Defense Minister Sandoval at the presidential press conference Wednesday.
The National Guard will patrol tourist destinations in Quintana Roo with a new tourism security battalion.
The new force will be formed of 1,445 National Guardsmen and begin operations on December 1 to combat crime in the Riviera Maya, which encompasses Tulum.
The latter destination has seen a rapid rise in violence, with an 80.5% jump in homicides in the first nine months of the year in annual terms.
Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval announced the formation of the new security force at President López Obrador’s morning news conference on Wednesday, held in Cancún. He said the battalion’s priority will be serving the municipalities of Benito Juárez (Cancún), Solidaridad (Playa del Carmen) and Tulum, locations with the state’s highest crime rates.
The force could be replicated in other parts of the country that are dependent on tourism. “It will be possible to take this model that we will use here … to apply it in other areas of the republic, in the main tourist centers …” he said.
The president confirmed that violence in the area in recent weeks had triggered the creation of the battalion. “They are painful events because nationals and foreigners lost their lives. That cannot be repeated, we have to prevent that from happening, that is why we have the plan to reinforce security,” he said.
The armed forces has seen its list of duties grow significantly under the López Obrador administration. Apart from security, military personnel have distributed gasoline, textbooks, vaccines and medication and are in charge of border surveillance, the detention and inspection of migrants and the construction and operation of the new Felipe Ángeles airport, set to open next year near Mexico City.
The leaders of Mexico, the US and Canada meet Thursday in Washington.
Cuba and energy loom as potentially contentious issues at Thursday’s North American Leaders Summit in Washington D.C., where President López Obrador will meet face to face with United States President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the first time since he took office in late 2018.
United States officials have indicated that the situation in Cuba, where a nationwide protest planned for Monday was suppressed before it happened, and energy integration will be on the agenda at the White House summit, the first between the leaders of the three North American nations since 2016.
According to an unnamed high-ranking United States official cited by the newspaper El País, Biden will ask López Obrador and Trudeau to join forces with the U.S. to demand that the Cuban government respect those who are seeking greater freedoms in the Caribbean island nation.
Monday’s planned “Civic March for Change” – at which Cubans opposed to the government intended to protest the lack of freedom under Communist Party rule and build on the momentum generated by mass demonstrations in July – fizzled because Cuban security forces prevented dissidents from leaving their houses to take to the streets.
Biden’s national security advisor said in a statement Monday that the Cuban regime had “predictably deployed a set piece of harsh prison sentences, sporadic arrests, intimidation tactics, and acts of repudiation all in an attempt to silence the voice of Cuban people.”
“… By its actions, the Cuban regime failed to respect the civil and political rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights treaties ratified by Cuba, including the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile,” Jake Sullivan added.
An attempt by the United States to gain the support of its neighbors to pressure Cuba is unlikely to be well received by López Obrador, who has indicated his support for the Cuban government on repeated occasions and hosted President Miguel Díaz-Canel as a guest of honor at this year’s Independence celebrations.
“You can’t choke the Cubans who have decided to stay in Cuba,” López Obrador said Monday. “I’m against the blockade, I believe it’s inhumane. Nobody has the right to cause people to rebel against their government via these practices,” he said.
Conflicting views on energy policy could cause another flashpoint at Thursday’s summit. López Obrador sent a constitutional bill to Congress in October that seeks to overhaul electricity market rules so that the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission is guaranteed a 54% share.
López Obrador, Biden and Trudeau: the ‘three amigos’ are back.
López Obrador said last week he didn’t expect his proposed electricity reform would be a topic for discussion in Washington, but U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols said that energy issues will be on the agenda.
“I don’t want to totally preview the president’s meeting but I will say there will be a broad discussion of integrating North American supply chains, labor issues [and] ensuring that we continue to make progress in North American energy integration,” he told the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday.
“[These] are some of the examples of the issues in USMCA [that will be up for discussion],” Nichols said, referring to the North American free trade agreement that took effect in July last year.
United States companies have denounced the Mexican government’s energy policies and plans, including the proposed electricity reform and oil sector changes, arguing that they violate the USMCA.
The United States’ top oil lobby, the American Petroleum Institute, wrote to the U.S. government twice earlier this year to ask it to urge the Mexican government to uphold its trade agreement commitments to treat American petroleum sector investors and exporters fairly.
Canadian companies, and Canada’s ambassador to Mexico, have also raised concerns about Mexico’s energy sector policies and plans, which in a nutshell seek to give the state greater control at the expense of private and foreign companies.
While issues related to Cuba and energy could cause discord, Thursday’s trilateral meeting – the first gathering in five years of the so-called “three amigos” – is slated to focus more on commonality and cooperation than things that divide the nations.
The White House said in a statement last week that the countries will reaffirm their strong ties and integration during the summit, “while also charting a new path for collaboration on ending the COVID-19 pandemic and advancing health security; competitiveness and equitable growth, to include climate change; and a regional vision for migration.”
Foreign Minister Ebrard said the main issues Mexico will raise are development cooperation for southern Mexico and Central America, “regional economic integration to promote investment in our country,” preparation for the next pandemic and “how to achieve fair economic recovery in 2022 and 2023.”
Mission president Alfredo Zanudo and his wife Guadalupe were threatened with a knife in the attack. Church of Latter-day Saints
Seventy Mormon missionaries in Torreón, Coahuila, were robbed by armed men last Friday.
The attackers, who the church’s spokesperson Sam Pernod said in a statement entered a church meetinghouse in the Ampliación Los Ángeles neighborhood, demanded cell phones, tablets, watches and wallets from the 57 men and 13 women of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mission president Alfredo Zanudo and his wife Guadalupe were threatened with a knife. Some missionaries in the group were hit and kicked, but no one required medical attention, Penrod said.
Penrod added that the men were carrying guns but did not say that they were used to threaten the missionaries.
The head of the local Attorney General’s Office, Maurilio Ochoa Rivera, said that the assailants’ movements had been tracked after they tried to withdraw money using a stolen bank card.
Torreón’s Chief of Police Manuel Pineda Rangel said the crime was the first of its kind, according to police records. “We checked the crime statistics, and there are no reports of a similar event,” he said.
He added that patrols would be increased around religious sites and places where large groups gather to avoid any further large-scale robberies.
Penrod said that the Church of Latter-day Saints was taking additional precautions.
“Missionaries have been removed from the area where the incident occurred and instructed to be extra cautious. A church security officer is in Torreón to evaluate the situation,” he said. “Our prayers are with these missionaries and their families as they recover from this frightening and traumatic experience.”
Coronavirus case numbers declined during 16 consecutive weeks to early November, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Tuesday.
Speaking at President López Obrador’s regular news conference, López-Gatell said case numbers declined 7% in epidemiological week 44, which ran from October 31 to November 6.
“[We’ve had] 16 continuous weeks of reductions,” he said before acknowledging that the week 44 decline wasn’t as significant as those recorded in previous weeks.
Mexico is currently in week 46 but data for the two most recent weeks is not considered reliable for epidemiological purposes because it may be incomplete and subject to change.
López-Gatell also said that hospitalizations of COVID-19 patients continues to trend down. Compared to the hospital occupancy peak in January – the worst month of the pandemic for COVID-19 deaths – the number of patients current receiving hospital treatment is down 90%, he said.
The deputy minister also reported that 129.8 million vaccine doses have been administered across Mexico. He said 75.5 million people have received shots and 84% of that number are fully vaccinated. López-Gatell also said the government will offer vaccines to youths aged 15 to 17, although he didn’t say when inoculation will begin.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated case tally is currently 3.84 million after 775 new infections were reported Monday. The official COVID-19 death toll rose by 57 to 291,147. There are 22,113 estimated active cases, including more than 3,000 in Mexico City and over 2,600 in Baja California, the only high risk orange state on the federal government’s coronavirus stoplight map.
González is believed to be a financial operator of the CJNG.
The wife of the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) was arrested in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara, Jalisco, on Monday.
Rosalinda González Valencia, wife of Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, was captured in Zapopan by soldiers working in conjunction with the federal Attorney General’s Office and the National Intelligence Center.
The Ministry of National Defense (Sedena) said in a statement that soldiers were acting on an arrest warrant issued against González for several crimes.
It said that evidence suggests she is linked to the “illicit financial operation of an organized crime group.”
The arrest of González, who was previously detained in Zapopan in 2018 on money laundering charges but released from prison on bail of almost 1.6 million pesos (US $77,000), is a “significant blow for the financial structure of organized crime in the state of Jalisco,” Sedena said.
The ministry said she was transferred to a federal women’s prison in Coatlán del Río, Morelos.
The arrest of González, who authorities said in 2018 was the “administrator of the economic and legal resources” of the CJNG, came just days after her brother, José González Valencia, was extradited to the United States from Brazil on drug trafficking charges. He is alleged to be a member of Los Cuinis, a gang considered the CJNG’s financial arm.
Another brother, Abigael González Valencia, former leader of Los Cuinis, was arrested in Puerto Vallarta in 2015 and is collaborating with federal authorities on the case of the 43 students who disappeared in Guerrero in 2014. Two other brothers were given prison sentences for drug and weapons charges in late 2019, while yet another brother was arrested in 2016.
Rosalinda González’s son is also in prison on cartel-related charges.
Meanwhile, Oseguera – wanted in both Mexico and the United States, where a US $10 million reward is on offer for information leading to his arrest — remains at large.
The cartel he heads – generally considered Mexico’s most powerful criminal organization – is notorious for violence and engaged in vicious turf wars in several parts of the country, including Michoacán and Guanajuato. Authorities expressed concern that the arrest of Oseguera’s wife could trigger reprisal attacks.
El Mencho and other former members of the Milenio Cartel formed the CJNG in 2010 with the aim of seizing control of drug trafficking and other criminal activities in the states of Jalisco and Michoacán.
Eleven years later, it is a transnational criminal organization with contacts in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Central America and the United States.
The cartel, a major mover of drugs such as cocaine and fentanyl, is believed to operate out of at least 24 Mexican states including Jalisco, Michoacán, Baja California, Veracruz, Chihuahua and Mexico City, where it allegedly carried out an attempt on the life of the capital’s police chief last year.
Committee members meet with government representatives in Mexico City on Monday.
The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) has begun a 12-day “historic visit” to Mexico during which it will assess the country’s capacity to respond to the missing persons crisis in which more than 94,000 people have disappeared.
Headed by Peruvian lawyer Carmen Rosa Villa Quintana, the committee is made up of a group of experts who monitor the implementation of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, to which Mexico is party.
The CED has been seeking to come to Mexico since 2013 but the previous federal government rejected its requests to visit despite pleas by victims’ family members that it be allowed to enter the country.
“This is a historic visit, requested since 2013,” Villa said Monday during an event with federal officials.
The CED is slated to visit 12 states and meet with municipal and state officials, relatives of missing people, civil society representatives and National Human Rights Commission officials, among others.
The U.N. experts will also attend exhumations carried out by authorities and victims’ families, accompany search brigades on missions to locate missing people and visit prisons to examine their registration systems.
Villa said her team has two main objectives: to help Mexico prevent enforced disappearances and to contribute to the fight against impunity.
Mexico has extremely high impunity rates for numerous crimes, including abductions and homicides. In addition, due to a lack of forensic experts and money, authorities have struggled to keep up with the immense task of identifying the bodies of victims of crime.
According to data disseminated by Movimiento por Nuestros Desaparecidos (Movement for Our Missing People), a non-governmental organization, there are more than 52,000 unidentified bodies in morgues.
Speaking at Monday’s event, Deputy Interior Minister for Human Rights Alejandro Encinas acknowledged that the federal government has a missing persons “crisis” on its hands.
“It was at the beginning of this government that the state opened itself up to international scrutiny and supervision and recognized the crisis of the disappearance of people that today adds up to more than 94,000 missing people,” he said.
“This is the most painful legacy the government of Mexico faces and one in which we have to make the greatest effort … to overcome [it],” said Encinas, who has previously described Mexico as an “enormous hidden grave.”
“I want this visit to be beneficial, for it to have good results,” the deputy minister said, explaining that the government is open to hearing the CED’s recommendations.
“… The success of your mission will imply the success of the policies we are implementing. We’re willing to open the doors to the entire federal government so that you can fulfill your mission,” he added.
The CED is scheduled to hold a press conference on the final day of its visit to Mexico – November 26, and will publish a report on its findings next March.
An electrical storm Sunday night provoked rain and hail that left a layer of icy, snowy precipitation on the ground. Facebook
Puebla city residents woke to a novelty on Monday: a snowfall followed a heavy storm the night before.
The streets of the city’s historic center and the Paseo Bravo park were lined with hard, icy snow that formed after an electric storm provoked rain and hail.
Snow is unusual in Puebla and hadn’t been seen for years, the newspaper El Universal reported. What’s more, the cold weather phenomenon is out of season: meteorological winter doesn’t start until December 1.
Many delighted residents posed for photographs, and children took the opportunity to build small snowmen and make attempts at snow angels. However, some local business owners were all work and no play and arrived with shovels to remove the snow from entrances.
The chilly spell is set to continue due to a cold front affecting north, central and eastern Mexico, which has already brought 6-degree temperatures to Puebla city, the newspaper El Sol de Puebla reported.
Mazatlán's warm climate and economic living were the writer's original reasons for moving to Mexico. eskystudio/Shutterstock
Why am I here?
Sixteen years ago, when I moved to Mexico, my reasons were very basic: affordable lifestyle and warm weather. I was rather shallow in that regard.
I never gave much thought to the culture I was about to drop into, other than how comfortable I have felt whenever spending time south of the border. It’s the composition of the culture that catalyzes my feelings of peace and contentment.
But I guess it could also just be the cold beer and the endless opportunities for Mexican food.
My first couple of years here, I suffered from a transitional brain fog, where the only thing I was vaguely aware of was the warm weather and the reasonable cost of living. My gringo-ness still hovered about me like an aura that colored all my interactions with the culture. However, the complex process that incrementally flavors the core of your psyche happens whether you are aware of it or not.
Early signs: when you’re not spending Cinco de Mayo pounding tequila in a place like this, then your transition from gringo into expat has begun. deposit photos
The transformation from slightly confused immigrant to entrenched expat has been a work in progress from the very start. Of course, there have been the epiphany moments when you string together your first complete sentence in Spanish or when you suddenly understand which hand gestures make people smile and which could endanger your life. But most cultural transition happens over weeks, months and years until it no longer feels like you are living in a foreign country.
So what is so enticing about this culture? Why does the prolonged exposure to Mexico tend to soften the soul, or take the edge off life in general?
There are subtle but portentous indicators all along the twisting path of cultural acclimation by which you can gauge your progress. These are a few of mine:
When you find yourself slowly sipping an excellent tequila and not pounding shots of José Cuervo on the Cinco de Mayo holiday with your buddies at a Mexican-themed bar, you’re getting close. Just the realization that there are tequilas that are smooth and tasty was an epic moment in my cultural odyssey.
Another watershed moment came at an intersection waiting for the light to change when a transito, the car of a traffic cop, pulled up behind me.
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the light bar on the roof and the stern countenance of the officer behind the wheel, and I felt no fear, no anxiety, not the slightest uptick in my heartbeat. In my previous life in the United States, no matter how carefully I drove, in an automobile that was 100% compliant with local regulations, any law enforcement presence in my rearview mirror would always spark some level of apprehension.
The writer spent the ’60s hoping people like the Indian guru Paramahansa Yoganada could teach him how to live in the present.
North of the border, when people meet each other for the first time, they invariably ask each other, “What do you do?” Your profession is so much a part of your persona in the U.S. that it shapes how the world sees you.
When you become a seasoned expat, you will still have some of this persona, but it will not be the preeminent factor of who you are in Mexico. Here, you will be judged by your day-to-day synergy within the culture.
It wasn’t until eight or so years into my Mexican life that I realized that my sense of time had adapted. This revelation occurred while having a few beers with two friends at our favorite beachside bar.
I asked a simple question: “What day is it?”
There were several moments where we debated whether it was Tuesday or Wednesday because none of us knew for certain. A quick look at a phone confirmed things, but this was a breakthrough moment in which I realized that time is superfluous to my life in Mexico.
For many Mexicans, time does not exist; only clocks exist. One of the things that I have found fascinating about this culture is the deeply ingrained propensity here to fully live in the moment.
One thing the writer was glad to escape in the US was how your profession is used to define you as a person. Marten Bjork/Unsplash
I, as well as others from the 1960s, spent years studying how to live in the moment and then attempting to incorporate it into my life, from Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums to the story of spiritual teacher Paramahansa Yogananda’s impressive journey to Be Here Now, the book by Richard Alpert (better known as Ram Dass), as well as other tomes we all devoured in the quest for enlightenment back then — or in other words, the quest to live perfectly in the moment.
Had I known that a simple culture change could achieve such a profound awakening, the library of my youth would have been significantly smaller.
There has been a profusion of things written about the meaning of the word mañana. A Spanish dictionary will simply say it means “tomorrow.” However, the culture of this country has embraced mañana as a defining component of a Mexican lifestyle, one that values giving yourself over completely to the present, even if it means you’ll put something else off until tomorrow.
It is one of the most difficult aspects of this culture for most expats to embrace. Many transplants here view the mañana perspective as a cultural flaw when it is in fact one of the cornerstones of this laid-back country.
So, as I look back through the years of being an expatriate, I realize I still enjoy the warm weather and the affordable lifestyle, but I now know that the preeminent reason for my continuing to live in Mexico is purely cultural.
The writer describes himself as a very middle-aged man who lives full-time in Mazatlán with a captured tourist woman and the ghost of a half-wild dog. He can be reached at buscardero@yahoo.com.
The situation has pushed pay levels as high as 100,000 pesos a month in northern states. canacar
Commercial supply chains are under threat in both Mexico and the United States due to a shortage of truck drivers.
Mexico’s National Chamber of Trucking (Canacar) puts the shortfall at 50,000 drivers, while the International Road Transport Union (IRU) said the shortage in Mexico grew 175% in 2021, the equivalent of 87,500 drivers.
The United States is facing the same pressure, according to the American Trucking Association (ATA). It said last month the driver shortage had risen to 80,000, an all-time high, and predicted that 100,000 more drivers would be required by 2023.
(A report published last week by Quartz disputes the ATA’s claim, arguing that there is no shortage of drivers but a shortage of “good trucking jobs.” It said there has been a shortage for 16 years due to extremely high turnover because truckers can find better working conditions and pay elsewhere.)
In Mexico, the shortage has raised pay levels. Before the coronavirus pandemic, drivers earned 20,000-45,000 pesos a month (about US $2,340 at the higher end), but in northern states they can now earn 70,000-100,000 pesos a month (as much as $4,800).
In the U.S., private fleet truck drivers earned an average of $86,000 a year before the pandemic, which has increased to $100,000 since, and comes with a signing bonus, the newspaper Reforma reported.
The head of a logistics think tank in Querétaro said the knock-on effects of the pandemic had transformed the industry. “With the pandemic and the saturation in ports, the salaries of drivers have increased around 20%,” said Carlos Canseco of Cilqro. “The northern states of Mexico are where salaries have increased exorbitantly and where companies suffer most from the flight of drivers to the United States,” he said.
The Road Transport Union said Mexico’s shortfall was due to a lack of qualified truckers, difficult working conditions, migration to the United States and a failure to attract young people to the trade.
The vice president of Canacar, Refugio Muñoz, added insecurity on the highways and health risks to the list, which he said included obesity, high blood pressure and drug consumption to meet the physical demands of the work.
Muñoz added that the labor shortage was causing wider economic damage: “[It] forces [companies] to stop their investment and growth plans …”
Trucker Rocío Hernández, 38, who has 10 years’ experience in the industry, said the working conditions made the job a hard sell: “This is a job where we do not have set hours, we are away from home for long periods of time and we do not always receive the treatment we deserve despite the importance of our work. Sometimes that bad treatment comes from employers and their clients,” he said.
This is the address of one of the firms awarded a contract. The building is residential and contains no offices.
The National Defense Ministry’s outlay on contracts awarded without a competitive tendering process increased 64% in 2020, data shows.
Data collected by the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO), a think tank, and compiled in its Corruption Risk Index shows that the National Defense Ministry (Sedena) spent 6.33 billion pesos (US $304 million) on contracts awarded directly last year.
The ministry’s total outlay on purchases was also up, rising 62% to 17.46 billion pesos (US $838.6 million). That means that 36% of its total expenditure was via directly awarded contracts.
The newspaper Reforma said that Sedena awarded contracts directly to companies that had recently been created and/or with addresses where there is no sign of commercial activity.
It said that Angar Azcapotzalco and Soluciones Integrales en Gestión de Riesgo de Desastres (Comprehensive Risk Disaster Management Solutions) stand out among Sedena’s five biggest suppliers since the current federal government took office in late 2018.
The former company was directly awarded a contract in October 2019 to supply 2,200 pickup trucks for 1.21 billion pesos (US $58.1 million), while the latter won a 1.17-billion-peso contract to supply ventilators during the coronavirus pandemic.
According to information on CompraNet, the government’s online transparency platform, the ventilator contract awarded directly to Soluciones Integrales is the only pubic contract the company has received.
According to Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, a non-governmental organization, the company is owned by former Institutional Revolutionary Party Senator José Maria Tapia Franco.
IMCO said that Sedena awarded contracts worth 199 million pesos last year to companies that were less than one year old.
Reforma reported that Distribuidora Yovic was established at the end of June 2020 and went on to win 10 contracts worth 1.9 million pesos in the second half of the year. It was invited to participate in a restricted tendering process that sought to find a supplier for heavy machinery parts just three weeks after it was established. Reforma said it visited its tax address in Tlalnepantla, México state, and confirmed there is no company there, only a private home in a working class neighborhood.
Losequi, a company directly awarded a 10.4-million-peso contract to supply protective equipment and other contracts worth some 15 million pesos, was also formed just before it began doing business with Sedena, and its tax address is an apartment complex in the Mexico City neighborhood of Del Valle.
The recent formation of companies that won contracts and the lack of commercial premises in some cases raises questions about their legitimacy. Front companies and shell corporations have been used before to divert government resources, such as the so-called “Master Fraud” embezzlement scheme in which 11 federal agencies diverted over 3.4 billion pesos in public money during the administration led by former president Enrique Peña Nieto.
The current government, however, has eliminated corruption from within its ranks, according to President López Obrador.
