The government of Zacatecas announced Monday that red light restrictions would take immediate effect due to an increase in coronavirus cases.
Health Minister Gilberto Breña Cantú told a virtual press conference that Zacatecas is facing a “perfect storm” created by a range of factors.
“We have a pandemic, we have the cold season, we have the flu season, we have all the parties that are commonly held [at the end of the year],” he said.
Both coronavirus cases and Covid-19 deaths have recently increased, Breña said. Indeed, about a third of Zacatecas’ 16,780 confirmed cases were detected this month.
The health minister noted that the risk of coronavirus infection is orange light “high,” according to the federal government’s stoplight system, but explained that state authorities had reached the conclusion that the risk level is in fact already red light “maximum.”
As a result, nonessential businesses will be required to close by 7:00 p.m. and public transit services will end at 9:00 p.m. Places of worship are banned from holding services and all parties including weddings and 15th birthday celebrations are prohibited.
Parks, town squares, museums, gyms, public swimming pools, sports centers, nightclubs and bars must all close while restaurants and hotels are limited to 25% of their normal capacity.
The restrictions will remain in place for the next two weeks and apply across Zacatecas even though about three-quarters of the almost 17,000 cases detected in the state since the start of the pandemic are concentrated in just six of 58 municipalities.
Zacatecas city leads the state for cases with 4,278 as of Sunday. The next highest number of cases was detected in Guadalupe, with 3,730; followed by Fresnillo with 3,099; Sombrerete with 650; Jerez with 460; and Río Grande with 392.
Ten Zacatecas municipalities have recorded fewer than 10 confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic and two – Mezquital del Oro and Moyahua – have recorded just one each.
The northern state has recorded 1,485 Covid-19 deaths, of which almost 40% occurred this month.
Zacatecas city also leads for Covid-19 deaths with 294 followed by Fresnillo and Guadalupe with 274 and 211, respectively.
Finding the right homemade cat treat recipe may take a few taste tests.
Since my story a few weeks ago about homemade dog biscuits, I’ve been eager to make treats for my two cats and write this next article. Many of the recipes I found used canned tuna (Luna and Sissy’s favorite) as a base, and I thought they would be so pleased. Hah.
Cats are notoriously finicky, and mine have never had “treats” before: in their world, there’s wet food, kibble and the occasional creature (small lizards, big cockroaches and, sadly, the random hummingbird). Decidedly unimpressed with my first try, they batted the “treats” around and walked away.
Apparently, more research was needed.
Some cats are fussy about the size of what they’re eating and may not like anything too big. When I broke the treats I’d made into smaller, pea-size pieces, they cautiously ate them. But when presented with the option of store-bought treats or my homemade ones … well, you know what happened.
Back to the drawing board: “Kitty Pavlova,” with just two simple but tasty ingredients, seemed promising (and easy) and was met with unrestrained enthusiasm by my tasters. Should I ever again want to woo my cats with treats, this is the direction in which I’ll go. See below for the recipe.
The best meat to use for cat treats is … well, trust us, they’ll let you know.
But as I found more and more complicated recipes, I had to wonder, why bother? My cats have little interest in “pleasing” me, and I’m not trying to train them. They — like me, ahem — have no need of between-meal snacks. What’s the point?
Philosophical musings aside, should you, however, want to make treats for your feline friends, start with a protein like canned tuna in water, canned or cooked chicken or their favorite canned cat food; fresh-cooked fish is too flaky to hold together. Add an egg and some kind of binder: gelatin sheets (not Jello!), cornmeal or powdered milk.
Feeling creative? Try adding some manteca or other animal fat, unsalted beef, chicken or bone broth or, if you can find them at an Asian food store, dried bonito flakes. Some cats also like greens like cilantro or spinach; others love to eat catnip.
Because cats are more finicky than dogs, your knowledge of what things they already like to eat should be your guide. My cats, for instance, will happily eat corn chips if allowed, so using cornmeal as a binder seemed to make sense.
That said, I discovered my limits: if I want to give Luna and Sissy a special treat, I’ll stick to a forkful of canned tuna or some pieces of leftover chicken. Your cats will let you know what works for them.
This treat is a delicacy even for the most discerning of feline tastes.
Kitty Pavlova
Quite possibly this will work with canned cat food too. If you try it, let me know!
1 egg white
1 5-oz. can water-packed tuna, thoroughly drained OR 1 5-oz. can cooked chicken OR ½ cup shredded cooked chicken
Preheat your oven to 350 F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Beat egg white until stiff peaks form. In a separate bowl, mince and mash tuna or chicken as finely as possible.
Add two tablespoons of the whisked egg white to tuna/chicken; mix thoroughly until there are no lumps. Gently fold in remaining egg white.
Pipe or spread the mixture in lines about a half-inch wide and a quarter-inch high onto a baking sheet.
Bake about 20 minutes until dry to the touch and beginning to brown along the edges. Cool, then break into pieces. Store in airtight jars for up to a month.
Using a pastry bag makes softer mixtures easier to distribute on a baking sheet
EZ Kitty Treats
1 can cat food
Optional: pinch of catnip
Preheat oven to 375 F and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Stir catnip and canned food together to a mousse-like consistency.
Put mixture in a Ziploc bag, snip a small corner off and use it like a pastry bag to make small, evenly spaced dots on the baking sheet. Bake 8–10 minutes.
Remove from oven. (Mixture will be slightly soft.)
Once cooled, roll the half-baked mixture into tiny quarter-inch balls.
Store in an airtight container.
An optional addition to Tuna Biscuits is a perennial favorite: catnip
Tuna Biscuits
1 5-oz. can tuna packed in water, well-drained
1 whole egg
3 to 4 Tbsp. cornmeal OR whole wheat flour
1 Tbsp. powdered milk
Optional: 1 tsp. catnip
Preheat oven to 400 F. Combine everything in a bowl and mix until the consistency of cookie dough.
Pinch into tiny bite-sized pieces (about one-quarter teaspoon each) or press into thin graham-cracker-sized layers onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet.
Bake about 15 minutes till firm but not dried out. Cool.
Break layers into small pieces. Store refrigerated in an airtight container for 10–14 days.
Taste-tested and cat-mom approved.
No-Bake Turkey-Pumpkin Kitty Treats
⅓ cup canned pumpkin (no added salt or sugar)
¼ cup cooked turkey or chicken meat
Enough gelatin powder or leaf to set 3 fl. oz of liquid (strengths vary, check your gelatin packet for how much to use)
Water
Strain pumpkin in a cheesecloth or tea towel, then squeeze to extract as much of the liquid as you can. Follow directions for dissolving gelatin with water.
Blitz meat in blender or food processor until it forms fine crumbs.
In small saucepan, combine meat, pumpkin and gelatin. Heat gently on low heat — don’t boil — adding water if needed to prevent mixture from getting too dry and sticking. Aim for toothpaste consistency or a little thicker. Once gelatin has completely dissolved, remove from heat.
Cool about 10 minutes; mixture will be sticky and soft.
Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil or parchment paper. Roll mixture into pea-sized balls and place on baking sheet. Refrigerate to set for 8–24 hours, depending on gelatin.
Once fully set, store refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 1 week.
Janet Blaser has been a writer, editor and storyteller her entire life and feels fortunate to be able to write about great food, amazing places, fascinating people and unique events. Her first book, Why We Left: An Anthology of American Women Expats, is available on Amazon. Contact Janet or read her blog at whyweleftamerica.com.
Finance Minister Herrera: projects will have an 'immediate impact' on employment and investment.
The federal government and the private sector presented details on Monday of an agreement to collaborate on the construction of 29 infrastructure projects worth 228 billion pesos (US $11.3 billion).
Finance Minister Arturo Herrera said that 10 projects worth a combined 43 billion pesos are already underway and that the other 19 are to start soon.
“The idea is … to announce the projects that are very close to starting,” he told reporters at President López Obrador’s morning press conference, asserting that they will have an “immediate impact” on employment and investment.
He said the largest new project is a 47-billion-peso natural gas plant to be built by the Mexican energy company IEnova in Ensenada, Baja California. Construction is slated to commence in January 2021.
Among the other projects presented Monday were the 20-billion peso Naucalpan-Ecatepec highway in México state, the 4.2-billion-peso Cuapiaxtla-Cuacnopalan highway in Tlaxcala and Puebla, a 9-billion-peso gas pipeline on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the 5.2-billion-peso Silao-San Miguel de Allende highway in Guanajuato.
Business leader Carlos Salazar said the bundle of 29 infrastructure projects will create 400,000 jobs.
There are also several Federal Electricity Commission projects and two projects that are part of the construction of a desalination plant in Los Cabos, Baja California Sur.
Including the projects presented Monday, the government has agreements with the private sector to build 68 infrastructure projects with an investment of 525 billion pesos (US $26 billion) Herrera said. Details of 39 of them were presented in early October.
The president of the Business Coordinating Council (CCE), an umbrella organization representing 12 business groups, said that the new bundle of 29 infrastructure projects will create 400,000 jobs.
“This is the number we need to recoup the [formal sector] jobs that were lost [due to the pandemic],” Carlos Salazar said.
He said that the investment associated with the 29 projects is equivalent to 2.3% of Mexico’s GDP.
Salazar also said that the best way to strengthen the economy – which in 2020 appears likely to suffers its worst contraction since the Great Depression due to the coronavirus pandemic and associated restrictions – is for both the private sector and the government to invest in it.
“We [the private sector] are very interested … in supporting the kind of projects” announced today, he said.
The CCE chief added that the government and private sector are working on another bundle of projects but didn’t say when it would be presented.
President López Obrador has ruled out any possibility that a United States company will be allowed to proceed with a brewery project in Mexicali, Baja California, that the federal government halted after a referendum in March.
During a visit to Mexicali on Friday, López Obrador once again asserted that the brewery will not be allowed to open and publicly instructed Environment Minister María Luisa Albores to ensure that is the case.
“The decision was taken that a permit allowing this plant to operate would not be granted and that [remains] the commitment. I say it here with complete clarity so that there is no disinformation. We keep our word; we’re not the same as the doublespeak, double-moral conservatives. Consistency is fundamental for us,” he said.
“A consultation was carried out and the people said … they didn’t want this brewery to be built and to operate due to the lack of water in Mexicali, in Baja California [and] in the north of the country,” López Obrador said.
The president’s remarks came after he said earlier this month that there was concern in the state that the brewery would be allowed to go ahead despite citizens’ emphatic rejection of it in the March referendum.
López Obrador told reporters at his morning news conference on November 19 that brewing companies should instead seek to produce in locations in Mexico’s southeast where water is far more abundant than in the country’s comparatively barren north.
If the Mexicali brewery project – where Constellation intended to brew Modelo brand beers for the United States market – was approved, Mexico would be exporting “water that we don’t have,” the president said.
“There has to be a completely different policy. [There should be] permits for … breweries but on the Grijalva and Usumacinta [rivers in Tabasco and Chiapas]. Look at how much water [they have],” López Obrador said.
“The permits can be given there because look at how the floods affect us [there]. But in the center and the north of the country there’s no water and what has to be guaranteed is that there is no shortage of water for human use, … that’s the first thing and in second place is agriculture.”
The US $1.4-billion project was about 70% complete when construction was halted in March.
For the second time in less than a month and four days before a scheduled employee strike over nonpayment of wages, the financially beleaguered airline Interjet abruptly cancelled its flights this past weekend and into Monday morning, reportedly due to a lack of fuel.
Nineteen flights scheduled for today between Mexico City and Cancún, Monterrey, Cozumel, Guadalajara and Mérida were canceled this morning. On the weekend, 24 other flights between Mexico City and Cancún, Monterrey and Cozumel were also canceled with little notice to passengers.
Interjet employees interviewed by the newspaper La Jornada said the cancellation of flights came as a surprise to them. As of this morning, Interjet still had flights scheduled in and out of Mexico City for this evening, all occurring after 5 p.m.
This is the second time Interjet has had to cancel flights due to the inability to purchase fuel. Passengers flying between October 31 and November 2 also had their flights canceled with little warning, affecting 3,099 travelers.
The airline has been plagued with setbacks throughout 2020, stemming from debts going back nearly a decade, and worsened by losses in income this year due to the coronavirus pandemic’s effects on the airline industry.
It currently owes unpaid wages going back five pay periods to more than 5,000 workers, who are threatening to strike starting on Friday. Earlier this month, a federal judge greenlighted a lawsuit against Interjet by Aeropuertos y Servicios Auxiliares (ASA), the federally owned company that manages about two dozen airports and provides aviation fuel, in order to recover unpaid fuel debts.
The consumer protection agency Profeco recently issued a warning to Mexicans not to use Interjet, citing its tendency to change or cancel flights with little warning, saying the fault in the previous incident in October was “completely attributable to the airline.” In 2019, Profeco received 769 complaints from consumers against Interjet, 322 of them related to changed or canceled flights, refunds, or advertised discounts.
As of November 3, said Profeco, it had received twice as many complaints, 1,542 in total, 904 of which were ticketing related. The chief complaint was over flight cancellations.
In February, the organization Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity said it had found evidence that Interjet owes more than 3 billion pesos (US $150 million) in taxes and other debts to various federal agencies, including the Federal Tax Administration (SAT) and ASA.
The airline dismissed the report as “imprecise” and said it had reached agreements with SAT to pay off its debts. However, the tax agency’s chief, Raquel Buenrostro, told reporters that the only agreement it had made with Interjet was that it should pay income and sales tax debt dating back to 2013.
The coronavirus case tally for November exceeded that of October on Sunday, making this month the second worst for new cases since the start of the pandemic.
The Health Ministry reported 6,388 new cases on Sunday, pushing the accumulated number to 1,107,071.
The average daily tally reported this month is 6,280 – 7% higher than the October average. The only month in which more new coronavirus cases were reported was July with 198,548, or 6,404 per day.
After the July peak, new case numbers declined 12% in August to 174,923 and decreased again in September, falling 18% to 143,656. However, they increased 26.5% in October to 181,746.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. milenio
Meanwhile, Mexico’s official Covid-19 death toll rose to 105,655 on Sunday with 196 additional fatalities reported. In the first 29 days of this month, the Health Ministry registered 13,902 fatalities for an average of 479 per day.
July was also the worst month for Covid-19 fatalities with health authorities reporting 18,919, or an average of 610 per day.
Reported deaths declined 6% in August to 17,726 and fell an additional 25% in September to 13,232. However, they rose 7% in October to 14,107.
This month’s death toll will in all likelihood pass the October total when the Health Ministry reports the latest coronavirus data on Monday night. If that occurs, November will become the fourth deadliest month of the pandemic after July, June and August.
The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington is currently projecting that Mexico’s official Covid-19 death toll will rise to just over 120,000 by the end of the year and almost 144,000 by March 1, 2021.
With universal face mask usage, there would be about 8,500 fewer deaths by March 1, according to IHME projections.
Estimated active cases by state as of Sunday evening. milenio
The federal government has been a reluctant advocate for face masks, triggering criticism from numerous health experts and former health ministers.
“The government should make it clear that the use of face masks does help to reduce the spread of the virus,” said Alejandro Macías, an infectious disease doctor, a member of the National Autonomous University’s coronavirus commission and the federal government’s point man during the swine flu pandemic in 2009.
The November increase in numbers brought a warning Monday from the World Health Organization, whose director-general said Mexico was “in a bad situation.”
When both cases and deaths increase, it’s “a very serious problem,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who urged Mexico to take the situation seriously.
However, he based his warning on information that was at odds with official figures, claiming that both new cases and deaths had doubled over the course of three weeks.
WHO director-general Tedros said the situation in Mexico was ‘worrying.’
While the numbers for some days did indeed double in the second half of the month, overall case numbers were up 23% and deaths by 9% compared to the first half of the month.
But with winter approaching, case numbers rising again, hospitals in some states already filling up with coronavirus patients and the federal government ruling out any possibility of enforcing a strict lockdown, it appears inevitable that Mexico will see high numbers of Covid-19 deaths in the coming weeks and months, deepening the significant pain the pandemic has already inflicted on the nation.
Indeed, the real number of Covid-19 deaths is likely already considerably higher than the totals the IHME projects Mexico will reach by the end of the year and next March.
The Health Ministry reported in late October that the number of deaths in Mexico between January 1 and September 26 was more that 193,000 higher than the average for the same period in recent years. More than 139,000 of the “excess deaths” by September 26 – when the official coronavirus death toll was just over 76,000 – were judged to have been caused by Covid-19.
Many health-related allegations were made against maquiladoras.
A new report published by an organization whose goal is advancing human rights in business has catalogued how companies across Mexico have accelerated human rights violations across their workforces, under the cloak of, and justification of, the Covid-19 pandemic.
The new and damning benchmark report by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre analyzed 229 public allegations across four key business sectors and found that corporate negligence was deliberately ignoring workers’ rights and putting theirs and their families’ lives at risk.
During the period covered by the report, 417 complaints were registered by Mexico’s National Council to Prevent Discrimination (Conapred). Of these complaints, 40% were against private entities and public companies, and 76% were related to illegal or unfair labour practices.
Despite government implementation of social distancing measures aimed at reducing the spread of the virus, many companies continued to operate throughout the early months of the pandemic without sufficient health measures in place to protect their workers.
The report, investigating the behaviour of such companies towards their workers, identified a number of key human rights abuses, including exposure to high risk situations, arbitrary and mass dismissals, and even one company which vanished into the void with no explanation, leaving its workers without wages or compensation.
Sectors with the strongest links to international business were found to be the worst for abuse of workers’ rights. For example, 65% of all health-related allegations came from the maquiladora industry, where imported goods are assembled by low paid workers to be exported to the country of origin.
A huge employer of workers, both in and out of Mexico, the maquiladora industry generates around 3 million jobs directly, and more than 7 million indirectly across the globe. In light of the fact that maquiladora companies refused to suspend their operations, or to implement sufficient health measures, it seems grievously predestined that the number of deaths across the sector has been exceedingly high, and that the number of Covid-19 infections continues to increase in the sector.
This was particularly the case in states on the border with the U.S., where overcrowded work spaces, low wages, flexible labour and low prices engender overwhelmingly unsafe working conditions: of more than 100 cases of abuse reported in the maquiladora industry, the majority were located in the border states of Baja California, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Tamaulipas, as well as in Mexico City.
While the issue here is with the conduct of businesses in Mexico, there is a dire need for accountability from international companies also buying products produced in Mexico, whose low purchase prices exacerbate already notoriously low wages in conditions where preventative safety measures are lax, to say the least. Thus, families already living on the breadline are forced to accept wage reductions and work in unsafe conditions, or risk losing their jobs.
In Aguascalientes, employees from FrontRunner Technologies maquiladora reported that they had stopped receiving wages for more than a month; workers were informed on March 23 that they would have their wages suspended for one month, and at the end of the month, they were informed that they would not be receiving their payment because of economic insolvency.
They were not, however, given any indication that the plant would be closing, which it subsequently did. In the meantime, staff payroll accounts were deactivated, and the company disappeared, denying any responsibility for the wellbeing of its employees.
One FrontRunner employee who wished to remain anonymous speaks of how they arrived at the plant to find it deserted: “The place was vacant, it was empty, it didn’t say it was FrontRunner anymore. We tried to contact the manager and he told us that he doesn’t have any instructions from the Florida directors, that they just hadn’t sent the deposit and that’s why they couldn’t pay us.”
All this is not to say that there was no positive action taken by Mexican businesses; a number of companies donated food and medical supplies in response to Covid, and repurposed supply chains and facilities to aid distressed communities. However, these actions often lie within a model of corporate social responsibility which, though broadly aimed at contributing to the well-being of communities, is largely oriented towards business results and enhancing reputation.
The report outlines a number of recommendations, which can be summarized as relating to the implementation of human rights due diligence across businesses, and the restoration of jobs and rights to workers where they were removed over the course of the pandemic.
Companies across Mexico, the report continues, need to systematically implement and review protective policies against contagion which take into account worker diversity, including age, ethnicity and gender. Only by doing this can they hope to remedy the fundamental lack of protection of workers’ rights exacerbated over the course of the pandemic and encourage compliance with obligations defined under the UN Guiding Principles.
The report is no surprise to industry observers, who comment that while these inherent flaws have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, they are hardly new glitches in the system, but instead are systemic problems which have beset workers in Mexico for generations due to lax governmental oversight and poor working practices.
One worker in Mexico, it seems, is always easily replaced with another.
Shannon Collins is environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think tank.
His parents, Santiago Albino and his wife, Elisa, who laid their son Lazarito to rest on Saturday in Tlatlauquitepec, have filed a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission, which has begun investigating the city of Puebla’s La Margarita hospital — the IMSS hospital where Lazarito was born — for medical negligence.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of what actually happened with regard to Lazarito’s birth,” the parents said in a statement.
Puebla Governor Miguel Barbosa has also requested that federal and state prosecutors investigate the case.
Santiago Albino accused the hospital, where his son was born on October 21, of negligence.
“I hold the doctors that attended to [my wife] directly responsible,” he said. “They left Elisa alone for 15–20 minutes at a time and they walked by her looking at their cell phones without attending to her even when they could hear my wife screaming with childbirth pains.”
IMSS officials stated that the 23-week-old newborn had been declared dead after assessing him according to established medical protocols for extremely premature newborns. He had shown no vital signs, they said.
The hospital had the baby’s father sign a death certificate and transported Lazarito to the morgue, where he remained in a storage refrigerator until Albino and family members arrived to pick up the body for burial. While verifying the child’s identity, morgue staff realized he was alive, Albino told the newspaper El Universal in October.
Immediately following the discovery Lazarito was transferred back to the neonatal intensive care unit at La Margarita Hospital, where doctors said from the beginning that they could not guarantee his survival.
The president continues to enjoy a strong approval rating. buendía & laredo/el universal
The ruling Morena party has a clear advantage over its two main rivals just six months out from the 2021 midterm election while President López Obrador continues to enjoy the support of a strong majority of Mexicans, according to two new polls.
A survey conducted by the polling firm Buendía y Laredo for the newspaper El Universal between November 12 and 18 found that 32% of respondents would vote for Morena if the midterm election, at which all 500 seats of the lower house of Congress will be up for grabs, was held today.
That result gives Morena a 2-1 lead over both the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which attracted 17% and 16% support, respectively.
None of the other seven parties to contest the June 6, 2021 election attracted the support of more than 5% of respondents.
Of the 1,000 people polled, 4% said that they would vote for each of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), the Ecological Green Party (PVEM) and the Labor Party (PT) while 3% said they would cast their ballot for the Citizens Movement (MC). One in six respondents – 17% – declined to reveal their voting intention.
While the poll indicates that Morena is the most popular political party in the country, its support has declined 20 points since February 2019. Meanwhile, support for the PAN and the PRI increased nine and eight points respectively from 8% in February last year.
Only 27% of respondents to the new poll were aware that an election to renew the Chamber of Deputies will be held next June, indicating that most voters are not yet paying close attention to the upcoming electoral process.
Preferences are prone to change as the election date approaches and voters tune in more closely to the platforms parties are running on and who their local candidates are. Nevertheless, Morena is in an enviable position.
While 32% of respondents said they planned to vote for the party founded by López Obrador, 54% said that they had a very good or good opinion of it. Only 23% of those polled said that they had a bad or very bad opinion of Morena, leaving the party with a positive over negative differential of +31.
Among the seven parties with at least 3% voter support, only two others have a positive opinion differential. They are MC, with a +14 differential, and the PT – a Morena ally – at +6.
The PRI, which was in power from 2006 to 2012 and most of the 20th century, has the worst opinion differential at -31 – a figure that is perhaps unsurprising given the number of scandals that plagued the previous federal government – followed by the PRD (-12), the PAN (-11) and the PVEM (-1).
Morena is the clear leader in voters’ preference for Congress. buendía & laredo/el universal
Another positive for Morena is that López Obrador’s approval rating remains strong almost two years after he took office. The poll commissioned by El Universal found that 64% of respondents approved of the president’s performance while only 25% disapproved.
His approval rating, however, has declined 21 points since February 2019 when it was 85% just two months after he was sworn in.
A notable finding of the El Universal poll is that 64% of respondents approve of López Obrador’s performance but only half that number – 32% – said they would vote for Morena at the midterm election. The discrepancy apparently indicates that a sizable portion of the population support the president, who will celebrate two years in office on Tuesday, but want Congress to keep him in check rather than act as a rubber stamp for his proposals.
A poll commissioned by the El Economista newspaper also found a strong approval rating for AMLO, as the president is best known.
Conducted over the internet with a much large sample size of 87,735 respondents, the poll found 58.4% approval of the president’s performance.
Approval was highest in Guerrero, Tabasco and Tlaxcala, where more than 70% of respondents supported López Obrador, and lowest in Aguascalientes, Chihuahua and Colima, where fewer than 40% of those polled approved of the president’s performance.
The combined 58.4% figure is more than 10 points higher than in June when AMLO’s approval rating dropped to 47.5%, according to an El Economista poll conducted that month.
The president’s 47.5% rating, recorded the month after Mexico’s coronavirus restrictions were eased following a two-month suspension of nonessential economic activities, was his lowest since taking office in December 2018. His highest, according to El Economista polls, was 67.1% in February 2019.
López Obrador’s current approval rating is the third best among Mexico’s six most recent presidents after they served two years in the job.
Carlos Salinas, president from 1988 to 1994, had a 67% approval rating after two years in office, nine points higher than AMLO, while Felipe Calderón, president from 2006 to 2012, had a rating of 61% two years into the job.
López Obrador’s approval rating is 17 points higher than that of his predecessor Enrique Peña Nieto, who had a 41% rating two years after taking office. AMLO is four points ahead of Vicente Fox, president from 2000 to 2006, and one point ahead of Ernesto Zedillo, who served from 1994 to 2000.
If the 2018 presidential election was held again today, 48.9% of respondents to the El Economista poll would vote for López Obrador. That level of support is just below the 53.2% of the vote he attracted in July 2018.
However, removing the 14.1% of respondents who declined to say who they would vote for, support for López Obrador rises to 56.9%.
The “effective” support for AMLO is more than double that of Ricardo Anaya, who represented a PAN/PRD alliance at the 2018 election, and more than triple that of José Antonio Meade, who ran as the PRI candidate.
A similar percentage of respondents – 57.2% – said that they intend to vote for López Obrador to complete his six-year term at a “revocation of mandate” referendum slated to be held in 2022.
Asked how they would evaluate the president’s performance in a range of specific areas, 51.5% of respondents said that he has reduced corruption a lot or quite a lot. Although only just over half of those polled commended his performance in the area, it was López Obrador’s best result.
However, the result doesn’t exclude respondents who declined to offer a positive or negative assessment. Therefore the “effective” result for the president in that area and the 17 others respondents were asked about would be higher.
The president’s second and third best results were in “strengthening democracy” and “protecting citizens’ rights” while his worst results were in the areas of “achieving peace” – 2020 is on track to be most violent year on record, “combatting crime” and “reducing poverty.”
Cabrito is grilled goat kid, popular in Monterrey. Alejandro Linares García
Not exactly vegetarian-friendly, the north of Mexico loves meat cooked over a fire.
Such images of vaqueros (cowboys) cooking over open fires lead some culinary experts to think that there is nothing here to offer, but they are wrong.
Perhaps the best example of a deceptively simple food is roasted or grilled goat. It is to Monterrey what barbecue is to the southern United States and sausages to Germany. No visit is complete without trying it.
The most common name for the dish is simply cabrito (little goat), but more descriptive are names like cabrito asado (grilled goat) or cabrito al pastor (shepherd’s-style goat). Like tacos al pastor, the meat is traditionally cooked over a flame in a semi-upright position; the similarity ends there.
The dish in Mexico goes back about 450 years to the early colonial period. The Spanish crown sent unwanted Jews, as well as Portuguese and Arabs to settle this desolate and, frankly, dangerous area. These peoples brought with them their Mediterranean tastes for lamb, goat and spices such as oregano. In fact, today, Nuevo León is the most important producer of oregano in Mexico.
Cabrito on a spit. Courtesy of Ivan Martinez (CC)
Simply put, cabrito is a kid, in the original sense of the word, that has never been weaned before it is slaughtered. The carcass is sold in markets such as Mercado Juárez in the historic center of Monterrey and usually weighs about 10 kilos. It’s often sold whole and trussed, with the innards removed.
It is a simple preparation, but most regios (residents of Monterrey) jealously guard their recipes and cooking techniques. The goat is soaked in a brine both to hydrate and salt it. Purists insist this brine has only water and salt, but there are cooks who also add cumin and/or pepper. The animal is then trussed on a metal spit to lay flat, much like a spatchcocked chicken.
The most traditional way to cook cabrito is to jam the long end of the spit into the ground at an angle such that the meat hovers over a mound of hot mesquite coals. This technique requires four hours of cooking time and that the meat be turned frequently to avoid hot spots.
Along with whole goats, it is not unusual to see other spits with “stuff” wrapped around the cooking end. These wrapped bundles are called machitos, innards such as the liver and heart wrapped in the stomach and/or intestines and cooked the same way as the rest of the goat. The kidney, with its high fat content, is particularly prized. North of the border, machitos are called “Texas haggis” and, like a lot of things many people won’t eat, are said to be an aphrodisiac.
There are plenty of places that make cabrito in this manner, but modern living can make such cooking impractical. One alternative is to cook the goat in a special oven instead, one made from adobe in an igloo shape. This innovation has led to another name for the dish, cabrito al ataúd (coffin goat).
Diners usually select the part of the goat they want, very much like ordering chicken. The meat is pulled off the bone and eaten in tacos, generally accompanied by red salsa and frijoles borrachos (drunk beans). Monterrey is both corn and flour tortilla country, so it is likely you will be asked which you prefer. Cold beer is recommended for washing it down.
Herding goats in Guanajuato. Courtesy of Arriero (CC)
The al pastor name comes from the fact that this was the food of shepherds, who often ate the excess males born to nanny goats.
Over time, it became popular in markets and weekend roadside stands much the way that barbacoa is in the center of Mexico and birria is in Jalisco. Some market stalls that sold the fresh meat exclusively, like El Pipiripau in Mercado Juárez, started serving cooked meat, starting the dish’s popularity in the city.
Cabrito has become something of a mania in Monterrey, with full sit-down restaurants specializing in it. Most of these, of course, claim to have the best in town. Well-known restaurants include El Pastor, Los Principales, El Rey del Cabrito (with three locations), and El Tío, which was the first of its kind.
Most of the cabrito raised in Nuevo León comes from small farms south of Monterrey, but these small producers cannot come anywhere close to meeting the demand. About 1 million goats are eaten here each year, so animals are brought in from all over the north of the country.
Although by far associated with Monterrey, the eating of cabrito extends west into Coahuila and as far as Baja California, although availability may be spotty. Because of migration, the dish can also be found outside of its home range, especially in Mexico City.
Cabritos at a fair. Courtesy of Alejandro Linares García
Although cabrito al pastor is the most popular goat dish, it is not the only traditional preparation. For example, the cabrito may be stuffed with a mixture of rice, saffron, raisins and nuts, showing its Mediterranean and Sephardic heritage.
Cabrito en salsa is cooked with tomatoes, onions, garlic, serrano chiles, oregano, cumin and bay leaf.
For the more adventurous, there is frittata de cabrito and cuajitos de cabrito. Both are preparations of goat meat, using tomatoes, tomatillos and spices, but both include goat blood as an important ingredient.
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 17 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture. She publishes a blog called Creative Hands of Mexicoand her first book, Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta, was published last year. Her culture blog appears weekly on Mexico News Daily.
