Musician Aiden McGill is a long way from Acapulco.
A Canadian musician who visits Mexico regularly has released a song and video designed to cheer up others who have decided to forgo travel due to the coronavirus.
“Here’s to all the folks who want to vacation but because of Covid-19 they cannot,” wrote Aiden McGill in a message accompanying the country tune and a video on his YouTube channel.
With plastic palm trees on a snowy lawn, Tan In a Can and the heat cranked up to 32 C, Our Own Mexico brings a Mexican beach vacation home to an Ontario winter.
It was written a few years ago by McGill and fellow musicians Tim Taylor and Shawn Christian during a visit to Nashville, and since then tweaked to reflect Covid and the new reality. The song was recorded at McGill’s home studio in Hastings, Ontario.
The video is made up of stills McGill shot during trips to Mexico and others while snowbound in Canada.
OUR OWN MEXICO Aiden McGill
McGill says he travels to Mexico a few times a year.
“I love the food, I love the people and my favorite all-time place to go is Acapulco.”
13-member brigades went to work in 333 municipalities Monday.
The vaccination of seniors against Covid-19 is underway in marginalized, mostly rural municipalities across Mexico after 870,000 doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University shot arrived Sunday from India.
Health Ministry official Ricardo Cortés said Sunday night that the inoculation of seniors would begin 8:00 a.m. Monday in 1,081 vaccination centers in 333 poor municipalities located in all 32 states of the country.
Thirteen-member brigades made up of doctors, nurses, government social program employees, volunteers and members of the military will be responsible for the rollout of the vaccination program to seniors. Some 1,080 brigades were to swing into action on Monday.
The commencement of the seniors’ vaccination program comes after a first shipment of AstraZeneca, two-dose vaccine manufactured at the Serum Institute of India arrived at the Mexico City airport.
An additional 1.16 million doses are expected to arrive from India in March, the Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement, while Mexico has an agreement to purchase more than 77 million doses to be manufactured in Argentina and bottled here.
The 870,000 doses, purchased for US $4 each, were taken to facilities of state-owned vaccine company Birmex for inspection prior to distribution across the country via air and land.
Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard, who was at the airport to receive the vaccines, noted that the shipment is the largest Mexico has received to date. Indian Ambassador Manpreet Vohra said the consignment is the first to reach Latin America from India.
President López Obrador announced Sunday that the initial shipment of AstraZeneca vaccines would be used to inoculate seniors in isolated and poor communities where there is scant medial infrastructure to treat Covid-19 patients.
Speaking at a press conference in Oaxaca, he stressed that all seniors – and all Mexicans – will be immunized free of charge but priority has been given to those who live in “the most remote, the poorest and the most needy communities.”
“We’re beginning in 330 municipalities … with these characteristics, all the seniors of those municipalities will be vaccinated. The next delivery will cover other municipalities, also from [all] 32 federal entities,” López Obrador said.
The president noted that vaccination will also begin Monday in the Mexico City municipalities of Milpa Alta, Cuajimalpa and Magdalena Contreras. He cited the Cañada region of Oaxaca and the Mixteca region of Puebla among the areas where vaccines will be administered starting today.
Vaccine arrives from India Sunday morning in Mexico City.
He predicted that the country’s approximately 15.7 million seniors will have received at least one vaccine dose by the middle of April, two weeks later than previously anticipated.
Millions of vaccines from Russia and China are expected to arrive in the coming weeks, while further shipments of the Pfizer/BioNtech shot, which has been used to inoculate health workers, are also slated for delivery, including a lot of almost 500,000 doses on Tuesday.
Speaking at the Health Ministry’s coronavirus press briefing on Sunday night, Cortés said the government had decided to prioritize vaccination in rural areas over cities because the “epidemiological impact” of administering the limited number of doses Mexico currently has would be minimal in urban areas – even though they have been hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic.
“If we focused first on covering all the urban areas, with just 870,000 doses at the moment, the epidemiological impact that those 870,000 doses would have would be practically non-existent,” the health promotion chief said.
“… If we focus on vaccinating the 3 million older adults in the more remote rural areas, we will probably have … everyone vaccinated [with a first dose] in one or two weeks,” Cortés said, apparently overstating the pace at which vaccines are likely to be administered.
“… we’ll reduce the risk for people who are highly vulnerable due to their geographic location,” he said.
“[People in rural areas] have a lower probability of finding a secondary level health service or intensive care if they need it than people who live in urban areas,” Cortés added.
“… The decision has been taken to complete the vaccination in remote rural areas … to cover people who are highly vulnerable in that regard more quickly.”
In addition to health workers and seniors, other sectors of the population that can expect early access to Covid-19 vaccination include teachers, dentists, people with chronic illnesses and athletes who will represent Mexico at the Tokyo Olympics to be held in July and August.
“The demand of dentists [to be vaccinated] is legitimate, just as we have the necessity to vaccinate teachers to protect them for the return to in-person classes,” López Obrador said Sunday.
“We also have to vaccinate the sportspeople who will represent us at the Olympic Games, all of them, and we have to do it now because the You are not allowed to view this event. is approaching and then the people with chronic diseases aged under 60 – people with high blood pressure, diabetics, those who suffer from obesity,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s coronavirus case tally is on the verge of reaching 2 million after 4,099 new cases were reported Sunday, pushing the accumulated total to above 1.99 million. The official Covid-19 death toll rose to 174,207 with 436 additional fatalities registered.
Sor Juana, one of the most recognizable female historical faces in Mexico, as she appears on the latest version of the 100-peso bill.
Iconic Mexican figure Sor Juana, a familiar face for years on the 200-peso bill, recently got a makeover and a new home on the 100-peso bill, part of Mexico’s regular updating of its “families” of bills and coins to respond to economic and technological shifts. But these sorts of changes also regularly provoke political and cultural discussions as to what and who should be honored on Mexico’s money.
Sor Juana herself speaks to the discussion in recent decades regarding the appearance, or lack thereof, of female personages. Since 1969, only 10 women have appeared on Mexico’s currency, as opposed to 46 men. And only three have been historically significant — Frida Kahlo, Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, and Sor (Sister) Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Some female figures have appeared representing a class of women, such as the “Adelitas” — women soldiers of the Mexican Revolution. Others have appeared for questionable reasons, such as Gloria Faure’s image in the early 20th century. Faure was the lover of Bank of México governor Alberto J. Pani.
Not surprisingly, most of the featured images are those of people involved in Mexico’s wars, especially the War of Independence and the Mexican Revolution. But in more recent times there has been pressure to honor those who have made contributions in the cultural realm, rather than just “national heroes.” Sor Juana’s image fits in well with this desire. However, when the Bank of México announced the introduction of a new series of bills, the fear was that all female images would disappear, including hers.
Alas, Frida Kahlo’s image seems to be gone, at least for now.
High inflation and currency devaluation, leading to even everyday goods costing thousands, moved Juana’s image to a gold 1,000-peso coin in 1988.
Although Kahlo is far better known internationally, in Mexico Sor Juana has an appeal that crosses generations and social classes. Comments in support of her image on Mexico’s money come with enthusiasm from Oxxo cashiers to head librarians at universities. She is one of the most recognized figures in classical Latin American literature, but her life of pushing the limits of what society permitted appeals to a wide public.
Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillano (1648–1695) was born in the small town of San Miguel Nepantla, southeast of Mexico City. Although learning was not absolutely forbidden to women at the time, it was highly discouraged. Fortunately, her grandfather had an extensive library at the family hacienda. It is claimed that she learned there almost entirely on her own, reading by age 3 and writing by age 8. Her intelligence attracted attention, allowing her to travel to Mexico City to learn Latin. In 1665, she became part of the court of the viceroy’s wife, Leonor Carreto, where she astonished with the depth of her learning.
Although she received marriage proposals, she chose the life of a nun as it would allow her to continue studying and learning. She became well known for her poetry, written in Spanish, Latin, and Náhuatl. Her intellectual work skirted the boundaries of what was acceptable for a woman, getting away with much because she had supporters in the church and the court. Unfortunately, the cloistered life and fame did not afford absolute protection. Newer church leaders frowned upon her writing and attitudes about women’s intellectual parity with men. She eventually was forced to stop writing, do penance, and spend the rest of her life doing charitable works. She died in 1695, a victim of a plague caught tending to others.
As Mexico’s “Tenth Muse,” Sor Juana remained important academically. But it was the research and writing of Nobel laureate Octavio Paz in the mid-20th century that reintroduced her into the general Mexican consciousness.
Paz idolized her as someone pushing against a chauvinistic and authoritarian culture. However, because she lived over 350 years ago and nothing in her writings is remotely controversial today, she is a “safe rebel” to promote. She represents how far Mexican society has come, with her memory no threat to any current power structure.
This is likely why Sor Juana has appeared on various bills and coins for over four decades. She first appeared in 1978 on the 1,000-peso bill. High inflation turned this bill into a coin by 1988, which kept her image, but it disappeared with the 1992 peso revaluation. She then appeared again on the 200-peso bill, which did much to keep her alive in the popular imagination.
The classic image of Sor (Sister) Juana Inés de la Cruz, who often astonished her male contemporaries with the depth of her knowledge.
Despite her popularity, the Bank of México decided to return the images of Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos to the 200-peso bill, issued in 2019. She immediately stands out on the new 100-peso bill because of its vertical orientation.
The change does not signal a “downgrading.” In fact, the 100-peso bill has the widest circulation of all bills in Mexico, according to Alejandro Alegre, director of circulation of the Bank of México. Seventy million of the high-tech polymer bills will be printed before the end of 2021.
Fortunately, Sor Juana is not the only woman to appear on Mexico’s new series of bills. The others include Mexican revolutionary heroines Carmen Serdán and Hermila Galindo, sharing space with Francisco I. Madero on the new 1,000-peso bill. The last, poet Rosario Castellanos, is planned to appear with Octavio Paz on a proposed 2,000-peso bill, which is awaiting approval.
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 17 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture. She publishes a blog called Creative Hands of Mexicoand her first book, Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta, was published last year. Her culture blog appears regularly on Mexico News Daily.
An anti-impunity organization says Lozoya should face a full trial. But as a protected witness, that may be unlikely.
A year after former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya was arrested in Spain, scant progress has been made in the Odebrecht corruption case, in which he has implicated a who’s who of Mexico’s political elite including three past presidents.
Lozoya, head of Pemex during the first half of the 2012-2018 government led by former president Enrique Peña Nieto, was taken into custody in Spain on February 12, 2020 and extradited to Mexico last July.
He is accused of receiving more than US $10 million in bribes from Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company, in exchange for awarding it a lucrative contract for work on the Pemex refinery in Tula, Hidalgo, and taking a kickback in excess of $3 million from the president of Altos Hornos de México, a company from which Pemex purchased a rundown fertilizer plant in 2015 at an allegedly vastly inflated price.
The former state oil company chief, formerly a close ally of Peña Nieto, denied those charges in court appearances via video link shortly after he was extradited to Mexico. He hasn’t been required to appear in court, either in person or virtually, since.
A day after Lozoya’s arrest in Spain, President López Obrador pledged there would be “no protection for anyone” involved in the Odebrecht corruption case but after returning to Mexico the former Pemex boss was given protected witness status and has not been held in custody, apparently because he is in less than optimal health.
Lozoya has implicated ex-presidents and other officials but no one has appeared in court.
(Upon arrival in Mexico, Lozoya was immediately transferred to a private Mexico City hospital, where he was treated for anemia and an esophagus problem.)
In cooperating with authorities in the hope that he will be acquitted or given a lighter sentence, Lozoya has implicated former presidents Peña Nieto, Felipe Calderón and Carlos Salinas in corruption linked to Odebrecht as well as numerous other former and current officials. Based on Lozoya’s claims, the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) accused Peña Nieto of being the author of a bribery scheme that allegedly used Odebrecht money to buy lawmakers’ support for the former government’s structural reforms, in particular the energy reform which opened up the sector to foreign and private companies after an almost 80-year state monopoly.
While the government has been trying to obtain a warrant for the arrest of former finance and foreign affairs minister Luis Videgaray, whom Lozoya also implicated, none of the officials cited by the former Pemex chief has yet been brought before a court.
Estefanía Medina, a lawyer and co-founder of the anti-impunity organization Tojil, told the news agency EFE that it was “extremely worrying” that Lozoya was afforded the opportunity to cooperate with authorities as a protected witness given the gravity of the crimes of which he is accused. She predicted that he will eventually be exonerated of all charges against him in exchange for providing the information that implicates other former officials.
Medina said that authorities in other Latin American countries that have conducted probes into Odebrecht have given implicated government officials the opportunity to cooperate in exchange for exoneration or more lenient sentences. But such arrangements have typically been limited to lower ranking functionaries who were not at the center of the corrupt activities, she said.
Given that Lozoya was at the center of the Odebrecht scandal in Mexico, he should face a “full trial at which the facts are clarified,” Medina said.
As there has been little information in recent months about the progress of the FGR’s investigation into the corruption case, there is fear in some quarters that impunity, which has long plagued Mexico, will once again prevail.
“The Lozoya case, once he was brought to Mexico, began to exhibit strange signs,” constitutional lawyer Luis Pérez de Acha told the newspaper El País.
He claimed that it was never made clear why Lozoya was given the opportunity to cooperate with authorities on the case in exchange for potential acquittal, adding that it was strange he was given that chance given the serious nature of the accusations he faces.
Pérez also said that more than enough time has passed for Lozoya to provide information to the authorities and for them to build their case against those allegedly involved in the Odebrecht case.
The FGR said in late January that former Senator Jorge Luis Lavalle, one of the lawmakers who allegedly received cash in exchange for supporting the former government’s reforms, would be summoned to appear in court but no date for that to occur has yet been set.
Accusations against Lozoya are serious but he may never face trial.
El País said that if the case against Lavalle, whose former close collaborator Rafael Caraveo was seen receiving wads of cash in a video that surfaced last August, is not successful, other allegations made by Lozoya might not stand up to scrutiny in court either.
If authorities are unsuccessful in using Lozoya’s evidence to obtain guilty verdicts against the officials he has implicated, or even bring them before a court, they would presumably be more likely to seek a hefty sentence against the ex-Pemex CEO in order to avoid complete impunity and at least provide some evidence to back up the claim that the federal government is serious about prosecuting corruption.
However, it is possible that the authorities and Lozoya have already reached an acquittal deal, regardless of the final outcome of the case, that hasn’t been revealed: the entire case has been characterized by a lack of transparency, with information only arriving in dribs and drabs via leaks and infrequent, sometimes nebulous statements from the FGR.
Indeed, more information has been released by the president than justice officials, raising criticism that the case has been used for political gain. Earlier this week López Obrador went after opposition critics of new energy policies, suggesting they ought to be embarrassed in light of “millions of pesos” having been handed out to politicians to approve the 2013-2014 energy reform.
He claimed there is proof of the payments being made, yet no evidence has been presented in a court of law.
Whether Lozoya and those he has implicated in corrupt activity will be put on trial is as yet unclear but the probability of that occurring any time soon appears very low due to the slow pace at which the Odebrecht case is proceeding.
While the former Pemex CEO and others might be in lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, the chance that they will be locked up behind bars in the near future appears negligible. If impunity in the case – former Odebrecht officials have admitted bribes were paid in Mexico – does eventually prevail, as many ordinary Mexicans believe will occur, it will not only be yet another setback for the rule of law but a major blight on the record of the federal government.
Factory workers in Baja California, one of only three states where job numbers were up.
Mexico had its worst January in seven years in terms of job creation as a spike in coronavirus cases and a consequent tightening of restrictions put the brakes on the country’s economic recovery.
A net total of 47,919 formal sector jobs were added last month, according to Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) data, a 30.5% decline compared to January 2020.
It was the worst performance since January 2014 when only 22,000 new jobs were created. The weak job growth coincided with the worst month of the pandemic in terms of both new coronavirus cases and Covid-19 deaths. Ten states faced red light restrictions in the second half of January while Mexico City and México state, key drivers of the national economy, were red all month.
IMSS data published Friday also shows there were almost 670,000 fewer formal sector jobs at the end of January compared to a year earlier. Just over 19.8 million workers were registered with IMSS on January 31, a 3.3% decline compared to the same date last year.
Millions of people lost their jobs in the formal and informal sectors in the first months of the pandemic before a jobs recovery began in the middle of last year. The Mexican economy slumped 8.5% in 2020, its worst contraction since the Great Depression.
el universal
The sectors that suffered the biggest job losses in percentage terms over the past year were business services (-9.9%), construction (-6%), mining (-5.4%) and retail (-2.4%).
The sectors that added the most jobs were agriculture (+0.7%), social services (+0.3%) and transformation, or advanced manufacturing (+0.1%).
Only three states had more formal sector jobs at the end of January than at the end of the same month in 2020. They were Baja California (+3%), Tabasco (2.4%) and Chihuahua (+1.4%).
Quintana Roo, which is heavily dependent on the hard hit tourism sector, suffered the biggest drop in formal sector jobs, recording a 23.2% decline in the number of people registered with IMSS between January last year and the end of the first month of 2021.
The next biggest job losses occurred in Baja California Sur (-9.9%), Guerrero (-7.7%), Puebla (-6.6%) and Mexico City (-6.3%).
Mónica Flores, Latin America president of Manpower, a staffing firm, told the newspaper El Universal that the jobs recovery in Mexico in 2021 is uncertain.
“The recovery of employment depends on a lot of variables, such as the vaccination scheme, job creation incentives and economic performance at a global level,” she said.
“The big problem that Mexico faces is informality, which it hasn’t been able to reduce in order to move people into formal work.”
Images of warm beaches filled with palm trees lured the writer for the first time to Zihuatanejo from his snowy home in northern California.
Growing up in Southern California, I had excellent access to the wilds of Baja California. Access to the mainland of Mexico, however, was costly and time-consuming.
The dreaded mainland was also constantly patrolled by corrupt law enforcement agencies endowed with various levels of turpitude, which was reflected in their dealings with American kids. There were numerous horror stories about hapless travelers incarcerated in rat-infested penal institutions in Mexico, evocative of the darkest tomes of Cormac McCarthy. And when I was able to hop in my truck after lunch and enjoy a cold beer in Ensenada before sundown, why bother with the mainland?
The Baja was relatively undeveloped and unpoliced, and consequently, a visit there carried few of the risks of traveling the mainland. I enjoyed time there frequently. Later, however, when I moved to the mountains of northern California, Mexico became part of my past.
So, my first real experience with mainland Mexico was not until February of 1979.
It was on a Sunday morning in January when my wife pointed out an advertisement in the latest edition of the travel magazine Hideaways. It showed a breathtakingly beautiful sandy beach, a few palms gently waving and a cute little cottage. It was apparently in a place called Zihuatanejo.
The travel magazine that inspired the writer’s Mexican getaway.
She knew I was especially vulnerable to any possibility of escape from what was turning out to be a 20-foot winter. I normally enjoy a nice snowy season. We both savored skiing, and my snow removal business allowed us some leisure time. However, our normal seasonal contentment had lost its relish as the 1978–1979 winter relentlessly dumped foot after foot of snow.
The gorgeous beach picture lured me with an indescribable dislocation that transported me into dreamland while I enjoyed an evening sauna. I relaxed in the 165-degree heat and listened to the constant whump, whump of the fir trees losing their load of snow onto the roof above. In my quixotic state, I could only conjure up sandy beaches and the possibility of experiencing temperatures significantly above freezing.
The next day, while swilling my morning caffeine, I blurted out to my wife, “Let’s can the rest of the month here and go to Z … wa … tin … a … ho…, or whatever it is called.”
The place was many miles below the Tropic of Cancer, and I knew it had to be warm.
Of course, she reminded me that we had over a mile of road which needed to be plowed regularly if we ever wanted to return to our home before April.
“And what about all the people that need to be plowed out while we are away?” she asked.
She then apologized, saying, “I should have never taunted you with that photo in Hideaways.”
I felt my mental picture of sandy beaches and swaying palms slowly dimming. Wait! I suddenly had a brilliant revelation.
I got on the phone and called Scotty, a longtime friend who lived in Berkeley, and asked if he would like a month-long ski vacation. I explained our need to get away as well as our need to find someone who was willing to plow snow at all hours, day or night.
He was actually excited at the prospect of plowing snow during a raging blizzard and immediately accepted the offer. Scotty has always been a true adventurer, and the thought of meeting nature’s fury with an eight-foot sheet of articulating steel, backed by several-hundred horsepower, was the opportunity of a lifetime.
Scotty arrived three days before our departure to the Mexican tropics and received what I then called a “crash course” in snowplowing; later, I would regret my use of the term.
Just to get from our house to a county-plowed road required driving a mile and a quarter of single-lane dirt road. That road had two narrow bridges over running water and 500 feet of cutbank, with white water below and loose rocks above. I told Scotty the cutbank can be a bit tricky because the steep hill likes to slough debris and that he should be careful and proceed with caution. He made copious notes while I showed him my plowing route’s various parking lots and driveways.
What the writer’s housesitting friend was dealing with back home.
Scotty’s intelligence, combined with an abundance of enthusiasm, eased most of my initial fears, but I knew that sometime during the next month, he would have one or more adrenaline-laced moments while pushing around Mother Nature.
Four days later, as we stepped off the plane at 10:30 p.m., we were stunned by the humid warmth of Zihuatanejo. The next several days were pure bliss, and I had nary a thought of snow until the end of the first week. That Sunday, I walked to the closest public phone and stood in line for no longer than 30 minutes to make my weekly call to Scotty.
He said the weather had been clear and cold and that the skiing was fantastic. The plow truck hadn’t even been started since we’d left.
The next Sunday, I called but had to leave a message on the machine. A couple of hours later, I called again, but still no Scotty. After four more unsuccessful attempts during the day and one again at nine in the evening, my alarm bells were all going off.
I called a friend who lived within a couple of miles and asked him to drive down and see if our house was still standing. I learned that 40 inches of snow had fallen and that it was still coming down.
None of the county roads had been plowed since the morning before. It would take days to dig out of the mess. He volunteered to borrow a friend’s snowmobile and try to locate our missing housesitter and told me to call him again in a couple of hours.
When I called back, he started the conversation with, “You won’t believe what happened.”
As my friend described the scene at the cutbank section of our road, I knew Scotty had pushed Mother Nature a bit too far. With a week’s worth of sunny days, a crust had formed on the snow that covered the steep hillside above the road. The 40 inches of fresh snow was sitting at rest — at rest until a snowplow came along and began to remove the bottommost portion of the angled snowfield. As the supporting snow was cut away, the entire hillside of snow above the road had instantaneously collapsed, burying both the plow truck and Scotty.
In our next telephone discussion, Scotty told me he had been about halfway across the cutbank when he looked up through an open window and saw a big slab of snow dislodge itself. He described the slab coming down with the speed of a free fall. The next moment, he said, he was up to his neck in snow as the cab of the truck completely filled.
When avalanches stop, the last of their energy is expended by compacting the snow to the consistency of wet concrete. In this case, the truck took up most of the energy as the snow pushed it to the lip of the adjacent drop-off. Scotty explained that he had been able to claw himself out of the truck with 40 minutes of diligent work.
Of course, I took the story as a confirmation that my decision to be in the tropics, while Scotty was in the frozen north, had been truly prescient. Scotty was proud of his adventurous escape, and my wife and I relaxed even more, no longer waiting for the snowy axe to fall.
I am tempted to call for another cerveza or margarita every time I relive the memory.
The writer describes himself as a very middle-aged man who lives full-time in Mazatlán with a captured tourist woman and the ghost of a half-wild dog. He can be reached at buscardero@yahoo.com.
Next week's stoplight map is noticeably less red than the current one. ministry of health
Mexico will have just two maximum risk red light states as of Monday, according to the updated coronavirus stoplight map presented by the federal government on Friday, a reduction of 11 compared to the map currently in force.
Health Ministry official Ricardo Cortés said that only Guanajuato and Guerrero will remain red next week, while the other 11 maximum risk states will switch to high risk orange.
Orange is the predominant color on the updated map, with 21 of Mexico’s 32 states painted that color.
The orange light states for the next two weeks will be Mexico City, México state, Nuevo León, Jalisco, Querétaro, Hidalgo, Morelos, San Luis Potosí, Puebla, Nayarit and Colima – all of which will switch to that color from red – as well Baja California Sur, Coahuila, Zacatecas, Veracruz, Michoacán, Aguascalientes, Oaxaca, Yucatán, Quintana Roo and Tlaxcala, which are already orange.
There are eight medium risk yellow light states on the updated map and one at low risk green – Chiapas, which will return to that color on Monday four weeks after it regressed to yellow.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. milenio
The yellow light states for the next two weeks will be Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas and Tabasco – all of which will switch to that color from orange – as well as Campeche, which is already yellow.
Each stoplight color, determined by the Health Ministry using 10 different indicators including case numbers and hospital occupancy levels, is accompanied by recommended restrictions to slow the spread of the virus but it is ultimately up to state governments to decide on their own restrictions.
The publication of the updated stoplight map, on which no state regressed to a higher risk level for the first time this year, comes as new case numbers are trending downwards.
There are currently 67,688 active cases in the country, according to Health Ministry estimates, whereas the figure was above 110,000 in late January. The average number of daily cases reported in the first 12 days of February – 9,558 – was 32% lower than the daily average in January.
Cortés highlighted that the national positivity rate – the percentage of Covid-19 tests that come back positive – had recently declined 4% to 34%. The national hospital occupancy rate for general care beds is 45% and only two states – Mexico City and México state – have a rate of 70% or higher whereas several states were recently above that level.
But while there is evidence that Mexico is coming through the worst days of the pandemic – January was the worst month to date for both new case numbers and Covid-19 fatalities – the daily death rate remains very high.
The Health Ministry reported a daily average of 1,168 fatalities in the first 12 days of February, an increase of almost 11% compared to January.
Mexico’s accumulated case tally rose to almost 1.98 million on Friday with 10,388 new cases reported while the Covid-19 death toll increased to 172,557 with 1,323 additional fatalities registered.
As the spike in case numbers in January was largely attributed to family and friends coming together over the Christmas–New Year holiday period, authorities are understandably urging people to not gather in large numbers for Valentine’s Day celebrations this Sunday.
In Mexico City, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum called on citizens to not organize or attend parties or family gatherings this weekend, advising people to wait until “we’re all vaccinated” before celebrating with loved ones.
Mexico’s vaccination efforts have virtually stalled as there is a very limited number of doses currently in the country, but about 1.5 million AstraZeneca and Pfizer shots are expected to arrive over the next two days, allowing the inoculation of seniors to begin.
To date, Mexico has administered just over 726,000 Pfizer vaccine doses, mainly to the country’s frontline healthcare workers.
Mexico City residents will see some restrictions eased.
After remaining at the red light maximum risk level on the coronavirus stoplight map for eight weeks, Mexico City and Mexico state will switch to high risk orange on Monday as hospital occupancy rates trend downwards in both entities.
Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced Friday that the capital would transition to a virus control stage she called “orange stoplight without dropping our guard.”
Hospital occupancy in Mexico City has fallen to just below 68%, government official Eduardo Clark told a press conference Friday. The rate had risen to as high as 90% and numerous hospitals in the capital reached 100% capacity in recent weeks.
Clark said that daily case numbers and the positivity rate are also on the wane. Mexico City has recorded more than 514,000 confirmed coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic and 31,655 Covid-19 deaths, far more in both categories than any other state in the country.
Once the stoplight switches to orange, Mexico City restaurants will be permitted to stay open an additional hour until 10:00 p.m. but they will remain limited to outdoor dining for in-house customers.
Mayor Sheinbaum: ‘Don’t drop your guard.’
Theatrical productions will be permitted in outdoor spaces, and gyms and public swimming pools will be allowed to reopen, although group classes will remain prohibited. Churches and other places of worship will be permitted to reopen between 7:00 a.m and 7:00 p.m. but religious services cannot be held.
Department stores and shopping centers were allowed to reopen this week at 20% of their usual capacity.
Announcing the switch to orange in México state, Governor Alfredo del Mazo noted that new case numbers and hospitalizations have begun to fall. Hospital occupancy for general care beds is 69%, according to federal data, and 58% for beds with ventilators.
Del Mazo said that all commercial establishments that are already open, including department stores and shopping centers, will be permitted to operate at 30% capacity until 9:00 p.m. every day of the week starting Monday. He said that restaurants will be permitted to operate at 30% capacity in indoor spaces and 40% in outdoor areas until 10:00 p.m. seven days a week.
Party halls and nightclubs must remain closed and large events are still prohibited, the governor said.
“We have to be very responsible with the reopening. We have to find the balance that allows us to keep looking after our health, which is the main priority, and at the same time support families’ economies,” del Mazo said.
“… It’s the time to continue being careful and to maintain the preventative measures. [We have to] continue looking after the health of our families, especially the elderly.”
México state ranks second among the 32 states for both coronavirus cases and Covid-19 deaths. It has recorded more than 203,000 of the former and almost 20,000 fatalities.
Including Mexico City and México state, there are currently 13 red light states on the federal stoplight map but the Health Ministry is due to present an updated map Friday night and it appears likely that some additional states will lose their maximum risk status.
Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro said Thursday that the risk level in that state had declined to orange light high and asserted that, according to federal government criteria, it was even close to switching to medium risk yellow.
He said that there has been a “significant” reduction in all the indicators the federal government uses to assess the coronavirus risk level, including case numbers and hospitalizations, and claimed that the restrictions implemented by his administration were behind the decrease.
“There is clear evidence that the right thing was done,” Alfaro said.
‘We’re on stoplight orange,’ reads the notice. ‘Don’t drop your guard, use face masks [to] protect yourself and others.’
Coronavirus case numbers are also on the wane nationally compared to January, which was the worst month of the pandemic with almost 440,000 new cases. However, Covid-19 fatalities have increased this month.
The Health Ministry reported an average of 9,482 new cases per day in the first 11 days of February, a 33% decline compared to the January average. The accumulated case tally currently stands at just under 1.97 million.
An average of 1,154 Covid-19 deaths were reported each day between February 1 and Thursday, a 9% increase compared to the daily average last month. The official Covid-19 death toll is 171,234 and the case fatality rate is 8.7, the highest among the 20 countries currently most affected by Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Mexico has administered more than 725,000 Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine doses, mainly to health workers, using 95% of all the shots it has received. There were only about 40,000 doses left in the country Thursday night but about 1 million AstraZeneca/Oxford University shots are expected to arrive Sunday and a shipment of almost 500,000 Pfizer doses is slated for delivery on Monday.
The arrival of those two shipments will allow the vaccination of the country’s approximately 15 million seniors to begin. People aged 60 or over who live in large and medium-sized cities have been invited to register for vaccination on a government website.
Hidden graves in El Salto yielded 131 bodies yet there were only 49 homicides recorded during the year.
Murders in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara, Jalisco, declined 12% in 2020 but the statistics don’t include victims found in hidden graves and therefore paint only a limited picture of the security situation in Mexico’s second largest city.
There were 1,369 victims of homicide and femicide last year in the nine municipalities that form the metropolitan area of Guadalajara (ZMG), 184 fewer than 2019.
While any reduction in homicides is welcome, high levels of violence continue to plague Guadalajara, said Jorge Tejeda, a security expert at the city’s ITESO university. In an interview with the newspaper El Universal, he noted that bodies found in clandestine graves are not included in the murder statistics when they really should be.
“For the study of criminal incidence, which is used to design public policies against insecurity, these discoveries should be counted as homicides,” Tejeda said.
During 2019 and 2020, 406 bodies were found in hidden graves in the ZMG, according to state government data. The municipality of El Salto, located southeast of downtown Guadalajara, provides a stark example of how the perception of security in a particular area can be altered by not including those bodies in the official statistics.
According to the National Public Security System, there were only 49 homicides and femicides in El Salto last year. But in a period of just three months between October and December, state authorities recovered 131 bodies from a mass grave in the municipality, the largest ever found in Jalisco.
Guadalajara has long suffered from violent crime, and residents of the city were reminded this week that an outbreak of violence is liable to occur at any time. An attack on a building in Tlaquepaque claimed the lives of five people on Wednesday while a restaurant in an exclusive Zapopan neighborhood was the site of an armed confrontation between civilians on Monday that left one person dead, at least three injured, and one person kidnapped.
Security analyst Alejandro Hope said the recent armed attacks don’t constitute an “escalation of violence” because such incidents have long occurred in Guadalajara.
“It’s a pattern that’s been repeating for years, it’s not limited to the current government,” he said.
Tejeda said the response to the attacks in Tlaquepaque and Zapopan showed that there is a lack of coordination between the different authorities.
“With regard to the incident on Monday, it stands out that there was not an appropriate operational response, considering that [Zapopan] is among the municipalities in the country with the highest number of municipal police officers. In the area where [the incident] occurred there is a high concentration of police,” he said.
“During the escape – via very busy avenues – there was nobody who blocked [the aggressors’] way,” Tejeda said.
“Less than 500 meters from the place where this shootout occurred there are always Zapopan police officers and it’s relatively easy to stop traffic and keep track [of fleeing criminals] via the C5 [security] cameras.”
A restaurant belonging to a witness burns Monday morning in Nayarit. Firefighters said it was deliberately set.
The federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) has offered to provide protection to 10 witnesses who testified against former Nayarit governor Roberto Sandoval and his attorney general Édgar Veytia.
A restaurant owned by one of the witnesses was torched early Monday morning in an apparent act of revenge.
The 10 witnesses accused the former governor and attorney general of orchestrating and participating in kidnappings and torture while they were in office. Since speaking to federal authorities last December they have been victims of reprisals, including fabrication of crimes and the arson attack.
The newspaper Milenio reported that the FGR wrote to the 10 witnesses on Thursday to seek their authorization for the government to provide security to them.
One of the witnesses is Agustín Magallanes, who alleges he was abducted and tortured by Veytia, nicknamed “The Devil,” in 2013. He also says the state government dispossessed him of a parcel of land and imprisoned three of his sons on fake charges.
In the early hours of Monday morning, Magallanes received a telephone call alerting him that a restaurant he had recently finished refurbishing and was about to open was on fire.
Located in Nayarit beside the Tepic-Puerto Vallarta highway, the restaurant “was completely roasted,” he told Milenio, adding that firefighters told him that the blaze was deliberately lit.
Magallanes said he was expecting to be targeted in one way or another as a result of the accusations he made last December. “It was for what happened on December 16,” he said.
On that date, the witnesses told the FGR what they knew about the cases of 39 people who disappeared in Nayarit during the government led by Sandoval. Seven of them said they had been abducted by state police and taken to Nayarit Attorney General’s Office facilities where they were beaten and tortured, including by Veytia himself.
Sandoval is wanted for embezzlement but his whereabouts are unknown.
Rodrigo González Barrios, president of the Nayarit Truth Commission and one of the 10 witnesses, told Milenio that ever since they spoke to the FGR, the Nayarit Attorney General’s Office, headed by Attorney General Petronilo Díaz Ponce, has been opening investigations against them for fabricated crimes.
He said there are people within the Nayarit Attorney General’s Office who worked closely with Veytia and are afraid that they could be implicated in his crimes by the declarations the 10 witnesses made to the FGR.
González said the arson attack on Magallanes’ restaurant, the imprisonment three weeks ago of another witness on fabricated kidnapping charges, and the issuance of arrest warrants against the witnesses’ lawyers for alleged involvement in the torture committed by former government officials “are directly related to Roberto Sandoval, Édgar Veytia and a group of people in the [Nayarit] Attorney General’s Office who are criminalizing us.”
The reprisals are due to the fact that the witnesses have shown that the Nayarit police committed kidnappings and took victims to state government buildings where they were tortured by Veytia and other officials, he said.
González had already filed several complaints against Sandoval and Veytia prior to speaking to FGR officials in December, and has been the target of three attacks as a result.
The FGR’s security offer comes after the United Nations last month urged the government to provide protection to witnesses who testified about abuses committed in Nayarit during the 2011-2017 administration led by Sandoval.
González said the witnesses were invited to meet with federal Interior Ministry officials on Friday to discuss the security and protection measure the government will offer them.
