Protest turned violent on the Global Day of Action for Safe and Legal Abortion in Mexico City.
A violent pro-abortion protest in Mexico City was linked to “conservative feminists” by President López Obrador at his morning news press conference Wednesday.
Hooded female protesters demanding the total legalization of abortion and free access to it left 27 police, a female civil servant and nine other people injured in the city center Tuesday.
The Supreme Court (SCJN) effectively decriminalized abortion across Mexico in September. However, outside cases of rape and risks to the mother’s life, abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy is currently only legal in four states: Mexico City, Oaxaca, Hidalgo and Veracruz.
Despite the high political sensitivity which accompanies the abortion debate, the president hinted at conspiratorial forces behind the use of violence, aimed against his administration.
“There have been acts of violence that were not present before. I would say that it is a new phenomenon that has to do with the beginning of our government, so I even distrust its authenticity,” he said.
A conflict between protesters and police at the National Palace.
“You see that usually extremes come together. I see these movements as very conservative, very conservative … these conservative movements would like us to be repressive, to use force. They are provoking, provoking and provoking,” he added.
The infiltration of “conservative feminists” was commonly recognized among the wider feminist community, the president claimed, declaring that the feminist movement was a recent phenomenon. “You have to see what is behind it because about two years ago, when the feminist movement started, many women participated but they began to realize that [the movement] had been turned into conservative feminists just to damage us,” he said.
AMLO has consistently sidestepped questions about his view on the Supreme Court’s decriminalization of abortion. “I can’t express an opinion. I’m not washing my hands of it … it’s better for all Mexicans that a president doesn’t take sides on an issue of this nature,” he said at his press conference on September 21.
The president proposed holding a referendum on the subject prior to the Supreme Court’s decision, but has since said that he respects the ruling.
Mexico is still a largely conservative nation with the second highest number of Catholics in the world after Brazil, and is the most populous country in Latin America to decriminalize abortion.
Largely peaceful pro-abortion protests were also held Tuesday in Chilpancingo, Guerrero; Xalapa, Veracruz; and Cuernavaca, Morelos; and Toluca, México state.
The Star Médica private hospital chain had the most consumer complaints, the Profeco chief revealed.
Private hospitals are guilty of increasing their prices well beyond the inflation rate and committing a range of other abuses, the head of the consumer protection agency Profeco said Wednesday.
“Inflation was 2.83% last year and is 5.59% this year. However, the [price] increases at private hospitals have been 15% to 20% – well above inflation,” Ricardo Sheffield told reporters at President López Obrador’s regular news conference.
He accused some private hospitals of deliberately charging patients amounts that exceed the limits of their insurance coverage.
“[That’s] something we’re looking at very carefully,” Sheffield said.
The Profeco chief said that some private hospitals order studies that aren’t necessary and overcharge for medications and medical supplies they use to treat patients.
Profeco chief Ricardo Sheffield reported on the excesses of private hospitals at the president’s Wednesday morning press conference.
Sheffield said Profeco has detected that some are charging patients deposits without explaining to them how the money can be recovered. “A lot of the time it’s above the deductible,” he added.
“What are the reasons why we’ve visited hospitals? For not displaying prices, for not respecting prices that are displayed and for improper, unjustified and excessive charges,” Sheffield said, adding that Profeco has responded to more than 800 complaints during the past two and a half years.
“The last operation we carried out was last weekend in several hospitals in Monterrey, Mexico City and México state,” he said.
“… The hospitals that have had the highest number of complaints are Star Médica with 11, nine at Ángeles hospitals, six at Médica Sur hospitals, five at the Centro Hospitalario Universidad and three at the Centro Médico del Noreste, … several of these hospitals are national chains,” Sheffield said, adding that Profeco has issued 64 fines.
“What do we recommend to consumers? Make sure that the [health care] provider … shows you its list of prices and medical rates. If they ask you for a deposit, they should explain how they will return it to you, what it will be used for and why [they’re asking for] that amount,” he said.
Sheffield also said that hospitals should be upfront about the prices they will charge for medications and medical supplies.
Contracts between hospitals and patients should be registered with Profeco and the former should advise the latter how they can file a complain should the need arise, he added.
“And the most important thing, if you are a victim of a hospital that exceeds the limit [of acceptable conduct] please call us … so we can advise you and support you.”
Former governor Alejandro Tello of Zacatecas and new governor David Monreal speak at a press conference in July, before the transition of power.
Six new governors have accused their predecessors of leaving their states in financial ruin, a common occurrence following any election.
The governors of Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Nayarit, Sonora, Campeche and San Luis Potosí expressed discontent with the economic situations they inherited.
María Eugenia Campos, National Action Party (PAN) governor in Chihuahua, said that Javier Corral, who also represented the PAN, bequeathed her an 11-billion-peso (US $536.3 million) debt owed to government suppliers.
“Corral’s government lived on short term loans and when it couldn’t go into more debt it started to survive on credit,” she said. “We plan to begin paying suppliers [but] there are so many of them.”
Campos, who took office on September 8, recently applied for an 800-million-peso loan to start paying off debts, the newspaper Reforma reported.
Ex-governor of Chihuahua Javier Corral, left, and incoming governor María Eugenia Campos, right.
David Monreal, the new Morena party governor in Zacatecas, accused his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) predecessor Alejandro Tello of leaving the state’s coffers empty. There won’t be funds to pay teachers until December at the earliest and there is no money to undertake highway projects or provide support for the agricultural sector, he said.
“Our debts easily exceed our income. The finances of the municipalities are in tatters, our state is dying,” Monreal said.
The new governor went to the offices of the federal Interior Ministry on Monday to seek federal support to pay teachers’ salaries and pensions this year and next.
Miguel Ángel Navarro, Morena governor in Nayarit, also petitioned the federal government for help, asking that it cover the salaries of health workers so the state can pay a 3.45-billion-peso debt owed to the Nayarit Autonomous University and 9 billion pesos in debts payable to the Mexican Social Security Institute, the federal tax agency SAT and the National Workers Housing Fund.
“Nayarit wants to wake up and get ahead,” he said after urging Morena party federal senators to “lend a hand.”
Navarro succeeded PAN governor Antonio Echeverría on September 19.
Nayarit’s new governor, Miguel Ángel Navarro, asked the federal government for help covering health worker’s salaries shortly after he took office.
In Sonora, Morena Governor Alfonso Durazo said he inherited a 23-billion-peso (US $1.1 billion) debt from his PRI predecessor, Claudia Pavlovich, while Layda Sansores, who took the top job in Campeche for Morena two weeks ago, said she was left with a 700-million-peso tax debt.
Carlos Aysa González preceded Sansores as governor of Campeche after replacing Alejandro Moreno, national president of the PRI, in mid-2019.
In San Luis Potosí, Green party Governor Ricardo Gallardo said he received a 16-billion-peso debt from the PRI’s Juan Manuel Carreras. “They said our state debt was 4.7 billion pesos but that was just the tip [of the iceberg],” he said.
The inheritance of difficult financial situations is not limited to new governors. Abelina López Rodríguez, who becomes mayor of Acapulco on Thursday, will inherit a “financial crisis” from Adela Román Ocampo, Reforma reported.
One challenge López will face is finding 203 million pesos needed to pay salaries and benefits to municipal employees. The incoming mayor said Wednesday that officials in Román’s government failed to tell her the whereabouts of the money.
Both López and Román won power in the resort city as representatives of the Morena party, founded by President López Obrador.
A recently used extermination camp was discovered near Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, a city on the United States border, said the head of the National Search Commission, Karla Quintana.
The Tamaulipas Search Commission found human remains, shovels and axes near abandoned housing off kilometer-26 of the Monterrey-Nuevo Laredo highway. Quintana has since confirmed the camp was used as a clandestine crematorium for systematic murder.
The search relates to the disappearance of at least 100 people near the state border with Nuevo León, the majority of whom are thought to be truck drivers and taxi drivers. Disappearances are often related to organized crime, and Tamaulipas is home to the violent Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros. The criminal group has long dominated criminal activity in the state and has been undergoing an internal power struggle since 2017 to control drug and human trafficking routes.
In response to the spate of disappearances, a cross-state working group was set up to enable collaboration between the Attorney General’s Offices of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas and to bring together the National Search Commission and local search commissions in Nuevo León, Coahuila, México state, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí and Veracruz.
The first discovery came in June when Tamaulipas authorities found voter credentials, cell phones and clothing near the highway.
Quintana said that further investigation would be necessary to identify the bodies but that it was the responsibility of state authorities. “We are going to recover these human remains in a dignified manner and with due diligence … it is the state Attorney General’s Office of Tamaulipas which is responsible for the respective identification … in forensic matters,” she said.
She added that searches would continue in the area over the next few months. Search teams are supported by the National Guard, Tamaulipas police officers, Nuevo León security forces and the army.
Fifty-seven extermination sites have been found and documented in Tamaulipas by relatives of missing people, Animal Político reported.
Fifty-three of those sites have been discovered in southwestern Tamaulipas in five municipalities: Mante, Xicoténcatl, Llera de Canales, Gómez Farías and Ocampo.
The northeast has been the region of the country where the most extermination camps have been unearthed, Quintana confirmed.
Politics is a murky business in Tamaulipas. Federal authorities accuse state Governor Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca of having ties to organized crime but have been unable to take him into custody due to his immunity from prosecution in Tamaulipas.
Over the last 15 years, more than 80,000 people have disappeared in Mexico. According to a report by the federal government in April, Tamaulipas and Nuevo León are among the five states with the highest number of disappearances reported.
Mexico reached the 100-million mark Tuesday for vaccinations given.
The number of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in Mexico passed 100 million on Tuesday, 278 days after the first shot was given on Christmas Eve.
The federal Health Ministry reported Wednesday that just over 100.5 million shots have been given after 648,293 jabs were administered Tuesday.
Only eight other countries have administered more vaccines than Mexico, according to The New York Times vaccinations tracker. They are China, India, the United States, Brazil, Japan, Indonesia, Turkey and Germany.
However, on a per capita basis Mexico ranks 75th with 78 shots given per 100 people. Exactly 50% of Mexicans have received at least one shot, according to the Times tracker, while 35% of the population is fully vaccinated.
Among the eligible population – people aged 18 and over – the first dose vaccination rate is just over 70%, according to the Health Ministry.
Despite having vaccinated 100 million people, Mexico could end up breaking last month’s pandemic record of 594 deaths from COVID-19 per day.
Despite the growing vaccination rate, Mexico continues to record hundreds of COVID-19 deaths every day. An average of 594 fatalities per day were recorded last month as case numbers reached a pandemic peak, while the average in the first 29 days of September was 608.
The vast majority of people currently dying from COVID-19 are unvaccinated, data indicates. Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said recently that over 95% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients are not vaccinated.
In other COVID-19 news:
• The Health Ministry reported 9,796 new coronavirus cases and 596 additional COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, lifting Mexico’s accumulated tallies to 3.65 million and 276,972, respectively.
There are 62,098 estimated active cases, a 1.4% increase compared to Tuesday.
• The coronavirus positivity rate in Mexico is currently 34%, according to Health Ministry data, meaning that one in three people tested is infected. Data shows that the rate is above 50% in three states: Campeche, Puebla and Quintana Roo.
A student at the National Polytechnic Institute gets her temperature taken at a COVID-19 checkpoint.
According to World Health Organization guidelines, a coronavirus outbreak cannot be considered under control if the positivity rate is above 10%.
Mexico’s positivity rate has been high throughout the pandemic as testing has mainly been used to confirm the cause of serious illness rather than to control the spread of the virus.
On a monthly basis since November, Bloomberg has graded 53 countries with economies larger than US $200 billion to determine where the virus has been handled most effectively with the least amount of disruption to business and society.
“The United Arab Emirates and Mexico rose nine and seven places respectively, as domestic restrictions became less stringent amid falling cases and deaths,” Bloomberg said in its “notable movers” explainer.
Ireland currently ranks as the best country to be in, while the Philippines is in last place.
• There are just over 7,500 hospitalized COVID-19 patients across Mexico, according to federal data, which also shows that general care COVID wards are at capacity in 63 hospitals.
Puebla has the highest occupancy rate for general care beds among the 32 states with 48% currently taken. Aguascalientes and Morelos rank second and third with rates of 48% and 46%, respectively.
Tabasco has the highest occupancy rate for beds with ventilators with 45% currently in use. Close behind are Aguascalientes and Mexico City with rates of 44% and 40%, respectively.
Juventino Hernández García pushes his crew's boat out to sea. photos by joseph sorrentino
About 30 men — and three women — gathered in the early morning light and began loading their boats with what they’d need for a day working on the water: fishing line, hooks and bait for the fish. Some water and snacks for themselves.
They started working around 7 a.m. and won’t return until 4 p.m.
Acapulco, even on an early morning in late September, is hot and humid. In the afternoon, it is brutally hot and humid.
Fishing on a boat for seven hours with the sun beating down and reflecting off the water isn’t easy work. But it doesn’t bother these fishermen.
“We are accustomed to it,” Homero Gómez Ruíz said. “It is like if you work construction and are on the third floor outside of a building. It is not hard because one is accustomed to it.”
Lucinda González has fished for five years. Despite the difficult physical work, she says she’ll always continue to do it.
The fishermen on this stretch of beach belong to one of four cooperatives. “A cooperative is several boats,” explained Vicente Hernández, who is 59 years old and has done this for 35 years.
There are around 40 members in each cooperative, and each boat will typically head out into the water with three or four fishermen.
Members of the Las Hamacas cooperative use nets to catch fish while those in the other three use fishing line with a hook and a sardine attached as bait. No one uses a fishing pole. “It is better to just use a line,” Alfonso Rebollar Santana said. “It is more sensitive. You can feel the fish biting.”
It may be better, but one look at his hands shows that it’s not easy work. The back of one hand was crisscrossed with thin scars and most of his fingertips were scarred too.
Some boats, like Ruíz’s, leave in the early morning. Others, like Hernández’s, leave around 4 p.m., returning at 11 p.m. The boats working at night use lamps and flashlights to light the sea. “What is difficult is not sleeping,” said Victor Olea, whose boat goes out at night. “It wears out your body.”
When it’s time for a crew to put out to sea, logs are placed under the boat, and fishermen push it over them toward the water. When the boat has reached the water’s edge, most of the crew jump in, leaving just one person to make the final push into the surf. The boat is then paddled out some distance before the small outboard motor is cranked to life.
A crew returning after seven hours at sea push their boat onto the sand and then roll the boat up the beach on logs. Once the boats are parked, the catch is sorted and the fishermen are paid.
“In each boat, everyone helps each other, sharing whatever they earn,” said Bernardo Soto. When they set out for the day, no one knows how much they’ll make. “Every day, the money varies between 200 and 1,000 pesos,” said Pedro Brito Echeverría, “depending on what is caught, depending on the season.”
During a full moon, Soto said, they don’t earn as much because fewer fish are caught. “The fish don’t come to the surface as much,” he said. “The important thing is to have faith to fish.”
After the catch is sorted, most of it is loaded onto small carts and wheeled to local markets and small stores, but a few stands are also set up along the sidewalk that skirts the beach. Freshly caught fish are laid out on small wooden platforms, and people stop by to make their purchases.
Like everywhere else in the world, climate change is having an impact on the fishermen in Acapulco. “The fish are scarcer,” Brito said. “And it is thought to be due to climate change.”
He’s certainly seen the changes, having worked as a fisherman for 36 years, starting when he was 14. “Twenty years ago, we would catch double,” he said. “And the fish now are smaller.”
Fisherman Homero Gómez Ruíz cleans some of the day’s catch.
Because they’re never sure how much they’ll earn — and because they never earn very much — the majority of the fishermen work other jobs as well. Gómez is an administrator at the Autonomous University of Guerrero. Rebollar works in construction and as a gardener. Juventino Hernández García has an ironworking shop.
Fishing may not be lucrative work, but all the people interviewed said they were happy to do it. Lucinda González, one of only three women working on the boats, has fished for five years. She admitted that the profession is physical and difficult but, “I like the work,” she said. “I find it fun.” When asked if she’ll continue doing it, she said, “I will always work as a pescadora [a fisherman].”
Soto, who has done this for 12 years, also says that he has found his life’s work. “I do not have anything extra, and I do not lack anything,” he said. “I have everything I like, just like the fish do.”
Most of the people interviewed downplayed the dangers of fishing. “I do not think the sea is dangerous if one takes precautions,” Gómez said.
But at times it is indeed risky work. One can be surprised by an unexpected storm or strong winds. In fact, on August 28, two boats with a crew of six went missing. All are thought to have drowned.
“They were lost on the open sea,” Soto said. To date, only one body has been recovered.
Cooperatives have donated money to help pay for the search. They’ll help in other ways as well. “If someone dies,” Soto said, “everyone in the cooperative will help the family economically.”
There’s something about the sea that pulls certain people to it. Despite the dangers, the hard work and the, at best, meager pay, these people are out there, seven hours a day, day after day.
“It is the work of a family,” Brito said. “Generation after generation. Yes, the work is dangerous, but the work is carried in your blood.”
Mexican and Russian officials at Tuesday's signing.
Russia and Mexico signed an agreement for cooperation on space exploration Tuesday, taking advantage of the Russian delegation’s visit for the 200th anniversary of Independence.
The director of the Mexican Space Agency (AEM), Salvador Landeros Ayala, signed the agreement with the deputy general director of the Russian State Space Corporation (Roscosmos), Sergey Valentinovich Saveliev.
Areas of cooperation which could result from the accord are outer space exploration, including astrophysical research and planetary studies; remote observation of Earth from space; satellite communications; and information sharing, the newspaper El Universal reported.
Potential areas of cooperation include manned space travel and the shared use of spacecraft launch services, the study of spacial meteorology, space biology and medicine, and the mitigation and reduction of space debris.
The agreement will also provide a platform for academic exchange, with a focus on the use of space technology for social good. Priority areas will be medicine and distance education, the monitoring of climate change, agriculture, and the protection of citizens from natural disasters and fires.
The Mexican Space Agency’s Landeros said Russia’s history of space exploration had long inspired Mexico. “Russia’s pioneering activities in space have been an inspiration for the whole world, especially for Mexico, and we remember, for example, the incredible journey of Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space in 1961, who after that achievement made a visit to our country. A year later, the National Commission for Outer Space was created here, the precursor of the current Mexican Space Agency, so we have a long history of good relations,” he said.
The National Immigration Institute's Las Ajugas detention facility in Mexico City, where Daniel Maté was held for 24 days.
According to official statistics, some 147,000 people apprehended by Mexican immigration authorities were held in a detention center between January and August this year. Earlier this month, Herbenson Elma, 38, of Haiti and Canadian Daniel Maté, 46, joined this unenviable club.
Both were apprehended by authorities while traveling by bus through Mexico, but this is where most similarities in their stories end.
“We were in prison together,” said Elma, who, with other Haitian migrants, was released shortly after Maté.
Elma, had been camped out in Tapachula, Chiapas, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala, hoping to reach Tijuana to find work. Like many migrants from his country, Elma left Haiti to escape gang violence, living the past two years in Brazil before making the trek to the Guatemala-Mexico border.
“When they released [the Haitian migrants], they gave us each a letter of expulsion that says we have to leave the country in 20 days,” he said via WhatsApp from Tapachula, where he and his fellow migrants were taken by immigration authorities following their detention in Mexico City.
Maté teaching students songwriting and recording at PS 397 in Brooklyn, New York. Maté is a musician, performer and writer.
By comparison, Maté — who was apprehended due to a tourist visa that expired while he was waiting for a second vaccine dose in Mexico before returning — was released from detention and deported home. There are no legal obstacles to him returning to Mexico.
The Canadian was so troubled by the differences in his experience from the migrants with whom he was imprisoned that the composer and writer began publicizing his story on social media as soon as he was safely home with his family.
“Hi. This thread is about an ordeal I just [had] in the Mexican immigration system. It’s about my experience, but it’s more about what’s going on for the hundreds of men from Haiti, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia and elsewhere still locked up there.”
“I was released yesterday from the notorious Las Ajugas federal immigration detention center in Mexico City after 24 days incarcerated, run by @INAMI_Mx [Mexico’s National Immigration Institute],” Maté tweeted. “My crime was an expired (by two months) tourist visa. I was deported, blessedly, back to Canada.”
In his posts, Maté went on to detail his experience in detention, which was extended when he contracted COVID-19 and was required to quarantine. This infection, he said, was “highly probable” considering that testing did not occur when he entered detention in Las Ajugas, that there is overcrowding and mask-wearing is only “loosely enforced.”
A photo from inside Las Agujas from 2019.
The rights of prisoners to services like translation, making complaints and lawyers are advertised on posters around the facility, he wrote. “But nearly all of them were denied to us.”
In quarantine, Maté was locked 24 hours a day in a tiny area with up to 22 other men. The men were attended once, very briefly, by a doctor and otherwise left with “little ventilation and no outdoor time for 13 of the 15 days,” he wrote.
Maté marveled at the kindness and resilience shown by those with whom he was detained.
“There’s no hostility among the detainees. It’s an environment of tremendous solidarity and goodwill. It felt safe in that way, no threat from the others … The threat is of malign neglect [by Mexican authorities].”
Maté also wrote that he was poorly treated, but that it was much worse, for example, for Haitian prisoners who were “particular recipients of contempt and neglect.”
“One of them was very sick for days with circulation and breathing problems and received next to no medical aid, carted back to the locked cell block on a stretcher rather than [taking] him to a hospital.
Migrants from the Caribbean and Africa at the Mexican government immigration complex in Tapachula. Ann Deslandes
“I fear for his life. The last thing he said to me, in French, was that he believed God had put me there to tell the world ‘what they’re doing to us.’”
Maté believes that there is no good reason why he should have been released from detention while the other prisoners remained.
“That I’m out and free now and they’re not is a function of our respective lots in life, nothing more,” he said.
“I had outside support,” he told Mexico News Daily. “My consulate supported me. My publisher, Random House Mexico, hired a lawyer for me; the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul was in the ambassador’s ear every day because he’s friends with my dad [Maté’s father is renowned trauma and addiction specialist Gabor Maté].”
This placed obvious pressure on immigration authorities.
“They knew I had a team behind me — someone brought by a prescription from a Canadian doctor for extra vitamins and supplements for me; my family hired an infectious diseases specialist from a local university to come and examine me.”
“They couldn’t ignore me,” he said. By contrast, “the Haitians waited days for health care.”
“I got moments of hostility, but it was just nothing like the neglect that other people were getting,” Maté said. “And, of course, I hadn’t spent months and US $6,000 trudging through the Panamanian jungle — getting held at gunpoint, losing friends, exhausted,” he added, referring to the dangerous trek through the Darién Gap that connects Colombia and Panama, taken as part of the long journey by many migrants from the Caribbean and Africa into Central America and Mexico.
The Gap is beset by violence and lawlessness: gangs frequently attack migrants — stealing from, beating, raping and sometimes killing those passing through — exactly the sort of thing Elma was escaping when he left Haiti in the first place.
“’I left my country after bandits with guns tried to kill me,” he said. He needs to find work to support his wife and five children still in Haiti, he added.
Maté said he observed his fellow inmates being treated with “dishonesty, contempt and racism.” The very ill man whom he saw being taken on a stretcher to the locked cell block “hadn’t been able to change his clothes in 12 days, and he wasn’t eating.”
Migrants who had crossed many borders in recent months told Maté that their treatment by Mexican immigration authorities was the worst of them all.
Graffiti on the wall of the INM offices in Tapachula. Ann Deslandes
In recent weeks, the Mexican government has joined the United States in a concerted effort to expel Haitian migrants from Mexico and prevent them from crossing the U.S. border. Some 4,000 have been deported to Haiti by U.S. authorities, and federal authorities from both countries have used violent force against migrants, including hunting, beating and ambushing them.
As CNN has recently reported, Haitians recently deported from the U.S. border following an apparent binational operation to corral them into Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, which neighbors Del Rio, Texas, have been returned to a situation of escalating violence in the poorest country in the Latin America and Caribbean region.
“I am not going anywhere,” Elma said. “To go back home to my country would be looking to be killed. I prefer to die here.”
Maté urges people in Canada and the United States “to understand that our main North American little brother is carrying out our dirty work,” abusing migrants who are seeking safety.
Governor Aureoles defended his record and said he risked his life for Michoacán.
The governor of Michoacán only has one full day left in office, but is set to leave without explaining the use of 3.65 billion pesos (about US $178 million) in federal funds, the federal auditor (ASF) said.
Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) Governor Silvano Aureoles is believed responsible for 19 separate cases involving the questionable uses of federal money. The ASF alleges embezzlement.
Another 4 billion pesos (about $195 million) in credit is also missing, incoming Morena Governor Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla said. Aureoles took out the loans in December, allegedly for public works projects. The loans represent debt for the new state government.
The largest single unexplained use of federal money was for more than 1.1 billion pesos, supposedly spent by the state Finance Ministry on software maintenance, advertising, consulting, technological services and “monitoring systems.” The ministry did not present evidence of the contracting process.
Another unexplained expenditure was 852 million pesos supposedly paid to the Health Ministry, the public relations department and educational institutions.
The third largest irregularity found by the ASF was for over 370 million pesos, of which a large proportion was never used, but nor was it returned to federal authorities.
Morena Deputy Hirepan Maya Martínez accused Aureoles of corruption and links to organized crime in the state Congress Tuesday. “That’s how it is in Michoacán. We have drug trafficking governors, like the outgoing one, who has plunged our state into corruption … this misogynist, corrupt drug trafficker, outgoing governor,” he said.
Aureoles wrote on social media to defend his record. “Six years ago I took on the challenge of governing Michoacán … I know that there will be those who do not recognize that there was a before and after, and that Michoacán has changed, but I leave with a clear conscience because I was true to my word and I risked my life for Michoacán,” he said.
President López Obrador’s wife has urged the new governor of Campeche to exercise caution after she appointed an official to her cabinet who last year insulted Mexico’s leader and his spouse.
Layda Sansores, who took office in the Gulf coast state earlier this month, formalized on Tuesday the appointment of Manuel Enrique Pino Castilla as general director of the Campeche State Workers Social Security Institute (Issstecam).
Pino, formerly cultural director at the Campeche Autonomous University, called López Obrador and Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller imbeciles in a Facebook post in February 2020.
“Behind an imbecile, a big imbecile,” the new Issstecam chief wrote above a link to an article about Gutiérrez’s opposition to the national women’s strike, held on March 9, 2020. The post, which Pino denied writing himself, was subsequently deleted.
Gutiérrez, a writer and academic, has evidently not forgotten the slight. Beneath a Facebook post by the news website Visión Política that linked to its story about Pino’s appointment, she wrote “ojo” – “watch out” or “be careful” – before tagging Governor Sansores, who represents the ruling Morena party, which was founded by López Obrador.
Manuel Enrique Pino said his Twitter account was hacked.
Her remark garnered hundreds of responses, including one from Sansores herself, who asserted that Pino had not made the offensive remarks.
“He is a respectable university teacher who has been close to our movement since 2003 and is incapable of making these kinds of aggressive and disrespectful comments,” she wrote before directing Gutiérrez to a “clarification” Pino published to his Facebook account.
He again denied that he had personally written the post calling the president and his wife imbeciles, insinuating that his account had been hacked.
“My political commitment is with the president of the republic and Governor Layda Sansores,” Pino wrote.
“… I’m profoundly respectful of the wife’s president and all women; today more than ever the work Dr. Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller is undertaking for the benefit of Mexican woman requires the support of all Mexicans,” he wrote.
“The show of affection, support and recognition I’ve received in my new assignment is irrefutable proof of my career and work for Campeche. I regret that perverse minds are obsessed with discrediting the work of the fourth transformation [a nickname for the federal government] and of those of us working for the good of Campeche,” Pino said.
“… I affirm my love and unconditional support for the president … and his wife …”
