Another candidate killed in second most violent election season since 2000

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May 14, 2021

Candidate for mayor in the municipality of Cajeme, Sonora, Abel Murrieta Gutiérrez, — Abel Murrieta Gutiérrez, a candidate for mayor in the municipality of Cajeme, Sonora, was killed in an attack on Thursday.

A candidate for mayor in Cajeme, Sonora, was murdered on Thursday in yet another incident of violence during what is already the second most violent electoral season in Mexico in this century.

Abel Murrieta Gutiérrez, a former Sonora attorney general and mayoral candidate for the Citizens Movement (MC) party, was shot multiple times at approximately 5:00 p.m. while campaigning on the streets of Ciudad Obregón, the Cajeme municipal seat.

A young woman who was part of the candidate’s campaign team was wounded in the attack. Murrieta was taken to hospital but died shortly after he arrived, the newspaper Milenio reported.

The Sonora Attorney General’s Office (FGJE) said that police launched an operation to locate the aggressors but no arrests were reported. Governor Claudia Pavlovich condemned the murder ,describing Murrieta as a person with “deep love for Sonora.”

Citizens Movement party president Clemente Castañeda Hoeflich blamed organized crime for the attack, saying Murrieta was targeted for his campaign message that he would confront narco crime in Cajeme.

Candidate for mayor in Morelia, Michoacán, Guillermo Valencia Reyes — A candidate for mayor in Morelia, Michoacán, Guillermo Valencia Reyes, said he’ll change his campaign following a recent attack.

“Abel paid [the price] for having said now and again in his campaign that he had the bravery to confront narcos and that he would deal with them once he became mayor,” Castañeda said. “It’s clear that organized crime governs Sonora.”

President López Obrador said Friday that the federal government will collaborate with Sonora authorities on the investigation.

“… It really is sad that these things happen, and we send our condolences to the family,” he said at his regular news conference. “We are also committed to doing the investigation and punishing those responsible.”

Murrieta, who served as attorney general of Sonora between 2004 and 2012, was a lawyer for the LeBaron family, who lost nine members of their extended family in a 2019 massacre near the Sonora-Chihuahua border.

Adrian LeBaron, an antiviolence activist, condemned Murrieta’s murder and asked, “Who will defend us now?”

Violence in the lead-up to elections has become commonplace in Mexico, but this electoral season, which officially began last September, has been particularly bad.

According to the risk analysis firm Etellekt, the current electoral period leading up to municipal, state and federal elections on June 6 is the second most violent since 2000. It published a report last week that stated that there were 476 acts of aggression against politicians, candidates, their collaborators and their families between September 7, 2020 and April 30, 2021.

Among the acts of aggression, which occurred in 31 of Mexico’s 32 states, were 174 threats, 79 homicides of politicians and candidates, 29 murders of family members and collaborators, 25 abductions and 14 attempted murders.

There were 443 victims, 35% of whom were women, Etellekt said. The number of victims is a 64% increase compared to the 2017–2018 electoral season.

Veracruz has recorded the highest number of murders of politicians or candidates with 14 occurring up to April 30. Oaxaca ranks second with 10, followed by Guerrero with eight and Guanajuato with six.

In Michoacán, where three politicians or candidates had been murdered as of April 30, a candidate for mayor in the state capital, Morelia, said earlier this week that he would have to modify his campaign after he was targeted in an attack that wounded two members of his team.

The personal assistant of Guillermo Valencia Reyes and another collaborator were wounded last Saturday after three gunmen opened fire on a vehicle in which they apparently believed the Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate was traveling.

“They had studied my movements [but] fortunately I wasn’t in that [vehicle],” he told the newspaper Reforma.

“… We have to reconsider a lot of things, we can’t campaign in the same way because my life is threatened; I was used to being among the people at events … there were a large number of people because of the social support we have. We have to reconsider the way we do our campaign but [we will] continue,” he said.

“… If I were to quit that would please those who tried to kill me. We can’t allow fear to lead us to pleasing people who do harm, who do evil. I hope the authorities do their job and arrest those responsible.”

Citizens Movement party candidates in Ixcapuzalco, Guerrero, took a different view, deciding to pull out of the elections after receiving threats from an organized crime group.

MC candidates for mayor, municipal trustee and councilor abandoned their campaigns last week because they don’t want to run the risk of being the targets of an attack, the news website Net Noticias reported.

Source: Milenio (sp), Reforma (sp), Net Noticias (sp), Forbes México (sp)

Mexico’s ‘organic architecture:’ curvatures in space and time

By

Jude Webber

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May 14, 2021

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Nautilus, a logarithmic spiral whose shape was adapted to the lot on which it was built.

When one of Javier Senosiain’s daughters was in kindergarten, she was asked to draw her house. Her picture showed an undulating green roof and semi-buried structure. She left out the giant shark’s head overlooking the garden but even so, the teacher was alarmed enough to call her mother and the school psychologist. The explanation turned out to be simple: her dad’s an architect.

And not just any architect. Senosiain, 73, is Mexico’s leading proponent of so-called “organic architecture,” a concept popularized in the U.S. in the early 20th century by Frank Lloyd Wright, who sought to place his buildings in a harmonious balance with their natural habitat.

The Casa Orgánica (Organic House) drawn by Senosiain’s daughter is not just any house either. Built in a residential neighbourhood in Naucalpan de Juárez just northwest of Mexico City and finished in 1984, it is Bilbo Baggins,’, crossed with the Teletubbies’ Tubbytronic Superdome, meets the modular bubbles of the children’s book Barbapapa. The contrast with the elegant, entirely rectilinear homes all around it could not be sharper.

Inspired by caves and igloos, the Casa Orgánica’s tunnels and curves are not only in keeping with nature but a joyful return to life’s origins. Senosiain sees it as the architectural equivalent of a mother’s embrace, or apapacho, a word borrowed from the Aztec language, Náhuatl, meaning “shelter of the soul.”

“There are hardly any straight lines in nature,” says Senosiain, who lived in the house for a quarter of a century until his two daughters, now in their 30s, went to university. “Our natural space is curved, it’s the antithesis of the boxes we’re used to.”

He embraced swirls and flow to such an extent that he declared early in his career he would never build straight lines. In fact, he did, but soon threw himself into a glorious evocation of the natural world’s forms, functions and colours. “I’m even more convinced now, with the pandemic, that we’re going to turn to … the origin, what is primitive,” he says on a video call from his Mexico City home, where he is spending the pandemic completing a book.

Next to the Casa Orgánica is the Ballena Mexicana (Mexican whale, completed in 1992) covered in vibrant mosaics. Nautilus (2007), another of his most recognizable works, is reminiscent of a conch shell. The Nido de Quetzalcóatl (Quetzalcóatl’s Nest, 2007) is a horizontal apartment block in the shape of a snake’s body — a nod to the pre-Hispanic plumed serpent deity.

Sam Cochran, features director at Architectural Digest magazine, calls his structures “wildly creative.”

“Senosiain’s work anticipated the interest in biomorphic forms and the innovative merging of indoor and outdoor space that are top-of-mind for many of today’s leading designers,” he says. “It synthesizes many influences into a totally singular point of view.”

To appreciate that in all its glory, you have to take a trip to Naucalpan, a gritty industrial suburb on the northwestern fringe of Mexico City.

The colourful Torres de Satélite (Satellite Towers), designed by famed Mexican architect Luis Barragán and sculptor Mathias Goeritz, rise up from the Periférico ring road. A briefly cheerful respite from the uninspiring fringe of one of the world’s biggest cities, they are Naucalpan’s main claim to fame.

Casa Orgánica, inspired by caves and igloos. — Casa Orgánica was inspired by caves and igloos.

But keep on driving, up to the top of a hill affording panoramic views of the mountains ringing the megalopolis, and you enter another world. Like Antoni Gaudí’s Parc Güell in Barcelona, or Edward James’s surrealist masterpiece Las Pozas in the Mexican town of Xilitla, Senosiain has let his prolific imagination off the leash in the Parque Quetzalcóatl.

Senosiain, who brushes off the notion of retirement but has been forced into a slower pace by the pandemic, began the adventurous — and ambitious — project in 2000, imagining it initially as a conservation project. But it has grown and developed, and he hopes it will finally open to the public within five years.

Once you’re inside the rippling, serpentine walls, manicured lawns give way to secret passageways and a succession of surprises. An ugly electricity substation, and boxy houses sprawling up a distant hill, are sometimes visible — but just as reminders of a prosaic reality that seems light years away from Senosiain’s enthralling, absorbing universe.

Structures of snakes — some studded with marble and tezontle, a reddish-brown volcanic rock; others with intricate mosaic designs picked out in primary colours — slither over the landscape. Sinuous paths bear curved lines picked out in stones, like the ridges of ammonites.

Entering a riotously colourful tunnel that takes its inspiration from a snail feels like being on a magical mystery tour at a funfair: the exit leads into a plant nursery crowned with nearly 2,000 yellow, orange, red and blue panes making up a stained-glass cupola in the pattern of a star. Senosiain’s structures are made from cement slathered on to metal forms covered in chicken wire, a system known as ferrocement. Fountains gush from snakes’ heads into ponds.

Once the park is finished and opened to the public, visitors will be able to recline on white fiberglass chairs floating on the water, whose elegant shapes are reminiscent of doves, or relax on land on tongue-shaped benches.

The park’s meandering spaces take their cue from the natural contours of the land. An abandoned cave will house a shop. A butterfly and hummingbird garden spirals into a vegetable patch that will supply an organic pizzeria and on to an area where a farm is planned.

The magical touch extends to the most mundane of features: a toilet, nestled among the trees, is concealed inside a shiny metal egg. As Senosiain puts it, his designs have to be functional but, equally, “they have to be fun.”

“Young people like the Casa Orgánica more than they did 36 years ago,” he says. “Then, they saw it as something weird. Now they’re much more conscious of ecology.”

Indeed, the Casa Orgánica, near the park, blends into the landscape to such an extent that most of the house is invisible. No walls can be seen, just bubbles for windows, like large, free-form portholes. Instead of a roof, there is a carpet of grass over bulges where the house is hidden below.

That provides not only harmony with nature but also protects the house — erected in malleable ferrocement on top of a sloping skate park-style structure, then sprayed in polyurethane to seal and insulate it — from wet and extreme temperatures that could cause fissures.

Entry is through an oval swinging door and down a cream-carpeted passageway. It feels like descending a flume at a swimming pool as it swooshes round into a surprisingly airy living room illuminated with a large window.

In the Nautilus, neither the floor, nor the ceiling, nor the walls are parallel.

“The idea of passing from a wide space with a lot of light through another that is dimly lit, to re-emerge in another with plenty of light and colour — that’s Barragán’s influence,” Senosiain says.

One of the house’s most dramatic features is the shark’s head that emerges into the garden. It was Senosiain’s upstairs office, its windows affording panoramic views of Mexico City.

Equally inventive is Quetzalcóatl’s Nest, which appears to float inside the park — only 5% of its structure is in contact with the ground. Alongside it is a giant snake’s head studded with hand-painted ceramic rings to evoke the intricate beadwork of Mexico’s indigenous Huichol people. Visitors can experience it for themselves on Airbnb — but there’s a long waiting list.

Senosiain’s work is “a bit off the grid,” says Francisco de la Isla O’Neill, an architecture professor at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University, who briefly had Senosiain as a professor. With the homes’ curved walls, “you can’t just buy furniture [for his houses] in Ikea,” he laughs.

But, he adds, Senosiain’s exuberant embrace of a different aesthetic to imported minimalism showed “the possibility of doing things differently — and that has value … In terms of exploring the possibilities for how we can change our environment, his contribution is very important.”

Covid-19 has forced us to be more introspective as we have curtailed our movements, while also imprinting on us a more profound yearning for, appreciation of, the outside world. “We are all craving a connection to nature and Senosiain’s work certainly espouses just that,” says Cochran.

And that is the legacy Senosiain himself hopes to leave, he says, summing up his architecture as “a concern with returning to our roots so that we can have a better quality of life.”

New species of dinosaur identified from 72-million-year-old remains found in Coahuila

By

MND Staff

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May 14, 2021

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An artist's conception of what the Tlatolophus galorum might have looked like. Luis V. Rey/INAH

A team of paleontologists has identified a new species of dinosaur after unearthing its 72-million-year-old remains in Coahuila eight years ago, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) announced Thursday.

The institute said in a statement that paleontologists discovered in 2013 the remains of a large herbivorous dinosaur that died 72 or 73 million years ago in a body of water with copious amounts of sediment that covered and preserved it throughout the ages.

The paleontologists determined this year that the remains are of a new species of crested dinosaur that has been named Tlatolophus galorum.

In 2013, during a dig in the municipality of General Cepeda, INAH and National Autonomous University paleontologists found numerous parts of the dinosaur, including its skull.

“Once we recovered the tail, we kept digging below where it was located. The surprise was that we began to find bones such as the femur, the scapula and other elements,” said Ángel Alejandro Ramírez Velasco of UNAM.

The new dinosaur had a crest in the shape of a water drop. One researcher said he thought at first the crest’s bone was part of the pelvis. INAH/Marco A. Pineda

Ramírez, who coauthored an article on the discovery of the new species, said that among the bones was an elongated one in the form of a water drop.

“At the time I said that it was part of the pelvis, but another one of the project participants, José López Espinoza, said it was the animal’s head,” he said.

What the paleontologists had found was in fact the 1.3-meter-long crest of the dinosaur. They also found several other parts of the reptile’s head, including lower and upper jawbones, its palate and a part known as the neurocranium, which encased the brain.

All told, the paleontologists were able to recover almost 80% of the dinosaur’s skull. They compared the remains they found with those of other dinosaurs known to have inhabited the region such as the Velafrons coahuilensis.

“The examination showed that the crest and the nose were different from the Velafrons and more similar to … another tribe of hadrosaurids [a type characterized by a duck-bill shape to the snout]: the Parasaurolophus genus,” INAH said.

However, the crest of the “General Cepeda specimen” with its water-drop form wasn’t an identical match to the “tubular crest of the Parasaurolophus, … which inhabited the actual territories of New Mexico and Utah, United States, as well as Alberta, Canada, and which has been depicted in movies such as Jurassic Park,” the institute said.

Member of the INAH-UNAM team — The remains were found in Coahuila in 2013, but paleontologists only recently determined that it belongs to a new species. INAH

“After all these discoveries, we convinced ourselves that we were faced with a new genus, a kind of crested dinosaur,” said Felisa Aguilar Arellano, an INAH researcher in Coahuila.

The paleontologists’ conclusion was supported by independent members of the scientific community, who reviewed an article on the discovery published in the journal Cretaceous Research.

INAH said the name given to the new species is a tribute devised by the paleontologists.

Tlatolophus comes from the Náhuatl word tlahtolli, which means word — a reference to the animal’s ability to perceive low-frequency sounds and thus the possibility that the species was “talkative” — and the Greek word lophus, which means crest.

The galorum part of the name pays tribute to people who assisted the paleontologists who made the discovery. Ga acknowledges the contribution of philanthropist Jesús Garza Arocha, while lorum recognizes the support of the López family, who provided accommodation and meals to the paleontologists while they were working in General Cepeda.

INAH also highlighted that the tail of the Tlatolophus galorum is on display at a museum in the municipal seat, located about 60 kilometers west of Saltillo.

“This fossil, which remains under investigation, is an exceptional case in Mexican paleontology because for it to be conserved in the conditions in which we found it, highly favorable events had to occur millions of years ago when Coahuila was a tropical region,” Aguilar said.

Paleontologists have found the remains of many dinosaurs in Coahuila, including those of a genus — the Parksosaurus — that wasn’t previously known to have existed in Mexico.

Mexico News Daily

Academics-turned-detectives track down stolen papers that belonged to Hernán Cortés

By

MND Staff

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May 13, 2021

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A group of academics-turned-detectives in Mexico and Spain helped stop a New York auction house’s scheduled sale in September of a 1521 letter sent to Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, according to a report published Thursday by the news agency Reuters.

The same group — whose members include María Isabel Grañén Porrúa, a scholar of 16th-century Spanish colonial books and a prominent Mexican cultural figure, Mexico-based Dutch philologist Michel Oudijk and María del Carmen Martínez, an esteemed Cortés scholar in Spain — has also unearthed nine other Cortés-linked papers that were auctioned in New York and Los Angeles between 2017 and 2020 after being stolen from Mexico’s national archives.

The “rare treasure” that the Swann Galleries auction house was planning to sell was a 1521 letter to Cortés from allies, urging him to avoid a royal Spanish emissary who intended to strip him of his powers. The missive to the leader of the Spanish forces that conquered what is now modern-day Mexico was expected to fetch US $20,000 to $30,000 at auction, but the “plucky” group of academics “helped thwart the sale,” Reuters said.

Through reviewing her personal collection of thousands of photographs of Spanish colonial documents, Martínez, an academic at Spain’s University of Valladolid, was able to determine that the letter was once held at the National Archive of Mexico (AGN) in Mexico City, which she visited in 2010 and 2014.

The other academics have been searching online catalogs of global auction houses to find Cortés-related documents for years, and one of them recruited the Spanish scholar to assist their efforts.

Martínez saw that the letter Swann Galleries was planning to sell was the same document she had photographed at the AGN years earlier.

The “penman’s swooping cursive and a small triangle-shaped chunk of parchment missing from the left-hand margin” left no doubt in her mind that the document shown on the auction house’s website was the one she’d seen. The academics made their concerns about the provenance of the letter public in early September, and Swann Galleries canceled its September 24 auction after Reuters made inquires.

The group also drew up a list of nine other Cortés papers sold in recent years, of which Martínez had photographed seven.

Officials at the AGN told Reuters that at least eight of those documents, as well as the 1521 letter whose sale was foiled, were missing from the national archives. They said that some of the documents appeared to have been surgically removed, as if with a scalpel, from old books in which they had previously been bound.

“It’s scandalous,” said Grañén, the colonial books scholar. “We are very worried, not just by this theft, but also about all the other robberies and looting of national heritage.”

Swann Galleries, which put a total of six Cortés papers on the block between 2017 and 2020, denied wrongdoing.

“Knowingly moving stolen material through an auction house is just about the silliest thing a person can do,” said Alexandra Nelson, the auction house’s chief marketing officer.

London-based auction house Christies, which put two Cortés papers up for auction in the United States, told Reuters it carefully vets the provenance of all items it sells. Bonhams, also of London, and Los Angeles auction house Nate D. Sanders, which sold one Cortés manuscript each, declined to comment or didn’t respond to the news agency’s questions.

Robert Wittman, a former special agent and founder of the Art Crime Team at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), said that major auction houses are not doing enough to prevent the sale of looted items.

“They are not in the business of recovering stolen property or protecting cultural property,” he said. “They’re in the business of buying and selling.”

Reuters also revealed that Mexico’s Foreign Ministry (SRE) has sought the assistance of the United States Department of Justice to repatriate the 10 manuscripts.

Reuters managed to identify one of the buyers of the manuscripts, who told the news agency that he had returned it to the auction house.

“I have returned the letter, acquired in good faith, to Swann Galleries,” Brazilian art historian Pedro Corrêa do Lago said in an email, referring to a 1538 letter from Cortés to his property manager that Corrêa do Lago bought for $32,500.

Swann Galleries declined to comment on those remarks, Reuters said.

The legal director at the AGN, a cash-strapped institute that Mexican academics have long warned is susceptible to theft, told Reuters that the archive is “not ruling out any hypothesis” about the removal of the Cortés papers.

“We are not discounting the possibility that the person responsible for the thefts of these documents was a manager, a worker or a researcher,” Marco Palafox said.

He said the AGN didn’t contact Swann Galleries itself to stop the sale of the missive to Cortés last September because it was unable to quickly establish that the document, and others, were in fact missing from its collection, even though the match between Martínez’s photos and those posted to auction house websites were compelling evidence.

Palafox said that only about 40% of the AGN’s hundreds of thousands of documents have been catalogued, and therefore finding documents — or checking if some are missing — can be a challenge.

However, the AGN obtained assistance in the form of a collection of microfilm images recorded at the archive in 1993 by the Genealogical Society of Utah, a Mormon nonprofit now known as FamilySearch that has photographed archive documents around the world to help Mormons and others trace their ancestry.

Palafox said that among the nonprofit’s images — available online — AGN staff found photographs of nine of the 10 Cortés papers that had been auctioned in recent years. That allowed the staff members to locate where those documents should be, and they discovered that all of them were missing, the legal director said.

Palafox said he spoke with United States investigators on a video call last October and showed them images of the Cortés documents from the auction house websites alongside those belonging to the nonprofit and to Martínez.

“This was enough to get their attention,” he told Reuters.

A senior source at the SRE told the news agency that the United States Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. State Department and a federal attorney’s office in New York state were working together to recover the stolen documents that were auctioned off in recent years.

Palafox said the Mexican Attorney General’s Office is conducting its own probe into the theft of the documents.

Wittman, the former FBI agent, told Reuters that U.S. authorities would likely subpoena the auction houses that sold the Cortés documents in order to identify the individuals that put them up for sale as well as those who transported them. The strategy involves going down the chain until investigators arrive at the suspected thieves in Mexico, he said.

Source: Reuters (en)

Yucatán announces tourism, real estate projects worth 1.5 billion pesos

By

MND Staff

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May 13, 2021

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A new project that has just opened in Yucatán is the ecotourism park Chichikan, near Valladolid.

Yucatán Governor Mauricio Vila announced Thursday that 17 companies would invest almost 1.5 billion pesos to develop tourism, real estate, retail and restaurant projects in the eastern part of the state.

The projects are worth a combined 1.47 billion pesos (US $73.7 million) and will generate more than 4,800 direct and indirect jobs, the governor said at an event at a housing development in Valladolid, 160 kilometers east of the state capital Mérida. Vila announced a long list of projects to be developed in Yucatán’s east.

Grupo Alves is investing 653 million pesos in five real estate projects in Valladolid in addition to its new Finca Los Álamos estate where today’s event was held.

• The company Cenote Mukul will invest 500 million pesos in a sustainable tourism project on a property with a cenote (natural swimmable sinkhole) near the city.

• The company Zayanna will invest 189 million pesos to build 111 new apartments that will have access to a range of amenities including swimming pools, “wellness areas” and tennis courts, while developer Plaza Santo Secreto will build a new 120-million-peso shopping center that will include both retail stores and restaurants.

• Among other projects are numerous hotels, a 36-million-peso ecotourism park, a 16-million-peso recreational park with a zoo and on-site accommodation, a 106-lot residential project and an Italian restaurant.

The governor also announced that the transportation company Grupo ADO will launch a tourist bus service in Valladolid.

Vila stressed that his government is committed to creating well-paid jobs across Yucatán, not just in Mérida, the state’s largest city. He said tourism provides significant opportunities to generate jobs, although he acknowledged that the sector has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.

Still, the projects announced today show that there are “good conditions” for investment in Yucatán, the National Action Party governor said.

He cited the construction of a 160-meter-tall skyscraper in Mérida and Amazon’s new distribution center near the state capital as examples of companies’ confidence in investing in the state.

Theme park operator Grupo Xcaret has also invested in Yucatán, spending more than 2.8 billion pesos (US $140.4 million) to build a tourism complex featuring eight cenotes and three hotels near Valladolid.

In touting the investment potential of Yucatán, Vila noted that the state continues to be the safest in Mexico and boasted that the state police force is the most trustworthy in the country.

“According to [the national statistics agency] Inegi, … 77.2% of Yucatán residents trust the police when the national average is about 35%,” the governor said.

“… With the grain of sand that you’re putting in today as investors and the grain of sand that we’re putting in as the government, Yucatán could be a tourism powerhouse in the next 10 years,” Vila told company representatives.

Source: Milenio (sp)

Meeting the Tarahumara inspired book on ‘weird’ history of exercise

By

Rich Tenorio

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May 13, 2021

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Pedro Parra ultramarathoner and Raramuri — Most Tarahumara run in their daily lives, although some, like Pedro Parra, seen here in The Big Dog's Backyard Ultramarathon in 2020, compete internationally.

Harvard University evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman grew up encouraged to lead an active lifestyle, from hiking to cross country skiing. Yet he was amazed to experience the long-distance running feats of the Tarahumara, or Rarámuri, indigenous community in Mexico while doing field work in the Copper Canyon in 2012.

Just as amazing was an insight he gained from an elderly Tarahumara runner. When Lieberman asked how he trained to run such long distances, the man did not understand the concept of training and replied, “Why would anybody run if they don’t have to?”

“It was such a great question,” Lieberman recalled. And it was the genesis of his new book, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding. “It suddenly zapped me that it would be a fun topic for a book,” he said, “the natural history of exercise being a kind of weird modern behavior.”

Lieberman studied biology and anthropology as a Harvard undergraduate. He combines the two fields in his work today. Although he does much of his research in Kenya, he traveled to Mexico almost nine years ago to learn more about the Tarahumara after reading Christopher McDougall’s bestselling book Born to Run.

“The Sierra Tarahumara is so beautiful and stunning,” he recalled. “It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever had the opportunity to visit.”

Tarahumara taking part in a Rarajipari event, a game that involves running and using a bat-like stick to move a ball.

Lieberman observed traditional Tarahumara running events such as the rarajipari — a combination of an ultramarathon and a ballgame — and the ariwete, a 25-mile run for young women involving the pursuit of a hoop. At one rarajipari, he enjoyed a communal meal of soup, tortillas and chiles and drank pinole, a roasted ground maize beverage. During this particular event, which lasted an entire December day, he joined one of the competing teams, led by champion runner Arnulfo Quimare.

“I asked everybody questions about their running,” he said, including “how they trained. Nobody seemed to understand that word. [The translator] said, ‘This guy [Lieberman] runs five miles every morning to get ready for running,’” which prompted the elderly Tarahumara man’s disbelief.

Exercise, Lieberman notes, has become part of western culture. Consider the treadmill, which he follows in the book from its antecedents in the Roman Empire to its use as a Victorian-era punishment for criminals such as Oscar Wilde to its ubiquity in gyms today.

“I can’t think of anything less fun,” Lieberman said. “So many people exercise on treadmills. They can’t be enjoying themselves. They watch a movie or show, a podcast.” He then adds, “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

Yet he is concerned about the approach that many people have toward exercise, whether it’s at a gym, on the treadmill or through an Ironman triathlon.

“People are ‘exercised’ about exercise,” he said. “They are confused about its mission and myth. A lot of it stems from medicalization and commercialization. It’s a very unusual activity; it’s not so easy.” And, he added, “Not everybody likes the topic. A lot of people find it a very irritating thing.”

Victorian-era prisoners in Gloucester, England — Photo of prisoners on a treadmill from a prison in Gloucester, England, during the late 19th century.

At one end of the spectrum, there are elite athletes who train hard for intense competition that would intimidate many others. Lieberman explored such types of competition by going to the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, before his trip to Mexico and by attending a mixed martial arts fight in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

On the other hand, there’s a perception of exercise as a necessary but unpleasant way for weekend warriors to get fit and shed extra pounds. The book’s publication, delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, came out around New Year’s Day, when many traditionally make fitness resolutions.

“If you somehow don’t like it,” he said, it’s assumed there’s “something wrong with you, you’re lazy. It’s normal to want to avoid unnecessary exercise. People are made to feel bad about it, that there’s something wrong with them if they don’t go for a run or to the gym.

“It’s totally normal for human beings like the Tarahumara and everybody else not to go to the gym and lift weights whose sole function is to be lifted, to run five miles in the morning to stay fit. People overwhelmingly think it’s crazy — like the guy who asked me that question.”

Lieberman urges readers to find a middle ground: “We need to be more compassionate toward each other, understanding, less judgmental about each other.”

Although he understands the unpleasant side of exercise, he urges people to take it up in some form. The key is to “make it necessary, make it fun,” he said.

Daniel Lieberman, author of the book Exercised.

“School is enjoyable, and also required. I think we should treat exercise the same way, [whether it’s] “walking with a friend, going dancing, running with some friends, playing a game of soccer, engaging people. The better we do that, the better we will all be.”

That also goes for the elderly.

Lieberman cites a 1986 study of Harvard alumni by Dr. Ralph S. Paffenbarger Jr., that found that in their 20s, 30s and 40s, subjects who were more physically active had a 20% lower death rate than their nonactive peers. By the time subjects were in their 70s and 80s, the more physically active individuals had a death rate 50% lower than those who were not.

“As we get older, physical activity becomes more important,” Lieberman said. “We evolved not just to live to be grandparents but active grandparents — hunt, gather, grow food to provide for our children and grandchildren.”

For seniors today, he said, the active lifestyle is threatened by retirement — “a very modern Western concept” that historically did not apply to hunter-gatherers. “Physical activity is healthy,” he said. “It keeps us from senescing.”

He said that the Tarahumara, in general, “stay healthy as they age.”

“They are very physically active people,” he said. “Traditional Tarahumara are living a very healthy lifestyle for the most part.”

The average Tarahumara individual takes between 15,000 to 18,000 steps a day, well over twice the 4,000 steps a day for the average American. “Most Americans drive to the supermarket,” Lieberman noted. “They use a shopping cart; they don’t carry anything.”

In contrast, he said, “the Tarahumara are farmers … They don’t have machines, they don’t have cars, they don’t go to stores to get food.”

The tens of thousands of walking mileage logged by Tarahumara individuals are made “every day, all their lives,” Lieberman said, including on weekends, and are supplemented by other types of physical activity such as carrying and digging. He cautions against adopting a monolithic, stereotypical view of the Tarahumara as universal super-runners.

“Most Tarahumara do not run long distances,” Lieberman said.

He suggests that readers looking to exercise don’t need to run long, either.

“There’s no need to run a marathon,” he said. “There’s no need to do crazy stuff. A little bit goes a long way. My other advice is you don’t need a lot. Just a little bit has huge effects. Just a little bit has huge benefits.”

Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.

Travelers get a wet welcome at Mexico City airport

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MND Staff

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May 13, 2021

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Mopping up wet floors at Benito Juárez International Airport. — Mopping up wet floors at Benito Juárez International.

Rainfall is a cause for alarm at the country’s biggest airport due to leaks in the roof, despite 14.75 million pesos (around US $700,000) having been spent on waterproofing in 2020.

Travelers arriving at the capital in wet weather are greeted by yellow buckets, strategically placed on the floor to catch drips from the ceiling.

Waterproofing and roof replacement work was carried out between July and December last year.

Cleaning staff and police officers have been seen teaming up to prevent puddles from forming on the terminal floor and to contain precipitation at Gate 4, which is prone to turn into a small river flowing to the check-in area.

Rainfall is set to intensify over the summer months and remain at high levels until October.

The government has stated that renovation of the airport is a priority, but so far works have been concentrated on terminal 2.

The president canceled the construction of a new airport for the capital in 2018. Though it never saw the light of day, the Texcoco air hub won an international architecture award earlier this year.

Source: El Financiero (sp)

Mexico responds to GM union complaint by accusing US of violating migrants’ rights

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MND Staff

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May 13, 2021

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The federal government responded to the United States’ request that it review alleged union abuses at a General Motors plant in Guanajuato by accusing its neighbor of not protecting migrants’ labor rights.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) said in a statement Wednesday that Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, Esteban Moctezuma, has written to U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh to raise concerns about the “lack of application” of labor laws in the U.S. agriculture and meatpacking industries.

Mexico’s criticism of labor conditions in the United States came just after the U.S. government announced that it had asked Mexico to examine alleged union abuses at the GM factory in Silao, Guanajuato, such as denying workers the right of free association and collective bargaining.

The SRE noted that labor rights in the U.S. protect all workers regardless of their migration situation, but in practice factors such as “lack of awareness, fear and abuse on the part of some employers prevent migrant workers from fully exercising their labor rights in some industries and states,” the SRE said.

The ministry said Moctezuma’s letter set out a range of failures on the part of some employers.

They include the failure to pay overtime and in some cases the minimum wage, to allow workers to organize and negotiate in a collective way, to give workers sufficient breaks, to follow Covid-19 health protocols and to attend to cases of violence and sexual harassment in agriculture and meatpacking.

The federal government proposed cooperation with the United States within the framework of the new North American free-trade agreement, the USMCA, in order to “fully guarantee the labor rights provided for in federal United States legislation and Chapter 23 of the USMCA,” the SRE said.

“… It’s important to take into account that the USMCA promotes the application of fundamental labor rights; it seeks to guarantee the protection of migrant workers; it promotes an agenda of cooperation that allows the application of international labor rights; and it encourages dialogue to attend to differences …” the ministry said.

President López Obrador said Thursday that provisions in the three-way trade pact are “reciprocal,” explaining that “just as they can present complaints about the situation in which employees work in our country, we too can present complaints if there are violations of rights of workers in the United States.”

The United States’ request for a review of the situation at the GM plant — where Mexico’s Labor Ministry detected “serious irregularities” in a recent vote to ratify a collective bargaining agreement — represents the first time that any of the three North American trade partners has used the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism in the USMCA, which took effect last July. The mechanism allows any of the partner countries to target worker rights violations at specific factories.

The Mexican government said on Wednesday that it was already acting on its neighbor’s request.

“Based on the request received today, Mexico is beginning the review of the case in question,” the Labor and Economy ministries said in a joint statement.

Mexico News Daily

Militarization: a lost war that has only brought ‘catastrophic’ results

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MND Staff

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May 13, 2021

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Mexico's National Guard — The National Guard is an example of how militarization has morphed from a supposedly temporary measure into a long-term strategy, says a new report.

The results of the militarized war on crime, launched by former president Felipe Calderón almost 15 years ago, have been “catastrophic,” the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) says in a new analysis.

Written by the research and advocacy organization’s director for Mexico and migrant rights, Stephanie Brewer, the analysis notes that Mexico has recorded approximately 350,000 homicides since Calderón deployed the armed forces to combat organized crime in December 2006.

It also notes that annual homicides have more than tripled since the intensification of the war on crime.

Published under the title Militarized Mexico: A Lost War that Has Not Brought Peace, the analysis acknowledges that former president Enrique Peña Nieto, who followed Calderón in 2012, perpetuated the militarized public security model with some differences.

And it notes that President López Obrador has failed to demilitarize public security despite his criticism of the militarized model before he became president and his pledge to take the armed forces off the streets.

“On the contrary, he has deepened various aspects of the militarized model,” Brewer writes, noting that this month marks the first anniversary of the president’s decree ordering the armed forces to continue carrying out public security tasks until 2024.

Mexico president Felipe Calderón — Former president Felipe Calderón in 2009 in Nuevo León for Day of the Army. Calderón began deploying the military to combat organized crime in 2006.

She also notes that while the National Guard, which was created by the current federal government, is officially part of the civilian Ministry of Security, it is in fact “a militarized force that operates under the coordination of the Ministry of Defense.”

“… Militarization has morphed from a supposedly temporary measure into a long-term strategy,” the analysis states, referring to the heavy reliance on the armed forces for public security tasks by Calderón, Peña Nieto and López Obrador.

“…The results of the militarized war on crime have been catastrophic. Homicides increased dramatically from the Calderón presidency onwards. Arrests and killings of kingpins have fostered the fragmentation of criminal groups, leading to increased violence. Shootouts with security forces trigger increases in local homicide rates. The overwhelming majority of the tens of thousands of people the government reports as disappeared were taken in the past 15 years.”

Brewer notes that various analysts have identified a decrease in federal security forces’ levels of frontal combat against criminal groups over the past two years and describes their “scaling back the use of warlike tactics” as a positive step.

“However, this modification in the strategy has not been accompanied by appropriate and sufficient measures to address ongoing violence … Today, a range of criminal groups continues to victimize the population while homicides remain at record levels,” WOLA’s Mexico director writes.

Her analysis states that Mexican authorities have not used the nearly 15 years of militarization to implement sustainable and effective anti-violence measures across Mexico.

“Instead of buying time for authorities to implement solutions, militarization has become the addiction that postpones those solutions indefinitely,” Brewer writes.

She asserts that prioritizing the reform and professionalization of civilian police institutions is necessary to develop an effective security model.

“… Achieving this requires overcoming once and for all the historic lack of commitment to police reform at all three levels of government,” Brewer writes.

However, during the 2 1/2 years since the current federal government came to power, “the creation of the National Guard has been a much more visible priority than police reform,” she says.

Brewer also notes that the militarized war on crime triggered high levels of serious human rights violations such as enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions and torture committed by security force members.

“… According to an analysis by the World Justice Project … 88% of people detained by the navy and 85% of people detained by the army from 2006–2016 reported torture or ill-treatment. According to the same official survey, 41% of women detained by the navy, 21% of women detained by the army, and 10%–13% of women detained by police forces reported having survived rape in the context of the detention,” the analysis states.

Member of Madres Buscadoras de Sonora with discovered remains — Member of the Madres Buscadoras de Sonora, which searches for missing family members in the state, with human remains found in February in the Hermosillo area.

Brewer notes that the armed forces are also currently engaged in a range of other nontraditional tasks, including the construction and administration of infrastructure projects, immigration control and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.

“… In any country in Latin America — a region whose history has been marked by coups and military dictatorships — the delegation of civilian tasks to the armed forces raises red flags,” she writes.

“… Mexico’s experience has differed from that of other countries: throughout the wave of dictatorships in the region, Mexico suffered no military coups. However, the influence of Mexico’s armed forces within and beyond the security sphere may mean that a coup is not necessary in order for them to wield levels of power that, while falling short of a military government, hardly speak of a healthy democracy.”

Brewer writes that it appears unlikely that militarism in Mexico will decline in the near future given that “López Obrador sees the armed forces’ participation in government tasks as a strategy to fight corruption” and guarantee efficiency.

In that context, she warns that the president could also give the military responsibility for “an indefinite list of other civilian functions.”

In her conclusions, the WOLA director notes that it is the people of Mexico who have suffered the greatest losses during the country’s almost 15-year-long militarized war on crime.

Querétaro municipal police. — Mexico, the analysis says, has a “historic lack of commitment to police reform at all three levels of government.”

“The militarized model has increased violence without furthering effective security strategies,” Brewer writes.

“As WOLA and other organizations and experts have emphasized on numerous occasions over the past 15 years, no deployment of security forces will be sufficient to reverse violence as long as authorities are among criminal networks’ accomplices; as long as civilian police reform lacks commitment; as long as the country’s institutions do not make significant progress in investigating criminal phenomena; and as long as institutions charged with consolidating the rule of law tolerate human rights violations,” her analysis states.

“Addressing these factors — ensuring a constant focus on protecting the population — should be at the heart of Mexico’s anti-violence strategy. Such a strategy requires political will and close follow-up to take hold at the national level,” Brewer writes.

“What is concerning is that the government seems instead to be opting for a deepening and indefinite dependence on the armed forces.”

Mexico News Daily

New Pizza Hut in Guadalajara is location No. 1000 in Mexico

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MND Staff

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May 13, 2021

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Pizza Hut is to open its 1,000th site in Mexico in the same city where the chain was introduced 52 years ago.

Guadalajara, Jalisco, will see the new location on Manuel J. Clouthier avenue, a short distance from where it first welcomed Pizza Hut in 1969, at the Plaza del Sol shopping center.

The Clouthier site is the fifth new unit to open since the company formed a new strategy in 2019 to transform its Mexico-based locations.

It has remodeled six locations since then and expects to add 30 new restaurants and hundreds of new jobs in the region by the end of the year.

“Every new concept, design and innovation is driven by two core elements: our customers and their love for pizza and our team members and their passion and ability to fulfill that love,” said Oscar Peláez, global director of innovation at Pizza Hut International in a statement.

“How we bring that to market evolves based on culture, trends, and societal norms and needs,” he added.

The new location will be staffed by 14 employees.

The state of Jalisco has the second highest number of fast food restaurants after the state of México.

Pizza eateries only account for 9% of the country’s fast food outlets. However, sales from those locations account for 25% of all fast food sales, according to Seale & Associates’ 2018 Fast Food Industry report.

Source: Entrepreneur