological Park, and then sent to live at equine sanctuaries in México state and Puebla.

Source: El Financiero (sp), Reporte Indigo (sp)

11 officers suspended after clash with protesting cyclists in Mexico City

By

Michelle Aguilar

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February 8, 2021

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Police and cyclists during Friday's dustup.

Eleven Mexico City transit police officers have been suspended after they were caught on video in an altercation on Friday evening with cyclists protesting the deaths of fellow riders.

The video of the chaotic incident showed several officers targeting individual cyclists and punching and kicking them while they were restrained.

After Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum instructed Police Chief Omar García Harfuch to investigate, the 11 officers, including four commanders, were suspended Satruday pending further analysis by the police department’s office of internal affairs.

García said the investigation is looking into whether additional officers besides the 11 who were suspended had assaulted civilians and that that any found to have attacked demonstrators would be fired.

Several cyclists were injured and needed treatment on the scene by paramedics. On a video captured by the ForoTV network and circulated widely on social media, several police officers could be seen running at cyclists to restrain them, then punching them and throwing some to the ground and kicking them.

¿Qué decías que no volvería a ocurrir en la CDMX, @PPmerino?

Repudio la salvaje represión de @Claudiashein contra ciclistas.

¡Que los abusos y excesos policiacos NO queden impunes!

Espero ver a la @CDHCMX haciendo su trabajo.

Con la @CNDH no contamos.pic.twitter.com/KSjlKRVUhm

— Fernando Belaunzarán (@ferbelaunzaran) February 6, 2021

The cyclists were riding as a group in the Nápoles neighborhood of the city as part of a demonstration for greater safety for cyclists, protesting recent deaths of fellow biking enthusiasts.

The confrontation occurred as the cyclists attempted to access the second level of Mexico City’s Anillo Periférico beltway, which is prohibited to bicyclists. After police prevented the cyclists from getting onto the highway, the situation on the street escalated.

The road remained closed for a long period afterward so that paramedics could treat the injured.

Sheinbaum, who called for the officers involved to be fired, said that some of the demonstrators did assault police. However, she said, the officers’ behavior was “unacceptable.”

“At no time can we have the aggression that we saw on the video by officers toward protesters,” Sheinbaum said. “It’s for things like this that much training has been done with the police. It’s about containing, not assaulting [civilians], but in this case, there was police action that shouldn’t have happened.”

Sources: Milenio (sp), El Financiero (sp), El Universal (sp)

AMLO’s back: president returns to host daily press conference, ‘continue transformation’

By

MND Staff

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February 8, 2021

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lopez obrador — The president shares a happy moment with reporters Monday.

Two weeks after he announced he had tested positive for Covid-19, President López Obrador returned Monday to his favored position at the front and center of Mexican political life, appearing at the National Palace for his regular morning press conference.

“We’re back on our feet and fighting,” the unmasked president told reporters after thanking the foreigners and “all the Mexicans, men and women, who were concerned about my disease, my Covid infection.”

“We’re going to continue the transformation. It’s fundamental for Mexico to put an end to corruption so that the country is moralized and we can live with well-being and happiness,” López Obrador said.

The president, who was replaced by Interior Minister Olga Sánchez at the morning news conferences, noted that Health Minister Jorge Alcocer led a medical team that monitored his health and revealed that he participated in an experimental Covid-19 treatment study.

“It was decided that I’d participate in an Institute of Nutrition research process. I accepted … to try certain treatments. They gave me an antiviral medication and anti-inflammatories from [January 25 – the day after he tested positive]. Fortunately they gave good results,” he said.

Echoing the remarks of government officials who provided brief updates on the president’s health over the past two weeks, López Obrador said he only experienced mild symptoms such as body aches and a low-grade fever while he remained in isolation at his apartment at the National Palace in downtown Mexico City.

“I came out of it with the treatment. I started to exercise, to walk and do breathing exercises,” he said.

“I thank Jorge Alcocer [and the medical team he led]. They’ll be checking up on me. I want to thank all the doctors, all the public [health] institutes. … They gave me special treatment because of the affection with which they treated me.”

López Obrador, who has a history of high blood pressure and suffered a heart attack in 2013, said that one of two reasons he contracted Covid-19 was that he chose not to get inoculated before the broader population has access to Covid vaccine.

“Why did I get sick? Firstly because I didn’t get vaccinated, I didn’t take advantage [of my position]. I could have gotten vaccinated, there are heads of state, presidents, who have been vaccinated, they’ve been the first,” he said, adding that he didn’t want to set a bad example and that everyone should be be treated equally.

“… Secondly, why did I get infected? Because, like millions of Mexicans, I have to work. There’s no way that I could stay shut away the whole time, you can’t live locked up. I looked after myself, I maintained a healthy distance but it [the virus] got me. Fortunately, I was able to get over it,” López Obrador said.

The president returned to the press conference podium after a two-week absence.

The president, who played down the threat of the coronavirus at the beginning of the pandemic and said on several occasions that Mexico had passed the worst of the outbreak even as the country hurtled toward new peaks, is one of almost 2 million Mexicans who have tested positive for Covid-19, although the real number of cases is believed to be much higher due to the low testing rate.

López Obrador has opposed hard lockdown measures that impinge on people’s freedoms and has not advocated forcefully for the use of masks even as evidence showed they could have a significant impact on slowing the spread of infection.

Instead, he has placed faith in the capacity of vaccines to bring the pandemic to an end and put a stop to a daily Covid-19 death toll that has regularly exceeded 1,000 this year.

While cooped up in isolation, the president released a video message in which he predicted that all senior citizens will have received at least one dose of a vaccine by the end of March, noting that Mexico will receive shipments of Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Sputnik V and CanSino shots this month and next.

But to meet that target – there are some 15 million seniors in Mexico – hundreds of thousands of doses will have to be administered on a daily basis once the vaccines get here, a mammoth logistical undertaking that could prove to be difficult to achieve.

As things stand, only about 713,000 Pfizer vaccine doses have so far been administered, mainly to health workers, and there are only about 53,000 unused shots in the country.

In comparison, the U.S. has been giving more than 1 million injections per day for more than two weeks.

Asked on Monday morning if he was planning to begin wearing a face mask, the president said no and suggested that the mask issue was a political one promoted by opponents of his administration’s transformation of the country.

He said his doctors had told him he was not contagious.

Source: Sin Embargo (sp), Reforma (sp)

Another destination pays for economic reopening with post-holidays Covid surge

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MND Staff

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February 8, 2021

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Beaches throughout Quintana Roo are now operating at 30% capacity.

Coronavirus cases surged on Mexico’s Caribbean coast in January and early February after large numbers of tourists descended on beach destinations over the Christmas-New Year vacation period, forcing authorities to implement tighter restrictions across Quintana Roo as of Monday.

Between the start of January and February 5, the state of Quintana Roo, home to popular destinations such as Cancún, Playa del Carmen and Tulum, recorded 3,176 confirmed cases of the virus, according to local health authorities.

Not since the middle of last year, when 3,114 confirmed cases were recorded between June 15 and July 15, had Quintana Roo seen so many cases in such a short period of time.

State authorities attribute the upsurge in new infections to the influx of domestic and international tourists in December – more than 400 flights per day were arriving at and departing from the Cancún airport in late 2020 – as well as end-of-year gatherings of family and friends, large clandestine parties and events and people relaxing their observance of health rules such as keeping one’s distance from others and wearing a mask.

The arrival of international visitors, many of whom came from the virus-ravaged United States, brought much-needed revenue to Quintana Roo, whose economy relies heavily on tourist dollars, but bequeathed an unwanted legacy: tighter restrictions that will cause more economic pain for the state’s residents.

Governor Carlos Joaquín González announced Sunday that all of Quintana Roo would be high risk orange on the state coronavirus stoplight map as of Monday. The northern part of the state, where Quintana Roo’s main tourism destinations are located, switched to orange from medium risk yellow in the last week of January and now the southern half is also painted that color.

(The state has been orange on the federal map since mid-January but the Quintana Roo government has its own stoplight system that it uses to guide the easing and tightening of economic restrictions.)

Businesses across the state will now have to respect shorter opening hours while a 30% maximum capacity level for beaches, parks, cinemas, theaters, shopping centers, casinos, hair salons, factories and places of worship applies equally in Cancún in the north and Chetumal in the south as well as in all other cities and towns.

Hotels, restaurants, archaeological sites, theme parks, golf courses, gyms and sports centers can operate at a higher maximum capacity of 50% while the orange light designation remains in place but bars and nightclubs in all 11 municipalities must remain closed.

The state’s schools, like those across the country, are still shut almost a year after they closed at the onset of Mexico’s coronavirus outbreak.

Governor Joaquín announced Sunday that the southern part of the state would revert to orange on Monday.

Quintana Roo has recorded 19,286 confirmed cases of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, and almost half the cases were detected in Benito Juárez, the municipality that includes Cancún.

Othón P. Blanco, which includes state capital Chetumal, ranks second for cases followed by the municipality of Solidaridad, where Playa del Carmen is located.

Hospital occupancy in Quintana Roo is currently 26% for general care beds and 24% for beds with ventilators, according to federal data.

The occupancy rate is slightly higher in the north while there are more active coronavirus cases in the south, Governor Joaquín said Sunday, adding that authorities will ramp up Covid-19 testing as a result of the statewide orange light designation.

The health care facility that has come under more pressure than any other in Quintana Roo during the pandemic is the Cancún General Hospital, where 47% of general care beds are currently taken.

“We’re stressed because my colleagues on the front line against Covid are fatigued, … there have been increases [in hospitalizations], new admissions to the hospital,” a nursing director told the news agency EFE.

Identified only as Luis Alberto, the nursing chief said that coronavirus patients’ medical reports indicated that they recently relaxed observance of health measures and traveled to different parts of Quintana Roo and/or gathered with friends and family.

He said there has been a recent increase in admissions of younger Covid-19 patients and called on the public not to let their guard down and continue to follow the measures designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

“It sounds disturbing to say it but sometimes it’s not until those dying are people we know that we understand the gravity of the situation,” Luis Albero added.

More than 2,200 people have lost their lives to Covid-19 in Quintana Roo, according to official data, including more than 200 since the start of 2021.

In recording an increase in case numbers in January, the Caribbean coast state suffered the same fate as Guerrero, where coronavirus restrictions were also eased in tourist destinations for the end-of-year vacation period. That state switched to maximum risk red on the stoplight map in late January amid what the governor described as “the worst moment of the pandemic.”

There are currently 13 red light maximum risk states on the federal stoplight map, which will be updated at the end of this week.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated case tally rose to 1.93 million on Sunday with 6,065 new cases reported while the official Covid-19 death toll increased by 414 to 166,200.

Source: EFE (sp), El Economista (sp)

Mexico’s pandemic optimism falls flat after president catches virus

By

Jude Webber

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February 8, 2021

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covid vaccination — Positive spin has been applied to vaccine shipments. The president insisted they were delayed to make supplies available to poor countries. Pfizer said it was due to an upgrade to its factory in Belgium.

On his first day in isolation after contracting Covid-19, President López Obrador had a call with Vladimir Putin.

Whereas his first call with President Joe Biden, three days earlier, had been “friendly and respectful,” López Obrador gushed about the “genuine affection” from the Russian president as Mexico prepared to receive 24 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine.

Foreign diplomacy does not usually interest López Obrador, but this time it was urgent: Mexico, one of the world’s worst-hit countries, faced a three-week halt in vaccines from BioNTech/Pfizer and needed more fast.

Well before Sputnik V published peer-reviewed clinical trial results, Mexico dispatched Hugo López-Gatell, the coronavirus czar, to secure unpublished information on the jab from Argentina, where it is being rolled out. That fueled fears that political expediency had prevailed — López Obrador wants a third of the population vaccinated by midterm elections in June.

It was typical of the mixed messaging that has plagued Mexico’s pandemic management. As early as last April, the populist López Obrador was claiming to have “tamed” Covid-19. He said an amulet protected him, refused to enforce mask-wearing or lockdowns and continued traveling around the country.

Even amid record death tolls, Interior Minister Olga Sánchez Cordero, who has been acting president while López Obrador convalesces, said the pandemic was “absolutely contained, with a slight fall.”

The health ministry has long been accused of trying to put a positive spin on its handling of the pandemic by conducting few tests and counting only confirmed cases.

But even the autonomous state statistics office, Inegi, which acknowledged far more Covid-19 deaths than the health ministry has reported, faced flak.

Inegi attributed 108,658 deaths to Covid-19 between January and August last year. But Mario Romero, a researcher into Mexico’s pandemic toll, believed all of 184,039 excess deaths recorded in the period were caused by Covid because other leading conditions — heart attacks, diabetes and influenza or pneumonia — also posted unusual rises.

He and Laurianne Despeghel, an economic consultant, have combed through death certificates and estimate that Covid-19 deaths are 2.85 times under-reported — putting the current death toll at some 430,000, higher even than in the U.S. Based on that research, Mexico City’s excess death toll is “already the worst [city] in the world, by a large amount,” he said.

“I think they’re being intentionally confusing,” said Romero.

The spin does not stop with the numbers. Faced with no BioNTech/Pfizer deliveries until February 15, López Obrador insisted the pause was to free up vaccines for poor countries — a global call for which he claims credit.

The drugmaker said the delays were because of the revamp of its plant in Belgium, designed to increase the group’s production capacities. As a result, it is locked in a bitter dispute with the EU over deliveries.

Mexico has so far administered just under 715,000 vaccine doses, well behind Brazil which began inoculations later. An online system for over-60s to sign up for the shot crashed soon after launch.

Despite that, the president said in a video message: “For February, we are going to have 6 million doses and for March double that, 12 million, no problem.”

His announcement on January 24 that he had caught Covid-19 also sparked questions: had he traveled on a commercial flight while knowingly ill?

His spokesman, Jesús Ramírez, initially said the president felt unwell and was tested in the northern city of Monterrey on the eve of his return home. Ramírez later said he had misunderstood other aides and insisted the president “felt a bit fluey” the day of his flight back and was tested later in Mexico City.

In the face of harsh criticism from experts, López-Gatell has talked of a strategy rethink. Experts say that is urgent: Arturo Erdely, a mathematician tracking the data, expects Mexico to hit 600,000 deaths by the end of June.

“What they need to change is to tell us the truth and give clear messages,” said Sergio Aguayo, a political analyst.

Food writer travels the world for his art but adopted Mexico as his home

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Leigh Thelmadatter

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February 6, 2021

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Nopal with mint salad, one of the recipes in James Oseland's new cookbook, World Food: Mexico City, focused on the capital's cuisine. All photos courtesy of Ten Speed Press

As the former editor of Saveur magazine and a cookbook author, veteran food writer James Oseland has traveled the world for over 30 years, visiting international cultures and their cuisines, but his passion for travel and food began in Mexico.

Although he traveled with his family as a child, his first real experience outside the United States began as a wild idea, a road trip through Mexico with his father. They drove from the Texas border to Chiapas and back over the course of three weeks, stopping in Mexico City on the way down and back.

“I knew the moment that I stepped foot out of that station wagon and onto the zócalo [main square] that I had become someone that I wasn’t before.”

What changed? Mexico gave him the sense of being “someplace else,” a place where there were similarities but also differences as to what a culture and society are.

“A fire was lit,” he says.

Oseland has had a long and distinguished career writing about food, passionately believing that you can understand a culture through its cuisine. As a U.S. citizen, he has had the “great fortune of living next door to what for all intents and purposes is the Latin American version of Italy in terms of richness, complexity and interestingness.” But developing a career before the internet era meant needing to live where the publishing world is, and for about three decades that was New York.

Not that he abandoned Mexico.

“I always had the idea in my back pocket that when I need a break from whatever I was doing in the United States, I can just go to Mexico in four to five hours by plane and I can be in this other place.”

While he strove to get to know as much of the country as he could, he has lost track of the number of times he has returned to Mexico City.

So, when he succeeded in negotiating a series of cookbooks on the cuisines of the world, the obvious place to begin was Mexico’s capital to repay “a debt of gratitude I have for the knowledge and experience I received.” Oseland returned to Mexico City, rented out an apartment in the historic center and worked out 75 recipes there.

The result is World Food: Mexico City, a curious mix of recipes, stories and cultural information as it applies to food.

Oseland's "World Food" cookbook series covers international cuisines. — Oseland’s “World Food” cookbook series covers international cuisines.

It is an unusual take on Mexican cooking, one that avoids much of the cliché that appears in many Mexican cookbooks, demonstrating Oseland’s decades-long relationship with the country. The book seeks to engage home cooks who look to have a little taste of a faraway world, a kind of armchair travel in the kitchen, through both anecdotes of everyday people and recipes adapted to foreign kitchens.

As a 12-plus-year resident of Mexico City with a chilango (Mexico City native) husband, I recognized most of the recipes, including comfort foods such as lentil soup with bacon, tamales, enchiladas, Mexican-style shrimp cocktail, and carnitas (pork confit). These are the foods Mexicans eat at home, in cantinas, in local restaurants and on the street. There are a few creative recipes that give a nod to the city’s well-developed dining scene, Oseland says, but “I wanted to focus on home cooking because here the truth of the culture is revealed.”

Oseland also believes that “in Mexico City, you have the cuisines of Mexico.” To bolster this point, he includes dishes such as birria (stewed beef or goat from Jalisco), tlayudas (Oaxaca’s “pizza”) and miners’ enchiladas (San Luis Potosí and north).

Some dishes, such as carnitas (Michoacán), shrimp cocktail (the coasts) and pozole (Guerrero) have become completely adopted into Mexico City cuisine. However, I should note that the integration of dishes from the provincia follows migration patterns into Mexico City. For this reason, lacking are dishes from the Yucatán and the north of the country.

The book balances the cookbook’s need to categorize types of recipes and the cultural elements that make Mexican food special. One section is dedicated to corn prepared in different ways, from stews to tamales, with tacos downplayed. The appetizer section pays homage to the chile pepper. Although Mexico City is located on a high mountain plateau, the book includes an extensive section on seafood.

This may seem odd, but Mexico City, as the center of an empire and country, has been the destination for much of the country’s food production. Today, it is home to the world’s second-largest seafood market after Tokyo.

James Oseland's 30-year career as a food expert includes editing the magazine Saveur. — James Oseland’s 30-year career as a food expert includes editing the magazine Saveur.

My favorite section is the platos fuertes (main courses). These are the meals cooked in homes and small family restaurants.

Appropriately, the book does not have a section on baked goods. Mexicans love their sweet bread, but since the colonial period their creation has been the purview of local bakeries. Home baking is simply not a thing.

Oseland came to Mexico City to work on the book and nothing else, but that idea did not last long.

“Maybe at the subconscious level I was thinking about making the move, but it wasn’t until then when I started connecting the dots and realized, ‘Oh, I can live here in this wonderful place. I don’t have to just visit now. I can shop at the markets I love and bring home those fruits and herbs and put them in my own kitchen in this wonderful place that inspires me and energizes me.”

The writer now focuses on basic Mexican home cooking for his everyday life, cooking beans in clay pots and charring vegetables on comal griddles. He cannot imagine doing it any other way.

Although his professional focus is still global, with the second book in the series focused on Paris, the shift to living in Mexico still has an effect. Many of the French recipes were tested working with the cooks he admires from the Mexico City book. It makes sense given that the idea is to make the recipes accessible to cooks unfamiliar with the cuisine.

The series is an ongoing, open-ended project. Asked if he would come back to a Mexico-related topic in a subsequent book, he said, “We’ll see. Because Lord knows there are such complex and rich stories of regional cuisine in Mexico that could be told.”

• World Food: Mexico City is available on Amazon.

Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 17 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture. She publishes in various Mexico-based publications and her first book, Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta, was published last year. Her culture column appears regularly on Mexico News Daily.