More than 80 brands were taken off the shelf after the federal regulators' operation this week. Cofepris
Bottles of Coca-Cola, packets of Oreo cookies and boxes of Kellogg’s chocolate-flavored cereal were among more than 10,000 product units removed from supermarket shelves in Mexico City this week because they didn’t meet labeling requirements.
Consumer protection agency Profeco and health regulator Cofepris carried out a joint operation that resulted in the removal of 10,075 Mexican-made and imported product units of over 80 different brands.
The authorities said in a joint statement that Profeco officials visited Walmart, La Comer and Chedraui supermarkets in the capital while Cofepris officials inspected products at Soriana and Chedraui stores.
Among the other products removed were Chips Ahoy! cookies, Doritos corn chips, Soriana’s maple-flavored syrup, JELL-O jelly crystals, Lorusso organic strawberry jam, Filippo Berrio pesto sauce and Pepsi cherry-flavored soda.
The products were seized due to “irregularities” on their labels, Profeco and Cofepris said.
Some products were taken off the shelves due to misplaced nutritional warning labels. Photo by ProtoplasmaKid CC BY-SA 4.0
Among the irregularities were the absence of warnings about excess calories or sugar and the nonappearance of warnings about the presence of allergens, caffeine and sweeteners.
The authorities noted that Mexican and foreign companies have a legal obligation to comply with food and beverage labeling laws. “The nutritional warning stamps must be placed on the front of the packaging,” they added.
“Placing stamps in a side or rear position may have the purpose of hiding unhealthy content or deceiving consumers about the nutritional properties of articles,” Profeco and Cofepris said.
A list of all the products seized by the two authorities is available here. They didn’t say whether they intended to carry out additional labeling checks in other parts of the country.
A woman smokes at a 2017 march in favor of cannabis legalization. Cuartoscuro
The use of marijuana for recreational purposes has not yet been legalized in Mexico, but pot smokers can find an oasis in Oaxaca city.
The city government has advised police not to bother people smoking weed in public places in the state capital.
In an official letter directed to members of the Plantón 4:20 – pro-marijuana protesters who have occupied the El Llano park in recent months – and cannabis consumers in general, the city government reiterated its commitment to respecting human rights and noted that there is no municipal law that expressly prohibits the “personal responsible consumption of cannabis in public spaces.”
The government acknowledged that the Supreme Court has ruled that laws prohibiting the use of marijuana are unconstitutional, but also recognized that the court argued there is a need to protect the rights of people who don’t want to be or shouldn’t be exposed to secondhand smoke, such as children and adolescents.
“In that sense, we call on consumers to avoid consuming cannabis in places where there are girls and boys or there is express disagreement from other people,” the April 13 letter said.
La municipalidad de #Oaxaca@MunicipioOaxaca ha sentado un precedente histórico en reconocer los derechos de las personas usuarias de #cannabis y crear una descriminalización basada en la DGI 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 Felicidades a todas las personas involucradas 💚💚💚 pic.twitter.com/wIyzg33OcU
The letter from municipal authorities called on police to avoid bothering marijuana smokers, as long as the smokers are not bothering other members of the public.
“In addition, this municipal authority urges municipal police officers … to abstain from causing … trouble to consumers. In case of disagreement from a person in the same space, proceed only to ask consumers to move to another place,” it said.
The city government’s letter came in response to requests from Plantón 4:20 members and others that they be allowed to smoke marijuana in public without being criminalized.
Its publication coincided with the allocation of federal permits allowing 26 indigenous communities in Oaxaca to cultivate marijuana for medicinal purposes.
The use of marijuana for medicinal purposes has been legal in Mexico since 2017. The Supreme Court has directed Congress to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes, but it has repeatedly missed deadlines to do so.
The new Dos Bocas refinery in Tabasco reflects Mexico's commitment to investing in fossil fuels.
It looked too good an opportunity to miss.
Latin America was ideally placed to leap ahead in renewable power. It already generates more than a quarter of its energy from sustainable sources, thanks to abundant hydro dams.
Northern Mexico and windswept Patagonia are among the best locations in the world to generate green electricity. Lithium and copper, crucial minerals for the global switch to electric transport, abound. Governments had billions of dollars to spend in COVID-19 recovery funds and policy gurus gushed with enthusiasm about a green post-pandemic world.
The reality so far? Dirtier and browner than expected.
According to the Energy Policy Tracker, Latin America’s four biggest economies have committed most COVID recovery funds to fossil fuel projects and subsidies, with only a few bones tossed to renewables.
Mexico is the worst offender. President López Obrador, a 1960s-style resource nationalist, has lavished billions of dollars on state oil group Pemex to expand its unprofitable oil refining business. At the same time, he has tied in knots renewable energy investors such as Spain’s Iberdrola and Italy’s Enel with policy changes favoring the fossil fuel-powered state electricity behemoth CFE at their expense.
No surprise that renewable energy investment in Mexico has plummeted and court challenges are multiplying.
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry has made three visits in the past five months to try to talk the quixotic president around. López Obrador’s response has been to redouble efforts to pass a constitutional reform guaranteeing a minimum 54% share of the power market for CFE and, for good measure, nationalizing the nascent lithium industry.
Mexico’s government has meanwhile committed four times more in COVID recovery funds to fossil fuel projects than to renewables, according to the policy tracker.
Even that dismal record is overshadowed by Argentina and Colombia, whose governments have both spent more than US $1 billion on fossil fuel-related post-pandemic policies, yet only a few million dollars of recovery funds on renewables, according to the tracker.
“This is a region which had the worst economic performance in the world during COVID,” said Francisco Monaldi, a Latin America energy expert at Rice University in Houston. “So governments do not have priorities focusing on the energy transition if that implies cost.”
Among the region’s national oil companies, Brazil’s listed oil group Petrobras has used the energy transition as an excuse to concentrate on its most profitable business, deep sea oil production, while jettisoning less lucrative activities, according to Monaldi.
By contrast, Colombia’s Ecopetrol has made a $3.7-billion bet on electricity, buying 51% of transmission company ISA. This was partly born of necessity — the country’s oil reserves are rapidly declining — but also gives the company a useful hedge against the eclipse of fossil fuels.
The failure of Latin American governments to invest post-pandemic funds in renewable energy should leave plenty of space for the private sector. Indeed, Chile, Colombia and Brazil have already attracted billions of dollars of non-state green energy investment. But Mexico shows that even renewables can fall prey to resource nationalism.
Chile is the world’s second-biggest lithium producer and a budding leader in the production of green hydrogen. Its new radical left president Gabriel Boric touted his green credentials in last year’s election. But his first big economic package last week included fossil fuel subsidies, rather than money for renewables, and he also plans a state-owned lithium company.
Brazil and Colombia are holding presidential elections this year and polls suggest that both will elect left-wing nationalists. Private investors who have bet big on renewable energy will be hoping that the Mexican experience is not repeated farther south.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022. All rights reserved.
One of Isla Tortuga's many rattlesnakes basks in the sun. Metropoli
Three scientists were stranded on a rattlesnake-infested island in the Gulf of California for three days after the boatman who dropped them off last weekend failed to return.
The marine biologists – two men and one woman from La Paz, Baja California Sur (BCS) – hired a boatman to take them from San Bruno, BCS, to Isla Tortuga (Turtle Island) last Saturday for a research trip. They also arranged for him to pick them up and take them back to the peninsula, but he didn’t keep that end of the bargain.
It wasn’t until three days later and after the scientists were reported missing that a naval vessel was dispatched to collect them from the island, located 40 kilometers east of Santa Rosalía, BCS. It is home to an endemic rattlesnake species commonly known as the Tortuga Island rattlesnake.
Such is the ubiquity of the pit vipers on the island that it has been described as “the biggest rattlesnake nest in the world.”
The news website Metropoli reported the rescue of the marine biologists but didn’t say how much food or water they had with them or whether they had any close encounters with the venomous snakes.
The Northwest Biological Research Center scientists were found safe and sound, Metropoli reported, but nevertheless received medical care from navy personnel in Santa Rosalía, the municipal seat of Mulegé.
Isla Tortuga, a volcanic island with a kilometer-wide, 100 meter-deep caldera, has attracted herpetologists from around the world. Reptile researchers from countries such as the United States, Canada, Italy, Japan and Germany have camped on the island while they observed and collected data on the endemic rattlesnake species, known scientifically as Crotalus atrox tortugensis.
With trees and trenches, protesters blocked Highway 199 just north of Ocosingo. Twitter
Residents of Ocosingo, Chiapas, have blocked the highway to Palenque since Wednesday to express their discontent about an unresolved land dispute.
Disgruntled residents used heavy machinery to dig at least one trench across Federal Highway 199 and also utilized felled trees to block the highway in the same location in El Contento, a small community in Ocosingo, a large municipality in eastern Chiapas that borders Guatemala.
The blockade was erected to protest an agrarian conflict that dates back to 1994, the newspaper Reforma reported. Land disputes are common in the southern state.
The Chiapas Attorney General’s Office said Thursday that the protesters had disarmed and detained the Ocosingo municipal police director, a deputy director and 15 officers. They also seized two police vehicles and four pickup trucks owned by the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS). No IMSS personnel, who were transporting medicines and medical supplies, were injured or detained, the institute said.
The highway blockade has affected chiapanecos, as people from Chiapas are known, as well as tourists on Holy Week vacations in the southern state. Ocosingo is about 120 kilometers south of Palenque, home to the Mayan archaeological site of the same name, and just under 100 kilometers northeast of San Cristóbal de las Casas, a colonial city popular with tourists.
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One tourist complained about the blockade on social media. “Friends, we had a bad experience yesterday on the Ocosingo-Palenque highway,” Facebook user Sharo Macc wrote Thursday, adding that she had to travel on a dirt road “that doesn’t appear on Google Maps” in order to continue her trip through Chiapas.
Carlos Huerta, who is traveling with 28 people on a bus tour that left León, Guanajuato, earlier this week, told Reforma that their plan to visit Palenque was stymied by the blockade. “The highway was wrecked with trenches, so people couldn’t pass,” he said.
Zacatecas authorities announced this week that 55,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine would be distributed to hospitals and clinics this month. Estado de Zacatecas
Authorities are racing to administer some 3.7 million AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines before they expire at the end of the month.
Large-scale vaccination campaigns are underway or will begin soon in at least 18 states across the country.
Authorities in Mexico City and at least two states – Michoacán and Durango – have announced that second booster shots (a fourth dose in most cases) will be available.
Four large vaccination centers will operate in the capital between April 18 and 30, and almost 200 public healthcare clinics will also be offering shots. Authorities believe as many as 1 million people could receive shots during the 13-day campaign.
Adults, adolescents aged 15 to 17 and younger youths with existing health problems that make them vulnerable to serious illness will be eligible for vaccination. Authorities will even inoculate people who don’t live in Mexico City.
Seniors lined up for a third vaccine dose in Mexico City in late February. To be receive a dose in this month’s campaign, their booster must have been at least four months ago.
Mexico City Health Minister Oliva López recommended a fourth shot for seniors with underlying health issues who received their first booster at least four months ago.
Health authorities in Michoacán announced that fourth shots would be available to adults who received their first booster at least four months ago. The state Health Ministry also called on people who have not yet been vaccinated to come forward and get a shot.
In Durango, military personnel confirmed that fourth doses are being administered to those who ask for them, El Sol de México reported.
In Tamaulipas, authorities are aiming to use 545,000 vaccines before they expire on April 30. Shots are being administered at 200 healthcare centers as well as five mass vaccination centers set up in the most populous areas of the northern border state.
The primary objective across the 43 municipalities is to inoculate unvaccinated people and those who didn’t get a second shot after their initial vaccination last year.
Authorities in Guanajuato are aiming to use 591,000 AstraZeneca shots before they expire at the end of the month, while Hidalgo Governor Omar Fayad has set a goal of administering 42,000 doses in the next two weeks. Vaccines are widely available across the latter state, including in tourism destinations that will see an influx of visitors this Easter weekend.
A state official presents the “Better late than never” campaign in Veracruz, which invites unvaccinated residents to get a shot. Twitter @MiguelHuertaLdG
In Veracruz, a vaccination campaign operating under the slogan “Better late than never” has commenced. Authorities are hoping to administer some 230,000 shots at 500 temporary vaccination centers set up in parks, shopping centers and near beaches in the Gulf coast state.
In Zacatecas city, a nocturnal vaccination center was set up by the army Wednesday in the historic center, where the 2022 Zacatecas Cultural Festival is in full swing. Mexico City resident Erika de la Cruz was among the tourists who decided to get a shot at the temporary center, which operated into the early hours of Thursday morning.
“It’s something that I never imagined – that I could be vaccinated against COVID just because I was hanging out here in the [city] center, it’s really amazing,” she told the newspaper Milenio.
Among the other states where authorities are trying to boost their vaccination rates with soon-to-expire shots are Jalisco, México state, Baja California Sur, Puebla and Quintana Roo.
Over 194.5 million shots have already been administered in Mexico to almost 85.7 million people, according to the most recent federal Health Ministry data. Over 38 million people have had booster shots.
According to The New York Times vaccinations tracker, Mexico has the 77th highest vaccination rate in the world, with two-thirds of the country’s approximately 126 million people having had at least one shot.
The federal government has not yet offered shots to minors under 15 (with the exception of those aged 12-14 with health problems), but is set to do so soon. The national vaccination rate could increase significantly once shots are offered to kids under 15 as there are almost 32 million children aged 0-14, data from the 2020 census shows.
Mexico, which has the second highest number of Catholics in the world after Brazil, will celebrate Easter amid a much improved coronavirus situation compared to earlier in the year. There are fewer than 5,000 estimated active cases, according to the Health Ministry, compared to a peak of over 300,000 at the height of the omicron-fueled fourth wave in January.
The accumulated case tally currently stands at 5.72 million, while 323,891 people have lost their lives to COVID-19 in Mexico, according to official data that the government has acknowledged underestimates the true toll of the infectious disease.
Rarámuri runners Martín Moreno and Enrique Moreno star alongside actor David Angulo in 37 kms. Rafael Montero
Two Rarámuri runners are part of the cast of a new Mexican movie about a man training to compete in the Mexico City marathon.
Martín Moreno and Enrique Moreno star alongside film and television actor David Angulo in 37 kms, a film directed by Rafael Montero that is currently in the final phase of postproduction.
The protagonist meets Martín and Enrique at the start of the film, asks them for help to achieve his goal of running in the Mexico City marathon and pledges to accompany them as they run along the highway from Chihuahua city to the state’s Sierra region.
“They laugh at him a little and tell him he won’t get anywhere with those shoes,” Montero told the newspaper El Universal.
Tomás J. Ramírez, a Rarámuri siríame (traditional leader) in a Sierra community where the movie was partially filmed, and Martín Makawe, a local teacher, also appear in the film. The director said that the Rarámuri men also contributed to the development of the plot in real time.
“They said, ‘Yes, we want to participate but in a direct way, suggesting things,’” Montero said. “Some [of them] had already done theater in the sierra. They already had certain experience, so it wasn’t complicated. In the end, they understood what making a movie is about.”
Montero said that the amateur actors speak in both Spanish and Rarámuri in the film, which is expected to premiere at festivals later this year. Spanish subtitles will accompany the Rarámuri dialogue, he said.
The filming of 37 kms was postponed twice due to the pandemic, but shooting finally happened between September and November last year.
The federal government and private investors helped cover the 30-million-peso (US $1.5 million) cost of making the film, which already has a distributor in the United States.
“The idea is that when you come out of the cinema, you’ll feel good,” said Mineko Mori, one of the producers.
“It’s the story of a man who, like all of us, isn’t perfect. He has several problems in his life, but he’s not a bad person. Through this journey, he connects with the best version of himself, and it’s always nice to see the transformation of a person,” she said.
The vaquita, a critically endangered species, only lives in the northern end of the Gulf of California.
The Mexican government’s erratic approach to saving the vaquita marina porpoise in Gulf of California has only furthered the critical threat illegal fishing poses for the species.
After years of collaboration with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to combat illegal fishing, the Mexican government announced the birth of two vaquitas in early April. Both the nongovernmental organization and the Mexican navy credit their thorough patrols of the area for the small sign of recovery.
Last fall, a group of experts convened by the organization the International Union for Conservation of Nature used a technique called expert elicitation to analyze the results of a survey of the vaquita’s Gulf of California habitat over 17 days in 2021 and estimated that only between seven and eight vaquitas remained, with at most two of them being calves.
So the news of the births came as a surprise, especially given that in July 2021, the Mexican government officially scrapped the zero-tolerance area (ZTA), where fishing had been previously banned inside the Vaquita Protection Refuge. While fishing with gillnets — long wall-like structures that are dragged along the ocean floor — remains banned, the government has replaced the zero-tolerance approach with a sliding scale of sanctions based on the number of fishing vessels in the area.
The Mexican government’s move was widely lampooned by experts.
Scientists with the first-ever caught vaquita marina porpoise calf in the Gulf of California in October 2017. Semarnat
Adding to the pressure on the vaquita marina, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) approved the trade of farm-raised totoaba fish in March 2022. The swim bladders of the totoaba are prized as a delicacy in China and fetch high prices there, which has made it a mainstay target for illegal fishing in Mexico. While the vaquitas are not the target of illegal fishing, they are often bycatch. They become entangled in gillnets used to catch totoaba, shrimp and other fish.
Until March, international trade in the totoaba, which shares waters with the vaquita marina, had been illegal.
InSight Crime Analysis
While controlling illegal fishing in the vaquita habitat would have always been a challenge, Mexico’s meandering approach to enforcement has made the situation even more difficult.
There have been some attempts at prosecuting wildlife traffickers: in February 2021, the government increased penalties for totoaba trafficking and followed this with several arrests of alleged totoaba traffickers linked to organized criminal groups.
A source working for a conservation group in Baja California who wished to remain anonymous for security concerns said that this was the first successful intelligence-led operation to take down totoaba traffickers.
Totoaba in a fisher’s boat. White tissue under the knife is of a recently-extracted swim bladder. G.K. Silber
The Mexican navy, however, has few options to crack down on the number of vessels fishing inside the vaquita refuge. According to the conservation source, the government’s unofficial policy towards illegal fishing in the area remains non-confrontational. “The navy’s role is to ask fishermen to move their nets out of the ZTA without forcing them to do [so],” the source explained.
While there is some level of compliance, dozens of vessels are routinely spotted inside the refuge area.
Andrea Crosta of Earth League International (ELI) told the Mongabay environmental news site that while taking down larger criminal structures will help ensure the vaquitas’ survival, the problem ultimately lies in tackling demand. Chinese traders operating in Mexico are the most critical link in the supply chain, moving the swim bladder to East Asia, according to Crosta.
Reprinted from InSight Crime. Henry Shuldiner is a writer with InSight Crime, a foundation dedicated to the study of organized crime.
Aranza Ortega Jaimes in Vienna. Twitter @EmbaMexAua
A 15-year-old pianist from Iguala, Guerrero, won an international music competition in Vienna, Austria, this week.
Aranza Ortega Jaimes, a student of the National Conservatory of Music, won the 13-15 years piano division of the Grand Prize Virtuoso Vienna 2022, which also has categories for string and wind instruments as well as singing and chamber music.
She played Frédéric Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1 in B minor, Opus 20 in the competition, held Tuesday in the Musikverein concert hall in the Austrian capital.
Ortega, who has been playing piano since she was seven, told the newspaper Reforma that she was very happy to represent Mexico on the international stage.
“I’m very pleased that the name of my country was in the program, I got very excited. I’m also very happy because I felt a lot of support from my teachers,” she said.
Ortega noted that the National Institute of Fine Arts supported her financially so she could travel to Vienna.
“It was an experience that meant a lot to me and it gave me the impetus to keep wanting to play piano,” she said.
In a post on Twitter, Mexico’s Embassy in Austria congratulated the young musician on her victory in the event, which was open to musicians of all ages and nationalities.
“She had the opportunity to debut in one of the most important halls of Europe, Gläserner Saal at the Musikverein in Vienna,” the post added.
A rendering of the Riad Romeo, a proposed condo hotel in El Cuyo, Yucatán. Grupo Tsalach
Hundreds of residents of a small town on the northeastern coast of the state of Yucatán are fighting to stop the construction of a luxury condo hotel that has already been approved by the federal government.
The Environment Ministry (Semarnat) last year approved construction of the beachfront Riad Romeo hotel in El Cuyo, a fishing village on the Gulf of México near Yucatán’s border with Quintana Roo.
Local authorities have also signed off on the project. In the past, much smaller projects have been rejected based on their environmental impact, leading some residents to suspect that there were irregularities in the new hotel’s approval process.
Residents say the four-story building – which would consist of 40 apartments (already on sale on real estate websites) and amenities including a restaurant, rooftop swimming pool and car park beneath the first floor – threatens the natural environment and local wildlife, and would cause sewage, litter and light pollution problems.
They say the hotel would adversely affect the Ría Lagartos Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO protected area with mangroves, small estuaries, coastal lagoons, marshes and savanna that are home to a variety of species, including endangered ones.
The road into the town of El Cuyo, which is located on a narrow peninsula and surrounded by Ría Lagartos National Park. Photo by Alfri Peraza
Residents assert that the planned construction poses risks to the reproduction of flamingos, crocodiles, fish and sea turtles that nest on the coastline of northeastern Yucatán. They have also warned of risks to migratory birds.
In addition, the new hotel – which would easily be the tallest building in El Cuyo – would place additional pressure on electricity, water and trash collection services, which are already stretched.
Local official Neydy Yolanda Puc Gil, elected town commissioner last September, and other El Cuyo residents opposed to the developments have denounced Semarnat’s failure to consult with locals before approving the Riad Romeo hotel and other tourism developments.
At a recent meeting with Paulina Navarrete, a representative of the hotel, residents made it clear that they do not want the new hotel.
They told Navarrete they didn’t want any new developments to be built in El Cuyo, according to a report by the newspaper El Diario de Yucatán. They also gave some blunt advice to the company, telling it to get out of town and not come back.
For its part, Riad Romeo has asserted that the construction will benefit the economy of the local community, such as providing jobs for El Cuyo residents. That claim was met with contempt at the recent meeting, according to a resident who spoke with Mexico News Daily. (The resident spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from local authorities, some of whom support the project.)
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Meanwhile, a Change.org petition with the hashtag #SalvemosElCuyo (Let’s Save El Cuyo) had attracted support from about 21,000 people as of Thursday morning, a figure some 10 times larger than the town’s population.
“Only working together can we save El Cuyo! Let’s preserve the peace! Let’s preserve everything that makes El Cuyo so beautiful! No to massive construction! No to political leaders who insult the wishes of residents! No to turning El Cuyo into another [Isla] Holbox! No to the destruction of the environment!” the petition says.
José Jesús Rosado Castro, an El Cuyo homeowner, explained that he supports the petition because “the tranquility of the residents is worth more than the ambition of authorities and unscrupulous developers.”
The El Cuyo resident who spoke with Mexico News Daily said this week that construction is currently stopped amid the ongoing community opposition, but given that the project has the all the required permits – obtained in the proper way or otherwise – work is likely to resume at some point, unless people power ultimately prevails.
