For consumers in Jalisco, El Chorrito packed more than a punch.
Thirty-four people died after drinking tainted alcohol in Puebla and Morelos on Mother’s Day, local authorities report.
In Chiconcuautla, Puebla, the mayor’s office declared a health emergency and the National Guard was deployed to help identify others who may be showing symptoms of poisoning.
The 20 who have died thus far in the community drank refino, an agave distillate similar to mescal which costs 15 pesos a liter or 5 pesos a glass and may have been tainted with excessive levels of methanol.
Typically used in solvents and antifreeze, methanol can metabolize to formaldehyde and formic acid in the liver and become toxic within a few hours of being ingested.
Symptoms included dizziness, blurred vision or blindness, difficulty breathing, seizures and severe abdominal pain.
The mayor’s office appealed to the public to avoid consuming alcohol, asked those experiencing poisoning symptoms to seek immediate medical attention and announced that a full investigation would be conducted.
Meanwhile, 14 people died in the municipalities of Axochiapan and Jonacatepec, Morelos, after drinking tainted bootleg alcohol, reported Pedro Enrique Clement Gallardo of the state’s Civil Protection agency.
In Telixtac, a small, indigenous community in Axochiapan, authorities closed stores illegally selling the alcohol, despite coronavirus dry laws, and seized 86 liters of what is known locally as cachorro, amargo or damiana after nine people died. Five others died in Jonacatepec where the sale of alcohol was also prohibited due to the pandemic.
Civil Protection warned that the number of poisonings and dead could increase as the investigation continues.
In Jalisco at least 28 people have died since April 26 from drinking El Chorrito, cane alcohol tainted with methanol, and seven have died in Yucatán after drinking bootleg liquor.
Miners will be among those going back to work soon.
The federal government’s General Health Council (CSG) has designated automotive production, construction and mining as essential activities, paving the way for the sectors to reopen despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Manufacturers in the aerospace, rail and shipbuilding sectors will also be able to restart activities as the CSG decision applies to all companies that make transportation parts and equipment. Tuesday’s ruling will help restore North American supply chains that were interrupted by the government’s suspension of nonessential economic activities at the end of March.
Most transportation sector manufacturers as well as mining and construction companies are expected to recommence operations soon after the official publication of the CSG decision.
The Confederation of Industrial Chambers (Concamin), an umbrella group that represents a range of manufacturing sectors, welcomed the health council’s ruling.
“Construction, mining and the manufacture of transportation equipment [are] industries of great impact across the entire economy. Our proposals have been listened to,” Concamin said in a Twitter post.
Automotive industry is seen as part of the ‘heart’ of the Mexican economy.
The director of the Institute for Industrial Development and Economic Growth, a think tank, said the three sectors will help kickstart the ailing economy as they together contribute 10% of Mexico’s GDP.
They are part of the “heart” of the Mexican economy, said José Luis de la Cruz, adding that they have the potential to boost 100 other branches of industry.
Automotive sector representatives said that most companies that produce vehicles and parts will get back to work as soon as possible. However, the president of an automotive organization in Jalisco warned that the sector must be cautious and not rush into getting all their employees back to work.
Rubén Reséndiz Pérez of the Jalisco Automotive Cluster said that companies have to make the health of their workers a priority, suggesting that the number of employees on the factory floor could initially be cut by half to ensure that social distancing recommendations can be followed.
For his part, the president of the Mexican Chamber of the Construction Industry said that member companies are ready to resume activities but stressed that strict health controls will be put in place and that each construction site will have a supervisor to ensure they are followed.
Eduardo Ramírez said that open-air projects, such as work on highways and airports, will be the first to restart, adding that workers employed on more confined construction sites will be given training to ensure that the risk of Covid-19 spreading is reduced.
The construction chamber said that workers’ temperatures will be checked before they start work and during their shifts, that they will have access to facilities to regularly wash their hands and that they will be given personal protective equipment such as masks to reduce the risk of infection. It also said that workers will be transported to and from their workplaces in company vehicles where possible.
The CSG said on Tuesday that all companies will be required to follow official workplace health protocols.
The council also announced that restrictions on economic and educational activities will be lifted in municipalities that have not recorded any coronavirus cases and don’t border any with confirmed infections.
A Bachoco employee serves chicken soup to a healthcare worker.
Poultry producer Bachoco is on its way to serving over 50,000 bowls of chicken soup to doctors, nurses and relatives of Covid-19 patients outside hospitals in Mexico City, Puebla and Monterrey.
Playing on the rhyme in the Spanish words for chicken (pollo) and support (apoyo), the Caldito de Apoyo program has been feeding hungry bellies outside hospitals since April 30.
The program has donated an average of 1,500 bowls of chicken soup daily since it began. But the meals aren’t reserved exclusively for those directly affected by the coronavirus. Bachoco employees are feeding every hungry person who approaches and asks for food.
“This program allows us to send an emotional message of support to everyone in order to show them that we are with them today more than ever,” said Bachoco sales director Andrés Morales Astiazarán.
“… we’ll do what is in our power to reduce the negative impacts of this pandemic on the people,” said Arvizu.
Companies both big and small have found ways to help those in need during the coronavirus emergency. The American Legion bar in Mexico City has devoted its kitchen to making meals for vendors, homeless and other hungry people on the streets during the quarantine period.
Mexico recorded 353 Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday, the highest yet in one day. milenio
Mexico recorded its biggest single-day increase to both its coronavirus case tally and death toll on Tuesday as the country enters its fourth week of phase three of the pandemic.
The federal Health Ministry reported 1,997 new Covid-19 cases, increasing the total number of accumulated cases to 38,324. It also reported 353 additional deaths, lifting the death toll to 3,926.
The numbers for new cases and deaths exceeded those recorded on May 7 when the Health Ministry reported 1,982 of the former and 257 of the latter.
He told reporters at the nightly coronavirus press briefing that there are also 22,980 suspected cases of Covid-19 across the country and that more than 142,000 people have now been tested. Just under 20,000 people confirmed to have Covid-19 have now fully recovered.
Confirmed cases now total 38,324. There were 1,997 new cases recorded on Tuesday. milenio
In the three weeks since the government declared the start of phase three of the pandemic, Mexico has recorded 29,552 cases, 77% of the total, and 3,214 deaths, 82% of the total number of coronavirus-related fatalities.
More than 10,000 coronavirus cases have now been detected in Mexico City since the beginning of the pandemic and the capital also leads the country for active cases with 2,170.
Mexico City’s two most populous boroughs, Iztapalapa and Gustavo A. Madero, rank first and second, respectively, among Mexico’s more than 2,400 municipalities for both accumulated and active cases. Iztapalapa has now recorded more than 2,000 cases while 1,351 have been detected in Gustavo A. Madero.
Eight other boroughs in the capital – Tlalpan, Álvaro Obregón, Coyoacán, Cuauhtémoc, Iztacalco, Xochimilco, Venustiano Carranza and Miguel Hidalgo – have recorded more than 500 cases.
México state has the second highest number of accumulated and active cases among the country’s 32 federal entities, with 6,540 of the former and 1,176 of the latter. Several México state municipalities that are part of the greater Mexico City metropolitan area have recorded high numbers of cases.
Baja California ranks third for accumulated cases, with more than 2,500, while Veracruz has the third largest active outbreak in the country, with 508 cases.
Active coronavirus cases as of Tuesday evening. milenio
Four states are close to eliminating coronavirus within their borders, with less than 50 active cases each, according to official data. Colima has just 15 active cases, Durango has 33, Baja California Sur has 47 and Zacatecas has 49.
Colima is the only state in the country to have recorded fewer than 10 fatalities, with seven reported as of Tuesday.
At the other end of the scale is Mexico City, where 937 people have now lost their lives to Covid-19. Baja California has the second highest death toll, with 443 fatalities, followed by México state and Tabasco, where 378 and 242 people, respectively, have died after testing positive.
Just under 70% of the almost 4,000 fatalities were men. In addition to the confirmed Covid-19 deaths, there are 244 fatalities that are suspected of having been caused by the disease.
If a suspected Covid-19 patient dies before he or she is tested, and is not tested subsequently, a committee of medical specialists analyzes the case and makes a decision about whether the fatality should be attributed to the disease and added to Mexico’s official coronavirus death toll.
Based on the number of Covid-19 cases and deaths confirmed by Tuesday, Mexico’s fatality rate is 10.2 per 100 cases, a figure that has increased by 1 over the past two weeks. The global fatality rate is 6.9 per 100 cases.
Most of the Covid-19 patients who have died in Mexico had underlying health conditions, the most prevalent being hypertension, diabetes and obesity.
Calderón, left, and López Obrador: the latter wants to reopen a controversial scheme hatched during the former's term in office.
The federal government has sent a diplomatic note to the United States Embassy in Mexico to seek information about the decade-old “fast and furious” gun-running sting, renewing focus on a controversial issue that dates back to the administrations of former Mexican president Felipe Calderón and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama.
Under the 2009-2011 scheme, the United States government allowed people to buy guns illegally in the U.S. and smuggle them into Mexico so that the weapons could be tracked and law enforcement officials could locate and arrest crime bosses.
However, the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost track of most of the weapons, some of which were used in fatal shootings of both Mexican and U.S. citizens.
Referring to the details of the diplomatic note in a video message, Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard said that if the United States government executed the gun-running scheme without the knowledge of Mexican officials, it violated Mexico’s sovereignty.
On the other hand, if the government led by Calderón did know about the “fast and furious” scheme, that administration committed “serious violations” against the constitution, Ebrard said, because former Mexican officials denied knowledge of it in statements made to Congress and society.
At least 2,000 firearms disappeared after they were smuggled into Mexico.
The foreign minister cited Obama-era U.S. attorney general Eric Holder as saying that officials of the Calderón administration knew about the scheme. The news agency Reuters said that representatives of Holder didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Ebrard said that more than 2,000 high-caliber guns were smuggled into Mexico under the scheme and that the weapons were used to commit “several crimes” in Mexico, the United States and “even third countries.”
The scheme caused “the regrettable loss of Mexican and American lives” without achieving the objectives of arresting criminals and obtaining intelligence about illegal arms trafficking in Mexico, he said.
“The government requests that it be provided with all the information available regarding the ‘Fast and Furious’ operation,” he said.
President López Obrador said earlier on Monday that while Calderón has denied knowledge of the scheme, a media report purportedly based on declassified United States government documents says that former attorney general Eduardo Medina Mora did know about it.
Ebrard: operation has not been sufficiently explained.
López Obrador said that his administration wants the United States government to reveal whether Medina passed information about the scheme onto Calderón, a long-time political foe of the president.
He described the gun-running operation as a flagrant violation of Mexico’s sovereignty.
López Obrador first brought up the “fast and furious” scheme a week ago when responding to questions about Calderón’s public security minister, Genaro García Luna, who was arrested in the United States in December on charges that he allowed the Sinaloa Cartel to operate in exchange for multimillion-dollar bribes.
The president has used García’s arrest to support his claim that the Calderón administration and other past governments were corrupt.
The former security minister has pleaded not guilty to the conspiracy charges and Calderón denies any knowledge of his involvement in criminal activities.
Source: La Jornada (sp), Milenio (sp), Reuters (en)
Many people can probably expect to return to work soon.
The federal government will announce a plan on Wednesday outlining how “the new normal” will look as Mexico takes steps to reopen the economy and get back to work amid the coronavirus pandemic, President López Obrador said on Tuesday.
“Tomorrow we’ll announce the plan to return to the new normal,” the president told reporters at his regular news conference.
López Obrador said authorities are looking at which parts of the country are coronavirus-free and which parts are most affected.
“It’s not a return to normal, it’s a return to the new normal because there have already been changes, reality changed … and we have to begin a stage with other procedures, other methods, other attitudes, other behaviors,” López Obrador said.
A national social distancing initiative has been in place since March 23 and the government declared a health emergency at the end of March that suspended all nonessential economic activities.
The restrictions are currently scheduled to be lifted on May 30 but authorities have said that municipalities with no or very low transmission of Covid-19 could see them eased on May 17.
“Of the 2,500 municipalities, there are about 1,000 with cases, about 1,000 or 1,100 that don’t have cases but their neighbors do, and about 300 or 400 that are completely clean, … their neighbors don’t even have cases,” López Obrador said.
The coronavirus-free municipalities, he added, are home to communities of indigenous people.
“For example, … the majority of these 300 or 400 municipalities are in Oaxaca. I can tell you that the whole Sierra Norte and Sierra Juárez are practically free of infections … and it’s that way in other regions [as well],” López Obrador said.
However, not all parts of the country can look forward to the beginning of the “new normal” either next week or at the end of the month.
In Mexico City, the epicenter of the country’s coronavirus outbreak with almost 10,000 confirmed cases and more than 800 deaths, there is no certainty that restrictions on businesses will be lifted and that schools will reopen on June 1.
An umbrella group of business organizations wants to see more testing to avoid workplace contagion.
Mexico City Health Minister Oliva López Arellano said Monday that authorities are currently analyzing that possibility along with their counterparts in México state municipalities that are part of the greater metropolitan area of the capital.
“Nothing is defined; there is a general proposal from the [federal] Health Ministry [to lift restrictions on May 30] but we’re working day by day,” she said.
Meanwhile, the president of a powerful business group said that more coronavirus tests need to be made available so that businesses in the manufacturing sector can be certain that Covid-19 won’t spread among employees.
Testing workers widely is essential to avoiding a severe second wave of infections, said Carlos Salazar Lomelín, chief of the Business Coordinating Council.
“We’re a country that has performed a very, very small quantity of tests. … We need the tests so that we have certainty that the workers entering workplaces are not infected,” he said.
The president of the Confederation of Industrial Chambers, Francisco Cervantes, said the private sector is waiting anxiously to find out which businesses can reopen and when.
Approximately 45% of factories that export products are currently closed because they are considered nonessential, the newspaper El Financiero reported, while the other 55% are operating with protocols to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Some manufacturers, including a significant number that operate in northern border cities such as Ciudad Juárez, defied the government order to suspend operations, triggering protests by workers who said that their employers were forcing them to keep working and thus exposing them to the risk of infection.
Coronavirus has triggered better pay for medical personnel in some states.
States are offering generous salary hikes in an effort to attract doctors and nurses to help treat coronavirus patients.
In Coahuila, Health Minister Roberto Bernal Gómez had been unable to find doctors willing to work in the city of Monclova due to the high rate of infection.
So he began offering monthly salaries of up to 60,000 pesos (nearly US $2,500) for specialists.
In 2019 a Physicians Compensation Report by the website Medscape revealed that, on average, Mexican doctors earned around 16,146 pesos per month (US $672).
Bernal also confirmed that all medical personnel who have been infected with the coronavirus will be able to return to their jobs once they recover and will receive the higher salary.
Baja California Sur Governor Carlos Mendoza Davis announced that the salaries of doctors, nurses, chemists and radiologists under contract with the state will increase by 60% in recognition of their efforts in caring for coronavirus patients.
Salary increases are in the works for Chihuahua, too, where doctors and support staff will receive a 30% raise.
In Guanajuato, the state government is intent on offering medical staff better working conditions and will place at least 402 healthcare workers on the state payroll.
Quintana Roo is now offering doctors monthly salaries ranging from 20,000 to 40,000 pesos a month depending on whether they are general practitioners or specialists.
In Veracruz, doctors earn between 26,000 and 35,000 pesos a month and in Colima they earn slightly less, from 22,000 to 35,000 pesos.
In Jalisco, Morelos, Nayarit, Tabasco and Yucatán doctors receive similar salaries ranging from 19,000 to 30,000 pesos.
As of last Friday, 215 doctors had been hired in the state of México, 122 in Querétaro, 75 in Chihuahua, 44 in Aguascalientes, 25 in Quintana Roo, 13 in Guerrero and nine in Morelos.
Five states have hired a total of 1,099 new nurses, but many more are needed.
Rosa Amarilis Zárate Grajales, director of the National School of Nursing and Obstetrics, says that Mexico needs to hire another 350,000 nurses in order to meet the demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Currently, there are 315,000 nurses working in Mexico.
They'll be patrolling Mexico's streets for another four years.
President López Obrador came to power a year and a half ago promising a gradual withdrawal of the military from the nation’s streets.
But on Monday he published a decree ordering the armed forces to continue carrying out public security tasks for another four years, an about-face that appears to acknowledge that the National Guard has failed in its mission to reduce violence.
The decree states that the military will patrol the streets and carry out public security operations in conjunction with police forces and the National Guard until March 2024. López Obrador’s six-year term will end six months later.
The decree perpetuates the militarization model — widely criticized as a failure — first implemented by former president Felipe Calderón shortly after he took office in late 2006. Homicides surged after the so-called war on drugs commenced and high levels of violence continue to plague the country, with murders reaching their highest level ever in 2019.
López Obrador has frequently blamed the violence on the failed security strategies of Calderón and his immediate predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto, who also made extensive use of the military to fight crime.
President López Obrador at the inauguration of the National Guard in July 2019. The force was the centerpiece of his security strategy.
The president instead pledged to reduce violence with a “hugs, not bullets” strategy, pouring money into social programs he said would address the root causes of crime such as poverty and lack of opportunity. López Obrador also created a new security force, the National Guard, which he said would contribute to reducing violence.
It was supposed to be the centerpiece of his administration’s security strategy.
But almost a year after the Guard was formally inaugurated, the presidential decree appears to be a concession that the new security force and the government’s social programs have not been as effective in reducing violence as López Obrador hoped, and that the military is indeed needed to tackle Mexico’s notoriously dangerous criminal organizations.
National Autonomous University (UNAM) academic and security consultant Carlos Mendoza said the publication of the decree amounts to an admission that the National Guard is incapable of stopping violence and that the support of the army is still needed to curb crime.
Javier Oliva, a UNAM politics professor, said it also acknowledges the weakness of municipal and state police forces. He said that López Obrador’s decision to keep the military on the streets for at least the next four years was in “harmony with the gravity” of Mexico’s security situation.
Soldiers killed at least a dozen civilians at the Tlatlaya massacre in 2014. The military’s human rights record is not exactly spotless.
Damián Zepeda, a federal senator with the National Action Party, said the decree recognizes that insecurity in Mexico is “out of control.”
“It’s clear that the government is not able [to control violence] and is handing over [responsibility for] public security to the armed forces,” he said.
The move triggered renewed criticism from human rights groups, which have long argued against using the military to combat crime.
“In effect, the army and navy are going to be handling police duties until 2024,” said Santiago Aguirre, director of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center.
Both branches of the military “have a long history of not being accountable, especially in cases of serious human rights violations,” he said.
Seguridad Sin Guerra (Security Without War), a group made up of academics, human rights defenders, activists, journalists and others, expressed concern that the decree doesn’t establish accountability mechanisms that will keep the military in check as it carries out public security tasks.
The decree “authorizes the armed forces to make arrests, execute arrest warrants, seize goods, protect and process crime scenes and do public security work at the borders, in customs, on federal highways and in airports … without external controls and without accountability mechanisms,” the group said in a statement.
Seguridad Sin Guerra criticized the decree for not stipulating that the armed forces will be under the authority of a civilian government agency.
The decree “normalizes the practice established since the government of Felipe Calderón: the militarization of public security without any control,” the group said, charging that it violates the constitution and a Supreme Court order that “ruled unequivocally” that the armed forces must be under civilian command when carrying out permanent security tasks.
While the constitutional reform that created the National Guard established that the use of the armed forces to combat crime could be ramped up, “it doesn’t establish with precision the extraordinary situation that justifies the intervention,” said security analyst Alejandro Hope.
He also said that López Obrador’s decree violates the constitutional reform that created the National Guard.
“The reform says that [the use of the armed forces] must be controlled and supervised [by civilian authorities] but the decree establishes that” the armed forces will oversee their own operations in the carrying out of public security tasks, Hope told the newspaper El Universal.
“The reform establishes that [the military] must be subject to civilian command and supervision but the decree doesn’t,” he said.
Hope also questioned why the decree was published amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“Why is it at this time, when we’re right in the middle of a pandemic, that the government decides to pull the trigger on this reform?” he asked.
César Gutiérrez Priego, a lawyer who specializes in military matters, acknowledged that the National Guard has had corruption and discipline problems but predicted that the armed forces will have its own problems now that its role in enforcing public security will be bolstered.
He said the National Guard has greater numbers of personnel than the armed forces and therefore questioned how the latter will be able to complete all the tasks López Obrador is asking of them.
“How are the army, the air force and the navy going to carry out all the roles the president is entrusting them with if they don’t have enough personnel?” Gutiérrez said.
The lawyer also predicted that having so many different security forces engaged in public security tasks will create command problems.
“… one of the great problems of the armed forces is that authority is not shared … so we’re going to see various situations [in that respect].”
A bicycle manufacturer attempted hide over 350 employees at a Mexico City factory during an inspection to verify that the company had halted production during the coronavirus emergency, city officials said.
Mexico City Labor Minister Soledad Aragón Martínez said the workers were discovered when managers at Bicicletas Benotto refused to open certain doors in the factory during an inspection on Friday.
“Our inspectors noticed that there were hidden workers. And the [Benotto] staff attending them didn’t want to open some doors. Our inspectors are authorized to supervise the entire work area,” she said.
The inspectors called for assistance from the city’s Administrative Verification Institute (Invea) to require Benotto to open up.
“When Invea arrived, they threatened to shut the factory down because it’s not an essential activity, and that’s when they were forced to open the doors and there were over 350 employees hidden there,” said Aragón.
She added that the Labor Ministry is reviewing the nature of the fines the company will face for violating labor laws. Her department has carried out 13 workspace inspections, in which three businesses were forcibly closed: a call center, a store and the Benotto factory.
Benotto, founded in Italy in 1931, has been manufacturing bicycles in Mexico since 1953.
The young crocodile, center right, that has eluded firefighters in Michoacán.
Residents of a southern neighborhood in Morelia, Michoacán, are living in fear of a meter-long crocodile that has evaded capture since April.
The reptile was first noticed on April 27, when authorities were alerted to its presence in an irrigation ditch. Firefighters searched the area, but were unable to find the animal.
The crocodile made another appearance on Monday morning. Firefighters once again went to the scene and were able to locate it, but they failed to capture it due to a lack of equipment.
They searched the area after it got away, but were unsuccessful in relocating it.
Experts say the animal is most likely a former pet that was released into the irrigation ditch after its owners realized it was going to grow into a real crocodile.
