The baseball stadium in Palenque that is slated for an upgrade.
President López Obrador’s brother and a large sum of money are being mentioned in the same sentence for the second time in less than six months.
Pío López Obrador found himself in the media spotlight last August after two videos emerged showing him receiving large amounts of cash in 2015. The payments were not corrupt but rather “contributions” from ordinary people to strengthen the Morena party, said AMLO, as the president is widely known.
Now, AMLO’s younger brother is in the news again after the Ministry of Agrarian Development and Urban Planning (Sedatu) awarded an 89-million-peso (US $4.5-million) contract for the upgrade of a stadium in Palenque, Chiapas, that is the home ground of a professional baseball team he founded.
Anti-graft group Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) revealed Monday that Tuxtla Gutiérrez-based company Alz Construcciones was awarded a contract to upgrade the home stadium of the Guacamayas (Macaws) of Chiapas. The stadium is owned by the Palenque municipal government.
MCCI reported that Sedatu disqualified 26 bids because they didn’t meet the established criteria. Among them was one proposal to complete the upgrade for 33 million pesos less than the winning bid and another that was 12.5 million pesos cheaper.
The president with members of the Guacamayas at their home stadium in Palenque.
The upgrade includes the construction of team dugouts, dressing rooms, new grandstands and boxes, commercial spaces and public washrooms as well as improvements to the playing surface.
While the money is not going directly to the hands of Pío López Obrador, as was the case with the political “contributions,” the president’s brother, who is also the director of the Guacamayas, lists the Palenque baseball stadium as the club’s business address.
That his brother’s team stands to benefit from a lucrative government contract does not look good for AMLO, who has made combating corruption a central aim of his administration.
The president, who in 2018 posted a video to Twitter that showed him training with the Guacamayas in the lead-up to the presidential election he won, has repeatedly asserted that his government, unlike its predecessors, doesn’t permit nepotism, cronyism or any other forms of corruption.
His commitment to that position was questioned by government critics who charged that the allocation of funds for the stadium upgrade is evidence of hypocrisy and misplaced priorities.
“Mexico is going through one of the worst crises in its history. The health system is on the brink of collapse and thousands of people have lost their jobs. Even so, the López Obrador government prefers to allocate 89 million pesos to a baseball stadium of a team founded by Pío López Obrador,” National Action Party Senator Xóchitl Gálvez wrote on Twitter.
“There are powers above the general interest,” political scientist and columnist Denise Dresser said on Twitter, citing “Pío López Obrador, money and baseball stadiums” as one of several examples.
Her post came in response to a Tuesday morning presidential tweet that asserted that nothing comes before the general interest of the people.
It’s not the first time that López Obrador has come under fire for federal government spending on baseball, which just so happens to be his favorite sport.
He was heavily criticized in 2019 after the government agreed to pay the state of Sonora more than 1 billion pesos to purchase two stadiums that will become baseball schools.
López Obrador faced more condemnation last April when the government ponied up 511 million pesos to complete the purchase of a stadium in Hermosillo at a time when health workers were struggling to find personal protective equipment and supplies to respond to the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic.
More than three years after Congress approved the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, it will finally become legal on Wednesday.
President López Obrador on Tuesday published regulations for the production, research and use of medicinal marijuana.
The Congress-approved reform to legalize medicinal marijuana was originally published in June 2017 but not promulgated, although then president Enrique Peña Nieto was supposed to sign off on the law within 180 days.
It wasn’t until July 2020 that a regulatory framework developed by the federal Health Ministry was put out for public consultation, paving the way for its implementation.
Published in the federal government’s official gazette, the new regulations authorize the government to oversee the production of marijuana for research and medicinal purposes. Companies growing medicinal marijuana and/or using the plant to manufacture medications must be authorized by the health regulator Cofepris.
The regulations allow pharmacies to supply cannabis-based medicines to authorized patients in possession of prescriptions. Drugstores will be required to maintain a registry of people with approval to purchase them.
In addition, the regulatory framework permits the importation to Mexico of seeds, cannabis derivatives to be used in medicinal products and processed marijuana-based medications.
The rules published today apply exclusively to the medicinal marijuana sector. A bill legalizing the recreational use of marijuana was passed by the Senate in November but the Chamber of Deputies has not yet debated it and put it to a vote.
The Supreme Court in December granted an extension to the lower house of Congress to debate the recreational use of marijuana after lawmakers requested one on the grounds that the bill was complex and time was limited.
The court ruled in 2019 that laws prohibiting the use of marijuana are unconstitutional. The Chamber of Deputies will have until the end of their first 2021 sitting period in late April to make the recreational use of marijuana legal, as ordered by the court.
Acapulco welcomed 600,000 visitors during the Christmas vacation period. The cost is expected to be a surge in new cases.
The coronavirus situation in Guerrero will become critical in the coming days as a result of end-of-year celebrations and the influx of visitors, state authorities predict, while the situation is dire in Mexico City, where about 90% of hospital beds are currently occupied.
Guerrero Health Minister Carlos de la Peña Pinto said that a critical situation is expected in terms of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
“We’re already starting to pay the bill for what we lived during December,” he said.
About 600,000 tourists traveled to Guerrero over the Christmas-New Year vacation period, mainly descending on coastal destinations such as Acapulco and Zihuatanejo/Ixtapa, where restrictions were temporarily eased by the state government to allow hotels and restaurants to increase capacity. Many of the visitors came from the red light, maximum risk entities of Mexico City, México state and Morelos as well as Puebla, which is high risk orange on the federal stoplight map.
De la Peña said that hospitalizations increased in Guerrero in the first days of 2021, citing a 20% spike compared to December. He said that hospital occupancy had risen to 45% from a level of 25% that had been maintained since September.
Federal data shows that 60.5% of general care beds are currently occupied in Guerrero while 27.5% of those with ventilators are in use.
The state health minister said that 139 residents lost their lives to Covid-19 in the first 10 days of the year, including 19 on Sunday. Guerrero’s official Covid-19 death toll is currently 2,678 while its accumulated case tally is just over 27,000.
The federal Health Ministry estimates that there are just over 900 active cases in the state.
In contrast, there are an estimated 29,753 active cases in Mexico City, which has recorded almost 369,000 confirmed cases and 23,612 Covid-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Mexico City government data updated Monday night shows that 6,581 coronavirus patients are in hospitals in the capital, including 1,611 in beds with ventilators. Hospital occupancy is 88%, according to city authorities, while federal data shows that 91.5% of general care beds and 86% of those with ventilators are taken.
“We’re at the highest peak of hospitalizations since the pandemic began and it continues to increase,” Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said Monday. “It’s not about dramatizing [the situation] but acting. We’re continuing to increase hospital capacity and we’re calling … on citizens to comply with the red light measures.”
A man sells face masks in Tijuana, where using them is now mandatory.
Sheinbaum said that hospital admissions had been higher than expected over the past four days, attributing the spike to end-of-year celebrations and the vacation period.
Warning that as many as 35,000 coronavirus patients could require a hospital bed at the same time in a worse case scenario, academics from Mexico City’s Center for Research and Teaching in Economics and Stanford University urged officials to prioritize “rapid hospital capacity expansion.”
Sheinbaum stressed Monday that capacity is being increased at several healthcare facilities, citing the Tláhuac General Hospital as one example.
In other Covid news:
• Public hospital doctors and nurses in Oaxaca issued a plea for the southern state to regress to red on the stoplight map. With an accumulated case tally of just under 30,000 and a Covid-19 death toll of 2,139, Oaxaca is currently high risk orange, according to the federal government system. A red light designation would require all nonessential businesses to close their doors.
Health workers in Oaxaca issued an urgent call to President López Obrador to send 10,000 Covid-19 vaccines to the state in order to immunize frontline workers at the 25 Covid hospitals. Federal health authorities announced Monday that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine would be distributed in all 32 states on Tuesday.
The secretary general of the Oaxaca branch of the national health workers union said that only 4,000 health workers were on the early vaccination list but urged that cleaning and cooking staff, among other hospital employees, should also be immunized due to the infection risk they face on a daily basis. Mario Félix Pacheco also said that most health workers haven’t had any time off since the pandemic began and many are tired. He called for the deployment of relief medical personnel in order to give tired workers a break.
• Municipal authorities in Tijuana, Baja California, signed off on fines for people not wearing face masks in public places. Scofflaws face the prospect of having to pay between 434 and 1,303 pesos (US $22 to $659) if they are caught without a mask.
Councilor José Cañada García noted that Baja California is currently red on the stoplight map and that hospitals and funeral services are overwhelmed. He asserted that the aim of fining people for not wearing masks is to protect people’s health, not raise money for the Tijuana government. Funds collected via fines will be used to buy face masks to distribute to residents, Cañada said.
Baja California Governor Jaime Bonilla was critical of the approval of fines in the state’s largest city, saying that mask use should be encouraged but not made mandatory. That view is consistent with that of López Obrador, who founded the Morena party Bonilla represents, and seldom wears a mask himself.
Baja California has recorded more than 37,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and 5,951 Covid-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Tijuana ranks first for deaths among the state’s five municipalities and second for cases behind Mexicali.
Mexico City hospitals remain under pressure.
• Authorities in Veracruz announced that tighter restrictions on people’s movements will apply in 12 municipalities for four days this week.
Governor Cuitláhuac García said Monday that a decree that will apply Thursday through Sunday in eight municipalities currently red on the state stoplight system and four municipalities that are orange. The decree detailing the exact measures was due to be published on Tuesday.
The municipalities where the tighter restrictions will apply are Actopan, Cazones, Papantla, Tecolutla, Espinal, Gutiérrez Zamora, Tihuatlán and San Rafael, all of which are red, and Poza Rica, Veracruz, Xalapa and Orizaba, which are orange.
As is the case in some other states, Veracruz has used its own stoplight system to set restrictions rather than that developed by the federal government. The Gulf coast state is currently medium risk yellow on the federal map, having switched to that color from low risk green on December 21.
Veracruz has recorded more than 45,000 coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic and 6,391 Covid-19 deaths. According to federal data, hospital occupancy in the state is 41% for general care beds and 34% for those with ventilators.
• Nuevo León Health Minister Manuel de la O Cavazos said that a case of coronavirus very similar to the more contagious strain first detected in the United Kingdom in September had been found in the northern state. He said the case was 96% similar to the B117 strain, which U.K. authorities said is up to 70% more transmissible. The health minister said that a sample was sent to a federal lab and that federal authorities will determine whether the case is of the new strain or not.
Restaurant workers make some noise in Mexico City.
Some restaurants in Mexico City and México state are defying the red light coronavirus restrictions currently in place in the Valley of México by reopening to in-house diners at a time when they should only be offering takeout and delivery service.
The restaurant chains Sonora Grill, Fisher’s, Toks and Potzocalli were among the establishments that reopened on Monday, the day on which the suspension of nonessential economic activities was originally slated to conclude.
(The Mexico City and México state governments announced last Friday that the suspension would remain in place for another week.)
Sonora Grill, a steakhouse chain, announced its reopening plans on social media.
“Today we open just like informal commerce [such as street food stalls] and public transit (always supersaturated) but with the big difference of always complying with strict safety and hygiene protocols to the letter of the law,” it announced on Twitter.
“Sonora Grill Group has taken the decision to OPEN. Valued guests, we cannot give up. To our leaders we say: we can’t allow ourselves to die. … Our restaurant industry is a source of employment, not infections.”
Fisher’s, a seafood restaurant chain, said on Twitter: “For us, for our families, for everyone. We’ll open … January 11 #abriromorir [open or die].”
The operations director at Potzocalli, which specializes in pozole, told the newspaper Milenio that the chain had no other option but to reopen.
“We decided to take this decision because the money has already run out; we asked for loans but they won’t give them to us anymore and we’re going into more debt. … We opened to generate a few sales and with that … pay our employees,” José Delgado said.
He said that sales have fallen 90% since the closure order took effect three weeks ago, adding that the chain is desperate and will “die” if it doesn’t reopen.
The decision of some restaurants to defy the closure order came four days after more than 500 restaurateurs in Mexico City and México state made a desperate plea to political leaders to allow them to reopen to in-house dining, saying that their businesses will perish if they are not allowed to do so.
Diners at a Sonora Grill that opened in defiance of Covid restrictions.
The national restaurant association said it was not involved in the reopening initiative in Mexico City, asserting that restaurants organized among themselves. However, the president of Canirac acknowledged in an interview that many restaurants no longer have the appetite to comply with the prevailing restrictions.
“We’ve tried to maintain dialogue with the authorities to tell them that people are mad as hell,” Francisco Fernández said. “I can’t tell [restaurant owners] to let their businesses die.”
In response to the defiance, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said that establishments not complying with the red light restrictions will be sanctioned.
“We’re not going to seek any confrontation because that’s what some of them are looking for,” she added. “There are those who want to politicize this issue [the economic shutdown]; that won’t be the case for me.”
The Mexico City government last month announced an economic support package for people affected by the shutdown, including 2,200-peso (US $110) lump sum payments to restaurant workers, but restaurant owners have denounced the fact that they have received no financial support from the authorities.
While some restaurant owners and staff were back serving in-house customers on Monday, others took to the streets of Mexico City’s historic center to demand that the city government declare the restaurant sector essential.
The disgruntled restaurateurs and employees staged a cacerolazo – a protest featuring the banging of pots and pans – during which they declared that if restaurants weren’t given the green light to reopen to in-house dining, they would be forced to close for good.
“[I want] to say to the authorities that we’re not sources of contagion, we’re sources of employment. That’s why we ask that they allow us to work,” said Mireya García, a spokeswoman for the protesting restaurateurs.
The Mexico–United States land border will remain closed for another month, according to officials from both countries.
The reason given was the increase in Covid-19 cases in both countries.
“Due to the propagation of Covid-19 and due to the fact that several federal entities find themselves at the color orange [on the coronavirus stoplight risk assessment system], Mexico has asked the United States to extend restrictions to nonessential land crossings on its common border for one more month,” Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted on its Twitter account Monday.
Restrictions will remain the same as they have been since the crossing ban was initiated on March 21 and remain in effect until February 24, at which time it is likely they will be renewed for another month.
People with reasons considered essential — including those relating to business, health or emergencies — will still be allowed to cross. Flights between the two countries remain unrestricted.
However, there have been many claims that the ban is one-sided because Mexico allows travelers to enter the country from the U.S. side without restrictions.
President López Obrador raised eyebrows in December when he openly welcomed 500,000 Mexicans living abroad, mostly in the United States, who were expected to visit Mexico over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
López-Obrador said that the half a million countrymen deserved to be received “like heroes” because they support Mexico, referring to remittances sent home by Mexican nationals.
One of the vehicles involved in Monday's confrontations between gangsters and police.
A Guanajuato police officer was killed and one National Guardsman was wounded after gunmen believed to belong to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) made five separate attacks on state and federal law enforcement officials Monday in the municipalities of Villagrán and Celaya.
In total, eight of the aggressors were killed and one other presumed gang member was later found dead inside a truck on the road between Celaya and Salamanca.
Three were arrested in the conflicts.
Although some of the gunfights reached as far as Santa Rosa de Lima, a stronghold of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel led until last year by jailed leader José Antonio “El Marro” Yépez Ortiz, authorities attributed the attack to the CJNG.
Yépez was arrested by federal authorities in August, spawning fears that the power vacuum would prompt bloody turf wars between the two gangs in Santa Rosa de Lima territory, which includes Celaya, Irapuato and Villagrán, as well as adjacent zones in the north and south.
In the final tally after the five firefights, authorities confiscated 10 vehicles and several weapons, including guns, grenades — some fragmentation grenades and some improvised — and Molotov cocktails. They also discovered 47 doses of crystal methamphetamine and cardboard signs with messages targeted at an unidentified criminal group.
The first attack on law enforcement occurred at dawn on the road between Santa Rosa de Lima and San José de Guanajuato, authorities said. There, officers ended up in a gunfight with armed men aboard several vehicles, resulting in five of the latter being killed. The police officer who died was injured in that conflict and died in a hospital in Celaya.
After the first attack, authorities brought in reinforcements, who were also attacked on three separate occasions near San Salvador Torrecillas in Villagrán.
After the first of those attacks was staved off, the armed civilians jumped off the pickup truck from which they had staged the firefight and fled into nearby farmland, evading arrest. The second attack, which came from a different vehicle in a different location, resulted in the attackers fleeing the scene without any arrests.
In the third attack, state officers killed one of the aggressors.
The National Guard were also attacked by gunmen in two SUVs in a separate incident between Santa Rosa de Lima and San José de Guanajuato. In that battle, one officer sustained mild injuries, one attacker was killed and a second attacker was wounded and later died. A minor was arrested.
Two other people were also detained on the highway between Celaya and Villagrán after their truck was stopped and they were found to be in possession of drugs and weapons.
Spending on social programs such as the tree-planting initiative has been the president's priority.
Mexico’s refusal to mitigate the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic by boosting public spending is set to leave it with the lowest budget deficit among Latin America’s major economies this year — but that also means its recovery is lagging behind.
President López Obrador, an unlikely fiscal conservative, is fiercely opposed to taking on additional debt. His stimulus plan is equivalent to just 1.1% of GDP, less than a quarter of the average in Latin America according to the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Mexico has spent an eighth of what the region’s biggest economy, Brazil, has spent on pandemic help as a proportion of GDP, according to the commission’s data. And most was in the form of loans to small businesses, not grants.
López Obrador has continued to pay the social benefits that are a hallmark of his government, boosting his popularity even though Mexico has notched up the world’s fourth-highest Covid-19 death toll. He has also plowed ahead with a handful of pet infrastructure projects and with aid for the struggling state oil company Pemex. But he has resisted spending more in other areas.
The president justifies his penny-pinching stance as a mixture of principle and necessity. He believes that his government should avoid increasing public debt which, he fears, future generations would have to finance. He abhors state-funded bailouts, which he argues have in the past turned private debts into a public responsibility.
Since taking office in 2018 he has pursued austerity policies in a bid to free up cash for his priority social and infrastructure projects. He says his crusade against profligacy and corruption has so far saved 1.5 trillion pesos (US $75 billion).
His stance leaves Mexico with a healthier budget balance than other economies in the region, Joan Domene at Oxford Economics noted: “By not spending much on pandemic relief measures, Mexico will be very close to running primary surpluses in 2020 and 2021.”
That will hold down its debt levels. Mexico’s general government gross debt-to-GDP ratio is forecast to remain steady year on year at 65.5% in 2021, according to the IMF. By comparison, in Brazil the ratio is forecast to rise more than 1 percentage point to 102.8%.
But López Obrador’s fiscal restraint is ill-timed, economists argue. The IMF and World Bank have for months been urging nations to borrow to tackle the economic crisis caused by the pandemic, despite the long-term problem of higher public debt that this will leave them with.
“We think they could have done more — Mexico has access to credit and the cost of financing for Mexico in dollars is at historically low levels,” Alejandro Werner, the IMF’s western hemisphere director, said recently. That left Mexico with “an enormous growth challenge in the medium term,” he added.
Brazil’s increased spending is set to help its economy through the crisis better than Mexico’s — Brazil will regain its pre-pandemic GDP level by 2023, according to IMF forecasts, but Mexico could take until 2026.
López Obrador is putting money into infrastructure projects such as the Dos Bocas oil refinery rather than economic stimulus.
Mexico’s economy was contracting even before Covid-19 struck and IMF estimates suggest that it suffered the third-biggest contraction among Latin America’s major economies in 2020. The economy has shrunk year on year for six straight quarters, according to the state statistics institute.
Mexicans themselves are gloomy. In a new poll, 59% felt the economy was faring badly or very badly. Just 14% said it was doing well.
Christopher Garman, managing director for the Americas at consultancy Eurasia Group, said in a recent research note that policies hostile to private investors — Mexico has canceled a partially-built airport and brewery and abruptly changed energy sector rules, for example — are also likely to hold back growth.
Mexico’s economy will get an indirect boost if Joe Biden launches further stimulus measures in the U.S., its biggest trading partner. Furthermore, its restraint on debt has reduced the risk of a credit-rating agency downgrading it to junk — a threat that had once appeared inevitable this year — analysts say.
“A year ago, Mexico was looking worse than every other country in the region,” said Domene. “Now it’s not that bad.”
Andrés Abadía at Pantheon Macroeconomics called a downgrade avoidable, though. He added: “The situation could worsen faster than elsewhere.”
Even if Mexico hits the government’s target of 4.6% GDP growth in 2021 — well above the IMF’s expectation of 3.5% — state revenues are under increasing strain and, with midterm elections due in June, López Obrador will be unwilling to increase taxes.
Mexico received a public finance boost in 2020 because the tax authority squeezed longstanding debts from large companies, but that feat will be hard to sustain, according to analysts. Pemex remains a drain on state finances and Mexico has burned through most of its budget stabilization fund known as FEIP, a rainy-day savings pot.
“We think the FEIP will have run out in December [2020],” said Mariana Campos at México Evalúa, a think tank.
Meanwhile, a bonanza that the government had a few months ago been set to enjoy from the Bank of México’s surplus on its dollar reserves has not materialized. Analysts had believed it could total as much as $25 billion, but the recent recovery in the peso may erode it.
“The way things are going, it’s probable there won’t be any windfall for the government,” said one former senior public official.
That leaves López Obrador facing dwindling revenues, so he is unlikely to change his stance on Mexico’s fiscal policy.
As Domene put it: “You only need money if you plan to spend.”
Senior citizens will be up next for Covid vaccine.
The Covid-19 vaccination program will be extended to all 32 states of Mexico on Tuesday, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Monday as the country recorded more than 7,000 new cases and almost 700 deaths.
“In the vaccination plan, we’re moving from the calibration phase to the expansion phase. We’re going to have vaccination units operating in Covid hospitals in the 32 federal entities,” the coronavirus point man told reporters at the Health Ministry’s nightly press briefing.
The deputy minister said the establishment of more vaccination points would “radically change” the pace of the vaccine rollout.
Mexico started immunizing healthcare workers on December 24 using the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine but the vaccination program has been limited to Mexico City and Coahuila. So far only 87,060 people have received a first dose of the vaccine, which is administered in two shots three weeks apart.
But López-Gatell highlighted that almost 440,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine were scheduled to arrive Tuesday, adding that they would be distributed by the military. It is expected that all health workers in Mexico will be vaccinated against Covid-19 by the end of January, he said.
López-Gatell: pace of vaccination set to change radically.
The focus will subsequently shift to seniors aged 80 and over followed by those in the 70-79 and 60-69 age brackets.
President López Obrador said Tuesday that it’s expected that 15 million seniors will be vaccinated against Covid-19 between January and April. People aged under 60 with chronic diseases that make them more vulnerable to a serious Covid-19 illness will be next in line.
The president said last week that the aim was to inoculate 12.45 million seniors by the end of March, explaining that 10,000 vaccination brigades would fan out across the country to complete the task.
Presenting a five-stage national vaccination plan in December, López-Gatell said that the intention is to administer Covid-19 vaccines to about 75% of the population aged 16 and over by the end of 2021.
To reach that ambitious target, Mexico intends to use a range of Covid-19 vaccines.
The Pfizer vaccine is the only one currently being used in Mexico but the health regulator Cofepris last week approved the AstraZeneca/Oxford University shot. That vaccine – for which the government has an agreement to buy 77.4 million doses – will be used in Mexico starting in March, López-Gatell said Tuesday.
The deputy minister said Monday that the federal government has held initial discussions with Russia to purchase 24 million doses of its Sputnik V vaccine. López-Gatell said he met with Russian officials during a trip to Argentina last week and that the Mexican government reached “preliminary agreements” to purchase that number of doses – enough to inoculate 12 million people.
Speaking at López Obrador’s press conference on Tuesday, the deputy minister said the Sputnik vaccine has a “capacity and efficiency similar to the other vaccines that have been authorized.”
(Russia said in December that the vaccine had an efficacy of 91.4%.)
López-Gatell said that Cofepris began the vaccine review process on the weekend and that a decision with respect to emergency use approval will be taken soon.
Mexico also has an agreement to purchase 35 million doses of China’s CanSino Biologics single-dose vaccine. Immunization could begin in February if it is approved by Cofepris, the Foreign Affairs Ministry said last week.
The government has pledged to make vaccines available free of charge to the entire population of Mexico. López Obrador has said that he is not opposed to the private sector purchasing and administering vaccines but suggested it wouldn’t be easy due to limited global supply.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. milenio
The Health Ministry reported 7,594 new cases on Monday, pushing the accumulated tally just above 1.54 million. The official Covid-19 death toll rose to 134,368 with 662 additional fatalities registered.
Hospital occupancy levels remain a concern in several states, and scores of healthcare facilities across the country have reached 100% capacity.
The situation is particularly dire in Mexico City, the country’s coronavirus epicenter. The occupancy rate for general care beds set aside for coronavirus patients in the capital is currently 91.5%, according to federal data, while 86% of beds with ventilators are taken.
Mexico City has recorded just under 369,000 coronavirus cases, a figure that accounts for almost one quarter of total cases across Mexico. The number of Covid-19 fatalities in the capital – 23,612 – is equivalent to 17.5% of the national death toll.
Official figures for both coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico are widely believed to be significant undercounts due to the low testing rate here.
The right to information is already guaranteed, insists President López Obrador.
The national transparency watchdog is not needed because the federal government maintains “permanent communication” with citizens and guarantees the right to information, President López Obrador said Monday.
The president’s remarks came after he announced last week that his government intends to incorporate autonomous organizations such as the National Institute for Transparency and Access to Information (Inai) and the Federal Telecommunications Institute into federal ministries and departments in order to save money and eliminate the duplication of responsibilities.
The plan was widely denounced as an attempt by López Obrador to further concentrate power in the executive. Its announcement came after the government abolished 109 public trusts late last year on the grounds they were vehicles for corruption.
Speaking at his regular news conference on Monday, the president stated: “If we have permanent communication, if the right to information is guaranteed … there is no need … for an entire [transparency] apparatus that costs so much. It costs 1 billion pesos [US $49.9 million] to maintain the transparency institute.”
The Inai is not necessary “if we act with rectitude and fulfill our responsibility,” he stressed, “because we have to respect and enforce the laws – and transparency is a golden rule of democracy.”
“So why have a costly administrative apparatus if the government is obliged to report and reveal everything it does? Besides, this is a government of the people, for the people and with the people – we don’t have anything to hide,” López Obrador said.
“It’s no longer the time of the corrupt governments that dominated during the entire neoliberal period [and] had to go around hiding information, reserving it.”
The president charged that previous governments (he describes the 36 years before he took office as the neoliberal period) created autonomous bodies to oversee their actions to create the impression that they were honest when in fact they were anything but.
“All these organizations that were created for pretense, that cost a lot, that are maintained with the public budget – which is the money of the people, are not necessary because the government already exists; there is the executive power, the legislative power and the judicial power. [So] why did they create all these alternative bodies? … To pretend that there was transparency, to pretend there was honesty.”
In a lengthy consideration of the matter, López Obrador went on to say that autonomous bodies eat up billions of pesos of public money that could otherwise be directed to education, healthcare and “people’s wellbeing.”
“All this has to be debated. That’s why I put in on the table, so that we all reflect on this matter,” he said.
The president, who met with his cabinet later on Monday morning to discuss the proposal, said the first step would be to review the various autonomous bodies, among which are several regulators.
“All these bodies were created in other circumstances, when the government was organized [and] oriented to serve as an instrument, as a facilitator of the looting of the assets of the people and the nation; the government was a committee at the service of a predatory minority,” López Obrador said.
“… It’s important that it’s known that we arrived here to transform and for that reason, even though they don’t like it, we’re going to continue reviewing the mess they left.”
Despite the president’s claim that his government informs citizens of everything they have a right to know, Inai data suggests that the public is not entirely happy with its level of transparency and clarity.
Information obtained by the news website La Silla Rota shows that 4,491 clarification orders related to transparency – which stem from citizens’ requests for more or clearer information – were submitted to government departments by Inai in 2020. That figure is more than five times higher than the number of clarification orders it made in 2018, the final year of the government led by former president Enrique Peña Nieto, whose six-year term was plagued by corruption scandals.
The government departments to which Inai passed on the highest number of clarification orders last year were, in order, the ministries of Public Education (SEP), Public Administration (SFP), National Defense (Sedena) and Health (Ssa).
Requests for clarification from the Education Ministry increased from just 24 in 2018 to 866 last year. The SFP and Sedena only received four Inai orders for clarification in the last year of Peña Nieto’s government but were given 397 and 359, respectively, in 2020.
Inai data also suggests that the office of the president (Presidencia) is not as transparent as López Obrador claims. In 2020, Inai formally instructed the office to supply or clarify information on 198 occasions while it did so a record 526 times in 2019.
In the final year of Peña Nieto’s term, his office was only directed to supply or clarify information on seven occasions.
Citizens’ applications for information increased to 3,721 in 2019 from 896 in 2018 before declining to 1,774 last year.
With transparency evidently not as strong a suit as López Obrador would have people believe, it’s not surprising that the plan to incorporate Inai into a government department – over which the president has ultimate control – has not been well received by many.
Investigative journalists are among those who stand to lose if the president gets his way and Inai is effectively disbanded.
Eliminating Inai is an attack on transparency: Romandía.
Writing in the newspaper Milenio, Sandra Romandía said that López Obrador’s proposal “sounds disastrous” for her profession.
Romandía cited a case in which reporters from Semanario Zeta, a news outlet in Tijuana, Baja California, gained access to information via transparency requests that allowed them to expose that some lawmakers in the northern state had improperly used generous allowances granted to them. Without a body that guarantees the right to transparency and access to information, that exposé and others would have been impossible to reveal, she asserted.
The president’s proposal to eliminate Inai is an attack on decades-long efforts to make Mexico more transparent, she contended, writing that the 2002 creation of the Federal Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection, Inai’s predeccesor, was a historical achievement that not only benefited journalists but democracy in Mexico.
The journalist charged that an Inai incorporated into the SFP – which López Obrador said was an option – would be toothless, pointing out that the ministry’s head, Public Administration Minister Irma Sandoval, is “aligned” with the president.
After quoting early 20th century United States president Theodore Roosevelt – who said in 1910 that “a great democracy has got to be progressive, or it will soon cease to be either great or a democracy” – Romandía wrote:
“To take backward steps is to erase from the map the hope for a better, more educated nation, with more information for decision making. It’s to erase moments like that … which the Semanario Zeta team and others lived, which – thanks to the exposure of realities [others] want to hide – generate changes in favor of a better society.”
Verdologa, a succulent, has an almost infinite number of varieties.
I think the first time I noticed verdolaga was during a weekly shopping trip at the big central market in Mazatlán. Standing in front of piles of produce at my regular stand, my gaze fell upon big bundles of what looked like some sort of succulent. Qué es eso? I asked Sergio.
He explained what it was and what to do with it, and I went home with a third of that giant bundle — about two big handfuls — and a new vegetable entered my culinary repertoire.
Since then, I’ve added verdolaga, called purslane in the United States, to a host of dishes. It tastes kind of like fresh-cut grass, and I find it a wonderful flavor and texture addition to simple dishes like scrambled eggs, omelets, stir-fries, vegetable soups and, of course, salads.
At its most basic, verdolaga can be sautéed with garlic and chopped tomatoes in olive oil and eaten with warm tortillas. Both the stems and leaves are thick and juicy, crunchy when raw and becoming chewy and a bit mucilaginous when cooked — but not in a bad way! As you become more familiar with it, you’ll notice some bunches have smaller, thinner and younger stems and leaves, which will be more tender.
The word verdolaga comes from a nickname for South American football clubs, which have green and white uniforms, like Argentina’s Ferrocarril Oeste and Colombia’s Atlético Nacional.
Verdolaga is indeed a succulent, with an almost infinite number of varieties. It grows wild all over the world and has been eaten for centuries, all the way back to prehistoric times. Cultivated varieties are more tender; all are high in vitamin C, omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants. In Mexico, verdolaga is a popular vegetable easily found everywhere from big grocery stores (usually near the cilantro and fresh herbs) to your corner tienda.
This pork stew goes well with beans and tortillas.
Salsa Verde Verdolaga with Pork
4 big handfuls verdolaga, washed, thick stems removed
2 lb. pork shoulder or butt
1 Tbsp. salt
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 lb. tomatillos, husked and quartered
4 serrano chiles, halved
½ onion
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
½ cup cilantro, chopped fine
¼ – ½ cup beef stock or water
Salt and pepper to taste
Clean verdolaga, removing thick stems. Trim the pork, cut into palm-sized pieces, and salt liberally on all sides. In a blender or food processor, mix tomatillos, onion, garlic, chiles and cilantro on high speed until smooth.
In a deep Dutch oven or stew pot, sear pork to brown on all sides. Remove from pan and set aside. Pour tomatillo sauce into hot pan to deglaze, stirring well. Add broth or water to pan and place meat back into the liquid. Cover and simmer on medium-low for 1 hour.
When meat begins to pull apart, add the verdolaga. Cook about 30 minutes more until meat is easily pulled apart with a fork.
Serve in a bowl with black beans and flour tortillas.
Top these scrambled eggs and verdologa with the salsa of your choice.
Scrambled Eggs with Verdolaga
3 handfuls verdolaga
6 eggs
1 onion
Salt & pepper
2 Tbsp. olive oil or butter
Clean verdolaga, removing thick stems. In a medium saucepan, bring it to a boil and then cook for 3-4 minutes.
Remove from pan, drain and set aside. In a small bowl, whisk eggs well. Finely chop the onion and sauté in a hot pan with olive oil or butter.
Add eggs, lower heat and cook, gently stirring, till almost done. Add cooked verdolaga and stir, cooking for 2 more minutes or so.
Top with salsa of your choice.
Verdolaga Salad with Mango Vinaigrette
4 cups verdolaga, cleaned
1 cooked chicken breast, cubed
2 Tbsp. fresh mint leaves, minced
½ cup mango pulp or finely chopped fresh mango
2 Tbsp. fresh ginger, minced
1 Tbsp. olive oil
¼ cup vinegar
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. black pepper
1 Tbsp. sugar
Optional: 1 cup any kind of lettuce
In a bowl, mix verdolaga, chicken, tomato, mint leaves and other lettuce, if using.
Set aside.
In a jar, put mango, ginger, olive oil, vinegar, salt, black pepper and sugar; shake well to mix.
Pour over the salad and stir gently.
Verdologa is called purslane in English.
Turkish Stew with Verdolaga
This classic Turkish dish is usually served garnished with a dollop of yogurt.
1 bunch verdologa (about 3-4 cups)
1 onion
1 carrot
1 big tomato, chopped
1-2 cloves of garlic
2-3 Tbsp. olive oil
2 jalapeño or serrano chiles, or to taste
Salt & pepper
Rinse verdogola and remove thick stems. Slice onions and carrots. Add olive oil to a large saucepan, add onions and garlic and sauté for a minute on medium-low heat, then add carrots. Chop verdolaga roughly and add to the mixture; add tomato.
Sauté onion in olive oil in a medium pot over medium-high heat until translucent and lightly golden, 5-7 minutes. Stir in garlic, tomatoes, tomato paste and seasonings. Add 4 cups of boiling vegetable stock or water to the pot and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Add lentils and cook 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Stir in verdolaga and chickpeas, lower heat to medium-low and simmer for 5-7 minutes more.
Adjust seasonings and garnish with chopped cilantro.
Janet Blaser has been a writer, editor and storyteller her entire life and feels fortunate to be able to write about great food, amazing places, fascinating people and unique events. Why We Left: An Anthology of American Women Expats is her first book.
