Hilton's Yucatán Resort Playa del Carmen will open this year.
Hotel giant Hilton has 31 hotels in development in Mexico which will all open by the end of 2022.
One of the biggest projects is the Hilton Cancún complex, an all-inclusive resort with 715 rooms 20 kilometres south of Cancún’s hotel zone, set to open late this year.
Another is the The Yucatán Resort Playa Del Carmen, a 60-room all-inclusive resort which will open this summer.
Mexico has the fifth largest concentration of Hilton hotels anywhere in the world.
“In Mexico we are seeing a great deal of interest in vacation and leisure destinations and in traditional destinations, led by Cancún, Vallarta and Los Cabos,” said Mario Carbone, Hilton’s development director for Mexico and Central America.
“The necessity to travel is even more evident after so long ‘trapped’ in our homes, so we predict a boom in interest for vacation travel. That will be the first thing we see, followed by business travel, which we are very confident is going to recover in the long run,” Carbone adds.
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic saw Hilton invest more in hotel conversions, where existing infrastructure is incorporated into the Hilton brand, such as the DoubleTree complex in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, which opened on October 1.
Last year Hilton’s total projects in Latin America went from a 20% concentration on hotel conversions to 50%.
The company opened 400 hotels in 2020, 14 of which were in Latin America, and now has 100 complexes in development in the region.
A file photo of migrants at the Mexico-US border wall.
Mexicans are attempting to cross illegally into the United States in numbers not seen for more than a decade.
Some 147,000 Mexicans were detained by U.S. border agents in the first three months of the year, a figure equivalent to two-thirds of all arrests of Mexicans by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in 2020.
If the trend continues, almost 590,000 Mexicans will be intercepted by the CBP this year, which would be the highest number since 2008, when more than 600,000 were detained.
The spike in the number of Mexicans trying to enter the U.S. without going through official immigration channels comes after years of decreases in migration flows across the northern border. In 2017 — for the first time ever — the number of Mexicans returning home from the United States exceeded the number of Mexicans heading north.
Migration expert Eunice Rendón told the newspaper Milenio that CBP arrests of Mexicans last month were more than four times higher than the level seen in recent years.
The number of detentions by fiscal year (October to September). This year’s figure, reflecting six months of data, is already at 93% of last year’s total. milenio
“In March, for example, border patrol captured 171,000 people, of whom 68,000 were Mexicans. … What we have seen in other years is [the detention of] 15,000 Mexicans [per month],” she said.
Rendón attributed the surge to economic factors related to the coronavirus pandemic as well as displacement caused by violence.
In the almost 2 1/2 years since President López Obrador took office, about 776,000 Mexicans have been detained by the CBP, meaning that arrests during the six-year term of the current government are on track to exceed the number recorded during the 2012–2018 presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, during which about 1.15 million Mexicans were intercepted.
Writing in the newspaper El Universal, columnist León Krauze noted that López Obrador said in a 2019 interview with the news agency Bloomberg that his “dream” was to reach a point in his presidency at which there would be no need for Mexicans to migrate to the United States because they had work and could be happy where they were born.
Not only has the president not achieved that goal but the migration of Mexicans has, in fact, increased, he wrote.
“About four of every 10 migrants detained on the [United States] southern border in recent weeks are of Mexican origin,” Krauze wrote, adding that “the grave trend” threatens to undo gains made over the past decade during which migration of Mexicans to the U.S. recorded negative numbers.
The columnist said there was no detailed study about the new wave of Mexican migration to the United States but contended that the causes are the same as those that drive other people in the region. Krauze cited insecurity, poverty, lack of work opportunities and climate changes as migration push factors.
“The consequences of the pandemic have been particularly harsh in Mexico, where the government has failed in the containment of the health emergency and in the management of the economic crisis. The explosion in poverty in the country has the same consequence as always: the people go to where there is … the possibility to survive,” he wrote.
The journalist asserted that López Obrador needs to urgently respond to the growing migration phenomenon, which has also been encouraged by the departure of former U.S. president Donald Trump, who enacted harsh immigration policies, and the arrival in the White House of current President Joe Biden, who rolled back some of his predecessor’s policies even as he simultaneously told migrants not to come to the U.S.
Krauze added that 2021 data shows that the government is failing in what López Obrador described as its responsibility to guarantee security, employment and well-being for the Mexican people so that they don’t have to leave their homes and seek a better life elsewhere.
“There is still time to rectify [the situation],” he wrote.
A forest fire in the hills of Tepoztlán, Morelos, has hospitalized six firefighters, one with third degree burns.
The fire has grown to affect 180 hectares and is the largest on record in the area.
Environmental emergencies chief Raymundo Rosales Martínez said 244 firefighters were working to extinguish the fire, which could continue to burn for another six days due to adverse weather conditions. Three helicopters are also helping to tackle the blaze.
“We have 20% control but it grew exponentially even when we were working against it … This fire is bigger and has behaved much more aggressively than those in the past. The ones before had an average of 80, 120, 160 hectares, but this one is already at 180 hectares, and we might end up with another 50 hectares affected,” Rosales said.
State Civil Protection coordinator Enrique Clement Gallardo said the fire came within 300 meters of the community of San Juan Tlacotenco yesterday, but confirmed there was no longer any risk to the population.
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The closest populated area that could be in any danger is three kilometers away, he said, but was not currently at risk.
National Civil Protection head Laura Velázquez confirmed that the fire in Tepoztlán was one of the five biggest in the country, with other large scale fires in Querétaro, San Luis Potosí and Guerrero.
“We are going through a moment of atypical dryness which is aggravating the situation,” Velázquez said.
There are 83 active fires in the country, affecting 23,000 hectares.
Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum has a higher approval rating than the country’s president, according to a recent survey by El Financiero and Bloomberg.
Of the 600 Mexico City residents surveyed on April 9 and 10, 71% said they approve of Sheinbaum’s performance in office, while only 55% responded in kind when asked about President López Obrador.
The disapproval ratings were also favorable to Mayor Sheinbaum: 43% of those surveyed rated the president’s performance negatively, while only 26% gave the mayor a bad review.
There was also some good news for Morena, the political party of both leaders. Voting intentions for the June 6 legislative elections gave the party a strong hand in Mexico City, according to the survey.
Forty-four percent of decided voters said they favor Morena. Only half as many said they would vote for the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) while 11% would support the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and 6% the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD). Fully 25% of those polled were undecided.
In 2014 Sheinbaum broke from the traditional left-wing PRD to join López Obrador’s splinter movement, forerunner to the Morena party. Both were elected in the Morena sweep of the polls in 2018, when Sheinbaum became Mexico City’s first female mayor.
She is widely seen as a frontrunner — along with Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard — to succeed López Obrador as the Morena candidate in 2024.
'We were displaced … without knowing the reason or the motives,' said Rafael, an El Maguey, Jalisco, resident forced out of town at gunpoint.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has forced more than 400 people out of their homes in two communities in Jalisco and Michoacán.
According to a report by the newspaper El Universal, members of about 80 families in El Maguey, a town in the Jalisco municipality of Quitupan, and El Lobo in Cotija, Michoacán, were ordered out of their homes at gunpoint by presumed CJNG criminals during the past two weeks.
Rafael, one of those who was forced to leave, told El Universal that he and his family went from having a calm and productive life at home to being unable to afford to eat.
“We were displaced by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel without knowing the reason or the motives,” he said, adding that some 150 residents of El Maguey were forced out of their homes on a single night.
Rafael, whose family worked in agriculture, said that a group of armed men broke into his home and those of others in the community and pointed their weapons at residents, including children, women and seniors, as they ordered them to abandon their dwellings.
He said the cartel members threatened to kill them if they didn’t obey their orders. Rafael also said that the residents of El Maguey are good people who don’t owe the CJNG anything.
“It’s an incredible thing that we can’t yet get over. We lived really comfortably, very calmly, but they changed our lives overnight without any reason,” he said.
Rafael, whose 20-year-old nephew was killed by suspected CJNG gunmen, and many other El Maguey residents are currently taking refuge in the municipality of Los Reyes, but some are considering seeking asylum in the United States.
Rafael’s brother told El Universal that he is now in a precarious situation, explaining that although he is safe, he has had to start his life from scratch and struggles to pay for everyday expenses.
“I want it to be known that since the Jalisco New Generation Cartel people came [to the community], we started living through a true hell,” he said.
He said that his father died of grief because he had to leave the life he had built over decades in El Maguey. He also said that he could be tempted to take up the fight against the CJNG himself, if he could afford to buy weapons.
Luis, another displaced resident, said that federal authorities have done nothing to stop the illicit activities of the CJNG even though there is a National Guard base in Cotija, which borders Quitupan.
“They [the guardsmen] don’t do anything. … They even protect the Jalisco cartel,” he said, adding that members of the two organizations have been seen together.
“… What hope do we have to live in peace, what hope do we have that this forced displacement won’t happen in other places?”
The CJNG, usually considered Mexico’s most powerful and violent criminal organization, has recently expanded its influence in parts of Michoacán, including Aguililla, the birthplace of the cartel’s leader, Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes.
A school in Veracruz after it was looted by thieves.
Schools left empty by the coronavirus pandemic have been a target for thieves in the state of Veracruz, where at least 67 schools have been robbed since March.
That’s on top of the more than 80 robberies reported last January at schools in the city of Veracruz since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
Some schools have been hit several times.
The Elena Martínez Cabañas kindergarten has been robbed seven times, while other schools have faced more than three break-ins.
An official in Veracruz city said the state’s Education Ministry has not done enough to tackle the crimes.
“There are schools where there is nothing left to steal, they are completely cleaned out, but unfortunately [the ministry] has not tackled the issue. There is no solution to curb the robberies, those who steal for a living know that no one is going to chase them,” he said.
He requested that the ministry reconvene inter-institutional working groups to put together a strategy to tackle the crime. “We do not need a police officer in every school. What we need is a strategy.”
He claimed the working groups were not suspended because of the pandemic, but because the ministry argued with the security authorities that sit on them.
Education Minister Zenyazen Escobar García said it would be difficult to replace all of the stolen equipment. “Of the 67 schools many had been given computers … and what we have always been told is that once a school has received new equipment, that school goes to the back of the line … but we are considering what to do,” he said.
Disqualified gubernatorial candidate Félix Salgado at a protest by supporters outside Mexico City’s National Electoral Institute headquarters.
Accused rapist and disqualified political candidate Félix Salgado, who was barred from contesting the upcoming Guerrero gubernatorial election because he missed a deadline to report pre-campaign spending, issued a threat on Monday against the National Electoral Institute (INE) councilors who stripped him of his candidacy.
Speaking at a protest by supporters outside INE headquarters in Mexico City, Salgado — who was selected as the candidate for the ruling Morena party despite accusations of rape by five women and widespread opposition to his candidacy — said that he and his supporters would track down the seven electoral councilors, including INE president Lorenzo Córdova, if they don’t reinstate him on the ballot for the June 6 election.
His remarks came a day after he threatened to stop elections from happening in Guerrero unless he is allowed to run.
The INE general council will convene on Tuesday after the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF) ordered it to reformulate its sanctions against both Salgado and Raúl Morón, Morena’s candidate for governor in Michoacán — who was also barred from contesting the elections for failing to report pre-campaign spending.
“If they don’t vindicate themselves, … we’re going to find the seven [councilors],” Salgado said, “we’re going to look for them, and we’re going to go and see Córdova.”
Salgado, left, at the protest with Morena party president Mario Delgado. In the background, a banner accuses the INE’s councilors of corruption.
“Wouldn’t the people of Mexico like to know where Lorenzo Córdova lives? Wouldn’t you like to know where his little … sheet metal home is, which leaks when it rains and wets his body? Yes? Little bastard!”
Salgado, a federal senator on leave and a former mayor of Acapulco, asserted that he and his supporters would not allow themselves to be victims of INE’s “abuse.”
“… We have the support of the people. We’re the majority,” he added.
Salgado’s supporters at the protest also issued a threat to the INE president, writing “Lorenzo, count your days, demon rat” on a coffin that was on display behind the would-be candidate as he spoke.
Facing criticism for his remarks, Salgado later on Monday attempted to walk back the threat he made against the INE councilors.
“A lot of people have visited me in my home, [and] nothing happens,” he told reporters. “I’m not going to [Córdova’s] house; [I say it] so that the man isn’t worried. It’s not a threat, it’s not violence.”
After the INE council meets, he said, and regardless of the decision it makes with respect to his candidacy, “we’re going [back] to Guerrero.”
“We’re leaving tomorrow [Tuesday] once we find out the result. We’re not pressuring anyone, we’re not hurting anyone, we’re not blocking any road, we’re not exercising violence,” he declared.
In a subsequent television interview, Salgado asserted again that his remarks don’t amount to a threat but also claimed that people have a right to know where government officials, including the INE councilors, live.
“We didn’t come to destroy or annoy anyone,” he said, adding that if the INE doesn’t overturn its decision to strip him of his candidacy, he will once again take his case to the TEPJF.
Morena national president Mario Delgado also came to Salgado’s defense, telling reporters that “no threat has been made to anyone.”
Morena is “a peaceful movement,” Delgado said.
Félix Salgado’s supporters set up a fake coffin telling INE president Lorenzo Córdova to “count your days, demon rat.”
“Throughout all these years, we have shown that. … Today we’re here singing, we’re dancing,” he said, referring to the protest at the INE offices. “There is no aggression towards anyone. Yes, we’re demanding that they [the INE councilors] act with impartiality. Yes, we’re demanding that the [elections] umpire doesn’t become a player [in the electoral process].”
Delgado once previously called on INE councilors opposed to Morena to join one of the opposition parties and take up the fight against the government “from the correct trench.”
In light of Salgado’s remarks, Interior Minister Olga Sánchez, in an unprecedented move, called on both Morena, which was founded by President López Obrador, and the INE to act in accordance with the law and treat each other with respect.
“As interior minister, I make an energetic call to keep differences within [the framework of] legality and mutual respect,” she wrote in a Twitter post directed to both entities.
For his part, Córdova said he will allow the Mexican people to come to their own conclusions about Salgado’s remarks and those of other political actors who have also issued threats against the electoral body he heads.
“I understand that as part of their strategies, political parties defend their interests and want to position INE as [another] party. The citizens will judge the threats,” he said in an interview.
National Electoral Institute president Lorenzo Córdova and Interior Minister Olga Sánchez look over ballots for the upcoming federal deputy elections in June.
Córdova said that if he was concerned by threats issued against him, he wouldn’t have accepted the INE presidency in the first place. (He has held the job since 2014). He stressed that the INE is not in favor of or against any political party and noted that the electoral institute of today is the same one that certified the resounding victory of Morena at the 2018 elections, at which López Obrador won 53% of the vote in a four-way contest for president.
In a video message posted to social media on Sunday, Córdova said that the INE — as the organizer and “neutral umpire” of the elections — will guarantee the transparency and fairness of the process in strict accordance with the law.
This year’s election, at which voters will renew the entire lower house of federal congress and elect municipal and state representatives, including governors in 15 states, will be Mexico’s largest ever.
Mara Fernanda Castilla was sexually assaulted and strangled.
A court in Puebla handed down a 50-year prison sentence to former Cabify driver Ricardo Alexis Díaz on Monday for the femicide of 19-year-old student Mara Fernanda Castilla Miranda.
The political science student disappeared on September 8, 2017 after taking a ride through Cabify in San Andrés Cholula, on the outskirts of Puebla city.
According to investigators Castilla was taken to a hotel where she was sexually assaulted and strangled. Her body was found in a ditch days later.
Alexis, 24, was always the main suspect in the case.
Castilla’s mother, Gabriela Miranda, said that while she was satisfied with the sentence, her lawyers would appeal to extend it to the maximum of 60 years.
“Although we would have wanted 60 years, I feel satisfied because from the beginning I promised Mara that there would be justice and it wasn’t going to be left as it was … after this long and difficult journey, this nightmare, we are reaching our goal, after a great deal of pain and uncertainty. We appreciate the solidarity that everyone has shown,” Miranda said.
“Ricardo Alexis is receiving punishment from our authorities, but divine punishment will come in its moment,” she added.
The defense also confirmed that it would appeal the sentence. “Today there was everything apart from justice,” the lead defense lawyer said.
Deaths like these could have been preventable, said the World Health Organization.
About 190,000 deaths could have been avoided in Mexico last year if the government managed the coronavirus pandemic better, according to a study commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Entitled Mexico’s Response to Covid-19: A Case Study, the study by the Institute for Global Health Sciences (IGHS) notes that there were 43% more deaths in Mexico in 2020 compared to the average for 2018 and 2019.
Carlos del Río, a professor of medicine at Emory University and one of the study’s author’s, told the news website Animal Político that among 39 countries analyzed, Mexico had the fourth highest excess death rate behind only Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.
He said the average excess death rate in 2020 for the 39 analyzed countries – among which were also the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Russia, Thailand, Israel, Brazil, Chile and Colombia – was 17.3%.
“If Mexico had had a similar performance [in managing the pandemic] to the other countries where the excess mortality was 17% [on average], there would have been 190,000 fewer deaths,” del Río said.
That figure refers to Covid-19 deaths as well as fatalities caused by other health problems that weren’t treated adequately, or at all, due to the pandemic.
Del Río noted that the United States – which easily has the highest official Covid-19 death toll in the world – had an excess mortality rate of just 20% last year, less than half that of Mexico.
The study notes that there were 326,609 excess deaths in Mexico in 2020, according to official data. That figure is 2.6 times the official Covid-19 death toll for 2020, which stood at 125,807 at the end of last year.
It noted that, according to Health Ministry data, the diagnosis of malnutrition, heart disease, uterine cancer, diabetes and breast cancer was down 56%, 45%, 34%, 27% and 20%, respectively, in 2020.
Del Río asserted that the federal government’s management of the pandemic, which has already been widely criticized, was a failure.
One of the study’s authors said management of the pandemic, which has been largely in the hands of President López Obrador and Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, right, was a failure.
“One of the main flaws is leadership. When you have a country like the United States with poor leadership and strong institutions, the performance [in managing the pandemic] is bad. When you have a country with poor leadership and weak institutions as is the case in Mexico, the performance is even worse,” he said.
The IGHS case study asserts that Mexican authorities failed to take decisions related to the management of the pandemic in a timely manner. The health experts who conducted the study were critical of the relegation of the government’s General Health Council to a secondary role in the management of the crisis and censured the government for not consulting with outside experts before taking key decisions.
The study asserted that there was a lack of understanding on the part of government at the beginning of the pandemic both about the threat posed by the coronavirus and the collaboration that would be required between authorities to effectively combat the threat.
It also criticized the government for recommending, at the start of the pandemic, that people sick with Covid-19 not go to hospital until their symptoms were serious so as to avoid saturating the health system. That advice contributed to the high death rate, the study said, noting that an estimated 58% of Covid-19 fatalities occurred outside hospitals.
However, even if patients got to hospitals in a timely manner, there was no guarantee that they would get the treatment they required.
The capacity of the Mexican health system to respond to the pandemic has been limited, del Río said, even though the federal government scrambled to increase capacity at many hospitals.
Another problem, the health expert told Animal Político, is that the government’s messaging during the pandemic has been poor.
“How many times has it said that this is going to end?” he said, apparently referring to President López Obrador’s repeated claims that the pandemic was under control or was being brought under control.
“It still hasn’t forcefully recommended masks,” del Río added.
The study was also critical of the government’s lack of economic support for citizens that, if provided, would have helped them comply with lockdown measures.
(Many people live day to day in Mexico and therefore have to go out to work every day to provide for themselves and their families.)
The health experts also criticized the government for not testing more widely. Mexico’s low testing rate – it ranked 155th out of 203 countries for per capita testing as of last month – hindered the government’s capacity to identify cases, isolate people and therefore limit transmission of the virus.
Del Río said the prevalence of chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and obesity has also contributed to Mexico’s high death rate.
As of Sunday, Mexico had officially recorded 2.28 million confirmed cases, while the Covid-19 death toll stood at 209, 338, the third highest total in the world.
Child soldiers from the Guerrero community of Ayahualtempa.
A group of armed children in Guerrero has appealed for government help to combat high levels of violence in the state’s lower mountain region.
For a third consecutive year, boys wearing caps, kerchiefs, and huaraches (traditional sandals) and toting firearms and sticks participated in a military-style parade on Saturday in Ayahualtempa, a town in José Joaquín de Herrera.
The parade, in which adult community police members also participated, serves as both a call for help to the federal government and a show of force to criminal groups, such as Los Ardillos, that operate in the opium poppy-growing lower-mountain region, located east of the state capital, Chilpancingo.
Video footage published by the newspaper El País shows a group of armed boys firing weapons after an adolescent member of the community police-in-waiting denounces the government for not providing security.
The armed youngsters demanded that the government provide support to widows, orphans and displaced people and made it clear that they are fed up with crime and discrimination against indigenous people.
The founder of a local self-defense force told El País that there were six clashes with narcos last year and lives were lost on both sides. Bernardino Sánchez Luna denounced the inaction of the authorities and said the community police are forced to train children in the handling and use of weapons so that they too can protect themselves if they come under attack.
He noted that President López Obrador has said that he is on the side of the people and promised that his government would prioritize assistance to the nation’s indigenous citizens. The reality, Sánchez said, is very different.
“We’re indigenous here, and we haven’t received any support from the federal government,” he said. “… It only makes promises … but doesn’t keep any of them.”
A 27-year-old woman told El País that she wouldn’t like her children to wield weapons but acknowledged that she might not have a say in the matter.
“It will be what God wants. I wouldn’t like my children [to take up arms], but if that’s what the town decides, nothing can be done,” Claudia Bolaños said.
Romain Le Cour, the cofounder of Noria Research, a collective of researchers and analysts that studies international affairs and conflict, supported Sanchez’s claim that the town of Ayahualtempa and other communities in the region have been abandoned by authorities.
“In the face of a simplified discourse that attributes all [problems] to the narcos, the authorities end up looking the other way. ‘There’s nothing to do,’ they seem to say,” he said.
“What’s happening here is much more complex,” Le Cour said. “It’s a social problem, a problem of poverty and neglect. It’s not enough to blame the violence on narcos and leave indigenous communities to govern themselves without help.”
The hartazgo [the feeling of being fed up] of the residents of Ayahualtempa, the municipality of José Joaquín de Herrera — where at least nine women have been widowed by violence and 14 children have been orphaned — and other towns in the region is forcefully encapsulated in the words of the teenage boy who orders his fellow “child soldiers” to shoot in the air during their show of force.
“If there isn’t anyone who defends us, we’re going to respond to the [criminal] hitmen with [our own] fire, motherf*****s!”
