Police accused in death of man arrested for not wearing face mask

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June 4, 2020

Puerto Vallarta seeks to bring back the tourists.

Puerto Vallarta, the premier tourist destination in Jalisco, is preparing a marketing campaign aimed at getting visitor numbers back to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year.

The campaign will target potential tourists in the United States – the main source country for visitors to the Pacific coast resort city – Canada and Mexico’s largest cities.

The Jalisco government will contribute 100 million pesos (US $4.6 million) to the efforts to revive tourism in Vallarta, located on Banderas Bay just south of the Nayarit border.

Jalisco Tourism Minister Germán Ralis told the news website Forbes México that authorities are hopeful that tourists will start returning to the city over the summer.

However, the marketing campaign will try to attract visitors to Vallarta in the fall and winter months, he said.

Ralis said the campaign will primarily target potential tourists who live in cities where it takes no more than four flying hours to get to Vallarta given that there is unlikely to be much appetite for long-haul trips while Covid-19 remains a threat.

He said that Puerto Vallarta, “our star destination,” and other tourism hubs in Jalisco – among which are state capital Guadalajara and the town of Tequila – will be especially competitive in the United States market.

Ralis also said that Jalisco has signed an agreement with Zacatecas, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato and Aguascalientes to encourage residents to take short interstate trips.

The tourism minister said that some Jalisco hotels will offer three-nights-for-two promotions and that some restaurants will also offer special deals to create an “integrated experience” for visitors from within Mexico and abroad.

Some nonessential businesses in Jalisco that were ordered to close due to the coronavirus pandemic have begun reopening but the state’s economic restart has been surrounded by confusion.

Jalisco had recorded 2,136 Covid-19 cases as of Wednesday of which 790 are considered active. The metropolitan area of Guadalajara has recorded more than 1,000 confirmed cases while 276 people have tested positive in Puerto Vallarta, according to the federal government’s Covid-19 municipal map.

Source: Forbes México (sp)

Foundation hands out boxes of food to Mexico City organ grinders

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June 4, 2020

Organ grinders receive care packages in Mexico City.

About 200 Mexico City organ grinders gathered on Donceles Street today to receive food boxes containing rice, beans, tuna, oil and other items to help them get through the coronavirus crisis.

The food was a gift from the non-profit aid association CADENA, which helps communities in more than 23 countries in times of crisis and disaster.

Members of the organ grinders union lined up on the sidewalk wearing masks, practicing social distancing and playing music as they waited for their packages.

One said they suffer abuse and discrimination but remarked “it’s a great job.”

Another said organ grinders are often ridiculed by younger crowds who don’t respect their craft or the traditions behind it.

“I am going to be 18 in December. I started because of the lack of work and because my father has always dedicated himself to being an organ grinder. He has left me with many wonderful experiences,” the young woman said.

“If you don’t like it, don’t mistreat us, ignore us, it’s our way to earn a livelihood.”

Organ grinders emigrated to Mexico from Europe in the late 1800s and are commonplace on the streets of the nation’s capital where they work for around US $10 a day, although even that has been hard to come by during the coronavirus pandemic.

Since stay-at-home measures were enforced, many organ grinders have abandoned the street corners they usually stake out to travel to neighborhoods where they play for audiences confined to the balconies of apartment buildings.

Source: Milenio (sp)

Tropical Storm Cristóbal dumps heavy rains in six states

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June 4, 2020

Flooding in Campeche has forced 138 people to flee their homes.

Tropical Storm Cristóbal has battered six states in Mexico, causing heavy rains, flooding, evacuations, landslides and damage to homes and highways in Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Veracruz, Chiapas and Tabasco before moving into Campeche where it was hugging the coast of the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday.

Nine thousand soldiers and National Guard members have been dispatched to affected areas and those still in the storm’s path.

Cristóbal’s sustained winds dropped to 65 kph yesterday as it approached Ciudad del Carmen, and it was downgraded to a tropical depression earlier today with sustained winds of 56 kph.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said at 4:00 p.m. CDT on Thursday that the storm is expected to deliver extreme rainfall amounts through Saturday in Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán.

Cristóbal is expected to regain strength as it moves over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico Friday night and heads northward where it could make landfall in the United States.

In Campeche, 139 people had to be evacuated by the army due to rising floodwaters that washed out highways and threatened residences. Two communities in the municipality of Centla, Tabasco, were also evacuated.

A highway is left impassable by Tropical Storm Cristóbal.

Yucatán officials declared a yellow alert due to the approaching storm, which could be raised to red by Friday.

Mass evacuations could be carried out in Celestún, Maxcanú, Hunucmá, Opichén, Kinchil, Samahil, Santa Elena, Chocholá, Tekax, Kopomá, Muna, Oxkutzcab, Sacalum and Tzucacab if conditions worsen. Five thousand hectares of soybeans, squash, chiles and other crops have been lost to the flooding in Yucatán, where some areas have received up to 360 mm of rain since Sunday.

In Quintana Roo, the Chetumal-Escárcega highway was closed due to flooding, with water levels reaching 80 centimeters, leaving the southern part of the state cut off.

At least 12 municipalities in Veracruz were put on yellow alert due to strong winds and torrential rain.

In Chiapas, Chicoasén, Bochil, Copainalá, Tecpatán, Ixtapa and Unión Juárez have all seen landslides and wash-outs due to the storm.

National Civil Protection coordinator David León said one person in Chiapas was killed by a falling tree.

Cristóbal was born on June 2 from the remnants of Pacific Tropical Storm Amanda, which battered Central America leaving at least 22 dead in El Salvador and Guatemala, and marks the earliest named storm in the Atlantic ever. The previous record was set in 2016 when Tropical Storm Colin formed on June 5.

Source: Milenio (sp), El Universal (sp), Accuweather (sp)

Some tequila brands are narcos’ ally for laundering drug money

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June 4, 2020

El Viejo Luis tequila was linked to the Güeros cartel.

The tequila industry and some of Mexico’s notorious drug cartels have a criminal association dating back at least 14 years.

The federal government announced this week that the Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) had frozen the bank accounts of 1,770 people, 167 businesses and two trust funds linked to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) through a money-laundering network of front companies passing themselves off as vendors of tequila.

Accounts containing a total of US $1.1 billion were frozen after an operation, dubbed “Blue Agave” for the main ingredient in tequila, was carried out by the UIF in cooperation with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

It’s not the first time that criminal groups have made use of Mexico’s most famous tipple to advance their illicit activities – links between the tequila industry and the underworld date back to at least 2006.

That was the year the DEA first discovered a connection between tequila and drug trafficking in Mexico, the newspaper Milenio reported on Thursday.

Onze Black tequila was allegedly a product of Jalisco cartel ally Los Cuinis.

The criminal organization found to be in cahoots with the tequila industry at the time was the Tijuana Cartel, also known as the Arellano Félix organization.

According to a September 2006 report by the United States Department of the Treasury, the tequila company 4 Reyes helped the Tijuana Cartel to launder the money it obtained from distributing drugs in both Mexico and the U.S.

Seven years later, the DEA discovered that shipments of cocaine were being brought into the United States in trucks transporting bottles of tequila. According to a 2013 U.S. Treasury Department report, two tequila companies were in fact front companies for the criminal organization known as Los Güeros.

United States authorities identified four brothers as the chief operators of the drug cartel: Daniel, Esteban, Luis and Miguel Rodríguez Olivera. Daniel and Esteban were both arrested in Mexico and extradited to the United States, where they were jailed on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.

Another link between narcos and tequila was detected in 2015 when the U.S. discovered that the tequila company Onze Black had been set up by Los Cuinis, a drug gang with close links to the CJNG, to help finance the latter’s criminal activities. The U.S. government added the company to an economic blacklist the same year.

Earlier this year, the daughter of CJNG kingpin Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes was arrested in Washington, D.C., after she arrived at a federal court to attend a bond hearing for her brother. Jessica Johana Oseguera González was charged with associating with businesses blacklisted in the United States for their links to the CJNG including a tequila company.

A tequila company owned by the actress Kate del Castillo was investigated by Mexican authorities to establish whether it had any financial links to the former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, currently imprisoned in the United States.

However, no illicit dealings between del Castillo’s company, Tequila Honor, and El Chapo were detected.

Source: Milenio (sp)

Baja fisherman potentially beats world record with 39-kilo sea bass

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June 4, 2020

Ricardo Reyes and his potentially record-breaking sea bass.

A fisherman from La Paz, Baja California Sur, landed a giant white sea bass on April 30 which could beat a long-held world record for the species.

“This catch has the potential to break the current All-Tackle record of 37.98 kilograms that has been held for over 67 years,” the International Game Fishing Association (IGFA) posted to its Facebook page yesterday.

The white sea bass is a species of croaker normally found between Magdalena Bay, Baja California, and Juneau, Alaska.

Ricardo Reyes Martínez, 36, caught the monster fish, which he says weighed in at 39.9 kilos, southwest of La Paz on the Pacific side of the Baja California peninsula while surfcasting for snapper.

Should the catch be certified, it could set a double world record for the All-Tackle and 9-kilo-line class catch.

The fish could break a 67-year-old record.

The IGFA has strict rules on how a world record is measured, requiring the catch to be weighed on an IGFA or government-certified scale, but Reyes is hopeful that his application, which needs to include samples of his fishing line, photos and witness testimony, will be approved.

“I did not expect to win a world record. I did not even plan to send the information, but when I saw that the fish was a good size, I decided to send in the official documentation,” he said.

Source: BCS Noticias (sp)

Massive Maya structure in Tabasco is largest and oldest ever found

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June 4, 2020

The massive platform found by archaeologists in Tabasco. — Part of the massive platform found by archaeologists in Tabasco. Takeshi Inomata

Archaeologists have discovered a massive clay and earth platform near the Guatemala border in Tabasco that is the largest and oldest known structure built by the ancient Mayan people.

An international team found the structure at the Aguada Fénix site using an aerial remote-sensing method known as lidar, or light detection and ranging.

The platform is 400 meters wide, 1,400 meters long and 10 to 15 meters high. Its total volume is greater than that of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

The structure was built about 3,000 years ago and was probably used for rituals attended by large numbers of people, researchers said on Wednesday. The earthen platform predates the stone pyramids at Chiapas’ Palenque site and Tikal in northern Guatemala by about 1,500 years.

Nine causeways and a series of reservoirs were once connected to the structure, located at a partially-wooded site where cattle are now raised.

Shown in dark brown is a 3D image of the platform at Aguada Fénix. Takeshi Inomata

“It’s not a pyramid but a great rectangular platform that we believe is related to rituals and ceremonies,” said Verónica Vázquez, a Mayan archaeology expert and a member of the team that explored the site.

“The size and shape of the structure would have allowed the gathering of a lot of people,” she said.

Ceramic offerings as well as shells, animal bones and jade axes have been found but no sculptures depicting high-status individuals have been discovered.

That suggests that Mayan society was communal at the time the rectangular platform was in use and only later became hierarchical, the researchers said.

“We don’t have evidence here of the marked hierarchical structure that appears at other sites, with the Olmecs, for example. It is believed that the the colossal head sculptures represent rulers but we don’t have this at Aguada Fénix,” Vázquez said.

Takeshi Inomata, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona and the lead author of an article on the monumental architecture that was published Wednesday in the journal Nature, said the structure “is so large horizontally” that “if you walk on it, it just looks like natural landscape.”

However, “its form comes out nicely in lidar,” he added.

Inomata said that the rituals and ceremonies held at the structure probably attracted many people from surrounding areas and were possibly tied to calendar cycles.

“The rituals probably involved processions along the causeways and within the rectangular plaza. The people also deposited symbolic objects such as jade axes in the center of the plateau,” he said.

Inomata has calculated that construction of the massive rectangular platform would have taken about 5,000 people more than six years.

It is believed to have been abandoned around the year 750 B.C., some 50 to 250 years after it was built.

Source: Reforma (sp), Reuters (en)

Romanian criminal group ‘skimmed’ cards with rigged ATMs: probe

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June 4, 2020

A Multiva ATM in Playa Del Carmen, Quintana Roo. occrp

An international investigation has revealed that a Romanian criminal organization stole millions of dollars for several years by placing ATMs equipped with skimmers in popular tourist destinations throughout Mexico.

A former gang member said that earnings from the cloned cards created by the skimming process averaged US $20 million per month, according to the report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI), the Quinto Elemento Lab and the Romanian RISE Project.

Their investigation found that the Romanian crime syndicate has been operating in Mexico since 2014, when the gang formed a font company, Top Life Servicios, and persuaded the Mexican bank Multiva to allow them to install their Intacash brand of cash machines.

The OCCRP said the bank is owned by Olegario Vázquez Aldir, a member of one of the wealthiest families in Mexico and an appointed member of President López Obrador’s business advisory council. Multiva renewed its contract with the Romanians in 2018.

The gang’s alleged leader, 43-year-old Florian “The Shark” Tudor, was identified in a separate investigation conducted by journalist Bryan Krebs in 2015, but Tudor has repeatedly denied he engages in criminal activity, claiming he is only a businessman who refuses to be extorted by the police.

Krebs discovered that Bluetooth devices had been placed inside the ATMS to clone the cards and that members of the syndicate needed only to walk up to the tampered cash machines with a cell phone to download the stolen data. Using a burner phone, Krebs found compromised machines in Cozumel, Playa del Carmen and Tulum, including in his own Cancún hotel.

When Tudor and his bodyguard, Constantin Sorinel Marcu, who was murdered in 2018, got wind of Krebs’ reporting they were incensed. “They destroyed us. That’s it. Fuck his mother. Close everything,” Tudor allegedly told Marcu via a messaging app. He then ordered Marcu to kill whoever was responsible for leaking information. The bodyguard acquiesced. “OK, I can kill them. Any time, any hour.”

The OCCRP’s investigation, which includes Krebs’ findings, claims that Tudor’s gang purchased Chinese ATMs and doctored them to clone tourists’ debit cards which were then used to make withdrawals in Mexico, Indonesia, India, Barbados, Granada, Paraguay, Brazil, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in amounts totaling upwards of $1.2 billion.

Experts say Mexican ATMs need stronger regulation. Currently, banks are responsible for investigating themselves when their ATMs are tampered with.

“We realized that there is a legal vacuum,” said Mario Di Costanzo, former head of Condusef, a federal protection agency for financial consumers. “No one supervises them.”

Tudor is also under an investigation opened in January of this year by police in Romania for his activities as leader of an organized crime syndicate, which they allege includes threats, assault, blackmail and murder.

Tudor denies this as well. As he told OCCRP, “I have never killed anyone and I have never ordered anyone killed.” He and is associates are living as free men in Mexico, although Multiva suspended its contract with Intacash in 2019 and no longer processes their banking transactions.

OCCRP-affiliated journalists in Mexico, the United States and Romania spent eight months researching and writing the report, which involved the analysis of over 15,000 pages of documents.

Source: El Financiero (sp), Aristegui Noticias (sp)

Guanajuato is testing 500 people a day for Covid-19

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June 4, 2020

Guanajuato Governor Sinhue at the state's coronavirus testing laboratory.

Guanajuato’s state-run medical laboratory has increased its coronavirus test processing capacity fivefold since the beginning of the pandemic and is now processing about 500 tests per day, up from 100 when Covid-19 was first detected in Mexico at the end of February.

The lab is operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week with a total of 41 staff members involved in the test analysis process.

Guanajuato Governor Diego Sinhue praised their work during a visit to the laboratory on Wednesday.

“We feel proud to have the best health system and laboratory in the country thanks to the chemists and technicians that work here,” he said.

“They’ve processed more than 18,000 samples … and detected more than 2,000 [coronavirus] patients who we’re attending to in a timely way.”

Sinhue said that the state Health Ministry bolstered the lab’s diagnostic capacity in order to detect more Covid-19 cases and thus limit the spread of the coronavirus.

He warned Guanajuato residents that the risk of infection remains high in the state and urged them to continue following the advice to stay at home.

A total of 2,009 people have tested positive in Guanajuato, according to federal data, and 779 cases are considered active. The state has the fifth largest active outbreak in the country behind only Mexico City, México state, Tabasco and Jalisco.

Guanajuato has recorded 122 Covid-19 deaths for a fatality rate of 6.1 per 100 cases, much lower than the national rate of 11.6.

Source: El Universal (sp)

Consumer agency identifies butter that shouldn’t be labelled as such

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June 4, 2020