The coronavirus pandemic and the deployment of almost 100,000 National Guard troops did little to halt violence in 2020: homicides declined for the first time in years, but only by 0.4%.
The federal government reported Wednesday that there were 34,515 homicides last year, a reduction of 133 compared to 2019, which was the most violent year on record. It also reported that there were 969 femicide victims – women and girls killed on account of their gender – in 2020, an increase of 0.3% compared to 2019. The worst state for that crime was México state followed by Veracruz, Jalisco, Mexico City and Nuevo León.
The total number of homicide and femicide victims last year was 35,484, a reduction of just under 0.4% compared to 2019. The figure equates to 97 murder victims per day, including 10 women and three children or adolescents. Almost seven in 10 victims were shot, federal data shows.
Although the reduction in the homicide rate was minimal, President López Obrador asserted that the government is making progress in improving security.
“My objective, honest assessment is that we’ve made progress. We still have a lot of things to do but there has been very significant progress,” he said.
Homicide statistics since 2015.
But the fact remains that violence remained at extremely high levels in 2020 even as people spent more time at home as a result of the pandemic and associated restrictions and the National Guard, which was created by the government in 2019, fanned out across the country in greater numbers. The number of homicide victims last year was almost double the number in 2015 when 17,886 people were murdered.
Murders increased in 11 states in 2020, government data shows, and Guanajuato remained the most violent in terms of the number of victims.
There were 4,510 homicide and femicide victims in the Bajío region state, a figure that accounts for almost 13% of the total number of people murdered in Mexico last year.
Compared to 2019, the number of victims in Guanajuato, which is plagued by cartel violence, rose by almost 1,000 or 25%. The leader of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, a major fuel theft, drug trafficking and extortion gang, was arrested last August but his capture didn’t result in a sustained reduction in violence. Authorities estimate that 80% of murders in Guanajuato, where the Jalisco New Generation Cartel also has a strong presence, are linked to organized crime.
After Guanajuato, the most violent states in terms of the number of murder victims were, in order, Baja California, México state, Chihuahua, Jalisco and Michoacán.
In percentage terms, Zacatecas and Yucatán recorded the biggest increases in violence in 2020. Murders in the former state increased 67% from 645 in 2019 to 1,075 last year.
The number of homicide and femicide victims increased by the same percentage in Yucatán but violence remained low. There were 60 murder victims in 2020, an increase of 24 compared to 2019.
San Luis Potosí, where the number of murder victims rose 45.4% to 759 last year, recorded the third highest increase among the 32 states.
The other states that recorded an increase in violence last year were Guanajuato, Michoacán, Baja California, Campeche, Chihuahua, Durango, Sonora and Querétaro.
In per capita terms, Baja California, Chihuahua, Colima and Guanajuato were the most violent states. Those four, all of which are plagued by cartel violence, recorded more than 70 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
Across Mexico there were 27 homicides per 100,000 residents. By comparison, there were about five murders per 100,000 residents in the United States in 2018, the Associated Press reported.
In addition to homicides, kidnappings and vehicle theft were among the crimes that declined. The number of kidnappings fell 38.5% compared to 2019 while vehicle theft was down 23.9%.
The archaeological dig at the site of the Aztec town of Zultépec.
Spanish conquistadores massacred women and children in an Aztec-allied town 500 years ago after the indigenous residents sacrificed and apparently ate a group of Spaniards they captured, according to new research.
The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has published findings from decades-long excavation work at the Tecoaque, or Zultépec, archaeological site in Tlaxcala.
INAH said in a statement that indigenous Acolhua residents of the town of Zultépec captured members of a Spanish caravan that was part of an expedition led by conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez. The governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, sent Nárvaez to Mexico in 1520 to stop the invasion of Hernán Cortés because he hadn’t authorized it.
After capturing members of the Spanish caravan, including women and children, the residents of Zúltepec sacrificed them over a period of “eight agonizing months” as an offering to the gods, INAH said.
In around January or February of 1521 it’s probable that the Acolhuas sacrificed the last of 450 people they had captured, among whom were also Cubans of indigenous and African descent who arrived with the Spaniards, and Tlaxcaltec, Totonac and Mayan people who allied themselves with the Spanish.
Remains of the European victims of sacrifice. royecto Zultepec Tecoaque
At about the same time a hill in Zultépec where the people were sacrificed came to be known as Tecoaque, which in the Náhuatl language means “the place where they were eaten.”
That suggests that the Acolhua people ate the victims of their ritual sacrifices. It is also believed that they killed and ate horses upon which the Spanish arrived.
When they were killing the last of their captives in early 1521, the residents of Zultépec knew that there would soon be revenge for their actions, INAH said.
Indeed, Cortés – who led the expedition that conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in August 1521 – ordered Gonzalo de Sandoval to carry out a revenge attack on the town after he found out what had happened to the members of the Spanish caravan.
Enrique Martínez Vargas, an archaeologist and director of the Tecoaque-Zúltepec site, said the attack likely occurred at the start of March 1521. He said that there are references to the attack in The True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a conquistador, and Cortés’ Third Letter of Relation to the Emperor Carlos V.
Fearing revenge, the Acolhua people of Zultépec tried to fortify the town by building walls and other defensive constructions but they were ultimately unable to stop the invasion on horseback led by Gonzalo de Sandoval.
Human bones were found in shallow wells where they had been hidden by the locals. Melitón Tapia INAH
“Some of the warriors who had stayed in the town managed to flee, but women and children remained, and they were the main victims,” Martínez said. “This we have been able to demonstrate over a 120-meter stretch of the main thoroughfare, where the skeletons of a dozen women were found who appeared to be ‘protecting’ the bones of 10 children between the ages of 5 and 6 whose sex has not been determined.”
Martínez said that “women and children who were sheltering inside rooms were mutilated, as evidenced by the discovery of hacked bones on the floors.”
“The temples were burned and the statues of gods were decapitated. This is the way that this place, which represented a resistance for Cortés, was destroyed,” he said.
INAH said that the residents of Zultépec also hid evidence of their sacrifices in shallow wells when they became aware that a revenge attack would occur. Archaeologists have found human bones that were carved into trophies, the remains of animals brought by the Spaniards (cows, goats and pigs) and a wide range of personal objects that belonged to those captured, among other relics.
The Palenque, Chiapas, stadium where the Guacamayas play.
President López Obrador on Wednesday defended the federal government’s investment of 89 million pesos in a baseball stadium where his brother’s professional team plays.
The municipal sports facility is the home stadium of the Guacamayas (The Macaws), owned by López Obrador’s brother, Pío López Obrador.
The president said the stadium’s upgrade is nothing unusual, just one of the many public works projects requested by municipal governments. They are projects that the government is funding across the country to repair and upgrade municipal sports centers, part of a goal to allow Mexicans to take better care of their health.
“It’s to make sure that there are enough fields for soccer, basketball, all the sports, including baseball,” López Obrador said at this morning’s press conference. “It’s about health, about taking care of our nutrition, not eating junk food, and exercising, doing sports. We have talked about this many times.”
The project came under the spotlight earlier this month when an antigraft group reported that the Ministry of Agrarian Development and Urban Planning had awarded a Tuxtla-Gutiérrez construction company, which has won other government contracts in the past, the contract to upgrade the stadium after 26 other bids were disqualified.
The other bids were rejected because they didn’t meet the established criteria, government officials said. One of the bids was 33 million pesos cheaper than the winning bid, and another was 12.5 million pesos cheaper.
Pio López Obrador will not benefit directly from the awarding of the contract, although his team’s fortunes will likely improve due to the construction of team dugouts and dressing rooms, new grandstands and boxes, commercial spaces and public washrooms, as well as improvements to the playing surface and lighting.
The president said that the implications of corruption or cronyism in the Palenque stadium project were due to “slanderers” who claimed that the federal government must have selected the stadium only because his brother was involved.
“It’s a remodeling of a public sports facility — and not just in Palenque but all over the country. Close to 80 public sports facilities have been rehabilitated.”
As an example, he reminded reporters that the federal government has funded other stadium projects, such as two stadiums in Sonora — in Hermosillo and Obregón. The federal government bought the two baseball stadiums from the Sonora government to help it overcome an economic shortfall affecting government worker pensions, a deal that helped an opposing-party governor.
“The governor proposed to us that instead of selling [the stadiums] to private owners who would build shopping centers, why not have the [federal] government acquire them?”
However, López Obrador drew heavy criticism for those purchases, in which the federal government shelled out just over 1 billion pesos to buy the facilities, which will be converted into baseball schools for regular middle school and high school classes, in addition to training would-be major league stars.
The president’s proclaimed favorite sport is baseball. In the run-up to his election in 2018, he was seen practicing with his brother’s team.
"The People Await the Sunrise" by Gabriela Larios, who illustrated Stavans' book, Popol Vuh, A Retelling.
When Ilan Stavans first learned about the Popol Vuh as a teenager growing up in Mexico City, he was fascinated by the millennia-old Mayan tale. Decades later, Stavans reconnected with the text and saw it as comparable to other foundational narratives from world civilizations, such as the Bible. Yet he noted a key difference: unlike these classics, the Popol Vuh had remained obscure.
Now Stavans — an acclaimed scholar of the humanities, Latin America and Latino culture at Amherst College — is helping modern readers connect to the ancient story that began as an oral tradition among the K’iche people, who are part of the Maya.
Stavans has released Popol Vuh: A Retelling, a book-length version of the narrative that he hopes will interest a mainstream audience. The book features illustrations from Salvadoran artist Gabriela Larios, whose artwork provides a crucial dimension, Stavans said, as does the foreword by Homero Aridjis, Mexico’s former ambassador to UNESCO.
“My intent in this retelling was to insert the Popol Vuh into the canon of world classics, sagas that represent the birth and development of a nation,” Stavans said. “I have always been puzzled by the total absence of pre-Columbian indigenous aboriginal narratives that tell the story of the various peoples of the Americas prior to the arrival in 1492 of the Europeans in a way that is comparable to The Iliad and the Odyssey, to the Nordic sagas of Beowulf and other similar stories, and even to religious texts like the Bible, the Ramayana, and the Quran.”
Stavans drew multiple comparisons between the Popol Vuh and these texts.
Ilan Stavans’s take on the text is not a translation but a retelling meant to lure modern readers. Courtesy of Restless Books
“If you see the Ramayana, if you see the Bible, you see literary texts that tell us stories about the gods and humans interacting,” he said. “Stories like the Ramayana are about genealogy, explaining how a people acquired its identity, what its mission is in life.”
That’s what he sees in the Popol Vuh, which he describes as “a beautiful story” about “how the world was created. At the center of it are fallible humans. Within the humans, there’s a kind of selection of one people that is going to honor the deities. That people are the K’iche.”
Stavans lamented that when he was younger, the Popol Vuh and another foundational Mayan text, the Chilam Balam, were treated as anthropological or archaeological items, not as books. He said that he was “angry at the way [that] throughout Mexican history, indigenous cultures had been, like many people in time, fossilized, turned into fossils, seen as historical artifacts, historical entities, not incorporated in any meaningful way into the lens of daily life in Mexico, and even less so in Mexican culture.”
He said that today, translations of the Popol Vuh exist primarily in scholarly or poetic editions. He decries what he describes as a shortage of translations for popular audiences, which he said is not the case with classics such as Beowulf. He notes that on rare occasions, translations of the Popol Vuh have been released by mainstream houses or by independent nonprofit publishers like that of his version, released by Restless Books, of which he is the head. He notes that his version is a retelling, not an exact translation. He describes it as an attempt to reach readers with modern sensibilities.
In this regard, he sees Larios’ illustrations as vital. Her artwork depicts the gods, demigods, animals and humans of the narrative — including the demigod twin brothers Junajpu and Ixb’alanke, who undergo a difficult journey into the underworld of Xibalba.
“I thought Gabriela would be wonderful for this retelling,” Stavans said. “We would work back and forth,” until the text and artwork were “kind of woven together.”
Ilan Stavans first encountered the Mayan creation text the Popol Vuh as a teen in Mexico City. Kevin Gutting
He also praises the foreword from his friend Aridjis, whom he describes as an activist for ecology and indigenous cultures.
Some of the animals in the Popol Vuh appear in another book by Stavans published this year, illustrated by the Mexican artist Eko — A Pre-Columbian Bestiary: Fantastic Creatures of Indigenous Latin America.
According to Stavans, the Popol Vuh began as an oral tradition among the K’iche, who have roots in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, as well as in Chiapas, the Yucatán and El Salvador. With each retelling, the story was modified, although certain characters, metaphors and themes remain, he said.
One theme is duality: God has two K’iche poetic names, Heart of Heaven and Heart of Earth. The world is divided into an upper realm and an underworld, or Xibalba, which Stavans likens to the Christian hell or purgatory.
Many characters in the narrative are siblings — or even twins, including Stavans’ favorite characters, Junajpu and Ixb’alanke.
Junajpu and Ixb’alanke seek to avenge the deaths of a previous set of twins — their fathers — at the hands of the Lords of Xibalba. In the underworld, they survive a roomful of jaguars and a chamber of fire, but a vampire bat decapitates Junajpu. However, his brother creates a fake head out of a chilacayote squash to fool the Lords of Xibalba. Although both brothers ultimately die, they return to life and conquer Xibalba.
Twin brother demigods Jun Junajpu and Wuqub Junajpu are Stavans’s favorite Popol Vuh characters. Gabriela Larios
Stavans said that one thing he loves about the Popol Vuh is that he sees “a lot of magical realism here even before it became a fixture in Latin American literature” such as in the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar.
In the Popol Vuh, “objects can do supernatural things, animals can speak … all some of the elements that make this, I would say, an animistic book. It’s very endearing, almost to the point where you can say it could be children’s literature, except it’s very violent.”
The arrival of the Spanish conquistadors interrupted the oral tradition, and the Popol Vuh risked becoming “on its way to oblivion,” Stavans said. However, in the late colonial period, a Dominican friar named Father Francisco Ximénez preserved the narrative in written form through indigenous scribes, the first in a series of transcriptions.
“Father Ximénez had the idea to put pen to paper,” Stavans said. “It’s a critical moment in any people’s history.”
Yet, he is unsure of Ximénez’s motives, wondering whether “the colonizers also had some hand in shaping the narrative.”
Several elements in the text “are very close to how the Bible describes the beginning of the world,” Stavans noted, adding that Ximénez and other missionaries may have been trying to “infiltrate the minds of the storytellers. It’s hard to know.”
An image of owls taking a Mayan princess to be sacrificed. Gabriela Larios
“It feels to me almost a usurpation, to be honest, to refer to Father Ximénez as kind of an author,” Stavans reflected. “He’s the medium, the bridge.”
Portions of the Popol Vuh continue to be told among the K’iche, who have suffered since the Conquest, according to Stavans.
“The plight of this indigenous people is a very challenging one,” he said. “Poverty, illiteracy, illness, alcoholism … These are the echoes of what happened during the colonial period; they’re still experiencing them, day in, day out. In many ways, the Conquest has not finished.”
Yet, he said, there is also a heroic story of survival.
“We have this book, we have this people that link us to the past.”
And, perhaps, to the future.
“[The retelling] came out around a very specific moment, when we’re all looking for different kinds of roots,” Stavans said, “with Black Lives Matter, with the search for more multidiverse backgrounds, with Latinos looking to understand their past in more native ways, connected with indigenous culture. It has touched a chord.”
Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
If you’re traveling from Mexico City to the United States or Canada you’ll need a Covid-19 test to prove that you’re not infected.
(Travelers to the U.S. who have recovered from Covid-19 are exempt but must provide documentation showing they have recovered in the 90 days preceding travel.)
However, there are some Mexico City laboratories, mostly private, that are able to offer international travelers test results quickly, in some cases as soon as 24 hours.
The National Autonomous University of Mexico, for example, has testing laboratories experienced with providing all kinds of test results.
In general, travelers to the U.S. should present to airlines and possibly immigration officials test results that clearly state the name of the traveler, the date of the test, the type of test done and the test result.
Travelers to Canada are advised to have results that clearly state the complete name of the traveler, their date of birth, the date of the Covid-19 test, the name and address of the laboratory where the test was conducted, the type of test, and the test result.
Here are some laboratories in Mexico City that offer PCR tests:
Clinica del Viajero (Travelers’ Clinic)
Cost: 3,000 pesos.
Delivery time: 24 hours
Results delivery: via email
For more information: 55 4313 0190; WhatsApp: 55 6748 9375 or [email protected]
Payment: done online during the application process.
This clinic is associated with the National Autonomous University. Covid-19 tests are not being done at the clinic’s normal location but at the Instituto Conde Valenciana in the Obrera neighborhood (Chimalpopoca 14). Information is available on their appointment site.
International travelers should check the viajero internacional (international traveler) and the requiero certificado medico de viaje (I need medical traveling certification) options during the online application process.
Once you have applied for a test online, the website says they will call you to make an appointment, but you can call 55 6748 9375 to confirm receipt of your online application. The fee covers the consultation before your trip, the certified test results and follow-up via email or social media while you are out of the country and after you return.
You should come to your testing appointment with proof of your travel itinerary (including layovers) with evidence of hotel reservations or airline tickets.
Salud Digna
Cost: 950 pesos
Delivery time: 48–72 hours
Results delivery: via their website or WhatsApp
For more information: 52 55 39566729 or consult their website
Payment: done online during the application process.
Note: This private laboratory also has locations in many major Mexican cities. Not all offer the Covid-19 PCR test.
Hospital Médica Sur
Cost: 3,949 pesos
Delivery time: 24–48 hours
Results delivery:
For more information: 55 5424 7200 Ext. 3991 (Covid laboratory call center, open 24 hours) or Ext. 6805 (hospital customer service line) or their website
Payment: done during the online appointment scheduling process
Testing can be done inside the hospital’s Covid laboratory or drive-through without leaving your vehicle. Two testing sites are available, one in Toriello Guerra and another in Lomas-Virreyes.
Federal health official Alethse de la Torre presents new Covid data on Tuesday.
Mexico recorded a new single-day record for Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday and its third highest total for new cases, while the number of vaccines administered against the infectious disease rose to almost half a million.
The federal Health Ministry reported 1,584 additional Covid-19 fatalities, lifting Mexico’s official death toll to 142,832. The number of deaths registered Tuesday exceeds the previous record (set a week earlier) of 1,314 by 270, or 20.5%.
The ministry also reported that Mexico’s accumulated case tally had increased by 18,894 to just under 1.67 million. The only days on which a higher single-day tally of cases was reported were last Friday and Saturday when new case numbers exceeded 20,000.
There are currently an estimated 102,797 active cases across Mexico while the national hospital occupancy rate for general care beds is 60%. Eight states have an occupancy rate above 70%. They are Mexico City, 89%; Guanajuato, 87%; México state, 85%; Hidalgo, 84%; Puebla, 82%; Nuevo León, 81%; Morelos, 75%; and Nayarit, 71%.
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell reported that 498,122 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine have been administered to health workers. Of that number, 488,513 doses, or 98% of the total, were administered as the first of the two required shots. Only 9,609 health workers have received both of the required doses.
Mexico received a shipment of almost 220,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday but no further consignments are scheduled until February 15 because the United States pharmaceutical company is currently upgrading its plant in Belgium in order to boost production capacity.
Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Tuesday that millions of doses of the Sputnik V, CanSino biologics and AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccines will arrive in the coming weeks and that the government expects to inoculate almost 14.2 million people by the end of March.
After all health workers have been vaccinated, Mexico intends to inoculate more than 12 million seniors in a period of about two months. The government’s 32-billion-peso (US $1.6-billion) plan to vaccinate Mexico’s entire population of almost 130 million is expected to conclude in March 2022, the newspaper El Universal reported.
In other Covid news:
• The Michoacán Congress approved a law on Tuesday that stipulates that people can be fined, ordered to complete community work or even placed under house arrest for failing to wear a face mask in public places including stores and public transit. According to the law, police or state health officials should first give a verbal warning to mask scofflaws. If they subsequently decline to put on a mask, a written warning should be issued. If a person continues to refuse to wear a mask, he or she can be fined up to 1,344 pesos (US $68).
People issued fines can choose to complete community work in lieu of paying them, according to the law, which also stipulates that such work should not last for more than three days. Authorities can also order mask scofflaws to stay at home for up to 36 hours in addition to the other sanctions.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. milenio
Businesses and public transit operators can be fined up to 2,688 pesos (US $137) if they don’t comply with the mandatory face mask law. Businesses could also be temporarily or permanently shut down.
Governor Silvano Aureoles praised the new law in a Twitter post.
“Today Michoacán has taken another important step in the management of the health crisis,” he wrote.
Lawmakers in several other states including Morelos, Chihuahua and Colima have also approved laws that make the use of face masks mandatory and establish penalties for those who don’t comply.
Michoacán, currently high risk orange on the federal coronavirus stoplight map, has recorded more than 37,000 confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic and 3,113 Covid-19 deaths.
• Oaxaca Governor Alejandro Murat announced that an agreement has been reached with business leaders for commercial establishments in the state capital to close on a staggered basis and reduce their business hours as part of efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Restaurants, supermarkets and markets are among the businesses that will open later, close earlier or both.
The statewide hospital occupancy rate in Oaxaca is 53% for general care beds, according to federal data, but 14 of 49 Covid-designated hospitals have reached capacity and the number of hospitalized coronavirus patients in Oaxaca city reached a new peak this week.
The southern state, currently orange on the stoplight map, has recorded almost 32,000 confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic and 2,234 Covid-19 deaths. About 30% of the cases were detected in Oaxaca city.
The state government has launched a new social media campaign to encourage citizens to follow the measures designed to stop the spread of the virus such as the use of face masks and staying at home as much as possible.
• Authorities in Guasave, Sinaloa, ordered the closure of bars, cantinas, party halls, sports centers, street markets and beaches due to a recent increase in case numbers and deaths. Active case numbers have almost tripled in the municipality this year, rising from 56 on January 2 to 154 on Tuesday.
Located about 150 kilometers north of the Sinaloa capital Culiacán, Guasave has recorded 68 Covid-19 deaths this year. Mayor Aurelia Leal López said that stricter restrictions were necessary because the coronavirus situation has worsened as a result of gatherings and parties over the Christmas-New Year period.
In addition to closing some businesses, local authorities will ramp up inspections to ensure that supermarkets, department stores, banks and other commercial establishments are complying with health rules. Municipal police have been instructed to break up any large private gatherings and parties and ensure that people don’t try to access local beaches.
Guasave authorities didn’t say when they expected to lift the tighter restrictions. The municipality has recorded almost 4,000 confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic and more than 550 deaths.
The accumulated case tally in Sinaloa, currently an orange light state, is just over 29,000 while its Covid-19 death toll is 4,457.
It was mid-afternoon on the Monday after Christmas when the messages started flooding Twitter: power cut. No lights. First the reports came from different parts of Mexico City, then across the country.
As 10.3 million users had their electricity abruptly shut off, it soon became clear that this was not the usual kind of local outage in a country where utility poles are often tangled with illegally-connected wires used to steal electricity — known as “little devils.”
This was a significant event. The CFE, the state electricity company — which perhaps advisedly seems to have stopped advertising itself as “a world-class company” — tweeted that cutting off users was necessary to avoid pulling the plug on the entire national grid.
According to Manuel Bartlett, CFE’s director, in numerous press briefings, the culprit was renewable energy. Because renewable power is intermittent — sunshine and wind are not constant — and must be backed up by other sources, it puts strain on the system. It is an argument the government has used repeatedly in its attempt to reduce renewable energy producers’ participation in the sector.
Yet, back in 2015, the White House hailed Mexico as “setting an example for the rest of the world” after it became the first developing nation to submit climate change pledges, including generating 35% of electricity from clean energy by 2024, ahead of the landmark Paris agreement.
Renewables are out of favor today in Mexico.
President López Obrador’s championing of fossil fuels has changed all that. Only about 6% of Mexico’s electricity comes from renewables even though the cost of green generation is less than half that of gas-fired or other thermal power plants. The government has spent months trying to force through ways to squeeze private players in favour of the CFE.
Mexico skipped a summit last month designed to take stock of the world’s progress towards the Paris climate goals. Two weeks later, in a cosmic come-uppance, the power cut happened. It seemed to underscore López Obrador’s determination to impose his statist vision on Latin America’s second-biggest economy even if, quite literally, the lights go out.
Independent energy experts say the government’s aversion to green power generation is political — many other countries rely heavily on renewables. They say that the problem with the grid has more to do with under-investment in transmission lines, which are under CFE control.
For the president and Bartlett, the CFE is unfairly criticized. López Obrador says the neoliberal policies of his predecessors would have privatized the sector and killed off the CFE. Officials last year repeatedly tried to ram through rule changes, including increasing transmission tariffs on companies generating their own electricity and stalling permits. Courts have blocked the attempts, but investors are alarmed.
Now Bartlett has seized on the outage to have another go. The former minister is notorious for another system crash: the vote count in the 1988 presidential election, which he was in charge of. It suspiciously failed as the ruling PRI party was lagging behind. When the system came back up, the PRI won.
The December 28 power cut was similarly tainted by fraud allegations. The CFE said the outage was triggered by a fire under transmission lines in the northern state of Tamaulipas and presented a letter, purportedly from the state Civil Protection agency, to support its claims. But the letter was fake — as the CFE and López Obrador were finally forced to admit.
Bartlett stuck to his core assertion: the real reason the transmission lines were so strained was because of renewables. As a result, the supposedly independent electricity market operator, Cenace, would be “obliged” to remove some renewable generation. Meanwhile, López Obrador is building a new oil refinery. He has vowed to boost coal-fired generation and wants green power to come from CFE-owned hydropower plants. Mexico’s Paris pledges now look out of reach.
Back when Washington was lauding Mexico, Joe Biden was vice-president. As he enters the White House, López Obrador’s policies look more like those of climate change deniers such as outgoing President Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
With López Obrador's election in 2018, the writer’s hopes were high.
So, y’all ever been wrong before?
Man, I sure have. About a lot of things, of course, most of them (mercifully) not too consequential.
One thing I am deeply saddened to have been wrong about is our president.
Don’t get me wrong; I want him to do well because I want Mexico to do well. But, gosh, it’s become so hard to defend him.
Even when he did or said things I didn’t really like, I let them slide, thinking, “Well, at least he’s not a cynic. At least he sincerely seems to be trying to do what’s best for Mexico, which is more than I can say for most other presidents.”
But his choice of friends disturbs me.
El Chapo’s mother? What was that? When I saw the picture of him greeting her warmly, it was the kind of slap in the face that one might feel upon finding their spouse on a romantic dinner date with someone they (with very good reason) deeply dislike.
And Trump. Trump! What is it that President López Obrador finds so appealing about him?
At first, I thought he was simply trying to appease Trump because that’s the smart thing to do when your neighbor is both very powerful and very mentally unstable and unpredictable. After all, if Trump were to get mad, there’s presumably a lot of damage he could have done to Mexico, especially regarding trade. That’s what I told myself too when López Obrador stood conspicuously back as all the other world leaders congratulated Biden on his win.
But no; AMLO seems to genuinely like the guy.
The thing that I hate, hate, hate being wrong about is this: that Trump and AMLO do, in fact, share many similarities, from their open dislike and disparagement of the “mainstream media” to the demonization of anyone not “with” them politically. Another sad similarity is their insistence that only they have the solutions.
Given these similarities, it’s thankfully not a perfect parallel. AMLO, for example, actually had experience governing before becoming the president. I also still believe that, however misguided I think he is now, he at least believes that he’s doing what’s best for his country. While I am starting to seriously doubt that he cares about the way so many Mexicans are suffering with no economic help during the pandemic on top of their health woes, I do believe that he at least took office with the desire to improve citizens’ lives.
I haven’t lost hope that he might come to his senses — I’m not writing him off — but, man, am I sad about how this presidency is going.
The situation with former defense chief Salvador Cienfuegos is also something that’s knocked a few other torches I’d carried for AMLO out of my hand. I’m no crime expert, but I have absolutely no doubt that the U.S. came to the correct conclusions about who Mexico’s ex-defense minister was. The fact that Cienfuegos was determined innocent once back in Mexico without so much as a trial knocked me off my feet.
The issue here seems not to be his guilt or innocence but hurt pride that the U.S. went after him without Mexico’s cooperation or knowledge. And if there’s one thing I know about Mexican culture, it’s that hurt pride, especially when it involves powerful men, is not often tolerated.
But I can’t say I blame the U.S. for leaving Mexico out. After all, corruption often reaches the top levels of government, and any message to the wrong person could tip off exactly the right person, and then it all goes to hell and the bad guy gets away.
I was sure that AMLO was solidly against impunity, but with this, the veil has been lifted. I would so love to know what the president thinks privately; surely he doesn’t really believe that Cienfuegos is an innocent man. Is he embarrassed because he’s given the military so much power lately? Is it that admitting the possibility of corruption in the military means admitting that maybe he made a mistake or two by putting them in charge of so much?
It seems, too, that through his public upset, the president is trying to whip up some anti-U.S. sentiment. Why? Most analyses I’ve read liken him to a growling dog, warning Biden as he comes into office that he doesn’t want the United States to be involving itself in matters down here.
So this is it. I’ve officially fallen out of AMLOve. I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that there were certainly many good things that I just wasn’t aware of that might even cancel out the bad, that perhaps my problem was that I didn’t fully understand the things I thought he was doing wrong. It truly has been like ending a relationship: the hardest step is going from assuming things can be fixed to finally deciding that they can’t.
Oh, how I long to be told, “Don’t worry. The grown-ups are here. They’ll take care of things.”
From the looks of things around here, it could be a while.
Sarah DeVries is a writer and translator based in Xalapa, Veracruz. She can be reached through her website, sdevrieswritingandtranslating.com.
Sorghum growing season is at risk in the northeastern area of the state.
Fifteen thousand farming families in northeastern Tamaulipas could go bankrupt because they can’t plant new crops due to a lack of water for irrigation, according to the president of a local landowners association.
Jorge Luis López Martínez, president of the Regional Union of Rural Landowners and a member of the Río Bravo Basin Council, told the newspaper Milenio that the water shortage in irrigation district 025 is becoming more and more serious.
Encompassing the municipalities of Matamoros, Valle Hermoso, Río Bravo and part of Reynosa, the irrigation district is one of Mexico’s largest and the country’s biggest sorghum producer. Farmers have already incurred losses of 2 billion pesos (US $102.1 million) due to the lack of water, López said.
He said water that should be flowing from Chihuahua to the Rio Grande on the Tamaulipas-Texas border has been unlawfully withheld, and criticized the National Water Commission (Conagua) for not intervening to stop what he called the illegal retention.
“We’re in an emergency that is becoming increasingly serious and causing a crisis,” López said, adding that the occupation of the La Boquilla dam by Chihuahua farmers opposed to the diversion of water to the United States resulted in about half of the water that should have been sent to Tamaulipas not arriving.
“Now even less is being received [and] new economic losses are being added to those [Tamaulipas farmers have] already suffered. … It’s unfair. They’re illegally retaining 1.1 billion cubic meters of water in the upper part of the … Conchos River in Chihuahua, they’re not allowing it to pass.”
López said the situation has been exacerbated by a dry winter caused by the La Niña weather phenomenon, adding that significant rainfall is not expected until April or May.
He said the water shortage has placed the sorghum sowing season – Tamaulipas is Mexico’s largest producer of the grain – at extreme risk. Farmers have gone into debt in order to be able to plant new sorghum crops but the lack of water will prevent them from recouping the money they have invested, López said.
“If they don’t plant, the losses will be incalculable,” he said.
Among the communities that are directly affected are Anáhuac, Santa Apolonia, Empalmes, Magueyes and El Realito, López said, adding that the entire northern region of Tamaulipas is indirectly impacted.
The landowners’ representative said that water from Tamaulipas was used to repay Mexico’s water debt to the United States and that the state of Chihuahua didn’t respect agreements to replenish Tamaulipas’ stocks.
“The consensus was to replenish” the water sent to the United States from Tamaulipas with water from Chihuahua and distribute it to farmers, López said.
“But it wasn’t done. … Natural resources should be distributed fairly … and that’s not happening, they are giving Chihuahua more” water than Tamaulipas, he said.
“… Last year there were even injunctions … to avoid paying the United States with water from Tamaulipas but it was done anyway. … It’s an injustice whichever way you look at it because Chihuahua is stealing water and now Conagua is giving it the right to more,” López said, referring to a water commission authorization that allows Chihuahua to use hundreds of millions of cubic meters of water from the Conchos River and deep wells for irrigation purposes.
“It’s a double illegality,” he charged. Chihuahua has a massive surplus of water “while Tamaulipas is dying of thirst.”
The federal government will provide loans to 60,000 small businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic and recently imposed economic restrictions, Economy Minister Tatiana Clouthier announced Tuesday.
Distribution of the 25,000-peso (US $1,275) loans is expected to start in February and conclude before the April start of the midterm elections campaign period.
A total of 1.6 billion pesos (US $81.6 million) has been set aside for the program, the government’s second small business loans program during the pandemic. The first program also offered 25,000-peso loans, an amount that was widely criticized for not being enough.
Its announcement came after a new political group opposed to the government published an analysis that showed that the pandemic and the lack of support to mitigate its economic impact have significantly increased inequality in Mexico.
Clouthier told a press conference that 20,000 of the new loans will go to small businesses managed by women. Another 20,000 will go to businesses that haven’t laid off any workers during the pandemic and the same number will be granted to “micro-enterprises” that didn’t receive a government loan last year.
“The objective … is to support small businesses … that were affected by the impact of Covid-19 on our economy,” she said, adding that the aim is to avoid their closure and the loss of jobs.
The economy minister also said that loans of up to 250,000 pesos (US $12,740) will be made available to restaurants, which have been hit hard by the pandemic. In addition, the government will provide support for tortilla shops, or tortillerías, Clouthier said.
“We’ll provide support to tortillerías that have between one and 50 employees and need liquidity,” she said. “We’ll support them with equipment so that they become more efficient and can reduce their costs.”
Clouthier, who was President López Obrador’s 2018 campaign chief and a federal deputy before becoming economy minister earlier this month, also said that the government is seeking to attract investment from the Ford Motor Company, which recently announced the closure of three plants in Brazil.
The new small business loans scheme was endorsed by the presidents of the Concanaco and Concamin business organizations but the head of the National Council for the Development of Small Business was far less enthusiastic.
Gerardo Cleto López Becerra described the program as “half an aspirin for the cancer that micro and small businesses are suffering,” adding “we expected a more elaborate plan to match the negative [economic] impact” of the pandemic that caused 1 million small businesses to close.
