A day after the assassination of a Guanajuato politician while he was jogging in the city of Juventino Rosas, the National Guard and state police disarmed local police and took over security in the municipality.
A 2021 mayoral hopeful in the municipality of the same name, Juan Antonio Acosta, 55, was killed Tuesday after armed men ambushed and shot him seven times in the back not far from his home.
Governor Diego Sinhue Rodríguez said the Guard and state forces took over security in the municipality on Wednesday, a decision approved by the state Attorney General’s Office, he said.
“We are working with a plan. The state government and the military have initiated Operation Thunder in Juventino Rosas,” Sinhue told reporters Thursday.
Acosta, a National Action Party (PAN) legislator with a diverse career in Guanajuato state politics, was a two-time former mayor in Juventino Rosas, from 2006–2009 and 2012–2015.
He had just registered a few weeks before as a mayoral candidate for 2021.
His killing prompted condolences and condemnation from state officials, including Sinhue, state PAN president Román Cifuentes Negrete, who called him a man committed to Mexico, and federal Interior Minister Olga Sánchez Cordero.
Covid-19 can make life feel like it did for Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day."
Life during a pandemic is unsettled at best, and boredom can come creeping up on you. I don’t mean the type of boredom where you forlornly stare at your feet and declare there is absolutely nothing to do. There are always things you are required to do and things you would like to get done, but I am talking about the type of boredom when the things you really want to do are not executable due to societal maledictions.
But we had locked down in March, and we needed a break from the mundane humdrum of life in isolation — something off the wall, some comic relief.
One evening, while enjoying a tropical sunset and a few adult beverages, I suggested to The Captured Tourist Woman (TCTW) that we could add some real excitement to our lives by hosting an online cockroach race. In my distant and somewhat misspent youth, I have raced many things, from motorcycles in Tijuana to starfish in Puertecitos. So, the thought of racing cockroaches was not beyond my ken.
This would be an event we could share with our friends via Zoom, I explained. I described the small arena we would build along with the betting we could gin up among our remotely participating friends. I, of course, would run my proud and shiny Black Stallion cockroach against TCTW’s Wonder Woman Roach. The betting would be fierce.
Since by then we were well into our fifth month of self-imposed confinement, TCTW actually gave me a thoughtful nod as she sucked an empty glass noise at the bottom of her 16-ounce mojito.
After months of boredom, you’ll try almost anything for fun.
During normal times, she would have issued a serious guffaw in my direction, and that would have been the end of such fine madness. But not now. With both of us gripped in the unrelenting virus blues, we were game for anything with the potential to elevate our melancholy. I determined that I would begin the search for hardy competitors first thing in the morning.
The next day, as I began looking in the corners and crevasses of our garage for ambulatory roaches, I started seeing a few tiny mouse turds. Since all manner of Mexican vermin are quite adroit at finding their way into even the tightest of houses, this was an issue. And, since I know our casa is far from tightly sealed, the thought of mice rummaging in our cupboards was just another brick in the wall of our confinement.
I quickly relegated the one active roach to the bottom of my garbage can and began the urgent search for more feculence de ratón.
It didn’t take long to trace their trail to our second-story living quarters and into the kitchen. Their droppings were so tiny that I began to wonder if we might have a pack of prepubescent scavengers. Within minutes, Google told me Mexico has a critter known as a pocket mouse. These tiny rodents looked to be half the size of a common field mouse, which explained the micromanure.
I approached TCTW with my revelation that a mini-mouse was possibly living quietly among us. Since she was leaning over her latest jigsaw puzzle, I knew she was only half-listening when she responded with “Oh, that’s nice. Is Mickey here too?” But as soon as she realized that I had found actual rodent droppings within the walls of our home, I had her full and undivided attention.
Our cockroach races were quickly fading into the coming Mexican sunset, so I set out instead for my favorite local tienda. I entered the store and went directly to the aisle dealing exclusively with the extermination of everything from bugs to large mammals. The fact that there were machetes also displayed in that aisle of death gave me a bit of a shudder as I searched for a mousetrap.
An entertainment option the writer did not consider.
I wanted the time-honored favorite: the Victor mousetrap. This spring-actuated device will dispatch a small rodent quickly, ending its short life humanely with a quick snap and no pain of a lingering death. I purchased three and headed home.
In the past, I had discovered that mice like peanut butter, and it sticks to the trip pedal quite nicely, so I applied a small dab of peanut butter onto the pedals of all three traps and placed these alluring artifices in different locations along the presumed rodent corridor to our kitchen.
The next morning, I went to see how many mice we had ushered into mousy heaven.
When I discovered all the traps still cocked and ready, I looked closely at the trip pedals and saw that each one had been licked clean — not a smidge of peanut butter left behind. Of course, my next move was to lightly touch the trip pedal, all the while knowing I would regret it.
As I suspected, there was nothing wrong with any of the traps.
Later that day, TCTW came home with a pack of two sticky traps. I have never liked the sticky traps because I don’t believe them to be humane. The poor mouse could struggle for hours before being properly executed. However, since our rodents were not large enough to trip the spring trap, we went for the cruel and unusual glue trap. We retired that night, confident that we would have a mired mouse in the morning.
The Roomba in less interesting times.
Most unfortunately with hindsight, distracted by our zeal to catch the tiny invader, we both forgot that our robot vacuum was programmed to start its cleaning routine in the wee hours of the morning.
Over the span of my lifetime, I have used many different types of glue, but nothing in my past prepared me for the tangled mess of goo I encountered the next morning. The glue trap had caught the mouse as well as the robot vacuum. While studying the carnage on our kitchen floor, I realized that the vacuum had put up a hell of a fight — the mouse not so much.
Pieces of the brutally dismembered mouse carcass were pasted across the bottom of the appliance with mucilaginous gunk that had firmly adhered itself to any body part or surface that had the extreme misfortune to make contact with it. It looked as though one of the motorized drive wheels managed a full revolution before succumbing to total seizure.
The next eight hours were spent in cleaning and careful disassembly. I bought a gallon of Goof Off gunk remover, thinking at the time that it might not even be enough.
All I can say about that is, thanks to that fateful day, I have written a nice letter to the Roomba people, lauding the incredible power of their machine.
The writer describes himself as a very middle-aged man who lives full-time in Mazatlán with a captured tourist woman and the ghost of a half wild dog. He can be reached at [email protected].
Retired army general Cienfuegos: cleared of narcotics charges.
The federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) has exonerated former defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos of drug trafficking and money laundering charges less than two months after he returned to Mexico from the United States, where he was arrested last October.
Cienfuegos, army chief during the 2012-2018 government led by former president Enrique Peña Nieto, was detained in Los Angeles on October 15 on charges he colluded with and excepted bribe payments from the H-2 Cartel, a splinter group of the Beltrán Leyva Organization.
United States authorities alleged that Cienfuegos as defense minister conspired with the H-2 Cartel to smuggle thousands of kilograms of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into the U.S.
But under pressure from Mexico, which implicitly threatened to restrict the activities of U.S. agents working here and expressed “profound discontent” over not being informed of the plan to arrest him, the United States dropped the charges against the 72-year-old retired general and granted Mexico its wish to conduct its own investigation.
However, there was broad skepticism in both the United States and Mexico that Cienfuegos would ever face trial, let alone be convicted, even though the U.S. said it had a strong case against him, including cell phone messages intercepted by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that allegedly incriminated the former army chief, who was apparently known to his alleged conspirators as the Godfather.
That skepticism was validated Thursday night when the FGR announced that it would not proceed with charges against him.
The Attorney General’s Office said it received the United States evidence against Cienfuegos and that the former defense minister presented his own evidence after being notified on January 9 of the charges he faced. The latter’s evidence, provided in a period of just five days, completely disproved allegations of wrongdoing, according to the FGR.
“The conclusion was reached that General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda never had any meeting with the criminal organization investigated by American authorities, and that he also never had any communication with them, nor did he carry out acts to protect or help those individuals,” it said in a statement.
The FGR also said that it found no proof that Cienfuegos used an electronic device to communicate with criminals while defense minister (United States authorities said he used a Blackberry to contact cartel members) or that he had issued orders that favored the H-2 Cartel. The U.S. had accused him of allowing it act with impunity, ordering operations against its rivals and helping it secure maritime transport to ship drugs to that country.
In addition, the FGR said that there was no evidence that the former army chief had received illegal income or that his wealth had grown abnormally while serving as a government official.
Speaking at his news conference on Friday, President López Obrador, whose administration is relying heavily on the armed forces for a range of traditionally non-military tasks, claimed that the United States fabricated evidence against Cienfuegos.
López Obrador: Cienfuegos’ arrest was politically motivated.
“The most important thing is truth and justice. So, the Attorney General’s Office resolved yesterday not to proceed with the accusation that was fabricated against General Cienfuegos … by the DEA,” he said.
“The FGR has acted because it was deemed that the evidence presented by the United States government … has no probative value … [in terms of] initiating a court case against General Cienfuegos.”
López Obrador accused the DEA of lacking professionalism and seeking to damage relations between Mexico and the United States. He committed to releasing full details of Mexico’s investigation into the general, whose arrest was deeply embarrassing for the Mexican government given that it has placed so much trust in the armed forces.
“We offer apologies to the United States government for acting in this way [releasing the FGR investigation]; they could say ‘how dare we disclose this document’ in which it is clear that the evidence they collected over many years is not solid,” López Obrador said.
The president stressed that the FGR acted independently but said his government supports its decision to drop the case.
“We maintain that impunity and of course corruption must be ended but … crimes cannot be invented. Nobody should act in this way,” he said.
López Obrador suggested that the arrest of Cienfuegos was politically motivated, noting that he was taken into custody just before the United States presidential election even though U.S. authorities had been investigating the general for years and he previously traveled to that country.
“Why was [his arrest] on the eve of the election? What was the message? Who did it come from? What was it that they were trying to do? Weaken the government of Mexico? Weaken the armed forces of Mexico? What happened?” the president asked?
Meanwhile, news of the FGR’s decision to drop the case against Cienfuegos was regarded as unsurprising by many observers.
“The United States returned General Salvador Cienfuegos to Mexico under unusual circumstances. It took Mexican authorities less than two months to decide that (shock!) Cienfuegos will not face any charges. What will the [United States] Justice Department say? Anything?” León Krauze, a journalist and news anchor, wrote on Twitter.
Security analyst Alejandro Hope opined that Cienfuegos’ exoneration was barely newsworthy, while Maite Azuela, a columnist for the newspaper El Universal, said the decision to drop the charges against him made a “clear mockery” of the federal government’s anti-corruption fight.
José Antonio Crespo, an academic and political analyst, offered a similar view.
“A lot of [López] Obrador supporters who believe (or believed) that AMLO’s fight against corruption is serious said that the return of Cienfuegos to Mexico would allow that belief to be proven. Maybe with this the penny will drop,” he tweeted.
Denise Dresser, a political scientist and columnist, wrote on Twitter that “the exoneration of Salvador Cienfuegos shows that the armed forces are untouchable.”
“They act above the law, they’re the true untouchables, they will continue [to operate] outside democratic scrutiny, they are really the ones that govern [Mexico] and have become the new mafia of power,” she said.
In the United States, Mike Vigil, a former DEA chief of international operations who said in November that “the chances of Cienfuegos being convicted in Mexico are slim to none,” contended that the exoneration of the former army chief “could be the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as U.S.-Mexico cooperation in counter-drug activities.”
(Despite the United States decision to drop charges against Cienfuegos, Mexico last month approved legislation that regulates the activities of foreign agents in Mexico, removes their diplomatic immunity and allows for their expulsion from the country. That legislation went into force today.)
“It was preordained that Mexican justice would not move forward with prosecuting General Cienfuegos,” Vigil said.
“It will greatly stain the integrity of its judicial system and despite the political rhetoric of wanting to eliminate corruption, such is obviously not the case. The rule of law has been significantly violated.”
After noting that the Mexican president has maintained a close, friendly relationship with United States President Donald Trump and held off on immediately congratulating Joe Biden for his win in November’s election, the Associated Press said in a report that “the restrictions on U.S. agents, and López Obrador’s veiled warnings to the Biden team to stay out of Mexican affairs, appeared to foreshadow thorny relations.”
“The Cienfuegos decision may only add to that perception,” AP added.
Super Bowl guacamole is good for Mexico's avocado growers.
The coronavirus pandemic won’t stop Mexico from sending a huge quantity of avocados to the United States in the lead-up to the Super Bowl to be played February 7 in Tampa, Florida.
The Mexican Association of Avocado Producers, Packers and Exporters (APEAM) expects just over 132,000 tonnes of the fruit will be sent north of the border before next month’s big game. That would be a 4% increase compared to 2020, when just under 127,000 tonnes of avocados were exported to the U.S. before the National Football League championship game.
“As is the case every year, we’ll have the final figure [for 2021] after the Super Bowl,” APEAM chief Gabriel Villaseñor told the newspaper Milenio.
Avocados are in high-demand in the United States prior to the Super Bowl because guacamole is a popular snack for football lovers glued to their screens.
Villaseñor said that over 1.2 million tonnes of avocados are predicted to be picked during the 2020-21 harvest season, which runs from October to February. Over 1 million tonnes will be exported, mainly to the United States.
Michoacán, Mexico’s largest avocado producer, is the only state in the country with certification to export the fruit to the United States. Approximately 84% of all avocados grown there are sent across Mexico’s northern border.
Despite the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the global economy, exports of avocados from Mexico – which is easily the world’s biggest producer of the fruit – increased 12% in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period of 2019. After the U.S., the main markets are Canada, Japan and China but Mexican avocados are also sent to Europe, South America and the Middle East.
Villaseñor noted that the pandemic didn’t slow down exports in 2020 but added that it did have a negative impact on their price at the tail end of the year. However, prices have begun to recover just in time for one of the most important times of the year in terms of exports, he said.
Given that there is hope that vaccines will soon bring an end to the pandemic, the future for the Mexican avocado industry “couldn’t be more promising,” Villaseñor said, adding that the reopening of restaurants will help the sector.
Quirky commercials made by Avocados From Mexico, a marketing group responsible for promoting the product in the United States, have appeared on television in the U.S. during the Super Bowl telecast for the past six years but there won’t be a new ad this year.
The APEAM president said the industry is already “very well positioned” among U.S. consumers who buy avocados before the Super Bowl and Cinco de Mayo celebrations. The marketing strategy in the U.S. is now focused on promoting avocados at other times of the year, he said.
Hopeful times: Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell and a map indicating the municipalities of hope.
Mexico’s list of coronavirus-free “municipalities of hope” has dwindled from 324 to 80 in the space of eight months.
In the middle of May, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said that 324 municipalities in 14 states hadn’t recorded a single case of the coronavirus and didn’t border any with known cases.
The municipalities were given the green light to lift coronavirus restrictions on May 18 and get back to work and school, although most chose not to.
At the time, officials were optimistic that the virus would soon be brought under control. In June the president declared that Mexico was an example for the rest of the world for having succeeded in slowing its spread.
Now, eight months later, the situation is far worse than predicted and there are just 80 so-called municipalities of hope in five states.
Chihuahua, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Michoacán, Nuevo León, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas and Yucatán all had municipalities of hope last May. Now they have none.
Of the 80 remaining coronavirus-free local government areas, 76 are in Oaxaca while Chiapas, Puebla, Sonora and Veracruz boast one each.
Oaxaca, however, has lost 137 municipalities of hope since May, while the number in Chiapas, Puebla, Sonora and Veracruz has declined by four, 12, 15 and 11, respectively.
Among the states that have gone from being municipality of hope “haves” to “have nots,” San Luis Potosí has fared the worst. Its six erstwhile coronavirus-free municipalities have now recorded 2,165 cases, including almost 1,800 in Matehuala.
Guerrero’s 12 former coronavirus-free municipalities have now recorded 866 cases, including 476 in Ometepec, which is located in the south of the state near the border with Oaxaca.
In Oaxaca’s 137 erstwhile municipalities of hope, 831 positive coronavirus cases have now been detected. San José del Progreso, located 50 kilometers south of Oaxaca city, has the highest tally with 94 confirmed cases.
Among the Oaxaca municipalities that have been successful in keeping the virus out are the Northern Sierra locales of San Bartolomé Zoogocho, San Andrés Solaga, Santiago Zoochila, Santa María Yalina, Santiago Laxopa and San Juan Tabaá.
They have prohibited the entry of visitors unless they first test negative for the coronavirus and go into self-isolation for 14 days.
Outside the 80 remaining hopeful municipalities, Mexico’s coronavirus pandemic continues to grow at a rapid pace.
The federal Health Ministry reported the second highest single-day totals for both cases and deaths on Wednesday.
Mexico’s accumulated case tally rose to 1.57 million with 15,873 new cases, while the official Covid-19 death toll increased to 136,917 with 1,235 additional fatalities.
The charges are not the first against Romero, who remains a full-time Pemex employee. It's not clear what his duties are.
A group of current and former state oil company workers in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche, have filed a complaint against their local union leader and a former secretary general of the Pemex workers union for illicit enrichment and the sale of positions within the firm.
The newspaper Reforma reported Thursday that workers affiliated with section 47 of the union filed a complaint on December 30 with the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) against local leader Víctor Kidnie and ex-secretary general Carlos Romero Deschamps, who resigned in October 2019 after 26 years in the job.
They accuse the two men of embezzlement of union funds, extortion, making threats, selling Pemex positions over a period of 30 years and physical violence.
The disgruntled workers, some of whom have more than 30 years’ experience at the state-owned firm, also said that their salaries had been arbitrarily docked by the union leaders.
Kidnie and Romero enriched themselves at the expense of the petroleum workers they represent, they said in the complaint filed with the FGR.
One of the complainants, an oil platform electrical technician who is no longer employed at Pemex, said he began speaking out about union corruption in 2015 and two years later was physically assaulted by people close to Kidnie. He said he reported the assault to the FGR, the National Human Rights Commission and the Campeche Attorney General’s Office but they ignored him.
The former worker also said that he witnessed the section 47 union leader selling positions to four people in Paraíso, Tabasco, who went on the payroll but never actually worked for Pemex.
“That case was also taken to the FGR but nothing was done. It’s part of the … corruption in section 47,” he said.
Having a complaint filed against him is nothing new for Romero, who also represented the Institutional Revolutionary Party in both house of Congress and was named by Forbes magazine in 2013 as one of the 10 most corrupt politicians in Mexico.
Other Pemex workers and the government’s Financial Intelligence Unit have filed complaints against the 77-year-old former union chief for money laundering and illegal enrichment among other offenses, and the FGR launched an investigation into his alleged corruption in 2019.
Despite the allegations he faces, and having stepped down as union boss more than a year ago, Romero remains an active Pemex employee, the oil company told Reforma in response to a freedom of information request.
He is currently receiving a monthly salary of 41,203 pesos (US $2,090) but his responsibilities at the firm are unknown.
A citizen’s collective in Sonora that searches for burial sites of missing relatives made a grisly discovery Wednesday: 19 clandestine graves, one of which contained the remains of at least 10 people.
The Madres Buscadores of Sonora, or “Searching Mothers of Sonora,” a group that has found about 200 such graves since being formed in 2019, made its latest discovery in Ortiz, Guaymas.
The group of around 30 women, who search using little more than shovels and pickaxes for digging, also found three spent and rusted ammunition shells buried with some of the remains, most of which were not more than scatterings of badly burned bones.
“Why do you burn the bodies?” one group member asked with disbelief in her voice as she filmed the group’s live broadcast on Facebook of the search through remote, desiccated land.
“With their death, they’re already gone,” she added ruefully.
Burning bodies is a common method criminal gangs use to dispose of their victims.
At that point, the brigade was digging out the 15th gravesite of the day.
The Sonora Attorney General’s Office said that forensic experts and detectives would be following up on the discoveries Thursday and analyzing the remains.
Madres Buscadoras was created by leader Cecy Flores, whose own son, Marco Antonio, went missing in Bahía de Kino, located near Hermosillo, in 2019. In the group’s searches throughout Sonora, it has found gravesites and even a “crematorium” site used to burn victims’ bodies. At times, they search for bodies in notoriously dangerous areas known to be smuggling routes and cartel territory.
Organizers said the group would next be heading to Huatabampo to do more searches on Friday and Saturday.
Reporters raise their hands to question the president at his morning press conference.
President López Obrador’s communications coordinator has denied that the government pays reporters to ask questions at his boss’s morning press conferences after the National Electoral Institute (INE) inquired if that was the case.
“The INE asked the government of Mexico to inform whether it pays reporters who ask questions at the morning press conferences. The very question offends (journalists). This already changed, there has never been so much freedom to ask a question to the president,” Jesús Ramírez wrote on Twitter.
His tweet Thursday morning came after the INE disputes division asked the president’s office to clarify whether journalists who asked questions at López Obrador’s December 23 press conference had received any remuneration or other benefits from the government.
On that day, a reporter from the Public Broadcasting System of the Mexican State asked the president to offer an opinion about the new political alliance formed by the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD)
In a long-winded response, López Obrador said the three parties were representative of the old regime and wanted to seize control of the lower house of Congress at the midterm election in June in order to wind back the government’s social welfare programs.
(The PRI ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century before ceding power to the PAN in 2000 only to retake the presidency in 2012. López Obrador represented the PRD at the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections before leaving the party and founding Morena, the current ruling party.)
“It’s going to be an extremely interesting election because the people will decide what they want. … Backward steps or do they want us to continue moving forward?” López Obrador said.
The PRD subsequently filed a complaint with INE, asserting that the president, in responding to the question about the political alliance, had improperly intervened in the electoral process.
On December 30, the INE’s complaints commission ordered the president to abstain from making remarks about the upcoming elections to avoid violating equity between the participating parties but the electoral tribunal subsequently said that such an order had to be approved by the INE’s general council.
On Tuesday, the INE sought information from the president’s office about whether it had commercial arrangements with any journalists. It said that a formal warning would be issued if it didn’t receive a response within 24 hours.
While Ramírez denied the government was paying journalists in his Twitter post, it was unclear whether the government had submitted a formal response to electoral authorities.
Reporters who attend the daily conferences appear to be largely supportive of the president, laughing at his jokes and avoiding hard questions.
López Obrador has also criticized the INE this week over its intention to prohibit transmission of his morning press conferences in the two-month campaign period leading up to the state and federal elections in June as part of its efforts to maintain a level playing field for all political parties.
The president said that any ban on the broadcast of his pressers would be “an act of censorship, an affront [and] an attack on freedom.”
He has been highly critical of censorship since United States President Donald Trump was kicked off Facebook and Twitter last week, and proposed on Wednesday the creation of a national social network in Mexico to ensure that he and other Mexicans can’t be gagged.
Only outdoor seating will be allowed and staff must take Covid tests.
After some Mexico City restaurants openly defied anti-Covid regulations this week and began illegally providing in-house dining to customers, the city government and restaurant owners have come to a tentative compromise that will allow restaurants to reopen Monday despite the city’s current shutdown of nonessential economic activities until January 19.
The agreement reached Wednesday is still not official but restaurant owners issued optimistic statements thanking the city, though even that statement was the source of a minor dispute between both sides.
Still, everyone appears to have agreed that under the new, stricter rules, restaurants will be free to serve in-house customers at tables outdoors. Under the current lockdown, they had only been allowed to serve takeout or delivery meals, a situation which owners said was killing their businesses.
Since December 19, the city and México state have been under stricter lockdown orders that suspended all nonessential economic activities. The shutdown was supposed to end Monday, but last Friday both governments announced that the suspension would remain in place for another week as the coronavirus situation continued to worsen.
Several restaurants and restaurant chains in Mexico City refused to follow the order after January 10, and reopened on Monday anyway, including Sonora Grill, Fisher’s, Tok’s and Potzocalli.
Current details of the agreement include:
Restaurants will close to in-house dining by either 4 p.m. or 6 p.m., after which they will be allowed to serve takeout or delivery meals. Statements by the restaurant owners and the city government about the closing time are contradictory, with owners thanking the city for agreeing to the 6 p.m. time and Mexico City officials telling the newspaper El Universal that it had agreed to 4 p.m.
Tables must be set up outdoors, either on the sidewalk or on outdoor terraces. Tables must be 1.5 meters apart, with only four people seated per table.
Restaurants will put their menus online with a QR coding system that diners can access with their cell phones to prevent the spread of the virus via physical menus.
Restaurants with 50 or more employees will have to test 5% of those employees for Covid once per week.
Regarding the dispute over closing times to in-house dining, restaurant owners told El Universal that the 4 p.m. closing is “unworkable” because Mexican diners typically don’t even eat lunch until 2:30 or 3 p.m.
Restaurant owners also said they agreed to a future scheme should Mexico City return again to the maximum Covid threat level on the coronavirus stoplight map.
According to the scheme, upon the city going red restaurants would reduce customer capacity to no more than 25% capacity indoors and 35% on terraces and in outdoor seating areas, with no more than six people seated at a table and a closing time of no later than 10 p.m. They would also use QR menus and ban live music. Businesses with over 50 employees would test 5% of their employees for Covid weekly
However, upon going back to orange on the stoplight map, owners said, restaurants would be allowed to return to previous Covid regulations: maximum 30% occupancy indoors and 40% outdoors, closing by 11 p.m., six diners per table, and live music allowed, among other rules.
Propping up the state oil company Pemex is costing the cash-strapped government at least 1.4 points of GDP a year, according to Moody’s Investors Service and a senior former public official.
Pemex is a priority of populist President López Obrador, who sees the former monopoly as a lever of national development. He is investing heavily in a new refinery despite the company’s downstream activities losing money hand over fist and the firm suffering negative cash flow overall.
“Supporting Pemex in 2021, for the company to cover its financing needs, could impose a financial burden of up to US $14.7 billion or 1.4% of GDP on the sovereign, in addition to the already budgeted transfer of $2.3 billion to build the Dos Bocas refinery,” Moody’s said in a report.
That, however, is just to keep things muddling along for Pemex, rather than allowing it to boost production significantly.
“If the government was to provide additional [capital expenditure funds] of $10 billion, which we estimate is the amount required on an annual basis to lift production on a sustained basis, the cost would rise to around $25 billion or 2.3% of GDP each year,” Moody’s said.
That chimes with the estimates of a senior public official, who told the Financial Times that Pemex had “burned through 300 billion pesos” (US $15.2 billion) in 2020 — some 1.5 points of GDP. “It’s an incredible amount,” added the former official, who expected the company to need state support “very soon in 2021.”
The government has resorted to increasingly creative ways to help the nation’s former cash cow, as the nationalist López Obrador continues to prohibit Pemex from sharing risk by partnering with private companies in exploration and production.
Nymia Almeida, Moody’s senior vice president and a Pemex analyst, said that last year Pemex had been given about half the aid it received in 2019. That it had managed to keep production about stable when its main fields were mature and declining at 25% a year was no mean feat, she said.
“The challenges are still the same: high tax and debt,” Almeida said. Pemex is already the world’s most indebted oil company, with net debt of $110.3 billion at the end of the third quarter of 2020 and $6 billion due this year.
Pemex’s debt has already been downgraded to junk but could be at risk of further pressure if Mexico’s sovereign debt rating is cut — something that is no longer most analysts’ base case for this year unless economic recovery is badly delayed.
“The main trigger [to downgrade] Pemex is the sovereign,” said Almeida. “In other years, it’s been the other way round.”
