Two CJNG vehicles abandoned in Zamora, Michoacán, after a shootout in May 2019.
Eight decapitated bodies have been found in the Michoacán municipality of Aguililla, the state Attorney General’s Office announced Thursday. The killings are believed to be the result of confrontations between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the Cárteles Unidos, which are in the midst of a territorial dispute.
The eight men’s bodies were found after authorities received a report of possible crimes in the town of La Enramada. Upon investigation, forensic services found the mutilated bodies, which also bore gunshot wounds.
“The bodies were taken by medical forensic services for legal autopsy and continued investigation,” said the state attorney general.
In 2020, more than 50% of intentional homicides were associated with six criminal groups, including the CJNG. Last year Michoacán registered 50.4 intentional homicides per 100,000 residents, nearly double the national average.
Juanita, aged 101, gives two thumbs up for Covid vaccine after getting her shot in Ixtapaluca, México state.
More than 6 million seniors have now received at least one shot of a Covid-19 vaccine as Mexico’s vaccination program continued to accelerate this week, but there are still more than 9 million people aged 60 and over who have not yet had a jab.
According to the most recent data published by the federal Health Ministry, 6.02 million seniors have received a first vaccine dose, and almost 292,000 have received two.
There are approximately 15.7 million people aged 60 and over, meaning that some 9.7 million seniors were still unvaccinated at the end of March. (The latest vaccination data was published March 31.)
To achieve President López Obrador’s goal of administering at least one vaccine dose to all seniors by the end of April, an average of about 320,000 shots will have to be given each day this month.
The application of more than 300,000 shots per day has seldom been achieved since the government began vaccinating seniors in the middle of February, but authorities demonstrated this week that they do have the capacity to exceed that figure. In fact, more than 467,000 doses were administered to seniors on Wednesday, a new record.
The federal government’s ability to ramp up the vaccination program has been aided by the arrival of more than 4.9 million vaccine doses between March 25 and April 1. That figure accounts for one-third of the almost 14.7 million vaccine doses that have arrived in Mexico since the first shipment landed in December.
The most recent shipment was 1.2 million AstraZeneca shots that arrived in Mexico City from the United States on Thursday. The United States government has now shared more than 2.7 million AstraZeneca doses with Mexico since the two countries struck a deal in mid March.
Additional shipments of Pfizer, SinoVac, CanSino and Sputnik V vaccines have also recently arrived in Mexico.
The government campaign to vaccinate seniors began in rural areas but is now focused on urban areas, including Mexico City, where vaccination is taking place in five boroughs this week.
Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum predicted Thursday that all seniors in the capital will receive their second vaccine dose by June. She said the last seniors to receive their second dose will be those who live in the boroughs of Cuauhtémoc, Benito Juárez and Álvaro Obregón, where first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine are being administered this week.
Seniors in several México state municipalities, some of which are located in the metropolitan area of greater Mexico City, are also being inoculated this week. Among those who have received shots in Mexico’s most populous state are a number of centenarians, the newspaper Milenio reported.
Seniors wait their turn for a Covid-19 vaccine.
One was 104-year-old Hermelinda Hernández Cruz, who received her shot in Lerma, a municipality that adjoins the México state capital, Toluca. Hernández, who was accompanied by her daughter — who also qualified for a shot — burst into tears and gave praise to God after receiving her jab.
“Finally, I’m going to see my four children,” she said.
Other states where vaccines have been administered this week include Michoacán, where shots have been given in municipalities such as Pátzcuaro, Los Reyes and Queréndaro. However, authorities there announced that vaccinations would be suspended in the state between Friday and Sunday to avoid increasing mobility over the Easter weekend.
While the national vaccination program has now reached seniors in several large cities, including Guadalajara, Morelia, Puebla and Acapulco, older residents of some smaller towns are still waiting anxiously for a shot.
One such person is Lydio Salinas Morales, a 68-year-old resident of Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, who has heard nothing about when vaccines might arrive in the Pacific coast resort town.
“I understand that they started in rural areas, but they also sent a lot of doses to the Central Valleys region, where Oaxaca city is. They haven’t sent anything to the coast,” his daughter, Denisse Sanilas, told the newspaper La Razón.
Once all seniors who want a jab have received one, Mexico will still be a long way from reaching herd immunity against Covid-19 as the 15.7 million people aged 60 and over only represent about 12.5% of the total population.
Some health experts estimate that 70% to 90% of the population needs to be inoculated or infected with the virus to reach that level of immunity. For that to occur, a minimum of around 90 million Mexicans would need to have Covid-19 antibodies generated either by infection or inoculation.
According to The New York Times vaccinations tracker, 5.5% of Mexicans are currently vaccinated and 0.7% are fully vaccinated, meaning they have received both required doses of two-shot vaccines.
About 7.85 million vaccine doses have been administered in Mexico, according to the latest available government data, mainly to seniors and health workers.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated coronavirus case tally rose to 2.24 million on Thursday with 5,381 new cases reported. The official death toll increased by 454 to 203,664, a figure that even the federal government has acknowledged is a significant undercount.
The pandemic continued to wane in March but remains a significant threat, with a daily average of about 5,000 cases and more than 500 Covid-19 deaths reported in the third month of the year.
A gender reveal stunt went tragically wrong this week in Cancún, leaving at least two people dead in a plane crash.
The plane was performing stunts over Nichupté Lagoon before the fatal crash, which occurred after the gender of the expectant parents’ child was revealed with a banner.
Guests screamed, “It’s a girl!” as a banner unfurled behind the plane, a single-engine Cessna 206 owned by local rental company Xomex. Moments later excitement turned to horror as the aircraft nosedived into the lagoon.
Local media reported that there were two to four passengers on the plane and at least two deaths as a result of the accident. It was not clear if the pilot was among the casualties.
Francisco Fernández Millán, president of the Nautical Association of Quintana Roo, told local media that one of the victims died during the rescue operation. Another person died while paramedics performed first aid.
Así se desplomó taxi aéreo en zona turística de Cancún; hay dos muertos
The parents-to-be had recorded the accident while watching from a boat with friends and family, one of whom joked beforehand, “It’s all good as long as it doesn’t end up crashing into us!”
Baja California candidate Jorge Hank Rhon, who Governor Jaime Bonilla has alleged is a cartel crime boss in the state.
The governor of Baja California has made explosive allegations against one of the contenders for his job.
Morena party Governor Jaime Bonilla accused Jorge Hank Rhon, a gambling tycoon and former mayor of Tijuana who will represent the Solidary Encounter Party in the June 6 election for governor, of being the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) in the northern border state.
He described Hank as the biggest criminal Baja California has ever seen.
“I identify Jorge Hank as the head of this criminal group in the state,” he said in a live video message, adding that he believed that the 65-year-old is responsible for the high levels of crime in Baja California.
“I think that Jorge Hank has been behind all this, the high levels of crime and homicides in Baja California, for many years,” the governor said.
“… He is the true generator of violence. … The day Jorge Hank leaves Baja California, 80% of the violence will end because the violence arrived with him,” Bonilla said, apparently referring to Hank’s 2004–2007 term as mayor of Tijuana.
Bonilla’s allegations against Hank come after presumed members of the CJNG, generally considered Mexico’s most powerful and dangerous criminal organization, threatened Bonilla in a video posted online.
The governor accused Hank of having told the presumed criminals what to say.
“[He is] a person who has stolen everything from the people,” he said, adding that the candidate’s deceased father, Carlos Hank González — a former governor of México state, mayor of Mexico City and a federal minister — did the same.
“The other day he was boasting that he was a very rich man and didn’t need to enter government to steal. We would have thought the same about his dad, but he was in government and he stole,” Bonilla said.
Morena’s candidate, Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda, who is a former mayor of Mexicali, is considered the favorite to win the June 6 election. Some polls indicate that Hank is the second-most favored candidate.
Officials shut down the Riolajante attraction at Xenses.
Civil Protection officials have closed an attraction at the Playa del Carmen amusement park Xenses where a 13-year-old Durango boy was injured on Saturday and later died after his leg was sucked into an exposed part of the attraction’s water filtration system.
Solidaridad Civil Protection officials said the attraction, a manmade “river” of heated saltwater called “Riolajante,” would remain closed while authorities investigated the incident. Playa de Carmen is located in the municipality of Solidaridad.
According to Civil Protection head Francisco Poot Kauil, park workers told his staff that a part of the filtration system in the attraction’s manmade waterways had been left without a grate after maintenance work on the system.
“In the reports, park staff informed us that it was [a case of] negligence, since one of the workers left open one of the grates,” he told the newspaper Milenio.
Grupo Xcaret, which owns the park, admitted in a press release Wednesday that “human error” during work on the attraction was a factor in the incident. It said it was cooperating fully with authorities in the investigation.
Leonardo Luna Guerrero was in the aquatic attraction with his family when his leg became caught in the system and he was pulled underwater. Although his father managed to extract him from the filter and pull him out of the water, Leonardo had lost consciousness.
His father, cardiologist Miguel Luna-Calvo, gave his son CPR and chest compressions before park medical emergency personnel arrived, he said. The boy was taken to a private hospital in Playa del Carmen, where he died on Sunday of pulmonary complications, according to Luna-Calvo.
Luna-Calvo has in the past few days accused authorities of “irregularities” in the investigation of his son’s death, saying he was told he would have to sign a legal waiver freeing the park of legal responsibility in exchange for being given immediate custody of his son’s body without an autopsy being performed.
“They warned me that I was going to have to wait 10–15 days [for his body to be turned over] because they had several cadavers [to process],” he told the newspaper Reforma on Thursday. “I was six hours in the assistant prosecutor’s office. I had to get down on my knees and cry for them to allow me to take him … I believe that I touched the heart of the attorney and she said, ‘Go then. Give the summary of the facts, and you have to sign this waiver.’ I think they didn’t want evidence to remain of what had happened.”
The Quintana Roo Attorney General’s Office told the newspaper El Universal that the legally required autopsy was waived after Luna-Calvo asked for an exemption. The office also confirmed that Luna-Calvo had signed a legal waiver, although it said that the case was nevertheless being investigated as a culpable homicide, or manslaughter.
Luna-Calvo told Reforma that the family didn’t want an autopsy performed because they didn’t want any further damage done to Leonardo’s body.
“My wife didn’t want them to touch my son’s body,” he said. “We already knew the cause of his death.”
Candidate Claudio Vega was just getting into introducing himself when shots rang out.
There’s nothing like a bit of gunfire to get in the way of an election candidate’s efforts to record a video message for his campaign.
That’s what happened to municipal council candidate Claudio Vega Roque when he was filming for a political advertisement on Tuesday: gunfire in the near background interrupted the filming and forced the candidate to make a stage left.
The Citizens Movement candidate in Tamuín, San Luis Potosí, was filming in the town’s Friendship Plaza when the incident took place.
In the video, Vega had begun speaking when the sound of gunshots interrupted him, but it turns out he was not the target.
Police said one man and a police car were hit.
Tremendo susto se llevó candidato!!!
Enorme susto se llevó el candidato a diputado local Claudio Vega Roque, ya que cuando grababa un video presentación en el municipio de #Tamuín, se suscitó la balacera muy cerca de ahí misma que dejó un saldo de una persona muerta… pic.twitter.com/RQfyGKiNp8
According to the state Attorney General’s Office, the shots were reported shortly after 5 p.m. local time on Pedro Antonio de los Santos Avenue. A man without vital signs was found in a garage at the site of the shooting. Within minutes, he died of his wounds, which included shots to the head.
According to witness testimony, the 44-year-old victim was traveling in a vehicle when he was intercepted by several armed men. The man exited his vehicle and ran to a garage, trying to escape but was hit anyway.
A police patrol saw the shooters, who began to shoot at the police car, which responded with force. The attackers fled on foot.
The next day, Vega confirmed on social media that he and his family were unharmed.
“Yesterday, while filming a promo in the municipality of Tamuín, there was a shooting. Thanks to God, I am fine and with my family. Thank you for all your gesture of support,” he wrote on Facebook.
Forty used police vehicles were destroyed after a large brush fire spread into a vehicle storage area at the Valladolid state police station in Morelia, Michoacán, on Thursday.
The fire started in dry, grassy fields behind the station then spread toward the storage depot, used to store vehicles that are no longer in service.
“Michoacán state police personnel in coordination with Civil Protection worked to help emergency services confronting a field fire which reached the vehicle depot located behind the Valladolid police station in Morelia,” police said on their Twitter account.
At 3:05 p.m. they reported that the fire had been controlled.
Thirty years ago, Aureliana started delivering water by donkey to hard-to-reach areas in the Mexico City borough of Xochimilco. Today, she carries on doing the same work, taking water to families that still do not have municipal or other water sources.
One such area is Acalpixca, one of the 14 original towns that make up Xochimilco, and still lacks water service.
“Before there were many donkeys. We had 10 or 15 animals, but now they have exchanged donkeys for cars because trucks can get to most places. Or they pay for water trucks and do not need donkeys anymore.”
“This delivery method has been in use for about 50 years. It began in Barrio de las Cruces, which was one of the first populated neighborhoods, and people delivered by donkey because there was no other way to get water,” said Abel Martínez, a local journalist.
Initially, many people worked in water delivery because the area had no public water service. Donkeys abounded to such a degree that the neighborhood was nicknamed “Donkey Town.” As public services grew and improved, fewer and fewer people dedicated themselves to delivering water. Now, customers are limited to roughly 200 families, who buy water due to lack of services or drought.
Eulalia, another delivery worker who still uses donkeys, said that many of her peers have sold their donkeys to buy cars as the roads have improved. But Eulalia carries on with her donkeys.
Donkeys are often loaded with four 20-liter containers. The animals and the delivery people have to travel approximately four kilometers from the water source to reach their remaining clients.
A convoy of vehicles is escorted by police to provide security.
Some Mexicans traveling home from the United States for Easter holidays via the border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, are being pressured to pay tips to police and extortion payments to criminals.
According to a report by the newspaper Reforma that cites travelers’ testimonies, Tamaulipas state police officers deployed to escort returning Mexicans as they travel through the state are asking for tips.
The officers – deployed as part of the ostensibly free Programa Paisano (Compatriot Program), which encourages Mexicans returning home for holidays to travel in convoys escorted by security forces – offer their protection services to travelers after they leave the vehicle importation module at the Juárez-Lincoln port of entry, Reforma said.
Some travelers said that police have asked for tips or fees in excess of US $20 per vehicle to escort them to the federal inspection station located 26 kilometers south of the border city on the Nuevo Laredo-Monterrey highway.
“[The officer] told me: ‘If you want to give us a tip, it’s from your heart and holy hand,’” said one traveler who declined to give his name.
Rogelio Ávila, representative in Illinois of the National Council of Lawmakers and Migrant Leaders (Conalym), told Reforma that police asked him for a tip when he crossed into Mexico via Nuevo Laredo a few days ago as part of a convoy of travelers heading to Zacatecas.
He said that state police approached him and other travelers, welcomed them to Mexico, told them they would escort them until they were out of danger and then pressured them to make a “donation.”
“It happened to me,” Ávila reiterated. He also said that some Mexicans retuning from the United States have been victims of armed criminals who demand “protection fees” of up to US $500 per vehicle. If people refuse to pay, the criminals steal their belongings, Ávila said.
The Conalym representative said criminals also “hunt” travelers after they leave the vehicle importation module, adding that he witnessed three people being robbed at a checkpoint operated by the Federal Commission for Protection Against Health Risks.
“Three people were robbed and they hit the SUV of one person to force him to stop,” Ávila said, adding that the criminals were young men.
The land border between Mexico and the United States is officially closed to nonessential travel but large numbers of vacationing Mexicans have entered the country via Nuevo Laredo in recent days, Reforma said.
Ávila said that more Mexicans who live in the United States will cross the border to Mexico over this Easter weekend.
A dog saunters by with the end of a beet in his mouth. Mellow 70s-style dancehall music plays somewhere in the distance. Elias Ahumada is manning the grill, and Carlos Tellez is prepping food on a long metal table in the middle of the banked-down dirt that serves as both Cubo’s front yard and its dining room. All around us are soldier-straight oyamel pines, adding just the slightest hint of pine to the scent of wood smoke coming from the firepit.
As Covid-19 continues to surge through Mexico City, it feels good to be outside in the fresh air, social but safe. The Cubo (cube) house is exactly what you would imagine — a perfect square, less than 100 square meters, with the entire front wall of the house opening as a massive door.
Just like a giant dollhouse, the peeled-back wall reveals the contents within — a loft for sleeping, a small living room with overstuffed chairs that face the woods, a collection of seemingly random books and knickknacks along the walls. Outside, a grassy yard arches up from the house, and small tables are set here and there for the 20-odd guests that have come out to spend their Sunday at Cubo.
This food experience that everyone is buzzing about was sparked five years ago when Roberto Lingard purchased the house from a cousin and came up on weekends to forage mushrooms in the fungi-rich land that surrounded it. He was working with the local mushroom foragers in the nearby town of Santa Ana Jilotzingo, selling their product to local high-end restaurants, when chefs started to ask him for a trip out to experience the foraging for themselves.
From those early barbecues among friends sprung the idea for events at Cubo, culinary experiences in a range of styles that Lingard and then-partner Diego Niño advertised on Airbnb Experiences. For six months, he and Niño tossed ideas around of how they wanted the events to work — high end or simple, monthly or daily. But then the pandemic brought everything to a halt. With most clients being foreign tourists, they were suddenly without a guest list.
Food foraging educational tours in the woods are part of the Cubo experience.
So Cubo went off the radar for a few months. Then, in mid-summer of 2020, it suddenly reappeared.
“Mid-June, I thought I would start advertising again,” says Lingard, “and it turns out people were really eager to come here.”
In this second incarnation of Cubo, Lingard decided to pivot and invited several new collaborators to the project: Tellez, a local chef and mushroom fanatic, Anaís Martínez, a longtime food tour guide and Mexico City mover and shaker, and Ahumada, the owner of Metro Cacao, a local chocolate company.
The four turned their attention to a more local clientele and started offering all-day food and foraging experiences on the weekends for 20–25 people.
As soon as you enter the woods from the federal highway, there is a noticeable shift. The air is cleaner, your steps are softer and the atmosphere is quieter — that is until the four or five dogs that hang out at Cubo come joyfully bounding out of the woods to sniff you.
The day starts with a light breakfast and some coffee or Metro Cacao’s hot chocolate. Lingard leads the group in a short Otomí ritual around the fire to bless the food we will be eating, and the group sets off into the nine-acre woods to forage.
Fresh peaches warming on the open grill.
Lingard explains what is seasonally available right now along the forest floor and sets us to looking for today’s supplies — tiny wild clover, fresh pinecones and parsley’s cousin, a wild chervil that grows here.
The woods are majestic with their towering oyamels and massive ground-covering ferns. Over the footfalls of the group can be heard distant norteña music from a neighboring house down the road.
Once back at the cube, we sit down to Chef Tellez’s four-course lunch, all of which is cooked over an open flame outside on the wood-fired grill.
“When I got here, I had no idea how to use wood,” says Tellez “I would add more and more and make these huge fires. Roberto taught me how to use less and how much for each purpose — to smoke, to fry, to sear — there’s a world of possibilities with wood.”
Our first course is roasted beets and root veggies with a tangy homemade jocoque sauce and a sprig of our foraged earthy chervil on top. We move on to a spicy mole colorado with sweet plantain mash at its center, dusted with Parmesan cheese.
The main dish is a thick slice of pork belly, just slightly seared over the grill and placed atop pumpkin seed and sweet potato mash. For dessert, there are grilled peaches with homemade ice cream and a buttery crumble.
Only about 20 guests at a time are scheduled, and the world-class menu is served in a rustic family style to encourage diners to get to know each other.
Each course is accompanied by a cocktail, often the result of a local sponsor of the event — on this Sunday we had Nami sake and Haiku rice beer, both made in Mexico.
While Tellez serves as chef-in-residence, Cubo has at least two other guest chefs each month that present their own culinary concepts, always with the prerequisite that their menu will need to be adaptable to either the pit oven or the grill.
The Cubo folks encourage chefs to work with as many of the seasonally available products from the area that they can, Lingard says.
The food is gourmet and its presentation chic, and the space and ambiance of Cubo is laid back, with time for sitting on the grass, sipping an after-lunch cocktail and even a bit of dozing off in the sun.
The smell of the fire impregnates your clothes and hair, and a curated soundtrack encourages lingering and making small talk with strangers. It’s an atmosphere that guests can appreciate at the end of a long year of lockdowns and pandemic worries.
“I think the pandemic made people realize that mostly we’re kind of sick of dining among four walls,” says Lingard. “[Since] we’ve been open, we haven’t had a single guest who hasn’t had a blast.”
Most if not all of the restaurant’s meals are prepared outdoors in front of guests.
You can contact @cubo.mx or @thecuriousmexican on Instagram. The price is around US $60 for the day and covers food, drink and transportation.
Lydia Carey is a regular contributor to Mexico News Daily.
