The damage caused by Tuesday’s 7.5-magnitude earthquake in Oaxaca continues to cut off several communities in the Ozolotepec indigenous region, where roads are blocked by debris and communication hampered by limited phone and internet.
In some cases authorities have had to resort to delivering assistance on foot.
Federal emergency services and the Red Cross, who arrived within 12 hours of the earthquake, often had to abandon their vehicles and walk to isolated communities. Many of the settlements, which are some of the poorest in Mexico, are connected to the outside world by vulnerable dirt roads that under normal rainy season conditions become impassable.
The indigenous Zapotec communities of San José Ozolotopec, San Antonio Ozolotepec and San Andrés Lovene, local officials told El Universal, remain incommunicado. Officials estimate there are a total of about 150 homes there.
Two people in other communities have been reported dead and one missing. Another 15 are reportedly trapped under fallen debris in the community of Santa Catarina Xanaguía. Residents there say part of a hill broke away causing a landslide, but government authorities say that it was actually the result of earthquake damage to a local highway.
A rocky hill disturbed by the earthquake threatens the community of Santa María Mixtequilla.
“Many homes are demolished,” he told the newspaper LaRazón. “They have many cracks. People won’t be able to inhabit them … At this point, we don’t know how many people are injured. We don’t have the machinery to clear the roads.”
The state government has opened a shelter to provide food and shelter for the displaced.
Meanwhile, emergency officials in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, warn that a likely inevitable rockslide threatens Santa María Mixtequilla. Residents are asking state and local Civil Protection authorities to intervene and activate preventative safety protocols.
The earthquake loosened part of a large rocky hill, creating observable fissures that a citizen reported to local authorities. One large rock has already fallen, crashing into the bathrooms of a local church, and another threatens to tumble onto the village if another major earthquake or even strong rains occur, local Civil Protection officials said.
The damage to the rock face made news initially because it revealed a previously unknown example of what appear to be prehistoric cave paintings. Residents are also asking federal authorities to send anthropologists to examine and preserve the site.
Colima judge Uriel Villegas and his wife were murdered two weeks ago.
A series of assassinations of high-profile public figures in Colima marks the latest manifestation of violence in one of Mexico’s smallest yet deadliest states — a dubious honor attributable to Colima’s location along the territorial fault lines dividing Mexico’s most powerful cartels.
Colima, with a population of less than one million, has topped Mexico’s murder per capita list every year since 2016. In 2019, the state finished with a rate of 97 homicides per 100,000 residents — far outpacing Baja California, which had the second-highest rate at 80 homicides per 100,000 residents.
This year, Colima has registered more femicides than any other state. It’s also one of five states that accounted for more than 50% of the clandestine mass graves exhumed during the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The coastal state was once considered one of Mexico’s safest and most desirable vacation spots. Its murder rate in 2015 was one-third of what it is now.
Accompanying this rise in violence has been a series of brazen and public murders of high-profile political and social leaders in Colima.
On June 16, hitmen fired more than 20 shots in the killing of Uriel Villegas Ortiz, a Colima federal judge, and his wife, Verónica Barajas, in the state’s capital city. Villegas had delivered judgments in several cases involving top Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and Sinaloa Cartel leaders.
Two weeks before that, authorities discovered the body of Colima congresswoman Anel Bueno in an unmarked grave. She had been abducted more than a month earlier by a group of armed men in broad daylight as she partook in an event to promote a new sanitation project amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Villegas and Bueno are just two of at least a dozen public figures assassinated in Colima since 2010 — a list that includes lawyers, ministry officials and the state’s former governor.
InSight Crime analysis
The key to understanding violence in Colima is its location along invaluable drug trafficking routes.
Manzanillo, the state’s largest town and main port, serves as an arrival point for chemical precursors from Asia and a transit point for drugs moving towards the United States and Europe, according to Mexican journalist and organized crime expert Óscar Balderas.
Some of the largest cocaine seizures in Mexican history have taken place in the Pacific port city.
“The port of Manzanillo is one of the most active and coveted ports for the drug cartels,” Balderas told InSight Crime in a text message.
When Colima first began its downward spiral in 2016, Manzanillo was also at the center. A spike in homicides then was attributed to a three-way power struggle between the Sinaloa Cartel, the CJNG and Los Zetas over Colima’s coastal trafficking routes.
The violence also seemed to coincide with internal Sinaloa Cartel turmoil in the absence of its kingpin, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo.” This strife allowed the CJNG to make gains in Colima, according to Balderas.
The result was 206 homicides in the first four months of 2016, up from 44 across the same four months in 2015.
Since then, Mexico’s criminal landscape has become more fractured, birthing smaller cells that have resorted to extreme violence in pursuit of territory and legitimacy — a phenomenon that has made its way to Colima, too.
Citing official documents from the federal government’s security cabinet, Excélsior and Colima Noticias reported in February the presence of at least four different criminal groups in Colima.
According to the reports, the CJNG struck an alliance in 2019 with former members of the nearly defunct Arellano Félix Organization from Tijuana, who are now acting as Jalisco enforcers in Colima under the new name Tijuana New Generation Cartel (CTNG).
At the same time, a group called Los Troyanos, an armed wing of the Nueva Familia Michoacana, has also allegedly been operating in Colima. Sinaloa Cartel elements are also believed to have a presence in the state.
This fragmented criminal scene has collided with political instability, according to security analyst Alejandro Hope. Colima has swung for a different political party in each of the last three presidential elections and cycled through eight governors in the last 20 years.
“Colima has kind of plateaued at this very high level of violence,” Hope told InSight Crime. “It’s not clear if it’s organized crime violence or political violence, or a combination.”
Reprinted from InSight Crime. The author is a journalist, researcher and student on an internship at InSight Crime, a foundation dedicated to the study of organized crime.
The mother of Guanajuato crime gang boss El Marro leaves prison yesterday.
The mother of Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel leader José Antonio “El Marro” Yépez was released from prison on Sunday due to a lack of evidence, triggering criticism from President López Obrador.
At a two-day hearing that concluded on Sunday afternoon, a judge ordered the release of María Eva Ortiz, one of her daughters, her niece and two men after ruling that there was insufficient evidence to submit them to trial.
Security authorities arrested a total of 31 people with alleged links to the gang in an operation in Celaya on June 20 but all of them have since been released from preventative custody.
During the weekend hearing, lawyers for Ortiz and the other defendants presented evidence that showed that security authorities planted 2 million pesos on El Marro’s mother, who was accused of being a financial operator for the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel.
According to a report by the newspaper El Universal, Ortiz’s defense team proved that agents with the Guanajuato Criminal Investigation Agency removed the money from 30 different addresses in the community of San Isidro Elguera that have no connection to the Santa Rosa gang.
The lawyers also asserted that Ortiz was not detained at the address at which authorities said she was arrested. They said she was arrested at a nearby address and subsequently taken to another house for which the authorities had a search warrant.
However, Ortiz and the other alleged cartel members were arrested hours before the search warrant was issued at about 9:00 p.m. on June 20, the defense team said. Lawyers asserted that some of those detained, including members of El Marro’s family, were subjected to psychological torture.
In audio evidence presented at the hearing, men believed to be federal security agents are heard pressuring a woman, allegedly Yépez’s cousin, to tell cartel members to cease their dramatic response to the arrests, which included setting vehicles on fire to create almost 50 road blockades in 13 Guanajuato municipalities.
The woman subsequently calls her son and asks him to tell the cartel members and associates to “calm down.”
“They will beat us if they keep burning [vehicles],” she said.
An emotional El Marro in one of two videos released after his mother’s arrest.
A presumed federal agent is also heard threatening to kill cartel lookouts if those detained don’t cooperate by telling them to put an end to the blockades.
“[If you don’t cooperate], all that you’ll achieve is that I’ll come for them in the night because I already know who they are. … Let them know that I won’t catch them alive,” the presumed agent said.
An investigation has been launched into the alleged psychological torture to which some of those detained were subjected, El Universal reported.
Speaking on Monday morning, López Obrador condemned the release of Yépez’s mother and claimed that it is related to “an old problem” in the judicial system “linked to inefficiency and corruption.”
He implied that the judge – a woman by the name of Paulina Iraís Medina Manzano – had reached some kind of agreement with the suspected criminal and attempted to hide it by ruling that there were inconsistencies in the way in which authorities said she was arrested.
“Some judges have always looked [to see] if there was a mistake in [detailing] the time of arrest, in the paperwork, in anything that [allows them] to release alleged criminals,” López Obrador said.
“In this case, a thorough investigation will be carried out to review the reason why [Ortiz] was released,” he said.
Her son, El Marro, is one of Mexico’s most wanted persons but has managed to evade arrest despite the launch of a security operation last year whose specific aim was, and is, to take him into custody.
After the arrest of his mother, sister and cousin, Yepéz appeared in two emotional videos posted to social media in which he threatened authorities.
An attempted bomb attack on the Pemex refinery in Salamanca, Guanajuato, last week is suspected of being related to the law enforcement crackdown on his Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, including the recent arrests.
Former president Peña Nieto, Trump and Canada's Justin Trudeau signed the new agreement in 2018.
A new trade pact between the United States, Mexico and Canada begins on Wednesday with the top U.S. negotiator threatening litigation, investor distrust rife and supply chains tested by the Covid-19 pandemic.
While U.S. President Donald Trump and his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, plan to toast the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) at the White House, probably after U.S. Independence Day on July 4, others are more cautious.
“I don’t believe that on July 2, there is going to be a queue of foreign investors in Mexico,” warned Carlos Salazar, head of Mexico’s main business lobby, which has seen relations with the leftist nationalist leader sour.
The North American Free Trade Agreement was born with fanfare and the sense “that Mexico was opening to the world and would become developed and prosperous, and that it could negotiate as equals with the U.S.,” according to Verónica Ortiz, head of Comexi, a foreign affairs think tank.
By contrast, the USMCA which replaces it was forced into being by Donald Trump. The U.S. president branded NAFTA the worst deal ever and vowed to pull out unless there were changes that would encourage companies to repatriate jobs from low-wage Mexico.
US Trade Representative Lighthizer warned Mexico to prepare for challenges.
Three arduous years of talks ensued, culminating in a deal that went well beyond NAFTA. López Obrador is betting the USMCA will bring investment and jobs. The business community, meanwhile, hopes it will enable Mexico to position itself as a manufacturing hub for companies relocating from China amid trade tensions with the U.S.
But U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer warned Mexico to brace for challenges, including over its enforcement of new labour rules, long a thorny issue in negotiations.
“After July 1, I expect to … look at complaints … and to the extent that we have problems, I expect to bring cases. I think Mexico understands that, I hope they understand that, I’ve made it as clear as I can,” he told a legislative hearing this month.
The new trade pact also comes at a time when abrupt policy shifts from the Mexican president, especially those designed to favour state-run oil company Pemex and utility CFE, have triggered outrage from U.S. companies.
“Just as China is losing its luster and Mexico should be saying ‘we are open for business, come on over,’ they’re putting the brakes on new FDI [foreign direct investment],” said Nelson Balido, a trade consultant based in Texas.
Christopher Landau, U.S. ambassador to Mexico, admitted in a conference call last week with Mexican executives: “I can’t lie. I can’t say it’s an opportune moment to invest in Mexico if we’re seeing things that are very discouraging.”
US Ambassador Landau, left: not an opportune moment to invest in Mexico.
Mexico’s changes to the rules in the electricity sector, penalizing renewables projects to favour the CFE, have triggered complaints and threats of arbitration. Investors are also upset over delays in issuing permits for gas stations, fuel storage and imported fuel, for example.
In a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and trade officials, the American Petroleum Institute this month blasted “recent actions … [that] discriminate against U.S. investors in violation of commitments that Mexico agreed to in both NAFTA and USMCA.”
The American Fuel and Petrochemicals Manufacturers wrote to Trump to complain about Mexican policy which, it said, “threatens not only the direct investment U.S. companies have made but also future revenue and U.S. jobs to make those investments viable.” It raised “serious questions about whether such actions are permissible under Mexican law and Mexico’s obligations under the new USMCA.”
The Global Wind Energy Council, meanwhile, wrote to Rocío Nahle, Mexico’s energy minister, to say that policy changes “have severely deteriorated the investment climate in the sector, and recovering that confidence is all the harder … given the Covid-19 crisis.”
Cross-border supply chains and a tightly intertwined North American manufacturing industry, in which components cross between the U.S., Mexico and Canada multiple times before winding up in a finished car, TV or other manufactured good, are the lifeblood of NAFTA and USMCA.
But a failure to harmonize Mexico’s official definition of essential industries during the Covid-19 pandemic with that in the U.S. has led to bottlenecks and delays. “Supply chains aren’t keeping up,” said trade consultant Balido. He added that some U.S. production lines had risked having to close and furlough workers “because they lack parts from Mexico … We’ve tried to talk sense into the López Obrador administration but they’re very difficult to work with.”
Still, the USMCA held much promise, said Luis de la Calle, a former NAFTA negotiator. He said the treaty could be a significant lever of development in Mexico’s poor southeast, which López Obrador has vowed to revitalize.
“There is enormous potential to detonate investment in agriculture, as happened in the Bajío [Mexico’s main central manufacturing region] under NAFTA,” he told a seminar.
“USMCA is far from being a panacea,” cautioned Duncan Wood, head of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center, a think tank, but the treaty did provide clear rules and the legal protections that investors craved.
But Landau, the ambassador, was blunt. “This is a moment to try to attract new investment to the whole of North America … [with] supply chains looking very vulnerable especially in China and Asia,” he said.
“It’s golden opportunity for Mexico to attract foreign investment. I hope they don’t waste it, frankly.”
A taxi is disinfected against the coronavirus in Mexico City.
The coronavirus pandemic continues to grow but the speed at which new infections and deaths are occurring is slowing, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said on Sunday.
Speaking at the Health Ministry’s nightly coronavirus press briefing, López-Gatell highlighted that the increase in case numbers in percentage terms from one day to the next is much lower now than during March, the first month of the pandemic.
He made the same point last week while acknowledging that the percentage increases are in comparison with an increasingly higher number of total cases.
López-Gatell also presented graphs from the University of Oxford website Our World in Data to support his claim that the pandemic in Mexico is stabilizing and has not grown as quickly as in some other countries.
He highlighted that Spain reached a point in its pandemic at which more than 170 new confirmed Covid-19 cases per million inhabitants were reported on a single day.
López-Gatell: another sign of the ‘famous flattening of the curve.’
Brazil has recorded more than 160 new cases daily per million people, the United States has detected more than 100 cases per million and the pandemic in Italy peaked at almost 90.
In contrast, Mexico thus far has reached a peak of just over 40 new confirmed cases per million inhabitants per day.
Referring to Mexico’s epidemic curve, López-Gatell said that “we’re starting to see a much slower rise” than in earlier phases of the coronavirus outbreak.
He stressed that the inclination of Mexico’s curve is not as steep as the other countries shown in the graph, which also included the United Kingdom, Germany and France.
“This is another one of the signs … of the famous flattening of the curve,” López-Gatell said, claiming that the coronavirus mitigation measures put in place by the government achieved their goal and avoided the health system being overwhelmed.
The deputy minister also emphasized that no country in the world knows exactly how many Covid-19 cases it has. Therefore, Mexico’s comparatively low number of daily cases cannot be attributed solely to a low testing rate.
The daily tally of coronavirus cases and deaths. Deaths are numbers reported and not necessarily those that occurred each day. milenio
López-Gatell also presented a graph showing that Mexico’s number of cumulative confirmed Covid-19 deaths per million people is lower than that of the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy and Brazil. Only Germany has a lower per-capita death rate than Mexico among the eight countries included in the graph.
López-Gatell said the rate at which deaths are occurring in Mexico is slower than that of all the other countries bar Germany.
He highlighted that many of the Covid-19 fatalities in Mexico are related to diabetes, hypertension, obesity and other chronic diseases. The population of Mexico is more affected by those illnesses at a higher rate than the populations of almost every other country in the world, he said.
López-Gatell’s assertion that the pace of growth of the pandemic is slowing is also supported by recent data for the greater Mexico City metropolitan area, Mexico’s coronavirus epicenter.
Health Ministry data shows that the number of new cases detected between June 15 and 21 in the 16 Mexico City boroughs and 59 México state municipalities that are part of the Valley of México metropolitan area was 12.3% lower than in the previous week.
A total of 7,154 cases were detected between June 15 and 21 compared to 8,162 during the week before. It was the second consecutive week that case numbers declined in the Valley of México after a 7.2% drop between June 8 and 14.
The 7.2% decrease was the first weekly drop in case numbers since Covid-19 was first detected in Mexico at the end of February.
At the national level, the number of cases reported on Saturday and Sunday declined in comparison with previous days, although López-Gatell acknowledged that the Health Ministry usually registers fewer cases over the weekend.
He said that 4,050 additional cases were registered on Sunday, increasing Mexico’s cumulative case tally to 216,852.
Mexico’s Covid-19 death toll increased by 267 – the smallest daily spike since June 7 – to 26,648.
López-Gatell said that an additional 2,004 fatalities are suspected to have been caused by Covid-19 but have not yet been confirmed.
Of the total number of confirmed cases, 25,558, or about 12%, are considered active.
Mexico City currently has the highest number of active cases in the country, with 3,838, followed by México state and Puebla, where 2,513 and 1,826 people, respectively, tested positive for Covid-19 after developing symptoms in the past 14 days.
Six other states have more than 1,000 active cases. They are Guanajuato, Tabasco, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Yucatán and Jalisco.
López Obrador, left, lacks vision, according to Rodríguez.
Nuevo León Governor Jaime “El Bronco” Rodríguez hopes some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Covid-related economic strategies will rub off on Mexican President López Obrador next month.
“It is good that the president is going to the United States, because that will open up his vision, which unfortunately he does not have at the moment,” quipped Rodríguez in Tamaulipas at a meeting of governors from nine states.
Rodríguez contrasted López Obrador’s economic plan, mainly focused on increased social aid, the delivery of small micro-credits and the construction of legacy projects such as the Maya Train, with that of the Trump administration.
The governor expressed support for employment subsidies in the United States where the government has invested up to 30% of its gross domestic product in creating jobs to stimulate economic recovery, something that is not happening in Mexico, he said
The meeting between the two presidents coincides with the entry in force of the new trade treaty between Mexico, the United States and Canada on July 1, and it will be the Mexican president’s first trip abroad since taking office in 2018.
Rodríguez urged the president to use the meeting with Trump to standardize the terms of the treaty in sectors such as agriculture, logistics and the production of goods destined for the United States. “Mexico has enormous opportunities to be productive, and we need to take advantage of them,” he said.
Some of López Obrador’s critics are skeptical that the meeting will be beneficial for Mexico, where Trump is not generally well-liked, and did not mince words.
In a post to Twitter last week, the former Mexican ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhán, called the potential visit “a big blunder and a mistake,” saying that Trump would only use the Mexican president as an electoral prop.
In an interview earlier this month Sarukhán called such a visit “suicidal for Mexico’s long-term and strategic relationship with the United States.”
Cellist Alan Durbecq performs with a young student in Amatlán, Morelos.
Not content with a successful international career, a Mexican musician has chosen to work at providing artistic opportunities to Mexican children.
World-renowned classical guitarist Morgan Szymanski, born in Mexico City in 1979, has created an organization that so far has offered music workshops to more than 17,000 children.
Szymanski is descended from Coronel Ignacy Szymanski, a Polish military officer who migrated to New Orleans in the 19th century and whose son, Jean, made his way to Mexico after the civil war. His mother came from Scotland to study Mexican textiles, married his father, and served as the head of the Edron (British) School in Mexico City for a number of years.
Their son started playing the guitar at age 6 with the support of his parents. After studying at the National School of Music in Mexico he continued at the Edinburgh Music School and the Royal College of Music in London, graduating in 2004.
In 2015, he was named by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as one of 100 Mexican artists with international impact.
Musician Lavinia Negrete with children in Valle de Bravo, México state.
During his time in the U.K. he worked with Live Music Now! (LMN) a project of international violinist Yehudi Menuhin that takes young performers into nursing homes, hospitals and rural villages to play music.
In 2016, Szymanski founded PRISMA (Programa de Retribución e Impacto Social Mediante las Artes), using a crowdfunding campaign that collected money from all over the world.
PRISMA is affiliated with LMN, but is more ambitious. The latter focuses only on setting up live musical performances but PRISMA does more and integrates more kinds of art.
Its main performance events are festivals. In February for each of the past four years it has put on multi-day events in the towns of Tepoztlán, Morelos, (where Szymanski lives) and Valle de Bravo, several hours west of Mexico City.
After the earthquake of 2017, PRISMA organized an “artistic campaign” for damaged schools in Tepoztlán, offering workshops and raising money. It did the same for in Oaxaca after seismic events during the same year.
Fortunately, PRISMA festivals for 2020 were held before the Covid-19 pandemic shut everything down. This year the theme was Mexican folk music and featured two special guests — María Bernal and Angelina Benavides. It also included jazz guitarist Chris Van Buren, Finnish clown Sampo Kurppa, and Mexican violinist Nabani Aguilar.
Andrés Loewe, a Tepoztlán artist, teacher, actor and musician, wows students with his drum.
During the rest of the year PRISMA sponsors workshops with schoolchildren living in highly marginalized areas, mostly in the state of Morelos. (Now, of course, they are on hold.) Artists go into schools and introduce their art, after which the students interview the artists to learn about their career. Of course, the artists perform as well.
Some workshops introduce children to multiple arts. For example, at one Szymanski played his guitar while students painted what they felt listening to the music.
The workshops are special because for many children it is their very first experience with the art presented. One appreciative teacher told Szymanski that “one of these workshops is worth six hours in the classroom.”
The organization recruits Mexican and international performers in music, visual arts, dance, film, acting and clowning to give the workshops to children, allowing them not only to see a live performance, but to learn something about it.
With luck, some of the children will be inspired to pursue an artistic activity. One of the artists is British violinist Lizzie Ball, who takes her experiences working with Mexican children home when she plays in venues such as the Royal Albert Hall.
The shows and workshops also give young performers a chance to develop their careers. They receive only a small fee, but almost all want to return. One very possible reason is that these artists are often the guests of the communities they visit — receiving food, lodging and other support from local families.
Classical guitarist and PRISMA founder Morgan Szymanski.
The “very Mexican welcome” that artists receive is a huge change from impersonal hotel rooms and gives artists, especially foreign ones, a glimpse into Mexican life they might never otherwise get.
PRISMA is the only program of its type in Mexico. Most of the activities are privately funded although the government of Valle de Bravo has provided support there. Szymanski believes it is important for Mexico as there are so many children in need of artistic contact.
It is easy to get children and schools interested in the workshops but the problem is that once the activities grow past a certain size, it becomes necessary to work with government bureaucracies.
But Szymanski believes that PRISMA can go national. He says that despite the organization’s small size, they have reached thousands of children. Sometimes, he says, “If you keep things small, you can do things well.”
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.
A sargassum-free beach Friday in Playa del Carmen.
Saharan dust clouds, the consequences for tourism of the coronavirus and the advent of hurricane season have given residents and businesses in Quintana Roo plenty to worry about as the state faces one of its most difficult summers in history.
However, reports from Playa del Carmen and other beach destinations in the state have added another concern to the list of worries: the return of sargassum which has blighted beaches in the area for several years.
As of this week, 5,678 tonnes of sargassum have been removed from the region’s beaches since the algae first washed up in May, according to a report by the navy.
Photos published on Facebook by the Citizens’ Sargassum Observatory showed the foul-smelling weed on several beaches.
“Seven workers and a single tractor is all they have on the ground to collect the sargassum in Playa del Carmen,” the organization reported, posting an image of a group of people attacking the seaweed with shovels.
Playa Mamitas in Playa del Carmen on Wednesday. Observatorio Ciudadano Sargazo
The upscale, gated community of Playacar has also seen its beaches covered in a blanket of sargassum this month.
So far, Playa del Carmen, the Riviera Maya and Akumal have recorded the highest concentrations of sargassum, which can cause irritation if it comes in contact with the skin.
There were significant quantities in Punta Piedra, Tulum, and an image captured from Krystal Hotel and Resorts, in Punta Cancún, showed a long line of sargassum on its white sand beaches, although the seaweed problem there was minimal compared to other areas.
Puerto Morelos, Cozumel, Holbox and Punta Allen have also seen low quantities of seaweed, and Isla Mujeres and Isla Contoy have so far been immune, according to reports.
The navy warned this week that large accumulations of sargassum will hit the Quintana Roo coast over the next three months. According to forecasts, the most affected beaches will be in Solidaridad, where Playa del Carmen is located, Cozumel, Tulum and Othón P. Blanco.
“With cleaning of the sea in the Mexican Caribbean area as a priority, naval personnel work constantly for the eradication of the algae with the support of state, municipal and civil organizations,” the Navy said. More than 20,000 people have been involved in the coastal cleanup.
Additionally, Navy marines have installed 4,252 meters of floating barriers at sea to stop the seaweed from washing up on beaches.
The navy also uses flyovers to determine the position of the seaweed, and deploys sargassum-seeking ships to intercept the floating brown algae before it blights the coastline.
Police guard the crime scene Friday in Mexico City.
Government officials, including President López Obrador, had known for two weeks that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) was planning an attack against a top-level official.
Friday morning, Mexico City Police Chief Omar García Harfuch was ambushed by 28 armed men who sprayed the armored car he was traveling in with more than 150 high caliber rounds in a brazen murder attempt.
García received three bullet wounds but has been reported in stable condition and expected to recover.
Two police officers were killed in the attack as was a 26-year-old woman who found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Security Minister Alfonso Durazo confirmed what Milenio reported on June 17: that between June 8 and 12 the National Intelligence Center (CNI) intercepted a telephone conversation between CJNG members.
Government officials and President López Obrador were made aware of the threat two weeks ago when security officials revealed the content of the phone call, in which cartel members were allegedly discussing their plan. They talked about which hitmen would be dispatched to attack public servants who were disrupting their criminal operations.
Authorities say the targets mentioned include Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard, for the recent extradition of El Menchito, CJNG leader Nemesio Oseguera’s son; Minister Durazo for federal operations against the cartel; Financial Intelligence Unit head Santiago Nieto for recently blocking 1,939 bank accounts linked to the cartel; and Chief García for arresting some of the cartel’s main leaders.
Security for some government officials was intensified as authorities worked to assess the validity of the threat, which played out at 6:35 Friday morning.
As García was on his way to his morning meeting with Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, a construction truck and an SUV blocked the Paseo de la Reforma near the intersection with Monte Blanco in the upscale Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood and opened fire, killing two officers who were escorting García as well as a woman driving through the area. Four police officers and one 23-year-old female bystander also suffered injuries.
Fragmentation grenades, .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles, pistols and bulletproof vests were recovered from the scene.
García was shot in the shoulder, clavicle and knee and underwent surgery yesterday, but not before tweeting from his hospital bed that he blamed the CJNG for the attack. “This morning we were cowardly attacked by the CJNG, two colleagues and friends of mine lost my life, I have three bullet wounds and several shrapnel injuries. Our nation must continue to confront cowardly organized crime. We will continue working.”
That evening he updated his status. “I came out of surgery, I’m fine. I appreciate the displays of solidarity and affection. We will continue working for security and maintaining peace in our great Mexico City. Thank you very, very much for everything!”
Prosecutors say that the 12 men who were initially arrested in the attack stated that they were hired three weeks earlier. Footage of the attack was captured on surveillance video, leading to the additional arrests of two suspects in Atlacomulco and five in Tláhuac.
Among those in custody is Armando Briseño de los Santos who authorities are naming as the intellectual author of the attack.
Briseño is reported to be a cartel hitman who authorities suspect was responsible for the murder of two Israeli men in Mexico City in July 2019.
García, who was named Mexico City’s chief of police in 2019, has been battling organized crime for years.
In his previous role as head of the investigation division of the Federal Police, García was responsible for the release of 186 kidnapping victims, the capture of 606 kidnappers and the dismantling of 56 criminal gangs, according to El Heraldo de México.
Although confirmed coronavirus cases have topped 208,000, the federal government’s latest color-coded “stoplight” risk map indicates that 18 states have moved from maximum risk to high risk and are able to ease coronavirus restrictions.
Colima, Hidalgo and Nuevo León, however, will move out of orange and back to the red, maximum risk level, as coronavirus conditions worsened. And Baja California, Guerrero, the state of México, Morelos, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Puebla, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tabasco and Tlaxcala remain at maximum risk.
In the 18 orange states, gyms, spas sporting clubs, churches and swimming pools are permitted to operate at 50% of their capacity, as are hotels, restaurants and cafés. Theaters, museums and cultural attractions may reopen at 25% capacity.
Markets and supermarkets can operate at 70% capacity, but may only allow one person per family inside the store. Barbershops and beauty salons may reopen but by appointment only.
Aguascalientes, Baja California Sur, Campeche, Coahuila, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Mexico City, Durango, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, Querétaro, Quintana Roo, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Yucatán and Zacatecas have all been designated orange states.
The daily tally of coronavirus cases and deaths. Deaths are numbers reported and not necessarily those that occurred each day. milenio
The government considers four factors when determining the risk level and corresponding stoplight color for each state: case number trends (whether new infections are increasing, decreasing or stable), hospital admission trends for coronavirus patients, hospital occupancy levels and positivity rates (the percentage of people tested who are confirmed to have Covid-19).
Health officials say that hospital occupancy carries a weight of 50%, case numbers and hospital admission trends 20% each and the number of new cases 10% in their decision-making on how the coronavirus is progressing in each state.
The Ministry of Health reported Friday evening that another 5,441 cases had been added to the tally, which now totals 208,392. An additional 719 deaths were reported, bringing that total to 25,779.
