The federal government introduced its coronavirus stoplight map in June 2020, but left the responsibility for implementing COVID strategies with the states.
The declining third wave of COVID-19 is reflected in the new coronavirus stoplight risk map, issued Friday by the federal Ministry of Health.
More low-risk green and a lot more medium-risk yellow color the new map that takes effect on Monday.
Baja California Sur and Sinaloa will be painted green, joining Chihuahua and Chiapas, while 24 states will be yellow, nine more than on the map issued two weeks ago.
At high risk and colored orange are four states, down from 13. No states are at maximum risk red.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: create a convincing, healthy version of crispy, smoky bacon.
It sounded like a good idea: making “imitation” bacon from marinated roasted mushrooms. But what that led to was, well, another experience altogether.
I’m going to tell you right off the bat that I prepared, cooked and ate banana peels — yes, banana peels — in my search for The Perfect Non-Meat Bacon.
I’m also going to tell you that it was pretty terrible and I will not be doing that again. Ever.
Maybe some of you are strict vegans or have health or dietary restrictions that prohibit you from eating real bacon. If that’s the case, perhaps these recipes will be helpful. But if those considerations don’t apply to you, I’d say stick with the real thing in moderation. Learn from my experience. Without having to eat banana peels yourself.
Of the three versions I tried, the “bacon” made with rice paper was the most successful. The process was fairly easy, the flavor was tasty and the finished strips were crispy and a little — just a little — irresistible.
Mushrooms as bacon weren’t bad but lacked the proper mouthfeel.
The mushroom version tasted good too, but were I to make it again, I’d play around with the flavorings. It didn’t taste like or have the mouthfeel of bacon but would work in or with an omelet, in a sandwich or as a side dish.
Really, the recipe is just mushrooms sautéed slowly until they’re dry and almost-but-not-quite crispy, and the marinade imparts a bacon-like flavor. It’s easy to burn them, though, so do be careful.
And the banana peel “bacon?” Well … it tasted like bananas. I don’t care what all those vegan food bloggers say — it tastes like bananas. And it was difficult (read: impossible) for me to get over the fact that I was eating banana peels. BANANA PEELS!
Some of those bloggers touted the fact that “people in other countries have been eating banana peels for years.” What countries, I wondered? Japan has developed a banana with a thin, edible peel; supposedly India includes unpeeled bananas in some recipes (none that I’ve heard of or found).
Scientists say they’re full of nutrients, and that may be so, but I’ve been doing fine these many years without incorporating banana peels into my diet, thank you very much. On another note, watering houseplants with water that you’ve soaked a banana peel in does give plants an added nutrient boost.
Liquid smoke is available through Amazon México and at some large chain grocery stores. A good barbecue sauce can be substituted, but it won’t be quite the same. (Note: Sriracha doesn’t work; it has a decidedly non-smoky flavor.)
Rice Paper “Bacon”
By far the best! Crispy, flavorful and the most like real bacon. The marinade flavorings can be adjusted easily to suit your tastes.
2 Tbsp. sesame oil
2 Tbsp. reduced-sodium soy sauce
2 tsp. maple syrup
1½ tsp. miso paste, if available
1 tsp. liquid smoke, if available OR substitute 1 Tbsp. BBQ sauce
½ tsp. ground paprika
½ tsp. black pepper
2 sheets rice paper
Preheat oven to 400 F. Cover a baking sheet with parchment.
In a shallow bowl, whisk sesame oil, soy sauce, maple syrup, miso, liquid smoke or BBQ sauce, paprika and pepper.
Stack two pieces of rice paper and using scissors, carefully cut into bacon-sized strips. Dip each two-strip slice into the soy mixture for a few seconds; they will soften immediately and stick together. Place on the parchment-covered baking sheet.
Rice paper yielded the most convincing version — a nice smoky flavor and an irresistible crispiness.
Bake, turning once, until strips are dry, 5–8 minutes. Watch carefully that they don’t burn.
Remove from oven and serve. They will be crispy, crunchy and kind of irresistible.
Mushroom Bacon
Any kind of mushroom will work; each will have a slightly different flavor. These do not get crisp but have a bacon-y flavor.
1½ Tbsp. olive oil
1½ Tbsp. soy sauce
½ Tbsp. maple or agave syrup
½ tsp. liquid smoke, if available, OR substitute 1 Tbsp. BBQ sauce
8 oz. mushrooms, sliced
In a bowl, mix olive oil, soy sauce, maple syrup and liquid smoke/BBQ sauce. Add sliced mushrooms; gently toss to evenly coat mushrooms.
Fried Method: Heat a large nonstick frying pan over medium-high heat. When the pan is hot, add mushrooms and any leftover marinade. You want mushrooms to be in a single layer on bottom of the pan.
Sauté 5–10 minutes without stirring, flipping once when they’re golden on the bottom. Transfer to a paper towel-covered plate for a minute; serve warm.
Baked Method: Preheat oven to 375 F. Line a baking sheet with parchment. Spread mushroom slices in a single layer on prepared baking sheet, adding any leftover marinade. Bake 18–25 minutes until dark golden and reduced in size. Cool for a minute; serve warm.
Banana Peel Bacon
Numerous vegan cooking blogs touted this as “quite delicious” with a “subtle hint of banana taste.” I beg to differ.
2 very ripe banana peels
3 Tbsp. soy sauce
1 Tbsp. maple syrup
½ tsp. smoked paprika
½ tsp. garlic powder
1 Tbsp. light oil (or more if needed)
These may look like the real deal, but don’t be fooled!
Note: Be sure bananas are very ripe but not bruised; spotted all over are the best. “The riper the banana the better the flavor.”
Remove peels from bananas; tear into 4 strips per banana. Using a spoon, scrape off the soft white pulp from the peel pieces using a spoon. Cut off stem ends.
Mix soy sauce, maple syrup, paprika and garlic powder together in a flat bowl big enough for peels to lay in. Add peels and turn to cover. Marinate for at least 15 minutes or up to two hours. (They will look like bacon, but don’t be fooled!)
Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add peels. Fry 2–3 minutes per side until they bubble up a little and turn golden brown. Don’t overcook!
Remove from pan, drain on paper towels a few minutes and serve ASAP — they lose their crispness quickly.
Processions were planned for a reflective week. The El Grito celebration on Wednesday would mark the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence.
El Grito, meaning the cry or the shout, had sparked the independence movement on September 15, 1810 when Miguel Hidalgo, a priest from Dolores, Guanajuato, ordered the church bells to ring and urged the people to rise up against their oppressors and take back their land with the cry “Long live Mexico!” On August 24 1821 Spain finally called time on so-called “New Spain,”and recognized independence with the Treaty of Córdoba.
Monday
The week of patriotism had arrived, the president announced. Monday would commemorate the defense of Chapultepec Castle by the “Heroic Children” who fought off U.S. aggressors in 1847. Wednesday was “El Grito,” and the presidential raffle; Thursday promised an air parade; Friday a meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac); and on Sunday flags would fly at half mast for victims of the 1985 earthquake.
A journalist had first dibs from Friday. Why, she posed, were Mexicans living abroad not being afforded the opportunity to exercise their vote? The National Electoral Institute, she said, appeared an “enemy of democracy.”
“If you analyze how much has been spent to achieve that [facilitating voting abroad] and what the results have been, we see that there hasn’t been any progress, very few people [living abroad] are participating,” said the president, before assigning the task to Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard.
Later in the conference, the president claimed that today’s corruption could be traced to the conquest. “The treasure of Moctezuma [the fallen, last Aztec ruler] kept diminishing because it was being robbed since the so-called conquest … when it was divided up there was almost nothing left … those at the top had kept the grand part of the treasure.”
AMLO offered journalists’ his Oaxaca plans: on Sunday he would go to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and give the morning news conference from the southern state on Monday. However, he lamented that time wouldn’t permit him to drop in on the Mixes, an indigenous group.
Tuesday
AMLO the hustler arrived on Tuesday: Lottery tickets “are 250 pesos, but it’s a stadium box, apartments, houses … and you have to trust your luck.”
COVID supremo Hugo López-Gatell declared that case numbers were falling in all states, and for the sixth consecutive week hospital numbers were down. Despite schools reopening, there hadn’t been an increase in cases among young people, he said. Education Minister Delfina Gómez Álvarez announced modestly improved school attendance with just over half of students having returned to classes.
Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez cracks a smile on Tuesday.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard spelled out the results of the high-level conference in Washington, D.C.: there would be bilateral coordination on supply chains and convergence on health regulations, but there was no big announcement on migration.
Interior Minister Adán Augusto López gave an update on the release of prisoners due to torture, old age and a few other circumstances, which did not include those accused or sentenced for more severe crimes. On Wednesday 682 prisoners would be released and 4,233 cases were under review. However, the decree only covered the 7.4% of prisoners who are in federal lockups.
The president was up. He said he wanted to appoint the governor of Sinaloa, Quirino Ordaz, as the Mexican ambassador to Spain. Ordaz belongs to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
“They [PRI] got very annoyed,” AMLO said of the party’s reaction to one of their number aligning himself with the rival Morena party.
Later he announced that border municipalities would complete their second doses of COVID vaccine on Tuesday, and that he would soon meet with the newly arrived U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar.
Wednesday
The Mexican public had to show their patience, for which they are famed, to hear from the president, as there was no morning news conference. But, as goes the tradition, he appeared from his balcony late in the evening to recite the Grito in honor of the heroes of the independence movement. Due to sanitary restrictions, Mexico City’s central zócalo square beneath him was largely empty.
“Mexicans!”
“Long live independence!”
“Long live Miguel Hidalgo and Costilla!”
“Long live José María Morelos and Pavón!”
“Long live Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez!”
A happy moment with reporters.
“Long live Ignacio Allende!”
“Long live Leona Vicario!”
“Long live Vicente Guerrero!”
“Long live the unnamed heroes!”
“Long live justice!”
“Long live equality!”
“Long live democracy!”
“Long live honesty!”
“Long live our autonomy!”
“Long live universal fraternity!”
“Long live love for your neighbor!”
Long live the pre-Hispanic cultures!”
“Long live Mexico!”
“Long live Mexico!”
“Long live Mexico!”
Thursday
Once again, the morning press conference was off. The president waited for the military air parade later in the day to speak publicly.
He began by introducing his guest “His excellency Mr. Miguel-Díaz-Canel, president of the Republic of Cuba,” and then explained why El Grito is more symbolically important than when Spain eventually ceded power. “We Mexicans care more about the initiator, the priest [Miguel] Hidalgo, than [Agustín de] Iturbide, the consummator, because the priest was a defender of the common people and the royalist general represented the elite, those at the top, and just sought to wear the imperial crown.”
The priest, Hidalgo, didn’t mince his words: AMLO read a letter he had sent to a Spanish general. “’The current [independence] movement is great and much more because it deals with recovering holy rights granted by God to Mexicans, usurped by cruel, bastard and unjust conquerors,” he said.
As the president related, Hidalgo’s head ended up on a spike for 10 years looking over Guanajuato’s main square, kept company by the revolutionary heroes Ignacio Allende, Juan Aldama and Dolores Jiménez y Muro, whose heads adorned the other three corners of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas.
After so much talk of colonial struggle, AMLO returned his attention to Cuba. “The people of Cuba deserve the dignity prize … the government I represent respectfully calls on the U.S. government to lift the blockade against Cuba, because no state has the right to subdue another people, another country. It is necessary to remember what George Washington said: ‘Nations must not take advantage of the misfortune of other peoples.’”
“It is a time of brotherhood and not confrontation … Long live the independence of Mexico! Long live the independence of Cuba!”
Friday
AMLO cut short his morning press conference in order to participate in a virtual climate conference hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden.
Later in the day he was busy with the Celac (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) conference, a political bloc and regional forum seen as an alternative to the often derided Organization of American States, headquartered in Washington, D.C.
Leaders and dignitaries joined him in Mexico to discuss issues mainly affecting Spanish speaking America. The only other large country with a different language, Brazil, left the organization in 2020.
Among likely topics of discussion were the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, how to promote Celac over the OAS and a pan Latin American space program.
A woman at a protest in favor of legal abortion in Querétaro in 2020.
In the Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa, Veracruz, there are figures of cihuateotl, representations of women who died in childbirth.
Eyes closed and mouths open, they were thought to have passed on to their next lives as warriors and were specifically charged with accompanying the sun each night as it made its way through the darkness.
Those statues have always sent a chill up my spine. For most of human history, childbirth has been the leading cause of death for fertile women; even today, it’s not as low on the list as one might think.
As you can probably guess, maternal death rates are higher in low- and middle-income countries. They increase with rates of individual poverty and with a decrease in the age of the mother under 20 years.
And as privileged as I am personally, my daughter and I would have joined the ranks of the dead had it not been for a quick-thinking, experienced and handsomely paid private doctor who got us through a near stroke from preeclampsia and a placenta that had become detached mere seconds before getting my daughter out at barely eight months of gestation.
And let me tell you something, people: that has been the easiest part of motherhood!
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading in horror about the goings-on in my home state of Texas, now the home of the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in the United States. It essentially allows literally anyone – anyone – to punish women for seeking out abortions and to get paid for it (US $10,000 if they win the case, plus their legal fees; if the other side “wins,” however, they get nothing).
I don’t know what you all think, but I’m pretty sure that it will give birth (ha! I can’t help myself) to the creepiest kind of bounty hunter-slash-entrepreneur I’ve ever heard of: “So, she thinks she’s going to get away with being an irresponsible slut, does she? Not on my watch!”
If the law holds, people will be able to make a living off forcing women to carry out their pregnancies, whatever the reasons they may have for possibly choosing not to be damned. (“If I can prevent just one abortion a month, I’ll break 120k a year!”)
At the same time, they get to sanctimoniously pretend that they’re not hurting the women themselves. The women can’t be sued, only every other person in their lives who might help them obtain an abortion; it’s indirect punishment through having a target on the heads of everyone else in their lives.
Who’d have thought that shifting our gazes south of the border would paint a sunnier picture for women’s reproductive rights? I know I was surprised.
Not long ago (in fact, mere weeks ago), women in Mexican states where abortion was illegal could be — and were — punished for seeking out abortions. In fact, just this year, 432 investigations were opened across Mexico into cases of illegal abortion, according to the New York Times.
By law, medical personnel are required to report to the authorities when they suspect a patient of theirs has committed a crime. Since abortion until very recently was a crime in the majority of Mexican states, many women desperate enough to not carry out a pregnancy that they were willing to risk their own lives have faced the decision after a risky DIY abortion gone wrong to either die as a result or go to the hospital to be arrested as soon as they’ve recovered enough to go to jail.
It’s been hard to get a completely accurate account of the exact numbers state by state, but there are currently thousands of women in jail in Mexico (who should hopefully be coming out any day now with clean records) for the crime of having an abortion or attempting to abort. Needless to say, women who had no intention to do so but had miscarriages are also in jail if someone suspected the miscarriage to have been induced and then went to the authorities with their accusations.
There is, of course, resistance, and I think a sizable portion of the population in Mexico would be perfectly happy to see a Texas-style across-the-board prohibition of the medical procedure. And in a country where the rule of law is far from strong, ensuring that women’s reproductive rights are respected will be a long and hard road.
The original version of this article, the part in my Word document that won’t be published, was angry.
Angry because an embryo or fetus’ life is always presumed by those against legalizing abortion to be more important than the life of the mother.
Angry because the anti-abortion movement is, at its core, about controlling women; if it were truly about preventing abortions, we’d be doing the many things proven to reduce its necessity to practically zero.
Angry about the priest who said women who aborted might as well be killed because they were useless, and about the many people I know who completely agree with him.
Angry about the assumption that women must be both sexual gatekeepers and 100% in charge of birth control while men get to pretend they’re not part of the equation of pregnancy at all.
Angry about how many of these men both want to have sex with women and also shame them afterward when there’s an “accident” after the fact — for having been willing to have sex with them in whatever circumstances they insisted on.
I’m tired of women being told to “close their legs” when even the most sexually willing woman can only carry one pregnancy to term in a year while a man can impregnate hundreds of women a year if he really puts his mind to it. (Seriously, have people who say this to women never had sex before? Open legs are not necessary, yo.)
Can we try “zip your pants back up” instead? Or how about mandatory vasectomies for every male when they hit puberty with paperwork and permission from their partners necessary to get them reversed?
I didn’t think so.
But for now, I’ll take this small victory and feel grateful of it. Well done, Mexico.
Sinaloa will switch to low risk green on the coronavirus stoplight map on Monday, while the risk level in México state will be downgraded to medium risk yellow.
Mexico City, which switched from high risk orange to yellow two weeks ago, will remain at the medium risk level for another fortnight, authorities said.
Just 17% of general care hospital beds in COVID wards in Sinaloa, which is currently yellow, are in use, according to federal data, while the occupancy rate is the same for beds with ventilators. The northern state has 717 active cases, or fewer than 25 per 100,000 people.
The only states with a lower number of active cases on a per capita basis are Chiapas, Chihuahua and Baja California.
Sinaloa Health Minister Efrén Encinas Torres said that vaccination and observance of virus mitigation measures have helped drive down case numbers over the past five weeks.
As a result of México state’s switch to yellow on the stoplight map, all businesses will be allowed to increase their maximum capacity to 70% of normal levels on Monday, Governor Alfredo del Mazo said in a video message.
He said that the progress made in vaccinating residents allowed his government to take the decision.
“Until now, we’ve administered more than 12.4 million vaccines,” he said, adding that all people over 30 have had the opportunity to be fully vaccinated.
Del Mazo also said that more than 1.3 million México state residents aged 18-29 have had a first shot and that hospitalizations are declining.
In other COVID-19 news:
• Mexico recorded 3,754 new cases on Friday and 190 COVID-19 deaths, increasing the accumulated tallies to 3.55 million and 270,538, respectively.
There are 72,172 estimated active cases across the country, a 10% decrease compared to Thursday. Tabasco has the highest number of active cases on a per capita basis with just over 200 per 100,000 people. Colima ranks second followed by Mexico City, Yucatán and Quintana Roo.
• The average number of new cases reported in Mexico each day has fallen by more than 6,700 over the last three weeks, according to the Reuters COVID-19 tracker.
An average of 9,870 new infections have been reported during the past seven days. “That’s 53% of the peak — the highest daily average reported on August 17,” Reuters said.
• Nuevo León Governor Jaime Rodríguez said on Twitter Friday morning that the northern state recorded 805 new cases and 39 deaths in the previous 24 hours.
Nevertheless, the state is making progress in the fight against COVID-19 “little by little,” the governor commonly known as “El Bronco” wrote.
“Yesterday, thanks to the reduction of new cases, we announced the opening of establishments that couldn’t yet operate, but that doesn’t mean that the virus has gone,” he said.
Rodríguez also posted a Doctor Strange-themed meme encouraging the use of face masks. “I have seen 14 million possible futures and only in the one in which we all use face masks do we defeat COVID-19,” the meme says.
• Nuevo León governor-elect Samuel García, who will succeed Rodríguez next month, predicted Thursday that, starting Monday, about 500 children per day will be vaccinated in McAllen, Texas, under a cross-border vaccination scheme he organized.
He said in an interview that Nuevo León adolescents will be inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine, the only shot authorized for use in children aged 12 and over.
Minors haven’t been vaccinated in Mexico with the exception of a small number of youths who have obtained injunctions ordering they be given the shot.
García said about 21,000 doses have already been administered in the cross-border scheme, which began busing Nuevo León factory workers to Laredo, Texas, last month and expanded to Mission this week.
• A shipment of 400,000 Sputnik V vaccines will arrive in Puebla next week, said state Health Minister José Antonio Martínez García. He said the shots will be used to inoculate poblanos aged 18 to 29.
Puebla currently has the highest occupancy rate in the country for general care hospital beds in COVID wards with almost 61% in use, according to federal data.
• Authorities in San Luis Potosí reported 359 new cases and 17 COVID deaths on Friday. Eighty-eight of the cases were detected in people who are fully vaccinated and 79 were detected in people who have had one shot.
The new cases were spread across 38 municipalities with the highest numbers in San Luis Potosí city.
Simon Bolívar established ties between Colombia and Mexico that are still strong today.
A disclaimer: as I write these lines, I know not where I am heading nor how it will end.
There are no other two Latin American countries as alike or as endeared to each other as Colombia and Mexico. We were even neighbors exactly 200 years ago.
In 1821, 11 years after we began fighting for our independence from Spain — Colombia on July 20, 1810, and Mexico on September 16 of the same year — we shared a border that today is the boundary between Costa Rica and Panama. This was when México, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica were part of the (short-lived) First Mexican Empire that had Mexico City as its capital and when Colombia, Panamá, Venezuela and Ecuador comprised the (ephemeral) Great Colombia, for which the capital was Bogota.
There are probably no other two nations as blessed by nature and as cursed for their proclivity for living on the edge: Colombia, the one with a War of the Thousand Days and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; and Mexico, the one with the Mexican Revolution and Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude.
Both countries are privileged by their geographies, natural resources, histories, cultures and public-spirited peoples yet beleaguered by poverty, violence, corruption, drug trafficking and political demagoguery.
One of Mexico’s curses is criminal violence.
Blessed are we both by our two coastlines — the Pacific and the Atlantic — and their marine natural resources, as well as the rainforests of the great Lacandon Maya jungle in Chiapas, and Colombia’s part of the vast Amazon rainforest and the indigenous peoples that live there.
Blessed are both countries by the mighty Amazon and Caquetá rivers in Colombia and the Usumacinta and Grijalva rivers in Mexico. Mexico has part of the Mesoamerican Reef, the world’s second largest barrier coral reef, and Colombia is home to 60% of Earth’s stunning páramos — those neotropical high-altitude ecosystems that extend between the upper tree line and the perennial snow border (3,200 to 5,000 meters above sea level), which creates a sky island archipelago.
Blessed are we both for having 1.7% of the planet’s total area, where together we are home to 20% of Earth’s biodiversity. Colombia has the highest number of species of birds, orchids and colorful butterflies on the planet, and it is second in diversity of amphibians and vascular plants.
Mexico has the highest number of pine species and is second in diversity of reptiles, third in mammals and fifth in amphibians.
Volcanoes, dead and alive, also bless us: Pico de Orizaba, Popocatépetl, Iztaccíhuatl, Nevado de Toluca and Malinche (“the one with the blue slopes” in Nahuatl) and Nevado del Ruíz, Nevado de Tolima, Nevado de Huila, Galeras and Puracé (“the mountain of fire” in Quechua).
We are also blessed with ancient indigenous cultures — Aztec, Maya and Olmec, and Muisca, Tairona, and Inca. Mexico is the world’s fifth most linguistically diverse country (it has 364 living languages), and 7.4 million Mexicans speak an indigenous language while
The Mesoamerican Reef is one of Mexico’s natural treasures.
Colombia has 65 living languages and 1.4 million Colombians speak an indigenous language.
Mexico is the country with the most Spanish-speaking people, while Colombia is second. Spain is third.
In 1821, Colombia was the first country to recognize Mexico’s independence. In fact, the first congratulatory message Mexico got as a free nation was from Simón Bolivar, el Libertador himself, on behalf of the Gran Colombia. The two countries established diplomatic relations on October 3, 1823, with the signing of the Treaty of Friendship.
That same year, Colombia and Mexico together laid out the basis for the Hispanic American asylum doctrine in a treaty of nonextradition for political crimes created in order to protect the heroes who had launched independence movements in the region.
Since Spain didn’t recognize the independence of any of its colonies or former colonies in the Americas, in 1823, Colombia fostered an alliance with Mexico against Spain’s aggressions with a flotilla of cannon-carrying ships to harass Spanish maritime trade in the Caribbean.
They also incited Cuba’s quest for independence — as documented in Germán de la Reza’s 2015 essay published in the journal Secuencia, “The Attempt to Integrate Santo Domingo into Gran Colombia (1821–1822).”
In 2016, former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and Mexico’s president Peña Nieto pledged to work together to fight cartels and drug trafficking between their two nations.
Those bonds between Colombians and Mexicans are even stronger today: Mexico is the third-highest source of visitors to Colombia, and Colombia is Mexico’s second-highest source of tourists. Colombians are the most numerous Latin Americans to study in Mexican universities.
Colombia is Mexico’s second most important Latin American commercial partner, and Mexico is Colombia’s third most important import partner, and sixth in terms of direct foreign investment. Mexico is the second largest Latin American economy and Colombia is fourth.
So if those are our blessings, what are our curses?
Some people say that Colombians and Mexicans are innately violent and corrupt, respectively. Nonsense.
However, it’s true that Colombia’s fratricidal wars between conservatives and liberals during 1946–1958 left 300,000 dead and 2 million displaced — at the time, nearly a fifth of the country’s population. From 1812 to 1902, Colombia faced thousands of deaths and the havoc caused by nine civil wars.
And since the 1960s, the armed conflict between the government and the left-wing guerrillas, the right-wing paramilitaries and the drug cartels and other organized crime has killed more than 220,000 Colombians. Millions of families were devastated.
Demonstrators in Bogotá, Colombia, outside the residence of President Iván Duque in May, protesting forced disappearances of citizens.
In Mexico, it has been estimated that 1 million people died between 1910 and 1920 in the wars of the Mexican Revolution. It was the continent’s deadliest civil war and the world’s ninth deadliest.
More recently (2006–2021), Mexico’s war against drug cartels and organized crime has resulted in the death of more than 372,000 Mexicans, leaving hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows.
And let us not forget that both Colombia and Mexico are globally among the countries where the most environmental defenders have been killed.
According to the United Nations, Colombia is currently the country with the most internally displaced citizens due to war, violence, and persecution: 8.3 million people (10% of the world’s total), including millions of children, have been forced to abandon their homes, leaving everything behind, resulting in even more displaced people than in Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique, Yemen or Afghanistan.
Paradoxically, Colombia also ranks second on the planet in accepting refugees (it is home to 7% of the world’s total, including 1.7 million Venezuelans). And in August of this year, Colombia and Mexico were the first Latin American nations to offer asylum to refugees from Afghanistan.
As of December 2020, Mexico had 357,000 internally displaced people, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. Regrettably, our current policy on refugees is contradictory, to say the least.
As recently as July 2021, Mexico’s government marked Simon Bolívar’s birthday.
On the one hand, Mexico was the first Latin American country to take refugees from Afghanistan (some 500 so far), but on the other hand, we seem to be turning our homeland into a despicable wall to stop refugees who are desperately fleeing hunger, crime and the impacts of climate change in Central America and the Caribbean.
Finally, two of the worst and most deeply rooted curses in Mexico and Colombia are their inequality and corruption. According to the United Nations Development Programme, between 2000 and 2019, Latin America was the second most inequitable region, only after Sub-Saharan Africa. And both Mexico and Colombia are among the countries with the most income concentration among the fewest people.
Mexico is Latin America’s second most inequitable country and Colombia is its sixth. Ten percent of Mexico’s population holds 59% of the national income, while 1% of Mexican citizens hold 29% of the nation’s income. And Transparency International, a global coalition working in over 100 countries to end corruption, has reported that Mexico is 124th and Colombia 92nd on their list of corrupt countries among 180 analyzed (the higher the position, the higher the corruption index).
As I admitted at the beginning of this essay, I don’t know how to close these thoughts.
That is why, with humbleness, I would only share the words that my Colombian and Mexican compatriot Gabriel García Márquez said in Mexico City on October 22, 1982, after receiving the Order of the Aztec Eagle, Mexico’s highest distinction to a foreigner:
“It is not, then, my second homeland, but another one, different than was given to me without conditions and without contesting the love and fidelity I profess for my own homeland, and the nostalgia with which she demands both from me without truce … My sons have grown here; I have written my books here; I have planted my trees here. … Thank you for these open doors. May they never be closed, please, not under any circumstances.”
Omar Vidal, a scientist, was a university professor in Mexico, is a former senior officer at the UN Environment Program and is the former director-general of the World Wildlife Fund-Mexico.
Not only essential pollinators and pest control agents, bats are pretty cute when not just recently assaulted by a terrifying nature photographer with a net. Merlin Tuttle
There are over 1,400 species of bats in the world but only 350 kinds of dogs. You are probably acquainted with quite a few of the dogs, but how many species of bats have you seen?
If you are like most people, you have probably never had a good, close, eyeball-to-eyeball look at even one bat in your entire life. Neither did I until I took up cave exploring as a hobby and then suddenly found myself thrown into the world of bats.
One of the first things I learned was that bats often turn off their famous echolocation systems when they’re hanging around a cave that they consider home … much the same as we might walk to our bathroom in the middle of the night without bothering to turn on a light.
How would you feel if you bumped straight into a large body while walking — all in the dark — toward your bathroom door?
Well, that’s what happens when a bat discovers a caver inside its home. After a few collisions, I learned that you have to let the bats know that there’s an intruder in the house … Yes, perhaps by singing a little song while squatting at the entrance to a bat passage until the inhabitants have had a chance to notice your presence.
Mother and child: young bats, like young humans, sometimes con Mom into taking care of them long after it’s necessary. Merlin Tuttle
Most people only see bats from a distance, as fleeting shapes, silhouetted against a night sky, but as a caver, I got a glimpse of them as social beings.
In La Cueva del Chapuzón, the closest big cave to Guadalajara, we crawled along a long narrow passage that ended at a high point near the ceiling of a big room. By chance, there was a long narrow fissure in the roof of the room, through which a few rays of sunlight happened to be falling upon a bunch of bats hanging from the ceiling only two meters from the spot where we were observing them.
This meant that we could see them right in front of us without using our lights, and for over an hour, we sat there on our little balcony, our feet dangling inside the room, totally entertained as we watched the antics of those bats.
They were grouped into clusters: family units? circles of friends? bat chats? I don’t know, but If you think bats spend all day sleeping upside down, you are wrong. These little creatures were full of energy and very busy doing whatever they were doing … and then we spotted Lonesome George.
George the bat would move from group to group, obviously trying to participate in the action. With great difficulty, he would push himself into one wiggling and jiggling mass of bodies, disappear for a minute and then suddenly pop back out.
“They don’t like him,” we whispered; but George, undaunted, would simply move to the next cluster of bodies and push his way right in, only a minute later to be ejected like a cassette tape (remember those?). George, however, was in no way inclined to give up, and we were all soon rooting for him as he approached yet another social unit.
Richard Morecroft, a trustee of the World Wide Fund for Nature, worked with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in production of Raising Archie, his story of raising an orphaned baby bat.
Years later, thanks to a gizmo that lowers bat frequencies to human audio levels, we discovered that all this frantic activity is accompanied by the bat equivalent of raucous chatting, laughing, complaining and frequent shouting to someone all the way at the other end of the room. Caves are thought of as quiet places, but if there are bats in it, it is about as quiet as a fiesta celebrating Mexican Independencia.
So we began to suspect that bats were far more interesting creatures than we had ever imagined, and this was confirmed when we came upon Archie.
Archie was a baby flying fox whose mother had been electrocuted on power lines in Australia. When her body was removed from the wire, it was discovered that she still had a baby clinging to her — and it was alive, cold and thirsty.
Archie was given food, kept warm and soon handed over to a volunteer foster parent: Richard Morecroft, a TV newscaster who tells the story of what happened after that in his book Raising Archie, published in 1991 by Simon & Schuster.
Morecroft’s story is funny and heartwarming. He describes feeding and washing his little flying fox, as well as changing its diaper, taking it to the post office to be weighed and, three months later, teaching it to fly.
Because the baby bat required constant care at the beginning, Morecroft had to take it to the studio where he worked. There, wrapped in a handkerchief — a substitute for its mother’s wings — it would occasionally wiggle under his shirt as he read the news every evening.
Thanks to the author’s media connections, the book has 54 delightful photographs, and it’s difficult to believe any human could page through it without falling in love with this little creature with big, beautiful eyes.
The photos of Archie contrast dramatically with the pictures of bats that used to appear in textbooks and encyclopedias before 1982. Typically a researcher would catch a bat in a net, disentangle it and hold it by its outstretched wings as a colleague snapped a photo of the utterly terrified struggling creature who showed its teeth to what it could only presume were predators about to devour it.
But then in 1982, Merlin Tuttle, the much-beloved face of the Milwaukee Public Museum, left his comfortable position and moved to Austin, Texas, to found Bat Conservation International.
Tuttle knew all too well that bats were considered all over the world as terrifying shadows in the dark: rabid rats with wings. He also knew that they were really peaceful creatures as smart and loving as dogs and that neither the planet nor the human race could possibly get along without them.
Realizing that what bats most needed was a public relations agent, Tuttle set out to help them change their image. Besides writing numerous articles for National Geographic, Tuttle devoted endless hours to photographing bats as they normally look while going about their business of pollinating plants, controlling insects and dispersing seeds.
He accomplished this by taking the bat out of the net, calming it down, finger-feeding it and then training it to cooperate with him inside a large studio that he would set up in the jungle, on a mountaintop or inside a hotel room.
A crawlway in La Cueva del Chapuzón (Cold Dunk Cave) near Guadalajara leads to “balcony seats” for observing bats.
Since bats are so clever, it might take only a day or two before they would, for example, fly on cue to the upper tip of a cactus (lopped off and stuck on a pole) to pollinate its recently opened flower.
To get a picture of just one bat doing its thing, a picture worthy of Nat Geo, Tuttle would take as many as 10,000 photos. This, of course, was in the days before digital photography, when photographers might spend hours deep inside a cave with no idea if even one of their pictures might be a winner.
In his book The Secret Lives of Bats, Merlin Tuttle describes his modus operandi:
“The next evening, my assistants set nets at a fruiting fig tree in the Kakamega Forest [in Kenya] and caught three Wahlberg’s epauletted fruit bats,” he writes. “These readily accepted food from my hand. Night after night, I virtually lived with my bats until I could call any one of them to my hand, pick them up, carry them around, even wipe a dirty face with a tissue.
“As with all bats, each had its own personality and intelligence, and some would permit liberties not accepted by others. Knowing their individual personalities was essential.”
The short shrift that bats usually receive was frequently on my mind as a cave explorer because it didn’t take me long to discover that in many parts of rural Mexico there is a “war against bats” taking place, which I hope to describe in a future article.
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, for 31 years and is the author of A Guide to West Mexico’s Guachimontones and Surrounding Area and co-author of Outdoors in Western Mexico. More of his writing can be found on his website.
Richard Morecroft with his bat Archie.
Who says bats are ugly? This epauletted bat is a seed disperser and lives in trees. Merlin TuttleMorecroft prepares to feed his baby bat, which is wrapped in a handkerchief to provide a sense of security. When not feeding, Archie was content to suck on a pacifier.
In a still from the documentary, a member of the community's voluntary security force stands guard.
A documentary about an indigenous uprising against organized crime in Michoacán and the subsequent establishment of a self-governing community premiered online on Thursday.
Cherán: The Burning Hope tells the story of Cherán, a Purépecha town 110 kilometers west of Morelia.
Fed up with the presence of drug traffickers and illegal loggers, residents banded together to oust the criminals in 2011, even using bonfires to prevent loggers from entering the community.
They later established their own security force to supersede the municipal police, whose members were in cahoots with the criminals, and dislodged the municipal government, replacing it with a community council.
Produced by Doha Debates, an organization affiliated with the non-profit Qatar Foundation, and directed by Elpida Nikou and Rodrigo Hernández, the 13-minute film tells the story of Cherán from the perspective of its residents.
Cherán: The Burning Hope | Doha Debates
Much of it is narrated by Yunuen Torres Asencio, an activist and owner of Radio Fogata, which has recorded oral histories of Cherán’s tumultuous past.
[wpgmza id=”347″]
“Before 2011, as young people we felt our liberties were being taken away,” she says at the start of the film.
“We couldn’t move around freely and were surrounded by fear. [Organized crime] was like a well-planned monster that, every day, was taking more of our territory in Michoacán.”
But in the 10 years since organized crime groups were expelled and Cherán became autonomous, peace and security have improved and the community has built a sustainable economy that includes a sawmill, a construction materials company and a garden, all of which are managed by the community, as well as Latin America’s largest rainwater collection system.
“Autonomy is the decision to govern ourselves. That is what gives us hope,” Torres says.
The documentary features spectacular aerial footage of Cherán and surrounding areas shot by drone operator Miguel Tovar and provides a fascinating insight into the struggles and successes of a small town in Michoacán, one of Mexico’s most violent states.
The iPhone 13 Pro costs 25,999 pesos (US $1,300) in Mexico.
An average Mexican professional has to work almost 50 days to afford the latest edition of Apple’s iPhone, an analysis by an international e-commerce platform found.
Picodi looked at iPhone 13 Pro (128GB) prices and average wages in numerous countries to develop its iPhone Index 2021, which determines how many days people need to work to buy Apple’s flagship product.
It found that an average Mexican has to work 49.3 days to afford the new phone, which costs 25,999 pesos (US $1,300) in Mexico.
The index used Mexican government data that shows that professionals earn 12,298 pesos (US $615) per month on average.
Millions of Mexicans earn significantly less than that amount, putting a new iPhone well out of reach.
Mexico ranked fifth to last in Picodi’s 2021 iPhone Index. Picodi
The index assumes that all of a worker’s earnings are put toward purchasing the cell phone.
The period for Mexico is 5.1 days less than it cost Mexicans to buy an iPhone 12 Pro in 2020, according to Picodi’s previous index.
Workers in just four countries included in the 2021 index – Turkey, Philippines, Brazil and India – have to work for a longer period to afford an iPhone 13.
Swiss workers have to work just 4.4 days to buy it, a shorter period than that needed by workers in all of the other 46 countries included in the index.
Ranking second is the United States, where workers can buy the phone after just 5.9 days of labor, followed by Australia (6.4 days), Luxembourg (6.4 days) and Denmark (6.9 days).
Migrants make their way across the Rio Grande near Ciudad Acuña.
There are more than 10,000 migrants in a makeshift camp beneath a bridge that connects Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, to Del Rio, Texas, the mayor of the latter city said Thursday.
Bruno Lozano said 10,503 migrants were camping under the Del Rio International Bridge on the U.S. side early Thursday evening, an increase of more than 2,300 compared to Thursday morning. The size of the camp, whose conditions have been described as squalid, has grown rapidly in recent days: migrant numbers were in the hundreds, rather than the thousands, earlier in the week.
They crossed into the United States to seek asylum but face lengthy waits for their claims to be processed, and could be returned to Mexico in the interim, although they will likely be transferred to U.S. migrant facilities first.
About 20 migrants told the news agency Reuters that there has been scant food and water in the camp, where daytime temperatures are currently hovering around 40 C and there is little shade. Reuters said it witnessed hundreds of migrants wading across the ankle-deep Rio Grande to re-enter Mexico to purchase essentials they aren’t receiving on the United States side of the border.
Ernesto, a 31-year-old Haitian, said he and his three-year-old daughter hadn’t received any meals in the camp since arriving there on Monday morning. He made his fourth trip back to Mexico on Thursday to buy food and water but told Reuters that his money is now running out.
The Haitian said immigration agents have generally not bothered him during his shopping trips to Mexico, a stark contrast to the heavy-handed tactics they have recently used to detain migrants in the south of the country.
Other migrants showed Reuters numbered tickets they received from the United States Border Patrol (USBP) after crossing Mexico’s northern border. Several said they had been told by other migrants that they could be stuck at the camp for up to five days.
Jeff Jeune, a 27-year-old Haitian reselling bottles of water to make a bit of money, said he and his young family had been sleeping on the ground and were exhausted and hungry. He said he was worried his children could fall ill in the camp.
“My 10-year-old asks: ‘When are we leaving?’ He’s always asking that,” he said.
The Border Patrol said in a statement that it was deploying more personnel to Del Rio to facilitate “a safe, humane and orderly process” for migrants, who have swarmed to the Mexico-United States border since U.S. President Joe Biden took office in January.
Thousands of migrants, many of them from Haiti, have camped under the Del Rio International Bridge.
It also said that migrants have been given drinking water and towels and that portable toilets were available.
“To prevent injuries from heat-related illness, the shaded area underneath Del Rio International Bridge is serving as a temporary staging site while migrants wait to be taken into USBP custody,” it added.
Some residents of Del Rio, located in a county won by former U.S. president Donald Trump at last year’s election, said the federal government appeared to have abandoned its border security obligations.
“Are they doing anything to stop them coming?” one woman asked Reuters while looking down at the camp from the bridge.
The answer to that question in Mexico is yes, as the National Guard and immigration agents has detained hundreds of migrants traveling in at least four caravans that left Tapachula, Chiapas, in late August and early September.
Some have been sent back to Guatemala, yet more than 2,000 kilometers to the north, migrants are still streaming into Ciudad Acuña.
El Siglo de Torreón reported that hundreds of migrants, some with babies and/or small children, are arriving in buses on a daily basis. Almost immediately after arriving in the northern border city, they cross the Rio Grande to seek asylum in the United States, the newspaper said.
Some migrants told Reuters they chose to cross into the U.S. from Ciudad Acuña because the river is shallow and there is less cartel activity than some other border areas. Mexican officials and migrants believe that more asylum seekers will make their way to the U.S. via the border city in the coming days.
During the Trump and Biden administrations, migrants who have reached the United States have routinely been expelled to Mexico under a health order put in place at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. But a U.S. district judge ruled Thursday that the order is unlawful because expelling asylum seekers denies them “the opportunity to seek humanitarian benefits” they are entitled to under immigration law.
Handed down by Judge Emmet Sullivan, the ruling takes effect in 14 days. However, it applies only to families and not single adults, who represent a sizable portion of migrants recently detained by the USBP.
