The funeral for Elvin Mazariegos was held Wednesday in Tacaná. rafael arreaga
The army has offered 1 million pesos (US $48,900) in compensation to the family of a Guatemalan man who was shot dead by a Mexican soldier on a remote stretch of Mexico’s southern border on Monday, according to the victim’s sister.
According to Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval, the soldier shot at the vehicle as it tried to escape in reverse from a military checkpoint. He said the decision to shoot was an “erroneous reaction” because the military personnel hadn’t come under attack.
Olga Mazariegos told the newspaper Reforma that the Mexican army had offered a single 1-million-peso payment to her brother’s family. But the family is also demanding monthly maintenance payments for Mazariego’s daughters, aged 9 and 5, and 2-year-old son, she said.
In a telephone interview with Reforma, Olga Mazariegos said the family is demanding monthly payments for each of the children at least until they turn 18. She said their father was the sole income earner in his family.
“What we want is monthly maintenance, but they say that they’ll only give [a single payment of] approximately half a million quetzales,” Mazariegos said.
(At today’s exchange rate, 1 million pesos is in fact 377,300 quetzales).
The slain man’s sister said the army’s proposed payment will be insufficient for the man’s widow to maintain her family.
“She’s left alone with her three children; what happened to my brother is not fair,” she said, adding that it was insulting for the army to say that his life was worth 1 million pesos.
Mazariegos said her brother traveled to Mexico frequently in his job as a truck driver, adding that he also regularly crossed the border to go shopping. However, when he was killed he was just going for a drive in his boss’s car, she said.
His body has been returned to Guatemala after undergoing an autopsy in Chiapas – authorities in the southern state said he had been shot in the neck and chest – but as of Tuesday night he hadn’t been buried.
Mazariegos said that the family hasn’t received any financial assistance from authorities in Guatemala but locals in Tacaná have provided monetary support.
The solider who shot Elvin Mazariegos was turned over to the federal Attorney General’s Office, Sandoval said Tuesday. Fifteen other soldiers deployed to the southern border in Chiapas were detained on Monday by a group of about 300 angry border residents including Guatemalans.
Nine soldiers were released about three hours after they were detained, Sandoval said, while the others were set free in the early hours of Tuesday morning after Mexican officials reached a deal with the civilians to provide them with “economic reparation” for the killing. The army chief didn’t reveal how much money was paid to the angry mob.
The killing of Mazariegos came just two days after the death of a Salvadoran woman who was violently pinned to the ground while she was being arrested by municipal police in Tulum, Quintana Roo.
The monument to peace symbolizes the effort to gather and destroy firearms.
The results of a program that invites citizens to turn in firearms in Mexico City became concrete and visible on Tuesday when government officials unveiled a new monument: a sculpture made with 4,700 guns voluntarily surrendered by residents.
The guns were turned in as part of a city program called “Yes to Disarmament, Yes to Peace.”
“There can be no act more symbolic that says, ‘We want peace in the city; we want peace in the country,’” said Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum at the unveiling.
The 3.5-meter-tall monument was created by the artist Miguel Ángel Campos Ortiz, who was selected over 109 other sculptors in a citywide competition. Designed in the shape of a grinding mill, intended to symbolize the disposal and grinding of firearms, is located at the intersection of Manuel González and Reforma avenues in the Cuauhtémoc borough.
Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez said that the program was a model that would be replicated on the national level in states where a large number of homicides have been recorded.
She cited Guanajuato, Jalisco, México state, Michoacán and Zacatecas as states that would be participating and said that other states were also free to join.
“All these actions seek to promote a culture of peace and strengthen the prevention of violence and crime …” she said.
Icela said the program would reduce crime, drug addiction and the recruitment of children and youths into organized crime nationwide.
Sheinbaum said that young people need to be given opportunities for schooling in order to be motivated to forgo violence.
“We can’t obtain peace, we can’t reduce violence if we don’t tend to its causes,” she said.
The Mexico City gun surrender program has been renewed for 2021, she said.
The restaurant that was closed Monday by authorities in Mérida.
A Mérida restaurant was abruptly closed Monday by authorities following accusations that a Canadian expat connected with the restaurant attacked the daughter of the owner of a business next door.
The restaurant, named Harlow, was closed indefinitely on Monday by local and state officials.
Accounts of the alleged attack — which went viral online after many users reposted an audio recording alleged to be of the attack — said the Mérida resident attacked the girl after a dispute escalated between the woman and the owner of a neighboring business. According to the newspaper Diario de Yucatán, the neighboring business was an art gallery.
In the audio that circulated online, a woman with an Anglo accent can be heard shouting death threats and apparently attacking a female alleged to be the art gallery owner’s daughter.
News of the incident spread online, galvanizing both Mexican and expat residents, some of whom demonstrated at Harlow on Monday, calling for justice for the teen and for the expat’s deportation. Later that day, authorities appeared at Harlow to close it down.
According to Diario de Yucatán, the dispute was regarding dining tables from Harlow that had been placed in front of the art gallery, and which the gallery owner had asked the other woman to remove.
In the audio recording, a woman can be heard speaking in English and telling a young female with a non-Anglo accent, “You better be calling your mom, because we need to have a little chat.”
When the girl on the audio responded in English that her mother was busy teaching a class and wouldn’t be coming to talk with her, the woman on the audio began insulting the young woman and issuing death threats, both littered with expletives.
“I’ll bury your body in the fucking front of this yard,” the woman told the girl moments before what sounds like a physical attack, followed by screams from the girl that apparently attracted a man to intervene and tell the woman to leave.
The Anglo-accented voice continued to shout death threats on the recording.
According to the newspaper La Silla Rota, the victim’s mother has filed a complaint with the state Attorney General’s Office.
Viva Aerobus has increased the number of routes it flies despite the global downturn in air travel.
Low-cost airline Viva Aerobus will begin flying three new Mexico-United States routes in May, increasing the number of services between the two countries to 24.
The three new routes, all of which will launch on May 29, will fly from two airports, the Bajío International Airport (BJX) in Silao, Guanajuato, and the Los Cabos International Airport in Baja California Sur.
The flights from Guanajuato will go to the Texas cities of Houston and San Antonio. There will be three services per week between BJX and Houston and two between BJX and San Antonio.
The third new route is a once-a-week seasonal flight between Los Cabos and the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. That service will end on August 8.
Viva Aerobus has 21 other Mexico-United States services scheduled for the summer season between late March and the end of October, according to aviation data company Cirium. Other U.S. destinations to which the airline flies include Nashville, Dallas Fort-Worth, New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The 24 different Mexico-U.S. services scheduled for the coming months is more than double the 11 routes it operated between the two countries in 2019.
Viva Aerobus has expanded its routes despite the sharp global downturn in air travel caused by the coronavirus pandemic. It has started or announced 15 new Mexico-U.S. routes since the start of the pandemic, six of which operate out of Mexico City and four of which depart from Monterrey, Nuevo León.
Among the factors that have helped the budget carrier are the problems at Interjet and Mexico’s open-border policy for incoming air travelers at a time when many other countries have restricted travel.
Both Viva Aerobus and competitor Volaris are looking to start flying to Colombia in the coming months, according to aviation news website Simple Flying. Neither airline currently flies anywhere in South America.
More than half of Mexico City residents are in favor of renaming the capital México-Tenochtitlán, according to a new poll.
A survey conducted by the newspaper El Financiero asked 600 chilangos, or capitalinos as the capital’s residents are also known, whether they would like Mexico City to be called by its pre-Hispanic name and 54% said they would.
In contrast, 42% of respondents said they didn’t support a name change while 4% said they they didn’t know.
Conducted earlier this month as Mexico City gears up to mark the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec empire capital with a series of cultural events, the poll also asked respondents if they identified more as Mexicas, as Aztec people were also known, Spanish or mestizo (mixed indigenous and Spanish blood).
Mestizo was the most popular response, with 55% of respondents saying they identified as such while 37% saw themselves more as Mexicas. Only 4% identified as Spaniards and the same percentage said they didn’t know with whom they identified most.
Asked whether the 500th anniversary of the conquest of Tenochtitlán by Spanish conquistadores led by Hernán Cortés should be commemorated or forgotten, 80% chose the former option while just 16% opted for the latter.
Three-quarters of respondents said they preferred areas of the the capital where colonial-era architecture predominates, such as the historic center, while 24% said that they favored zones with modern architecture.
There are also numerous examples of pre-Hispanic architecture in Mexico City including the Templo Mayor, Tlatelolco and Cuicuilco archaeological sites.
Tenochtitlán, which means “place where prickly pears abound” in Náhuatl, was founded by the Mexica people in 1325 on an island located on Lake Texcoco. The legend goes that they decided to build a city on the island because they saw there the omen they were seeking: an eagle devouring a snake while perched on a nopal, or prickly pear cactus.
The police and the military were singled out for arbitrary killings.
The U.S. Department of State (DOS) has cited impunity as a major problem in Mexico in a new human rights report that also raises concerns about allegedly unlawful killings committed by government security forces and violence against journalists and human rights defenders.
As might be expected, the report got a cool reception Wednesday morning from President López Obrador, who questioned why the United States was commenting on Mexico’s internal affairs. But he didn’t take issue with any of the report’s contents.
“Impunity and extremely low rates of prosecution remained a problem for all crimes, including human rights abuses,” the DOS said in its Mexico 2020 human rights report.
“The government’s federal statistics agency estimated 94% of crimes were either unreported or not investigated. There were reports of some government agents who were complicit with international organized criminal gangs, and there were low prosecution and conviction rates in these abuses,” the report said.
It also said that there were high levels of impunity for offenses committed by organized crime groups.
The report said politicians publicly discredited and criticized journalists. President López Obrador has been the most outspoken critic of reporters and the media.
“Organized criminal elements, including local and transnational gangs, and narcotics traffickers, were significant perpetrators of violent crimes and committed acts of homicide, torture, kidnapping, extortion, human trafficking, bribery, intimidation, and other threats, resulting in high levels of violence, particularly targeting vulnerable groups. The government investigated and prosecuted some of these crimes, but the vast majority remained in impunity,” the report said.
The DOS said that “significant human rights issues” in Mexico in 2020 included reports of the involvement by police, military, and other government officials and illegal armed groups in unlawful or arbitrary killings and forced disappearance; torture by security forces; harsh and life-threatening conditions in some prisons; and arbitrary arrest and lengthy pretrial detention.
It also said that violence against journalists and human rights defenders; serious acts of corruption; impunity for violence against women; violence targeting persons with disabilities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex persons; and the existence of the worst forms of child labor were issues of concern.
The report cited various alleged police and military killings under the sub-heading “arbitrary deprivation of life and other unlawful or politically motivated killings.”
After the gun battle, “one of the soldiers discovered a combatant still alive and subsequently received orders to kill the wounded person,” the report said.
In the report’s sub-section on freedom of expression, the DOS said that “perpetrators of violence against journalists acted with impunity, consistent with high levels of impunity for all crimes.”
“The NGO Article 19 reported that as of December 2019, the impunity rate for crimes against journalists was 99%. According to Article 19 and media reporting, as of December, six journalists had been killed [in 2020] because of their reporting,” the report said.
The DOS noted that Freedom House’s 2019 Freedom on the Net report categorized the country’s internet as only partly free due to concerns about online manipulation tactics, high levels of violence against digital reporters, and investigations surrounding abusive surveillance practices.
“The report noted political partisans launched social media campaigns against journalists who criticized President Lopez Obrador’s daily live-streamed press conferences. A trend on social media also saw public officials blocking critical journalists and media from following their social media accounts,” the DOS said.
The State Department also noted that while “journalists could criticize the government and discuss matters of general interest with no restrictions, politicians publicly discredited and criticized such journalists.”
The president discredited Article 19 on Wednesday, accusing the NGO of being aligned with the government’s conservative opponents.
“… Journalists were killed or subjected to physical and cyberattacks, harassment, and intimidation (especially by state agents and transnational criminal organizations) in response to their reporting. This limited media’s ability to investigate and report, since many of the reporters who were killed covered crime, corruption, and local politics. High levels of impunity, including for killings or attacks on journalists, resulted in self-censorship and reduced freedom of expression and the press.”
Speaking at his regular news conference on Wednesday, López Obrador criticized the United States government for daring to speak out about human rights issues in Mexico.
“Look at this: the United States Department of State yesterday made its recommendations about Mexico. To start, we don’t get involved in offering opinions about human rights violations in the United States, we’re respectful, we can’t give an opinion about what’s happening in another country,” he said.
“So why does the United States government weigh in on issues that only concern Mexicans?”
“It turns out that this association called Article 19 is financed by foreign companies, even by the State Department. That organization … is supported [in Mexico] from abroad and what’s more all the people involved with Article 19 belong to the conservative movement that’s against us. I can prove everything I am telling you,” he said.
López Obrador allowed himself to acknowledge that femicides and extortion have increased but didn't dwell on the government's shortcomings on crime.
Optimism, nationalism and a heavy dose of self-praise marked President López Obrador’s latest report to the nation in which he provided an assessment of the federal government’s first 100 days of its third year in office.
In a 40-minute speech delivered before a select group of cabinet ministers and other officials at the National Palace in Mexico City on Tuesday, López Obrador focused almost exclusively on the positive even though the 100-day period he was ostensibly reporting on – December 1, 2020 to March 11 – coincided with the deadliest days of the coronavirus pandemic in Mexico.
The president touted the government’s honesty, austerity and “policy of zero corruption,” claiming that billions of pesos in savings have been generated. He also boasted that his administration hasn’t taken on additional debt, raised taxes or increased prices for gasoline, diesel, gas and electricity. In addition, the peso hasn’t depreciated and inflation is under control, López Obrador declared.
Although many experts warn that the road to economic recovery after last year’s deep recession will be a long and arduous one, the president asserted that Mexico is already “coming out of the crisis” in both an economic and social sense.
“The growth forecast for this year has been going up and now even the most cautious people accept that it will be 5%,” López Obrador said.
The president and his wife, Beatriz Gutiérrez, en route to the presentation of his report to the nation.
“In my opinion, our economy will have recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the middle of the year. I also think that the most affected sectors such as tourism, retail, restaurants and other services will thrive again,” he said, adding that more than 500,000 of about 1.1 million formal sector jobs lost last year have been recovered.
AMLO, as the president is known to supporters and critics alike, also touted the benefits of the government’s myriad welfare and social programs, going over the same or similar ground he has covered in several previous addresses to the nation.
He then let his staunch nationalism run free, reiterating that Mexico under his leadership will move toward self-sufficiency in petroleum, gas and energy generation as well as food production. The government will respect oil sector contracts awarded to private and foreign companies as a result of the 2014 energy reform but will not grant new concessions and will continue protecting Pemex to shore up its participation in the petroleum market, López Obrador said.
“… The practice of exporting crude and buying gasoline will come to an end. … All raw materials will be processed in our country,” he said.
The president defended the Electricity Industry Law that was recently approved by Congress but promptly struck down by the courts, saying that it will allow the “serious damage” caused by the privatization of the sector to be repaired.
“While the market of this industry was opened up in order to give preference to domestic and foreign private companies … the [state-owned] Federal Electricity Commission plants were completely abandoned,” López Obrador said.
The president rejected accusations that his government is militarizing the country.
It wouldn’t be a bona fide AMLO speech without a rundown of the president’s pet infrastructure projects and indeed he didn’t miss the opportunity to once again highlight the benefits of the Santa Lucía airport, currently under construction north of Mexico City, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec trade corridor and the Maya Train railroad that will link cities and towns in five southeastern states.
Those three projects alone are generating 116,000 direct jobs and 227,000 indirect ones, López Obrador said.
He also highlighted that the government is building a range of other infrastructure projects ranging from drainage systems to federal highways and wastewater treatment plants to a new oil refinery on the Tabasco coast.
AMLO ran through a laundry list of government anti-crime measures including “looking after young people,” creating jobs, combatting poverty and strengthening moral, cultural and spiritual values. He asserted that the “fruit of this work” is a reduction in the incidence of numerous crimes including fuel theft, homicides and kidnappings, which he said had declined by 95%, 1.6% and 38%, respectively, during his administration.
He briefly allowed himself to acknowledge that femicides and extortion have increased but didn’t dwell on the government’s shortcomings on crime – homicides were at near-record levels in 2020 despite the pandemic – or try to defend his administration against widespread criticism that it is not adequately addressing Mexico’s shockingly bad gender violence problem.
The president instead moved on to highlighting the importance of the creation of the National Guard, which now has 100,00 troops, and thanking the military for its efforts in helping the nation recoverer from natural disasters, containing organized crime, rebuilding security and peace in the nation’s most crime-ridden regions and constructing infrastructure, among a range of other tasks.
The president gave his report before a select group of cabinet ministers and other officials at the National Palace.
His extensive recognition of the work of the military, which has continued to carry out public security tasks during the current government even though López Obrador pledged to withdraw the armed forces from the nation’s streets, came a day after a soldier shot dead a Guatemalan migrant on the southern border.
The president made no mention of that incident but responded to criticism that his government is militarizing the country.
“The accusations that we’re militarizing the country lack all logic and the majority lack even the most elemental good faith. The armed forces have not been ordered to wage war against anybody. They haven’t been asked to supervise or oppress society, to violate laws, to restrict freedoms … [or] to get involved in actions that repress or violate human rights,” AMLO said.
Toward the end of his address, the president acknowledged the “tremendous harm” caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the “immense pain” of families who have lost loved ones but declared that “little by little we are building a new normal.”
“Infections, hospitalizations and most importantly deaths have recently come down and we are now getting more vaccine doses in order to protect the entire population as quickly as possible. We’ve already started with those most exposed to the virus [health workers] and the most vulnerable [seniors],” López Obrador said.
While the president offered a largely sanguine assessment of the state of the nation and the future, he did acknowledge that there is still work to do to achieve the “central goal” of creating “a better, more fraternal society with more equality, justice and freedoms” and no “classism, discrimination and racism.”
“But we’re heading that way, in search of that wonderful utopia, that fecund and beautiful ideal of being happy as a result of being content with ourselves, our conscience and with our fellow human beings,” he said.
Seniors wait outside a vaccination center in the city of Puebla.
After experiencing long wait times and inconsistent decision-making by health officials, several seniors in Puebla criticized what they said was poor organization of Covid-19 vaccinations in the state capital, which began Monday.
Meanwhile, during the second round of vaccinations on Tuesday, an 82-year-old woman lost consciousness while waiting in line at a vaccination site and was pronounced dead upon arrival at a local hospital. Authorities said she had just managed to pass through the first stage of waiting when she passed out. No official cause of death has yet been given.
According to the newspaper El Universal, chaotic scenes on day 1 began outside the Ciudad Universitaria (University City) vaccination center just before 11:00 a.m. on Monday.
Hundreds if not thousands of seniors were lined up in close proximity in queues formed according to the different appointment times they had been assigned prior to Monday. Noting that people were not observing social distancing protocols, authorities began granting access to the vaccination center regardless of appointment times, El Universal said.
The decision triggered complaints that seniors with disabilities or illnesses should have been given priority.
Miguel Camacho, who arrived at Ciudad Universitaria at 10:45 a.m. for his 11:30 a.m. appointment, said he had to stand in line for about four hours, a wait made even more difficult due to recent surgery.
“I told a man that I had a gallbladder operation a few months ago, but he told me that it didn’t matter, that I had to wait,” he said.
Camacho and his wife weren’t vaccinated until almost five hours after arriving. They left the vaccination center tired, stressed and hungry, El Universal said, noting that they were only able to have a quick snack at a nearby store while a woman saved their spot in the line.
“Terrible organization,” Camacho said bluntly.
Many other seniors were forced to wait hours outside in the sun and then again inside the vaccination center in order to receive a dose of the SinoVac vaccine on offer in the Puebla capital.
“The organization was very bad,” said 67-year-old Rafael Hernández, who left the vaccination center more than four hours after his scheduled appointment time of 11:30 a.m. It was senseless to set an appointment schedule and then not follow it, he said, adding that there was little empathy from the vaccination center workers.
Authorities lost control of the situation,’ said one senior.
Alberto Sánchez got a shot on Monday but left the vaccination center a cranky man, El Universal said.
“I was under the sun for about three hours,” he said, saying that authorities had lost control of the situation.
“We hope that it won’t be the same for the second dose,” said Hernández.
In other Covid vaccination news:
Vaccination began Tuesday in three Mexico City boroughs and will commence Friday in two more.
Authorities are aiming to vaccinate a total of almost 340,000 seniors in Benito Juárez, Cuauhtémoc and Álvaro Obregón this week. People aged 60 and over with surnames beginning with A, B and C were eligible for vaccination Tuesday. AstraZeneca shots will be administered Wednesday to seniors with last names beginning with D, E, F and G. Those surnames beginning with H, I, J, K, L and M are eligible on Thursday. The rollout extends to those with surnames beginning with N, Ñ, O, P, Q and R on Friday and to seniors with last names starting with S, T, U, V, W, X, Y and Z on Saturday.
The vaccination program in the boroughs of Gustavo A. Madero and Iztapalapa will begin Friday, where the Sputnik V vaccine will be used. The same five-day schedule based on the first letter of seniors’ last names will apply, meaning that people with surnames beginning with A, B and C will be eligible for a shot on the first day of the rollout — Friday — and others will be eligible on one of the subsequent days. Authorities expect to administer almost 520,000 vaccine shots in the two boroughs, which include some of Mexico City’s poorest and most densely populated areas.
Vaccinations are also taking place this week in seven México state municipalities: Ecatepec, Huixquilucan, Amecameca, Ayapango, Juchitepec, Tepetlixpa and Tlalmanalco.
México state ranks second among Mexico’s 32 states for both coronavirus cases and Covid-19 deaths with more than 232,000 of the former and almost 23,000 of the latter. The capital has been Mexico’s coronavirus epicenter since the start of the pandemic, with more than 600,000 confirmed cases and over 39,000 Covid-19 deaths recorded there as of Monday.
Looking ahead to next week, vaccinations will start in Querétaro city and the Querétaro state municipality of San Juan del Río, which borders both México state and Hidalgo. El Universal reported that they are the only Querétaro municipalities where vaccines have not yet been administered to seniors.
Querétaro Welfare Minister Rocío Peniche Vera said Monday that it was not yet clear which day next week the rollout will start in both municipalities. Some 78,000 vaccine doses have already been administered to seniors in the Bajío region state, but more than 100,000 people aged 60 and over who live in the capital remain unvaccinated.
Just over 7 million vaccine doses have been administered since the first shot was given on December 24. Data presented by the Health Ministry at Monday night’s coronavirus press briefing showed that almost 1.5 million shots have been administered to health workers, of which more than 628,000 were second shots.
About 5.55 million shots have gone to seniors, and just over 40,000 have been administered to teachers. Of the approximately 5.3 million seniors who have received one vaccine dose, only about 205,000 have so far received a second shot.
Mexico has only used two-shot vaccines to date but is expected to begin using the single-shot CanSino vaccine soon. The federal government received 12.33 million more vaccine doses Monday night, including 1.5 million AstraZeneca shots sent by the United States government.
The nation has so far used the Pfizer, AstraZeneca, SinoVac and Sputnik V vaccines to inoculate citizens. According to The New York Times vaccinations tracker, Mexico has administered 5.6 doses per 100 people, and 4.9% of the population have received at least one shot.
Mexico is still facing medication shortages eight months after signing an agreement with the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) to collaborate on the international purchase of medicines, medical supplies and vaccines.
The federal government announced last July it had signed a deal with UNOPS that President López Obrador said would allow Mexico to obtain high quality medications and equipment all over the world at low prices and put an end to shortages.
Prior to that agreement, the government established a new system to purchase and distribute medications after dismantling the previous one. Under the new system, the ministries of Finance and Health are responsible for buying and distributing drugs whereas the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) and a network of private companies were previously in charge.
Despite the system change and the United Nations agreement, medication shortages still plague Mexico, according to a report by the newspaper Reforma.
The Cero Desabasto (Zero Shortage) collective, a group that monitors the availability of medications in the public health system and pressures the government to keep up supply, said there were supply problems with one of every four medications purchased in 2020.
Meanwhile, no consolidated purchases have been completed via the agreement with UNOPS , Reforma reported.
At the start of December, UNOPS launched tendering processes to find suppliers for almost 1,300 different medications and more than 600 medical products but hasn’t awarded contracts for the vast majority of them.
When IMSS was in charge of purchases, contracts were usually signed between the end of November and the start of January, Reforma said.
In light of the supply problems associated with the UNOPS collaboration, the State Workers Social Security Institute and Birmex, a majority state-owned medical company, have had to make their own emergency purchases, the newspaper reported.
The latter spent almost 3 billion pesos (US $145.8 million) at the end of January to purchase millions of analgesics and anticoagulants needed to treat Covid-19 patients.
According to the Mexican Institute for Competiveness (Imco), a think tank, the federal government’s performance with respect to purchasing medical supplies needed to respond to the pandemic has been poor since before the coronavirus arrived in Mexico and hasn’t improved.
The think tank, which earlier this month presented a report entitled A Year of Emergency Purchases in Mexico: Six Proposals for Improvement, said the government was slow to react at the start of the pandemic and that it wasn’t transparent about the purchases it did make.
Pablo Montes, Imco’s anti-corruption coordinator, said the government made similar mistakes later in the pandemic, explaining that it rushed to secure medical supplies when hospitals were again filling up quickly at the end of last year and as a result was unable to obtain good prices.
“A year after the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government hasn’t developed special mechanisms to purchase [medications and medical supplies] in times of emergency,” he said at the presentation of the Imco report.
“… Just as it has been widely said that the pandemic arrived in a Mexico with a deficient health system, it also arrived [in a country] with a defective public purchasing system and there have not been efforts to correct it. This has caused pandemic-related purchases to be opaque, tardy and [plagued] with irregularities,” Montes said.
Fernanda Avendaño, an Imco researcher, said the think tank’s study was based on information on the government’s online transparency platform CompraNet.
There are a lot of inconsistencies in the pandemic-related information uploaded to the site, she said, adding that there is scant information about medical purchases worth a combined 4 billion pesos (US $194.2 million).
“In addition to the [poor] quality of the information and in many cases the non-existence of same, there is a problem in the publication of this information,” she said, explaining that the details of many pandemic-related purchases were uploaded to the transparency platform well after they were made.
Imco general director Valeria Moy said it was regrettable that the federal government has not improved its medical-related purchasing practices a year after the coronavirus started spreading in Mexico.
“We saw that exactly the same thing happened in December [as occurred at the start of the pandemic], when everyone knew that another wave [of the virus] was coming. There is already talk of a third wave due to the relaxation of [health] measures in Holy Week. Are we preparing for the third wave or aren’t we?” she said, wondering if the government is already making the purchases necessary to treat a new influx of coronavirus patients to the nation’s hospitals.
“I believe there are a lot of lessons to be learned,” Moy added.
Leona's lead actors Christian Vázquez and Naian González Norvind.
Offering a rare cinematic look at a historic Mexican Jewish community, the new feature film Leona is a deeply personal subject for its director, Isaac Cherem.
A native of Mexico City, Cherem grew up in the Syrian Jewish community, which dates back to a mass migration from the Ottoman Empire over 100 years ago. His influences include the French New Wave as well as the late Korean director Kim Ki-duk and American independent filmmakers Miranda July and Jim Jarmusch. Another influence is Woody Allen, including the film Hannah and Her Sisters with its family dinner-table get-togethers that resonated with Cherem, who remembers numerous such occasions from childhood.
Set in the present day, his debut film Leona tells the story of a fictional member of this community, a young artist named Ariela who falls in love with a non-Jewish writer named Iván. Their romance encounters resistance from Ariela’s family and community, who fear that she will marry outside her religion.
The film opened in theaters and on-demand on February 5. Before that, it made the film festival run for several years, during which time Mexican actress Naian González Norvind, who plays Ariela, won a best actress award from the Morelia International Film Festival. González Norvind’s mother is famed telenovela star Nailea Norvind.
Cherem worked with Nailea Norvind as an assistant director on a film project while in his early 20s. He describes her as “at one point … probably the most famous actress in Mexico” and “willing to do anything for the sake of art.” They became friends, and he met her daughter. When Cherem asked González to be in his directorial debut film, she agreed not only to star in it but to cowrite the screenplay with him.
Leona is a coming-of-age story about Ariela, a girl from Mexico City’s insular Syrian Jewish community who faces conflict when she falls in love with an outsider.
Cherem originally intended Leona as a Romeo and Juliet story, calling it “impossible love” or “a basic romantic comedy.” After González joined the film, they teamed up for something different. “[The] relationship was not the center of the story, the center of the story is [Ariela’s] coming-of-age,” Cherem said. “Our story was about her becoming an adult, making her own decisions.”
It echoed Cherem’s real-life journey. He described his anger at expectations for him to marry within his community, have a large family and follow a business career. Instead, he said, “I wanted to be an actor and do films.”
He moved out of his parents’ house and went to film school in Los Angeles. There he realized he did not know much about his homeland or “what it means to be Mexican.” Eventually, Cherem decided to create a film that would reflect his interest in Mexico as well as the community he had grown up in.
Cherem filmed scenes of life in some of the Jewish neighborhoods of Mexico City, such as Bosques de las Lomas. Other scenes were shot in neighborhoods such as Roma and Coyoacán. In addition to stars González and Christian Vázquez (who plays Iván), Cherem recruited his parents and a local Kabbalah teacher for the cast. He said that Mexican Jews have received little attention in the national cinema, save for a handful of films, such as Novia que te vea and Morirse está en hebreò. Leona, Cherem said, represents the first Mexican cinematic treatment of the country’s Syrian Jewish community.
The community is rooted in two historic Middle Eastern cities: Aleppo and Damascus. Members with ancestors from Aleppo are referred to as halabi while those having Damascus roots are known as shami. Cherem’s father’s family is originally from Aleppo while his mother’s side has roots in Damascus. Both cities were part of the Ottoman Empire when Jews began migrating from there in the early 20th century.
“As local conditions became more undesirable, [they could find a] new life in the Americas,” said Dalia Wassner, director of the Project on Latin American Jewish and Gender Studies at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute of Brandeis University. This became especially important “with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,” she said.
While on the surface the film is a story of forbidden love, it’s also an exploration of being Jewish in Mexico.
Some went to the United States or Argentina. But by the 1920s, the U.S. closed its doors to immigration.
“For some, proximity to the U.S. was an attraction, even if they ended up ultimately staying in Mexico through the generations,” said Wassner, who presented Leona in Boston when it was shown by the National Center for Jewish Film in 2019.
Mexico’s Jewish community is now the 14th-largest in the world with between 40,000 and 50,000 members.
“They report very little intermarriage,” Wassner said. “Among the Syrian community, there’s a lower intermarriage rate, almost zero.”
When the film opens, Ariela is living with her divorced mother, Estrella, in Mexico City. Estrella looks to date available Jewish men and encourages her daughter to do the same. Ariela’s life is centered around Jewish family and communal events such as the Sabbath, or Shabbat in Hebrew, and a ritual bath, or mikvah, that a friend undergoes before her wedding. Yet, Ariela ventures outside her neighborhood to work on painting murals, and it is on one such excursion that she meets Iván.
Their romance blossoms over a meal of nonkosher-looking carne. Iván also introduces Ariela to some of Mexico’s indigenous cuisine — chapulines (grasshoppers) and the vegetarian huauzontles. Cherem said that huauzontles are González’s favorite dish.
Mexico’s Syrian Jewish community emigrated here in the early 20th century, mainly from Aleppo and Damascus, when both cities were part of the Ottoman Empire.
Ariela gets to know Iván’s theatrically minded family, yet she is reluctant to have him meet hers.
When her family becomes aware of the seriousness of the relationship, they respond dramatically: Estrella says Ariela cannot live at home anymore. Neither Ariela’s father nor her grandmother will take her in, although they show varying degrees of sympathy. Her grandmother says she once had a non-Jewish boyfriend before ending things for what she saw as the communal good. This last point is underscored by a rabbi who meets with Ariela and details the community’s history of immigration and cohesion.
Cherem said that Leona was to have made its debut at the Festival Internacional de Cine Judío (FICJ) in Mexico City but that the invitation was withdrawn. The FICJ did not respond to a request for comment. “I think they thought it was maybe too much for the audience,” Cherem said. “They were afraid of controversy. It’s sad because this is what I think films, good films, do.”
Some people have also questioned the intimate nature of scenes between Ariela and Iván, Cherem said.
“It shocks people who do not think premarital sex is OK based on religion,” Cherem said. “The taboo of sex, nudity is based on religion … an oppressive force, as I see it.”
Within the Syrian Jewish community, the reaction to the film has been complex.
Director Isaac Cherem. Leona is his debut film.
“The response from men, especially older men, is that it was not OK to show the film,” Cherem said. “Women and younger people are more kind of thanking me that this existed, [that it] can be talked about, that somebody’s thinking about it, that it’s cool, the fact there’s a debate.”
This debate is “open even to people who are non-Jewish,” Cherem said, “because racism, discrimination, supremacy is in every sector of Mexico, is in every community, every society here.” He attributes this to the Conquest and the social classification of people “based on how Spanish you are.”
“There’s ignorance of other cultures, other societies,” Cherem said. “Everybody wants to think they’re the best. There’s oppression, racism. I think it works with people who are not Jewish also.”
Currently, the film can be streamed online on Vimeo On Demand. You will have to sign up for the streaming service, which is free, and there is a cost to rent the film.
Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
