The foundation run by renowned businessman Carlos Slim has announced that it will donate 1 billion pesos (US $41 million) for medical resources and public health education to help mitigate the spread of Covid-19.
The organization said in a press release that the donation will go toward the purchase of medical equipment to treat patients in intensive-care units, such as ventilators, sonograms and video-laryngoscopes, in government hospitals across the country.
The donation will also fund personal protection equipment, or PPE, such as gloves and face masks, sanitation and disinfection operations in public hospitals, improving the country’s diagnostic capacity and restructuring of the health system.
It will also support the Public Education Ministry with its PruebaT (T-Test) online educational platform, by which it can educate children about how to protect themselves and others from spreading the virus.
For customers and employees in essential businesses that must remain open, the donation will fund educational materials about general risk prevention and hygienic practices they can follow both at work and at home.
It will also finance special medical attention for the elderly, people with chronic underlying conditions and pregnant women.
In addition the foundation announced that any employees of Carlos Slim’s companies with symptoms of a respiratory infection, or those who have been confirmed to have the coronavirus or who have had contact with someone diagnosed with Covid-19, will be obliged to self-quarantine in their homes.
His companies have also implemented new hygiene policies to prevent transmission of the disease, such as frequent cleaning of work spaces, allowing employees to work at home when possible, and canceling business trips, meetings and other events.
The arrival of Covid-19 in Mexico has triggered panic buying and looting but not all Mexicans can get their hands on the essentials they would need to ride out a quarantine to contain the spread of the disease.
Among those who are worried about having enough food and other supplies to survive a lockdown are residents of working-class neighborhoods in the northern city of Hermosillo, Sonora.
“I’m not prepared,” Claudia Camarena, a 32-year-old mother of six, told the newspaper El Universal in the neighborhood of Luis Donaldo Colosio.
Even though her husband works one job in construction and another as a gas station security guard, Camarena said that the only way her family would be able to stock up enough for an extended quarantine would be to borrow money.
She also said that her family would struggle to survive if her husband were to stop working or if he lost one of his two jobs. Camarena added that the main sustenance for her children – aged 1 to 12 – is nothing more than beans.
Rita Aurelia García, a 43-year-old resident of the same neighborhood, is in a similar situation.
“I don’t even know what I’m going to eat today — beans, I think,” she told El Universal.
“People are buying everything but there’s no money here. My husband goes to a tortilla shop and sells them in the street. He does it all day and only when he arrives, almost at night, can we buy what we’re going to eat,” García said.
“We can’t buy food to store like … a lot of people do. There are five of us here. One of my sons went away to work and one of my daughters got married but there are [still] five of us living here. … We struggle to eat, so we’re afraid [of a quarantine]” she added.
In the nearby neighborhood of El Chaparral, a 68-year-old woman identified only as Victoria spoke to El Universal after picking up a free 1-kilo bag of beans from the Salvation Army.
“Rich people can buy [as much as they need but] we don’t have anything, not even to get through the day,” she said.
Despite her age, Doña Victoria said that she doesn’t receive a government pension and that she and her husband try to get by on his social security benefits alone, although their children sometimes give them 100 pesos (US $4).
She said that she and her husband barely go out for fear of being infected with Covid-19, which had sickened 367 people in Mexico as of Monday and killed four.
“They say that there are one or two cases here in Sonora [there are now five confirmed cases in the state] … and that it’s dangerous. As the Bible says, ‘Worse things are coming.’”
Herrera was working to stop a housing development.
Defending the natural world from private interests has once again proven to be a dangerous job in Mexico. Environmental activist Isaac Medardo Herrera Avilés was shot to death in his home in Juitepec, Morelos, on Monday night.
Herrera worked to defend the Los Venados (The Deer) nature reserve located within the municipality. His murder brought politicians, lawyers and social activists together online to call for an end to the violence in the state and to bring his killers to justice.
Herrera acted as legal representative for 13 Morelos communities that launched a legal battle to save the Chihuahuita spring from development in 2007.
Real estate developer Casas Ara wanted to construct housing near the spring, threatening the municipality’s only protected land. Herrera’s team petitioned then-governor Graco Ramírez to expropriate the land and return it to the control of the Juitepec municipal government.
Although he agreed to do so, Ramírez never followed through before the end of his term. Development at the site resumed, for which Herrera and other citizens filed a complaint with state authorities just weeks before his murder.
A Mexico City Metro worker dispenses hand sanitizer for passengers.
Mexico’s Covid-19 death toll has risen to five and there are 405 confirmed cases of the infectious disease in the country, health authorities announced on Tuesday night.
A 61-year-old woman with multiple myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells, and diabetes died of pneumonia in a Mexico City hospital on Monday evening, becoming the first female coronavirus fatality in Mexico and the fifth overall. She returned to Mexico from Spain on March 17 and developed coronavirus symptoms the next day.
The other four people to have died also had existing health problems such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity.
Health Ministry Director of Epidemiology José Luis Alomia told a press conference that 2% of the 405 people confirmed to have Covid-19 – an increase of 38 compared to Monday – are in serious condition. The vast majority are recovering at home while 10% are receiving treatment in the hospital, he said.
Mexico City has the highest number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 followed by Nuevo León, Jalisco, México state and Yucatán. Tlaxcala is the only state that has not yet reported a confirmed case.
Tuesday night’s coronavirus map.
Alomia also said that there are 1,219 suspected coronavirus cases and that 2,161 people had tested negative for the disease.
At the same press conference, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said that authorities expected a “long epidemic that could extend until September or October.”
The highest number of cases is expected in August, he added. Earlier on Tuesday, the official announced that Mexico had entered a phase of local transmission of Covid-19, which had sickened more than 370,000 people around the world and killed more than 16,200 as of Tuesday, according to the World Health Organization. Seven Mexicans confirmed to have Covid-19 have not traveled abroad recently and are not known to have had direct contact with someone who did.
López-Gatell expressed confidence that Mexico would be able to contain the coronavirus outbreak through social distancing and other measures such as the cancellation of events with more than 100 people and the closure of schools. As a result, authorities will be able to better “manage the risk” and ensure that the health system is not overwhelmed, he said.
Separately, Mexican Social Security Institute Director of Medical Benefits Víctor Hugo Borja Aburto said that 19 new hospitals that are set to open soon will have the capacity to provide treatment to coronavirus patients.
For his part, the head of the commission that manages Mexico’s national health institutes, Gustavo Reyes Terán, said that more than 600 new beds have been added to wards in Mexico City and México state hospitals that have been set up specifically to treat Covid-19 patients.
Empty chairs indicate a slowing of economic activity.
Meanwhile, President López Obrador announced on Tuesday that he had signed a decree ordering both the public and private sectors to allow workers aged 65 and over and other vulnerable people to stay at home. The quarantined workers will continue to receive their full salaries and benefits, according to the decree.
López Obrador also called on Mexicans to take even greater care than normal of their older family members, stating, “We already do it but we must now apply ourselves more.”
In addition, the president announced that his government will provide loans to 1 million small businesses to help them get through the economic downturn caused by the spread of Covid-19.
“We’re going to provide loans without interest or with very low rates to 1 million small businesses: fondas [small restaurants], taco restaurants, workshops – all those that will be affected by the economic crisis,” López Obrador said without providing details about the size of the loans.
The mayor of Mexico City and the governors of at least nine states, including Jalisco, México state, Quintana Roo, Puebla and Nuevo León, have already ordered the temporary closure of many non-essential businesses such as bars, nightclubs, casinos, movie theaters and gyms.
The economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak in Mexico is predicted to be huge: the jobs of 18 million people could be at risk as the result of a coronavirus-fueled recession, according to a report by the bank BBVA México, and 42,000 businesses in Mexico City alone could close permanently due to a drop in consumer demand, said Eduardo Contreras, president of the Canacope business chamber.
The president announces a plan to confront the coronavirus pandemic.
Investment bank Credit Suisse and the Bank of America are both predicting that the Mexican economy will contract by about 4% in 2020, the peso has fallen to as low as 25 to the United States dollar, the stock market is faltering and Mexican crude prices have dropped to their lowest level since 2002.
Tourism, which contributes to around 9% of Mexico’s GDP, is one of the worst affected sectors with the number of people traveling both domestically and internationally plummeting as the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen.
Hotel occupancy on Mexico’s Caribbean coast fell 76% in a week as the result of the Covid-19 pandemic, while 28 hotels in Quintana Roo have decided to shut temporarily due to the drastic drop in demand, according to the Hotel Association of Cancún and Puerto Morelos.
Occupancy levels in the neighboring state of Yucatán have fallen to just 5%, the newspaper El Universal reported.
The retail, transportation and restaurant industries as well as the informal sector – which provides employment for millions of Mexicans – are also expected to take a significant economic hit.
In Mexico City, street vendors in the historic center told El Universal that their sales have decreased by at least 50%, while steep price increases for essential food items have been reported in the capital.
A kilogram of tortillas increased more than 40% from 12 pesos to 17, while the price of a kilo of eggs rose almost 20% from 38 pesos to 45, El Universal reported.
Canada’s ambassador to Mexico posted a video to Twitter on Monday evening in which he urged his compatriots to return to Canada “as soon as possible” in response to the threat and uncertainty from the global Covid-19 pandemic.
“Commercial flights are still operating, but the situation is changing very quickly,” Graeme Clark said. “The embassy and the consular agencies throughout the territory are working full-time to support you.”
He told Canadian citizens in Mexico to follow the Canadian Embassy on Twitter to receive the latest updates on the pandemic and government actions, and urged them to adhere to practices of social distancing.
“We are here for you. Take care,” he said. He added that all who return to Canada will be required to go into a 14-day quarantine.
Canada’s was not the first call by a foreign embassy in Mexico for its citizens to return to their countries of origin.
On March 17 the Swiss Embassy told its citizens in Mexico for both tourism and business to return home.
“The situation is getting worse on the American continent, so this embassy advises [Swiss citizens] to return to Switzerland while it’s still possible,” the embassy tweeted.
The French Embassy made a similar announcement to that country’s students in Mexico on March 20, saying that their “protection is our priority.”
“If the end of your stay or if your university/host organization is closed and your course/mission is interrupted, we recommend you return to France,” the embassy tweeted.
Mexican authorities have yet to put restrictions on international flights, but some airlines like Aeroméxico and Interjet are beginning to limit international service themselves.
A day after the federal government announced that it would halt Constellation Brands’ US $1.4-billion Mexicali brewery, the United States beverage company said on Tuesday that it is ready to hold talks with President López Obrador.
“We’ve taken note of their messages and we are ready to enter into the necessary talks with President López Obrador and his cabinet to work closely on a plan of action that considers the large current and future challenges that Mexico faces in an economic and social sense,” Constellation said.
In a separate statement posted to the company’s website, Constellation President and CEO Bill Newlands said that the company “will continue working with local authorities, government officials and members of the community on next steps related to our brewery construction project in Mexicali and options elsewhere in Mexico.”
“In the meantime, it’s important to note that we have ample capacity, based on current growth forecasts and production capabilities at our Nava [Coahuila] brewery and soon to be completed expansion in Obregón [Sonora] to continue fueling the growth of our beer business in the medium-term. We’ve had a positive, mutually beneficial relationship with Mexico for more than 30 years and we fully expect this to continue,” he said.
In the statement, Constellation reiterated that its “project in Mexicali, like all our operations, complies with and has complied with all the requirements that the law indicates, and prioritizes the care and availability of water for everyone.”
Local residents, especially farmers, have long argued that the operation of the brewery, which is about 70% complete, would threaten the local water supply.
Constellation, which produces Grupo Modelo beers such as Corona and Pacífico, asserted that it remains committed to the wellbeing of the communities in which it operates, adding that “Mexico is very important to us.”
While the company indicated that it is willing to discuss the situation with the government, the Mexico City-based consulting firm Ansley said that legal action is an option.
It said that Constellation could file action against the federal government in Mexico or internationally using the contents of the still-valid North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to support its claim.
In Mexico, the company could request “an injunction against the results of the [brewery] consultation, the enforceability of the results and any decision the government might take against its interests based on the results of said consultation,” Ansley said.
It also said that Constellation could seek compensation in an international tribunal for the US $900 million it has spent on the brewery and the 10% drop in its share price on Monday after the government announced the consultation results and its intention to halt the project.
Ansley said that the company’s claim could be supported by the NAFTA investment chapter, which sets out the rules for international investment in each of Mexico, the United States and Canada.
For its part, the Business Coordinating Council (CCE), an influential private sector group, slammed the federal government for its decision to shut down the project.
The announcement that the National Water Commission would not issue the permits that Constellation still needed to obtain in order to open the brewery shows that the government “is determined to destroy the possibility of generating confidence for national and foreign investors and demolish jobs,” the CCE said in a statement.
It also said that the decision is “arbitrary, authoritarian and unilateral” despite the staging of the consultation. “It violates the rule of law, hurts the community and workers and is a terrible signal to society and the world that democratic rules are not respected in Mexico.”
The CCE also said that the government’s decision to halt the brewery project will hurt the “most vulnerable” people in Mexico because “they will have less access to opportunities and wellbeing.”
“Democracy has rules, the company had complied with all … the permits and obligations that the state asked it [to comply with]. … There is no reason that justifies the cancellation of the project nor the investment. … In addition, the debate about the use of water in Mexicali has been manipulated with incorrect data by activists and malicious authorities. The plant … would only use 0.2% of the water resources of the area and it has mechanisms to treat and return water it uses for agricultural use,” the statement said.
The consultation “had no legal basis” and only attracted the participation of 5% of the population, the CCE added, asserting “in no way can it be binding.”
Despite Covid-19 risk prevention recommendations by the state government, some Morelos towns are going ahead with public dances and other large events, possibly putting the health of their citizens and those of neighboring communities at risk.
The municipality of Atlatlahucan, in the northeastern part of the state, held a large dance with over 2,000 in attendance to top off four days of festivities in preparation for Semana Santa (Holy Week), the two-week holiday period before and after Easter Sunday.
Thousands of people gathered in the town’s main square, but no risk prevention measures were taken. There were a number of musical and cultural acts, although two acts canceled their shows, citing public health concerns.
Mayor Calixto Urbano Lagunas had said that the festival, which began on March 19, would go on in solidarity with the artisans and other merchants who participated. Suspending it, he said, would affect the economy, and recommended that those who were sick not attend.
Safety measures were also flouted in Cuautla, where Mayor Jesús Corona Damián and other regional authorities also held large events that culminated in a dance on Sunday.
Yautepec Mayor Agustín Alonso Gutiérrez neglected to follow health recommendations as well when he called together all the workers from the municipal government to propose they donate part of their salaries to purchase supplies for poorer communities.
While Morelos lives it up, Oaxaca city has been put on a strict lockdown, with police patrolling the streets to ensure that people do not linger in parks or otherwise assemble in public.
Around 1,500 officers have been deployed to the city streets, using megaphones to urge the public to remain in their homes and to remind those on the street to keep a safe distance from one another.
“I say this knowing full well my responsibility: we are going to instruct the municipal police to restrict access to parks and public spaces, because during this school and work suspension, people must remain in their homes,” said Mayor Oswaldo García Jarquín.
“We are not going to allow families to expose themselves [to the risk of contagion],” he added.
He said police had been trained to break up groups of people and convince them to return to the safety of their homes.
“We have to take care of ourselves. The municipal authority will behave responsibly,” he said.
For jazz fanatics in the United State and around the world there are dozens of small independent labels where you can find new and experimental jazz – Porter Records, Sunnyside and Tzadik just to name a few. But here in Mexico you won’t find a single individual label dedicated to solely jazz, that is of course, until now.
“I was born into a family that loved art,” says Juan Pablo Aispuro, founder of Pitayo Music. “Both my parents are architects — not musicians at all — but my grandfather on my mother’s side was. This is his piano.” He points to the nearby Steinway.
“He had a bolero trio with his brothers. So at every party he would say to me ‘grab the maracas,’ ‘grab the guitar.’ He taught how to play any instrument.”
Along the walls surrounding Aispuro are other instruments – bows for the cello, an upright bass. A few guitars. Gourds covered in beads, mini-wind chimes, a tiny instrument that sounds like rain when turned upside down.
The studio is small, cozy and warm on this unusually cold day in February in Mexico City. I sip my instant coffee and Juan Pablo looks off dreamily as he describes his love affair with music.
Aispuro: contemporary Mexican music.
“Instead of soccer, I played in the orchestra,” he says with a grin. First cello in fact in the Universidad Panamericana Chamber Orchestra when he was a young teenager. He attended the Colegio Cedros as a grade-schooler and was on the path to becoming a great musician long before the beard growing on his face had began to sprout.
For high school he transferred to the Tec de Monterrey and upon graduating was set on studying architecture. That is, until his architect mother pulled him aside and essentially said, “What, are you crazy? Your thing is music.”
So he started to work at a local recording studio instead, and for the first time came face to face with the music that would change his life.
“The studio is where I heard jazz for the first time. I didn’t know anything about it before that. I didn’t even know what a standard was. And I thought to myself, ‘I have to learn how to play this, I have to learn to understand it.’”
So Aispuro decided on Paris, one of the great jazz epicenters in Europe, and studied at the American School for Modern Music for four years. When he finished his studies he did something that Mexican jazz musicians from the generations previous didn’t normally do – he came back.
And not just Aispuro. According to him, a whole generation of young musicians came back to Mexico, and when he arrived eight years ago after his four-year hiatus he realized there was a lot more going on than he thought.
“I think part of why I left is because I didn’t know about the jazz scene here. It existed but I didn’t know that. I knew a few names, but in reality I knew very little. There was no promotion, no publicity, no radio stations, and the typical jazz musician is someone who doesn’t care, they’re not out there looking to give interviews … they just want to play music.”
“I think something that happens in jazz is that there is a lot of auto-consumption among musicians. Me, as a musician I know everything that other people are doing, but non-musicians don’t. It’s a type of music that doesn’t leave the stage.”
In order for Mexican jazz musicians to get noticed they had to play abroad; in order to get a contract they had to be signed by some international label. There were no contests, no festivals. And even though the digital age was most definitely upon them, musicians weren’t uploading their work to platforms like cdbaby or Spotify or Soundcloud. No one could hear their songs unless they were sitting in front of the stage.
So Aispuro started asking musicians to come and play jam sessions at his studio and he started to record the tracks. He found he had a knack for producing, and other musicians respected him because he was a musician himself. The first albums he put out were compilations of those early sessions called, Sesions del Casa de Arbol, wide-ranging and wandering tracks that demonstrate the breadth of styles that can be found among Mexican jazz musicians.
“I realized that there was this big jazz scene in Mexico City that was experiencing a boom, but it wasn’t accessible. Once I was inside and realized there were these great musicians, I thought, ‘I think that it’s my job, and something I want to do, to show the world what is going on,’ and that’s why I started with the compilations. It’s much more difficult to make your own album and get a lot of notice than if you have an album with 20 different musicians on it.”
And there was a distinctiveness to the Mexican jazz scene that Aispuro hadn’t experienced in Paris.
Aispuro’s 2016 album Kelonia.
“Here in Mexico you can play four or five nights a week. In Paris you play once every two months. And it’s more a thing where I get some dates and then I see who I can play with, instead of looking for dates with my specific project. So maybe I play four times a week and none of those are with my band. Each time I play with someone different and it’s really enriching to the scene, because everyone plays with everyone and you improve your playing. In other places that only happens in jam sessions.”
Musicians get to know each other well and because there is a high demand and limited offer, there are a lot more opportunities for them to play in Mexico City, in Guadalajara, and in Puebla than in Copenhagen or London. This generation of young musicians, adds Aispuro, is making jazz into something that resists a singular category.
“There are a lot of young musicians that see themselves as ‘Mexican jazz musicians,’ to the point that what most of them play isn’t swing, isn’t American jazz. We can call it jazz because it has a lot of similarities to jazz and improvisation, but personally, I’m not really comfortable calling everything ‘jazz’ anymore, because I think it has cultural connotations. I think we are developing a kind of contemporary Mexican music.”
In 2016 Aispuro came out with his first non-compilation album, Chilacantongo, produced for saxophonist Diego Franco from Guadalajara. The record is an audio reminiscence of the young artist’s life in the city and his talent is apparent from track one. This album was the birth of Pitayo Music (in Spanish) as a serious label, which would now be producing artists (they currently have four) as well as fomenting jazz culture in the city.
“For me it’s really important that the new generations know that there’s this incredible scene they can join and that that scene’s not in New York or L.A., it’s here or in Jalapa or Puebla and its theirs. That’s really important, that they know that they can create music within their country and be part of a scene here.”
It also important to Aispuro to have a local label that can provide access to the city’s music for players and jazz lovers. Instead of having to go outside their country, musicians can produce an album right here at home.
“I want it to be like Blue Note,” he says, “like you see it and think ‘I don’t even know who this is, but Blue Note is always good so I’m going to buy it.’”
With a true musician’s heart, Aispuro says he hopes that people copy his ideas and start all kinds of small local labels and studios.
“What better way to enrich the jazz scene?” he asks.
• Listen to an online solo piano concert by Alex Mercado webcast from the Pitayo Music studio on Wednesday, March 25 at 9:00 p.m. CT. The cost is US $5.00.
The author is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily and lives in Mexico City.
The measure aims to safeguard the pilots' source of employment.
Members of the ASPA pilots union who fly for Aeroméxico announced that they will take a 50% salary cut and donate up to 65% of benefits in order to support the company during the difficult economic times caused by the global Covid-19 pandemic.
The 1,176 Aeroméxico pilots are the largest group of professionals in Mexico to band together to support their employer during the crisis so far, despite the airline announcing last week that it was going to scale down service significantly to and from Europe.
Besides the decrease in salary, they will also create a rotational system of optional unpaid leave. If a minimum number of leave permits are not taken voluntarily, they will be randomly divided among the remaining active pilots.
They will also temporarily relinquish other contractual provisions, such as overtime and night pay, the legally mandated seventh-day bonus for working six consecutive days, productivity bonuses and training.
Benefits such as social security and health and life insurance will remain in place.
Union president Rafael Díaz Covarrubias noted the size and impact the move will have on the industry and said that the historic measure aims to safeguard the pilots’ source of employment.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures, and in an unprecedented move, the pilots of ASPA have shown that the determination with which we’ve negotiated salary raises is as great as [our determination] to support the companies with whom we are collectively contracted,” Díaz said.
ASPA said it will remain in constant communication with the pilots and the airlines as the health crisis progresses.
There will be widespread rapid testing for Covid-19 in Jalisco as part of efforts to contain the spread of the infectious disease, Governor Enrique Alfaro said on Monday.
Alfaro said that his government has the capacity to conduct 5,000 polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests immediately and that it intends to obtain an additional 15,000.
Widespread coronavirus testing, as has occurred in countries such as South Korea, will help to limit the outbreak of the disease, he said.
“We’re going to begin a program of … mass testing in order to be able to detect cases in a timely fashion and act accordingly,” Alfaro said.
“What we want is to avoid deaths here, we want to avoid infections here. I’m not competing [to have the lowest Covid-19] statistics, I’m trying to act with responsibility,” the governor said.
“We’re not going to sit back and do nothing. In the face of a lack of general decisions [by the federal government], we cannot continue to allow the regions of Mexico to be at the mercy of the circumstances we are living through in the country. We’re going to take decisions, Jalisco is taking them,” he said.
For his part, the director of the Guadalajara Civil Hospital said that widespread Covid-19 testing is important because an asymptomatic carrier of the disease could be infecting other people for up to five days before developing symptoms.
If such people are not detected and as a result don’t self-isolate, they could be the source of a widespread coronavirus outbreak, Jaime Andrade Villanueva said.
As of Monday, there were 46 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Jalisco, the third highest number among Mexico’s 32 federal entities after Mexico City and Nuevo León. Many of the people confirmed to have coronavirus in the western state recently traveled to Colorado, United States.
Jalisco recorded its first coronavirus-related death on Monday – a 55-year-old man who suffered from obesity and diabetes.
In addition to increasing the number of tests in order to contain the spread of Covid-19, Alfaro said that he has asked the Pacific Airport Group, which operates the international airports in Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta, to suspend flights from destinations where there are coronavirus outbreaks.
Under the proposal, cargo flights and those transporting people to carry out humanitarian work would be exempt, he said.
The governor also said that his government would send a letter to the federal Ministry of Communications and Transportation to urge it to suspend flights from coronavirus hotspots into other airports in Mexico.
“The regulation of airports and flights that come from other countries and other cities with [Covid-19] problems … is truly urgent. Decisions that are extremely important cannot continue to be put off,” Alfaro said.
