A group of masked youths in Buenavista, Michoacán, vandalized patrol cars and the local police station on Sunday, overturning vehicles and lighting them on fire.
They also threw rocks at National Guard troops, who did not respond to the aggression.
Some reports state that the young people were acting on behalf of the Los Viagras cartel, which is active in the region, while others state that the violence was in response to a recent police operation to verify automobile documentation.
The Michoacán state police said that no illegal acts would be tolerated and called for the residents of Buenavista, located 87 kilometers southwest of Uruapan, not to involve themselves in criminal activity.
The force said in a tweet that police were supported by army and National Guard troops to reestablish order in the municipal seat of Buenavista Tomatlán.
“With the purpose of safeguarding and guaranteeing peace in the town, the security forces are carrying out coordinated actions in the area, where traffic was also reestablished,” the force added in a second tweet.
As of Monday, there were no reports of arrests. The Michoacán Attorney General’s Office has opened an investigation into the events.
There’s an urban legend in central Michoacán, on the road from Uruapan to Guadalajara.
The route winds its way through the mighty cones of defunct volcanoes, now covered in avocado groves which thrive in the rich igneous soil. Along this route sits the town of Aranza. There’s not much more to it than a strip of houses straddling one of the few straight sections of the road.
Today, avocado is big business, but that has only been the case for the past 20 years.
Previously, the locals had a different scheme for making a quick buck.
As cars sped through the town, they might suddenly see the emergence of a pig, running at full speed across the road. Too late to swerve, and slamming on the brakes, if the swine tossers hiding behind a wall by the side of the road had timed their throw to perfection, the poor animal would lie thrashing in the middle of the road.
Horrified families would descend from their vehicles to see the animal perish, squealing as only such animals can. Alongside them would appear the owner, concealing his satisfaction at his well-executed ploy, for it was he and an accomplice who had heaved the animal into the path of the speeding car.
Sidling up alongside, amid the confusion the Aranza native would confront the driver with the immortal line:
“Pagas puerco; o chingas madres.”
You pay for the pig, or you get a beating.
It would take a cool head in such a situation to argue. And while some might have paid whatever sum was demanded on the spot, others argued over ownership of the pig. With enough space in the car, the expiring porker might happily be loaded in next to the kiddies.
A life’s traumatization, but a year’s worth of bacon.
Those days of the swine ruse are long gone, but the legend remains.
Today in Michoacan, where cartel violence is infiltrating the avocado industry, bloodshed is a daily occurrence, and human life is not valued as before.
With an ongoing cartel war for control of Uruapan, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel is moving in on turf historically controlled by Los Viagras, gangsters from Michoacán. It’s coming down hard on locals. Business are extorted, civilians murdered and there’s no response from the local authorities.
One local avocado producer told us how a group of armed men, fully dressed in combat tactical gear and carrying high-powered rifles, presented themselves in his orchard in the name of the Jalisco organization.
Their leader carried a full rundown of his recent harvest. How many tonnes he had produced, how many workers had been on his land, how many truckloads of avocado had arrived at the processing plant, and finally, how much he had earned.
He was given three days to deposit US $10,000 in cash under a nearby road sign. Twelve hours later, the farmer put the cash where it had to go. He knew the consequences otherwise.
Those who have refused the gangsters’ demands have been murdered. Members of two of the longest-established avocado producing families have lost their lives.
In times of such brutality, the urban legend of “Pagas Puerco” is now looked back upon fondly, as a simpler and happier time.
Alasdair Baverstock is a freelance foreign correspondent and reporter for CGTN who has covered Mexico and Latin America for nearly a decade. You can follow him across social media at @alibaverstock.
A 25-year-old chef from Guadalajara, Jalisco, will represent Mexico on the world stage as the only female competitor in the Grand Finale of the S. Pellegrino Young Chef competition.
Cynthia Xrysw Ruelas Díaz, sous chef at the Xokol restaurant in Guadalajara, qualified for the event to be held in Milan, Italy, on May 8 and 9 by winning the Latin America regional final last September. She will now compete against chefs from 11 other regions of the world for the title of Young Chef 2020.
Ruelas, who goes by her second name Xrysw (which means piece of gold in Greek), won the Latin America final with her signature dish Milpa y Mar (Cornfield and Sea) – native lisa fish wrapped in lengua de vaca (a wild Mexican herb) and served with blue-corn tortillas, a fish broth and native corn.
An emulsion made of red, yellow and black chiles, Mexican dark chocolate, agave lechuguilla vinegar and lisa roe accompanies the dish.
Almost six months after wowing the judges at the regional final in Lima, Peru, and just two months shy of jetting off to Italy for the grand finale, Ruelas spoke to the newspaper Milenio about her love of cooking and what inspires her in the kitchen.
Ruelas’ signature dish, Milpa y Mar.
The chef said that her interest in pursuing cooking as a career began when she was 17 but that her life has always been intertwined with food because her family made and sold tacos and tamales.
“I was going to study medicine but I realized that I didn’t want that. I think that gastronomy is a science, it’s artistic and [requires] a lot of research. That’s what attracted my attention. It’s a career in which a lot of things have an influence, not just one,” Ruelas said.
She explained that before she started working at Xokol, she worked at Australian celebrity chef Curtis Stone’s cruise ship restaurant, Share. “It was there that I realized that [being a chef] is what I wanted to do,” Ruelas said.
The young chef said that she finds inspiration from the cooking “techniques of our ancestors,” explaining that she and her colleagues at Xokol like to research traditional cooking methods and dishes from different parts of the country.
“We don’t copy the dishes as they are,” Ruelas said, adding that she and her fellow chefs instead reinvent the recipes that were first developed in Mexico many years ago.
She described cooking Mexican cuisine as a search for her identity as a cocinera tapatía – a chef who is native to Guadalajara.
“Food from the center of the country, from Puebla, Oaxaca and even Yucatán, is always spoken about but I think food from Jalisco has been forgotten,” Ruelas said.
“Whenever you ask about typical food from Jalisco, people always speak about Guadalajara; we have birria [a stew traditionally made from goat or mutton], carne en su jugo [another stew – literally meat in its juice] and the torta ahogada [a pork sandwich ‘drowned’ in chili sauce]. We don’t know more [dishes] but we have more than 100 municipalities and each one has something,” she said.
Asked about where the idea for her Milpa y Mar dish came from, Ruelas responded:
“I was inspired by what was the role of the man and the woman, the interaction they had and the harmony … with the environment. The man was always in charge of hunting and fishing. The woman took care of the cornfield and cooking.”
She added that her signature dish is sustainable because lisa, a fish from the mullet family, is not highly-valued in Mexico and she uses all of its different parts.
Ruelas described her experience to date in the S. Pellegrino Young Chef competition as a “very significant professional challenge,” explaining that she had to prove her own capabilities to herself.
She also said that she has had to face claims that it was her mentor, Alcalde restaurant’s Francisco Ruano, or her partner and fellow Xokol chef, Óscar Segundo, who really invented Milpa y Mar.
“Those comments affect you. … I obviously had their support but the ideas are mine and having won [the Latin America final] is a great satisfaction.”
Players of the Mesoamerican ball game seek to preserve it.
The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has decided to play ball, establishing research and sports teams dedicated to the conservation and promotion of the Mesoamerican ballgame.
Many people are aware of the ancient game because of the over 1,000 ball courts which have been excavated at numerous sites from central Mexico into Central America. The game was an important part of the Olmec, Mayan, Toltec and Teotihuacan as well as Aztec civilizations. The Náhuatl word for the game is ulama, or “hip” and the ball pok ta pok.
What most people do not know is that the game is still played today.
The focus of the game is a large solid rubber ball that can weigh as much as 3 kilograms. It is moved around the court by bouncing off the players’ hips as they try to get it into the appropriate ring.
The first team is a multidisciplinary group of researchers looking to recover exactly how the rubber ball was made in the past. The team includes Emilie Carreón and Nora Pérez of the Institute for Aesthetic Research (IIE), as well as Baldomero Esquivel, Marisol Reyes, Mayra León and Everardo Tapia of the National Laboratories for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage, along with others from the School of Physics and modern-day players.
The exact composition and techniques for making the ball in the past are not known. The team is attacking the problem from several directions. One is to survey indigenous communities to find out what knowledge survives with them to the present day. Another is to work with players to know the exact requirements of the ball to determine the chemical characteristics it needs to have. Another is to analyze information already in the archaeological data, including some balls that do survive from the pre-Hispanic period, without damaging them.
It is known that the balls were made from the sap of the Panama rubber tree. Putting all the information together, the team intends to “… conserve ancestral knowledge, and propose a technique for the manufacture of balls for players.” stated Emilie Carreón.
The project is known by the long academic name of “Manufacture of the rubber ball of the Mesoamerican Ulama (or hip) game. Recovery of the techniques through its material characteristics,” but its aims are anything but boring.
UNAM hopes to get the game declared intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO and encourage more communities to revive the playing of the game.
Today, the game is played in different parts of Latin America and now there is a World Cup of Mesoamerican Ancestral Ball Sport. It was created in 2015 and include teams from Mexico, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama and Guatemala.
In Mexico alone, there are now leagues associated with Olmec, Mayan, Otomi, Teotihuacan, Tlaxcala, Chiapas and Aztec cultures.
The game was witnessed by the conquistadors and evangelists who marveled at the ball’s elasticity and bounce. “They had never seen any ball like it, which bounced much more than those made of hair or inflated bladders, which were usual in the Old World.” However, that did not stop these same Europeans from prohibiting the game once they took control.
Despite the prohibition, the game survived underground in some areas in the northwest of the country. In the 1980s, filmmaker Roberto Rochin produced Ulama in the state of Sinaloa to document the ancient practice, as well as the making of the ball. This same filmmaker is also part of the research team.
Students from the Schools of Philosophy and Letters and from the School of Chemistry are also in on the project, having established their own team at the University City campus in Mexico City in February 2020. The teams are still in formation and members of the public are invited to inquire. They can be seen practicing at the basketball and volleyball courts on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the campus.
“It is a diverse community, which comes together on the field and looks to preserve this game, with emphasis on the making of the rubber ball.” asserted Daniel Santiago Luna, the coach for the university players.
AMLO: 'Neighbors should advise us about these behaviors.'
Attention corrupt public officials: be careful with your gait.
President López Obrador on Friday called on citizens to report corrupt officials to authorities, claiming that there are telltale signs to look out for, including the way fraudulent functionaries walk.
“A corrupt person is a braggart, arrogant, it stands out a mile, even the way they walk because they start to strut,” he told reporters at his morning news conference.
López Obrador said that another sign of corruption could be officials suddenly changing address. If people become aware that their bureaucrat neighbor is leaving their middle-class neighborhood for an affluent area such as Bosques de las Lomas or Santa Fe in Mexico City, they should notify the government, he said.
“Neighbors should advise us about these behaviors because wealth doesn’t hide,” he said.
Public life is becoming increasingly more public, and therefore if an official has embezzled government resources or “is going down the wrong path” it comes to light almost immediately, the president claimed.
López Obrador has made combating corruption a priority for his government, which replaced the corruption-plagued administration of former president Enrique Peña Nieto in December 2018.
However, his remarks on Friday suggest that he believes that there are still some crooked and shady civil servants within his government. He suggested that was possible late last year.
After former president Felipe Calderón’s security secretary, Genaro García Luna, was arrested in the United States in December on charges that he accepted multi-million dollar bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel, López Obrador said that there would be an internal investigation to ensure that no members of García’s team were serving in his administration.
“If they passed through [the governments of] Calderón and Peña [Nieto] to us . . . they’re gone! We arrived here to change things and … corruption isn’t tolerated, not even in my family!” López Obrador said.
Residents of more than 50 indigenous communities in Tabasco have warned that they will lynch Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) workers who attempt to cut their power because they haven’t paid their bills.
The disgruntled customers, most of whom live in the municipality of Centro, say that the rates they are charged are too high and have declared accordingly that they are in “civil resistance” against the state-run company.
“We’re willing to pay but make it fair,” Nicolás Sánchez, spokesman for the civil resistance movement, told a press conference.
“Our resistance is based on not paying; we will not allow any CFE worker to cut [power] in these communities, we will not allow any worker to take readings of the meters, they’ll be run out [of town],” he said.
Sánchez said that residents are asking that the CFE charge a single preferential rate throughout the whole year. Electricity customers in Tabasco currently pay a lower rate in the hotter months of the year than in winter, leading many people to complain that they can’t afford the higher bills they receive when the weather turns cold.
In response, Tabasco Governor Adán Augusto López Hernández pointed out that the rates charged in Tabasco are already the lowest in the country.
Electricity customers have a long history of refusing to pay their power bills in the Gulf coast state, where President López Obrador launched a civil resistance movement in 1995 to protest against alleged fraud in the 1994 gubernatorial election, which he lost to Roberto Madrazo.
From the tender age of 3 Luisa Wilson was already cutting her first lines in the ice. Learning how to skate with a hockey stick in hand, she was instructed by her father Brian, a coach and life-long hockey enthusiast. She grew up as the sole girl playing among boys in the small world of federation hockey in Mexico.
“When I was about 8 or 10 I wanted to quit hockey because I realized girls couldn’t play in the NHL [National Hockey League] and I got a bit sad,” she says. But after some cajoling from her dad she decided, “Why should I quit a sport I really like?”
She stuck to it, moving from rink to rink in Mexico City, ever looking for a better coach, more time on the ice, better facilities. She liked to barrel through the boys she played against, pink helmet tightly fastened, body-checking them one by one. They secretly called her the pink assassin.
But Mexico is tough for a hockey-loving girl. Owners of ice rinks make most of their money on public skating, and hockey teams get the dregs of the time slots. Tournaments are not as regular as in other countries and the small pool of teams meant that the existing tournaments were relatively small and short. Luisa’s brothers were also falling in love with hockey and it reached a point where the three siblings wanted to play a lot more than they could with what was available in Mexico.
So, in 2017, Luisa, along with her mom and brothers, moved back to where her father grew up, outside of Toronto, Canada, where hockey is a national sport. Instead of playing 40 games a year they could now easily play 50 to 60.
Hockey player Wilson with her gold medal.
“My grandparents would say we moved for the schools or something, but I know in my heart that we moved for the hockey,” she says, smiling.
In her case it was a bit of both, as she joined a Sports High School – Bill Crothers — that while not allowing her to play hockey for the school team (student athletes aren’t allowed to play their No. 1 sport to ensure fairness for competing high schools), did encourage her to play hockey outside of school. Bill Crothers has also been the gateway to her latest athletic passion – rugby, which she says gives her more of a “killer instinct on the ice” – but she never lost her love for hockey.
Now that the family is binational, going back and forth between Mexico and Canada, when tryouts were announced in March 2019 in Mexico for the Youth Olympics, Luisa’s parents and school both proudly supported her in her quest to play at the international level. The 14-year-old ranked 30th internationally among the hundreds of kids that tried out and was placed on the yellow team (soon to become the Yellow Stars) with girls from Italy, France, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and other countries across the globe.
“It was pretty cool, but at the beginning it was kind of difficult to communicate with each other,” says Luisa. The team bonded over Bruno Mars and Ariana Grande as they belted their hearts out warming up before each game. “We got really close and were like best friends in a week.”
The girls played to a packed stadium in Lausanne, Switzerland — one of the best parts of the experience, says Luisa — and slowly worked their way to the finals as she watched her Mexican friends and their teams get eliminated one by one. Finally they were one of the two final teams and set out to play before thousands of screaming fans.
In the first half of the January 15 game they were tied 1-1 with the Black team and in the second half Luisa, the team’s forward, scored a second goal. The Black team never recovered, and the Yellow Stars won the gold medal. Luisa became the first Mexican ever to win a medal in any Winter Olympics.
Wilson on the ice in Lausanne.
“When I’m really in the game I’m just like ‘don’t get scored on get the puck get it out of here get the girl knock her down,’” she says in a rush. “It’s really quick and just moveyourfeet moveyourfeet moveyourfeet. When I am thinking like that I feel like I’m faster and it’s more fun because I feel like I’m playing better.”
Back home in Canada after weeks of excitement, Luisa is bemoaning the homework she has to do now and the fact that from signing autographs and making history she is going back to being a regular teenager.
“I didn’t think about it at the time, but now I realize that I am going down in the records as the first one [to win a medal] and it was a gold, and that’s really cool.”
Now it’s time to start running, she tells me, so that she can be faster on the ice and she’s honing her crosscheck skills by taking out the biggest girls she can find on the rugby field.
The future holds college hockey and maybe the Olympics again, this time as an adult. But for now, she’s ready for the rest of the hockey season in Canada and tackling that mountain of homework.
Lydia Carey is a regular contributor to Mexico News Daily.
The Health Ministry’s announcement on Friday that the first cases of coronavirus had been confirmed in Mexico sent people racing to their nearest pharmacies in search of the preventative fashion item du jour – face masks.
But many were disappointed, finding that stock at both small family-run pharmacies and large chains was already depleted just hours after Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell told the president’s morning press conference that two cases of Covid-19, as the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, late last year is known, had been detected, one in Mexico City and the other in Sinaloa.
Panic buying of face masks took hold in many parts of the country, according to a report by the newspaper El Universal, but was most prevalent in Mexico City, México state and Sinaloa.
Almost all pharmacies in the capital’s historic center, a mecca for those seeking medicines and medical supplies, ran out of both face masks and anti-bacterial gel not long after news of the virus’s arrival in Mexico broke – and quickly went viral. One downtown pharmacy even put up a sign announcing that it had no masks left, El Universal said.
As umbrella vendors appear as if by magic when the heavens open, face mask hawkers popped up on busy Mexico City streets on Friday, determined to cash in on the growing anxiety about the possible spread of Covid-19. Some pharmacies in México state reportedly increased the price of the in-demand items by as much as 200%.
‘No face masks,’ reads the sign in a Mexico City pharmacy.
By Friday afternoon, the number of people wearing face masks of varying colors on the streets and in public places in the capital had notably increased, El Universal said.
“Now it’s … coronavirus but people die from influenza every year in this season,” said a woman identified only as Karla who was wearing a pink mask in the zócalo metro station. “It scares me more than the virus from China.”
Outside the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases, located in the southern Mexico City borough of Tlalpan, it was difficult to spot anyone at all not wearing a face mask.
The attendant at a small medical supplies store in front of the hospital’s emergency department told El Universal that he usually sold 15-20 masks a day but demand spiked to 50 a day this week, exhausting supply completely. The owner of a nearby pharmacy, Karina López, said that she sold out even before the announcement that coronavirus had made its way to Mexico.
She suggested that people would have better luck in hardware stores, explaining that they sell masks and respirators for painters.
While wearing a mask is one way to protect oneself from infection with Covid-19 and other contagious diseases, health experts also recommend washing hands thoroughly and regularly, avoiding touching the mouth, nose and eyes, covering the mouth with the inside of the elbow when sneezing and coughing and avoiding contact with people with flu-like symptoms.
Deputy Health Minister López-Gatell also called on people to refrain from greeting each other with hugs and kisses, as is commonplace across Mexico and Latin America more broadly. However, it appears that his message didn’t get through to the man standing right behind him when he delivered the message: the president.
López Obrador gave out hugs and kisses aplenty to supporters at an event in an indigenous Chontal community in his native Tabasco on Friday afternoon, affection that was reciprocated by those in attendance.
“As if we’re not going to want to hug him … he came from here, from this land. We want to hug him, kiss him and tell him that we’re with him until the end. Don’t forget that us Chontales were with him from the beginning,” Alicia Sánchez said.
The Maya Train is President López Obrador's signature infrastructure project.
A court in Campeche has upheld an injunction granted to two indigenous communities in January that prevents the federal government from starting any new work on the Maya Train project.
The First Collegiate Tribunal of the 31st Circuit ruled that the provisional suspension order granted to two communities in the municipality of Calakmul, Campeche, does not have an adverse effect on public order or social interest, as the plaintiffs – the office of President López Obrador and the National Tourism Promotion Fund (Fonatur) – argued.
The provisional suspension order prevents the government from commencing any new construction work on the US $7.5-billion railroad that will link cities and towns in the states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Campeche and Chiapas, but it doesn’t stop it from carrying out rehabilitation or maintenance on existing stretches of track.
It also doesn’t prevent the government from seeking companies to work on the project via a tendering process nor does it stop it from making applications for environmental permits.
The newspaper Milenio reported that Campeche-based Judge Grissel Rodríguez Febles must now decide whether or not to grant the Calakmul communities a definitive suspension order against the Maya Train, which the government would be required to have overturned by a court before it could commence any new work.
Rogelio Jiménez Pons, head of Fonatur, which is managing the project, said in late January that the first phase of construction was expected to begin in April or May.
However, the government faces opposition from many indigenous communities and groups that reject the legitimacy of a government consultation process on the project and a vote that found over 92% support for it. They argue that construction of the new railroad will damage the environment and threaten their way of life, a claim the government rejects.
The viewpoint of the project’s opponents was supported by the Campeche collegiate court in its written decision to uphold the provisional suspension order.
“This court believes that … the project could produce changes to the Earth, forests, flora, fauna, natural resources, environment, biodiversity [and] water” in areas where indigenous people live, the court said, noting also that people’s health could be affected.
Those changes would cause “irreparable damage” to those communities and therefore their interests must be carefully protected, it concluded.
Businesses look to cross the border into safer Querétaro.
More than a dozen Guanajuato-based businesses are considering relocating to Querétaro due to violence, according to the head of a business group in the latter state.
“There are companies in Guanajuato that want to come to Querétaro. It doesn’t please us at all but it’s the reality,” said Jorge Rivadeneyra Díaz, president of the Querétaro chapter of the National Chamber for Industrial Transformation (Canacintra), which has fielded requests for information from between 15 and 20 businesses looking to flee the prevailing insecurity.
Rivadeneyra said that large and medium-sized businesses across manufacturing sectors such as auto parts and domestic appliances as well as service-oriented companies have expressed interest in moving their operations from Guanajuato – Mexico’s most violent state in 2019 – to Querétaro. The two states, both part of the Bajío region, are located side by side to the north of Mexico City.
Due to ongoing violence in Guanajuato – where the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel are engaged in a bloody turf war over control of fuel theft and extortion – businesses are now beginning to reach the conclusion that staying put is not viable, Rivadeneyra said.
“They’re saying: ‘if this [situation] isn’t fixed, let’s go to Querétaro,’” he said.
The Canacintra chief expressed regret about the insecurity currently plaguing Guanajuato, which he said is an important contributor to the national economy. He urged authorities to implement strategies that restore security and stability to the state.
“It’s one of the richest states and what’s happening there affects the whole country. … What’s happening is now [the situation] is getting worse. I guess the people of Guanajuato thought that it was temporary but with it not being resolved, there’s … a little bit of anxiety,” Rivadeneyra said.
“I don’t see a thriving Mexico if we don’t resolve [the situation in] Guanajuato. … It’s important that in Guanajuato they study some of the things we’ve done in Querétaro and implement them there,” he said, adding that state authorities need to work on their relationship with the federal government in order to improve security cooperation.
According to the Mexican Employers Federation, businesses in Guanajuato are more likely to be victims of crime than those in any other state. It reported in November that 76% of its member companies in that state had indicated that they had been targeted by criminals in the past year.
The average across Mexico was 65%, while 61% of businesses in Querétaro said that they had been victims of crime at least once within the last 12 months.
