Forensic personnel are examining the remains of at least 42 people found on ranches in Lagos de Moreno and Tlaquepaque on the outskirts of Guadalajara, Jalisco, state Attorney General Gerardo Octavio Solís Gómez reported.
All of the bodies found over the past 10 days showed signs of violence, authorities say.
Some were bound hand and foot, others were decapitated or otherwise dismembered, making the process of determining exactly how many people were found difficult for investigators.
One of the sites was located next to an abandoned mine where the bodies of two men and one woman were found lying on the ground covered in lime. One man has been identified after going missing in May, as has a woman who was last seen on June 11.
At another site, nine men and one woman were found. Some had been handcuffed and all but one of the men had been decapitated.
In the Santa Anita neighborhood of Tlaquepaque, 60 bags of human remains have been recovered belonging to at least 26 people.
Two bags containing human remains were found half-buried on a farm in Tlajomulco de Zúñiga.
“When the officers arrived, they located a 1-by-2-meter grave in the courtyard of an abandoned home, inside it were two black plastic bags which contained decomposing human remains,” police reported. The National Guard was dispatched to protect the crime scene.
State forensics experts have been working all week to identify the bodies and verify the number of dead.
From January to May alone, the state Attorney’s Office located 17 clandestine graves. More than 100 bodies and 500 body parts have been recovered.
Between January and May of this year, Mexico has recorded 14,631 homicides, with the highest murder rates occurring in Guanajuato, the state of México, Baja California, Chihuahua and Jalisco, respectively.
Security Minister Durazo presents the latest homicide data at Friday morning's presidential press conference.
Homicides declined slightly in May compared to both March and April, according to data presented Friday by Security Minister Alfonso Durazo.
There were 2,913 homicides last month, 116 fewer than March and 13 fewer than April.
Despite the decline in May – and the coronavirus lockdown measures over the past three months – Mexico remains on track to record its most violent year ever in 2020.
Data presented by Durazo showed that there were 14,631 homicides in the first five months of the year, an average of 2,926 per month. If the same trend continues, Mexico will end the year with more than 35,000 homicides.
With more than 1,900 between January and May, Guanajuato was the most violent state in the first five months. The next five most violent states, all of which recorded more than 1,000 homicides in the same period, were México state, Baja California, Chihuahua, Jalisco and Michoacán.
On a per capita basis, Colima was the most violent state, with almost 40 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in the first five months of the year. Baja California and Guanajuato were the second and third most violent per capita, with rates just above 30.
Yucatán was the least violent state in the first five months, recording just 18 homicides.
Eight other states recorded fewer than 100 in the period: Baja California Sur, with 22; Campeche, 32; Aguascalientes, 39; Tlaxcala, 51; Durango, 68; Nayarit, 77; Querétaro, 84; and Coahuila, 95.
Femicides – the killing of women and girls on account of their gender – also declined slightly in May compared to the previous two months.
There were 69 femicides in May, eight fewer than March and four fewer than April. Compared to December 2018, the first month of President López Obrador’s six-year term, femicides were down 31% in May.
Data also showed that there were a total of 385 femicides in the first five months of 2020. México state recorded the highest number followed by Veracruz, Nuevo León and Mexico City.
Several large protests against gender violence were held earlier this year after the brutal murders of a seven-year-old girl and 25-year-old woman in Mexico City shocked the nation.
A national women’s strike was also held on March 9, a day after large numbers of women marched in cities across Mexico to mark International Women’s Day.
A coronavirus patient is released from a Mexico City hospital after overcoming the disease.
A new single-day record of 5,662 confirmed Covid-19 cases were added to Mexico’s tally on Thursday, while 667 additional fatalities were reported, lifting the death toll to close to 20,000.
The Health Ministry reported that the cumulative case tally had increased to 165,455 and that confirmed Covid-19 deaths had risen to 19,747.
An additional 1,868 fatalities are suspected of being caused by Covid-19 but have not yet been confirmed.
About a quarter of Covid-19 patients who have died did not have an identified underlying health condition that made them more vulnerable to the disease, Health Ministry data shows.
There are currently 23,528 active coronavirus cases across the country while the results of 59,778 tests are not yet known. Just under 453,500 people have been tested for Covid-19, and three-quarters of those who tested positive have now fully recovered.
The daily tally of coronavirus cases and deaths. Deaths are numbers reported and not necessarily those that occurred each day. milenio
Mexico City continues to lead the country for accumulated coronavirus cases, active cases and deaths while México state ranks second in all three categories.
Just over 40,000 people have tested positive for Covid-19 in the capital since the start of the pandemic, with 10% of confirmed cases – 4,141 – currently active. Mexico City’s official coronavirus death toll is 5,184.
After Mexico City and México state, Puebla and Tabasco have the largest active coronavirus outbreaks. Just over 1,000 of Puebla’s 1,340 active cases are in the state capital, which has a larger active outbreak than any other municipality in Mexico.
At the municipal level, the Mexico City borough of Iztapalapa has the second biggest active outbreak followed by León, Guanajuato, and Centro (Villahermosa), Tabasco.
In addition to Mexico City, three states have recorded more than 1,000 Covid-19 deaths: México state, with 2,343; Baja California, with 1,638; and Veracruz, with 1,160. Seven others – Sinaloa, Puebla, Tabasco, Guerrero, Chihuahua, Hidalgo and Quintana Roo – have recorded 500 or more.
Mexico’s biggest success story of the pandemic is Colima, which has the lowest coronavirus case tally and death toll in the country. The small Pacific coast state has recorded just 339 cases, 89 of which are currently active, and 42 deaths.
Active cases of Covid-19 as of Thursday. milenio
Zacatecas is the only other state to have recorded fewer than 1,000 cases while four others – Baja California Sur, Zacatecas, Durango and Aguascalientes – have death tolls below 100.
National data presented at the Health Ministry’s coronavirus press briefing on Thursday night showed that 46% of general care beds set aside for patients with serious coronavirus symptoms are currently occupied while 39% of those with ventilators are in use. However, hospital occupancy levels are significantly higher in Mexico City and México state.
At Friday night’s press briefing, the Health Ministry will present a new “stoplight” map indicating the risk of coronavirus infection in each of Mexico’s 32 states.
Soledad, a Rarámuri artisan, has a new job sewing coronavirus face masks.
The Mexican budget airline Volaris plans to provide passengers with masks created by indigenous women from the mountains of Chihuahua.
The colorful masks, made from a fabric that is 65% polyester and 35% cotton and meets health standards, are hand-sewn by women from Sínibi Jipé, a small group of Rarámuri artisans who have shifted from producing clothing to making masks due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Each mask distributed to passengers comes with the name and photo of the woman who sewed it.
The Rarámuri, or Tarahumara as they are also known, are native to the mountains and canyons of Chihuahua’s Sierra Madre Occidental. Many still practice a nomadic lifestyle, and they are well known for their impressive ability in long-distance running, including marathons and ultramarathons.
Their culture is explored in the popular short documentary Lorena: La de Pies Ligeros (“Lorena: Light-footed Woman) through the story of Lorena Ramírez who won the Guachochi, Chihuahua, ultramarathon in 2017 running 100 kilometers clad in sandals and her traditional dress.
A Rarámuri seamstress at work on a Volaris face mask.
Luisa Fernanda Martínez, director of Sínibi Jipé, which means “Always Today” in Rarámuri, hopes that by making the masks for Volaris Rarámuri female artisans will begin to gain the kind of fame that the tribe’s runners have achieved.
They have already garnered numerous media reports including a mention in the pages of Vogue México.
The number of employees has increased from just four to 15 as they work to meet demand, but Sínibi Jipé is not only concerned about growing the business, it’s about personal growth as well.
“This business is one that seeks to get the best out of each person,” says Martínez, which she says is one of the reasons Volaris chose them to create the masks.
“Our main objective is the integral development of the artisans, and we have used clothing as a tool to achieve many purposes, such as raising their self-esteem and preserving their culture.”
Volaris is making another change to honor the seamstresses and their culture by translating health safety information cards into Rarámuri, marking the first time a national airline has translated information into an indigenous language.
The trailer for Lorena, Light-footed Woman.
In addition, Volaris has pledged that it will fly the women of Sínibi Jipé to Mexico City on August 30 so they can watch the Mexico City Marathon.
“This approach with Sinibí Jípe is very significant for Volaris because it allows us to offer our clients a fundamental piece of protection in the context of the health contingency, and also collaborate with the development of a community that faces exceptional challenges in our country,” said Holger Blankenstein, executive vice president of Volaris.
A sinkhole that opened up on the highway between Playa del Carmen and Tulum, Quintana Roo, has exposed a large water-flooded cave filled with the fossils of ancient sea snails and rocks that date back to the Pleistocene era.
Speleologists, or cave explorers, used the Playa del Carmen sinkhole as a portal to enter the cave, which is approximately 60 meters long and eight meters deep.
In addition to 2 1/2-million-year-old sea snail fossils and old rocks, they found crustaceans, mollusks, shrimps and other living creatures in the cave’s crystal-clear water.
The members of the Mayab speleology club also completed studies to make a topographic map of the cave, which is located beneath a stretch of road that will be near the Playa del Carmen-Tulum section of the Maya Train railroad.
They dubbed one section of the cave “Snail’s Heaven” because of the large numbers of sea snail fossils adhered to its walls.
The sinkhole on the Playa-Tulum highway.
Roberto Rojo, a biologist and speleologist, said that the cave has conduits that allow water from the Caribbean sea to flow into the cave and vice versa. He said that filling in the sinkhole and thus closing off the portal to the cave would be “ecocide.”
Rojo and other experts are preparing a report that will detail the characteristics of the cave and provide recommendations for its conservation.
The Yucatán Peninsula has an elaborate aquifer system that includes thousands of natural sinkholes called cenotes.
Some experts have warned that construction of the Maya Train poses environmental risks to the region’s underground water networks as well as the long-term survival of the jaguar.
Construction of the US $8-billion project started this month and is scheduled for completion in late 2022.
Construction at the new airport, where mammoths once roamed.
A federal judge has ruled that archaeological explorations at the Santa Lucía Air Force base must be prioritized over the construction of the new Mexico City airport.
Pedro Francisco Sánchez Nava, chief archaeologist with the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), said last month that it was possible that more mammoth remains will be found at the airport site as exploration continues.
The federal judge ordered INAH to report whether construction of the airport will interfere with its archaeological work. The court order doesn’t halt work on the multibillion-dollar airport but establishes that archaeological and paleontological relics must be protected and that the work to uncover them must take precedence over the construction work.
The ruling came in response to an injunction request filed by a complainant who argued that the airport project could violate his human right to have access to culture as well as international commitments Mexico has made to protect its cultural heritage.
The judge said that the INAH project is seeking to uncover 20,000 years of history in an area where the Xaltocan Lake was once located. The area’s history includes possible interactions between Pleistocene era fauna such as mammals and early human settlers of the region, he said.
The judge also directed INAH to clearly demarcate the areas of the site it is exploring to ensure that heavy machinery doesn’t cause any damage to animal remains, artifacts or other objects of historical importance.
Polevnsky was party president from 2017 until earlier this year.
Mexico’s ruling party has filed a criminal complaint against its former national president for embezzlement and money laundering.
Members of the Morena party’s National Executive Committee filed the complaint against Yeidckol Polevnsky directly with Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero, federal officials said.
Morena’s executive committee, now led on an interim basis by former lawmaker Alfonso Ramírez Cuéllar, began an audit of Polevnsky’s 2017-2020 tenure on June 10.
The audit, reported the Milenio newspaper, specifically probed Morena’s purchase of real estate while Polevnsky was at the helm of the party. It examined payments she made totaling 809 million pesos (US $35.5 million at today’s exchange rate).
The audit found that payments of 394 million pesos were made to two real estate companies owned by Enrique Borbolla García, a businessman who allegedly collaborated on an embezzlement and money laundering scheme with Polevnsky.
The funds were supposed to be used to complete renovations at properties owned by Morena. But some of the properties didn’t even exist and none of the services paid for was completed, the Morena executive committee says.
“Not a single brick was laid, the party can’t lose that money,” said one member of the party leadership, according to the newspaper Reforma.
Borbolla was arrested in 2014 on charges that he sold an aircraft for 2.5 million pesos but never delivered it to the purchaser. However, he was never convicted.
Polevnsky has denied any wrongdoing while at the helm of Morena, a party founded by President López Obrador.
“The peak of the pandemic is now a mountain range,” a Mexican Twitter user said last week referring to the federal government’s changing predictions about when the coronavirus outbreak will reach its highest point.
“The peak of infections will be next week – it doesn’t matter when you read this,” read a meme featuring a photograph of coronavirus czar Hugo López-Gatell sporting a beaming grin.
Since early May, López-Gatell, deputy minister for health promotion, has been saying that the peak coronavirus infection period is imminent, although he has stressed that Mexico is not going through one sole pandemic but rather numerous local epidemics as a result of its large geographical size.
As a result, there is not a single national epidemic curve but rather a series of curves for Mexico’s numerous cities and states. New infections are on the rise in some and decreasing or stabilizing in others.
Therefore, different predictions for when different cities will hit the peak of their local epidemics are perfectly valid, although López-Gatell said last week that if the epidemic curves of all 32 states come together as if they are one, the greatest transmission of the coronavirus will occur in the first two weeks of July.
As the aforementioned Twitter post and meme indicate, López-Gatell and the government more broadly have confused much of the Mexican public with the predictions they have publicly presented about when the pandemic will peak. They have indicated on different occasions that Mexico as a whole is on the cusp of the peak infection period even though the pandemic is not behaving uniformly across the country.
In addition to announcing varying predictions about when the contagion peak will occur, López-Gatell has claimed on several occasions that Mexico’s case numbers are stabilizing even as the government’s own data shows that they are trending upwards.
On May 5, he said “the epidemic is slowing down” and “we’ve flattened the curve,” an assertion that was promptly challenged by a National Autonomous University (UNAM) epidemiologist.
López-Gatell made a new “curve-flattening” claim at the Health Ministry’s nightly coronavirus press briefing on May 25 even though case numbers had continued to show steady growth.
The deputy minister has clarified that his assertions refer to a flattening of the curve in comparison with what would have hypothetically occurred had Mexico not implemented coronavirus mitigation measures such as the suspension of nonessential economic activities and the national social distancing initiative. The government’s actions have reduced new cases by as much as 75%, he has said.
However, “a flattening of the curve” in comparison with what might have happened is not how the term is commonly used.
This flattened curve is based on the government’s estimate of what might have happened without implementing measures to control the virus’s spread. It’s not how the term is commonly used.
While there is no way of knowing for certain just how effective Mexico’s mostly non-enforceable coronavirus mitigations have been in reducing new infections, hard data shows that case numbers have more than doubled since López-Gatell’s May 25 “curve-flattening” claim.
On that date, the Health Ministry reported that Mexico’s case tally had increased to 71,105. Last night it said that confirmed cases numbered 159,793, an increase of 125% in just over three weeks. An analysis by the Johns Hopkins University confirms that the epidemic curve has not been flattened in Mexico.
But while data shows that Mexico’s coronavirus outbreak has grown quickly in recent weeks, the real size of the pandemic here is undoubtedly much larger because testing rates remain low.
Sebastian Garrido, coordinator of the data science unit at CIDE, a Mexico City university, told the news agency Bloomberg that no one actually knows where Mexico is currently placed on the epidemic curve.
Mexico has made scant efforts to test widely for Covid-19, focusing almost exclusively on people with coronavirus-like symptoms. As a result the percentage of tests that come back positive in Mexico is much higher than in countries that test more widely.
Earlier in the coronavirus crisis, the Health Ministry provided estimates about the real size of the pandemic based on data about possible and confirmed coronavirus cases collected at 375 medical monitoring stations.
López-Gatell said in April that there were likely about eight undetected cases for each confirmed one, according to the data collected by the sentinel surveillance system. If the same estimate applied today, around 1.3 million people in Mexico would have had Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.
However, the government has not provided any sentinel system updates since April and López-Gatell said in May that it was no longer the principal means of measuring the pandemic because it was no longer practical, given the higher rapidity with which new cases were occurring.
The deputy minister continues to acknowledge that the size of the pandemic is much bigger than official data indicates but no longer presents extrapolated data that undoubtedly has the potential to alarm the population.
Instead, as Bloomberg notes, López-Gatell has sought to diffuse public panic by using his “nice-guy demeanor” and “knack for breaking down complex ideas into easily understandable bits” during his nightly press briefings.
Those attributes have helped him to become the most popular federal official, according to polls, but critics argue that they have also allowed him to conceal the true magnitude of the coronavirus problem, which in turn has made the outbreak worse and placed more lives at risk.
“He knows how to communicate and he knows how to put on a show,” Laurie Ann Ximenez-Fyvie, head of a molecular genetics laboratory at the National Autonomous University, told Bloomberg.
May’s case numbers: not much sign of flattening here.
“He has his talking points and he uses them to convince people that this is under control,” she said.
Just as the real number of Covid-19 cases in Mexico is unknown, so too is the number of deaths from the disease.
While accurately counting coronavirus fatalities is undoubtedly much easier than accurately counting cases, there is compelling evidence that the former are being drastically underreported in Mexico City, the country’s coronavirus epicenter.
An analysis by the independent organization Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity of death certificates issued in the capital between mid-March and mid-May suggests that four times more people died from Covid-19 in the period than the number officially reported.
As of Wednesday, Mexico City had officially recorded 5,042 coronavirus-related deaths but Nexos Datos, a data analysis organization, found that 17,310 more death certificates were issued in the capital between March 30 and June 7 compared to the average for the same period over the past four years.
Researchers said it is unlikely that all of the excess deaths could be attributed to Covid-19, explaining that some were likely the result of people not seeking timely medical attention. However, the 124% surge in deaths in Mexico City almost certainly means that Covid-19 fatalities are being significantly underreported.
Alejandro Macías, the federal government’s czar during the swine flu pandemic in 2009, charged that the federal government is not deliberately underreporting deaths, telling Bloomberg: “They’re not doing it on purpose; they’re not hiding bodies somewhere. It’s just that they haven’t figured out how to do it properly. The systems weren’t ready for this.”
Garrido, the CIDE data scientist, noted that there is a delay in reporting deaths, a point that López-Gatell emphasized after more than 1,000 deaths were reported on June 3.
He said that the lag is likely caused by outdated systems – all the data the federal Health Ministry reports comes from the authorities in the 32 states – as well as legal and medical requirements to certify deaths.
If a suspected Covid-19 patient dies before he or she is tested, and is not tested subsequently, a committee of medical specialists analyzes the case and makes a decision about whether the fatality should be attributed to the disease and added to Mexico’s official coronavirus death toll.
Some Covid-19 fatalities have not shown up in the official death toll for days, weeks or even months after they occurred.
Mexico currently has the seventh highest death toll in the world with fatality No. 20,000 likely to be recorded this week.
The most recent estimate from López-Gatell was that the death toll could reach 35,000, or as many as 60,000 in a worst case scenario, a significant increase from the prediction of 6,000 fatalities he offered in early May.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle is currently estimating almost 52,000 deaths by August 4.
But despite the alarming predictions, rising case numbers, spiraling death toll and a warning from the World Health Organization last week that Mexico is going through “one of the most complex and dangerous moments of the epidemic,” the economy is beginning to reopen and more and more people are returning to their regular everyday activities.
In central Mexico City, where the streets are gradually returning to their old chaotic self, many residents are taking precautions to protect themselves from the possibility of coronavirus infection by practicing appropriate social distancing and wearing face masks but others appear oblivious to the risk – hugging, shaking hands, high-fiving, fist-bumping and getting up close and personal with friends and strangers alike.
More coronavirus peaks are undoubtedly still to come.
The state of Michoacán announced it is adding 140 patrol vehicles to the police fleet, bringing the total number of new patrol cars purchased during the tenure of Governor Silvano Aureoles to 1,049.
The delivery of the new vehicles is part of Aureoles’ plan to strengthen public safety in a state where drug cartels are fighting for control of drug trafficking routes.
The patrol units will be distributed in Lázaro Cárdenas, Apatzingán, Coalcomán, Jiquilpan, Uruapan, Zamora, La Piedad, Huetamo, Zitácuaro and Morelia.
“The challenge we have is to make this institution the best police force in Mexico, with more and better officers, with more infrastructure and equipment, with better wages and benefits, and with more intelligence work to achieve together the Michoacán that we want,” said Aureoles.
In addition to the new vehicles, Aureoles has installed 6,000 security cameras, opened eight new police barracks and built a 31,000-square-meter command center, the largest such building in Latin America, the governor said.
In recent years, the state has also allocated resources to the professionalization of police forces, and Michoacán now has 6,250 trained officers, 5,050 more than it had at the beginning of the Aureoles administration in 2015.
Hours after the press conference announcing the purchase, Zamora’s police chief and another officer were ambushed and killed on the Mexico City-Guadalajara highway.
Tlaxcala’s Ministry of Tourism has announced that the 2020 firefly viewing season has been canceled due to concerns over the coronavirus.
Last year some 127,000 tourists flocked to the firefly sanctuary in Nanacamilpa de Mariano Arista, located around 80 kilometers east of Mexico City, to view the millions of luminescent insects that put on a dazzling display of lights at dusk from June through August.
The cancellation of the season means a potential loss of some 48 million pesos (US $2.13 million) to local tour operators and tourism-related businesses that have sprung up since the first firefly tours were offered in 2011.
Tourism Minister Anabel Alvarado Varela explained that the decision, made in consultation with representatives of the tourism sector, was made out of concern for the health of residents and visitors and also because antibacterial gel and other sanitizing products are harmful to the delicate insects.
Alvarado added that the break will help the sanctuary come back even stronger next year by allowing the species to reproduce unhindered by the distraction of visitors.
Some 150 police, Civil Protection agents, National Guardsmen and other law enforcement officials will be deployed to patrol firefly habitats and ensure tourists don’t venture out on their own or congregate in groups that put their health at risk.
The 200-hectare firefly sanctuary will also use the time to make improvements to the habitat. Also, certified guides plan to provide virtual tours and a digital platform will be developed to provide scientific information about the life cycle of the firefly and the benefits the species and the ecosystem will enjoy during this break.
The virtual marketing of fireflies is part of a larger campaign by the Ministry of Tourism called “Enjoy Tlaxcala from Home,” which promotes tourist attractions, culture, history, gastronomy and art in the state through videos and photos posted to social media.
As of June 17, Tlaxcala had 1,849 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and had seen 243 deaths.
