In order to emphasize the importance of wearing face masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, city officials in Toluca, México state, placed masks on 44 statues and monuments on Tuesday.
The move comes after the local council approved a new law that takes effect this week requiring the mandatory use of masks in public as the city eases some coronavirus restrictions. The state remains in the red on the federal government’s coronavirus “stoplight” map, meaning that it continues to be at maximum risk.
People not wearing masks in businesses, public transportation and on city streets could face fines ranging from 865 to 2,607 pesos (US $38 to $115) and 12 to 23 hours in jail.
“The initiative seeks to raise awareness among the population about the importance of using masks and to motivate people to protect themselves from the virus because according to health institutions, their use increases the effectiveness in preventing infections by up to 80%,” the city government said in a statement.
Mayor Juan Rodolfo Sánchez Gómez argued that masks are a tool that can reduce the risk of viral transmission, and should be worn not only during the maximum, high and intermediate-risk stages of the pandemic but as a permanent measure when out in public, calling it a new habit that residents should integrate into their daily lives.
Venturing out in public without a mask is punishable with a fine or jail time.
Enforcement of the new mandatory mask law will start with a warning, with fines imposed on the second occurrence and jail time upon the third. Names of offenders will be recorded in a database.
This “intense and unprecedented” campaign to safeguard Toluca residents comes as the city has seen a recent surge in the number of cases, officials say, reiterating that prevention is the most important tool in battling the spread of the coronavirus and frequent hand washing and social distancing must also continue.
As of Tuesday, the state had registered 39,108 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 4,894 deaths.
Healthy distances are difficult to maintain while taking group selfies.
The federal Health Ministry reported 6,258 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, increasing Mexico’s accumulated tally to 268,008, while 895 additional Covid-19 fatalities lifted the official death toll to 32,014.
Director of Epidemiology José Luis Alomía told a press conference that 26,557 cases are considered active, an increase of 752 compared to Monday.
There are also 77,703 suspected cases across the country, 4,668 more than the number reported on Monday.
Mexico City leads the country for confirmed and active coronavirus cases, with 53,423 of the former and 3,951 of the latter.
México state, which includes many municipalities that are part of the greater metropolitan area of the capital, ranks second in both categories, with 39,108 confirmed cases and 2,420 active ones.
The daily tally of coronavirus cases and deaths. Deaths are numbers reported and not necessarily those that occurred each day. milenio
Tabasco, Puebla and Veracruz rank third, fourth and fifth, respectively, for accumulated cases, while Guanajuato, Nuevo León and Veracruz fill the same positions for active cases.
Mexico City also has the highest Covid-19 death toll in the country, with 7,191 confirmed fatalities as of Tuesday.
With 4,894 confirmed Covid-19 fatalities, México state ranks second for deaths followed by Baja California, where 2,138 people are confirmed to have lost their lives to the disease.
Five other states have death tolls in excess of 1,000. They are Veracruz, Puebla, Sinaloa, Tabasco and Guerrero, which passed the four-figure mark on Tuesday.
In addition to the more than 32,000 confirmed Covid-19 fatalities, 2,253 deaths are suspected of having been caused by the disease.
Based on confirmed cases and deaths, Mexico’s fatality rate is currently 11.9 per 100 cases, 159% higher than the global rate of 4.6.
Alomía said that 16,462 of 29,711 general care beds set aside for coronavirus patients are currently available, while 6,216 of 9,956 beds with ventilators are vacant.
Tabasco and Nayarit are the only states in the country where more than 70% of general care hospital beds are currently in use, while Baja California and Nuevo León have the highest occupancy rates for beds with ventilators – 63% and 55%, respectively.
Two populists from opposite sides of the political spectrum.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador makes his first international trip as Mexico’s president to visit Donald Trump on Wednesday, where the two populist leaders will toast the launch of the USMCA trade treaty despite mounting woes at home.
Since taking office 20 months ago, López Obrador has made not upsetting Trump a priority despite the U.S. president’s provocations. But critics fear he is wading into a political minefield just four months before the U.S. election — and with no plans to meet Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.
López Obrador had initially expected to celebrate the July 1 start of the trade deal with the U.S and Canada — which replaced the quarter century-old NAFTA — via videoconference, because of the pandemic.
But on a visit to a border patrol station in Arizona last month, Trump said a visit was imminent. So Mexico’s president shelved his dislike of foreign travel to arrange a trip that — owing to his insistence on flying commercial — involved a layover and required him to take a Covid-19 test and wear a face mask, something he has refused to do despite rising numbers of cases at home.
The about-face reinforced a view in Mexico that despite their intertwined economies, López Obrador, who was critical of the U.S. president’s “authoritarian attitude” toward Mexicans and migrants in his 2017 book Hey Trump, invariably defers to his northern neighbour.
The decision by Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, to stay home — citing longstanding commitments — heightened those concerns.
Some fear that López Obrador will become a pawn in the re-election campaign of a president who professes friendship but has preached hostility to Mexicans and migrants and has made high-profile visits in recent weeks to his border wall.
“I think it’s a trap,” said Verónica Ortiz, head of Comexi, a foreign affairs think tank. Although Trump has hailed his counterpart as a “really great guy” and López Obrador has defended the U.S. president, “I don’t think people in Mexico see respect — they see continual aggression,” she added.
Both leaders — populists from opposite sides of the political spectrum — may find the meeting a convenient distraction from domestic troubles as they battle the Covid-19 pandemic.
López Obrador’s domestic approval ratings have dropped 20 points since early in his presidency, and he has been criticized for business-unfriendly policies including the cancellation of a partly-built U.S. brewery.
“He gets to say with USMCA that Mexico is open for business when everything else he is doing shows that Mexico is not,” said Duncan Wood, head of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center. “It’s a photo-op so he can say ‘I’ve handled Trump,’ which isn’t true.”
Trump has also seen his approval ratings drop as he comes under fire for his handling of the pandemic and its economic fallout. He continues to lose ground in polls to Biden.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus attacked the trip in a letter to Trump as “nothing more than an attempt to distract from the coronavirus crisis” as well as “a blatant attempt to politicize the important U.S.-Mexican relationship along partisan lines.”
Some fear that despite López Obrador’s policy of non-intervention in other nation’s affairs, his failure to meet Biden or senior Democrats could make it look like he was taking sides.
“USMCA was only ratified because of Democrat support,” said Jason Marczak, head of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center. “The U.S.-Mexico relationship is far more than just an AMLO-Trump deal.”
Mexican officials denied any bias. “The reason this trip is limited to meeting the president is precisely because Mexico does not want to intervene in an internal U.S. [electoral] process … It’s a government-to-government, president-to-president meeting between two countries which in 2019 were each other’s biggest trading partners,” said foreign ministry spokesman Daniel Millán.
Nevertheless, Trump has usually prevailed. Within a month of taking office, López Obrador accepted Washington’s demands for migrants to await U.S. asylum hearings in Mexico.
The U.S. president then threatened tariffs on Mexican exports unless it clamped down on rising numbers of Central American migrants. López Obrador acquiesced, deploying his National Guard police force en masse.
There is also the spectre of Trump’s visit to Mexico during the 2016 campaign, which left then-president Enrique Peña Nieto humiliated after failing to challenge insults against Mexicans and plans for a border wall.
López Obrador maintained “it is better to have good relations than to fight.” As well as controversial issues including drugs and weapons trafficking, he said the two men may also discuss their shared love of baseball.
Mexico’s president was to kick off his trip on Wednesday with a visit to the Lincoln memorial. After paying his respects to his favourite U.S. president, he was to visit a statue in the U.S. capital of his political hero, 19th-century Mexican president Benito Juárez.
He meets Trump on Wednesday afternoon. The trip will end with a White House dinner attended by top Mexican business leaders, including Carlos Slim, Mexico’s richest man and a prominent investor in the president’s infrastructure projects.
Others include Ricardo Salinas, a media, banking and retail mogul and one of his closest business advisers, as well as Bernardo Gómez, co-president of Televisa, Mexico’s top television station, who hosted Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, for a dinner at his home in Mexico City last year.
Andrade with a photo of her late husband, whose body was mistaken for that of another virus victim.
A grieving widow in Veracruz claims that hospital staff tried to give her the wrong body after her husband passed away from Covid-19.
Dulce María Andrade’s husband, 42-year-old Ángel Lucas Rueda, was admitted to the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) hospital in Coatzacoalcos on June 29 with respiratory symptoms and died just before noon on July 4.
Several hours later, another male patient also passed away. Relatives of both families were notified, but Andrade was unable to claim her husband’s body over the weekend.
“He passed away on Saturday morning, and so I asked the funeral home if they could pick him up, but they told me that it would be until Monday because they don’t work on the weekend,” Andrade says.
When she went on Monday to identify and claim his body from the morgue, the corpse they presented her with was not that of her husband.
Andrade says hospital staff tried to convince her that people look different after they have died, but the body they said was her husband was much older, and Andrade wasn’t buying it.
She asked the hospital if she could go from room to room looking for him, clinging to the hope that he might still be alive, but the hospital refused.
It wasn’t until the following day, Tuesday, that hospital officials were able to provide her with an explanation. IMSS staff said that when relatives of the other patient who died on Saturday arrived to claim the deceased, they were given the wrong body in a case of “erroneous identification,” and it was subsequently cremated.
Hospital officials told the widow that they would retrieve her husband’s ashes and turn them over to her once the appropriate paperwork was completed.
The hospital apologized to Andrade and stated that “the IMSS authorities in Veracruz are carrying out mediation work with the families involved in order to complete successfully the exchange of the funeral remains.”
Andrade says she plans to file a complaint against the hospital for negligence.
Family members of the missing students outside the National Palace in Mexico City.
Almost six years after 43 teaching students disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, the federal government announced on Tuesday that the remains of one of them had been identified.
Omar Gómez Trejo, the special prosecutor in charge of the reexamination of the disappearance and presumed murder of the Ayotzinapa rural teachers college students, said that forensic scientists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria had identified a bone fragment found in a ravine in Cocula, Guerrero, as the remains of Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre.
Gómez noted that the bone fragment was not found in the Cocula municipal dump or the nearby San Juan River and therefore the “historical truth” – the former government’s official version of events of what happened to the students on September 26, 2014 – “is over.”
The former government claimed that the students were intercepted by corrupt municipal police in Iguala after they commandeered a bus to travel to a protest in Mexico City. According to the “historical truth,” the police handed the students over to a local crime gang, the Guerreros Unidos, whose members killed them, burned their bodies in the Cocula dump and scattered their ashes in the nearby San Juan River.
However, the current federal government rejected its predecessor’s version of events and launched a new investigation shortly after President López Obrador took office in December 2018. Many people suspect that the army played a role in the students’ disappearance.
Gómez said that forensic experts from Argentina had confirmed the findings of the scientists in Innsbruck, adding that more remains will be sent to Austria for analysis.
A report by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), which has collaborated with Mexican authorities on the investigation into the Aytotzinapa case, said the bone fragment identified as the remains of Rodríguez had no signs of exposure to fire, debunking the “historical truth” proffered by former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam in January 2015.
Seen by the newspaper Milenio, the EAAF report said the identified bone fragment came from the student’s foot. Given the bone’s preserved state, the forensic scientists in Innsbruck were able to obtain DNA from it that allowed them to identify the student.
After comparing the DNA with genetic samples provided by Rodríguez’s three sisters and parents, the scientists concluded that there was “very strong evidence” that the bone fragment was the student’s remains.
An analysis conducted by the EAAF found that there was a probability in excess of 99.9% that the bone fragment corresponded to Rodríguez.
The bone fragment and other human remains were found by federal authorities in November last year. All told, more than 100 bone fragments were found in a ravine located about a kilometer from the Cocula dump, Milenio reported.
Ayotzinapa student Christian Rodríguez was one of 43 students who disappeared in 2014.
The remains of six bodies – three that were found in the ravine and three found on a property near Iguala – were sent to Austria in March.
At least five bone fragments sent away for analysis showed no signs of fire damage, Milenio said.
Rodríguez, who was 21 at the time of his disappearance, is the third of the 43 students to be identified through DNA analysis of discovered remains.
The other two were Alexander Mora Venancio and Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz. However, Guerreo’s family refused to accept the accept the scientists’ findings.
Deputy Interior Minister for Human Rights Alejandro Encinas said Tuesday that the veracity of the identification of Guerrero was under investigation.
The positive identification of Rodríguez is the first major breakthrough for the federal government, which has conducted searches for the students’ remains in hundreds of locations across several municipalities in Guerrero.
One theory is that the students were separated after their abduction and killed in different locations.
Encinas said President López Obrador will meet with the families of the victims on Friday and share details with them about the progress of the investigation. He said the family of Rodríguez was told about his identification two days before the news was publicly announced.
Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero said last week that authorities had established a new theory about what happened to the 43 students after their abduction in September 2014.
“We already know what happened, we know who ordered it, who covered it up … and [why] they did what they did,” he said.
The authorities have already obtained arrest warrants against former Attorney General’s Office officials, including the ex-head of the Criminal Investigation Agency, Tomás Zerón, who is believed to have fled Mexico.
Zerón is wanted on charges of torturing people detained in connection with the case, forced disappearance, evidence tampering and altering a crime scene.
The presumed leader of the Guerreros Unidos, the gang that allegedly killed the students, was arrested in late June after almost six years on the run.
José Angel Casarrubias Salgado, also known as “El Mochomo,” was released from prison last week after his mother allegedly paid multi-million-peso bribes to the presiding judge’s staff. However, he was immediately rearrested and remains behind bars.
The Ayotzinapa case is the biggest stain on the record of former president Enrique Peña Nieto, whose administration was plagued by scandals.
The disappearance of the students triggered some of the biggest protests seen in Mexico in recent years, with demonstrators calling for the resignation of Peña Nieto. But the ex-president survived the uprising and went on to complete his six-year term in 2018 before vanishing from public life.
He says the government’s large-scale infrastructure projects – among which is also a new refinery to be built by the state oil company on the Tabasco coast – will help generate 2 million new jobs by the end of this year.
But some experts say that more jobs would be created and the Mexican economy would benefit more if specialized construction companies were awarded contracts for the projects that have been entrusted to the army.
José Ignacio Martínez Cortés, head of the Laboratory of Trade, Economy and Business at the National Autonomous University, told the newspaper El País that while Sedena subcontracts small and medium-sized businesses to complete work on its infrastructure projects, the economic spillover is less than that which would be created by large private construction companies.
The spillover generated by Sedena-built infrastructure projects is not as big for two main reasons, El País said.
The first is that fewer jobs are created because construction work is carried out by military personnel who are already on the payroll of the Defense Ministry. The second reason is that the army is not a for-profit corporation and therefore it doesn’t generate revenue that is reinvested in the country.
According to César Gutiérrez, a lawyer who specializes in military and national security matters, military leaders have convinced López Obrador to entrust infrastructure projects to the army by telling him that his government will save money by doing so.
“The military men themselves sell him the idea [saying] ‘don’t worry Mr. President, you don’t need to go around spending on construction companies because we have the biggest construction company in the country, … the military engineers. We have an extremely cheap [construction] workforce because [their labor] is already included in [their] salaries,’” he said.
However, Gutiérrez charged that there is resentment within the army as a result of the president assigning it responsibility for building infrastructure projects.
“How do you think a soldier or an official feels about having to be working at full speed to meet new obligations … [while] receiving the same salary?”
In a recently published report, a researcher at the Espinosa Yglesias Study Center, a Mexico City think tank, also said that entrusting infrastructure projects to the military has a negative economic impact on the national construction sector, which in April had its worst month since 1995.
Enrique Díaz-Infante said that small and medium-sized construction businesses and their employees are adversely affected.
He wrote that the recovery of the economy from the coronavirus-induced downturn and the generation of jobs will depend on the success of sectors such as construction. His claim is supported by Inegi, which found that the construction industry has positive flow-on effects for 66 other economic activities as well as the potential to create jobs en masse.
In addition to cutting costs, the desire to eliminate corruption is another factor in López Obrador’s decision to put the army in charge of infrastructure projects. Indeed, one of the main reasons he cited to justify the cancelation of the former government’s Mexico City airport project was that it was corrupt.
An Inegi poll shows that the armed forces have an approval rating of 80% among the Mexican population, seemingly indicating that the army can be trusted to manage infrastructure projects honestly and transparently.
However, a researcher at the Bonn International Center for Conversion, an independent organization in Germany that deals with a wide range of global topics in the field of peace and conflict research, told El País that there is no guarantee that army officials won’t award contracts to companies to which they have personal connections.
Elke Grawert, the co-author of a book entitled Businessmen in Arms:How the Military andOther Armed Groups Profitin the MENA Region, stressed that the possibility for corruption to which she was referring was at an individual rather than institutional level.
El País noted that both the army and the navy have made purchases and awarded contracts that failed to comply with public tender transparency requirements. During previous governments, Sedena paid US $46 billion to about 100 companies that didn’t comply with legal requirements and didn’t have the personnel or technical capacity to complete the work the were assigned, El País said.
Some of them were in fact ghost, or front, companies, it added.
Grawert also raised doubts about whether the Mexican army has the necessary expertise.
“There is no reason to think that the army is necessarily competent as a builder. The question is: is the army really the best organization to do this work? Is it really better at construction management than expert private firms?”
López Obrador has set tight deadlines for the completion of the army-managed projects so the answers to those questions should become clear sooner rather than later.
The Chihuahua-Pacific railway that carries visitors through the stunning mountains of Chihuahua and Sinaloa has announced it will hit the tracks once again on July 17 after being shut down due to the coronavirus.
A regional train for residents has continued operations throughout the pandemic but the popular tourist train known as El Chepe, including the luxury Chepe Express, were sidelined on March 21.
“During almost four months both the operational and administrative staff have been trained and prepared to serve passengers in the face of the new normal,” said Grupo México Transportes, which operates the train. “In addition, this pause was taken advantage of to provide general maintenance to the train, as well as to incorporate a car specially adapted for people with disabilities and a new dining room for economy class.”
Safety and hygiene measures in accordance with state and federal governments are being adhered to, the company stated.
Occupancy will be restricted to 50% of the train’s capacity. Personal protective equipment is required for all personnel on board (face shield, face mask and gloves) and the staff’s health will be monitored daily by doctors.
The train will be thoroughly disinfected daily, with the staff constantly cleaning common areas such as handrails, observation decks and seats.
Before boarding the train, passengers will go through a sanitary checkpoint where their temperature will be taken. The boarding process will be carried out respecting healthy distance and monitoring the constant use of face masks by customers. Assigned seating will make sure that passengers are a healthy distance away from one another.
El Chepe is Mexico’s only tourist train and its 673 kilometers of tracks take visitors through the rugged splendor of Mexico’s Copper Canyon and the Tarahumara Sierra, passing over 37 bridges and through 86 tunnels, rising to an altitude of 2,400 kilometers above sea level near the Continental Divide. Completed in 1961 after 90 years of construction, the railroad links the capital of Chihuahua with the Pacific coast town of Los Mochis, Sinaloa.
Sun, sand and surf worshippers flocked to the beach in Guasave, Sinaloa, over the weekend despite the municipality having the third highest coronavirus tally in the northern state.
About 7,000 people descended on Las Glorias beach, located on the Gulf of California coast approximately 40 kilometers southwest of the city of Guasave. The beach was especially busy on Sunday, the newspaper La Jornada reported.
Videos that circulated on social media showed crowds of people, making it impossible for them to observe social distancing recommendations.
Musical groups mingled among the throngs, adding to the carefree atmosphere.
Upon observation of the beach scenes, one could be forgiven for thinking that the coronavirus pandemic had spared Guasave, one of 18 municipalities in Sinaloa.
However, Guasave has recorded 1,471 confirmed cases of Covid-19, the third highest number in Sinaloa after state capital Culiacán and the resort city of Mazatlán, where 3,121 and 1,492 people, respectively, have tested positive, according to federal data.
With 9,163 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 1,434 fatalities as of Monday, Sinaloa has the ninth highest case tally in the country and sixth highest death toll.
The risk of coronavirus infection is still at the “red light” maximum level in Sinaloa, according to the federal government’s “stoplight” system, but even so Las Glorias beach was reopened to the public on July 1 after being closed for the previous three months.
Sinaloa’s southern neighbor, Nayarit, is also a “red light” state but that didn’t stop residents organizing large events over the weekend.
In the municipality of Santiago Ixcuintla, police put an end to a soccer match at a local field where more than 70 people had gathered, while authorities intervened to prevent a volleyball tournament from going ahead in neighboring Ruíz.
In Tepic, the state capital, some 30 people attending a street party were dispersed by authorities.
Nayarit has recorded 2,055 confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic and 217 deaths, according to state government data.
Meanwhile, coronavirus restrictions have been tightened in Quintana Roo capital Chetumal due to an increase in case numbers.
Quintana Roo security chief Alberto Capella said that a quarantine would be reimposed at 11:00 p.m. Monday in the municipality of Othón P. Blanco, of which Chetumal is part. He said that the stay-at-home directive came from Governor Carlos Joaquín González.
Othón P. Blanco has recorded 859 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 44 deaths, according to state data. Hospitals in the municipality currently have an average occupancy rate of 59%.
Quintana Roo, also home to the tourist destinations of Cancún, Playa del Carmen and Tulum, has recorded 4,333 cases and 628 deaths since the start of the pandemic. “Orange light” restrictions currently apply in the Caribbean coast state.
Two young Mexican rising stars are among 10 young entrepreneurs from around the world awarded a total of 500,000 pounds sterling for their innovative solutions to realize sustainable development goals promoted by the United Nations.
Mexicans Edith Soria and Javier Larragoiti were among the winners of the Lead2030 award, presented by One Young World, an organization backed by the Duchess of Sussex Megan Markle, philanthropist Bob Geldof, Harry Potter actress Emma Watson among others, including several major international corporations. The Lead2030 awards support specifically youth-led initiatives.
Soria is the president and nutrition program coordinator of Create Purpose, a nonprofit organization that promotes the prevention of non-communicable diseases in orphans and vulnerable children living in low-income and marginalized communities in Mexico. The organization’s caretaker nutrition program is intended to improve nutrition knowledge among caregivers at orphanages and improve the nutrition quality of meals served to orphans.
Over the last two years, the project has positively impacted over 1,000 orphans and vulnerable children across 10 local orphanages, according to information provided by Lead2030.
Larragoiti is the cofounder of Xilinat, a company that offers an alternative and natural substitute to the global sugar industry. His company discovered a means of converting agricultural waste into xylitol, a natural sugar substitute that can be safely consumed by diabetics.
Edith Soria talks about her project Create Purpose.
Lead2030 awards young people who spearhead initiatives that meet the UN’s Sustainability Goals for 2030, a roadmap for scientific, environmental, and social change with goals ranging from recovering the world’s oceans to attacking poverty.
“Lead2030 demonstrates the importance of collaboration among big corporations and young leaders to build a better world – stressing the importance of building bridges, especially now, as the world copes with the humanitarian and environmental impacts of Covid-19,” said One Young World spokeswoman Maria Barracosa.
The inauguration of Ayuda Mutua's online gallery is tonight.
Just weeks after the Covid pandemic started to rip through Mexico City the mutual aid group Ayuda Mutua was formed and has since expanded to include a dozen or so organizations and lots of volunteers and donors all over the city.
While providing despensas (weekly food baskets of basics) has been the group’s main focus, they’ve also found the time and energy to get involved in other efforts for local musicians, street vendors and marginalized communities that are struggling through difficult economic times.
On Tuesday Ayuda Mutua has put together an online event they hope will weave a stronger web of mutual support between local consumers and artists. A series of talks and online performances will include Diego Beyró of Casa Equis art gallery discussing how Covid has impacted Mexico City’s art world, performance artist Andrea Garay Almada performing a piece based on movement as a form of intercultural communication, and Wakolda Lefxarw preforming a part of Medea Mapuche by Chilean playwright Juan Radrigan among other performances and talks.
Interspersed among performances will be videos created by of some of Ayuda Mutua’s partner organizations. Casa Frida is a temporary home for women and trans persons needing refuge. Heroes Locales is an offshoot of Ayuda Mutua that has been working to support market and street vendors in the city during the pandemic.
Newspaper vendors from Mi Valedor, Mexico City’s first newspaper with a self-employment model for marginalized communities, will be sharing some of their photos with the online audience and talking about their significance.
Beneficiaries of each of these organizations will also have work in the online gallery. The gallery includes local pieces including one-of-a kind silk-screened sweatshirts, traditional handicrafts, woven goods and original paintings and photographs. Proceeds from the sales will be split down the middle between the artists themselves and the group’s mutual aid fund that purchases the weekly despensas delivered throughout the city to needy families.
“The idea is to build community and networks of mutual aid while at the same time helping local artists survive this difficult economic time. We want to show people that through mutual support we can be a stronger, more resilient community. It’s also, of course, going to be a really fun time,” says Hector Bialostozky, who is running PR for the event.
The online event is free but donations are welcome. To join the event and see the online art gallery visit the Ayuda Mutua Facebook page.
