Life carries on as normal in the center of Chilpancingo, Guerrero, despite the worsening coronavirus outbreak.
Businesses such as hardware stores, clothing boutiques, pawn shops and imitation jewelry street stalls have resisted the order to close, according to a report by the newspaper El Universal, and the streets of the state capital’s downtown are busy with pedestrians.
Closing the city’s central square, as local authorities did weeks ago, has done little to dissuade residents from flooding downtown streets.
Families stroll as if the pandemic didn’t exist, people fail to observe the government’s social distancing recommendations and nobody appears to be in a hurry that would suggest that they have left their home to do something essential or urgent.
Street vendors are still out in force selling everything from mobile phone accessories to chilate, a local beverage prepared with cocoa, rice, cinnamon and sugar, and townsfolk line up at banks with less than the recommended 1.5 meters of separation.
Cars continue to clog Chilpancingo’s central streets, bringing even more people into the city’s bustling hub.
It’s not necedad, or stupidity, that brings many people out of their homes but necesidad, or necessity, said a woman selling snacks at a stall on a downtown street.
María told El Universal that she was continuing to operate her business because she still has to pay rent, adding that she also felt an obligation to keep paying her employees.
“They’re single moms that have to take something [home] to their kids,” she said, explaining that paying her workers was her first priority.
Other Chilpancingo street vendors as well as store owners and employees also said that they don’t have the luxury to stay at home during the health emergency period because they live off their daily earnings. Put simply, if they don’t work, they don’t earn anything and they won’t have money to buy food.
Some business owners say that if they close temporarily they won’t be able to open again because they’ll go bankrupt in the interim.
With sales down despite the still-heavy foot traffic, many are calling for the state and federal government to put a freeze on the payment of both rent and services such as electricity and water. To that end, a large group of business owners marched through the streets of Chilpancingo on Monday to demand a meeting with Governor Héctor Astudillo and federal government delegate Amílcar Sandoval Ballesteros.
A brigade of government workers clad in white overalls, gloves and face masks marched through Chilpancingo’s central streets at the same time, urging people to return to their homes and practice social distancing while they’re out.
Meanwhile, coronavirus case numbers continue to climb in Guerrero, a state that is ill-prepared to respond to the pandemic given that many municipalities don’t have hospitals capable of providing critical care to Covid-19 patients.
There were 215 confirmed cases in the southern state as of Monday, an increase of more than 300% compared to just two weeks ago.
Students at the opening of a new school built with the help of the Escalera Foundation. alessandro zagato
The communities of Chiapas are known for their unique political development, strong sense of autonomy and rejection of the Mexican state.
They are also known for their extreme poverty and neglect suffered at the hands of official institutions and government. Almost 80% of the state lives in poverty and one in five of its residents is illiterate.
For every 100 students who start first grade only 35 will graduate from high school and only eight will graduate college. The support required for students that want to get an education in the isolated areas of this southern state is an incredible challenge, but the Escalera Foundation is trying to meet it.
Escalera has a classic founding story. A family of good-hearted missionaries took a service trip to Mexico 20 years ago to build a rural school. They were struck with a desire to help students and started building schools in needy communities. Through their work, they found that the lack of access to education was much more complex than they thought and infrastructure was just the tip of the iceberg.
It could have ended there. A few good-intentioned foreigners that tried something that didn’t turn out the way they hoped. But the Garbett family of Utah wasn’t about to give up. They were determined to work out the most efficient way to help these students, with a program that would be culturally appropriate and scientifically proven to produce results.
A REACH program student and teacher in Chiapas. escalera foundation
Their first pivot was from building schools to supporting ninth-grade students entering high school with scholarships. Their pilot program combined motivational classes to explain why going on to high school was important, and cash payments for the students.
Through rigorous testing they found that the effect of the motivational classes was negligible. So instead of continuing with a bulky program they got lean and started simply offering the economic support – what in the end had the most effect on the students’ lives.
Ten years later, this program, called REACH, is still going strong with 2,700 students set to receive scholarships in 2020. The organization is now supporting their students for all three years of high school and they provide a voucher to pay for high school entrance exams – something they found was one of the biggest barriers for many students.
In conjunction with statewide educators, Escalera has now expanded their work to include an entrepreneurial curriculum for high schoolers.
“Most entrepreneurial programs are focused on business skills,” says Myriam Hernández, the organization’s current director of policy and development, “how to price things, make a budget, run a business. But business skills alone won’t make any difference if you really want to see social change.”
The Escalera Foundation program combines these more practical skills with the creative thinking and problem solving skills that they’ve found spell success on an intellectual and emotional level. The program focuses on growth mindset, says Hernández, which is the idea that if you fail, you can always try again and succeed.
An Escalera-built school in Zinacantán. escalera foundation
“In the traditional education system we’re told we are good at one thing, one thing only,” she says. “And if you’re not good in math in grade school you grow up thinking that’s not your thing so you kind of drop it. Growth mindset says embrace feedback, embrace failure as an opportunity for learning. It relies on the newest neurological studies that show the brain is malleable. And there are skills we can still learn throughout our lives.”
After testing a pilot program in eight schools in 2019, 2020 will be the first year with the full program implemented in 20 different schools serving 500 students. Escalera continues to tweak the curriculum to be more culturally and community specific. One way they do that is through randomized control trials or RCT.
The application of RCT to social change programs was first promoted by Esther Duflo at MIT, an idea that won her the Nobel Economics Prize for Poverty Reduction. Duflo and her partner, economist Abhijit Banarjee, took the RCT method, more commonly known for testing new medical drugs, and used it as a way to track outcomes of social change programs using the behaviors of their participants.
“In the 20th century, randomized, controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that don’t work. And you can do the same randomized, controlled trial for social policy,” says Duflo. “You can put social innovation to the same rigorous, scientific tests that we use for drugs. And in this way, you can take the guesswork out of policy making by knowing what works, what doesn’t work and why.”
In 2003, Duflo and Banarjee started a network of poverty researchers called the Addul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL, at MIT. Escalera was lucky enough to work with them on their new school curriculum.
Aware of their position as foreigners in a foreign land, the founders have been striving to build an organization that reflects their constituents and the unique needs of their programs’ participants. Nearly 100% of the field operators at Escalera are from Chiapas, the only outlier being Hernández, who is from Mexico City.
The organization works closely with community leaders, parent-teacher organizations, and state and local educators. Their work is hyper-localized in the Los Altos region of Chiapas and when I asked Hernández about community pushback, she said that sometimes it happens but they respect people’s choice to opt out.
“Mistrust is always the rule,” she explains. “We are seen as outsiders and when we come in and say we have money for you, they think we are behaving just like the government and we are going to follow that up with asking for votes. We have had communities reject us outright and that is fine … but what happens is that when you start working with 30 communities in different municipalities in very remote areas they start to see the positive effects [of the programs], they see our sustained commitment, and that we honor our promises.”
Supporting a student through three years of high school costs around US $86 a year, a small price to pay for a better education, improved quality of life, and more economic opportunities for these extremely marginalized communities.
To the over 25,000 students that have received a scholarship through the Escalera Foundation, this small sum has meant the chance of a lifetime.
Lydia Carey is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily. She lives in Mexico City.
There is a risk that corruption will infiltrate the loan scheme announced by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Mexican Business Council (CMN) to help businesses through the coronavirus crisis, President López Obrador said on Tuesday.
IDB Invest, the development bank’s private sector arm, and the CMN, an elite group made up of 60 of the largest businesses in the country, said in a joint statement on Sunday that the program will aim to provide loans worth US $12 billion to 30,000 small and medium-sized businesses.
Speaking at his morning news conference, López Obrador said that experience shows that top-down schemes designed to help business through tough times, boost economic growth and create jobs are invariably plagued by corruption.
“Those bailouts … are equivalent to corruption, synonymous with corruption,” he said.
López Obrador reiterated that he wasn’t opposed to the IDB Invest/CMN loan program as long as it doesn’t come at a cost to public finances, However, he stressed that the government will monitor it closely.
“What we don’t want and what we won’t allow is for these loans to become public debt if they are not [re]paid,” he said. “We can’t give preferential treatment to those who have economic means when there is so much poverty in Mexico.”
The president’s remarks came a day after he asserted that the Finance Ministry would not underwrite the loan scheme, as he he believed IDB Invest and the CMN had claimed.
CMN President Antonio del Valle said on Monday that López Obraor had misunderstood what the two entities said, asserting that the loan scheme will never make use of public resources even if borrowers fail to make their repayments.
“It’s inaccurate to say that the Finance Ministry is acting as a guarantor, … it’s only supporting [the scheme] as an IDB Invest shareholder,” he said.
“There is no loan guarantee, no resources from the government or the public sector; [public] debt won’t increase in any sense for this program, it’s strictly a private operation,” del Valle said.
IDB Invest and the CMN have called on local commercial banks, international investors and other development banks to participate in the scheme in which businesses will be offered loans “at very attractive rates.”
Tomás Bermúdez, Mexico representative for the IDB, said the scheme will “complement the measures” the federal government has taken to support small and medium-sized businesses amid the coronavirus crisis.
López Obrador has announced that his administration will provide 3 million loans to poor and middle-class Mexicans including small business owners.
But many business groups and analysts believe that the private sector needs more support to get through the sharp economic downturn caused by the measures to limit the spread of Covid-19, including the suspension of nonessential activities.
Mexicans are growing increasingly weary of stay-at-home orders that have now been in place for more than a month.
Cell phone GPS data collected by Google shows that more people were out and about in the days after the government declared the commencement of phase three of the coronavirus pandemic last Tuesday than during the Easter holiday period earlier this month.
Google said in a nationwide mobility report issued on Sunday that data collected from millions of smart phones operating with Android systems showed that the number of people at a range of places increased last week.
Numbers increased by 11% at leisure areas such as city and town squares, 8% at markets and pharmacies, 7% at parks and beaches, 5% on public transit and 2% at workplaces.
Mobility was up across almost all of the country including states with large coronavirus outbreaks.
A comparison between Thursday last week and the same day the week before shows that Mexico City, México state and Baja California – the three federal entities with the highest number of Covid-19 cases – recorded the sharpest mobility increases.
The number of people at places of leisure in the capital increased by 9%, there were 19% more customers at markets and pharmacies, park usage rose 10% and public transit ridership was up 5%.
In México state, the increase in the number of people at the same places was 14%, 10%, 10% and 5% respectively, while in Baja California it was 8%, 5%, 12% and 4%.
Data from iPhones made public last week also showed that more Mexicans were leaving their homes more often despite the risk of being exposed to Covid-19, which has now infected more than 15,000 people around the country and claimed the lives of 1,434.
Since the national social distancing initiative officially started on March 23, mobile phone data indicates that residents of Michoacán have been the least respectful of stay-at-home orders while those in Quintana Roo have been the most respectful.
However, those tendencies are not reflected in the statistics for confirmed Covid-19 cases.
Quintana Roo has the sixth highest number of cases among Mexico’s 32 federal entities with a total of 653 people having tested positive. Michoacán, where many people appear to have continued to live normal lives over the past month, ranks 18th with 213 cases.
People line a highway in Guatemala on Saturday holding white flags to indicate they have no food. It may not be long before the flags appear in Mexico.
Three million businesses and 28 million workers could be at risk if the federal government doesn’t support them through the coronavirus crisis, according to poverty-fighting nonprofit organization Oxfam México.
The nonprofit predicts that 3 million businesses classified as nonessential by the government will potentially be affected in the short term by the economic downtown caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the measures put in place to limit its spread.
According to 2019 economic data, those businesses generate an annual economic spillover of 1.2 trillion pesos (US $49.5 billion), Oxfam said.
The report also predicted that 28 million workers employed in nonessential sectors could be at risk of losing their jobs or not making enough money to support themselves. The figure accounts for approximately 47% of Mexico’s entire labor force.
Of the 28 million workers at risk, 10 million already live in poverty as a result of low incomes, 16 million don’t have access to social security benefits and 5.4 million struggle to provide enough food for themselves and their families, Oxfam said.
As the figures indicate, some of the vulnerable workers – 85% of whom live and work in urban areas – are afflicted by two or three of the predicaments.
In light of the situation, Oxfam said the government needs to provide financial support to businesses so that they can maintain their workforces and keep employees registered with the Mexican Social Security Institute. For those who live day to day and don’t have access to social security benefits, the government should pay them a basic income during the crisis to cover essentials, the organization said.
Oxfam said that supporting businesses and providing a basic income for informal sector workers would cost less than 2% of GDP but substantially reduce the impact of the coronavirus-fueled economic downturn.
Due to the high levels of poverty and inequality in Mexico, the Covid-19 pandemic is causing three simultaneous crises, it said: health, economic and social.
The federal government intends to increase spending on social programs and infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy during and after the pandemic but has announced scant support for business, triggering criticism from business groups and analysts.
President López Obrador continues to insist that “it’s not like before” when such support was tainted by corruption.
Presumed members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) disbursed basic food items and other necessities to poor residents of Manzanillo, Colima, over the weekend.
The armed men claimed to be members of the CJNG, the extremely violent drug cartel led by Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera. The packages they delivered to residents bore the cartel’s initials and other identifying images.
“What’s up, our people? We’re here handing out food and supplies to those in need in [the community of] Tapeixtle, in Manzanillo, Colima, on behalf of El Mencho,” says one masked man in a video posted to social media. The speaker and other masked men can be seen driving in a pickup truck holding firearms and holding packages of supplies on their laps.
In another video a man wearing a face mask hands over one of the packages emblazoned with the cartel’s logos, as well as El Mencho’s other nickname, El señor de los gallos (lord of the cocks).
He states that the food and supplies are “from El señor de los gallos, from Guadalajara, who helps his community due to the crisis they are experiencing, so you all know that we’re supporting the people.”
Calling the cartel “the four-letter company,” the masked man assured needy citizens that the drug kingpin is “with them.”
Upon receiving the products, one woman reportedly said the government had forgotten about them.
There have been stories recently of armed men believed to belong to various criminal gangs delivering food and supplies to those in need in states like Morelos, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Jalisco, Tamaulipas and Veracruz.
Despite the reports, federal Interior Minister Olga Sánchez Cordero claimed that the cartel charity in Colima was an isolated incident.
Although the government has ordered nonessential businesses to close, some Mexico City shop owners continue to operate on the sly, opening their doors clandestinely to passersby and whispering an invitation to enter, the newspaper El Universal reports.
Others simply post their phone numbers on shuttered storefronts, doing business by appointment only.
A violation of the closure guidelines can bring a fine from city inspectors who enforce the government’s guidelines, but it’s a risk many cash-strapped business owners on streets like Artículo 123 in the city center are willing to take.
“If they catch us, they will fine us. We have to take care of ourselves,” says Delia, an employee at an appliance store.
Shop owners still need to cover their overhead, despite fines that can reach around US $3,500.
Elsewhere in the city, a store selling motorcycle parts has taken precautions against the spread of the virus. All workers wear masks, they offer hand sanitizer at the store’s entrance and only allow three customers inside at the same time. Still, sales are down by 70%, an employee reports.
And at Parque México, one of the capital city’s urban gardens, a popsicle shop shoulders on, albeit shrouded in plastic. There, workers wearing masks and gloves pass their products to customers through a gap in a plastic curtain.
This would normally be the beginning of their high season as temperatures are on the rise, but the streets are for the most part empty. That situation is unlikely to change before at least May 30, according to government coronavirus guidelines.
Currently, Mexico City is one of the country’s epicenters of contagion and has seen 4,152 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, while 328 people have died.
The Mexico City government has launched an online platform to provide data on the development of the Covid-19 outbreak in the city.
Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum told a press conference on Monday that the portal provides geographical information on the distribution of confirmed and suspected cases, organizing them by borough as well as hospital capacity, social programs and public spending.
It also provides specific information on how many people have been hospitalized in each borough and how many of those have been intubated.
The portal will be updated daily at 7:00 p.m.
The platform is meant “to establish a comparison point with the metropolitan area of the Valley of México,” making the information it contains “of the utmost importance,” said Ignacio Chapela of portal developer Centro GEO.
The portal can be found here, but the information is only presented in Spanish. Hospital availability, locations and other pandemic information can be consulted in English via the APP CDMX, also managed by the Mexico City government.
Face masks are not necessarily effective, nor are they convenient.
While face masks have become de rigueur during the coronavirus pandemic — and obligatory in many states, their efficacy depends entirely on their proper use, says the Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell.
On Monday he warned that simply wearing a mask does not mean that one is guaranteed to avoid contracting the virus.
Masks can be effective for those who do have the virus to prevent them from infecting others, yet there is not yet enough scientific evidence to show whether people without the infection should use masks as a way to protect themselves against the coronavirus, he said.
The World Health Organization guidelines call for washing hands or cleaning them with an alcohol-based sanitizer before putting on the mask, which needs to cover the mouth and nose with no gaps. While wearing the mask you should never touch it, and single-use masks should never be re-used.
According to an analysis by Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health, four out of six studies found that the use of masks did not reduce the spread of acute respiratory infections.
López-Gatell said that the masks can be uncomfortable, hot and itchy, and that people will take them off for those reasons, or to eat, therefore reducing their efficacy. Also, he pointed out, the virus can still enter through a person’s eyes.
“Some people wear the mask for 15 minutes, and they take it off, they wear it as a hat, they touch their faces. And that’s where the biggest unknown is,” he said.
And some people can experience a false sense of security and neglect other essential coronavirus guidelines, like staying at home, social distancing and hand washing.
Despite many states mandating the use of masks in public, it’s the latter measures that really help control the spread of the virus. “It does not seem inconvenient to me that some state health authorities recommend the use of masks,” López-Gatell said. “But if by paying attention to masks we start to reduce the other massive mitigation measures, we would be diverting attention and reducing the most effective ones.”
Both traffic and trafficking are down at the Mexico-US border.
The prohibition of nonessential travel between the United States and Mexico has affected the ability of Mexican cartels to ship drugs north and dollars south, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).
CBP data reveal that from February to March, as the United States began to impose strict travel restrictions in the face of the growing Covid-19 outbreak, seizures of drugs and cash dropped substantially, as did the rate of human trafficking.
Seizures of cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin all decreased, while confiscations of marijuana rose slightly. The four harder drugs, whose movement appears to have been seriously affected, represent the bulk of sales for the drug cartels.
In March, as the pandemic began to seriously affect the United States and Mexico, the Pentagon deployed 500 additional troops to reinforce the more than 20,000 Border Patrol officers on the frontier.
This beefed-up military presence and the decrease in automobile traffic entering the United States lowered the number of drug mules smuggling contraband north.
“It’s not easy for the cartels to hide their shipments [during the health crisis],” said Víctor Manjarrez, former head of the Border Patrol offices in El Paso, Texas, and Tucson, Arizona.
The drug that has seen the biggest decline in movement and seizures is cocaine brought from Bolivia and Colombia, whose seizures fell by almost half, from 5.8 tonnes in February to 2.9 tonnes in March. This was followed by methamphetamine, which fell 31.3%, from 6.1 to 4.2 tonnes in the same period.
The amount of heroin confiscated at the border fell 16%, from 177.3 kilos in February to 149.2 in March, and fentanyl seizures fell 8.6%, from 126 kilos to 115.2.
The CBP has also seen a decrease in the movement of cash. Seizures fell 61.3% in March. U.S. authorities confiscated US $14.16 million in February, but that number fell to $5.48 million in the following month.
