Solar is an option for diversification but the government has not been supportive.
Mexico urgently needs to diversify its power generation sources and increase storage capacity for both fuels and energy in order to avoid more major blackouts, according to two energy experts.
Juan Carlos García de la Cadena, CEO of sustainable energy firm Beetmann, told the newspaper El Economista that the dependence on natural gas to generate more than 60% of the energy used in Mexico implies a huge risk, as seen this week when there was a major outage in the northern states after cold weather in the United States affected the supply of natural gas to Mexico.
He said that distributed generation – a variety of technologies that generate electricity at or near where it will be used, such as solar panels – is one way that Mexico’s dependence on natural gas can be lessened.
“The most important thing is that as a sector we learn the lesson that we need a more diversified [energy] generation mix that is less linked to the United States price indices and imports from an open market that is subject to so many variables, some of them uncontrollable such as the weather,” García said.
About 95% of all natural gas imports come from the United States, mainly Texas. The heavy dependence on those imports and the energy system’s majority reliance on gas for power generation left Mexico in an extremely vulnerable position when the Lone Star state was hit by a cold snap this week.
What was a regional weather and electricity supply problem in the U.S. became a national economic problem in Mexico, El Economista said. The newspaper reported that the need to make extraordinary purchases of natural gas – Mexico has purchased shipments to be brought by sea from the United States – and to ramp up capacity at plants that use other power generation sources will cost the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) 5% of its annual budget in the space of just a few days.
In addition to its heavy dependence on natural gas for energy generation, Mexico’s limited storage capacity for the fuel also makes it highly vulnerable in the case of an interruption to supply.
According to independent energy analyst Ramsés Pech, Mexico needs to increase its storage capacity for a range of fuels, especially natural gas. He also said that Mexico should be exploring possibilities to build small hydroelectric projects and store energy using large batteries.
The previous federal government announced in 2018 a plan to increase natural gas storage capacity to at least 45 billion cubic feet, or almost five days’ consumption, by 2026. However, the current government hasn’t proceeded with the projects outlined by its predecessor, including two in Veracruz.
Mexico’s current storage capacity might be best measured in hours rather than days, according to Nuevo León energy industry group president César Cadena, while the newspaper Reforma described it as “practically non-existent.”
In contrast, the United States has storage capacity for 65 days’ worth of gas consumption while some European countries have capacity for 100 days.
The CFE said Monday that it plans to increase capacity but it didn’t say when or how it intends to do so.
Tuesday's confrontation between farmers and soliders in Heliodoro Castillo.
Opium poppy farmers in the Tierra Caliente region of Guerrero are accusing the military of violence, theft and destruction of property in retaliation for citizens banding together to prevent the soldiers from eradicating their illicit crops.
Residents of Los Hoyos, located in the municipality of Heliodoro Castillo, say that after an initial confrontation on Monday forced the military to leave, the soldiers returned on Tuesday afternoon, beating residents, shooting up their cars and breaking into homes to rob them.
“Yesterday [Monday], the residents blocked [the military] and didn’t let them destroy the crops,” he said, “and today [Tuesday, the soldiers] arrived, took away families, beat them and I believe shot up cars; all this is very difficult,” one farmer told the newspaper Reforma.
The initial confrontation on Monday was caught on a video now circulating on social media, in which a group of men armed with sticks, machetes and stones can be seen shouting at the soldiers and throwing stones at them while women and children look on.
When the soldiers returned Tuesday afternoon, residents said, they unleashed a wave of violence and destruction, only leaving after the church bells rang, a warning signal to others in the community, said one resident.
A farmer told Reforma that one person was severely beaten during the incident.
The farmers said they would not back down from protecting their crops, which are their only means of viable income.
“We’re not going to let them destroy the poppy plants because the government doesn’t support us at all,” one farmer said. “They’re trying to placate us with despensas [provisions] and doing a poor job of repairing the highways.”
The military has been eradicating opium poppy crops for years in states such as Guerrero, Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango. Less than a month ago, a similar confrontation between farmers and the military occurred in San Miguel Totolapan.
Farmers from several communities confronted the military after the soldiers destroyed more than 50 hectares of crops. They demanded that the soldiers leave their communities for good and that the state and federal governments compensate them for their loss of income.
According to a farmer in San Miguel Totolapan interviewed by Reforma in January, a kilogram of opium paste currently sells for 8,000 pesos.
Guerrero farmers have appealed to President López Obrador to legalize the cultivation of opium poppies for use in manufacturing pharmaceuticals. While the government appeared to be open to the idea, nothing on that front has moved forward.
Natural gas flowing through pipelines from the US hasn't been enough to meet demand.
Blackouts occurred in 29 states on Tuesday night, far more than had been anticipated, as Mexico continues to experience the fallout from an interruption to the natural gas supply caused by a cold snap in the United States.
The National Energy Control Center warned there would be rolling, random cuts to power supply in 12 states in order to reduce pressure on the electricity system but the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) announced that the blackouts had extended to 26 states, affecting 3.2 million people.
However, authorities and citizens in 29 states reported that power went off for varying lengths of time on Tuesday night.
The only states where there were no reports of blackouts were Baja California, Baja California Sur and Sonora.
In Mexico City, which wasn’t one of the 12 states where outages were scheduled, there were blackouts in parts of the boroughs of Tlalpan, Miguel Hidalgo and Iztapalapa, the newspaper Reforma reported. Some México state municipalities that are part of the greater Mexico City metropolitan area, such as Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, were also left without power.
Authorities in Celaya, Guanajuato, said the city’s water and sewerage systems were affected by power cuts while water service was suspended in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.
Authorities in several states expressed concern about the possibility that hospitals would be left without power supply. In Nayarit, Governor Antonio Echevarría said patients connected to ventilators in hospitals in Ixtlán and Rosamorada had to be transferred to state capital Tepic.
In Yucatán, blackouts were reported in several municipalities including Progreso and Motul. Some neighborhoods in state capital Mérida also experienced outages.
In the neighboring state of Quintana Roo, parts of the tourist destinations of Cancún and Playa del Carmen were shrouded in darkness for up to two hours from about 7:30 p.m. More than 55,000 people in five municipalities in the Caribbean coast state lost power, according to the CFE.
Businesses affected by blackouts over the past two days – 4.7 million people in Mexico’s north were left without power on Monday – have incurred losses of some 54 billion pesos (US $2.66 billion), estimated Luis Manuel Hernández, president of the industry group Index Nacional.
He said that some factories in the north of the country were left without power for more than 24 hours, forcing their complete shutdown.
Volkswagen is one of 80 companies whose gas volume has been cut back.
Enoch Castellanos, president of the National Chamber for Industrial Transformation, said that he expected losses of 18 billion pesos (about US $890 million) between Tuesday and Friday due to the interruption in the natural gas supply from the United States, where sub-zero temperatures froze gas pipes.
The National Gas Control Center (Cenagas) issued a “critical alert” on Tuesday for the national gas system (Sistrangas) due to the limited amount of gas being sent to Mexico from the U.S.
The alert will remain in effect until further notice. The Ministry of Energy (Sener) said that injections of gas into the national system from the United States remain below scheduled levels.
“While Cenagas has the authority to carry out intervention actions through the purchase of natural gas … to remedy the situation, the market conditions currently reflect a low supply of that fuel,” the ministry said.
“As a control measure, the extractions from the entire gas system will be adjusted according to the availability of natural gas,” Sener said.
Cenagas published a list Tuesday afternoon of more than 80 companies that will have their gas volumes cut, among which were steel company Arcelomittal México, steelmaker Altos Hornos de México, glass producer Vitro, paper and cardboard company Bio Pappel and automaker Volkswagen. Some companies were to see cuts in excess of 99%.
President López Obrador acknowledged Wednesday morning that the situation is serious and warned that full electricity service might not be restored until Thursday or Friday.
“We hope that service is reestablished as soon as possible, they’re working on that,” he said.
The president said that three shipments of gas to be brought to Mexico by sea have been purchased in order to allow gas-fueled power plants to increase their capacity.
“[The situation] is fundamentally due to the freezing weather … in the north, mainly in Texas,” López Obrador said, ruling out any suggestion that the United States had withheld gas due to any problems in the bilateral relationship.
“To clarify, there is not any reprisal – that they’re not delivering gas is not because they don’t see us in a favorable light,” he said.
Guerrero was executed by firing squad on February 14, 1831.
Independence hero and former president Vicente Guerrero died almost two centuries ago but a new exhibition in Oaxaca is helping to keep his memory alive.
Organized by the National Institute of Anthropology and History, the exhibition Vicente Guerrero: Hero Liberator of Mexico opened Sunday in Cuilápam de Guerrero, located just south of Oaxaca city, to mark the 190th anniversary of the revolutionary’s death.
Guerrero, who was of mixed Afro-Mestizo descent, was executed by firing squad on February 14, 1831 in the Ex-Convent of Cuilápam, where the exhibition is being held.
Born in Tixtla, a town east of Guerrero state capital Chilpancingo, in 1782 to a mother of African slave descent and a mestizo father, Guerrero joined the revolt against Spain in 1810.
He became a major leader in the fight for independence, rising to the rank of chief general of the rebel troops after the execution of Catholic priest and independence leader José María Morelos in 1815.
About 7 1/2 years after Mexico gained its independence from Spain, Guerrero became the second president of the first Mexican republic after a liberal revolt forced president-elect Manuel Gómez Pedraza to resign and leave the country.
But Guerrero, who abolished slavery in Mexico, only lasted 8 1/2 months as president before he was deposed in a rebellion led by his vice-president, Anastasio Bustamante.
In early 1831, he was lured onto a ship in Acapulco by an Italian sea captain who promised to serve him a meal but had actually reached a lucrative deal with Bustamante’s government to capture the ex-president.
Guerrero was taken by sea to Huatulco, Oaxaca, where he was handed over to federal troops at a beach that is now called La Entrega (The Handover). Guerrero was put on trial, convicted of rebellion and treason and sentenced to death. He was executed at the age of 58.
The exhibition in Cuilápam makes use of high resolution images, didactic texts, maps, artworks and other sources to tell the story of the erstwhile general and ex-president. It focuses on his fight for freedom and independence, his presidential term, and his “last breath,” among other stages of his life. It also examines the legacy he left for the generations that succeeded him.
The curator of the exhibition, Salvador Rueda Smithers, told the newsmagazine Proceso that the exhibition will travel to other parts of the country with Guerrero’s native Tixtla slated to be the first stop after Oaxaca.
Senator Vázquez at a presentation of her new book.
A lawmaker whose crusade is the fight against the sexual exploitation of minors says Mexico needs to do much more to combat child sex tourism.
Senator Josefina Vázquez Mota, president of the Senate Commission on Child and Adolescent Rights, presented her new book on child exploitation at an event on the weekend in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, where she urged the establishment of a pact with the tourism sector to confront the issue.
Her book, titled Alas Rotas, or “Broken Wings,” tells the the story of more than 5 million children who are victims of crime and sexual violence in Mexico.
According to Vázquez, Mexico is the second-highest country in the world for sex tourism involving minors, after Thailand. It also producers 70% of the world’s child pornography, she said.
The senator said her presentation in Mazatlán was apt because the city and other tourist destinations in Mexico need to combat the sexual exploitation of minors in their communities.
According to a global study on the topic by the anti-child exploitation organization ECPAT International, locales with a heavy economic dependence on tourism and travel income frequently become centers of the exploitation of children because of the influx of affluent travelers and the fact that they often exist next to impoverished communities, where children tend to be more vulnerable to exploitation.
Governor Quirino Ordaz Coppel told the audience that sex crimes against children, including forced prostitution and child pornography, are the second most-profitable criminal activity in Mexico, after drug trafficking. He also said that the recent opening of a Financial Intelligence Unit office in Sinaloa was a boon for the state’s enforcement abilities, in combination with the state’s existing cyber crimes unit. He said the internet is the site of the greatest number of cases of the exploitation of minors.
The Balmis immunization expedition from Spain to its colonies in the Americas could teach us a thing or two about vaccination campaigns.
As the Covid-19 vaccine rollout continues across the world, organizers can find lessons from a historic vaccination endeavor in the Spanish Empire during the 19th century.
The Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition — informally called the Balmis Expedition after its leader, Spanish physician Francisco Javier de Balmis — vaccinated hundreds of thousands of people against smallpox, including in Mexico, principally from 1803 to 1806. It is widely viewed as the first-ever global public health initiative.
In Mexico, which was then part of the colony of New Spain, the expedition traveled from Veracruz to Acapulco, making stops in such major cities as Mexico City, Guadalajara and Oaxaca. Its achievements would endure after the country’s independence and inspire a 20th-century campaign against polio. Now scholars see parallels with the Covid-19 response.
“They had to solve the same kinds of problems we have today,” said Paul Ramírez, an associate professor of history and religious studies at Northwestern University, “logistics and transport, having to go to distant places, public trust, convincing people both healthy and sick why they did all of this.”
The reason was the dreaded infectious disease smallpox.
An excerpt of de Balmis’s translation of an 1801 book by French physician Jacques-Louis Moreau on smallpox and use of the vaccine.
“Smallpox was an incredibly deadly disease,” said Gabriela Soto Laveaga, a professor of the history of science and the Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University. “Smallpox in the Americas, as we know, also decimated the populations.”
She noted that the indigenous population of Mexico City plummeted from an estimated 20 to 25 million before the arrival of Europeans to under two million a century later, with “many of the deaths due to smallpox.”
In 1796, the British scientist Edward Jenner discovered a vaccine for smallpox, the first vaccine ever. He published his findings two years later. The discovery of vaccination became known to King Charles IV of Spain — whose daughter suffered from smallpox.
Farren Yero, a postdoctoral associate in gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University, said that Jenner’s discovery became known elsewhere in the Spanish Empire, including present-day Colombia and Ecuador, which were experiencing a smallpox epidemic and called for supplies.
“[But] the king dragged his feet for quite some time before responding to the request,” Yero said.
The Balmis Expedition sailed from La Coruna in November 1803. Balmis was a military physician who had spent time in Mexico during the 1780s. He had worked in a hospital in Mexico City and conducted research, notably with plants. Now he was returning on a much-larger-scale mission.
“The aim was to vaccinate every eligible Spanish subject,” Ramírez said, although he noted that “people who lived through a smallpox epidemic were already immune and couldn’t be vaccinated,” and that vaccinations were done “mostly with children under a certain age in any given campaign.”
The vaccine was actually transported through children who sailed with the expedition. Ramírez said they were orphans from Spain and estimates place their number in the low 20s.
“It could be incubated in the arms of children,” Ramírez explained. “It could be transported in people better than in glass slides. The best way was through human carriers.”
According to a 2004 article published in the scholarly journal Gaceta Medica de México, the expedition included a celebrated caretaker for the children — Isabel Cendala y Gómez. The article states that after stops in the Caribbean, the expedition made its first Mexican landings at Sisal, Yucatán, and then Veracruz. In Mexico, it said, Balmis traveled to nine cities, including Mexico City, to establish vaccination boards, to whom he provided the vaccine and taught how to vaccinate.
“He was smart,” Soto said. “He localized all efforts … selecting local people to do the vaccination. It was crucial for its success, not just in Mexico but across the world.”
“Just as today, there were a lot of protests,” she said, adding that to address opposition, Balmis “relied on the Catholic Church in a very religious Catholic country. What he did was rely on the local parish priests, the local clergy, to convince people.”
History of science professor Gabriela Soto. Courtesy of Gabriela Soto
Balmis himself was “such a strong advocate of the smallpox vaccine,” she said. “He had seen … the devastation this disease brought.”
Yero called the expedition “kind of a restitution for bringing smallpox in the first place. Spain was responsible for introducing smallpox with the conquest of Mexico in the 16th century, and even prior to that with Columbus, really.”
Yero also said that slavery played a role in the vaccinations: Cuba sent three enslaved girls to Campeche as additional carriers of the vaccine at Balmis’ request, and following Mexican independence and emancipation, Mexico continued to bring in slaves from Cuba as vaccine carriers.
Access to the vaccine was also an issue, as has been the case with Covid-19 vaccines.
“It was supposed to be universal, supposed to be for everyone,” Ramírez said. “One piece of evidence in the archive suggests a rather different experience — the fact that lower-class people often complained [because getting vaccinated meant] a day off work, one day of wages, a financial hardship to them.”
He also said that where indigenous populations lived, certain communities remained overlooked because they were deemed too distant.
Balmis left for the Philippines in 1805, according to the Gaceta Medica de México. When he embarked from Acapulco, he brought a new group of 24 children from orphanages in Guadalajara, Fresnillo and Zacatecas to carry the vaccine. Ramírez said that not all the children came from orphanages and that in some cases, their parents were paid.
After the Philippines, Balmis went on to further stops including Canton, China (present-day Guangzhou), and the British island colony of St. Helena. He provided the vaccine to St. Helena even though Spain and Britain were at war.
Soto said that when Balmis finally returned to Spain “he was greeted as a hero.”
“In his final report, he calculated that between his expedition and sub-expeditions around the world, as many as one million souls were vaccinated,” Soto said. “It’s a remarkable number,” she added, although she acknowledges that its veracity is “not clear.”
Regardless of the number, she said, “if you think about it, they traveled mainly by ship, by foot in 1806. They circumnavigated the vaccinations around the world.”
As for what happened to the children who carried the vaccine, scholars are not entirely sure.
Francisco Javier de Balmis’ 1803–1806 voyage to the Americas to eradicate smallpox is widely viewed as the first-ever global public health initiative.
“I want to believe they were returned safely,” Soto said. “They may well have been. There were a lot of ships going between Acapulco and Manila. It was a frequent shipping route.”
Yero said the children who went to the Philippines did make it back, although it is unclear what happened to the three slave girls who brought the vaccine to Campeche.
A few years later, Balmis returned to Mexico to monitor the vaccinations. By then, wars of independence were on the horizon across the Americas.
Yero noted the effects of the Mexican War of Independence on vaccinations.
“A lot of records were destroyed,” she said. “People later wanted to continue vaccination. They no longer had guides to doing it. They requested guides in addition to vaccines. There are letters complaining about insurgents burning records down.”
Ramírez said that “some organization and stability” was reinstated in 1817 and 1818, with vaccination campaigns resuming in the 1820s and 1830s.
“There were attempts to vaccinate throughout the 19th century,” he said. “It is an interesting story. Mexico ended up being at the forefront of preventive medicine at the beginning of the 19th century as a result of coordinated campaigns.”
Mexico finally eradicated smallpox nationwide in 1951, and the disease was considered eradicated worldwide in 1980. The late Mexican physician and Rotary International president Dr. Carlos Canseco used Balmis’ example in a subsequent international campaign against polio.
In a 1991 address, Canseco called Balmis “one of the great heroes in human history, because his feat made one thing clear to the people of the 20th century: the eradication of smallpox was not simply a beautiful dream, but a reachable, practical and noble idea.”
Now the Balmis Expedition has echoes for the Covid-19 response.
“I think adaptability is the main lesson,” Soto said. “They had a plan. The plan didn’t always work. What they needed to keep doing was vaccinating, with a mindset of vaccinating as many people as possible in as short amount [of time] as possible.”
Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
There will be random, rolling cuts to power supply in 12 states on Tuesday night, the National Energy Control Center (Cenace) announced.
The electricity market operator warned residents of Aguascalientes, Colima, México state, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, Nayarit, Puebla, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas that electricity supply will be interrupted between 6:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Central Time.
Cenace said the blackouts are necessary due to the increase in demand for electricity in the evening and night and the “unavailability of sufficient generation to cover the northern and northeastern regions of the country.”
Some 4.7 million people in Mexico’s north were left without power on Monday morning due to an interruption in the natural gas supply caused by cold weather in the United States, which froze gas pipes. President López Obrador said Tuesday morning that 80% of electricity services had been reestablished, meaning that close to a million people were still without power.
Announcing the cuts scheduled for tonight on Twitter, Cenace urged “all sectors of the population to take pertinent preventative measures” to prepare for the interruption to the electricity supply.
It also called on people to switch off lights they’re not using, disconnect electronic devices that don’t need to be plugged in, close curtains and blinds to conserve heat and reduce or cease nonessential production processes.
“The rolling cuts contribute to the load-generation balance by scheduling controlled interruptions to avoid a greater impact on the interconnected national system,” Cenace said in the last of a series of six Twitter posts.
The energy center also cut electricity supply on a scheduled basis on Monday night to reduce pressure on the national electricity system, with interruptions affecting several states including Morelos, Puebla, Veracruz, Michoacán, México state and Tlaxcala.
Ebrard: Mexico's position will be presented to the Security Council Wednesday.
Mexico will raise an objection at the United Nations over global inequality in access to Covid-19 vaccines, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Tuesday.
“Tomorrow in the United Nations Security Council, we’re going to present the position of Mexico and Latin America with respect to what’s happening in the world – the inequality, the inequity there is in access to vaccines,” Ebrard told reporters at President López Obrador’s morning news conference.
Ebrard, who has played a leading role in the federal government’s efforts to secure vaccines for Mexico, said the countries that produce the Covid-19 shots have high vaccination rates whereas they are much lower in Latin American and Caribbean countries.
“Tomorrow we’re going to raise that in the Security Council because it’s not fair. That’s what the president has instructed me to do,” he said.
Mexico has urged the UN for months to work to guarantee equality among the nations of the world with regard to access to medications, medical equipment and vaccines to combat the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed the lives of more than 2.4 million people around the world.
López Obrador on Monday urged the UN to hold a meeting to discuss the stockpiling and monopolization of vaccines, noting that the government had to enter into talks with European Union authorities to ensure that they would allow Pfizer vaccines manufactured in Belgium to be shipped to Mexico.
On Tuesday, he highlighted that the United States is not exporting vaccines to other countries.
“The United States plants are are only producing for the United States, that’s one of the things we want to look at with the UN so that there is equity, so that there is no vaccine stockpiling, so that there is a principle of equality so that all countries have the possibility to vaccinate their inhabitants,” López Obrador said.
Mexico has only received about 2 million doses as of Tuesday but less than half that number have been used.
However, the government has seven agreements to acquire 232 million mainly two-shot vaccines doses, Ebrard said, explaining that the number will be sufficient to inoculate 133 million million people, or about 105% of Mexico’s population.
The foreign minister said that Mexico will receive 55.5 million doses through the intergovernmental Covax initiative and has commercial agreements to purchase 77.4 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses to be manufactured in Argentina, just over 2 million doses of the same vaccine from the Serum Institute of India, 34.4 million Pfizer doses, 35 million single-dose CanSino Biologics vaccines, 24 million Sputnik V shots and 10 million Sinovac doses.
Mexico has so far only received about 1.25 million Pfizer doses, about 490,000 of which arrived Tuesday, and 870,000 AstraZeneca shots, which were flown into the country from India on Sunday. Full immunization with both vaccines requires two shots.
Most of the Pfizer doses received before today have been used to inoculate frontline health workers while the vaccination of seniors began Monday with the AstraZeneca shots.
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Tuesday that 87,472 AstraZeneca doses – 10% of the total – were administered Monday in 30 of Mexico’s 32 states.
No vaccines were given in Tamaulipas and Nuevo León due to cold weather, he said.
“They couldn’t vaccinate for climatic reasons; if the AstraZeneca vaccine was exposed to the elements it would have been damaged. Prudently it was decided not to vaccinate yesterday but the vaccine is guaranteed for those states,” he said.
More than 30,000 of the 87,472 AstraZeneca doses administered Monday, or just over a third of the total, were given to seniors in the Mexico City boroughs of Milpa Alta, Cuajimalpa and Magdalena Contreras. Seniors waited in line for up to six hours in the capital to get a jab, and some complained that their photos were taken in order to be later posted to government websites.
As Mexico’s vaccination program begins to gather speed, the number of new coronavirus cases being reported on a daily basis is trending downwards.
An average of 8,775 new cases were reported each day between February 1 and 15, a 38% decline compared to the January average. The accumulated case tally currently stands at 1.99 million after 3,098 new cases were reported Monday.
A daily average of 1,075 Covid-19 deaths were reported during the first 15 days of the month, a 2% increase compared to January. The official death toll rose to 174,657 on Monday with 450 additional fatalities registered.
A former Oaxaca beauty queen has been jailed without bail on suspicion of being part of a kidnapping ring operating in the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca.
Laura Mojica Romero, 25, was Miss Oaxaca in 2018 and the 2020 International Queen of Coffee in Colombia, a beauty pageant at which she represented Mexico. She was arrested Thursday with seven other people in a raid conducted by a federal anti-kidnapping unit after two months of investigation.
A judge on Saturday ruled that Mojica and the seven others will remain in prison for the next two months while authorities continue to gather evidence. Members of the group each face up to 50 years in prison.
Mojica, a native of the city of Tuxtepec, is a graduate of Veracruz University with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Her resume says she is fluent in English and a spokesperson for associations fighting breast cancer and cancer in children. She told Newsweek México in 2019 that she was “more than just a pretty face” and that her participation in beauty contests as Miss Oaxaca had made her a more altruistic person.
She cited as an example her efforts to bring coats, sweaters, and blankets to remote communities in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca. She also told the publication that she planned to organize support for a musical group for children in the Oaxaca municipality of San Pedro Cajonos and create an entrepreneurial group for women as a strategy to combat gender violence.
According to federal statistics, Veracruz occupies one of the top spots in the country for kidnappings, on average 15–20 per month, only surpassed by México state. One of the most recent high-profile kidnappings in the state occurred on November 11, in which Florisel Ríos, the mayor of Jamapa, was kidnapped and killed.
The lack of natural gas is a costly blow for industry in the north.
The industrial sector in the north of the country will see losses of 18 billion pesos (US $890.9 million) over the next four days due to the interruption in the natural gas supply caused by cold weather in the United States, according to a business leader.
Enoch Castellanos, president of the National Chamber for Industrial Transformation (Canacintra), said that factories along the northern border will only be able to operate at 30% of their full capacity this week due to gas shortage.
A cold snap in the United States affected gas supply on Monday due to the freezing of pipelines in Texas, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) said. The lack of gas caused a major power outage on Monday that affected some 4.7 million people in several northern states.
Power was restored to 79% of those affected by late Monday after the CFE injected its gas reserves into power plants in the north of the country. Consignments of natural gas are also being shipped by sea to the ports in Manzanillo, Colima, and Altamira, Tamaulipas.
The National Energy Control Center cut electricity supply on a scheduled basis on Monday night to reduce pressure on the national electricity system, with interruptions affecting several states including Morelos, Puebla, Veracruz, Michoacán, México state and Tlaxcala.
Castellanos said that Mexico is vulnerable to natural gas supply problems because of its heavy dependence on imports from the United States – about 70% of the gas used domestically comes from the U.S. – and because the federal government has not exploited gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico and in states such as Nuevo León, Coahuila and Chihuahua.
The Canacintra chief said that gas wells assigned to Pemex haven’t been tapped and that the government has put an end to oil and gas block auctions that would allow private companies to invest in the natural gas sector.
“They [the government] are neither eating nor letting others eat and what we have is a nosedive in gas production,” Castellanos said.
However, a change in sentiment is apparently afoot: President López Obrador said Tuesday that in light of Monday’s blackout, the government will seek to move towards self-sufficiency in gas.
“The power outage came about because we’re producing electricity with gas that is bought in Texas. And with the bad weather, with the snowfall, the gas pipelines were affected and the price of gas increased like never before. … Now we feel that we must try to be self-sufficient,” he said.
Mario Canales, a private sector energy consultant, said that weather forecasts for the next four days in Texas and parts of northern Mexico are not encouraging and predicted that there will be further power outages. He said that the CFE’s power generation capacity as well as industries that depend on natural gas will be affected by a lack of gas supply this week.
To offset supply problems, Mexico needs natural gas storage capacity of 20 days but it only has two or three days of capacity, Canales said, describing the predicament as a “serious shortcoming.”
Allowing the private sector to build storage infrastructure is urgent from an energy security point of view, he added.
César Cadena, president of an energy industry group in Nuevo León, said that Mexico’s storage capacity might be best measured in hours rather than days.
“The gas storage Mexico [supposedly] has is for a day and a half of consumption but now we’ve been given proof that in reality it’s not even that and that the storage we have might really be [just] hours,” he said.
José Ignacio Martínez, coordinator of the Laboratory of Commerce, Economy and Business at the National Autonomous University, said Monday’s blackout and ongoing natural gas supply problems will cause delays in the shipment of goods, including automotive products, to the United States and Canada.
Miguel Reyes, a CFE director, said Monday that Pemex needs to increase its natural gas production in order to increase supply to the state-owned power utility and guarantee the reliability of the national electricity system. He noted that the CFE uses 60% of the natural gas Mexico buys from the United States, adding that it is locked into 25-year contracts that cost the company 60 billion pesos (US $3 billion) a year.
Later on Monday, the CFE said it would make increasing storage capacity part of its commercial and operational strategy. Doing so has “strategic value because it is a way of maintaining natural gas reserves to confront contingencies in Mexico,” the company said.
López Obrador used the blackout to further justify his government’s decision to build a new US $8-billion oil refinery on the Tabasco coast, which has been criticized on the grounds that it diverts resources from Pemex’s more profitable exploration business.
He said the lesson that must be learned from the outage is that Mexico needs to be self-sufficient in the production of all fuels.
“In irresponsible technocratic logic they say, ‘Why are you building a refinery? Why are you going to produce gasoline?You can buy it. Dedicate yourself to selling oil, that’s where the business is.’ But they don’t take other considerations into account,” López Obrador said.
