Vaccine was shipped without paperwork; 800,000 doses remain in storage

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March 4, 2021

The Sinovac vaccine arrived last week from China.

A shipment of 800,000 Covid-19 vaccine doses that arrived last Saturday has not been used and remains in storage because it was not accompanied by the necessary paperwork to certify the quality of the shots.

Ruy López, director of the National Center for Disease Prevention and Control Programs, said Sunday that the government was waiting for the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac to deliver documentation of the analytical tests that confirm the quality of the doses.

He said the documents were expected to arrive this week and that as soon as they do the vaccines will be released from storage and distributed across the country. As of Thursday morning, that had not happened.

Gilberto Castañeda, a pharmacology researcher at the National Polytechnic Institute’s Center for Research and Advanced Studies, told the newspaper Reforma that failing to send the analytical test results with the vaccine doses was a serious oversight.

“It’s strange that the product has arrived and that all the information that justifies its use hasn’t,” he said.

“They can’t release [the shipment] until the analytical tests arrive, … it’s just a sheet of paper,” Castañeda said.

According to the Health Ministry, the 800,000 Sinovac shots will be used to inoculate seniors in 623 rural municipalities across the country. Health Minister Jorge Alcocer expressed confidence that they would be distributed this weekend.

The shipment of Sinovac shots that arrived last Saturday was the second consignment of the Chinese-made vaccines to reach Mexico. A first shipment of 200,000 doses arrived on February 20 and was used to inoculate seniors in Ecatepec, México state.

The government announced on February 10 that health regulator Cofepris had granted emergency use authorization to the two-shot Sinovac vaccine, which has been shown to have an efficacy rate of just over 50%.

The Sinovac vaccine is one of four Covid-19 vaccines to have arrived in Mexico, all of which must be administered in two separate shots. The others are the Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca/Oxford University and Sputnik V vaccines.

As of Wednesday night, Mexico had received just under 4.7 million vaccine doses and administered 2.63 million of them, according to Health Ministry data. About 51% of the shots have gone to health workers, 48% to seniors and 1% to teachers.

More than 572,000 health workers have received both required vaccine doses as have over 17,000 teachers. None of the 1.26 million seniors who have received one shot has received a second jab.

The government has agreements to acquire 232 million mainly two-shot vaccine doses and more than 100 million are expected to arrive before the end of May.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated coronavirus case tally rose above 2.1 million on Wednesday with 7,793 new cases reported. The official Covid-19 death toll increased to 188,044 with 857 additional fatalities registered.

Source: Reforma (sp)

When that green stoplight sends our kids back to school, we must be ready

By

Sarah DeVries

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March 3, 2021

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When Mexico's kids go back to school, it won't look like this.

Will our kids ever go back to school?

We’re getting very close to a year into the pandemic officially hitting Mexico. When it did, classes carried on for a couple of weeks with students’ temperatures being checked at the door. As coronavirus cases rose and showed no sign of improving, schools shut their doors.

Most of us assumed that kids would be out for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, while we “flattened the curve.” Hah!

When it was decided they wouldn’t return for the remainder of the semester, we wiped our brows, preparing for tough times. It was unimaginable at that point that we would get to the same date the following year and still have our children at home.

Little did we know that many private schools were closing for good (18,600 is the estimate a private school association gave) and that many teachers in the ones that managed to stay open would be receiving a fraction of their normal salaries because of lack of enrollment.

The National Association of Private Schools, in a show of frustration and gasping for breath, announced that private schools would reopen on March 1, with or without the Education Ministry (SEP), to which SEP replied, “I don’t think so.”

In the end, the SEP reported Monday that no private school actually heeded the call to reopen and thanked the educational institutions and students’ parents for having the patience to wait. This is all fine and good, but private schools closing is going to be a society-wide problem, and not simply one for those schools.

Around 15% of Mexican students attend private school. As you’ve probably guessed, many parents have not seen the point of paying for private schools at a time when students can’t attend them. Many parents have lost jobs and income and have been unable to keep their children attending even if they would have liked to.

Many of these students have started attending (virtual) public school, and others are simply not enrolled anywhere because they lack the tools to access the now-virtual systems being used. This is a tragedy, one that’s hitting each age group a different way, even for privileged students in the best of possible circumstances.

For students my daughter’s age (she’s in the first grade), there’s only so much they can learn online. Taking the best online classes and getting even a little out of it requires an attentive adult at their side, something that I am sure many lack. After all, chances are that if the parents can still pay for private school, they still have jobs that they presumably need to do even though their children are now home and needing much more attention.

While I have not seen the exact numbers for Mexico, I think it’s safe to assume that, like their counterparts around the world, women especially have left the workforce in droves in order to take on the role of full-time caregiver (and now teacher’s assistant) at home. Even before the pandemic, women were doing most of the domestic labor. The main difference now is that they’re not also earning money outside the home.

Regarding this point, the fact that I do not live with my child’s father has turned out to be a blessing for us both: we each get half a week in which we don’t need to worry about childcare. He has a set work schedule, so gets her mostly on weekends and one or two school days. And as a freelance writer and translator, I arrange my own work time as well as I can around my days with her.

But even with this gigantic benefit, it’s hard. It’s the best of circumstances, but we’re still in a pandemic in which emotional exhaustion, boredom and mental strife are running amok for everyone.

I often stop to think about single parents right now, who must be dealing with added financial strife and an extra layer of loneliness on top of the above. What are they doing? How are they doing it? Are they getting by? My own daughter has an extensive (for pandemic times) support system and social circle since what she’d normally have is now doubled.

Yet, even with all this, when I take her on our daily walk and she sees another child even within five years of her own age, she looks at them as if they were a giant ice cream cone in the middle of the desert. A playmate? She gets to have quite a lot of interaction with others compared to many, and yet she still longs for hours and hours with other children.

Elementary school students, however, at least want to hang out with their parents. My heart truly goes out to teenagers right now who under normal circumstances would be spending approximately 95% of their time avoiding being at home with their parents.

While much has been written about childhood mental health crises in the United States and other countries during the pandemic — much of it the result of closed schools — there has not been much about the topic here in Mexico. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

For now, my fingers are crossed that students will be able to return to the classroom by the fall semester. So many countries have made reopening schools a priority, recognizing that students’ mental health is quite a bit weightier than the real risk of transmission in school. Could Mexican students safely return to the classroom before every state has been on “green” for over two weeks?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has released guidelines for reopening schools that include universal masking (check), social distancing (yikes — big classes, especially now in public schools), washing hands (we’ll need soap for the bathrooms), good ventilation (check, and maybe it could balance out the lack of distance), isolation/quarantine (yikes) and contact tracing (double yikes). The SEP and the Ministry of Health have announced guidelines for a return to classes in Mexico that might mean a hybrid setup, where students attend in-person classes every other day and do distance learning on the other days. They’re also talking about lots of temperature checks, social distancing, frequent handwashing and maybe parents having to submit a document promising that nobody in the family is currently displaying signs of Covid-19.

As terrible as the idea is for students, I think we’re going to wait for that green light. In the meantime, it would behoove the government to do what it could to help keep private schools open: we’re going to need them when it’s time to go back, especially if social distancing is to be reasonably expected. Can we also get teachers and school personnel listed as top priorities for vaccines, please?

Malls are open, restaurants are open, even lots of bars are open. Schools should have been the first priority at the expense of everything else, but there’s no time right now to be mad about it. It’s been a year, and we’re all exhausted. Let’s please try to get this right.

Our kids are counting on us.

Sarah DeVries is a writer and translator based in Xalapa, Veracruz. She can be reached through her website, sdevrieswritingandtranslating.com.

Authorities used excessive force, sexual violence to silence protesting women: Amnesty

By

MND Staff

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March 3, 2021

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Amnesty International has accused Mexican authorities of using excessive force and sexual violence against women protesting peacefully against gender-based violence at five protests in 2020.

In a report published Wednesday entitled The (r)age of women: Stigma and violence against women protesters, the human rights-focused, non-governmental organization said that authorities repressed women who attended protests in Guanajuato, Sinaloa, Quintana Roo, México state and Mexico City last year.

The authorities violated their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly by using “unnecessary and excessive force, arbitrary detentions and even sexual violence,” Amnesty International said.

Police even opened fire at a protest in Cancún last November against the femicide of a 20-year-old woman.

“The violent response of the various authorities to the women’s protests violated their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. During the arrests and transfers, police officers spoke to the women using violent and sexualized language, threatened them with sexual violence and subjected them to physical and sexual violence. Many women did not know where they were, who was arresting them or where they were taking them, meaning they were at risk of enforced disappearance,” said Tania Reneaum Panszi, executive director at Amnesty International Mexico.

An officer fires his weapon during a protest last year in Cancún. Eleven officers are awaiting trial in the case.

“The authorities at various levels of government have stigmatized women’s protests, characterizing them as ‘violent’ with the aim of discrediting their activism and questioning their motives,” she said.

“But make no mistake, these protests are a call for women’s right to live a life free from violence. They are a call to combat the impunity that prevails in thousands of cases of femicide and sexual violence that have caused unimaginable pain for so many families in Mexico.”

Amnesty International said it had concluded that police officers arrested more than a dozen women at protests without properly identifying themselves. It said that police held detainees incommunicado for long periods of time and transported them to police facilities using unusual routes without telling them where they were being taken.

The police actions caused women “intense fear” of becoming victims of enforced disappearance, the organization said.

“Deliberately causing suffering and uncertainty among the protesters about the possibility of being subjected to enforced disappearance is a violation of their right to personal safety and infringes upon the absolute prohibition of torture and other forms of ill-treatment,” Amnesty International said.

The NGO also said it had determined that police officers used sexual violence as a tactic to teach women a lesson about “daring to go out to protest in public and for behaving contrary to gender stereotypes.”

Amnesty said that authorities and some media outlets have stigmatized women’s protests by referring to them as violent.

“This stigmatization has created a hostile environment for women’s right to peaceful assembly that discredits their activism and encourages both authorities and civilians to carry out violence against them,” it said.

The organization issued a plea to the authorities to acknowledge the legitimacy of women’s protests and and to refrain from making stigmatizing statements against protesters.

It urged the authorities to carry out prompt, exhaustive, independent and impartial investigations into claims of sexual violence filed by protesters “in order to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice in fair trials and guarantee comprehensive reparation for the damages to the victims.”

The publication of the organization’s report comes just five days before International Women’s Day, a day on which women will hold marches against gender violence in cities across Mexico.

Mexico News Daily

Century-old bakery is Covid victim in San Luis Potosí

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Michelle Aguilar

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March 3, 2021

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la parisiense bakery — A shopper at the 117-year-old bakery, which closed last month.

A San Luis Potosí bakery with more than a century’s worth of memories managed to survive changes in tastes, demographics, and even remodeling in the city’s historic center, but it finally met its match last month in Covid-19.

La Parisiense, a four-generation family bakery founded by French immigrant Emmanuel Coulón in 1904 during the Francophile Porfiriato era, was the original panadería (bakery) of a company that over the decades expanded to its current 13 successful branches all over the city under the name La Superior, a brand the family founded in the 1950s.

But its flagship bakery, which retained the company’s original name and has been a downtown fixture since its founding, finally admitted defeat last month and closed its doors on a bittersweet Valentine’s Day.

The coronavirus, which brought sales down by an abysmal 50%, was the final nail in the coffin, a representative of the company told the newspaper El Universal.

“We couldn’t get in the black, we couldn’t manage to recuperate. Covid-19 hit us pretty hard,” they said. “… it just wasn’t profitable, especially with the rent that we were paying.”

However, the downtown bakery has been struggling for over a decade.

La Parisiense’s last true hurrah was in the 1990s and 2000s, when it not only had steady customers who bought their daily bread there but also vendors who would buy large amounts of bread to resell on on the outskirts of the city.

In the late 2000s, it was recognized by the city for being one of few businesses in San Luis Potosí that was still operating after a century.

However, it was also around this time that the historic center got a facelift. In 2008, it was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site, driving much renovation and refurbishing of the zone that the bakery blames for changing people’s driving routes and dragging down their sales by 18%.

By the time Covid-19 hit Mexico, La Parisiense was already a sentimental symbol of the company’s past rather than a profitable business. Its true profitability lies in the La Superior bakeries.

It just made hard business sense to close, the spokesman said.

“It was a difficult decision. It hurt us emotionally. It’s a family business, and it weighs heavy on our hearts, but we also have to know when to call it quits.”

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

In Jalisco, panic buttons protect over 500 women from domestic violence

By

MND Staff

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March 3, 2021

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Operators at the C5 Command Center in Zapopan.

Panic buttons issued in Zapopan, Jalisco, to more than 500 women considered at medium and high risk of becoming victims of femicide are saving lives, according to one woman who owes her life to the electronic devices.

Authorities in Zapopan, a municipality that is part of the metropolitan area of Guadalajara, have distributed 552 “pulse of life” panic buttons to women who have been victims of physical violence perpetrated by their former partners.

One of the participants in the program is Lorena (not her real name), a 26-year-old woman with an abusive, estranged husband.

She told the newspaper Milenio that her “pulse of life” saved her life when her husband – who had previously attacked her on numerous occasions –broke into her home. He broke into the gated community where she lives and attempted to enter her home with a house key still in his possession.

But the lock had been changed and he was unable to get in, she explained. Enraged, the man broke a window to gain access. Lorena knew immediately that her life was in danger and locked herself in the bathroom and contacted the police using the panic button hanging around her neck.

The panic button used by over 500 women in Zapopan, Jalisco.

Paulette Colorado, an employee in the municipal police C5 command center, tried to calm Lorena down and informed her that the nearest police car had been dispatched to her home. As she waited for the police to arrive, her husband managed to gain access to the bathroom, where he came face to face with his terrified wife.

Lorena told Milenio that when she saw him in front of her the only thing that she could think to do was to hold up her panic button and shout, “It’s the police!”

Immediately after, Colorado advised Lorena via her panic button that the C5 control center was listening to what was happening and that the police would soon arrive.

“That gave him a tremendous surprise,” Lorena said, adding that her husband took a backward step and she was able to lock herself in the bathroom again. The police arrived a short time later and apprehended the man after a short chase.

“When they were arresting him, he had the audacity to fight with the police, the aggression continued,” Lorena said.

“He came with other intentions; if it hadn’t been for the pulse of life, you and I wouldn’t be here talking, that’s the reality. … “I’m a survivor thanks to the pulse of life.”

The panic buttons come on a necklace-like chain and are equipped with technology that allows communication with the Zapopan C5 center and transmits the wearer’s location. A digital map in the command center shows the location in real time of all 552 women who have been issued with panic buttons since the 4-million-peso (US $191,000) security program began in 2019.

Juan Carlos Contreras, the deputy director of the command center, told Milenio that the women don’t need to identify themselves when they use their buttons because as soon as one is activated the carrier’s name appears on a screen.

“They don’t need to say, ‘My name’s Lupita and I have a problem,’” he said. “With the simple act of pressing the button … we know who we’re interacting with.”

Carlos Franco, head of the Zapopan police department responsible for preventing and investigating domestic and gender violence, said proudly that there have no murders of women issued with the buttons.

As a result of the success in Zapopan, police forces in some other Jalisco municipalities, including Guadalajara, Tlaquepaque and Puerto Vallarta, have introduced similar programs.

Asked how the program in Zapopan could be improved, Lorena said she was happy with the way it is operating now but would like to see it expand.

“The only thing I would like is for there to be more pulse of life panic buttons, for the authorities to support the program economically so that there are a lot more” because every one can save a woman’s life, she said.

With an average of about 10 murders of females every day, Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women.

Source: Milenio (sp)

President’s policies fatally undermine the energy companies he needs for funds

By

Pamela K. Starr

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March 3, 2021

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pemex truck — 'For the rescue of sovereignty,' reads the slogan on a Pemex truck.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s controversial president, has embarked on a program of national change he grandly calls the “Fourth Transformation.” Underpinning this historic overhaul are a costly series of infrastructure investments and an array of welfare initiatives.

So far, they have been paid for by a shift in government spending and increased tax collection. However, sustaining these programs will require new revenue sources and, as he has promised not to raise taxes or take on additional debt, that leaves just one option: Mexico’s two state-owned energy companies. This is where his whole project falls apart.

López Obrador, or AMLO as he is known, dreams of times when the national oil company Pemex was a cash cow. Yet those days are long gone, and his policies all but guarantee they will remain so. For one, a mix of nationalist energy policies is undermining the efficiency and profitability of both Pemex and the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), draining scarce fiscal resources. Furthermore, these policies are undermining the CFE’s capacity to deliver the cheap and clean electricity Mexico needs for economic growth. Yet without the extra tax revenues that come with faster growth, his vision of a transformed Mexico will fail.

Take Pemex. It has been losing billions of dollars, failing to meet its production targets, and its reserves continue to decline. The firm’s bonds have lost their investment grade, making its enormous debts more expensive to finance. The government’s decision to reduce private investment in the energy sector, and to plow several billions of dollars into building an unnecessary refinery, have further hurt this troubled firm.

Even if Pemex was a healthy company, doubling down on fossil fuels is an unsustainable strategy. The global economy is transitioning towards renewable energy: British oil company BP says it is shifting into green energy, while General Motors is going all-electric. Oil-based fuels are clearly the past, not the future.

Then there is the CFE, the giant utility that is Mexico’s second most powerful state-owned company. Under a new five-year plan personally endorsed by López Obrador, the CFE will end the electricity auction system that had provided users with access to cheap renewable energy. This will be replaced instead by its own power generation, which is far more expensive.

At the same time, López Obrador has promised to not raise household electricity prices. As a result, either government subsidies will be needed to make up the difference, further draining public funds, or industrial tariffs will need to be raised, undermining competitiveness. Under either option, Mexico shoots itself in the foot.

The CFE also plans to exclude any new capacity in renewable energy. This will jeopardize the estimated 65,000 jobs in the solar sector. More broadly, it will limit Mexico’s ability to attract new industrial investment, given that international companies increasingly set stringent clean energy requirements for their production facilities. Both will further undermine private investment just as Mexico’s economy emerges from a pandemic-induced slump.

These mooted changes in CFE policy have already faced legal challenges. The Supreme Court has said this nationalist energy strategy is unconstitutional and, because it favours domestic investment over foreign firms, elements of it may be at odds with several trade agreements, including the USMCA with the U.S. and Canada.

Nevertheless, López Obrador will not back down, despite the potentially expensive international arbitration that lies ahead. Nor does he seem moved by evidence that his strategy is failing. Quite the contrary. The impact of the cold snap last month in Texas, which dramatically reduced flows of cross-border natural gas and caused blackouts throughout Mexico, was mitigated by renewable electricity supplies. Yet the president took the incident as evidence that supported his plans.

How will Mexico generate the energy that it needs? How will it produce the strong growth needed to replace the jobs and firms lost during the pandemic? How will the government find the funds needed to pay for the president’s priority infrastructure projects and social welfare programs?

Without a shift in energy policy, which seems unlikely, none of these things seem possible. Mexico’s economic future, and the future of López Obrador’s “fourth transformation,” look bleak.

The writer is professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. Pedro Niembro of Monarch Global Strategies co-authored this piece.

Wife of ex-governor wanted for corruption pleads for halt to ‘political persecution’

By

MND Staff

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March 3, 2021

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The wife of former Nayarit governor Roberto Sandoval has issued a plea to President López Obrador to stop the “political persecution” against her family after a judge ordered the arrest of her husband and daughter on money laundering charges.

“We have nothing to hide. It’s not possible that these limits of depravity have been passed,” Ana Lilia López Torres said in a radio interview on Wednesday two days after a Nayarit-based federal judge issued arrest warrants for ex-governor Sandoval, who was in office from 2011 to 2017, and his daughter Lidy Alejandra Sandoval on charges of carrying out operations with resources of illicit origin.

“… I ask the president of the republic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, for an investigation to be carried out. … What I’m asking for is to stop this bitter political persecution,” López Torres said.

The order for Sandoval to be detained came 3 1/2 months after a state judge in Nayarit issued a warrant for the former governor’s arrest on charges of embezzlement and wrongful performance of duty.

The ex-Institutional Revolutionary Party governor was placed on the United States Kingpin List in May 2019 for corruption and suspected ties to drug traffickers, and former U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo accused him of “significant involvement in corruption” in February 2020.

roberto sandoval and family — The former governor and his family in a file photo.

The arrest warrants for the former governor and his daughter were granted after the government’s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) filed a complaint with the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) in January in relation to an embezzlement and money laundering scheme in which Sandoval, López Torres and their daughter and son were allegedly involved.

According to a UIF file to which the newspaper El Universal obtained access, López Torres and her children designed and operated a scheme to launder resources Sandoval obtained through the embezzlement of public money.

The scheme detected by the UIF had financial links to companies controlled by the ex-governor and his family members, El Universal reported. Sandoval allegedly siphoned off public money that had been allocated for the payment of government contracts.

To support its application for arrest warrants for Sandoval and his daughter, the FGR alleged that an “excessive amount” of public money was embezzled by the ex-governor and laundered by his family’s scheme.

The UIF has frozen 42 bank accounts linked to Sandoval which collectively contain almost 1.2 billion pesos (US $57.2 million). Among those that have been blocked are the accounts of his wife, daughter and son.

After the arrest warrants were issued on Monday, the FGR said it would seek the assistance of Interpol to locate and arrest Sandoval should he be outside the country. Until at least November 2020, authorities in Nayarit believed that the ex-governor was in San Pedro Garza García, an affluent municipality that is part of the metropolitan area of Monterrey, Nuevo León.

Entering the United States, legally at least, would not be an option for Sandoval as the U.S. announced last year that he and his immediate family members were ineligible for visas due to involvement in corruption.

In her radio interview, López Torres asserted that the accusations against her husband and family are based on lies and falsehoods.

She pleaded with López Obrador to give her the opportunity to meet with officials in order to submit financial documents that prove the innocence of Sandoval and her family.

“I’ll show that I’m right. I want you to know the history of our family. It’s political persecution,” López Torres said.

Although the latest arrest warrants stem from a federal investigation, the ex-governor’s wife accused current Nayarit Governor Antonio Echevarría of involvement in the fabrication of accusations against her family.

If Sandoval is detained, put on trial, convicted and imprisoned, he won’t be the first member of his government to end up behind bars. The former governor’s attorney general, Édgar Veytia, was sentenced to 20 years in jail in the United States in September 2019 after pleading guilty to drug trafficking charges.

Sandoval is suspected of collaborating with Veytia to commit a range of crimes while in power, including kidnappings, extortion, drug trafficking and murders.

The former governor has previously distanced himself from his attorney general’s criminal actions and has denied allegations of wrongdoing while in office in Nayarit.

Source: El Financiero (sp), El Universal (sp)

AMLO insists electricity bill doesn’t violate constitution but a court challenge is likely

By

Jude Webber

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March 3, 2021

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President López Obrador has dismissed suggestions that a law overhauling the country’s electricity market to favour a state-owned utility is unconstitutional, hours after it was passed by the Senate.

“There is nothing in it that violates constitutional rights, nothing, nothing, nothing,” López Obrador told his morning news conference on Wednesday.

Legal experts and trade lawyers have said the bill violates the constitution, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement and international trade treaties, and opposition politicians have vowed to pursue legal challenges. Investor unease pushed the peso down 1.4% in morning trading.

The law, passed early on Wednesday, rolls back key parts of an energy reform passed in 2013-2014 that created the country’s electricity market.

López Obrador, a populist nationalist who believes the state should be in control and that energy is the motor of national development, said the previous reform was an effort to squeeze the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), the former state monopoly, out of the market.

Nicknamed the “fuel oil law” by critics, the legislation passed Wednesday changes the order in which electricity is dispatched into the national grid, relegating cheap renewables behind all power generated by the CFE, including that from coal and fuel oil.

Hydropower from the CFE will now be at the front of the queue for dispatch into the national grid. López Obrador said he would announce a plan to modernize the company’s hydroelectric plants “to produce clean energy more cheaply.”

The CFE’s average generating costs for hydropower in 2020 were 1,400 pesos/MWh ($67) versus 650 pesos for electricity contracts under long-term supply auctions, which López Obrador has now scrapped, according to the Mexican Association of Wind Power.

Washington has already admonished Mexico over abrupt rule changes in the energy sector. López Obrador said the issue did not come up at a virtual summit with U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday.

The peso’s fall to around 20.88 to the dollar in part reflected investors’ higher perceptions of risk in a country where López Obrador has already scrapped prominent infrastructure projects and renegotiated contracts he considers to have allowed private companies to profit at the expense of the CFE and Pemex, the state oil company.

Gabriela Siller, head of economic and financial research at Banco Base, said “we do not rule out reaching levels close to 21 to the dollar again.”

Senators from the opposition PRI, PAN and PRD parties, which have teamed up to fight López Obrador in midterm legislative elections on June 6, said they would take action to the Supreme Court.

The legislation is similar to electricity rules favouring the CFE that were proposed by the energy ministry last year. Those changes were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court this month.

Ana Laura Magaloni, a lawyer who was among three candidates for a Supreme Court seat submitted by López Obrador in 2019, told the Financial Times it was “very shameless to send a bill [to Congress] that is unconstitutional.”

Analysts expect a flood of injunctions from renewable power companies, many of them from Europe and the U.S., to stop the law being applied to them.

Chihuahua priest sentenced to 34 years for sexual assault of altar girl, 8

By

Michelle Aguilar

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March 3, 2021

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Aristeo Baca assaulted the girl at least three times.

A Chihuahua priest who was convicted in February of aggravated sexual assault against an 8-year-old who served as an altar girl at his church was sentenced Tuesday to more than 34 years in prison.

Aristeo Trinidad Baca, 78, a suspended priest at the Santa María de la Montaña Parish Church in Ciudad Juárez, assaulted the girl between 2015–2018, the court found on February 22. The priest received multiple sentences, totaling 34 years, five months and 10 days, reflecting the fact that he had sexually assaulted the girl on at least three occasions.

Prosecutors said they were dissatisfied with the length of the sentence and would be pursuing action to advocate for more jail time for Baca. They also said they would try to increase the amount of financial restitution Baca was ordered to pay the victim, which currently stands at 59,129 pesos (US $2,800).

Baca’s defense team argued that the girl was lying about the assaults because her family had robbed Baca and had only made the accusations after the robbery was discovered.

The girl was frequently left alone with the priest on Sundays while her father helped out around the church. During her own testimony, the victim, now an adolescent, said Baca assaulted her in 2015 at the church’s parish hall after taking her to an ice cream social for children at a local orphanage he directed. In another incident in 2016, she said, he fondled her underneath some blankets just meters away from her unsuspecting parents while they all watched a film together.

The girl testified that the assaults made her uncomfortable and sad, but it was not until she reached the fifth grade — about two years after the initial assault — that she realized that was happening to her was wrong after she learned in a class that no one had the right to touch her body.

“I don’t just want that they throw him in jail,” she responded at one point to a prosecutor’s questions. “That’s not enough for me. I want him to die.”

About 20 witnesses provided testimony against Baca, including expert medical witnesses who said the girl showed psychological evidence of the assaults and that she would bear emotional consequences for the rest of her life.

The girl’s father told the court that after they reported the assaults, Baca asked for his forgiveness, saying that he had done “something stupid.”

“He taught us the Ten Commandments,” one of the victim’s sisters said in her testimony. “He said not to steal, and he stole our confidence from us. He said not to lie, and he lied to our entire family. He said not to kill, and he killed our faith.”

Baca is the first priest ever to be prosecuted for sexual abuse in Ciudad Juárez, according to the newspaper Milenio.

Sources: Milenio (sp), Periodico Enfoque (sp)

Italian bread brought here 140 years ago still a staple in one Puebla town

By

Joseph Sorrentino

-

March 3, 2021

0

Chipileña baker Dominga Zanella prepares small loaves of pintha. — Assistant baker Dominga Zanella prepares small loaves of pintha. All photos by Joseph Sorrentino

Karina Precoma is a bundle of energy, running between the batter she’s mixing, the front sales counter and the oven in her small bakery. She somehow manages to answer questions and talk on the phone the entire time.

Despite the chaos, the bread she’s baking — called pintha here in Chipilo, Puebla — always turns out perfect.

Chipilo is located about 10 miles west of Puebla city and was founded by Italians from the Veneto region of northern Italy in 1882. Although Italians and other Europeans settled in many parts of Mexico in the mid to late 1800s, Chipilo is the only pueblo that has maintained its ancestral customs and traditions, the only one that can truly be called an Italian pueblo. And it’s the only one in all of Mexico where pintha is made.

While some people think that the bread was invented in Chipilo, its origin is a little unclear.

“No one knows for sure because it’s been here for so long,” said Esperanza Sevenello Stefanoni. She and her husband Jacobo Simoni Piloni have a machine that grinds corn into the polenta that’s used in the bread, and she’s considered a local expert on all things chipileño. Their machine’s over 100 years old and, as Sevenello proudly pointed out, has been in use for three generations.

Karina Precoma busy at the sales counter of her Chipilo bakery.

“The legend is: ‘I learned to make the bread from my nonna [grandmother], who learned from her nonna,’” she said. “I am sure they brought the recipe from Italy, but it has changed.”

In fact, there’s a bread enjoyed in Italy called pinza that is somewhat similar to pintha.

“Pinza is Italian,” said Antonio Zaraín García, who has written about the history of Chipilo. “Pintha is Venetian.”

He said that when the first families arrived in Mexico, they were poor and didn’t have all the ingredients needed to make pinza.

“They make a bread in northern Italy that is much larger than what is made in Chipilo,” he said. “It is also sweeter. Here, pintha is considered as a bread of poor people.”

Both pinza and pintha are made with polenta, but pinza is a stuffed bread containing dried fruits and flavored with grappa and fennel. Neither grappa nor fennel is used in pintha, and it’s not stuffed; a few raisins, almonds or chocolate chips are sprinkled on top, along with a dusting of sugar.

Isabel Minutti is one of two assistants at Precoma's bakery. — Isabel Minutti is one of two assistants at Precoma’s bakery.

And while pinza is traditionally only served at Christmas or on Easter morning, pintha is available all year in Chipilo.

“I learned how to make pintha from my mother-in-law,” Precoma explained. “The recipe was passed down from her and an aunt, handed down through generations. I changed it a little: a little more of this, a little less of that. I use milk. Before, they did not use milk, only water.”

The milk gives the bread a richer flavor, she said.

The bakery has been in business for five years now and is the only bakery in Chipilo that makes the bread.

“There are people who still make it in their homes,” she said, “and every family has their own version of the bread. In most homes, people only use polenta.” Precoma uses a mix of flour and polenta to keep the cost down. Still, she said, “Polenta is the most important ingredient.”

Precoma and her two assistants typically turn out 200 loaves a day. Isabel Minutti keeps an eye on the bread in the ovens while Dominga Zanella sprinkles sugar on the tops of the unbaked loaves that sit in small metal pans.

Precoma with a fresh-baked batch of pintha loaves.

“When people first arrived here, they were poor,” said Sevenello. “They cooked on firewood and made large loaves that they would then cut.”

Each baked loaf weighs a bit under a pound and sells for 16 pesos (about 80 cents). Pintha tastes a lot like cornbread or a corn muffin. With its sugar topping, it makes a tasty breakfast bread or a great accompaniment to that afternoon cup of coffee.

Zuri Merlo is a regular customer at the bakery and is glad Precoma bakes the bread.

“It is easier now to have [it],” she said. “The measurements are very precise, it takes a long time and there is always a secret to making it.”

But Edith Merlo Stefanoni, her aunt, still prefers to make it at home.

“It has a homemade flavor and is more economical to make,” she said. “And nothing compares to the taste of the original [family] recipe.”

Husband and wife Jacobo Simoni Piloni and Esperanza Sevenello Stefanoni have a machine that grinds corn into the polenta for pintha bread.

Although Precoma’s pintha can be bought in many stores in Chipilo, it isn’t made, or even available, in nearby pueblos. It can, however, sometimes be found in cities like Puebla or Cholula.

“When it is,” said Sevenello, “it is called pan originál de chipileño” — original bread from Chipilo.

Joseph Sorrentino, a writer and photographer, is a regular contributor to Mexico News Daily. More examples of his photographs and links to other articles may be found at www.sorrentinophotography.com He currently lives in Chipilo, Puebla.