Pemex posts loss of US $18 billion in 2019, nearly double that of prior year

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February 26, 2020

Governor Bonilla and the state's new notaries.

Favoritism by state governments in the granting of licenses for notaries’ offices must come to an end, the head of an influential business group said on Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters at the National Palace after attending President López Obrador’s morning press conference, the president of the Business Coordinating Council (CCE), Carlos Salazar Lomelín, said that there needs to be transparency in the allocation of licenses for notaries’ offices, as occurs in other countries.

His remarks came after the newspaper Reforma reported that Baja California Governor Jaime Bonilla had gifted two notary’s office licenses each to former governor Xicoténcatl Leyva Mortera and the ex-governor’s nephew, José Román Leyva Castro. Leyva Mortera is a personal friend of Bonilla and considered the governor’s “political godfather.”

Unlike in Mexico, “anyone can be a notary” in other countries “as long as they meet a range of requirements,” Salazar said.

“If you do your exam, build your skills, you can be a notary,” he said. “I’ve seen it and that’s one of the things toward which we have to evolve.”

The CCE chief said that “little by little” state governors have to be persuaded to stop the practice of granting notaries’ offices to their friends and associates. Salazar said that the recently approved Citizens’ Trust Law could provide governors, and other officials, the impetus they need to leave bad habits behind.

He said he believed that the new federal law will serve as “an example for everyone” about how to restore the trust of citizens, which in turn will help Mexico become a country “in which we trust one another.”

Speaking this morning about the law – which will get rid of federal government inspectors – López Obrador said that all people have a responsibility to act with rectitude and honesty and to “turn their backs on corruption.”

Source: Reforma (sp)

Collection of rare Mexican cookbooks now accessible online

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Rich Tenorio

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February 26, 2020

One of the surprising discoveries was a recipe for turtle soup, said librarian Stephanie Noell. University of Texas at San Antonio

In a unique opportunity, selections from an archive of Mexican cookbook manuscripts dating back to the 18th century are now available online thanks to a recent initiative in Texas.

As of mid-February, 50 of the fewer than 100 manuscript cookbooks at The University of Texas at San Antonio’s Libraries Special Collections have been digitized for reading across platforms, from smartphones to tablets. The recipes reflect diverse culinary styles, regions and time periods in Mexican history, with the oldest volume from 1789 and the most recent from the 1970s.

“We try to be fairly broad in our selection,” said special collections librarian Stephanie Noell. “Pretty much every region is represented in our collection. … We try to make sure we pull from across the board, not just one specific region.”

The previously unpublished cookbooks are part of the overall Mexican Cookbook Collection of over 2,000 volumes at the university library. The core of the collection is the 550 cookbooks from longtime San Antonio librarian Laurie Gruenbeck’s personal collection, which she accumulated over three decades of traveling across Texas and Mexico and donated to the library in 2001.

Last year, food writer Diana Kennedy donated her personal research archives, which include the sole non-manuscript cookbook that has been digitized: a copy of the 1828 Arte nuevo de cocina y repostería acomodado al uso mexicano, a Mexican cookbook published in New York. Noell calls this book “incredibly rare.”

Various recipes are found in the cookbook of Doña María Ramona Quixano of Silao, Guanajuato, dated 1808. It is one of the oldest in the collection. The University of Texas at San Antonio

Cookbook manuscripts are also rare, Noell said. In most, she explained, “people would write down recipes and not anticipate [other] people would put them in a collection and preserve them for hundreds of years. They don’t come up very often. The ones we have are absolute gems.”

The two oldest — the 1789 volume from Jalisco and an 1808 manuscript from Guanajuato — are the only colonial cookbook manuscripts in the collection and the first to be digitized. The author of the 1789 cookbook wrote her name as “Doña Ignacita.”

“Of course, the older the cookbook, the harder it is to really determine who this person was,” Noell said. “There are sort of whole sets from the same family, a documentation of generations of a family. It really depends on the cookbook. Sometimes it’s just a first name.”

Even if the authors’ identities might be unclear, there are some clear surprises in the recipes.

“One of the first surprising discoveries was turtle soup, which I hadn’t seen in a cookbook before,” Noell said. Another surprise, she said, was “brains in fish sauce,” written in English as part of a recently digitized bilingual cookbook.

In some of the 19th-century cookbooks, there are “a lot of tamal recipes” that use rice instead of masa, Noell said. “I have not had tamales with rice filling,” she said. “Now they’re on my bucket list.”

An 1884 cookbook by Sister Guadalupe Pérez of Acatzingo, Puebla. — An 1884 cookbook by Guadalupe Pérez of Acatzingo, Puebla. The University of Texas at San Antonio

Digitizing these historic volumes is a complex and ongoing process. Library staff must use an overhead scanner, not a flatbed one. An overhead scanner will “keep everything in place with the text visible and not squash the book,” Noell explained, noting that individual texts present specific challenges, such as the 1789 cookbook, which has a torn cover page and some curled edges. The digitized cookbooks are then uploaded to a database.

The archive is a culinary excursion through Mexican history, representing a gradual blending of European and indigenous cuisine, such as in gazpacho recipes.

“What you see in a lot of early cookbooks is a heavy European influence,” Noell said. “But in the 18th century, really only within one decade or so that the [1789] cookbook was written, you start seeing gazpacho with tomato, a New World ingredient. That’s not how it was made in the old country.”

She notes, also, that “a lot of early cookbooks are very dessert-heavy. … Back in the 19th century, people really liked dessert. It’s a safe bet some [recipes] were good.”

She likes a relatively more recent recipe, from a 20th-century cookbook written by a German immigrant. “He has a five-minute flan in there,” she said. “I was blown away. … How can I make flan in five minutes in a pressure cooker?” And, she said, “some cookbooks have a whole section for bebidas. You can get some great drinks.”

Noell said that she “would like to get as many of these public domain cookbooks digitized as possible.”

“It’s a really fascinating collection to go through,” she said. “There’s something different every time you go in.”

7 dead in weekend of terror in Córdoba and Huatusco, Veracruz

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February 26, 2020

A bus and a military vehicle collide during weekend violence in Córdoba.

Four police officers and three suspected criminals were killed in the central Veracruz municipalities of Córdoba and Huatusco on Saturday, sowing fear among residents who largely remained indoors on Sunday.

The first incident of violence came when an armed group began shooting at a state police station in the city of Huatusco at approximately 5:00 a.m. Saturday, the newspaper El Sol de Córdoba reported.

Police officers pursued the aggressors in a chase that ended at about 7:30 a.m. in the community of Chavaxtla. A gunfight ensued that left three suspected criminals, including one woman, dead.

At 3:20 p.m., another armed group attacked a municipal police watchtower near the Shangri-La Arch in Córdoba, killing two officers. At the same time, two state police officers were shot and killed while traveling on the La Luz Palotal-Los Cerezos highway in Córdoba.

Federal, state and municipal police as well as the National Guard launched an operation in response to the simultaneous attacks that resulted in the arrest of two suspects.

The violence in Huatusco and Córdoba followed the abduction and murder of a man believed to be linked to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) on February 19. Córdoba municipal police are allegedly responsible for the forced disappearance and death of Gabriel Navarro Aceves, whose body was found last Thursday.

As a result of Saturday’s violence, most Córdoba residents chose to stay at home on Sunday, El Sol de Córdoba reported.

“We’re living through a wave of violence … and we’re no longer free,” said a woman identified only as Leticia. “We were walking around [the city] yesterday [Saturday] and heard about everything that happened and went home.”

The streets of central Córdoba were largely empty on Sunday, a rare sight for a day on which locals normally flock to the city’s downtown area to go shopping and spend time with family and friends. Some cultural and sporting events, including men’s and women’s soccer matches, were canceled and many businesses closed due to state authorities’ activation of a code red alert, which indicates a high threat of violence.

Security was beefed up in Córdoba, with helicopters assisting surveillance and marines deployed to the area. Municipal secretary Alfredo Hernández Ávila said that local authorities would ask for the bolstered security measures to remain in place for the foreseeable future.

Writing in the newspaper El Universal, security analyst Alejandro Hope said that Saturday’s violence had left a “trail of terror” in its wake.

He noted that Veracruz Governor Cuitláhuac García said Monday that the situation was under control and that state authorities had identified the aggressors. Hope also acknowledged the state government’s announcement that two suspects had been arrested and that three pick-up trucks and several weapons had been seized.

However, the analyst said that he doubted that the issue of violence in central Veracruz had been resolved.

Hope contended that the criminal groups responsible for Saturday’s violence achieved a “double victory,” explaining that they directly challenged state forces and didn’t pay a particularly high price, and that they effectively imposed a curfew on a city of 200,000 people.

“For now, they are winning the psychological war,” Hope wrote, adding that reversing the criminals’ victory will take more than government statements and the arrest of a couple of suspected murderers.

He then set out a four-point strategy that he described as the minimum required for authorities to wrest back control from organized crime.

Firstly, authorities need to implement “particularly vigorous” actions against not just the direct perpetrators of the violence but the specific group (believed to be the CJNG) behind the attacks, Hope wrote. He said that authorities must prioritize capturing the group’s leaders, attacking their income sources and transferring certain prisoners to federal prisons.

Secondly, Hope wrote that a bolstered security presence is required on the streets of Córdoba and neighboring municipalities, even if it is only a provisional measure.

Thirdly, he said that “the reactivation of accountability mechanisms” is necessary, explaining that security task forces and citizens’ crime-watch committees can help to link authorities to some sectors of civil society as well as generate trustworthy information, among other roles.

“At other times and in other spaces (Ciudad Juárez between 2010 and 2012, for example), a mechanism of this nature was key to the recovery of a certain normality,” Hope wrote.

Fourthly, “a campaign to take back the streets” is needed, the analyst said, asserting that all the cancelled events should be rescheduled and that more activities for residents should be added to the Córdoba social calendar. He also said that special security operations could be carried out in areas with a high concentration of restaurants and bars.

“If the authorities don’t like these ideas, come up with others,” Hope wrote. “It’s not fair to allow an important city in a crucial state to become a hostage of terror imposed by a few criminals. … If things remain the same, there will be more Córdobas. A lot more.”

Source. El Sol de Córdoba (sp), El Universal (sp)

Scientists rule out theory that a new volcano is arising in Michoacán

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February 26, 2020

The area in which the earthquakes have been recorded.

Increased seismic activity in Michoacán since the start of last month will not lead to the birth of a new volcano, National Autonomous University (UNAM) scientists have concluded.

There have been more than 3,000 earthquakes with magnitudes between 2.6 and 4.1 since January 5 in an area northwest of Uruapan near the Paricutín Volcano, according to the National Meteorological Service.

About 50 experts from several universities and government agencies traveled to the area to carry out tests to determine whether the earthquake swarm – as a sequence of similar magnitude seismic events occurring in a local area in a relatively short period of time is known – is related to tectonic or magmatic events.

A magmatic event occurs when magma – the molten or semi-molten material from which igneous rocks are formed – moves horizontally or vertically beneath the surface of the earth. Large volumes of magma can potentially break through the surface and form a volcano, as occurred in Michoacán in 1943 with the sudden emergence of the Paricutín Volcano.

Servando de la Cruz Reyna, a researcher in the volcanology department of the UNAM Institute of Geophysics, said that magma has been identified as the most likely cause of the earthquakes in Michoacán but ruled out the possibility of the birth of a volcano because the fracturing of the crust of the Earth has been minimal.

“It is suggested that the source of the force is the movement of magma but at depths of 10 kilometers or more. This is very common in volcanic areas,” he said.

De la Cruz said that scientists have concluded that most of the magma movements are horizontal rather than vertical and for that reason the molten material won’t ascend to the surface of the earth.

Hugo Delgado, director of the Institute of Geophysics, explained that the expert team led by the UNAM scientists carried out a range of studies before ruling out the possibility of the birth of a volcano. They included taking measurements with magnetometers, measuring the levels of carbon dioxide in the soil, testing for the presence of radon, analyzing samples of water collected in the area and looking at deformations in the surface of the Earth.

De la Cruz said that earthquake swarms have occurred in the same region of Michoacán on four occasions but only the first series of earthquakes resulted in the formation of a volcano.

“The first was in 1943 and culminated in the birth of the Paricutín Volcano. Subsequently, there were three others in 1997, 1999 and 2006,” he said, adding that the characteristics of the 2006 earthquake swarm were similar to those of the current one.

Carlos Gutiérrez Martínez, an official with the National Disaster Prevention Center, said that there has been constant communication between the federal government and the UNAM Institute of Geophysics as the studies of the earthquake swarm were taking place.

He explained that government officials have attended technical meetings with the scientists and have been careful not to overreact to the increased frequency of earthquakes in the area.

Source: El Financiero (sp)

Testing underway for presence of coronavirus; still no cases found

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February 26, 2020

The Ministry of Health announced on Monday that it is testing over 5,000 blood samples from across the country for presence of the coronavirus known as Covid-19.

Government epidemiologists said that the samples tested negative for the seasonal and A/H1N1 strains of the flu, and the results of the Covid-19 tests will be released this week.

In light of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) announcement that the world should prepare itself for a possible pandemic of the virus, the Health Ministry’s epidemiology department said that it would update the country’s response to the international outlook.

“So far we have no intention of joining Italy and other countries in their unnecessary travel warnings, as happened in China,” said José Luis Alomía Zegarra, director of epidemiology for the Ministry of Health.

He added that such decisions “will depend on the evolution or containment of [the virus].”

Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell announced on Tuesday that there was still no sign of Covid-19 in the country.

“The coronavirus has not arrived in Mexico. We have [investigated] 18 suspicious cases and each and every one of them has been ruled out,” he told reporters at the president’s morning press conference.

He said that the Pan American Health Organization recognized Mexico as the first country to adopt a protection protocol after Monday’s announcement to test the samples that came up negative for other strains of the flu.

“And we’re constantly looking for new alternatives to make this protocol more efficient. It’s a general sampling. We received over 5,000 samples of all of the acute respiratory diseases [in the country],” he said, adding that so far results have come up negative.

To date, cases of Covid-19 have been reported in 29 countries outside of China. The number of cases and deaths is expected to rise, considering that the original source of the disease is still unknown and cases of person-to-person transmission have been documented.

More information is needed to determine the incubation period of the virus and whether or not transmission can occur from asymptomatic people.

The WHO reports that the most common symptoms of Covid-19 are fever, fatigue and a dry cough. Some patients experience general malaise, nasal congestion, runny nose, sore throat and diarrhea.

Patients have recuperated without any specific treatment in as many as 85% of cases, but those who experience difficulty breathing require specialized treatment. The most at-risk people are the elderly with conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and pre-existing heart disease.

As of Wednesday, there were more than 81,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide, and at least 2,700 people have died. Tuesday’s figures revealed that for the first time there were more new cases outside China than inside. Chinese officials reported 411 new infections. In the rest of the world there were 427.

Sources: Milenio (sp), El Universal (sp), New York Times (en)

Staff charge negligence at overwhelmed Hidalgo hospital

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February 26, 2020

Overwhelmed staff and weary patients at a state-run hospital in Pachuca, Hidalgo, have accused authorities of negligence and demanded that they open a section of the hospital constructed three years ago to deal with the problem.

They reported that emergency room patients regularly wait up to 20 hours to receive treatment in the facility operated by ISSSTE, the State Workers’ Social Security Institute.

Hospital staff claimed that the situation is unbearable as they receive as many as 60 patients per day and there are not enough beds for such numbers.

The situation has led to patients regularly being treated in waiting room chairs or on the floor. Those who get a bed, they said, are “lucky.”

They said that the situation could be remedied by putting into service an internal medicine ward that was built three years ago on the second floor of the hospital. The area has 59 oxygen-equipped beds, but only 25 have been made available as administrators say there is insufficient staff to attend to all of them.

The situation has led to cases of maltreatment, such as that of a 48-year-old patient identified only by the initials G. H. R., who was diagnosed with bronchopneumonia. He was made to sit in a chair day and night, despite needing to be on oxygen.

The patient’s family tried to speak with hospital director José Antonio McNaught Gutiérrez, but were denied access to his office by a police officer.

The patient was finally taken to the intensive care unit on February 11, but it was too late. He died that day.

Hospital staff said that the man’s death attested to the need for a solution to the problem and that the overcrowding only gets worse on the weekends.

They said that such issues as the intolerably long waiting times in the emergency room have been hidden from federal and state authorities when they make observational visits, claiming that they are only shown the parts of the hospital that are functioning adequately.

Source: El Universal (sp)

It’s not just Mexico’s forests that need protecting for butterfly migration

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February 26, 2020

A monarch butterfly, under threat by more than depleted forests.

Mexico, the United States and Canada must share responsibility for the conservation of the monarch butterfly, according to a biologist who warns that the insect’s North American migratory path is at risk of becoming a thing of the past.

Víctor Sánchez-Cordero, a researcher at the National Autonomous University’s Institute of Biology and Mexico’s lead representative on a tri-national scientific committee that studies the monarch, said that the butterflies’ route from southeastern Canada to the fir tree forests of Michoacán and México state is under threat.

He blames the excessive use of herbicides, changes in the way land is used, climate change and a reduction in the availability of nectar and pollen.

“The commitment to conserve this migratory phenomenon not only focuses on Mexico; it’s a shared responsibility between our country, Canada and the United States,” Sánchez-Cordero said.

The researcher, who along with his team developed a system to monitor the migration of the monarch, said that there is a misconception that the most important – almost exclusive – factor in ensuring the continuation of the phenomenon is the conservation of forests in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve (RBMM), located about 100 kilometers northwest of Mexico City.

That idea “has placed great international pressure on Mexico,” Sánchez-Cordero said before adding that he and his team published an article in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science that shows that the decline in the number of monarch butterflies migrating to Mexico is not due to deforestation in the RBMM.

Deforestation has been drastically reduced in the past 10 years but butterfly numbers have continued to decline, he said.

“The dramatic reduction in the density of monarch butterflies that arrive at overwintering sites in Mexico doesn’t correlate with the loss of forest coverage, which shows that this factor is not responsible for the population reduction. … Other hypotheses to explain the decrease must be sought,” Sánchez-Cordero said.

One possible cause for the decline, he explained, is that the excessive use of herbicides is killing milkweed, a plant that is a main food source for monarch butterflies and on which females lay their eggs. Less nectar and pollen in the United States and Canada as a result of deforestation is another possible cause, Sánchez-Cordero said.

He added that large numbers of migrating butterflies have perished in Texas and the northeast of Mexico due to drought linked to climate change.

To conserve the migratory phenomenon of the monarch – butterflies fly some 4,500 kilometers to reach Mexican forests from Canada over the course of three to four generations – a network of conservation areas along their migration routes needs to be developed, Sánchez-Cordero said. He also said that the routes followed by the butterflies should be declared protected areas.

“A new conservation paradigm is needed. … It’s something that we [Mexico, the United States and Canada] should build together,” the researcher said.

Source: El Financiero (sp)

Court freezes bank accounts of opponents of Nayarit condominium project

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February 26, 2020

A protest against the San Pancho condominium project.

Residents and public officials in Nayarit involved in protesting the construction of a condominium complex on federally protected coastline have had their personal bank accounts frozen for over three months thanks to a lawsuit brought by the developer.

Despite holding protests as far back as 2018, opponents of Punta Paraíso, a luxury development in San Francisco — San Pancho, to locals — have watched Lemmus Real Estate continue with the project with no apparent regulation from the federal government.

They claim that the company has illegally built on almost 1,200 square meters of the Federal Zone, or Zofemat, a 20-meter wide strip of coastline meant to be protected by the federal environmental protection agency Profepa.

“We met with [President López Obrador] two times, we spoke with his super-delegate [in Nayarit], … we spoke with [Nayarit Governor Antonio Echevarría García] … and of course we protested openly,” said local activist Erik Saracho in an interview with Mexico News Daily.

After more than two years of fighting the development and seeing their demands that the law be applied in San Pancho go unheeded by any regulatory agency, Saracho and others involved in the opposition found themselves in a difficult situation at the end of last year.

Protesters on the beach in front of the condo development.

In late November, he and five other protesters woke to find that they had no access to their personal bank accounts. Without any official notice from a governmental or legal entity, the activists were told by their banks that their accounts had been frozen due to a lawsuit.

Carlos Lemus of Lemmus Real Estate told a press conference that same month that the company had sued the activists for defamation, claiming that their actions had cost Lemmus Real Estate over 12 million pesos (US $629,000).

“They froze our accounts by means that we consider to be corrupt,” said Ismael Duñalds, a state lawmaker from Bahía de Banderas, the municipality in which San Pancho is located.

“We were never notified. … We were not part of a case in which we could have defended ourselves. … We only found out when our banks told us that our accounts were frozen and there was nothing we could do because of the judge’s ruling,” he said.

“If that is the case, … then [freezing their accounts] would be illegal,” said Mexico City-based environmental attorney Raziel Villegas, who is not associated with the case. The lawyers representing Duñalds and the other activists were unable to comment, as it is still in litigation.

He said that the defendants should have known they were being sued and been given the chance to defend themselves in court before such actions were taken.

SP indicates the location of the condominiums. The red line shows the boundary of the Federal Zone.

The activists appear to be up against a formidable opponent with no apparent accountability. One said that Lemus personally threatened to put her in jail if she did not stop protesting.

When contacted by Mexico News Daily, Lemus said that the claims of frozen bank accounts were “false statements” and declined to comment further.

Judge Manuel Edgardo Servín Orozco of the Fourth Civil Court of Jalisco, who issued the ruling, likewise turned down requests for comment, as did Profepa.

Duñalds and the others know that they are up against a formidable opponent — Saracho himself called their case a “long shot” — but they haven’t lost hope.

“If we don’t [protest Punta Paraíso], it will set a precedent for companies to do what they want with the rest of the beach in San Pancho,” he said.

Local painter and landlady Elvía García, one of the six whose accounts have been frozen, said that she and the others are “very positive” and continue to fight, because “the situation puts the rest of the beach at risk.”

“We are here, and we’re going to see this through to the end,” she said.

Mexico News Daily

AMLO rejects congressional bid to bring back capital punishment

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February 26, 2020