Quintana Roo Governor Carlos Joaquín González criticized the national vaccination strategy during a meeting with federal officials on Thursday for what he described as a lack of flexibility.
Speaking at a virtual meeting also attended by other state governors, Joaquín described Quintana Roo as a “very young state” where the majority of the population is under 60, and consequently has a surplus of vaccines sent by the federal government for the exclusive inoculation of seniors.
He complained that there is no flexibility in the strategy to use any surplus doses to vaccinate people aged under 60, asserting that it made no sense not to use them when there are unvaccinated medical personnel and tourism sector workers in the Caribbean coast state.
“I have [private sector] doctors protesting and asking for vaccines. I have requests from tourism personnel who want them,” Joaquín said.
The governor also said the federal government hasn’t kept up with its scheduled vaccine deliveries.
“Some weeks ago, [Finance] Minister Arturo Herrera gave us a schedule of weekly vaccine deliveries across the country; I would like to have an update on that, if there is one, because these [promised] vaccine deliveries haven’t been met 100%,” Joaquín said.
Later on Thursday, the federal government announced that it had modified its Covid-19 vaccination schedule, pushing back by one month the start date of the different stages of the national vaccination plan.
At the federal Health Ministry’s coronavirus press briefing on Thursday night, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell addressed the first of Joaquín’s concerns, saying that members of the federal government’s “roadrunner” vaccination brigades have the authority to instruct that surplus vaccines be used to inoculate other priority sectors of the population such as health workers.
But in light of the governor’s claim that surplus vaccines are not being used in Quintana Roo, López-Gatell said that he would discuss the matter with the federal government’s delegates in that state.
The woman sits on the road after being pushed out of the car.
A man who was caught on a surveillance camera throwing a woman out of his car and beating her in Mexico City April 4 has been identified as Luis Galicia, a member of the National Guard.
The incident took place in Coyoacán where neighbors, woken by screams, bore witness to the incident.
In the video the couple can be seen struggling in the vehicle before the woman is thrown out. The man exits and begins to beat her, then returns to the vehicle.
Neighbors called emergency services for help and one tried to intervene. The aggressor, realizing he had been seen, dragged the woman back into the vehicle and fled.
Police later located the vehicle, a Mustang, and the driver matched the man in the video. A search of the vehicle turned up a loaded firearm and 60 small bags of what appeared to be cocaine. The man identified himself as a member of the special forces unit of the National Guard.
SE BUSCA
Aunq la mujer estaba desorientada, así la tiró al piso, este sujeto.
La tomó del cabello, la arrastró y la metió a jalones al auto.
Sucedió ayer por la madrugada @EnCoapa_
Si lo reconoce denúncielo en @SSC_CDMX o @FiscaliaCDMX
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“Tonight members of the [police] stopped a man associated with an attack on a woman in Calzada de las Bombas yesterday. This kind of violence against women is unacceptable in our city,” wrote Police Chief Omar García Harfuch on Twitter on April 6.
Though the woman, since identified as the attacker’s wife, declined to press charges the internal affairs office of the National Guard has begun an administrative process to sanction Galicia.
Mexico City prosecutors said the man claimed he attacked the woman after she confronted him about messages she had found on his phone. The couple were at a bar when the fight began.
According to the city’s Ministry of Women, 2020 saw a 5.4% increase in reports of domestic violence over 2019. Emergency calls for the same crime increased 7%.
On March 27, Tulum police allegedly killed a Salvadoran woman who had been detained for disorderly conduct. Now, less than two weeks later, a video has surfaced of police in Tulum using excessive force to detain a young man on Wednesday night.
In the video, the man can be seen face down on the ground, with his hands cuffed behind him. Officers dragged him up by his hands into the back of patrol pickup, then beat him as onlookers watched and recorded the incident. The man did not appear to resist, but called for help and asked that the number of the patrol vehicle be recorded.
“We are recording!” shouted the man wielding the cellphone that was recording the scene. A woman approached the police and tried to intercede, but was turned away.
The Quintana Roo Attorney General’s Office (FGE) determined that the cause of death was her broken back. They said that the force used by police was disproportionate, unreasonable and generated a high risk of death. The office has opened a murder investigation in light of the incident.
A 10 días del asesinato de Victoria Salazar a manos de policías municipales de #Tulum, hoy otro caso de brutalidad policiaca sale a la luz, luego de que un joven fuera sometido por uniformados de la patrulla 12233. pic.twitter.com/Vs9oOs3pjY
Salazar’s death has drawn comparison with the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May.
“I join the demand for justice and zero impunity for the murder of Victoria, a woman who lost her life at the hands of municipal police from Tulum, Quintana Roo. I condemn… the excessive use of [police] force. It must be punished,” said Martha Lucía Micher, a Morena party senator.
Quintana Roo Governor Carlos Joaquín González and federal Interior Minister Olga Sánchez also condemned the brutality and called for justice.
Julio Alberto Villaseñor Cabrera and Jimena Romo Jiménez with their daughter Julia.
A Jalisco family who disappeared two weeks ago has been found alive and well, Governor Enrique Alfaro announced Friday.
The governor said on Twitter that the four missing members of the Villaseñor Romo family — the father, mother, their son and the father’s sister — were located at 2:30 a.m. Friday.
The announcement comes a day after another member of the family, 1-year-old Julia Isabella Villaseñor, was found alone but in good health on a vacant lot in the municipality of La Barca, Jalisco.
“Yesterday, the little one, Julia Isabella, was found, and today we begin the day with the news we’d all been waiting to hear: at 2:30 in the morning, her family was found as well,” Alfaro wrote.
“After days of searching without rest in different municipalities of the state, … her mother, father, aunt and the little boy [her brother] … are today safe and sound.”
The Jalisco Attorney General’s Office (FGE) said that the family, who disappeared on March 25 while traveling home to Zapopan from Mexico City, was found in La Laja, a community in the municipality of Zapotlanejo, located about 40 kilometers east of Guadalajara.
Attorney General Gerardo Octavio Solís said members of the family were undergoing medical checks but were in good health. He didn’t provide details about what happened to the family or where they had been for the past two weeks.
Blanca Trujillo Cuevas, head of the FGE’s missing persons division, said the family was located as the result of “hard work” that included search operations, interviews and the collection of information.
“Today we celebrate that they’re alive, well and going to return to their family members,” she said.
The five members of the family were reported missing after Salvador Romo, father of Jimena Romo, lost contact with them as they were driving home to Jalisco from a vacation in Mexico City.
A senior citizen receives a Covid-19 vaccination in Mexico City.
Citing the delay in the delivery of Pfizer vaccines earlier this year, the federal government has modified its Covid-19 vaccination schedule, pushing back by one month the start date of the different stages of the national vaccination plan.
“The schedule of stages 2 to 5 has been modified and may undergo future modifications as it depends on the delivery of the pharmaceuticals,” the government said.
Stage 2 of the vaccination plan — the inoculation of people aged 60 and over and non-frontline health workers — will extend into May, according to the modified schedule. That presumably means that President López Obrador’s pledge to immunize all seniors with at least one vaccine dose by the end of April will not be fulfilled.
Almost 7.4 million seniors have so far received at least one dose, a figure that accounts for only 47% of the 15.7 million people aged 60 and over.
The inoculation of people aged 50 to 59 (stage 3) will take place in May and June while those aged 40 t0 49 (stage 4) will get their shots in June and July. Stage 5 — the vaccination of people aged 16 to 39 — is now scheduled to begin in July and conclude in March 2022.
The government said in late February that it expected to receive more than 100 million vaccine doses by the end of May, but as of Thursday night only 16.08 million had arrived. Mexico has secured most of those doses via commercial arrangements but received some 2.7 million AstraZeneca shots from the United States government under a loan scheme.
Finance Minister Arturo Herrera said Thursday that the government expects to receive an additional 5.5 million AstraZeneca shots in late April and May via Covax, a World Health Organization-backed initiative for equitable vaccine distribution.
Drug regulator Cofepris said Wednesday that it had no plans to limit use of the AstraZeneca vaccine although many countries have recommended that it not be used to inoculate younger adults due to growing evidence that it can cause blood clots in rare cases.
In addition to that vaccine, Mexico has used Pfizer, SinoVac, CanSino and Sputnik V shots to inoculate citizens. Four of the five vaccines used to date require two shots, whereas the Chinese-made CanSino is a single-shot vaccine. Herrera said the government has no plans to purchase Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine, which is currently being used in the United States.
One additional vaccine that could be used in Mexico is India’s Covaxin, to which Cofepris granted emergency use authorization earlier this week.
Just over 10.64 million vaccine doses — two-thirds of all doses received — had been administered in Mexico by Thursday night, according to Health Ministry data. Of the almost 7.4 million seniors who have received one shot, nearly 940,000 have had their second required jab.
More than 530,000 vaccine doses were administered on Wednesday, a new daily record, while more than 334,000 were given on Thursday, according to preliminary data that will be revised upward on Friday.
The New York Times vaccinations tracker currently shows that 8.4 doses per 100 people have been administered in Mexico, compared to 115 in Israel, which ranks first, 61 in Chile, 53 in the United States and 20 in Canada. Mexico’s southern border neighbors, Guatemala and Belize, have administered 5.8 and 0.7 doses per 100 people, respectively.
Only 7.1% of Mexico’s population has received at least one vaccine dose while just 1.3% is fully vaccinated.
Some health experts estimate that 70% to 90% of the population needs to be inoculated or infected with the virus to reach herd immunity. For that to occur, a minimum of around 90 million Mexicans — the country’s population is just over 126 million — would need to have Covid-19 antibodies generated either by infection or inoculation.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated tally of confirmed coronavirus cases rose by 5,140 on Thursday to almost 2.27 million while the official Covid-19 death toll increased by 548 to 206,146.
The federal government acknowledged in a report published late last month that Mexico’s true Covid-19 death toll was above 321,000, a figure almost 60% higher than the official count of test-confirmed fatalities, but it has not subsequently updated its official numbers.
Seniors who have received their second dose of Covid-19 vaccine can now return to work packing groceries in supermarkets, according to the National Institute for the Elderly (Inapam).
The return to work should be gradual, voluntary and in accordance with the coronavirus stoplight risk map in each state. Seniors who have had a respiratory illness within the past month should not return to work, Inapam said.
Major supermarket chains announced in March 2020 that seniors would no longer be permitted to work as baggers to prevent the spread of Covid-19 among vulnerable sectors of the public. The decision represented an economic blow to seniors who supplemented their pensions with tips from shoppers.
For many seniors, the tips were their main source of income, according to Elizeth Altamirano López, a gerontologist and psychologist with the Mexico City Council for the Prevention and Eradication of Discrimination. Losing their jobs can also take a toll on seniors’ mental health, she said.
The Mexico City government announced last month that it would provide economic support payments to seniors who had worked as grocery baggers in the amount of 2,200 pesos (US $109).
A criminal court has sentenced Catholic priest Francisco Javier Bautista Ávalos to 27 years and six months in prison for the murder of Leonardo Avendaño, whose body was found in the Tlalpan borough of Mexico City on June 12, 2019.
The prison sentence will be served without options for early release. The court also ordered a fine of more than 400,000 pesos (US $19,850).
Avendaño was reported missing on June 11, 2019, a day before his body was found in the back of a pickup truck in Tlalpan. The body showed signs of torture and asphyxiation. Bautista was detained a week later after having conducted the victim’s funeral service.
Video footage showed that he met with the 29-year-old deacon the night of his murder. Shortly after Avendaño’s death, his family said he was murdered to prevent him from going public with unspecified accusations against Bautista.
Initially, many parishioners supported Bautista. An online petition gathered more than 6,000 signatures in his support. Some early reports suggested that the murder may have been an accident in the course of a sex game. Josué Avendaño, the victim’s brother, emphatically rejected those claims.
“My brother was tortured. [His injuries] weren’t from a game or anything like that. It was something that was planned in advance. My brother was tortured, and then, after that, the cause [of death] was asphyxiation,” he said. He added that the body was badly bruised with a broken nose and some missing teeth.
After the sentencing, the victim’s brother said he was satisfied with outcome.
“I would have liked the maximum penalty but having justice served is more than enough.”
One of the men came to the vaccination site in a wheelchair.
Two men who passed themselves off as senior citizens in order to get vaccinated against Covid-19 are in prison and awaiting trial.
On Wednesday, a Mexico City judge ordered the two men to stand trial on charges of identity theft as well as falsification, alteration or improper use of identification documents. The judge remanded the men in custody and granted prosecutors a period of one month to complete their investigation.
Christian Alberto Nieva Gómez, 35, and Rubén Morales Zerecero, 31, allegedly went to a vaccination center in the Mexico City borough of Coyoacán on March 27 and passed themselves off as the latter’s uncle and father, respectively, according to the TV Azteca news website.
According to preliminary investigations, they presented birth certificates and citizen identification (CURP) numbers that corresponded to Morales’ relatives.
Wearing face masks, plastic face shields, gloves, sweaters with hoods and dark glasses, the men managed to deceive officials at the vaccination center and both received shots.
Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said that the men had also dyed their hair and eyebrows gray.
After the men had received their shots and were in the vaccination center’s observation area, a federal official became suspicious that they weren’t who they said they were. Their documents were checked again, and the official noted that the two men’s voices weren’t those of senior citizens.
Police were immediately notified and the men were arrested.
“What they did was falsify official documents, and that’s a criminal offense,” Sheinbaum said on Wednesday. “That’s the reason they’re in custody.”
The two men have connections and some renown in Latin America’s video gaming e-sports world, according to TV Azteca.
A video gaming news website said Morales, who is also the son of Mexican TV actress Aida Pierce, has been one of the best videogame players in Latin America during the past two decades.
He made a splash in the videogaming world at age 15 in 2005 as a third-place winner in the FIFA esports world championships and became popular enough that he was featured in commercials for the Xbox live videogaming platform in Latin America in 2015. He most has recently worked for the videogame company EA Sports on content creation.
Nieva also has worked for EA Sports and is known for working on the development and localization team for Latin America.
1-year-old Julia Isabella Villaseñor is reunited with her grandfather.
A 1-year-old girl who disappeared last month along with her parents, aunt and brother has been found, the Jalisco Search Commission said Thursday.
The commission said that Julia Isabella Villaseñor was found by municipal police on a vacant lot in La Barca, a municipality about 100 kilometers southeast of Guadalajara. The infant was alone, but was in good health and has been reunited with her grandfather.
Julio Alberto Villaseñor Cabrera, Jimena Romo Jiménez, their two children and Villaseñor’s sister disappeared on March 25 while traveling home to Zapopan, Jalisco, from Mexico City.
Seven police officers on the municipal police force in Acatic, Jalisco, were arrested in connection with the disappearances earlier this week. Two of the officers are suspected of involvement in another missing persons’ case.
On Thursday morning, officials from the Jalisco Search Commission and National Search Commission, as well as police, were continuing the search for the four other missing family members in Acatic, which is about 100 kilometers northwest of where Julia was found. Relatives of the family were also participating in the search.
The Zapopan couple disappeared in Acatic.
Authorities are also searching for the deputy director of the Acatic police force, who is wanted on forced disappearance charges.
The motive for the family’s disappearance has not been determined, but there could be a connection to an armed attack which took place days earlier in Guadalajara.
“[A] person who was assaulted with a gun in the city of Guadalajara four days earlier in a direct attack has a very close relationship with two of the disappeared people. So it is very probable that the events were related, but we are still not totally sure,” the Jalisco Attorney General’s Office said earlier this week.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Villaseñor Romo family has three children. They have two.
A farmer on the Usumacinta River moves his cattle. Photos by Gavin Shand
While the unseasonably late Hurricanes Eta and Iota slammed into Central America in the first half of November 2020, further north on Mexico’s Gulf coast, the sun was shining, as it almost always does there late in the year.
Meanwhile, however, across the so-called “northern triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, where the hurricanes were striking, significant quantities of rainwater poured into the area’s rivers, which largely flow from south to north and end up meeting the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico, largely via the Usumacinta River basin.
As the hurricanes hit, in fact, the Díaz family of San Eduardo at the westernmost edge of Campeche, a family well used to being surrounded by water the entire year, had little inkling that within two weeks and despite having had no rainfall whatsoever, they would be struggling with the harshest floods they had witnessed in a generation.
In no time at all, their entire land, crops and animals had either washed away or had been left at the literal water’s edge. At the highest watermark, in fact, the family had half a bedroom as the sole remainder of their dry existence; the rest of their lives had been fully immersed.
The Usumacinta River and its broad hinterland of deltas and extensive floodplains gathers and releases, on average, over 5,000 cubic meters of water per second. Straddling Tabasco and Campeche in Mexico’s remote southeast, reaching inland as far as Tenosique, it is by some distance the most voluminous river in Mexico and Central America.
The Usumacinta River, which runs through Tabasco as well as Chiapas.
Above Tenosique, in the highlands of Chiapas, where the river also serves as the de facto border between Mexico and Guatemala, the Usumacinta is generally a narrow channel cut through rock — including a classic high-wall gorge at Boca del Cerro — before it opens out below into a wide array of self-nourishing water systems. During the winter season, some of the expansive area of land occasionally dries, but the territory is more often composed of year-round wetlands that are home to innumerable native species, including manatee, crocodiles, the howler monkey and an immense array of bird life.
The Usumacinta is also home to Mexico’s little-visited and largely forgotten water communities, the Díaz family among them.
Comprising three generations and approximately 40 individuals, the family’s presence here began 60 years ago when their grandparents relocated to the area from the regional uplands. They moved because land (or water) was cheap and plentiful and natural resources from which they could live and sustain themselves were in abundance.
The waters rose, the waters abated, fish were everywhere and their little pocket of precarious paradise gave them enough space to keep and feed livestock, using everything that grew around them.
In the early days, the only transport was via the water on a Venetian-style punt. Though there are still traces of the canalete style of stand-up rowing, or punting, these days, outboard engines are favored over the punt for anything but the shortest of distances.
The nearest road was built 20 years ago but still ends miles from the family, a clear dead end that had soldiers who came to help with relief efforts in December completely stumped.
This traditional mode of transport is still used, but these days, the canoe has been mostly replaced by motorboats.
“They came in a massive truck,” says Sara, a second-generation member of the family and now regarded by all as the matriarch of the community. “The road was impassable, and they couldn’t conceive that it just stopped without going on anywhere. So their assistance ended up being to help some neighbors move a fridge they had just bought from the nearest town.” She rolls her eyes as she says this. “We’re better off alone here. Most people don’t understand how we can live so completely surrounded by — and at the mercy of — water, so much water.”
Further to the west in Tabasco, in the Centla biosphere reserve, husband-and-wife team Lupita and Raúl live much the same lifestyle as the Díaz family — one in which water is a permanent source of opportunity and livelihood but also risk. The couple live at Tres Brazos, the point of precise intersection between the Usumacinta and the vast Grijalva River and the smaller San Pedrito River, at which point the Usumacinta gets bigger than ever as it rolls on toward the ocean.
Here it isn’t just the full rivers that flood, says Lupita, but also ocean swells that barrel back in.
“We’re constantly at the mercy of our environment, but we’ve never known a place as beautiful as this. We are so lucky to live here.”
Communities across this broad, undefined area — except to say that it constitutes the westernmost edge of the Mayan world — all share a word in their common language, lacreciente. The concept refers to the river as it swells and threatens but also the fact that, as it bursts its banks, fish will fill the surrounding wetlands and lagoons, bringing bounty and sustenance.
As with every event that these most amazing and unique of communities endure, everything is a double-edged sword — no surprise when you live on a forgotten frontier.
Because the river stretches into Guatemala, a hurricane outside Mexico can end up swelling the river here to flooding.
The truth of such frontiers is that they are little-known and understood because they are hiding in plain sight in the heart of Mexico’s southeast. Most mainstream cultural exposure to them is at its very edges. But take the time to push on beyond where the roads end, to journey beyond the water’s edge, and you will find some of the most amazing unknown and unheralded communities in the country, a hidden parallel world living on the beautiful edge of existence.
Shannon Collins is an environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think tank. She writes from Campeche.
