Copper goods from Michoacán among products at Mexico City fair.
The Mexico In the Heart of Mexico tourism and culture fair has returned to the zócalo in Mexico City, bringing together dancers, chefs, artisans and tourism representatives from every state in the country.
The visual centerpiece of the fair is the Great Pyramid, a temporary exhibition space housing some of the most iconic archaeological pieces from the museums of the city’s Historic Center.
Visitors can satisfy their grumbling stomachs at the Kitchen Pavilion, which offers traditional dishes from all across the country and tasty delights from some of the most renowned Mexican chefs.
Mexico’s numerous folkloric dance traditions will be on display on the main stage, as well as concerts, art exhibitions and other cultural events.
But visitors won’t want to miss the artisans’ tent that organizers are calling The Serpent of Quetzalcóatl. Over 500 artisans from all corners of Mexico have been invited to the fair to sell their unique folk art and other products.
The stalls are filled with everything from embroidered blouses called huipiles to guitars made in Michoacán to bacanora, an agave distillate from Sonora similar to mezcal and tequila. The list of quality handmade products for sale is virtually endless.
There will also be tourism representatives from each state to provide information on the Magical Towns, festivals, gastronomy and other attractions for tourists in the places they call home.
The fair is already in full swing in the Mexico City zócalo and will run through next week, ending on Sunday, March 1. It is open from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. each day and admission is free.
Charros in their unique outfits at Tlaxcala Carnival.
With rich traditions, brilliantly colored costumes and masked revelers parading through the streets, carnival is in full swing in Tlaxcala this week.
The celebration began on Thursday with an inaugural parade in Tlaxcala city in which 80 troupes of costumed dancers romped down the streets on a route that included various government buildings, public plazas, the Tlaxcala Art Museum and the bullfighting ring.
The party continues through the weekend until Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, which begins the Catholic observance of Lent.
A signature feature of such festivities in Tlaxcala are the capering huehues (“old men” in Náhuatl), dancers who don colorful costumes and masks representing old people. In total, the carnival celebrations will include 387 troupes of huehues from 40 municipalities across the state.
The biggest party is in the capital, Tlaxcala, but visitors can join in the festivities in nearly every town and city in the state.
Pantola is a good place in which to observe the fiestas. Here troupes perform the dance around la garrocha, or maypole, as well as that of La Jota, a traditional dance from Spain.
The charros, or cowboys, in Tlaxcala don costumes totally distinct from others called by the same name elsewhere in the country. Instead of the traditional cowboy outfit most recognize as the uniform of the mariachi band, these charros wear frilled capes, huehue masks and hats adorned with huge, colorful feathers. Their dance is a must-see at Tlaxcala’s carnival.
The fun may have already begun, but there are still lots of parades, workshops, photography competitions, drawing classes for children and other events to celebrate carnival in Tlaxcala before it’s all over on Wednesday.
But if you can’t make it to Tlaxcala, there are carnival festivities going on in Veracruz and Mazatlán as well.
Students at a secondary school in Sonora have invented a building block made of recycled materials with which they plan to annex a bedroom onto the house of a fellow classmate from a low-income family.
Calling their ecology club Jóvenes Delfines (Dolphin Youth), the students from the coastal town of Bahía de Kino, Sonora, created Confib (from the Spanish words for “fibrous concrete”), a block made from recycled paper, sand and cement.
Their biology teacher, José Valenzuela, has worked on the project with several generations of students for over 10 years. He said that they get the paper from former students who donate old books and notebooks they no longer use.
“We tear the books up with our hands and then we soak them in water. Then we put this into a type of blender we created ourselves. After that, we filter out the residues and mix it with sand and cement. We use around 15 textbooks to make 20 blocks,” said Valenzuela.
The student for whom they plan to build a new bedroom is Ángel, whose entire family lives in a crowded one-room house.
“Ángel comes from a low-income family. … My students told me last year about the needs of their classmate. We went to visit his father and proposed the idea of building a new room based on our project,” said Valenzuela.
He and his team of students currently have around 40% of the materials they need to build a room for Ángel. They will need about 3,000 more blocks to begin building, and Valenzuela is confident that they will reach their goal, despite a lack of funds and materials.
The main obstacle is the cement, as it is the most expensive material to obtain. Valenzuela hopes other institutions will join them to expand the project and make the blocks a more viable construction material option in the region.
“What we’re proposing … is for other institutions to come and take advantage of our area, which has a rich ecosystem,” he said.
Jóvenes Delfines boasts a membership of about 20 students. They said they chose the name “because we are from a fishing region and dolphins are one of the most intelligent animals in the world.”
Paul Salopek leads his mule in eastern Turkey. John Stanmeyer. Courtesy Out of Eden Walk.
Several years ago National Geographic magazine published what struck me as an absolutely astounding story. It stated that every single human being on the face of the earth today is a descendant of a rather small number of people (perhaps only a few hundred) who emigrated out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, embarking on a trek that would quite literally take them to the very ends of the earth. This conclusion was based on advances in genetics and DNA samples taken worldwide.
The fact that we are all descended from Africans had impressed me, but I was especially interested in the fact that most of our ancestors had crossed the Bab Al Mandeb Strait over to the Arabian Peninsula and worked their way north through what is now Saudi Arabia.
This resonated with my own 13-year study of Saudi Arabia’s caves. I knew that the principal sources for water and shelter (from heat, cold and especially from wind) along vast stretches of western Arabia are lava tubes: caves up to 20 kilometers long and 40 meters wide which are located (sometimes in great numbers) among the 80,000 square kilometers of lava fields near which many of those early forebears must surely have passed.
That map of mankind’s great migration must have impacted many people around the globe, among them a man named Paul Salopek, one of the world’s great journalists and two-time winner of the coveted Pulitzer Prize. Salopek really took the story of humanity’s long walk to heart.
Following clues provided by DNA studies, he mapped out a route all the way from Ethiopia to Patagonia — 33,796 kilometers — and proposed to walk all that distance (except for a couple of short stretches over water) during what he first imagined would take seven years of his life. That was seven years ago, and he has still not reached the halfway point on his odyssey.
Proposed route for Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk.
Why did he want to do this?
“Long-term storytelling,” he replied. “It’s not an athletic event. … I want to examine the great issues of our day at three miles an hour … to watch the world around me and to get into people’s lives.”
Salopek started his journey in January 2013, crossed the Red Sea and, accompanied by a Bedu and two pack camels, slowly walked his way north through Saudi Arabia, always talking to local people, listening to their worries, hopes and dreams, and reporting short, fascinating dispatches every few days.
“I am on a journey,” he says. “I am in pursuit of an idea, a story, a chimera, perhaps a folly. I am chasing ghosts. Starting in humanity’s birthplace in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, I am retracing, on foot, the pathways of the ancestors who first discovered the Earth at least 60,000 years ago. This remains by far our greatest voyage.”
“We know so little about them. … They straddled the strait called Bab el Mandeb — the “gate of grief” that cleaves Africa from Arabia — and then exploded, in just 2,500 generations, a geological heartbeat, to the remotest habitable fringe of the globe. Millennia behind, I follow.”
National Geographic cover, December 2013. Seven years were not enough.
When I contacted the indefatigable walker, he noticed I was living in Jalisco and told me that he also had lived here:
“I grew up in Zapopan, on the fringe of Colonia Seattle,” he said. “I would go drop fishing lines down holes in Agua Azul Park to fish for rats. Took buses into the Barranca de Oblatos to go hunting with my neighbor Lalo’s hand-made flintlock. It was a fairly wild area back then. We used river stones as ammo and never hit anything. … My playgrounds were the guamuchil trees, garbage-strewn lots and lush green corn fields around the edge of the city. Some of my boyhood friends died young of curable diseases. We had fun.”
Salopek’s Mexican adventures didn’t stop there.
“Some years ago, I rode a mule from Douglas, Arizona, to Michoacán, down the spine of the Sierra Madre. A memorable journey.”The story of this 2,090-kilometer journey, which retraced the route traversed by Norwegian explorer Carl Lumholtz in 1890, is told — with reflections on Salopek’s boyhood in Mexico — in the June 2000 edition of National Geographic magazine.
In “Literature as Lucha Libre,” a lesson on writing for The American Scholar, Salopek reflects on a perhaps surprising aspect of his youth in Colonia Seattle:
“My greatest literary inspiration at this time was a comic book called Kalimán. Kalimán was a vaguely Sikh superhero in white tights who spoke Spanish. (These) adventures introduced the notions of cliffhangers and the second act. Kalimán was always going into trances, slowing his metabolism down into deathlike comas. Even then, as a child, this struck me as the perfect Mexican super power, a defense against 1 billion years of fatalism.
In Ethiopia, A’urta (Traded for a Cow) gets a reassuring head scratch. John Stanmeyer. Courtesy Out of Eden Walk.
“Soon I was drawing my own. My cartoons featured schizoid child geniuses who lived on desert islands and a race of woolly mammoths who lived underground. I rented out my comics, thus discovering editing and royalties. Kids in huaraches paid me 20 centavos to sit on the dirt sidewalk outside my house, page through stacks of my crude narratives and offer mostly negative textual analyses.”
I asked Salopek how much his years in Mexico had influenced his life.
“Mexico informs everything I do,” he replied, “because it’s my childhood. And like childhood, that Mexico of mule-plowed fields is fading fast. Maybe it’s gone. I grew up between 1870 and 1970. For better or worse NAFTA closed that gap. ‘El México que se nos fue’ and all that. It occurs to me from time to time that maybe I’m out looking for the older Mexico elsewhere. Don’t we all do this? And isn’t it always a lunatic enterprise?”
While examining the great issues of our day at three miles an hour, Salopek also has time to appreciate nature as some of our ancient forefathers must have. His latest dispatch comes from the hills of India’s northeastern frontier. He had been told that “in this place, there is nothing.”
Here are a few of Salopek’s comments on that “nothing”:
“In Umrangso, the tree frogs announced their love in the xylophone scales of bamboo wind chimes. I listened to gibbons rocket through the treetops along the Jiri River, dislodging showers of leaves and whooping like soccer hooligans. And everywhere, I overheard the hills speaking the sibilant dialects of unbounded water. The ionic hum of waterfalls. The white hiss of streams. The hard-knuckled rap of monsoon rain on roof tin. Even atop the highest ridges — where I expected nothing but damp wind — came the faint, quavering sigh of wild rivers far below.”
[soliloquy id="101827"]
Paul Salopek’s dispatches are a delight to read. Some are pure poetry, some show us how people in the most remote places are resonating with problems that impact our everyday lives. An example is his story of Robin Naiding, mild-mannered headman of the Indian village of Baga Dima, who was affected by the global crisis of conscience about the use of plastic straws and decided to start making them out of bamboo, resulting in a business which has won the hearts of thirsty Indians in megacities like Delhi and Bangalore.
Salopek has logged over 10,000 miles on his storytelling project and after 18 months in northern India, is about to enter China. Some time ago it became clear to him that his odyssey was going to take far longer than the seven years he had originally projected. Instead of speeding up, Salopek decided to slow down. By now he had discovered that good journalism, like love and gourmet cooking, must never be rushed.
This is slow journalism, par excellence.
You will find Paul Salopek’s recent and earlier dispatches on National Geographic’s Out of Eden page.
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, for more than 30 years and is the author of A Guide to West Mexico’s Guachimontones and Surrounding Area and co-author of Outdoors in Western Mexico. More of his writing can be found on his website.
The mayor of Taxco, Guerrero, Marcos Parra, center, addresses members of the LeBaron family and activist José Díaz Navarro. Lexie Harrison-Cripps
In the face of ongoing death threats and the belief that those behind a brutal attack on their family in Sonora in November will never be prosecuted, members of the LeBaron family continue to campaign for peace and justice throughout Mexico.
On November 4 three members of the extended LeBaron family were traveling with their children when their three cars were attacked near La Mora, Sonora. Of the 17 women and children on the road that day, the three mothers and six of their children were killed in the attacks, including a pair of 8-month-old twins.
The LeBaron family still don’t know the reason for the November attack but believe it to have been carried out by the cartel known as La Línea. Local press reported that Mario “El Mayo” H., leader of the gang, was arrested in December for the attack. But the Attorney General’s Office would only confirm that as of January 7 three people had been arrested in the investigation. Their names were not released.
Because some members of the LeBaron family are joint Mexican-U.S. citizens, the U.S. media and government are watching the situation. President López Obrador has granted the family police protection during their peace and justice campaign. That is likely an attempt to shield Mexico from the negative attention that would be associated with any further attacks on the family, according to Bryan LeBaron, the cousin of Rhonita Maria Miller, one of the mothers slain in the November attack.
López Obrador is facing increasing pressure to demonstrate that his security policy — “hugs not bullets” — is working in the face of rising crime levels and recent security blunders such as the bungled attempt to capture Ovidio Guzmán, the son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in October.
Federal Police officers guard the LeBaron family as they meet people in Chilapa, Guerrero. Lexie Harrison-Cripps
The executive secretary of the National Public Security System recorded 35,588 homicides and femicides in 2019, the highest annual murder rate on record. The Mexico Peace Index 2019 estimates that the cost of such violence amounted to US $268 billion in 2018, or 24% of GDP.
Bryan LeBaron acknowledged that it was unfair for his family to have federal protection when towns and villages also need it. However, he said, it gives the family an unprecedented opportunity to shine a light on the issue. To ignore this opportunity would be “cowardice,” explained LeBaron, who is considering moving his family closer to Mexico City to enable him to campaign on a full time basis.
Julian LeBaron’s decade-long fight against the cartels began in 2009 when he refused to pay a US $1-million ransom for the release of his brother Erik. Miraculously, Erik was released unharmed a few days later. But Julian’s brother Benjamin and brother-in-law, Luis Widmar, did not share the same good fortune and were brutally murdered two months later.
That ultimately led Julian LeBaron to join the poet and peace activist Javier Sicilia in the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity.
A little over a decade later, in January 2020, dozens of family representatives once again joined Sicilia in a peace march from Cuernavaca, Morelos, to Mexico City. Then in February, despite cartel threats and road blocks, four members of the LeBaron family joined activist José Díaz Navarro and 300 protesters in Chilapa, Guerrero, for the first peace march in five years.
Díaz became an activist following the murder and decapitation of his brothers in Chilapa in November 2014. His five-year campaign for justice — during which several attempts on his life were made — has culminated in 12 arrest warrants, but so far no suspects have been detained. That detail is unsurprising given that almost 90% of murderers avoid arrest, according to the NGO Impunidad Cero (Zero Impunity).
Adrian LeBaron speaks at a press conference in Iguala, Guerrero. With him are Julian LeBaron, center, and Bryan LeBaron. Lexie Harrison-Cripps
With that in mind, Adrian LeBaron predicts that his daughter’s killers will never be prosecuted for murder.
His concerns center around how municipal police chiefs are appointed. One of those arrested for his daughter’s murder, the director of public security in the municipality of Janos near the location of the attack, has held the position for 13 years through various municipal administrations, he explained. LeBaron’s concern is that police chiefs can only survive that long with cartel support.
Many local news outlets have proposed reasons for the attacks, including cartel involvement, a family history of violence and local water disputes. The initial reports from Security Secretary Alfonzo Durazo suggested that the victims were caught in the crossfire between two warring cartels. None of these theories have made any headway. What is clear, however, is that the LeBaron family and many other victims of violence in Mexico are subjected to a culture of victim-blaming rather than examining the criminals causing the violence.
Blame is also happening at the state and international levels. López Obrador blames the increasing violence in Mexico on the “corrupt conservatives” of the previous government. Christopher Landau, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, addressed international blame in December when he said, “it’s easy to lose yourself, one country blaming another. … We will never beat [the criminals] if we are always fighting and blaming each other.”
Meanwhile, the LeBarons are aware that their lives continue to be in danger. What they are doing is unpopular with the cartels. Despite this, they are undeterred, confirmed Bryan LeBaron, who remains surprisingly positive and proactive. “We are not looking to show what is wrong,” he explained, “but instead ask what we can do.”
He explained that they plan to visit other areas of Mexico to better understand local issues. They are working with senior members of the judiciary to consider legal reforms that would combat corruption and the associated impunity rates.
Finally, they are looking at how technology could empower citizens, advance investigations and ultimately take back control of Mexico.
Foundation directors and students celebrate a new agreement to further the teaching of English.
A pair of prominent educational foundations in Mexico have forged an alliance to make English language instruction more accessible to young students in vulnerable sectors of the country.
The Anglo Mexican Foundation and the Fundación Mano Amiga signed an agreement to promote the certification of English teachers in at-risk areas located in 14 states.
The pesident of The Anglo Mexican Foundation, Víctor Treviño, said at the signing ceremony that the country has not taken advantage of its proximity to the United States, citing that only around 10% of Mexicans speak English.
“If Mexicans knew English, we would spare ourselves many problems,” he said.
He highlighted the importance of gaining command of the language for the cognitive and professional development of the next generations of Mexican professionals.
He said that there is no opportune age for acquiring a new language, citing a myth that it becomes impossible to do once someone reaches a certain age.
“The human brain is conditioned to learn several languages, so we shouldn’t believe that there exists a [favorable] age for doing so. Adults as well as children can learn English, even senior citizens,” he said.
The United Kingdom’s ambassador to Mexico, Corin Robertson, was the guest of honor at the event. She shared her experiences as a diplomat with the Mano Amiga students and others in attendance.
Fundación Mano Amiga executive director Enrique Castañeda Téllez Girón said that the network of schools in his foundation favors a holistic education for children and young people in order to effect positive change in society.
The foundation currently works with over 15,000 students in its 21 schools located in 14 states. He said that the agreement will have a direct impact on more than 10,000 families who live in vulnerable communities.
For The Anglo Foundation CEO Anthony McCarthy the strategic program represents the organization’s commitment to creating new educational opportunities in Mexico.
The foundation has dedicated itself to English language instruction and strengthening cultural ties between Mexico and Great Britain since 1943. Its headquarters are located in the San Rafael neighborhood of Mexico City.
The Oaxaca government is betting that socks will be the solution to emigration from a municipality in the state’s Mixteca region.
On Thursday Governor Alejandro Murat officially opened a garment factory in Jaltepec where workers will primarily focus on manufacturing socks.
The primary aim of the government’s 10-million-peso (US $530,000) investment in the factory, an existing facility that has been fitted out with new machinery, is to provide jobs to local residents and thus deter emigration to other parts of the country and the United States. It is expected to create some 300 direct and 600 indirect jobs.
Murat acknowledged that when he visited Jaltepec three years ago, residents complained to him about the lack of job opportunities due to the closure of the town’s factory, its main source of employment. With few other options available to them, many residents chose to leave Jaltepec to try their luck elsewhere, primarily central Mexico and the United States.
In that context, the governor made refitting the factory and establishing it as a social enterprise, managed by the community, a commitment that he took to the 2016 state election.
“A lot of families wanted to improve their own incomes, and the best way to empower a family, a person and a municipality is by creating sources of employment,” Murat said.
He urged residents to manage the factory well to ensure that it fulfills its potential, suggesting that profits should be reinvested to expand the plant, create more jobs, widen distribution and generate more sales.
“For that, we’re going to help you,” the governor said.
For his part, state Economy Minister Juan Pablo Guzmán Cobián said that annual sales of about 1 million pesos (US $53,000) are already forecast because the factory’s products will be sold in large chain stores such as Walmart.
Mexico City attracted more new foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2019 than the combined total of the next three most successful states, while new FDI in Tlaxcala surged by more than 1,500%.
Data from the Economy Ministry (SE) shows that new FDI in the capital reached US $3.5 billion last year, an increase of 61% compared to the $2.17 billion it captured in 2018. The figure is more than triple the $1.09 billion attracted by México state, which ranked second for new FDI in 2019.
Rounding out the top five are Nuevo León, Querétaro and Veracruz, which saw $1.04 billion, $658 million and $612 million in new FDI in 2019. The last two replaced Coahuila and Guanajuato in the top five. Coahuila was relegated to ninth place from third in 2018, while Guanajuato dropped two spots to sixth.
In terms of new FDI growth, Tlaxcala – Mexico’s smallest state by area – was a clear winner. The central Mexican state attracted $78.9 billion in new foreign capital last year, a whopping 1,532% increase over 2018 when just $4.8 million flowed into Tlaxcala from abroad.
Michoacán, Veracruz, Puebla and Jalisco recorded the next best new FDI growth, with increases of 540%, 292%, 247% and 231%, respectively. In contrast, Aguascalientes, Guerrero, Sinaloa, Tabasco and Durango all attracted less new FDI in 2019 than the year before.
Mexico as a whole attracted FDI of $32.92 billion in 2019, according to SE data, but 53.1% of that amount came from reinvestment of profits. New foreign investment accounted for 39% of the total, while the other 7.9% came via loans to Mexican subsidiaries from their foreign parent companies. The total FDI figure was 4.2% higher than 2018.
Net foreign direct investment in Oaxaca was just $56 million last year but the southern state ranked first in terms of the percentage of new investment in its total FDI. Of the $56 million that Oaxaca attracted, $54.1 million, or 96.5%, came from new investment.
The United States, Japan, Italy and the Netherlands were the biggest investors in the state, putting money into sectors such as beverages, banking, accommodation, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals.
With 82.7% of its total FDI coming from new investment, Baja California ranked second followed by Nayarit, where new FDI made up 80.7% of the total. The tourism sector was the biggest beneficiary of the capital in both Pacific coast states. In the case of Baja California, more than 80% of new investment came from the United States.
While total FDI grew last year, some analysts believe that the ratification of the new North American free trade agreement and the trade war between the United States and China will help attract even greater foreign investment to Mexico in 2020.
Average GDP growth forecasts for this year hover around 1% but the Finance Ministry is currently still predicting a 2% expansion. Finance Minister Arturo Herrera said this week that he expects the Mexican economy to bounce back in 2020 after a contraction of 0.1% last year, the first decline since 2009, the year of the world financial crisis when GDP fell 5.3%.
Federal authorities announced that the son of the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has been extradited to the United States.
Arrested in June 2015, Rubén “El Menchito” Oseguera González, 28, is to be brought before a federal court judge in Washington D.C. on charges of drug trafficking.
Formerly second in command of the CJNG, the son of Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes has been held in the maximum security wing of the Cefereso federal prison in Hermosillo, Sonora, since last September.
His legal defense team filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights claiming that the extradition process was “plagued with irregularities.”
Oseguera González’s lawyer, Víctor Beltrán García, said that he had presented strong proof of violations of due process in December of last year, along with evidence of anomalies incurred by several members of the Mexican judicial system to the detriment of his client.
Beltrán said that his complaint included the names of those responsible for the alleged violations of his client’s human rights, claiming that the process violated Article 8 of the American Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees an accused person the right to be heard before a court.
El Menchito’s case was riddled with inconsistencies, which led to his release in July 2015, but he was immediately detained after being freed, which sparked a confrontation between the federal judiciary branch and the Attorney General’s Office.
Beltrán said that his client was extradited despite these inconsistencies and claims that he should not be tried for arms and drug charges in the United States since he has already been judged for those crimes.
He said that the extradition breached the terms of the treaty between the two countries, citing claims of forged signatures and false testimonies.
The attorney regretted that authorities from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to free his client despite the proof of these and other irregularities in trials in Mexican courts that caused judges to rule in Oseguera González’s favor.
Transportation official Meza at Thursday's protest march.
Hidalgo residents fed up with unfinished infrastructure projects in their communities forcibly removed two transportation officials from their offices in Pachuca and forced the two to march with them in a protest on Thursday.
Hidalgo delegate of the federal Ministry of Communications and Transportation (SCT), Ignacio Meza Echeverría, and SCT highways official Deyanira Rosales were forced to carry protest signs for over three hours while they walked the highway toward Mexico City.
Residents of the Valle del Mezquital region had been protesting outside the SCT offices in Pachuca for a week to demand that the government finish several public works projects.
Meza met with them on Thursday morning and told them that there were no funds in the budget allocated to completing the projects. The citizens then expressed their anger and coerced him and Rosales into marching with them toward the national capital.
Their rage was also directed at reporters who arrived to cover the protest. They attacked the journalists in efforts to expel them from the march, which blocked traffic on the Mexico City-Pachuca highway.
After more than three hours, state police and National Guard troops intervened to stop the advance of the march.
The two public officials were rescued near the Hidalgo C5i security headquarters in the vicinity of Acayuca and taken to a nearby hospital for medical examinations.
The SCT released a statement condemning the violent actions taken against its employees and members of the press.
“The Ministry of Communication and Transportation is in solidarity with the public servants … who were attacked. It also regrets the attacks committed against representatives of the media,” it said.
“The SCT is and always will be respectful of legal channels for resolving differences and energetically condemns the violent events that occurred in Hidalgo today.”
Federal Communication and Transportation Minister Javier Jiménez Espriú personally denounced the citizens’ actions on Twitter.
“In the SCT we neither extort nor accept extortions. Respectful dialogue and the law are the only acceptable courses of action,” he said.
