The Economy Ministry (SE) has placed an immediate ban on the sale of 19 brands of cheese and two brands of yogurt because they don’t meet official standards.
The ministry, in conjunction with the consumer protection agency Profeco, said Tuesday that various products called “cheese” and “natural yogurt” don’t comply with official Mexican standards and their sale has been carried out “to the detriment of consumers and with information that could cause them to be deceived.”
The ministry said the main breaches of the 19 cheese brands were that they claimed to be made with 100% milk when they were not; that vegetable oils were added in lieu of milk in their production; that they weighed less than the amount stated on their packaging; and that the main side of their labeling didn’t list the percentage of caseinates (milk proteins) used in their production.
The cheese brands whose sale has been banned are Fud, Nochebuena, Premier Plus Cuadritos, Zwan, Caperucita, Burr, Precissimo, Frankli, Selecto Brand, Galbani, Lala, El Parral, Portales, Walter, Sargento, Cremeria Covadonga, Aurrera and Philadelphia (original and light).
With regard to “natural yogurt,” the breaches were the addition of sugar and non-compliance with the minimum required quantity of milk. The banned brands are Danone Bene Gastro and Danone Natural.
The manufacturer of Philadelphia cream cheese has rejected the test results.
The SE said the companies that make the banned cheeses and yogurts will be fined in addition to having the sale of their products banned.
Profeco chief Ricardo Sheffield told the newspaper Milenio that the agency he heads has initiated legal proceedings against Danone for deceitful advertising of its Bene Gastro yogurt. He said the name of the product implies that it is good for the gastrointestinal system whereas due to its significant corn syrup content it is in fact not good.
“It could even be damaging to health,” he said, adding that the legal battle against Danone will likely end up in court.
More legal battles could be looming as two manufacturers have challenged the results of the lab tests.
The manufacturer of Philadelphia cream cheese asserted that the decision to ban its products is “unfounded.”
Mondelēz México said in a statement that it has evidence that quality studies carried out by Profeco’s national laboratory in September found that Philadelphia cheese met all required standards.
The company said the Economy Ministry’s order to the National Association of Supermarkets and Department Stores to withdraw its cream cheese products caused it “surprise” and “bewilderment” because it is “totally unfounded and harms the reputation of our brand.”
Grupo Lala, meanwhile, rejected the findings with respect to its sliced, lactose-free Manchego cheese, insisting that the product is made with 100% milk.
Police prevent access to a Columbus statue in Buenavista, Mexico City.
On the 528th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, protesters took to the streets this week in several Mexican states to denounce the “genocidal” explorer.
A statue of Columbus on Mexico City’s Reforma Avenue was removed on the weekend, ostensibly for restoration, but it came after threats to topple it. Nevertheless, protesters arrived at the statue’s base Monday and graffitied the fence that has been installed around it.
Among the messages: “Nothing to celebrate, nothing to forgive, everything to tear down,” “528 years of struggle, organization and resistance – the fight continues,” “Down with the symbols of colonialism” and “Good riddance, genocida [a person guilty of genocide].”
Another group of protesters made their way to a statue of Columbus in the Buenavista neighborhood, where they encountered a cordoned-off statue and a contingent of police who stymied their goal of defacing or bringing down the explorer’s likeness.
In Chilpancingo, Guerrero, protesters including members of the CNTE teachers union blocked traffic on the Mexico City-Acapulco highway for an hour to mark the anniversary of Columbus’s arrival.
Foiled in their attempts to take down a Columbus statue in Mexico City, protesters tear down street signs instead.
In Morelos, indigenous protesters expressed their support for President López Obrador’s request to Pope Francis for a public apology from the Catholic Church for the abuses committed during the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. In Oaxaca, there were protests to demand respect for indigenous peoples and to denounce large-scale energy projects, the newspaper El Financiero said.
Groups with links to the Zapatistas protested in the Chiapas cities of Tuxtla Gutiérrez and San Cristóbal de las Casas, where they condemned the negative impact of the Conquest and subsequent colonization.
The condemnations of the Genoan explorer are not new.
César Morado, a historian at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, told the newspaper El Norte that condemning Columbus – whose expeditions were sponsored by Spain – and debate about his legacy go back centuries.
“It’s an old conflict we’ve had since the 19th century,” he said, adding that there has long been a debate between the aztequistas, those who hold up indigenous customs and traditions as superior, and the hispanistas, those who favor the Spanish.
“This debate is highlighted now due to the fact that society is more interconnected by social media but the bottom line is the same: it’s a matter of how we interpret history,” Morado said.
There is Columbus the explorer and conquistador and Columbus the perpetrator of atrocities against indigenous peoples, he said.
However, Morado noted that the history written by the winners, the conquistadores, became the dominant one. But opposing narratives are now becoming more prominent, the historian said.
According to another historian, the marginalization faced by indigenous people in Mexico today cannot be attributed to Europeans’ “discovery” of the Americas in the 15th century and the subsequent Spanish Conquest.
Luis Alberto García told El Norte that he believed that an apology for the Conquest, which López Obrador has also sought from the King of Spain, is unnecessary.
An apology, he said, “won’t change the current situation at all nor establish a plan to do so.”
The boats are off in the shotgun start of the Bisbee's Black & Blue. Clicerio Mercado
Clicerio Mercado sits at a restaurant at the Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur, marina on a late-summer morning, sipping a smoothie and greeting locals who stroll by his table with his typical good cheer.
Everyone is happy to see him, not just because he’s overcome a nasty, six-week bout with the coronavirus, but because he helps run the legendary Bisbee’s fishing tournaments, which bring an estimated US $12-million injection into the Cabo San Lucas economy, a boost sorely needed in 2020.
For 30 years Mercado, now 73, grandfather to seven and great-grandfather to six, has organized the Bisbee’s in Los Cabos, a series of three tournaments culminating in the Bisbee’s Black & Blue, named for the two species of marlin it centers around, which draws anglers from all over the world to compete for millions in prize money.
In 2006, anglers aboard Bad Company took home a record US $3,902,997.50. In the tournament’s 40-year history, 16 teams have received checks of upwards of US $1 million.
And while other tournaments in Costa Rica, Florida and the Bahamas have been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, Bisbee’s soldiers on by adopting a new set of protocols.
Clicerio Mercado celebrates his 30th year with the Bisbee’s tournaments. Gary Graham
It’s just another example of how Mercado has learned to roll with the punches and his determination to continue with a tournament that he, those who fish it, and residents of Los Cabos dearly love. Fishing is, after all, what brought the first tourists to Los Cabos, and the October tournaments mark the beginning of high season for the resort destination.
Mercado is confident that the Los Cabos Offshore — October 15 through 18 — and the “Superbowl of fishing tournaments” as Sports Illustrated has called the Black & Blue — October 20 through 24 — will go off without a hitch.
The tournament was founded in 1981 when a group of six teams of fishing buddies decided to create a competition for a US $10,000 purse in what was then a relatively remote location with a reputation for excellent fishing.
As Los Cabos grew exponentially, so did the Bisbee’s.
Mercado was the food and beverage manager at a marina hotel when tournament founder Bob Bisbee, who died in 2018, first hired him to help with logistics in 1990.
“Throughout the tournament, we always needed help on things from our host facility and were unable to get the help needed by the different people there. So we found ourselves going to Clicerio for things that the general manager should have been doing. Also, for things that the maintenance department should have been doing,” said Bob’s son Wayne Bisbee, who is now tournament president.
Tricia and Wayne Bisbee and Mercado. Gary Graham
“Basically, Clicerio became our primary go-to guy for getting things done even if they weren’t in his department, and that was great for us.”
Mercado says he found that the skills he had learned in a 20-year career in the hospitality industry, where he began as a dishwasher, transferred well.
For him, coordinating a tournament means not only establishing a system and sticking to it, it’s also about diplomacy, cultivating friendships and making sure to know the right people in the right places to help pull off the event without a hitch.
“A main strength that Clicerio has which I don’t is that he likes meetings. I hate meetings unless they’re taking place on a boat while fishing or in a bar, so he is great for seeing that the needed meetings for organizational things are happening,” Bisbee said.
“He is much more organized than me and always has a checklist of what needs to be done versus trying to keep it all in his mind which I try to do. He also has a great capability of working with all the different organizations as needed in a very friendly manner.”
By 1993 Mercado began working for the Bisbee’s full-time, and since then he has become the Mexican face of the tournaments that he, Wayne Bisbee and his sister Tricia Bisbee run like clockwork, handling the logistics of holding such major events in Mexico with characteristic aplomb.
Last year’s winners of the Black & Blue. Gary Graham
In recent years more than 150 teams from around the globe have participated in what has become the world’s richest fishing tournament. As of October 13, 69 teams have registered for the Black & Blue, with entry fees starting at US $5,000 per team, or US $71,500 for across-the-board entry into daily jackpots. Seventy-six teams have registered for the Los Cabos Offshore.
More teams are expected to sign up for both tournaments in the coming days.
“Our expectation is to have over 100 teams per tournament, and that will be phenomenal for this very weird 2020,” Mercado says.
For an experienced coordinator like Mercado, putting on fishing tournaments in a pandemic is just a matter of changing up the rules a little for safety reasons. After all, the fish are still biting.
“We are holding normal Bisbee’s tournaments, and the restrictions do not have to scare people away. We have very good circumstances for the tournaments.” Mercado says.
Working with state and local governments, Mercado and the Bisbees developed a blueprint for how a fishing tournament could be safely held during the pandemic and put it to the test earlier this year in their annual August East Cape Offshore tournament.
Mercado, far right, at his first Bisbee’s tournament, in 1990.
The event was a rousing success, breaking records as 72 teams competed in the three-day event on the Sea of Cortés with a jackpot of over US $1,100,000, marking the first year that prize money had topped US $1 million. Local fishermen also landed a massive 704-pound blue marlin, the largest in that tournament’s history.
But the circumstances were a bit different, as they will be in the upcoming two tournaments.
This year the normal in-person captains’ meeting to go over rules will be held virtually, with every captain, angler and crew member receiving a link to feeds in both English and Spanish. Face masks are mandatory at all times and only the angler who caught the fish will be allowed to approach the weigh station, which has been moved from in front of the Puerto Paraíso mall to the cruise ship pier to prevent massive crowds from gathering, as they have in years past.
The annual fundraiser for the Bisbee’s Fish & Wildlife Conservation Fund, which provides scholarships for local college students, supports a billfish tag and release program and funds anti-poaching efforts in South Africa, will be held virtually as a silent auction.
But the main difference most anglers will note is the absence of the tournament’s epic parties.
“Due to Covid-19, we’re not allowed to bring people together in any way which I am personally very sad about,” Wayne Bisbee says. “A huge part of our tournaments is the camaraderie of all the teams from literally around the world.”
Gary Graham, a photojournalist, writer and fishing guru who first visited Baja in 1973, predicts that anglers weary of lockdown will still come out despite these uncertain times.
Graham covered the August Bisbee’s tournament whose success he describes as remarkable. “When that tournament took place, two weeks out there was no guarantee that it was going to happen, what the protocols would be, how it would be managed,” he said. The turnout showed that “teams that were interested in fishing tournaments, come hell or high water, would be there. That’s what I’m expecting in Los Cabos.”
For Mercado, the event’s success is a given. He’s got coordinating fishing tournaments down to a science that not even the coronavirus can derail.
The energy regulator is implementing a ban on new permits, which includes everything from renewables generation to gas stations.
Mexican regulators are clamping down on private investment in the energy sector in the latest attempt by the nationalist government to protect state oil and utilities companies, according to documents seen by the Financial Times.
The move escalates months of government efforts to abruptly change the rules in the sector that have soured investor sentiment, sparked a flood of injunctions and raised the prospect of litigation under international trade treaties, including the new North American trade pact, USMCA.
According to the documents, the energy regulator CRE is implementing an appeal issued by President López Obrador to regulators last month to ban new energy permits — a move that covers everything from renewables generation to gas stations.
Analysts and former officials say the policies are a backdoor attempt to discriminate in favour of Mexico’s struggling state oil company, Pemex, and state utility, CFE, without changing the law.
López Obrador, a fervent energy nationalist, sees the former monopolies as national champions and says past policies allowed for the foreign “conquest” of the country’s energy sector.
The government has displayed “a spectacular degree of stubbornness” in continuing to seek new ways to curb private sector involvement, said the chief executive of one renewable energy company.
The documents instructed officials to “abstain from implementing processes” laid out in three regulations from 2017 and 2018.
Those related to updating and authorizing permits, greenlighting generation activity, imports and exports. The move ensured that such decisions now had to go through the CRE board, a former energy official said.
López Obrador has appointed political loyalists to the CRE board, including a 91-year-old refinery expert, José Antonio Celestinos, who last week approved new curbs on some private generators saying: “[I vote] in favour, in accordance with the president’s instructions.”
A CRE spokeswoman said they were internal documents which “modified internal processes in support of the fight against corruption and transparency” and should “not be misinterpreted.”
López Obrador is a fierce critic of the landmark 2013 energy reform, which included allowing private investment in Mexico’s long-closed oil and gas sector. But he says he will only seek to change the law if his attempts to “rescue” Pemex and CFE founder.
The renewables CEO called the permit ban “a new chapter” in Mexico’s clashes with the private sector” and “absolutely extreme and absurd.”
He added: “They’ve halted private sector investment in energy completely.”
One former senior government official said companies were “preparing for the legal battle that will come . . . The idea of injecting more money into the country as of now is a no-go. They’re trying to protect the investments they’ve already made.”
That could include triggering investor protection mechanisms under USMCA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty and pacts with EU countries.
“We are very concerned with actions by the Mexican government to deny U.S. energy companies fair market access,” said Geoff Moody, vice president of government relations at the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers.
International oil majors and power companies have invested billions of dollars in Mexico. “We’ve put new investments on hold,” said one executive at a European power company, adding that international arbitration “is being considered very seriously”.
One source close to Onexpo, Mexico’s national association of petrol station owners, said 154 permit applications had been “frozen” by the CRE — the very authority supposed to ensure that the law is applied.
“They’re achieving very little but the destruction in terms of investor and regulatory certainty is very big,” said the former energy official.
The headdress is on display at a museum in Vienna.
President López Obrador revealed Monday that he had instructed his wife to ask Austrian authorities to lend Mexico an elaborate headdress that is believed to have belonged to the Aztec emperor at the time of the Spanish Conquest.
Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller met Monday with the president of Austria, where the penacho de Moctezuma (Moctezuma’s headdress) – made of feathers from the quetzal and other birds – is on display at the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna.
“With the intention of obtaining Mexican historical and archaeological pieces to be exhibited in our country during the bicentenary of independence [in 2021], Beatriz visited the president of Austria, Alexander Van der Bellen,” López Obrador wrote in a Twitter post above a picture of his wife and the head of state.
“I recommended that she insist on the penacho de Moctezuma, although it’s an almost impossible mission given that they’ve appropriated it completely to the extent that they didn’t even lend it to [Emperor] Maximilian … when they invaded us and imposed the so-called Second Mexican Empire,” he said in a second post.
Austria’s possession of the headdress, whose provenance has been disputed, has long been a source of tension with Mexico. The penacho is among a range of Mexican artifacts held by the European nation.
Müller, left, with Brigitte Macron in Paris.
In an Instagram post on Monday, Gutiérrez wrote that the Austrian National Library is in possession of a “great collection” of Mexican artifacts including the Venice Codex, a pictorial document dating back to the 14th century.
She also said the governments of Mexico and Austria had signed an agreement to allow digital access to the latter’s collection.
“This agreement will allow all Mexicans to see the digitalized collection of this historic and extremely important European library. Humanity’s cultural heritage is shared, … it belongs to everyone, not to a private individual,” Gutiérrez wrote.
Earlier in her European trip, Gutiérrez met in Paris with Brigitte Macron, the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, where she also attended the opening of an exhibition focused on the culture of Mexico’s Olmec civilization.
The president’s wife, who has broken with tradition and not adopted the title of first lady, also met with Italian President Sergio Mattarella in Rome and Pope Francis in Vatican City.
She delivered a letter from López Obrador to Mattarella in which he asked Italy to lend Mexico the Florentine and Cospi codices for exhibitions in 2021, which will also mark the 500th anniversary of the Conquest of Mexico led by Hernán Cortés and the 700th anniversary of the founding of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec or Mexica capital that stood on the land where modern day Mexico City is located.
The president also wrote to Pope Francis to ask for the Catholic Church to offer a public apology to Mexico’s indigenous people for the “atrocities” committed during the Conquest.
Meanwhile, the president of the Mexican Employers Federation (Coparmex) criticized López Obrador and Gutiérrez for bringing up “painful” events from the past while the latter is in Europe.
“In the 21st century reliving episodes that were painful, that were part of a historical context, seems like a bit of a pointless adventure. We have to build pride in our history,” Gustavo de Hoyos told a virtual press conference.
The Coparmex chief also criticized López Obrador for not traveling more to meet with world leaders and promote Mexico’s interests abroad.
It’s all well and good for government ministers or the president’s wife to travel overseas but international relations must also be conducted by the president because there are certain things that only he can do, de Hoyos said.
He said that López Obrador’s meeting with United States President Donald Trump in Washington – during the Mexican leader’s only foreign trip since he took office in late 2018 – was a clear example that “these kind of actions” can yield good results.
Joel Luis and a bottle of sauce made by El Típico in Ixtepec.
The Covid-19 pandemic has dealt a death blow to thousands of restaurants across Mexico, but a family operation in Oaxaca has found an innovative way to adapt — and deliver its products to Oaxacans nationwide who are nostalgic for a taste of home.
El Típico, a modest restaurant specializing in traditional cuisine in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec city of Ixtepec, was facing the same devastating economic losses as many in Mexico’s restaurant industry.
It had to close for several months, and the family faced the unenviable prospect of laying off its eight employees — that is until one young, tech-savvy member of the family, twentysomething son Joel Luis, found a way to keep his family’s business alive by bottling and delivering 20 of the menu’s sauces to anywhere in Mexico, allowing clients to recreate the restaurant’s meals at home.
The family also now sells the sauces in stores locally, in the city of Oaxaca, and even as far away as Veracruz, a Oaxacan enclave.
But the mail-order strategy has allowed El Típico to flourish, finding a niche market in out-of-state Oaxacans who were stuck at home across the country and homesick for the state’s traditional cuisine.
Sauces made and sold by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec restaurant.
Its success is likely helped by the fact that Joel Luis took advantage of the restaurant’s closure period to post video tutorials to El Típico’s Facebook page — complete with traditional music playing in the background — on how to cook the restaurant’s dishes using the sauces.
The customer supplies everything but the sauce, and the restaurant’s staff provide the step-by-step explanations for recreating the restaurant’s recipe within 10 minutes.
“For 40 pesos, the client can bring traditional flavors to their dish,” Joel Luis explains. “Without being experts, they can prepare a tasty broth using Oaxacan spices or a plate of shrimp with traditional sauce. They don’t have to do more than open a bottle and add it to the meat or the shrimp.”
The innovative strategy has paid dividends for both the restaurant and the young entrepreneur. Not only did the restaurant manage to keep its employees by refocusing them on producing items for the mail-order business during its closure, Joel Luis has recently brought on board seven new apprentices he is training to cook items for mail order.
“The truth is, the crisis has brought us to this point,” leading us to come up with an alternative.
Swedish furniture brand Ikea has opened its doors online, although its physical store will have to wait due to delays in construction caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Ikea announced its arrival in Mexico last year with a 23,000-square-meter store that was to open in October in the Oceania area of Mexico City. But the company now says the brick-and-mortar opening will happen in the first quarter of 2021.
The company estimated that 300 to 350 direct jobs will be created in the communities surrounding the location, which will include the brand’s Swedish restaurant with seating for up to 665 people.
But as of Monday, shoppers have been able to browse online through 18 categories of goods, including bathroom products, furniture, linens, decor, home security, plants and a host of products offered at less than 50 pesos (US $2.30) including bags, candleholders, frames, planters, containers, rugs, and curtains, among others.
However, the story is shipping only to addresses in Mexico City and certain México state municipalities.
Shipping costs are 79 pesos (US $3.69) for most items weighing less than 24 kilos, and delivery was being promised within three to five days. However, according to the website on Tuesday deliveries were being delayed by as much as four weeks due to high demand.
“Today we open our e-commerce site with more than 7,500 articles and distribution capacity in Mexico City and the metropolitan area. Why first in this area? Well, our goal is to reach as many people as possible, as fast as we can, and this part of the country is the most populated,” Ikea told Forbes México yesterday.
“In the near future, our ambition is to expand delivery to other large cities in the country, and eventually, to the entire Mexican territory.”
With the construction of the store, an e-commerce warehouse and a production plant, Ikea is investing approximately US $500 million in Mexico. Its 10-year plan for Mexico includes opening stores in Monterrey, Guadalajara, Puebla and Querétaro, the company says.
The world’s largest furniture retailer, Ikea was founded in 1943 by 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad who was the eighth richest person in the world at the time of his death in 2018. The company operates more than 430 stores in 52 countries.
An Obregón searcher sniffs a metal rod for evidence of a body.
Everything changes when you lose a child, and for Nora Lira one of the consequences of her daughter’s disappearance was an enhanced sense of smell, a useful skill when you are looking for decomposing bodies.
Tragically, it was this heightened sense that led her to her 17-year-old daughter Fernanda’s grave on October 2, two years to the day after she last saw her.
Lira was able to identify Fernanda’s clothing as well as a green bracelet she always wore on her right wrist. “Your mom has come for you, we’re leaving,” Lira wept as she cleared dirt from her daughter’s bones.
“I don’t want to put her in the ground anymore, she lasted for years in it. My daughter was not bad, she didn’t mess with anyone, and she’s come to end up here,” she sobbed.
Lira is the founder of Las Rastreadoras de Obregón (Searchers of Obregón), a brigade of 20 women — mothers, sisters, aunts and wives of the missing in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, who have taken it upon themselves to actively search for their loved ones.
Members of the Ciudad Obregón search brigade.
In the past two years they have found the remains of 50 missing people, including Fernanda.
“This year the reports have grown a lot, there are too many. It is a problem that you do not want to see. Women are disappearing, young people with a future ahead of them, and we have no idea why. They are people who were not doing bad things, who did nothing to anyone,” Lira says.
Lira formed the search brigade — it is one of dozens across the country — in February 2018, a few months after Fernanda disappeared. Gradually other women like Lira who felt abandoned by state and local authorities joined her.
Women like Blanca Hermosillo, who joined the group in April 2018 to find her son Tomás. He went missing after getting in a car with unknown people near his home.
That same month, the searchers located a property on the outskirts of the city where 38 bodies were found buried in clandestine graves. Four months later, the state prosecutor’s office notified Hermosillo that Tomás was among them.
Hermosillo refuses to believe that the remains were his, and continues searching, hoping to find her son in a better condition than the “bones they gave me,” she says.
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For Hermosillo, too, the smell of decomposition is what leads her to bodies. “It is an unmistakable, unique and also indescribable smell,” she says.
The group has its searches down to a routine. They go out two to three times a week clad in gloves, hats and cloth masks. When they come across a potential burial site, they sink a rod into the dirt, then pull it out and smell it. “If it smells — we already know the smell — we start digging because there is a body,” says Josefina, whose daughter went missing a year ago.
Government officials say that since 2006, more than 4,000 clandestine graves have been found throughout Mexico. In just the past four years 143 have been found in Sonora, but the Obregón searchers, as well as similar groups in other Sonoran cities, say the number is much higher.
Between January and September of this year, 4,960 people have been reported missing in Mexico. In total, 77,146 people across the country have disappeared.
Beaches such as Zicatela have been closed until the end of the month.
Authorities in a coastal municipality of Oaxaca have announced the closure of beaches and the implementation of an alcohol ban due to a large outbreak of coronavirus.
The government of Santa María Colotepec, one of two municipalities across which the resort town of Puerto Escondido is located, announced Sunday that 13 coronavirus mitigation measures would be in place between October 12 and 31 due to the Oaxaca Health Ministry’s notification of “a large scale outbreak of positive Covid-19 cases in our municipal jurisdiction.”
An official statement said that all beaches in the municipality, from Puerto Piedra to El Puertecito, would be closed and that the permitted capacity of restaurants and hotels would be reduced to 40% and 20% of normal levels, respectively.
The statement also said that bars must close; that the installation of street stalls in the Punta Zicatela area would be prohibited; that the sale of alcohol in the entire municipality would be banned; and that no parties or events would be allowed.
In addition, it said that recreation spaces near the Colotepec River would be closed; that a local cattle market would be suspended; that buses and taxis from outside the municipality would not be allowed to enter Santa María Colotepec; that local taxis and public transit vans would be limited to carrying three and seven passengers, respectively; that all public transit drivers and passengers must wear face masks; and that workers and customers at the Zicatela Market must strictly comply with preventative health measures.
The Colotepec government said the measures are designed to prevent an increase in cases of Covid-19,“which continues to take lives in our municipality.”
Anyone found not complying with the health measures will be sanctioned, the statement said.
Despite municipal authorities referring to “a large scale outbreak” of the coronavirus, Santa María Colotepec has only recorded 50 confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic and three Covid-19 deaths. Just six cases are considered active.
In neighboring San Pedro Mixtepec, which includes the central area of Puerto Escondido, 167 confirmed cases have been detected and 17 people have lost their lives to Covid-19. The municipality also has six active cases but authorities have not announced any new measures to control the virus.
Oaxaca, one of seven states that regressed to orange light “high risk” from yellow light “medium” on Monday according to the federal government’s stoplight system to assess the risk of coronavirus infection, has recorded 18,931 confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic, the 18th highest total among Mexico’s 32 states. The southern state’s case tally rose by 28 on Monday.
There are 736 active cases in Oaxaca, according to state authorities, with about three-quarters of that number in the state’s Central Valleys region, which includes Oaxaca city. There are just 47 active cases in the state’s Pacific coast region, where Puerto Escondido is located.
Oaxaca’s official Covid-19 death toll is 1,516 with five additional fatalities reported on Monday. Just under half of the state’s deaths occurred in the Central Valleys. The coast region has recorded 80 deaths.
Nationally, the coronavirus case tally increased to 821,045 on Monday with 3,542 new cases reported, while the Covid-19 death toll rose to 83,945 with 164 additional fatalities registered.
A senator holds a cartoon of López-Gatell, left, during his appearance in the Senate.
An appearance by Mexico’s coronavirus czar before the health committee of the Senate was suspended on Monday after the session descended into a farce.
National Action Party (PAN) senators repeatedly confronted Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell over his management of the pandemic, which has now officially claimed the lives of 83,945 people in Mexico.
They held up signs that condemned him with messages such as “excess of ineptitude,” “excess of arrogance” and “enough lies.”
Senator Lily Téllez used her opportunity to question López-Gatell to give him a cane, accusing him of being blind to the real extent of the health crisis and the strategies required to confront it.
Senator Martha Márquez stood beside the coronavirus point man at one point during his appearance and held up a canvas sign featuring a caricature of him holding a sheet behind which was a pile of skulls. Across the top of the sign was the question “How many [Covid-19] deaths have there been?” and the response, “As many as you say, Mr. President.”
The implication was that López-Gatell has told the Mexican people what President López Obrador wants him to tell them about the coronavirus pandemic and the number of lives it has taken.
The president of the health committee, Morena party Senator Miguel Ángel Navarro Quintero, called for order on several occasions as López-Gatell was interrupted by verbal attacks and stunts while he was speaking.
After countless interruptions, Quintero suspended the session, declaring that there was insufficient civility to continue.
“I ask you to please allow me to suspend the meeting given that there is not proper behavior for an appearance,” he said.
Later on Monday, López-Gatell told reporters at the Health Ministry’s coronavirus press briefing that the senators who attacked him appear to be suffering from “cognitive dissonance.”
“We identified … a small group of senators who are not only small in number but who also represent a social minority. … They appear to be enclosed in a series of fixed ideas that were put together at the start of the epidemic. They don’t leave them behind, they insist on maintaining the same vision,” he said.
“… A lot of these fixed ideas are about the use of face masks and the necessity … of using public force [to enforce a lockdown], undertaking coercive actions, using the police, the National Guard. They’ve said it over and over again; they appear to have a vision … [of] cognitive dissonance with the social reality.”
Meanwhile, the cartoonist who drew the caricature of López-Gatell that was presented at yesterday’s Senate session acknowledged on Twitter that his work had made its way into the upper house of Congress.
“I hope they don’t blame the suspension on me,” joked Miguel Parras.
President López Obrador defended the deputy minister this morning and charged that senators had “mistreated” him.
“They’re very annoyed, very angry when they should be offering apologies for all this. They continue wishing to return to the old regime of corruption, injustice and privilege.”
