Flood victims salvage their belongings from flooded homes in Tabasco.
Tropical Storm Gamma claimed the lives of at least six people in two states and affected some 600,000 citizens as heavy rain and near-hurricane force winds wreaked havoc on Mexico’s south and southeast over the weekend.
The worst affected state was Tabasco, where two people died and more than 590,000 people were adversely affected by the storm.
Federal authorities said there was one death in the municipality of Jalapa and another in Jalpa de Méndez. Both victims drowned in floodwaters.
Authorities in Chiapas said that four members of the same family, including two children, died after a landslide buried their home in San Juan Chamula.
In Tabasco, 593,150 people were affected by flooding, Civil Protection authorities said on Sunday night. More than 80% of those affected live in Centro, the municipality where state capital Villahermosa is located.
A beach toy came in handy for these flood victims in Tabasco.
But state Civil Protection chief Jorge Mier y Terán said that residents of 14 of 17 municipalities in Tabasco were affected by the storm. He said that 74 temporary shelters were set up across the Gulf coast state and that 4,595 people had taken refuge in them.
In Chiapas, 543 homes across 35 municipalities were damaged, said José Elías Morales Rodríguez, emergencies director with the state Civil Protection service. He said that two schools, more than 300 roads, two bridges and water infrastructure in the southern state also sustained damage.
National Civil Protection chief Laura Velázquez Alzúa said that a total of 131 temporary shelters had been set up in Tabasco, Chiapas and Veracruz. She said more than 11,000 homes, the vast majority of which are in Tabasco, were flooded as a result of heavy rain.
The tropical storm made landfall near Tulum, Quintana Roo, on Saturday with maximum sustained winds of almost 110 kilometers per hour (km/h), just 9 km/h below hurricane force levels. It also brought heavy rain to parts of the Yucatán Peninsula.
The United States National Hurricane Center (NHC) said Monday morning that Gamma was 255 kilometers east-northeast off the coast of Progreso, Yucatán, and that it was expected to make landfall again on Tuesday along the northern coast of the peninsula.
It said that Gamma is drifting toward the south-southwest at about 4 km/h and that flash flooding is possible in the state of Yucatán.
Citizens in Tabasco flee the flooding.
The NHC said that a turn toward the southwest or west-southwest is expected by tonight and that the same general motion is expected to continue through Wednesday morning. On the forecast track, the center of Gamma should move inland over the northwest coast of the Yucatán Peninsula Tuesday night and remain inland through Thursday, it said.
“The maximum sustained winds are near 75 km/h with higher gusts,” the NHC said. “Gradual weakening is forecast, and Gamma is expected to degenerate to to a post-tropical remnant low on Wednesday. Dissipation of the low should occur on Friday.”
A day after thousands of people flocked to Mexico City’s central square to demand his resignation, President López Obrador sent a blunt message to his detractors on Sunday: be patient and express your dissatisfaction at the ballot box.
AMLO, as the president is best known, stressed that his administration will always respect its opponents and that there will be no repression of protesters “because we’re not the same” as past governments.
Speaking at an event in Hermosillo, Sonora, López Obrador said “the only thing” the government wants is for protesters to be patient, noting that they will have the opportunity to express their discontent at the 2021 federal midterm elections, at which the entire lower house of Congress will be renewed, and at a vote in early 2022 at which the public will be asked if they want the president to complete his six-year term.
“The elections are coming up, we can resolve our differences [at that time]. They [our detractors] want to conserve the corrupt regime, the regime of injustices and privileges, I don’t have the slightest doubt about that. We want to change and transform [the country]. These fundamental differences that we have can be resolved democratically,” López Obrador said.
“There are going to be elections in the entire country in June next year and then I’m going to subject myself to a revocation of mandate [vote]. In the first quarter of 2022, the people of Mexico will be asked, ‘Do you want the president to continue or to resign?’ I’m a democrat and in democracy the people are in charge. The people install [their representatives] and the people remove [them],” he said.
Protesters shout ‘AMLO out!’ during Saturday’s event.
“I accept these rules so the only thing I ask of the conservatives, who are annoyed because there is no longer corruption, … is to be patient. These two dates are coming up, … if the people so decide, we’ll have to withdraw. [But] while the people support us, we’re going to continue governing the country.”
Even though recent polls indicate that his approval rating has dropped below 60%, López Obrador claimed that surveys show that he and his government have the support of 70% of the population, adding that he didn’t believe that level of support would decline because “we’re going to continue working for the benefit of the people.”
The president’s plea for patience came after the National Anti-AMLO Front (Frenaaa) – which two weeks ago set up a protest camp in the zócalo, the capital’s main square – held its largest ever demonstration on Saturday.
Thousands of people marched from the Monument to the Revolution to the zócalo, where they joined the sit-in protesters whose tents spread across approximately half of the large square.
Gathered opposite the National Palace – the seat of executive power and López Obrador’s home – the protesters called for the president’s resignation, shouting “López out!” with their fists raised.
Protesters are also angry about the economic response to the pandemic and what one man described as the government’s implementation of “21st-century socialism.”
The self-styled leader of Mexico’s “fourth transformation” has concentrated even greater power in his own hands.
When a president demands “blind loyalty” from officials, alarm bells should ring. When he calls for a people’s vote on prosecuting his predecessors, launches a broadside at the independent electoral body and publicly shames those who criticize him, there is good reason to feel fearful.
The Supreme Court has become the latest institution in Mexico to bow to the will of populist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. It ruled last Thursday that his plan to call a referendum over putting five ex-presidents on trial was constitutional, ignoring the principle that such decisions should be made by prosecutors on the basis of evidence.
Its only change was to reword the question on the ballot, making it vaguer and dropping the former leaders’ names.
López Obrador was elected by a landslide in 2018 with a mandate to pursue a radical “transformation.” He promised to rid his country of corruption, reduce the high murder rate and replace technocratic, market-friendly policies with actions that put the “poor and forgotten” first.
Such ideas had strong voter appeal: Mexican politics had been incorrigibly venal for decades and drug violence had scarred large areas. A narrow elite dominated the country, while the economic growth spurred by NAFTA had benefited the north but left the south behind.
What López Obrador did not win was a mandate to dismantle institutions. Mexico’s democracy was already fragile and its public bodies weak, the legacy of years of untrammelled presidential power and the predominance of a single political party. Genuine progressive reform would have granted greater autonomy to states and municipalities, reduced presidential power and reinforced the rule of law.
Instead, the self-styled leader of Mexico’s “fourth transformation” has concentrated even greater power in his own hands. Most big decisions are his alone. Institutions which refuse to bend to his will are targeted. The independent electoral authority has been attacked by the president for having “never guaranteed free elections,” even though it certified his landslide victory.
Journalists who disparage the president can expect to be named, accused of being “at the service of the authoritarian and corrupt regimes” which preceded him, and asked to apologize. Environmentalists who criticize his pet infrastructure projects, including an expensive new railway line to be driven partly through virgin Mayan forest, are described as foreign lackeys for hire.
Why is López Obrador so intolerant? After nearly two years in power, positive results are meager, apart from a modest pension reform. Economic growth halted in his first year and Mexico’s recession this year is forecast to be the worst of any major Latin American country bar Argentina.
Corruption and crime remain intolerably high and an erratic response to the coronavirus has led to one of the world’s highest per capita death tolls. The president’s habit of withdrawing approval for major projects which had already been agreed has crippled business investment. His interventions in the energy industry have favoured fossil fuels over renewables and the ailing state oil giant Pemex over the private sector.
The golden opportunity offered by the newly-agreed U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement to lure American companies returning from China to Mexico is being squandered.
Mexico is indeed being transformed, but not in the way López Obrador had promised. Unless the president changes course quickly, Latin America’s second-biggest economy risks sliding back into a poorer, darker and more repressive past, one inhabited by the authoritarian caudillos the region hoped it had left behind.
Tropical Storm Gamma at 4:00 p.m. CDT Saturday. The red dot shows its current location; in purple is the tropical storm warning area.
A hurricane warning for the east coast of the Yucatán peninsula — from north of Punta Allen to Cancún — has been downgraded to a tropical storm warning as Tropical Storm Gamma moves over the northeastern part of the peninsula.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said the storm warning is in effect for north and west of Punta Allen to Dzilam, Yucatán, including Cozumel.
Gamma is forecast to move into the southern Gulf of Mexico on Sunday and pass near or north of the northern coast of the Yucatán peninsula Sunday night and Monday.
The NHC said maximum sustained winds had decreased to about 100 km/h at 4:00 p.m. CDT on Saturday, when the storm was located about 60 kilometers north-northwest of Tulum.
Additional weakening is forecast for Saturday night and Sunday, followed by re-intensification by Monday.
Heavy rain is forecast across portions of the peninsula.
Puente Grande, once home to El Chapo Guzmán—until he escaped.
A notorious maximum-security prison in Jalisco whose closure was announced this week has been under the control of inmates belonging to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), Security Minister Alfonso Durazo said on Thursday.
“For inmates who belonged to the CJNG, being at the Puente Grande prison meant having all the conditions to continue ruling themselves, and part of the goal is to disperse these criminals among other prisons to eliminate the possibility of them repeating their self-rule,” Durazo said during a videoconference.
He offered Puente Grande as an example of how not to run a prison. “It has been irresponsible for the Mexican state to have criminals of such a high degree in a prison where some cells do not even have locks on the doors,” Durazo said, noting that there was a very high risk of escape from the facility, which Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán famously did in 2001.
The decision was made to close the prison and disperse the its 400 inmates to other medium and high-security prisons across Mexico to limit their influence and “take them out of their comfort zone,” Durazo said, as well as preserve their human rights and dignity. Closing the prison will also save Mexico 800 million pesos, nearly US $37 million.
Durazo said the federal government has up to 12,000 places available in prisons built during Felipe Calderón’s administration.
At Puente Grande, the inmates were in charge.
President López Obrador claims Calderón’s contracting out of prisons to private businesses is the reason for Puente Grande’s closure, not undue cartel influence.
“We are paying for federal prisons that we do not occupy. We have 9,000 spaces in federal prisons, and we have to pay as if they were full because those are the contracts that we inherited,” López Obrador said, indicating that he is in discussions with the governor of Jalisco to put the prison property to a different use.
Puente Grande, located near Guadalajara, was made famous by El Chapo’s escape in a laundry truck, but is also known for its riots involving highly dangerous inmates. In May a riot left seven inmates dead (three were gunned down and four were beaten to death) and nine injured. Authorities offered no explanation for how guns got inside the prison
Corruption at the facility was hardly a secret. Milenio reported in September 2015 that inmates controlled the majority of prison stores, managed the flow of prohibited substances, controlled the area reserved for conjugal visits and allocated prison cells.
The CJNG’s influence has also been well documented. In 2017 a video surfaced of a lavish party complete with a well-known musical group surfaced. The party was hosted by CJNG member José Luis “Don Chelo” Gutiérrez Valencia and the footage showed prisoners, women and children dancing and drinking.
“I’m the one who rules here,” he told his guests. “Ask for what you want, I’ll make you sure you have it.”
Other notorious inmates over the years included Guadalajara Cartel kingpin Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero and Alfredo “El Mochomo” Beltrán Leyva.
Fundraising by Los Amigos del Arte Popular in the U.S. bought US $1,400 worth of corn, beans and some basics for these artisans in Chiapas.
It is almost cliché now to say that the pandemic has hit people hard, often those who can least afford it.
These include Mexico’s artisans, whose centuries-old traditions today depend on the tourism industry and the festival calendar. Who knows when the festivals will resume and when the people will decide it’s safe?
To make things even worse, the last months have shown just how useless Mexico’s institutions dedicated to handcrafts can be. Museums and government culture agencies shut down completely or are operating only enough to justify their own existence.
Fortunately, some help has come from individuals and organizations who care about those who create fine works in wood, clay, leather, metals, and more in some of the poorest areas of the country.
Although there was a desire to help with the immediate needs for food and rent money in the first weeks, the truth was that the only people who could help artisans were family members (sometimes) and those organizations dedicated to such needs for the general public.
Christian Mendoza Ruiz of Oaxaca made this rug for Friends of Oaxacan Folk Art for a Covid exhibition online.
But help targeting artisans has begun to materialize. The first were simple fundraisers such as a GoFundMe by handcraft collector Alan Goldberg and a fundraiser by the Los Amigos de Arte Popular, each raising US $20,000. One very notable early effort was the 5 million pesos spent by the Alfredo Helú Foundation to buy handcrafts from 156 families in Oaxaca and some other states.
Soon after, it seemed that everyone, craftsperson or not, was making novelty face masks as they are one of the few products that sell.
As Goldberg noted in an interview, such efforts are only a “band-aid.” The baseline problem is that artisans have no way to sell because they have been almost entirely dependent on the tourist market and selling to middlemen who are themselves often beholden to tourism. Mexican artisans have not been very internet savvy, even though much better prices can often be found outside Mexico than within.
As the months wore on, efforts began to shift to longer-term solutions, almost all internet-related. Goldberg’s GoFundMe morphed into a Covid-19 themed art competition, displaying the entry online.
The Friends of Oaxacan Folk Art (FOFA), based in New York, did something similar. They offered grants to past winners of previous competitions to make pieces related to the pandemic, which were exhibited online on their Instagram page. Many sold the pieces that were shown, even though FOFA does not directly get involved in sales.
The Feria Maestros de Arte is an organization that for 20 years has been focused on holding one of Mexico’s best fine handcraft fairs in Chapala, Jalisco. With such a narrow focus, the cancellation of the November 2020 event has been almost an existential crisis. Worried about how the accepted artists for this year would cope, they have tried their hand at selling online.
Artisans Friday is a collaboration by Ayuda Mutua CDMX and Red de Artesanos Anáhuac of Mexico City to support the sale of handcrafts by artisans.
Taking a cue from Stephanie Schneiderman’s six-week commercial project called the Tuesday Textile Tianguis, they set up a weekly sale on Facebook called the Monday Bazaar. For the first three weeks, sales were good, but they have since dropped significantly. They are experimenting with ways to engage the public to bring customers in.
Another sales effort is a collaboration between a mutual aid society created for the pandemic, Ayuda Mutua CDMX, and Red de Artesanos Anáhuac, a Mexican organization that promotes the work of Mexico City-based artisans. Ayuda Mutua previously had a sale of fine art on their website, which helped some artists sell and raised funds for their food basket program.
The version for handcrafts is called the Solidarity Market CDMX with pages in English and Spanish. After the run on the Ayuda Mutua website, Red de Artesanos plans to shift the developed pages and payment processes for their own site for future development.
Goldberg is also developing a website with the purpose of giving artisans a place online to reach national and international markets, which should be ready by the end of the year.
Thinking even longer term, FOFA decided to offer online classes and mentoring in online marketing and sales targeting mostly younger artisans in Oaxaca. The idea here is to give individual artisans the tools to create their own presence online, not only teaching how the technologies work, but by having marketing experts help them develop their branding, customer service and the like. So far, half of the trained artisans have been able to sell at least one piece to the United States.
The shift to online sales is a struggle for both artisans and projects. Those that seem to be doing immediately well have taken advantage of online audiences that they already had cultivated. Schneiderman stated her initiative resulted in about 800,000 pesos in sales to artisans in Mexico in only seven weeks by taking advantage of the audience she had for her tour business.
It is a similar story for FOFA and Ayuda Mutua. However, for those who are starting from scratch, the shift to online sales is still an ongoing struggle.
The experimentation with online marketing is an important step for the handcraft industry in Mexico. It is not easy for either the artisans or organizations as so much work is involved before any benefit is seen. With travel still not recommended by most experts, however, these efforts do allow those of us who love Mexico a way to support its hardworking people.
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 17 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture. She publishes a blog called Creative Hands of Mexicoand her first book, Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta, was published last year. Her culture blog appears weekly on Mexico News Daily.
People from a number of different walks of life took turns occupying the Tepotzotlán toll booths on the Mexico-Querétaro highway Friday, lifting the tollgates for drivers in exchange for spare change, a win-win situation for commuters and toll occupiers as the normal fee is 90 pesos.
A group of political activists was there early Friday morning, later replaced by people who told drivers they had lost their jobs and were seeking money to help support their families.
Around noon, bus drivers and circus workers moved in to take their turn at collecting money from commuters.
But when a group calling itself La Lágrima arrived Friday afternoon, the situation turned tense.
La Lágrima tried to kick the 40 bus drivers out of the toll plaza area, but more than 100 circus people went to their defense. Violence ensued as both sides shoved and kicked each other, some attacking with their belts, police said.
After brawling for about 15 minutes, members of La Lágrima got back on their bus and left. Authorities say around 200 people, including a few women, participated in the scuffle but no one was seriously injured.
The practice of commandeering toll plazas has become commonplace in Mexico. Between June 19 and September 29, a report shows that in Mexico state alone, plazas were taken over 1,215 times by various groups of people.
The Ecatepec-Pirámides plaza was seized 445 times, followed by Ojo de Agua which was taken 338 times. The Revolución toll plaza was occupied 313 times.
“Carnival workers, circus workers, waiters, neighborhood groups, they take turns taking the booths. Some leave and others arrive,” said MarcoAntonioFrías Galván, head of the Association of Road Infrastructure Concessionaires.
Plazas in Mexico City, Morelos, Baja California, Guerrero, México state, Oaxaca, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Sonora, Puebla and Hidalgo were occupied last week, according to a report by the newspaper Reforma.
In 2019 the country saw revenue losses totaling 3 billion pesos (US $138.7 million), according to Capufe, the federal highways and bridges agency, and this year losses from hijacked plazas are already at a similar level.
Enrique González, president of the National Chamber of Trucking, said that toll plaza takeovers cause significant losses for his industry, as truck drivers must pay those occupying the toll booths as well as tolls levied by sensors that detect their electronic tags.
Apart from necessity, impunity is also a significant incentive for would-be occupiers as a single toll plaza can yield up to 1 million pesos (about US $46,000) per day.
Ex-presidents Carlos Salinas, Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto could face prosecution.
President López Obrador’s plan to ask citizens to vote on whether they believe recent ex-presidents of Mexico should face prosecution for crimes allegedly committed while in office will cost more than 8 billion pesos (US $370 million), says Uuc-kib Espadas of the National Electoral Institute.
Espadas estimated that the referendum will cost the same as a federal election. It would probably take place August 1 next year, just under two months after the midterm elections, and would require “a significant effort on the part of the institute in technical terms, budgets and human resources.”
For José Antonio Crespo, a political analyst and historian, the consultation is “absurd” and unnecessary.
“It is a consultation regarding the whole past, all the political actors, all the decisions, it does not set limits, it does not say from where and until when, it does not say anything about Mexico beyond what we know. And it’s going to cost 8 billion pesos … It’s absurd,” said Crespo. “This money would be more useful for children with cancer, for vaccines, and they will spend it on a survey for which we already know the result: 90% [of people] want previous crimes to be reviewed.”
Former president Felipe Calderón, who along with Carlos Salinas, Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox and Enrique Peña Nieto could be investigated should a majority of citizens support the initiative, has said the president is confusing Mexico with a “Roman Circus,” and called the consultation “a regression of thousands of years in terms of justice.”
“If he has well-founded proof against me, he should go to the attorney general today and present it without the need for a consultation. But if he doesn’t have proof or specific accusations, … he should stop harassing me and respect my rights like any other citizen,” Calderón said.
Many critics have said the purpose of the vote is political and has little to do with justice. Next year’s midterm elections will be critical for the Morena party, which currently has a majority in both houses of Congress.
The Guadalajara International Book Fair will look a bit different this year.
The largest book fair in the Americas and the second largest in the world announced Friday that this year the event will be virtual.
In its 34th year, the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), the world’s largest Spanish-language book fair with an attendance last year of 828,000 people, will not be an in-person event due to coronavirus concerns despite organizers’ initial hopes.
“The restrictions on the organization of massive events and international travel, and the responsibility to protect the health of partners, visitors, participants and exhibitors, has led us to make the difficult decision,” fair president Raúl Padilla told a press conference.
“We are aware that digital does not replace face-to-face, since the main reason for the fair is meeting people, but through the digital format we will keep the FIL flame alive. This edition will be memorable,” he vowed.
Acclaimed Mexican writer Martín Solares congratulated FIL for having made a “wise decision” that “demonstrates their concern for readers and by being carried out virtually, they have opportunities to show a very creative path for other fairs in the world.”
Scheduled for November 28 through December 6, the fair will go ahead with all content disseminated digitally on the fair’s website, social media platforms, University of Guadalajara television and via public media throughout Mexico and Latin America. A full schedule of programming will be released at the end of October.
Exhibitors who have already registered for the 2020 conference will benefit from free tools available on the FIL website to help virtual attendees browse titles available from publishing companies.
The FIL website will also introduce a business platform to help publishing professionals access conversations, statistics and other information related to the industry.
There will also be no country of honor this year as in previous years.
Moving to a virtual format means a loss of between 24 and 28 million pesos (US $1.1 to 1.3 million) for the FIL, but also affects the income of other visitor-dependent services already reeling from the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
Of the 44 taxi drivers who once worked at the Expo Guadalajara taxi stand, only two remain, and they report fares have dropped by 75%.
A cafeteria near the fair will also suffer. Shift manager Álvaro Villaseñor said that income typically increases 200% during the days of the fair, an influx of cash that will be sorely missed in a difficult year.
The University of Guadalajara estimates that the 2019 FIL generated close to 8 billion pesos (US $370 million) in revenues for Guadalajara businesses, with 20% to 30% of that amount corresponding to tourism.
The president's supporters and detractors welcomed him to Chihuahua on Friday.
President López Obrador on Friday once again attacked the government of Chihuahua over its opposition to sending more water to the United States but stressed that his government would not abandon the people of the northern state.
Speaking at an event in Ciudad Juárez, the president accused the Chihuahua government and Governor Javier Corral of putting the interests of the National Action Party ahead of those of the nation.
López Obrador has accused politicians with the National Action Party, which is in office in Chihuahua, of protecting water in the northern border state for their own business interests and being behind frequent protests against the diversion of water to the United States.
He said today that regardless of the differences his administration has with Chihuahua authorities it will always support the people.
President López Obrador at an event in Ciudad Juárez.
“Don’t misinterpret things, we’re not going to abandon the people of Chihuahua,” he told attendees at an urban development event.
“We don’t have differences with the people of Chihuahua, we have differences with the behavior of the authorities who are putting partisan interests first and they forget that before personal interests, group interests and party interests, as legitimate as they might be, is the general interest, the interest of the nation,” López Obrador said.
The Chihuahua government’s opposition to Mexico complying with its water obligations to the United States is “irresponsible” and “opportunistic,” he charged.
“Of the northern states, all of them contributed … the volume of water they have to deliver to the United States. We’re just missing Chihuahua’s contribution. In a very opportunistic and irresponsible way they [the Chihuahua authorities] became nationalistic and they don’t want to deliver the water, placing the country in a difficult position,” López Obrador said.
