The municipal government of San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León, declared a state of emergency in response to an outbreak of Covid-19 and is essentially in quarantine.
There are currently 12 confirmed cases in the municipality that forms part of the greater Monterrey metropolitan area.
“We’ve come to find out that the virus known as Covid-19 is highly contagious from person to person and can be fatal, particularly for the elderly or people with high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity,” said municipal secretary José Dávalos Siller.
Mayor Miguel Bernardo Treviño de Hoyos issued a statement declaring the state of emergency on Tuesday.
The municipal government is taking specific steps to attempt to mitigate further spread of the virus, ordering the closure of all bars, cantinas, restaurants, sports and recreation facilities, nightclubs and public markets.
It has also suspended all public events, as well as the issuance of permits for future events, and it canceled any valid permits that had already been granted.
Services offered by all non-emergency public institutions like libraries, community centers and museums are suspended or restricted.
Citizens have been ordered not to congregate in parks or other public spaces, though they may walk through them.
The city government urged residents to stay in their homes except for urgent or other essential cases.
The declaration puts the city’s medical centers, rescue units and Civil Protection agency on high alert and mobilizes its security forces to take action against anyone who opposes the stipulations of the emergency declaration.
The measures are similar to those that will take effect if and when the federal government declares Phase 2 in its efforts to contain the virus.
The Perdiz field will be costly at today's oil prices.
The oil sector regulator has raised a red flag over the federal government’s decision to pour more money into an onshore field in Veracruz where the cost of extracting each barrel of crude will be slightly higher than the average per barrel price during the last week.
The government has given the green light to state oil company Pemex to invest US$87 million at the 47-square-kilometer Perdiz field over the next 14 years with the aim of extracting an additional 3.3 million barrels of heavy crude. Since 2014, Pemex has extracted 2 million barrels of crude from the field with an investment of $44 million.
The cost of crude extraction between 2020 and 2034 will be $24 per barrel, 10 cents higher than the average per barrel price of Mexico’s export grade oil mix over the past week.
The price has taken a hit due to the spread of coronavirus, growing pessimism over the impact the disease will have on the global economy and an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. It slumped more than 20% on Tuesday to $18.78, its lowest level in 18 years.
If crude prices remain low, the plan to extract an additional 3.3 billion barrels from the Perdiz field, located near the city of Tierra Blanca, would not be economically viable for Pemex, which already has debt in excess of $100 billion.
In that context, the National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH), the oil sector regulator, urged the federal government to reconsider the oil price models it uses to evaluate the viability of projects.
The CNH said that the cost-benefit analysis for the planned future extraction at the Perdiz field was based on a per barrel crude price of $55, a figure three times the price a barrel of Mexican crude was selling for on Tuesday.
Even if the crude price were to increase to that level, future extraction at the Perdiz field would be only marginally profitable once Pemex’s per barrel tax burden is taken into account, the CNH said.
According to commission chief Néstor Martínez, predicting oil prices will become increasingly difficult due to market uncertainty and thus long-term plans, such as the 14-year one in Veracruz, must be constantly reviewed.
The effects of the global Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Saudi Arabia price war are finally being seen at Mexican gas pumps, as prices drop to their lowest in years.
Per-liter prices have fallen 1.01 pesos on average across the country in the last week. Drivers in Mexico City have seen them fall an average of 79 cents in that time, with some stations posting prices under 17 pesos per liter.
The average liter of gasoline in Mexico City cost 20.38 pesos (US $0.85) on March 11. On Tuesday, it was 19.59 pesos.
One gas station on the Mexicaltzingo-Santiago Tianguistenco highway in México state was selling a liter of gas for as low as 15.71 pesos on Wednesday.
Stations in Tamaulipas posted prices as low as 11.99 pesos and one in Chihuahua was down to 10.50 per liter.
“Yes, [prices] have fallen, but not at the same rate in all gas stations, because several factors come into play,” said the president of the Organization of Petroleum Sellers (Onexpo), Roberto Díaz de León.
He said that it may take some stations longer to buy the cheaper gas, so they still have to charge higher prices for fuel bought a week ago when the market was much different.
The price of Mexican crude oil for export fell to US $18.78 per barrel on Tuesday, its lowest in 18 years.
Mexico is facing growing criticism for its response to the global coronavirus pandemic, with one scientist warning that the country “could end up in a situation like Italy,” where there are tens of thousands of confirmed Covid-19 cases and more than 2,500 people have died.
The federal government has announced a social distancing initiative to encourage people to avoid close contact — which doesn’t go into effect until March 23, more and more large events are either being postponed or cancelled and schools and universities are set to close in the coming days if they haven’t already done so.
However, the government is not considering closing Mexico’s borders even as many other countries restrict or ban the entry of foreigners as part of efforts to contain the spread of Covid-19, while President López Obrador has been criticized for continuing his campaign-style rallies at which he greets throngs of supporters with hugs, kisses and handshakes.
The president “is under fire for his blasé attitude about the coronavirus,” Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight for the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told the news website The Hill in an e-mail.
“He is leaving border states and towns picking up the slack. Many won’t be able to do so,” he wrote.
Critics of the federal government’s largely hands-off approach to preparing for an expected widespread outbreak of coronavirus say that it is driven by bad memories of a shutdown in Mexico in 2009 due to the H1N1, or swine flu, pandemic that deepened the country’s recession.
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Authorities acted quickly at the time, shutting down public life in Mexico City and other parts of the country. The spread of the swine flu was swiftly contained and normality resumed within weeks. However, the response shaved a percentage point off GDP growth in 2009, according to some estimates, at a time when the economy was already struggling as a result of the global financial crisis. GDP ended up contracting 5.3% in 2009, the economy’s biggest decline since 1995.
Now, according to a report by the news agency Reuters, “the gamble is straightforward: Mexico’s economy was stagnating even before the Covid-19 outbreak shuttered factories worldwide and the government has said it wants to limit economic damage by not over-reacting.”
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, the government’s main spokesperson on the coronavirus pandemic, said last week that “the economic loss” in 2009 “was directly related, in the most past, to the disruption of tourism, trade and services.”
López-Gatell, a senior official in the Health Ministry’s epidemiology department during the swine flu crisis, said that is “why it is so important, with very careful precision, not to take preemptive actions that do not correspond to the magnitude of the risk.”
Isacson: virus will likely sweep through migrant shelters.
“Acting responsibly, we can’t and should not take measures that exhaust our society. Let’s not use up all the interventions too soon. Let’s keep our calm,” López-Gatell said.
For his part, President López Obrador on Wednesday ruled out closing airports and implementing other tough measures such as closing restaurants, asserting that he is aiming to prevent a complete shutdown of the economy that would hurt the poor.
López Obrador said that there are “pressures of all types” to respond in a more extreme way to the growing threat of a widespread Covid-19 outbreak but his government won’t bow to them.
“Close the airport, shut down everything, paralyze the economy. No,” he told reporters at his regular news conference.
“Of course we’re worried about the situation of the epidemic, and we have to attend to it, but we also have to act responsibly.”
According to a report by the news agency Bloomberg, the Mexican economy is facing a perfect storm due to a possible recession in the United States – the country’s largest trading partner, a drastic reduction in oil revenue due to the slump in crude prices and a downturn in tourism as travelers stay at home as Covid-19 spreads around the world.
Investment bank Credit Suisse is now predicting that the Mexican economy will contract by 4% this year but López Obrador expressed optimism that the global economy will stabilize as a result of the “direct, deep” intervention of the United States government.
“They will do everything to stabilize so that helps every country in the world,” he said, adding that his government will tighten the budget while expanding its signature welfare programs such as pensions for the elderly.
While the federal government is taking a softly-softly approach to responding to the coronavirus threat for fear of hurting the economy, some Mexican scientists are worried about what the impact of not acting more quickly and broadly will be.
“I am worried that we [will] end up in a situation like Italy, where measures weren’t taken on time, and the number of cases started to get away from them,” said Rosa María del Angel, head of the Department of Infectomics and Molecular Pathogenesis at the National Polytechnic Institute.
In the event of a widespread outbreak, wealthier states are likely to be much better equipped to respond than poorer ones such as Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero in Mexico’s south. The security situation in individual states could also affect authorities’ ability to respond to the potential need to provide medical treatment to a large number of Covid-19 patients.
In Tamaulipas, for example, where cartel-fueled violence is a major problem, Isacson, the WOLA defense oversight director, said that the capacity of authorities is unclear.
Bukele of El Salvador urges Mexico to take the coronavirus more seriously.
“I don’t even have a good sense of what local authorities are doing and whether the security situation will hamper response,” he told The Hill.
Isacson also said that a widespread outbreak of Covid-19 could pose a particular threat to thousands of migrants living in shelters and camps along the Mexico-United States border.
“It will be an absolute miracle if the virus doesn’t sweep through those shelters and camps like a genuine plague. And I don’t see preparations for that underway. When chicken pox swept through the Mexican government shelter in [Ciudad] Juárez over the holidays, they just closed it for a few days. I don’t see what good that will do,” he wrote.
The government’s apparent failure to take the coronavirus threat seriously has also led to a spat between Mexico and El Salvador.
The president of the Central American nation, Nayib Bukele, claimed Monday that 12 people confirmed to have Covid-19 were intending to travel to San Salvador from Mexico City and criticized Mexico for not stopping them.
Although Mexico said that none of the 12 people in question had coronavirus or had even been tested for it, the airline Avianca cancelled the flight after Bukele said it wouldn’t be allowed to land in El Salvador.
In a Twitter message directed to Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, the Salvadoran president urged Mexico to take the coronavirus threat more seriously.
“I beg you to take drastic and forceful measures in the face of this pandemic. Mexico is a very big country and its responsibility should be too,” Bukele wrote.
“Otherwise, in 20 days the epicenter of this pandemic will not be Europe, but North America. Stop looking at this as something normal, please.”
Authorities are searching for the former head of the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC), Tomás Zerón, and his team for irregularities in the case of the 43 missing students from the Ayotzinapa teachers college.
The charges include torture, forced disappearance, evidence tampering and altering the crime scene. The arrest warrant was issued on March 10.
As federal reports indicate that he is currently located in Canada, Interpol has issued a Red Notice for Zerón, which initiates an international search.
The accusations against him stem from events that occurred on October 28, 2014, in Río San Juan de Cocula, Guerrero, but were not entered into the official case documentation.
That day Zerón allegedly took one of the suspects in the disappearances, Agustín “El Chereje” García Reyes, to one of the crime scenes with neither a lawyer present nor official authorization to do so.
A video released in 2016 shows the two in an area where at least one bag of burned human remains was found, evidence that was used to back up the investigator’s report and formed the basis of the so-called “historical truth,” the former federal government’s official version of events of what happened on September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero.
That version was released to the public in late 2014, and an independent team of experts invited to help with the investigation said in April 2016 that Mexican authorities were too “married” to the official version for them to uncover the actual truth of the night’s events.
The federal Attorney General’s Office says that Zerón also wrongfully ordered forensic personnel to look for bags containing human remains in the river in order to distract them from other parts of the search area.
Authorities said that it was sufficient evidence to assume that Zerón and his team fabricated the “historical truth” version of the story.
Another former AIC official, Ezequiel Peña Cerda, was arrested on Tuesday on charges of torture of one of the alleged perpetrators of the attack.
Parents of the missing students met with President López Obrador on March 5 to ask him to have the Financial Intelligence Unit investigate public officials who intervened in the Ayotzinapa case.
These include, in addition to Zerón, former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, former Iguala Mayor José Luis Abarca and his wife, among others.
Families of the missing students have long claimed that Zerón fabricated evidence.
The US Consulate in Monterrey will continue processing visas for agricultural workers.
The United States Embassy and consulates in Mexico began limiting services in response to the Covid-19 global pandemic on Tuesday until further notice.
The facilities will not shut down completely but will modify essential services to comply with the practice of social distancing.
“The U.S. Embassy and consulates will continue to provide essential consular services to U.S. citizens as well as emergency visa services,” said the U.S. State Department in a statement posted on March 16.
Routine passport and notarial services were to be minimized as of Wednesday, and citizens who already had appointments scheduled after that day will be asked to reschedule them for later dates.
Visa services will be suspended at the embassy in Mexico City and all consulates except for the one in Monterrey, Nuevo León. The consulate issued a statement late Tuesday saying that it would still process non-immigrant H-2 visas but modify its procedures to limit human contact as much as possible.
“The U.S. Consulate General Monterrey will prioritize the processing of returning H-2 workers who are eligible for an interview waiver. Because limited interview appointments will be available, we may cancel some first-time applicant appointments that have already been scheduled,” the statement read.
The H-2 visa is critical to the U.S. agricultural sector, as farmers need the temporary workers to harvest their crops. The program provides a legal framework by which around 200,000 foreign workers work in U.S. fields every year.
The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) said that a drop in the number of H-2 visa workers could lead to food shortages and economic hardship for farmers.
AFBF president Zippy Duval said that the State Department’s initial move to halt all visa applications in the country threatened U.S. farmers’ “ability to put food on America’s tables.”
The second quarter, from April to June, is the busiest time of year for contracting temporary farmworkers from Mexico. U.S. Labor Department statistics show that nearly 40% of workers contracted through the H-2 visa system arrive to work in the months of March and April.
“We fully support the administration’s efforts to protect the public during this health crisis. … We have urged [the U.S. government] to find safe, practical ways to admit farm laborers as emergency workers for visa purposes while still protecting public health. Failing to do so will impact our ability to provide a healthy, affordable, domestic food supply,” he said.
The U.S. Embassy said that emergency services are still available by calling 81-4160-5512 from Mexico or +1 (844) 528-6611 from the United States. Citizens can also keep up with the State Department’s coronavirus information here.
Two Mexico City police officers were arrested after stealing a young man’s iPhone in the trendy neighborhood of Roma on Tuesday.
Internal affairs agents arrested Ernesto Santiago A. and Julio César G., who had carried out a personal body inspection on a citizen on the street under the pretext that “he looked suspicious.”
The victim was stopped by the officers on the corner of Insurgentes and Tehuantepec streets and searched without justification or order from a higher authority.
The internal affairs agents arrived on the scene during the search and asked the 28-year-old man what happened. He told them that the officers had stopped him without reason and accused them of taking his iPhone XR.
The officers denied stealing anything, but the agents decided to check: they called the phone and heard it ringing inside the patrol car.
The citizen requested that the officers be arrested and taken before a judge.
The officers were taken to the public servants division of the city Attorney General’s Office, where an investigation was opened into the crime.
The bad news continues for the Mexican peso, which fell to a record low of more than 24 to the United States dollar early Wednesday morning before recovering slightly.
According to financial data and media company Bloomberg, a single greenback was trading at 24.11 pesos at about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday. Just after 9:00 a.m. CT, the peso had recovered to 23.75 to the U.S. dollar.
In banks, the U.S. dollar was selling for 24.12 pesos on Wednesday morning, the newspaper El Financiero reported.
The dollar has also strengthened against many other currencies as companies and investors rush to free themselves of assets seen as risky, such as the peso, amid growing fears of a global recession due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The peso has now fallen about 30% compared to its best level this year, El Financiero said, adding that it is the worst performing among a basket of major currencies.
The slump on Wednesday followed a 5.4% decline in the value of the peso on Tuesday, according to data from the Bank of México. The peso closed trading at 23.16 to the U.S. dollar on Tuesday, which was also a record low at the time.
Financial experts are not ruling out the possibility of the peso falling to 25 to the dollar in the coming weeks, El Financiero said.
Mexican crude prices are also taking a hit due to the spread of coronavirus, growing pessimism over the impact the disease will have on the global economy and an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.
The per barrel price for Mexico’s export grade oil mix slumped 22.36% on Tuesday to US $18.78 as expectations grow that demand for petroleum will fall due to a coronavirus-fueled recession. The price is the lowest since March 2002.
The price for Mexico’s export mix had declined 66.5% this year as of Tuesday, El Financiero reported, while West Texas Intermediate and Brent Crude prices had both fallen more than 50%.
Classrooms are now empty in states where schools have shut down.
The federal Health Ministry announced 11 new confirmed cases of coronavirus Covid-19 on Tuesday, bringing the total number of cases in Mexico to 93.
The ministry also said that there are 206 suspected cases and that 672 people have now tested negative for the infectious disease.
With 21 confirmed cases of Covid-19, Mexico City has the highest number of cases among Mexico’s 32 federal entities. Campeche is the only state that has not reported a confirmed or suspected case of the new coronavirus.
Health Ministry Director of Epidemiology José Luis Alomia told a press conference Tuesday night that 12% of the people confirmed to have Covid-19 are in the hospital while the rest are recovering in isolation at home. Two patients are in serious condition, he said.
According to Health Ministry data, the youngest person confirmed to be infected with Covid-19 is 18 and the oldest is 80.
Churches have been urged to cancel Mass.
A total of 373 people have been identified as having had contact with confirmed coronavirus cases, of whom 91% have no symptoms of the disease. Of the 9% with symptoms, nine people tested positive for Covid-19.
Ruy López Ridaura, director of the National Center for Disease Prevention and Control Programs, said that Mexico has not yet entered a stage of community transmission of coronavirus but is transitioning toward it. He and Alomia both said that the so-called stage 2 of the Covid-19 outbreak could start next week.
With a widespread outbreak of the disease apparently on the horizon, more and more Mexicans are taking preventative measures to avoid infection with Covid-19, which had sickened more than 201,000 people around the world and killed more than 8,200 as of Wednesday morning.
According to a report by the newspaper El Financiero, waitstaff and street sweepers are among those protecting themselves by wearing face masks and using anti-bacterial gel to disinfect their hands, while mothers on the streets of Mexico City are urging their children to wash their hands thoroughly when they get home.
Tertiary educational institutes such as the National Autonomous University and Tec. de Monterrey have announced the suspension of classes, and the Ministry of Public Education took the decision to send the nation’s school students on Easter holidays on March 20, two weeks earlier than scheduled.
The governments of at least 10 states, however, decided to ignore the directive and suspended classes on Tuesday.
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A range of other decisions have been taken as part of efforts aimed at containing the spread of Covid-19.
The Mexico City government has suspended events that bring together more than 1,000 people, the Mexican Football Federation has canceled national soccer league matches, banks are limiting the number of customers they allow in at the same time and Nuevo León Governor Jaime Rodríguez announced the closure of casinos and movie theaters in Monterrey.
Casinos, nightclubs, bars and cantinas in Jalisco that regularly attract crowds of more than 50 will also temporarily close and many companies are ordering their employees to work from home.
Authorities in Yucatán and Guerrero have announced that they will temporarily close archaeological sites, El Financiero reported, and beaches in Tamaulipas, Sonora and Tabasco will close in response to the public health crisis.
The Catholic Church has recommended the suspension of Mass, suggesting that services could be streamed via the internet to a virtual congregation in people’s homes, while the Passion Play of Iztapalapa, a reenactment of the last hours of the life of Jesus Christ held annually on Good Friday in Mexico City, will go ahead as planned but without spectators.
Meanwhile, President López Obrador, who has been criticized for greeting his supporters with hugs and kisses despite the government’s “social distancing” advice, continues to hold his regular news conferences even though they attract significant numbers of reporters to the National Palace every weekday morning.
The president said on Wednesday that the main focus of his mañanera, or morning press conference, both today and tomorrow would be to provide an update on construction of the new Mexico City airport that is being built on an air force base approximately 50 kilometers north of the capital.
The use of the “México” brand to promote tourism and trade should be resumed, according to the president of the Mexican Federation of Tourism Associations (Fematur).
Jorge Hernández told the newspaper Milenio that if the brand, first used 15 years ago as a way to promote the country’s identity and appeal to foreign tourists, is no longer used, it will only benefit other countries competing with Mexico for tourism revenue.
He said that an agreement between the federal government and the private sector is needed to allow the latter to use the “México” brand legally. “We hope to make up for all this time in which the brand” hasn’t been used, Hernández said.
First used in tourism and trade promotion at the end of the six-year term of the government of former president Vicente Fox, the “México” brand also helped to increase the number of annual visitors to the country during the administrations of ex-presidents Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto.
The international trade and investment agency ProMéxico and the Tourism Promotion Council both made extensive use of the “México” trademark. However, as part of wider austerity measures, the current federal government disbanded both agencies, effectively killing off the “México” brand.
According to the general director and founder of the advertising agency responsible for it, its discontinuation is a mistake.
“Destination brands have to transcend time,” Eduardo Calderón, CEO of MBLM México, told Milenio.
“You can’t build [a brand] in one administration; that’s one of the mistakes we make as a country. We think that we can change the identity of destinations at every whim of new administrations. When we look at the identities of traditionally tourism-oriented countries such as Spain, France and Italy, they continue to maintain many of the components they had in their previous brands.”
Hernández agreed, stating that when promotional programs are successful – international tourist numbers roughly doubled during the years that the “México” brand was used from 20 million in 2004 to more than 40 million in 2018 – “they must transcend governments.”
He said that the “Viajemos Todos Por México” (Let’s All Travel Through Mexico) scheme developed by the previous government to boost domestic tourism and attract United States citizens of Mexican descent to the country is another example of a program that should have been maintained but which was scrapped by the current government.
Calderón said that it takes times for country brands to build momentum and have a greater impact and therefore the abandonment of the “México” brand – ranked as the most important brand in Latin America in 2018 by consultancy firm Brand Finance – shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
The advertising agency chief said that the “México” brand now belongs more to the people than the government and represents the whole country.
Calderón said that he believes that the brand can still be used to grow tourism in Mexico, adding that replacing it “will not change any of the negative things we have“ in the country.
He also explained that the iconography of each letter of the “México” brand logo represents a different aspect of the country.
The M represents pre-Hispanic culture and the fusion of cultures. The É represents the thousands of years of civilization in the land now known as Mexico including the period when Spain (España) conquered the territory and established a viceroyalty.
The X is symbolic of the crossing of paths by the indigenous people and Spaniards to form a new mestizo, or mixed, culture. The I, suggestive of a tall building or one of the Satélite towers in the iconic sculpture of México state, represents the architecture and monumental art of Mexico.
The C alludes to the diversity of flora and fauna in Mexico, while the O represents the country’s beaches and extensive Pacific, Gulf and Caribbean coastlines.
