Emilio Lozoya during his arrest in Spain last year.
Former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya is attempting to buy his way out of prison by paying US $5 million to compensate for the corruption of which he is accused.
Lozoya, head of the state oil company between 2012 and 2016, was remanded in preventative custody last week in connection with the Odebrecht case in which the Brazilian construction company paid multi-million dollar bribes in exchange for US $180 million Pemex contracts to complete work at the refinery in Tula, Hidalgo.
The ex-Pemex chief – who was ruled to be a flight risk on the grounds that he has access to at least 2 million euros (US $2.3 million) in a recently detected foreign bank account as well as contacts who could help him obtain false travel documents – has claimed that he received the bribes on the orders of former president Enrique Peña Nieto. He says the money was used to buy the support of National Action Party lawmakers in order to get the previous government’s energy reform through Congress.
The same federal judge who sent the former official to prison last week ruled on Wednesday that he must also be held in preventative prison in connection with the Altos Hornos de México (AHMSA) case in which Lozoya, who had avoided jail due to his cooperation with the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR), allegedly received US $3.4 million in exchange for Pemex’s 2014 purchase of a fertilizer plant at a vastly inflated price.
The newspaper Reforma reported that Lozoya – who faces criminal association, money laundering and bribery charges – offered to pay US $5 million in exchange for the FGR withdrawing its accusations against him in connection with both the Odebrecht and AHMSA cases.
His offer consists of $3.4 million for the AHMSA case – even though Lozoya denies any wrongdoing – and $1.6 million for the Odebrecht case. The money would come from a loan as well as the sale of three properties, including two in Ixtapa and Mexico City that Lozoya allegedly bought with bribes.
A lawyer for the ex-CEO said Wednesday that neither Pemex nor the FGR has indicated they will accept the compensation his client is offering.
“They haven’t responded but there is complete willingness [on Lozoya’s part] to compensate the damage to the Mexican state,” Miguel Ontiveros Alonso said.
“… If an agreement is reached and the criminal action comes to an end … Lozoya will have to be released,” he said.
Parents protest at Mexico City’s airport over a lack of chemotherapy medicines available for their children with cancer in a photo from 2021. (File foto/Cuartoscuro)
As long-running protests against medications shortages continue, President López Obrador directed two senior members of his government to resolve the problem “without excuses.”
Speaking at an event in Colima on Wednesday, the president urged Health Minister Jorge Alcocer and the director of the National Institute of Health for Well-Being (Insabi), Juan Ferrer, to put an end to the shortages that have plagued his government and triggered countless protests by parents of children with cancer, including one at the Mexico City airport on Tuesday.
“I don’t want to hear that medications are lacking and I don’t want excuses of any kind. We can’t sleep soundly if there are no medications to treat sick people,” López Obrador said.
“We won’t relax while there isn’t a sufficient supply of medications, … free medications, all of them, even those that are hardest to get,” he said.
López Obrador said his government made it possible for health authorities to source medications from anywhere in the world and therefore “there’s now no excuse” for shortages.
“In addition, the corruption that existed in which 10 distributors monopolized the government’s entire medications purchase is no longer permitted,” he said.
The president’s remarks came a day after parents of children with cancer blocked vehicular access to Terminal 1 of the Mexico City airport to pressure the federal government to resolve the medications shortages problem. The parents said the government has failed to supply chemotherapy drugs to public hospitals in several states, forcing them to seek alternative sources for the medicines their children need and pay for them out of their own pockets.
“We’re here because the government hasn’t fulfilled its job; we lack medications and our children need them. There are also adults that can’t undertake treatment,” said Mario Hernández, a spokesman for the protesting parents.
He said parents have had 21 meetings with Health Ministry and Insabi officials but the shortages problem still hasn’t been solved. The parents said they intend to protest at the Mexico City airport every Tuesday while the problem remains.
Protests against shortages began soon after López Obrador took office and have been held regularly since. One group of parents of children with cancer filed a criminal complaint in July against Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell for genocide, discrimination and negligence in relation to the long-running shortages.
In a column published by the newspaper El Universal the same month, journalist Carlos Loret de Mola claimed that 1,600 children have died as a result of the shortages.
“The shortage of cancer medications has killed 1,600 children who wouldn’t have died if they had their medicines. Only one person is responsible for the shortage: the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador,” he wrote.
In the past the president has denied that there have been shortages, dismissing the protests as politically driven.
The coronavirus pandemic closed one door for a 27-year-old Mexico City barber but opened another – that of a Volkswagen Kombi.
Calixto, as the barber is known, found himself unemployed at the start of the pandemic because the barber shops where he worked were forced to close.
Soon after, while watching videos of people who had turned vans into homes, he got the idea of taking his haircutting skills on the road.
To make his idea reality, Calixto sold some of his possessions and used the proceeds to buy a 1985 VW Kombi, which he converted into a mobile barber shop.
He then started offering hair appointments across the capital’s south side right outside customers’ homes, a strategy that proved successful given that so many people were sheltering in place.
Calixto the barber at work in his VW van.
Calixto only ever has one customer at a time in his Kombi, reducing the risk of coronavirus transmission, and follows a range of other health measures to prevent the virus’s spread.
In addition to supporting himself, the barber has used some of his earnings to buy essentials for people struggling to get by during the tough economic times precipitated by the pandemic.
Calixto and his kombi – known as the CalixCombi – have built up quite a following on social media. The CalixCombi Instagram account has almost 7,000 followers and its Facebook page has just under 2,000.
“Original concept and very good service, highly recommended,” one happy customer wrote on Facebook. “For a great cut don’t hesitate to contact Calixto and the CalixCombi,” said another.
A pig enjoying its best life at the Yum Kaax Animal Rescue Centre in Campeche city. Photos courtesy of Yum Kaax Animal Rescue Centre
When Bakliz’s lifelong owner passed away two years ago, the 21-year-old former cart horse in Campeche ended up living in the kitchen with his master’s widow.
Horse and human spent six months cohabiting in a single room in a situation that unsurprisingly proved untenable for both parties.
He then went to a series of halfway houses, but then Bakliz got lucky: he was taken in by an organization on the outskirts of Campeche city — the Yum Kaax Animal Rescue Centre, a volunteer-run organization that cares for animals of all types and sizes and helps ones that need it back to health. The organization offers some of its residents up for adoption to responsible homes, such as in the case of certain street dogs.
A 21-year-old former carthorse, however, doesn’t generally have an extensive array of second chances, and so two years after he first arrived, Bakliz is one of the most longstanding — and certainly the oldest — of the residents here.
Again, this aging horse is one of the lucky ones. For every animal given treatment and care by a charity group, an uncountable number across the country continue to suffer due to indifference at all levels of society. And when it comes to animal welfare in Mexico, government legislation talks a good game, but common practice continues to verge somewhere between neglect and outright abuse.
In Mexico, stray dogs are typically seen as a nuisance by officials, and animal abuse legislation rarely affords them protection.
An example: infamously, in the state of Campeche, a mass poisoning event of street dogs took place on the malecón boardwalk in 2019, affecting strays but also pets on walks. Scores of animals died overnight in an area well-policed by security cameras, which later were found to have had no recordings of the deliberately laid poison.
Understandably with such a coordinated event, suspicion fell on the state and municipal authorities, with both publicly declaring innocence and blaming the other. Whichever the way of it, in this by-no-means-unusual case, it was the government guardians of animal welfare themselves who were being accused of the killings.
Of course, street dogs in the country are far from a straightforward issue. Mexico has one of the largest populations in all of Latin America, and while this is partially due to irresponsible dog owners, a large part of the problem is lack of education and poor access to sterilization.
As a result, dogs who are allowed to move in and out of houses largely unchecked impregnate, or are impregnated by, dogs who do not have homes.
Where sterilization campaigns for street dogs do exist, they have a tendency to be ad hoc and usually feel like the forgotten extra of a non-policy. Even where such programs do exist, after-care for sterilized animals is virtually nonexistent, save for the efforts of local resident activists.
Sadly, most of these people are unfinanced, irregular and struggling against the sheer scale of the problem at hand, not to mention civic indifference.
Horses and other work animals can often be targets of abuse or neglect despite laws in place that are supposed to protect them.
Notwithstanding the moral necessity to care for other creatures, it’s also in the interest of the general public, municipal governments and health organizations to develop functioning policies for Mexico’s itinerant animals. The most obvious, yet hardly accepted, rationale for this is because animal welfare is a significant human public health issue in its own right. Taking better care of animal welfare would actually save the taxpayer countless millions of pesos that currently go into attending to dog bites and diseases carried by excrement and related parasites, to name but two issues.
“It’s a problem which multiplies itself,” said Anielka García Villajuana, president of the Patronato de la Ciudad de Campeche. “It can’t be dealt with piecemeal; it needs a concerted governmental drive. At the moment, at the front line of this situation are individual animal lovers and small organizations, but they can’t do this alone.”
Indeed, in some cases, local authorities spend more time opposing these citizen activists than addressing the problem themselves.
In Mérida, for instance, animal rights defenders are currently battling the municipal government over a recent order that prohibits the feeding of animals in the streets. Officials said the regulation was put in place to discourage the presence of animals in the city, as well as to protect the local fauna and the hygiene of the streets. However, critics highlight the irony by seeking to assign penalties to the very people who are regulating street populations through care and sterilizations.
For now, countrywide governments are aware of the problem without any real drive to address the issue holistically. Animals, who are voiceless, get forgotten in the corridors of power.
Part of the problem is legislators’ lack of vision. In the state of Campeche, for example, the Animal Protection Act (1997) — the only real legal vanguard against animal cruelty — only applies to domestic and breeding animals. In forbidding the mistreatment of animals, the law states that it is prohibited to kill any animal by cruel means, including poison and blunt force trauma.
In Mexico, for every animal cared for by a charity group, an uncountable number across the country suffer due to indifference.
What this means in reality, however, is that chronic domestic mistreatment of animals — difficult to monitor at best and impossible to regulate at worst — is left unchecked, and animals outside of the domestic sphere, i.e., stray dogs and other wild animals, are frequently subject to abuse with absolutely no repercussions.
It’s a familiar theme, but that makes it no less distressing: a society that allows abuse to occur in plain sight in any context is unavoidably generating future generations of people inured to the impact of violence against animals.
In the great struggle for the future of Mexico’s soul, a little more animal love and respect would pay widespread dividends long into the future.
Shannon Collins is an environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think tank. She writes from Campeche.
Mexico’s biggest airline recorded passenger numbers close to pre-pandemic levels in October.
Aeroméxico carried 1 million 564,000 passengers last month, which represents 91.8% of its total for October 2019.
Domestic travel came close to hitting its October 2019 levels, but fell 2.8% short. International travel, however, was still significantly down last month on October 2019, by 20.4%.
In September, the airline announced that from December 11 it would move nine domestic flights at Mexico City International Airport to Terminal 1, from which it will operate 20 departures daily.
The routes slated to move from Terminal 2 are Campeche, Durango, Los Mochis, Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Tampico, Zacatecas and Zihuatanejo. The company said the move will give passengers more flight options and a better level of service.
Meanwhile, the flag carrier might have to adjust its revenue projections: consumer protection agency Profeco told Aeroméxico, VivaAerobus and Volaris to stop charging for carry-on luggage and threatened legal action if they fail to comply.
Governor Sansores says it's time to take off the masks in Campeche.
Wearing a face mask in public places is now optional in the opinion of Campeche Governor Layda Sansores, but a rule requiring people to mask up in the Gulf coast state remains in effect.
The use of face masks in public places was made mandatory in Campeche in April 2020, but Sansores, who took office in September, believes it’s time to do away with the rule.
“… For me … the face mask is now optional, you put it on if you want to and if you don’t want to you don’t,” the governor said during her weekly social media program Martes del Jaguar.
An unmasked Sansores told members of her audience they were free to remove their masks if they wished. Masks are not needed because Campeche is “COVID-free” and green on the federal government stoplight map, she said before conceding that the state is still recording two or three deaths a day.
“I would also remove the social distancing [requirement], I’m going to ask if that’s possible. Of course we won’t hold [large] events, but they already had the Formula One,” Sansores said.
During her 80-minute program, the governor also said that wearing a face mask for more than eight hours a day causes people to “absorb their own microbes.”
Campeche currently has 85 active coronavirus cases, according to federal Health Ministry data published Tuesday. The state has recorded just over 24,000 confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic, the second lowest total in the country behind Chiapas, and 2,030 COVID-19 deaths.
In other COVID-19 news:
• The Network for Children’s Rights in Mexico (REDIM) rebuked the federal government for challenging the court order instructing it to offer vaccines to all youths aged 12 to 17. It urged President López Obrador to comply with the order.
“We demand that the president, as the highest representative of SIPINNA [the National System for the Protection of Girls, Boys and Adolescents] give his instructions so that the right to protection [against COVID] is guaranteed,” REDIM said.
• The Health Ministry reported 3,663 new cases and 299 additional COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday. Mexico’s accumulated tallies are currently 3.83 million and 290,110, respectively. Estimated active cases number 20,383.
Daily case numbers over the past week have averaged 2,780 in Mexico, according to the Reuters COVID-19 tracker, a figure equivalent to just 15% of the daily average peak recorded in mid-August.
A Buen Fin sign at a store in Toluca, México state.
The 11th edition of the Buen Fin shopping event started on Wednesday, offering shoppers special offers from more than 131,000 businesses until Tuesday, November 16. The event was originally inspired by the Black Friday shopping event in the United States.
Concanaco, a national business organization, estimated the event — whose name means “good weekend” —would generate up to 239 billion pesos (US $11.58 billion) in sales.
The federal tax authority SAT is also participating by conducting a lottery for consumers and sellers with prizes worth 500 million pesos (about $24 million).
Offers are available both online and in-store.
A full list of the online stores participating can be found here. To search for in-store participants, go to the Comprar en tienda link, and choose a department.
Additionally, consumer protection agency Profeco is offering a price comparison tool to sort through prices for electronic goods.
The first purchase of the event was made at a pharmacy in Mexico City, with the head of the Finance Ministry’s antitrust authority, Jesús Cantú Escalante, and the head of Concanaco, Héctor Tejada Shaar, in attendance.
Though not much of a consumer himself (he professes not to own a credit card), the president beat the drum for the event during Monday’s press conference, but issued a caution against buying luxury goods.
Forecasting that Buen Fin would be a big success this year, López Obrador urged shoppers to avoid superfluous purchases.
“… one must buy what is necessary, nothing superfluous, no cheap luxury goods; one must buy what is indispensable,” the president said before declaring that the economy is clearly in recovery.
The 'Three Amigos' summit will be the first time the three leaders have met as a group in person since Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau hosted in 2016.
President López Obrador, U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will meet at the White House next week for the first North American Leaders Summit since 2016.
The governments of all three countries announced the November 18 summit on Wednesday.
Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard told López Obrador’s morning press conference that the three leaders were expected to meet for two hours next Thursday. He also said the president would have separate one-on-one meetings with Biden and Trudeau.
The main issues Mexico will raise at the trilateral summit are development cooperation for southern Mexico and Central America, “regional economic integration to promote investment in our country,” preparation for the next pandemic and “how to achieve fair economic recovery in 2022 and 2023,” Ebrard said.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Mexico would like to discuss regional economic integration to promote investment.
López Obrador, who proposed a global poverty-alleviation plan at the United Nations headquarters in New York on Tuesday, said he didn’t expect that his proposed electricity reform – which favors the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission – would be a topic for discussion, even though U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar has recently raised concerns about it.
The White House said in a statement that the countries will reaffirm their strong ties and integration during the summit, “while also charting a new path for collaboration on ending the COVID-19 pandemic and advancing health security; competitiveness and equitable growth, to include climate change; and a regional vision for migration.”
It said “strengthening our partnership is essential to our ability to build back better, to revitalize our leadership, and to respond to a widening range of regional and global challenges.”
Trudeau’s office said the priorities will include “finishing the fight against COVID-19, getting the job done on vaccines, tackling the climate crisis, creating new middle-class jobs, building an economic recovery that works for everyone, and migration.”
There were no North American Leaders Summits during the four years former U.S. president Donald Trump occupied the White House, the most recent being hosted by Trudeau in Ottawa in 2016 when Enrique Peña Nieto and Barrack Obama were in power.
However, Mexico, the United States and Canada did negotiate a new North American free trade agreement, the USMCA, during the Trump years. That pact, which replaced the 25-year-old NAFTA, took effect in July 2020.
When the three nations’ leaders last met in person, Enrique Peña Nieto was Mexico’s president. File photo
López Obrador met virtually with Biden in March and the two leaders “committed to immigration policies that recognize the dignity of migrants and the imperative of orderly, safe, and regular migration.”
Higher LP gas prices helped drive inflation. shutterstock
Prices in Mexico continue to climb: monthly inflation registered its highest increase in October in 23 years, the federal statistics agency Inegi said on Tuesday.
Prices rose 0.84% in October compared to September; a jump second only to October 1998 when a monthly increase of 1.43% was registered.
The rate of inflation stands at 6.24%, the highest annual rate since December 2017, when it reached 6.77%.
The rise has been driven by higher prices for LP gas, which escalated in February due to a supply shortage caused by weather in Texas. And electricity prices rose 18.8% after a seasonal subsidy ended, the newspaper El País reported.
Eggs, onions, green tomatoes and air travel also became more costly.
Inflation in the United States is also sky high: it’s at its highest level since 1990, which inevitably has a knock-on effect for the Mexican economy, due to the two countries’ intimate trading relationship. U.S. inflation jumped from 5.4% in September to 6.2% in November, yet the Federal Reserve played down concerns, calling the rise “transitory.”
In Mexico, private sector specialists raised their inflation expectations for 2021 to 6.6%, which makes 10 consecutive months of upward adjustments. The Bank of México will meet again on Thursday to evaluate its inflation targets and monetary policy.
Deputy governor Jonathan Heath said the current inflationary phenomenon was complex and warned that the energy reforms proposed by President López Obrador could inhibit the country’s economic recovery.
However, an economist at consultancy Oxford Economics, Joan Domene, said prices could soon fall. “We will wait for the effect of the Buen Fin [shopping promotion] in November to generate a drop in prices. The recent rise in inflation and volatility of the peso could force Banxico to hike [interest rates] more aggressively,” he said.
The Mexican economy has experienced an economic rebound since the COVID-19 pandemic. Since an 8.5% fall in 2020, the government expects growth rates of 6-6.5% in 2021.
Irma Ríos described being repeatedly beaten and raped during her marriage of 30 years. Milenio
A three-decade-long nightmare that a Oaxaca woman endured after being sold into common-law marriage for a bottle of mezcal at the age of 10 has finally ended.
State Attorney General Arturo Peimbert Calvo said Tuesday that the man who gave Irma Ríos’ father the mezcal in exchange for his daughter in 1991, and proceeded to abuse her for the next 30 years, had been arrested.
The official said in an interview that authorities will prosecute the aggressor — Ignacio Rodríguez Cabrera — for a range of crimes and seek the maximum penalty the law permits.
Peimbert said that Ríos had been notified of her husband’s arrest and was receiving support from the Oaxaca Women’s Ministry and other authorities.
The victim said in a media interview before the arrest that her father sold her for a one-liter bottle of mezcal. Her husband was 20 when the exchange occurred.
"Por una botella de mezcal"; mujer indígena de Oaxaca detalla cómo fue vendida de niña
Irma Ríos’ interview with Milenio.
“… My dad said, ‘Go with him,’ but I didn’t want to go because I was 10 years old,” Ríos said.
She said she was beaten and repeatedly raped by Rodríguez, who fathered her three children. Ríos also said that she was locked up when her husband went to work and had effectively missed out on several years of her childhood.
“… I want to be happy, and I want to be free. … I want to be happy without violence,” she said.
Many of the child brides suffer years of sexual and other abuse, as was the case with Angélica, a 15-year-old girl sold into marriage at the age of 11 who was recently jailed for 10 days after she fled the home of her father-in-law, who allegedly attempted to rape her.
Indigenous girls sold into marriage in the Montaña region are “victims of the lack of attention of authorities,” said Abel Barrera, the director of a local human rights center. Families sell their daughters due to poverty, he told the newspaper Milenio.
Families who sell their daughters into marriage often do so because of poverty, said Abel Barrera, director of a Guerrero human rights center. Centro Derechos Humanos Tlachinollan
Barrera nevertheless expressed confidence that the federal and Guerrero governments will enact policies to reduce the incidence of child marriage and stop the suffering of hundreds of girls who are the victims of sexual, physical and psychological abuse perpetrated by their husbands.
