San Pedro de la Cueva closed its doors to outsiders when the pandemic began.
A good strategy for minimizing the risk of catching Covid-19 in Mexico might be moving to a small, rural community — if you can get in, that is.
According to the federal Ministry of Health, 193 small municipalities in six states have managed to remain completely free of Covid cases since the pandemic began. The state of Oaxaca heads the list with 172.
The other states with Covid-free municipalities, Chiapas, Puebla, Veracruz, Sonora and Tamaulipas, have far fewer that are virus-free but all display a similar pattern: relatively small populations, often indigenous, often with a percentage of the population scattered into even lower-density rural areas around the municipality.
In some communities, local and state officials also attribute the lack of cases to zero-tolerance policies preventing outsiders from entering.
In Puebla, only four of the state’s 217 municipalities do not have any Covid-19 cases: Axutla, Coyomeapan, Chigmecatitlán and San Juan Atzompa. All are small communities that are difficult to access, located in forested areas or mountainous zones.
Similarly in Veracruz, the five municipalities that have stayed free of the disease are all in remote locations in the northern and central sierras, with low-density populations dedicated to farming, whose residents only leave when absolutely necessary.
In Tamaulipas, health specialist Daniel Carmona said that the state’s two municipalities without cases, Palmillas and San Nicolás, “put the brakes” on Covid arriving thanks to their remoteness.
Some officials say their communities remain without cases because they closed access to outsiders early on.
Edna Rubal, mayor of San Pedro de la Cueva, Sonora, said her community made the decision to close the town right at the pandemic’s beginning, when the state was assessed at red, the highest risk level on the national coronavirus map. Hers is one of the three municipalities in the state that has remained virus-free, along with Átil and Bacadéhuachi.
Oaxaca Health Minister Donato Casas said that many of the state’s Covid-free municipalities have remained that way because of their rural locations but also because they exercised discipline with anti-Covid measures from the beginning of the pandemic. For example, the remote community of Santo Domingo Tlatayapam, whose population is 132, closed the town to strangers and even outside deliveries.
In Chiapas, seven communities have managed to stay free of the coronavirus. In three of them — San Juan Cancuc, Maravilla Tenejapa and San Andrés Larrainzar — strangers are not welcome for now.
Despite residents in those towns not being required to wear masks or use hand sanitizer in public places (although the local government does follow other risk-prevention protocols), Covid is not a problem.
Authorities are struggling with the colossal task of burying a humpback whale, estimated to weigh 35 tonnes, that washed up dead five days ago on a beach in La Paz, Baja California Sur.
Marine biologists with the federal environmental protection agency and coast guard officials arrived at El Mogote Beach Thursday to bury the dead animal but a front-end loader brought along to carry out the task was deemed insufficient for the job.
“They’re coming back … with two backhoes,” said a local fisherman who mentioned that local security officers also showed up at the scene and failed to make any progress.
Local residents and fishermen have been complaining about the odor the dead whale has been giving off since it washed up at low tide on Sunday, already in a state of decomposition. It has remained ever since at the water’s edge, and locals are demanding that authorities find a way to bury the 20-meter-long animal as soon as possible.
Francisco Gómez, director of the Museum of the Whale in La Paz, told Más Noticias BCS that the whale must be removed soon to avoid blood and body oils from the whale contaminating the shoreline.
The whale is believed to have lost its way and then died while still in the ocean, eventually being pulled onto the beach by tidal currents.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been left to mourn the deaths of loved ones.
Mexico on Thursday became the fourth country in the world to record 100,000 Covid-19 deaths, passing the tragic milestone eight months after the first fatality was officially registered in the country.
Health Ministry Director of Epidemiology José Luis Alomía reported that the death toll had risen to 100,104 with 576 additional fatalities registered on Thursday.
The only other countries that have passed 100,000 Covid-19 deaths are the United States, Brazil and India.
The milestone came five days after Mexico’s accumulated case tally passed 1 million. The Health Ministry registered 4,472 new cases on Thursday, increasing the tally to 1,019,543.
Both the death toll and case tally are widely believed to be much higher because Mexico’s testing rate is much lower than most other countries. The Health Ministry reported late last month that there were about 193,000 more deaths than usual in the first nine months of the year and that at least 139,000 of them were attributable to Covid-19.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. milenio
Based on confirmed cases and deaths, Mexico’s Covid-19 fatality rate is 9.8 per 100 cases, the highest among the 20 countries currently most affected by the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University. The country ranks sixth for per capita deaths among the same group of countries with 79.3 fatalities per 100,000 residents.
Speaking at Thursday night’s coronavirus press conference, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, the government’s pandemic point man, described the 100,000+ death toll as “unheard of.”
“Today in Mexico we have 100,000 people who have lost their lives due to Covid-19. It’s an unheard of amount, there is no precedent in Mexican society of an acute, infectious disease … affecting the lives of so many people,” he said.
The death toll is now 66% higher than López-Gatell’s prediction of what could happen in a “catastrophic scenario.”
When Mexico’s death toll rose to 12,545 on June 4, the deputy minister said the government couldn’t rule out 30,000 to 35,000 Covid-19 fatalities. “In a catastrophic scenario, it could be 60,000,” López-Gatell said.
On Thursday, he was critical of the media for being “alarmist” by focusing on the death toll reaching 100,000.
López-Gatell: death toll ‘unheard of.’
“The epidemic is terrible in itself, you don’t have to add drama to it,” López-Gatell said, charging that some media outlets were focusing on the figure to sell newspapers or to trigger “political confrontation.”
When Mexico officially passed 1 million cases, the deputy minister also took aim at the media, saying, “in terms of news it appears attractive to report a round number whenever there is one.”
He personally described the passing of the 1 million case mark as “insignificant.”
What is not insignificant is the effect the pandemic has had, and continues to have, on people’s lives. Every state in the country has recorded at least 600 Covid-19 deaths and all but four – Baja California Sur, Colima, Campeche and Nayarit – have recorded more than 1,000.
Mexico City had recorded 16,677 Covid-19 fatalities as of Thursday, by far the highest total in the country, while neighboring México state, where 11,399 people have officially lost their lives to the disease, is the only other state with a five-figure death toll.
A nationwide death toll in excess of 100,000 people means that there are multiple members of more than 100,000 families who have grieved for loved ones who lost their lives to Covid-19 this year.
The pandemic has also had a significant effect on people’s everyday lives as coronavirus restrictions curtail the nation’s social and economic activities. More than a million formal sector jobs were lost due to the pandemic – although jobs recovery is now underway – and countless millions more were lost in the vast informal sector.
Unsurprisingly, the economy slumped as restrictions took effect, and although a recovery of sorts is now underway the recession this year is predicted to be the worst since the Great Depression.
The pandemic has also taken a toll on many people’s mental health.
“Mexico’s living are bearing the scars of the pandemic along with their lost friends and loved ones,” the Associated Press (AP) said in a report published after the death toll passed 100,000. “Many surviving coronavirus victims say the psychosis caused by the pandemic is one of the most lasting effects.”
AP spoke to Daniel Alfredo López González, a community leader in the sprawling, poverty-stricken eastern suburbs of greater Mexico City, who said that he was extremely afraid when he contracted the coronavirus himself.
“It is a tremendous psychosis. In the end, sometimes the disease itself may not be so serious, but it is for a person’s psyche,” he said. “That is, knowing that you have a disease like this can kill you as bad as the disease itself.”
His sister is a public health outreach worker and became paranoid that she had been exposed to the coronavirus while working.
Dulce María López González told AP that during one moment of panic she believed that she couldn’t breathe. But then she said to herself, “No, it is a psychological question.”
She said she had to force herself to calm down, telling the news agency: “If I get worked up thinking I have the disease, that I am going to die, then I am going to have a heart attack.”
Many people are also afraid of going to hospitals amid the pandemic, both for treatment for Covid-19 and other unrelated ailments, because they believe they won’t receive proper treatment and be left to die or because they think they will be infected with the virus.
Large numbers of people have only sought medical attention when they are gravely ill, causing many to die in emergency wards upon arrival or soon after they were admitted to hospital.
Mexico City Health Minister Oliva López Arellano said earlier this year that during an influx of coronavirus patients in May, almost half died within 12 hours of arriving at hospitals in the capital.
“After seeing videos of what happens to people inside hospitals, screw that,” José Eduardo Bailón, a Mexico City man who spent 60 days at home recovering from Covid-19, told The New York Times. “I’d rather stay home and die there.”
Feed the Hungry distributes food to a community in San Miguel de Allende. lauren sevrin
A San Miguel de Allende charity is taking transparency to the next level on Giving Tuesday December 1 by live-streaming its distribution of 500 care packages to needy rural communities.
Giving Tuesday is an annual event that encourages people to give to charities.
In San Miguel, the organization Feed the Hungry is inviting the public to a special “24 Hours of Gratitude” on its social media sites, encouraging supporters to post one thing they are grateful for.
The organization is also selling art donated by a San Miguel gallery and copies of a bilingual cookbook created for the charity. All the proceeds will go toward purchasing food for its beneficiary families.
“Every day, we are helping thousands of families put food on their table, and on December 1 we want to give [the public] an opportunity to join us virtually …” said Feed the Hungry president Al Kocourek.
An organization whose model before the coronavirus pandemic was to deliver weekly food staples to school kitchens in needy neighborhoods and rural communities, Feed the Hungry had to adapt its delivery model once schools across Mexico shut down and students began to learn at home.
Over the past eight months of the pandemic, the NGO has provided more than 60,000 food baskets directly to families.
Residents of a severely flooded town in the Tabasco municipality where President López Obrador was born and grew up are desperately appealing for help from authorities, claiming that they have been forgotten as they face the worst crisis of their lives.
José Colomo is a small town of just 1,200 residents on the Chilapa River near Ciudad Pemex in the municipality of Macuspana. It has been flooded for the past month but residents say that the situation worsened when water released from the Peñitas dam in Chiapas arrived.
Several residents who spoke with the newspaper Reforma said that none of the aid promised by López Obrador has arrived.
With tears running down her cheeks onto her face mask, Marta Elena Álvarez Muñoz said that her home was completely inundated with water.
“I need help, I don’t have anything. A while ago I went to remove what I could, I was crying from the sadness of seeing my things the way they are – my fridge, washing machine, stove, I’ve lost everything. I can’t go on like this, we’ve been in water for a month. Please [help us] now!” she said.
Ernesto Muñoz Bardín, a local farmer, urged López Obrador not to forget about his fellow tabasqueños, as natives of the Gulf coast state are known, saying he should travel to José Colomo to see for himself what the local residents are enduring.
Like many others affected by flooding, Muñoz’s feet are badly hurt from being constantly submerged in water. Applying creams and ointments to them is pointless, he said, because, “we’re in water the whole time.”
Irasema Hernández García told Reforma that her most valuable possessions were ruined by the floodwaters that inundated her home.
“Photos, paintings, things that I sacrificed a lot to buy were destroyed in a second,” she said.
“And we haven’t received help from anyone. We had to go to the highway to see if they [passing motorists] would take pity on us and throw us something – a snack,” Hernández said.
“We hope that the president, … who is a Tabasco native like us … doesn’t abandon us, because we voted for him and we support him. … He shouldn’t abandon us,” she said.
'No echamos mentiras señor Presidente'
“We’re going through a terrible crisis where we live, we need help, we’re not lying. We’ve lost everything,” said Mariana Pérez Martínez, another resident. “The president needs to remember us, he should [come and] see that it’s not a lie, that we need help,” she said.
María del Carmen López Arias, who saw six turkeys she was raising for food washed away by floodwaters, also issued a plea for help.
“We want provisions, we haven’t been given anything, they [the authorities] don’t take notice of us. We can’t work, my crops were ruined – my bananas, my limes, we were left with nothing,” she said.
“[If] provisions are not arriving [in José Colomo], where are they sending them?” asked Ana Gabriela Alejandro Hernández, presumably referring to the more than 100 tonnes of food aid that was transported to Tabasco by the military this week.
“The federal government is responsible for this. If it’s sending help then it’s the state [government’s] fault. Or whose fault is it? That’s the question. Why doesn’t the aid arrive here; what do we have to do? We’re desperate.”
Juan Antonio López Hernández, the municipal delegate for José Colomo, has been accused by residents of not doing enough to secure government aid for the town. But he rejects the accusation, showing Reforma several letters and cell phone messages he has sent to state and municipal authorities appealing for help. In one letter dated November 17, López told the authorities that 572 food packages were urgently needed in the town.
López also appeared in a video published by Reforma in which he visits the flooded home of a resident.
“About 70 centimeters [is] the level of water inside the house, [this video is] so that the councilmen, the president of the republic and the governor of the state can see that we’re not lying – [this is the situation in] Ranchería José Colomo,” he said.
We’ve been making requests [for help] and they haven’t been attended to at all.”
But at his regular news conference on Friday, López Obrador asserted that the federal government is providing help to flood victims.
“About the floods, all these trashy publications – El Universal, Reforma – are talking about the victims not being attended to. Of course, we’re attending to them. And they will be looked after in all respects, like never before,” he said.
“Those who are not being attended to are those who dedicated themselves to looting and stealing. These newspapers, … because of the change [in government] are no longer prospering on the public budget. That’s what they’re angry about, that’s why they dedicate themselves to attacking us, to committing libel against us every day.”
The Gateway International Bridge between Matamoros, Tamaulipas, and Brownsville, Texas.
The land border between Mexico and the United States will remain closed to nonessential traffic for another month, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced Friday, although at many crossings the closure applies only to Mexican travelers heading north.
The Mexican government requested the extension to the closure, which has been in effect on a monthly basis since March to help prevent the spread of Covid-19.
“After reviewing developments regarding the spread of Covid-19 in both countries – and because various states are on the orange [coronavirus threat level] – Mexico proposed to the United States the extension by one month of nonessential land traffic on our common border,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Twitter.
By mutual agreement between the two nations, the border has been closed to all but essential land travel since March 21. The extension means that the border will stay closed until December 21.
The announcement is a blow to retailers on the American side of the border, who count on holiday shopping by Mexicans crossing into the U.S. during December. Downtown El Paso merchants recently told the newspaper Border Report that sales are down 70%-90% since the travel restrictions went into effect.
Mexicans, however, have generally been in favor of the border remaining closed, although many border town residents have expressed concern that the closure is one-sided: while Mexicans are not permitted to enter the U.S., tourists are able to enter Mexico from the U.S. seemingly without restriction.
Several critics had their say on Twitter in response to the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s tweet regarding the extension.
“[This is] ridiculous and absurd,” wrote one. “1. The restriction applies only to Mexicans. Aren’t Americans contagious when they go to Mexico? 2. The restriction is only for the land border. Is the virus not contagious when it travels by air? 3. Mexico is asking the U.S. to restrict [travel by] Mexicans.”
Said another: “Whey don’t they restrict access to American citizens, given that border cities on the U.S. side have the most Covid-19 cases? It’s incongruous that only Mexican citizens are restricted from crossing into the U.S.”
The Chihuahua Congress asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in October to enforce the border closures, saying that leniency on the Mexican side was a factor in the state’s Covid-19 spike last month.
Coronavirus continues to spike in border communities on both sides of the border. El Paso, Texas, and neighboring Ciudad Juárez have had a combined 957 Covid-19 fatalities in the past month. Both cities currently have overnight curfews in place to reduce the spread of the virus.
The first brick-and-mortar Ikea store in Mexico is scheduled to open in the first quarter of 2021 in Mexico City, although the company’s recently opened online site is already busy from unexpected demand.
“We are excited to open Ikea in Mexico only three years after the decision was made to enter the Mexican market, especially under the tough Covid-19 conditions in Mexico City,” said Ikea Mexico retail country manager Malcolm Pruys in a press release. “It took significant collaboration and support across the Ikano Group and the retail business to make this possible. We now look forward to opening the first store early next year,”
Ikano Group is a corporation that operates franchised Ikea stores in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. A conglomerate with businesses across several industry sectors, it announced in August that it plans to build a 100,000-square-meter manufacturing plant in Ramos Arispe, Coahuila, for mattresses and sofas to be sold in North American Ikea stores.
Ikea store manager Annie Chandler told the newspaper El Financiero that the new physical store will be an anchor in the Encuentro Oceania mall, currently under construction in a former industrial zone in the Moctezuma Section 2 neighborhood in Venustiano Carranza.
Originally, the brick-and-mortar store was meant to open before the online one, but Covid-related issues forced the company to open the online site first. The website opened with a soft launch with no publicity as the company wanted to get to know the Mexican market and work out long-term details like the kind of vehicles it would use in its delivery fleet.
A rendering of the Encuentro Oceania shopping center in Mexico City.
But customers found the site anyway. Within two days, the company was overwhelmed with orders from all over Mexico.
“We launched in a very discreet manner because we hoped to grow slowly,” Pruys told Forbes México. “There was a 1000% more demand than predicted, for which we were not prepared.”
The online site is currently dealing with the unexpected avalanche of orders with only about 150 customer service employees. The website warns customers that deliveries could be delayed up to 15 days.
Meanwhile, plans proceed slowly but surely to install the brick-and-mortar store in the Encuentro Oceania mall. The shopping center, which will have 85,000 square meters of commercial space available, will contain green spaces and will involve the renovation of the Romero Rubio Metro station and sidewalks in the neighborhood, said Galo Rosello, legal director for Pulso Immobiliario, the development company building the over 500-million-peso (US $25-million) project.
According to the Ikea website, the brick-and-mortar store is expected to create around 350 direct jobs and more than 1,000 indirect ones.
Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum recently announced that the mall will also host one of the 300 Pilares community centers she plans to open by 2021 to revitalize community life and reduce crime.
Technical problems with electricity infrastructure generated economic losses of just over 866 million pesos for the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) last year, a 16.2% increase compared to 2018.
According to a new federal auditor’s report for 2019, the CFE lost 866.07 million pesos (US $43 million) because power it supplied to the electricity grid didn’t reach consumers due to transmission problems.
The figure is 120.6 million pesos higher than the loss in 2018, which totaled 745.5 million pesos. Losses in gigawatt hours increased 10.7% last year to 8,609 from 7,773 in 2018.
The losses are caused by the overheating of conductors in transmission infrastructure and other technical problems. As expected, losses are greater on old power lines.
The increase in losses occurred despite the CFE having taken steps to rectify the problems. The company implemented two programs that were designed to reduce transmission losses by repairing or replacing faulty infrastructure but they were unable to stanch the bleeding.
The auditor found that a trust set up by the CFE in 2017 to fund four other projects to improve transmission infrastructure didn’t actually allocate any resources to them.
The auditor’s office advised the CFE to ensure that there are sufficient financial, administrative and operational resources available to mitigate energy losses due to technical problems. The state-owned firm should work to guarantee the expansion and modernization of electricity infrastructure while complying with its objective of generating profits for the state, it said.
Electricity theft and bad debts also generate huge losses for the CFE. The director of the state company’s distribution division said in February that the CFE had overdue customer debt of 55 billion pesos (US $2.7 billion) at the end of 2019.
Flooding has been severe across much of Tabasco but the residents of a town wedged between a river and the sea are worse off than most.
Villa Cuauhtémoc, a town of about 5,000 people 70 kilometers north of Villahermosa between the Santa Anita River and the Gulf of Mexico coast, has been flooded for the past month.
Making things worse is that the floodwaters are infested with caimans, snakes and fish with a penchant for biting people.
Local resident Mercedes May told the newspaper Reforma that the water inundating the town is not flowing out to sea because waves crashing into the coastline won’t allow it.
“So it stagnates here,” she said. “The problem is that people who are not affected have assistance [but] we don’t.”
[wpgmza id=”269″]
The main reason why humanitarian aid hasn’t reached Villa Cuauhtémoc is that it has been cut off due to flooding outside the town.
The highway between Villahermosa and Frontera, the municipal seat of Centla, is flooded near the community of El Espino due to the overflowing of water from nearby lagoons and swamps, making it impossible to reach Cuauhtémoc by road from the capital.
Entering the town from Nacajuca is also impossible because the road between that municipality and Cuauhtémoc has been closed due to landslides.
Cuauhtémoc residents are becoming increasingly worried about the situation.
“There are people who are sick, children and old people mainly. Where are we going to take them and how?” asked María Alicia Ramírez, a 30-year-old woman who lost two of her toenails as a result of constantly having her feet submerged in water.
“The water has been like this for a month, since the first rains started,” she said.
Ramírez added that the release of water from the Peñitas dam in Chiapas after recent heavy rains made the flooding worse. She said that her fridge, washing machine and the mattresses on the beds in her home were all damaged by floodwaters.
“We had to get our pigs out [of their pen] because they were going to drown,” Ramírez said.
She also told Reforma that she had to install a wooden barricade to prevent caimans from getting into her home.
“We’re asking for help, … our feet are hurt, we’ve got fungal infections, we don’t have water, the children are getting sick,” Ramírez said.
Another local woman said that residents can’t leave their homes to go to shelters due to the risk of robbery.
“There is a town near here, near the river, called Paso Nuevo and last night they were robbing [homes] using canoes,” Edith May said. “They [thieves] have already gone into some homes here as well. What we want is for help to come.”
A woman finds a dry place for her poultry.
While women are doing their best to clean up their homes, the men of Villa Cuauhtémoc are trying to make a living, Reforma said. Some are fishing, some are transporting people through the flooded streets on motorbikes and others are working at food stalls. But business is slow because few people have money to spend.
Although they have lived with the floodwaters for the past month, many residents are anxious that they are about to rise even more.
“Tonight or tomorrow, [the water] will rise double [the current level] as they send the water from the Peñitas dam,” said Edith May.
President López Obrador, a Tabasco native, admitted Sunday that federal authorities chose to divert water from the dam away from Villahermosa to low-lying areas of the state. The municipalities of Centla, where Cuauhtémoc is located, Nacajuca and Jalpa were hit especially hard by the decision.
Many residents of communities in Jalpa are facing a similar situation to those in Villa Cuauhtémoc.
“We’ve been like this, in the water, for 22 days,” said Asunción Vargas Hernández, who is camping out near a highway waiting for the floodwaters in her town to recede.
“We no longer know what to do, [the water] hasn’t gone down at all. We survive on what the people passing by give us, the government hasn’t given us anything,” she said.
However, the federal government did send more than 100 tonnes of essential supplies to Tabasco over the past two days and families were to be given food packages containing items such as rice, beans and canned tuna.
The government announced Wednesday that it would begin a census of victims next week and that each affected household will receive 8,000 pesos (US $395) and vouchers exchangeable for domestic appliances.
Salvador Cienfuegos is back in Mexico, and a free man. file photo
A secret “brotherhood” of high-ranking army officials was instrumental in getting former defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos out of jail in the United States and securing his return to Mexico, according to a report by the news website Emeequis.
Cienfuegos, army chief in the 2012-2018 government led by former president Enrique Peña Nieto, arrived at the airport in Toluca, México state, on a private plane last night just hours after a United States federal judge agreed to a request from the U.S. Department of Justice to drop drug trafficking and money laundering charges against him so that he can be investigated in Mexico.
The federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) is conducting an investigation and has received evidence gathered by United States authorities. But the former defense minister doesn’t currently face any charges in Mexico and was allowed to return to his home after a health check and brief interview at the Toluca airport.
According to the Emeequis report, neither Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard nor Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero – who announced the decision to seek the dismissal of the charges against Cienfuegos in a joint statement with U.S. Attorney General William Barr – were ultimately responsible for obtaining the former army chief’s return ticket to Mexico.
An army general paid a visit to current Defense Minister Sandoval, requesting he take a message to the president.
It said that a “brotherhood” within the army called “El Sindicato” (The Syndicate) can in fact take the credit for Cienfuegos’ return as a free man.
Emeequis said that it was told by army sources that just a few hours after news broke of the former army chief’s arrest, a representative of El Sindicato – mainly made up of active and retired four-star generals – knocked on the door of the office of current Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval.
The representative, according to the sources, was a general who has experience combating drug cartels in the north of Mexico and a longstanding friendship with Sandoval.
One source told Emeequis that the message to the defense minister was: “The high-ranking commanders of the army were not going to remain with their arms crossed while a foreign government tore their credibility to shreds.”
The general told Sandoval to pass the message on to President López Obrador, making it clear that the high-ranking members of El Sindicato were not happy about the federal government not going to bat for their former colleague.
Emeequis said that in addition to generals, lieutenants and colonels began complaining that López Obrador appeared to be siding more with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) than the powerful “brotherhood,” which according to the report “pulls strings” on crucial issues for the federal government, such as the deployment of the National Guard, the construction of the new Santa Lucía airport and the construction of the new refinery on the Tabasco coast.
When Cienfuegos was transferred to a prison in New York from Los Angeles, even the most patient army officials – people who had been calling for the president to be given more time to negotiate with U.S. authorities – were infuriated, the report said.
El Sindicato consequently increased its pressure on the government. Several more representatives of the organization visited Sandoval or spoke to him over the telephone to tell him to tell López Obrador that there was a risk that the discontent in the army could cause problems for the government.
The president then reportedly ordered Foreign Minister Ebrard to harden his tone in complaining to the United States about arresting Cienfuegos without informing the Mexican government, and told him to insist on having the former defense minister returned to Mexico given that he allegedly committed crimes here rather than in the U.S.
To support their demand that the former defense minister be sent back to Mexico, the FGR and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the United States that the federal government would reevaluate its future collaboration with the DEA, Emeequis said.
The Washington Post reported that prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York attributed the decision to drop charges against Cienfuegos to the Mexican government’s threats to limit the role of the DEA in Mexico.
Many analysts believe that Cienfuegos will never be tried in Mexico.
“What was put on the table was the collaboration with the DEA,” an army source told Emeequis.
“In the end they [the U.S. authorities] had to give in because the bilateral relationship is more important for them than capturing a single individual as high ranking as he may be.”
Indeed, U.S. prosecutors said in a filing asking a judge to dismiss the charges against Cienfuegos that “the United States has determined that sensitive and important foreign policy considerations outweigh the government’s interest in pursuing the prosecution of the defendant.”
Still, the decision was unprecedented and a major shock given that the United States spent years collecting evidence that Cienfuegos colluded with the H-2 Cartel and has previously shown little faith in the Mexican justice system.
According to Emeequis, the United States agreed to return Cienfuegos under terms set out by El Sindicato – with all charges withdrawn and without seizing any of his assets or freezing his bank accounts.
The only “blemish” on the brotherhood’s plan is that the U.S. government has shared its evidence against the former defense minister with the FGR, the news site said.
However, there are doubts about whether much of the evidence obtained by U.S. authorities – specifically thousands of incriminating Blackberry messages they intercepted – will be admissible in Mexican courts because it was obtained in Mexico without the authorization of a judge.
Many analysts believe that Cienfuegos will never be tried in Mexico let alone go to jail despite the United States’ apparent confidence in the Mexican justice system and its assertion that it has a “strong” case against the former army chief.
“The chances of Cienfuegos being convicted in Mexico are slim to none,” said Mike Vigil, a former DEA chief of international operations.
“The idea that he could be publicly tried is ludicrous,” said Benjamin Smith, a professor at the University of Warwick and a Mexican drug trade expert. “He knows exactly where all the bodies are buried.”
