Mexico City will offer 25,000-peso loans (approximately US $1,072) to some 100,000 itinerant market vendors in the city who have had to close their stalls due to the coronavirus.
Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced yesterday at a virtual press conference that the federal loans would be made available this month and payable over the course of three years, with a four-month grace period and 0% interest for those who work in street markets and bazaars.
Government workers in Mexico City’s 16 boroughs will conduct a telephone survey of open-air market vendors, the government will evaluate the information provided and guard against duplicates, and then the funds will be released through banks.
The process will be carried out regardless of the political affiliation of vendors, and the loans will be distributed directly to individuals, Sheinbaum said.
The loans are an attempt to keep Mexico City’s 1,500 street markets shuttered and thus prevent the spread of the coronavirus, effectively paying vendors to stay home.
In Iztapalapa, Mayor Clara Brugada said that not a single mobile street market out of the 354 in her borough has opened for the past 16 days. The situation is similar in Iztacalco where 36 informal market organizations have suspended their activities, as requested by Mexico City officials.
Homicide numbers decreased slightly in April compared to March but remain at alarmingly high levels despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking at the president’s press conference on Wednesday morning, Security Minister Alfonso Durazo told reporters that statistics from the National Public Security System show that there were 2,950 homicides last month, a 1.66% decrease compared to the 3,000 murders in March, the most violent month since the federal government took office in December 2018.
Although the homicide numbers barely budged between March and April, Durazo said that “the important thing” is that the upward trend didn’t continue.
“We managed once again to reverse the trend of growth … even though the numbers are [still] high,” he said.
However, there is little to celebrate considering that the slight reduction in homicides in April occurred in the first full month of the national social distancing initiative, during which the authorities are urging people to stay at home as much as possible.
Guanajuato remains the most violent state in the country, having recorded 1,534 homicides in the first four months of the year, followed by México state (982); Chihuahua (906); Michoacán (886); Baja California (880); and Jalisco (700).
Baja California Sur, plagued by high levels of violent crime as recently as 2017, is now the most peaceful state in the country based on homicide numbers between January and April. Just 15 homicides were reported in the state in the first four months of the year, one fewer than Yucatán.
Campeche, Aguascalientes and Tlaxacala were the next most peaceful states, with 26, 28 and 45 homicides, respectively.
Durazo also reported that femicides – women and girls who were killed on account of their gender – decreased to 70 in April from 78 in March, a 10.25% reduction. Compared to December 2018 – the month President López Obrador took office – femicides decreased 30% in April, he said.
The security minister said that federal crimes, including drug trafficking, fuel theft and firearms offenses, declined by about a third last month compared to March. He also said that vehicle theft fell 20%, muggings declined 24%, robberies on public transit decreased by 44%, burglaries dropped by 18% and business robberies were down 20%.
For his part, army chief Luis Cresencio Sandoval said that just over 150,000 members of the military and the National Guard are deployed around the country to carry out public security tasks.
Los Cabos hotels will remain quiet until further notice.
Days after the Los Cabos Hotel Association announced it was preparing for a partial opening of hotels in the popular southern Baja resort on June 1, the organization changed its mind and pushed back the date indefinitely.
The state still has high levels of coronavirus infection, and last week the association’s president, Lilcí Orcí, said it was working instead on a cautious reopening plan which would be put into place once state health officials determine it is safe to do so.
“In line with the federal authorities, a slight rethinking of the reopening phases was made,” Sandra de la Garza, public relations coordinator for the Los Cabos Tourism Board told Mexico News Daily. “Any decision that is made depends on the day-to-day development of the pandemic in the country and is therefore subject to change.”
Protecting the health of workers as well as visitors takes precedence over economic concerns, Orcí said, and all tourism providers will work together on health and hygiene guidelines for tourists.
Los Cabos will not offer a two-for-one plan on hotel nights to encourage visitors to return, as Cancun has discussed, but will rely instead on strict sanitary measures as a marketing concept through the Punto Limpio, or Clean Spot certification, a program that already exists but will be modified to reflect particular concerns associated with the coronavirus.
The Ministry of Tourism, Economy and Sustainability says Clean Spot training is set to begin today.
The certification process is divided into four phases and takes two months to obtain. Around 400 businesses will participate in the first stage of training, the government said.
“The idea is that we all have the same objective, that is why we are all under this same comprehensive plan and with this certification we will be working under unified criteria in hygiene and health that will give tourists the safety they are looking for right now,” said Orcí.
Tourism numbers for 2020 are expected to drop to just 25% of the visitors the resort destination normally receives in a year. Los Cabos will be lucky to see 1 million visitors.
The United States has announced that border restrictions between the U.S., Canada and Mexico will continue for an additional 30 days until June 22, a decision made in consultation with Mexico and Canada and based on a public health order.
“The president has made it clear that we must continue to keep legitimate, commercial trade flowing while limiting those seeking to enter our country for non-essential purposes,” acting Homeland Security director Chad Wolf said Tuesday. “Non-essential travel will not be permitted until this administration is convinced that doing so is safe and secure.”
The overland border was first closed to essential travel on March 21, and when it reopens will depend on an assessment from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“(The order) shall remain in effect until I determine that the danger of further introduction of Covid-19 into the United States has ceased to be a serious danger to the public health,” CDC director Robert Redfield wrote in a statement on Tuesday.
The closure mainly affects vehicular travel and residents of the border region. Citizens and permanent residents of the United States do not face restrictions, nor do those with temporary work visas, emergency personnel, students, government officials and those involved in cross-border trade. Both Mexico and the United States are working on joint sanitary measures for the border region.
Mexican tourists with visas may travel to the United States by air.
The announcement comes as most states in the U.S. are beginning the reopening process.
One of the hotels where nurses were used in extortion attempts.
A group of nurses who had traveled to Mexico City from elsewhere in the country to join the fight against the coronavirus outbreak were victims of a “virtual kidnapping” in the hotels provided for their accommodation on Tuesday, but the extortion attempt failed.
Claiming to have access to the hotels’ security cameras, the would-be kidnappers threatened the 14 nurses from the Mexican Social Security Institute via telephone and video calls that they would kidnap them if they left the establishments.
Authorities became aware of the situation after the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office (FGJ) received a report of an extortion attempt in a hotel in the Tacubaya neighborhood. They found over a dozen similar complaints upon arrival.
“According to initial investigations, relatives of the accusers were extorted over the phone by people who told them that they had their loved ones detained and that they would do them harm if they didn’t deposit a certain amount of money,” the FGJ said in a press release.
The victims were taken to FGJ facilities to leave their statements and were reported to be safe on Wednesday morning.
The FGJ did not release the names of the hotels involved, but photos of the incident reveal that one of them is Ambos Mundos. The newspaper Animal Político verified that Ambos Mundos is on the official list of over 200 hotels in the city fitted out to accommodate medical professionals who travel to the capital to join the fight against Covid-19.
The program offers visiting doctors and nurses free accommodations once they provide proof that they are working with coronavirus patients in a local hospital.
Hotel kidnappings are not uncommon in Mexico City, where kidnappers sometimes work in conjunction with hotel staff to extort out-of-town visitors by holding them hostage in the very establishment in which they paid to stay. The Mexico City Hotel and Motel Association is expected to release a statement about the incident later today.
The attempts to kidnap the nurses come at the most critical time in the coronavirus outbreak. Data from the federal Health Ministry revealed that 2,713 new cases were reported nationwide in the 24-hour period during which the attempted kidnappings took place, the highest one-day spike in new cases so far.
Amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, federal authorities announced on Monday that they had found large quantities of human tissue and other medical waste dumped in woods outside Mexico City and leaky hospital bags crammed into a warehouse in Puebla.
The environmental protection agency Profepa said that 3.5 tonnes of hospital waste was found in a forested area of the México state municipality of Nicolás Romero. It said it supervised the removal and disposal of the hazardous and infectious waste between May 4 and 11.
Environmental authorities in México state first reported in mid-April that hospital waste including partially-incinerated human tissue had been dumped on a hillside in Nicolás Romero, located about 40 kilometers northwest of central Mexico City.
Profepa said it had filed a criminal complaint with the federal Attorney General’s Office against whoever was responsible for the illegal dumping.
The scene found at a warehouse in the Puebla municipality of Cuautinchán was also a grotesque and grisly one.
Some 6,000 cubic meters of medical waste was piled to the ceiling of a clandestine warehouse in the municipality, located about 30 kilometers southeast of Puebla city. Plastic hospital waste bags were crammed so tightly into the metal warehouse that its walls were bulging and collapsing, the Associated Press reported.
Profepa said that blood and other bodily fluids were leaking onto the floor of the warehouse, whose refrigerated sections were out of order.
“This company’s improper handling [of the waste] represents a direct environmental and public health risk,” the agency said, explaining that most of it will have to be incinerated.
As the Covid-19 pandemic grows, specialized waste incinerators are being inundated with used personal protective equipment and dangerous hospital waste. The situation appears to have led unscrupulous operators to dispose of hazardous medical waste illegally.
In recent years, some 100,000 coffins were reused annually after disinfection, according to data from the Senate, but the coronavirus pandemic has put an end to the practice because people are fearful that infectious fluids may have leaked into them from body bags containing deceased Covid-19 patients.
With no market for used coffins, piles of them have accumulated at crematoriums in the capital, where there are three-day backlogs of bodies, according to a report by British media organization Sky News.
A report published Monday by the anti-graft group Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity said that death certificates indicate that there have been more than 4,500 coronavirus-related deaths in the capital, more than three times the number reported by authorities.
Confirmed Covid-19 cases as of Tuesday evening. milenio
More people are leaving their homes more regularly even as the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen: the number of new Covid-19 cases recorded yesterday was the highest ever.
Ricardo Cortés, general director of health promotion at the Health Ministry, presented cell phone data at Tuesday night’s coronavirus press briefing that showed that mobility increased in 27 of Mexico’s 32 states in the week to May 14 compared to the previous week.
Compiled by the National Council of Science and Technology using information from Google, Facebook and Twitter, the data showed that mobility increased by more than 3% in 14 states, while it rose by 3% or less in 13 states.
Aguascalientes recorded the biggest increase, with mobility levels spiking 11% in the second week of May.
“What this could mean in terms of the local epidemic in Aguascalientes is an increase in the number of cases or vital activity in the near future,” Cortés said.
Columns 2 and 4 show the number of cases and deaths recorded each day since May 2. Columns 3 and 5 indicate total cases and deaths. milenio
Baja California Sur and Colima recorded the next biggest increases, with people’s movement up by just over 8% in both states. The other states where mobility increased by more than 3% in the second week of May were Michoacán, Baja California, Durango, Morelos, Sonora, Hidalgo, Chihuahua, Yucatán, Nuevo León, Tabasco and Campeche.
The only states where mobility decreased in the second week of May compared to the previous week were Querétaro, Zacatecas, Tlaxcala, Puebla and Nayarit. However, the decreases were minimal, ranging from 1% in Querétaro to 4% in Nayarit.
Earlier in the press briefing, Director of Epidemiology José Luis Alomía reported 2,713 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 – the biggest single-day increase since the start of the pandemic – and 334 additional fatalities, the second highest daily death toll.
Mexico’s accumulated case tally now stands at 54,346 while the official coronavirus death toll is 5,666.
Alomía said that there are also 29,450 suspected Covid-19 cases and that 185,775 people have now been tested. Of the confirmed cases, 11,767 are considered active, he said.
Mexico City has now recorded more than 15,000 cases since the start of the pandemic, of which 3,032 are active. México state ranks second for both total and active cases, with 9,002 of the former and 1,426 of the latter.
Tabasco, Veracruz and Baja California have the third, fourth and fifth biggest active outbreaks, respectively. However, active cases in Tabasco decreased by 19 on Tuesday to 619.
Baja California Sur, Coahuila, Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Morelos and Campeche also recorded decreases in the size of their active outbreaks.
The daily death toll spiked sharply on Tuesday, up 115% compared to the 155 fatalities reported on Monday and 153% compared to the 132 reported on Sunday. Mexico’s coronavirus fatality rate is currently 10.4 per 100 confirmed cases.
In addition to the 5,666 confirmed Covid-19 deaths, 733 fatalities are suspected to have been caused by the disease, Alomía said.
Almost 45% of the confirmed deaths have occurred in just three states: Mexico City, Baja California and México state. The capital has recorded 1,452 coronavirus-related deaths, while more than 500 Covid-19 patients have died in both Baja California and México state.
Across the country, 22 minors have died after testing positive for Covid-19, according to Health Ministry data. Among those who lost their lives to the disease were 11 babies aged 2 or less.
Morena party leader Ramírez has run into widespread opposition to his idea.
A proposal from Mexico’s ruling party to allow national statistics agency personnel to enter people’s homes as part of efforts to measure their wealth has been met with widespread and firm resistance.
Alfonso Ramírez Cuéllar, national president of the Morena party, announced a proposal on Monday that seeks to give the statistics agency, Inegi, greater powers to measure wealth in Mexico. Ramírez said on Twitter that the aim was to “find out the true dimensions of inequality …”
He said that Inegi must be able to enter people’s homes to review their “real estate assets” and have access to their tax records and bank accounts “without any legal impediment.”
Under the proposal, the autonomous federal department would report on the assets held by all Mexicans every two years. Ramírez stressed in an interview that the intent was not to expropriate assets from the nation’s wealthy but merely to get a better picture of the distribution of wealth in the country.
But the proposal appears doomed to fail after President López Obrador – Morena’s founder – rejected it at his morning news conference on Tuesday.
“I don’t believe it’s right. The wealth of business people and all Mexicans has to be kept private,” he said, adding that only public servants have the obligation to declare their assets.
“I don’t believe that this proposal is advisable. So that there is not so much inequality, the best thing is for the government to help the majority of Mexicans to slowly ascend the social ladder,” López Obrador said.
“Corruption is the main cause of economic and social inequality. If there is no corruption, there won’t be inequality and there won’t be this large accumulation of resources in the hands of a few while the majority lacks the most essential things. But this [isn’t achieved] by … demanding that people say how much they have,” he said.
Ramírez’s proposal was also rejected by a range of people in academia, economics, business and politics.
National Autonomous University (UNAM) law academic Diego Valadés said that if the proposal became law, “the Mexican state would become a police state.”
“I prefer to believe that the proposal is an unpremeditated mistake,” and not a planned attack on democracy, he told the newspaper El Financiero.
Another UNAM law academic, María del Pilar Hernández, said the proposal is “unconstitutional” and agreed that it is reminiscent of something a police state would do. Neither the constitution nor federal laws allow for Inegi to be turned into an auditor, she said.
Gabriel Casillas, president of the economic studies committee of the Mexican Institute of Financial Executives, expressed doubt that allowing Inegi to measure people’s wealth would help to reduce inequality, while Raymundo Tenorio, an economist, raised privacy concerns.
The leadership of three opposition parties – the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the National Action Party and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) – described Ramírez’s proposal as a distraction and an authoritarian move.
“What Morena is seeking to do is divert attention from national problems and criticism of the president,” said Ángel Ávila, national president of the PRD.
“Granting Inegi the powers of a Soviet commission to assess the wealth of all people would involve perverting … Inegi and letting it rot,” he said.
Before López Obrador’s denunciation of the proposal, Morena’s leader in the Senate stressed that the proposal had not been submitted to Congress and that the lawmakers of the ruling party would look at it with caution.
“As a majority we will act with political responsibility and prudence,” Ricardo Monreal said.
On Tuesday afternoon Ramírez said there was never any intention that Inegi representatives would enter people’s homes to gather the data. The information needed is already in the Ministry of Finance databases, he said, vowing to carry on with his proposal by seeking a broad consensus for it, including that of the Morena party.
Just as Mexico moves to give higher priority to electricity produced with petroleum, a Mexican Nobel Prize winner has called for fossil fuel energy generation to be phased out over the next 10 years in favor of renewable energy.
Mario Molina, a co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on ozone depletion, said it was irresponsible for governments not to be working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The only way to combat global warming is to replace the use of fossil fuels with renewable resources such as wind and solar, he said during a lecture that was broadcast online on Monday night.
Molina’s remarks came just three days after the federal government published a new energy policy that imposes restrictive measures on the renewable energy sector that could effectively prevent its expansion in Mexico and consolidate control of electrical power in the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE).
The publication of the policy came two weeks after the National Energy Control Center (Cenace) announced a plan to use excess fuel oil produced at state oil company refineries to ramp up energy production at old CFE plants.
Mario Molina, co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on ozone depletion.
To “improve the reliability of the electricity system” during the coronavirus pandemic, Cenace also announced a suspension of trials that allowed wind farms and solar parks to provide power to the national grid.
While the government appears intent on limiting renewable energy generation, Molina said the sector’s growth is essential in order to combat climate change. Governments should aim to stop using fossil fuels for energy generation by the end of this decade, he said.
The scientist said that governments have to be respectful of international climate agreements and urged them to take energy policy decisions based on scientific advice.
“We have to convince our heads of state and high-level officials of all governments to pay a lot of attention to science and not make decisions based on ideas that are not scientific,” Molina said.
It “makes no sense to promote the use of oil” for energy generation, he said, adding that “using fuel oil is absurd.”
Governments that don’t take steps to phase out the use of fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions are demonstrating “an enormous lack of responsibility” and ethics.
Molina said that the Montreal Protocol, a 1997 international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the production of substances that cause ozone depletion, should serve as an example for governments in the current quest to stop, or at least slow, global warming.
“[The Montreal Protocol] is solving the problem, that shows us … that we can all work together and I believe that we can do it with the Paris [climate change] Agreement,” he said.
While Mexico’s government is waging a quasi-war on the renewable energy industry – President López Obrador is far more focused on “rescuing” the state-owned electricity and oil companies than tackling climate change – the legal system provides some hope for companies in the sector.
A coalition of business groups said they would “exhaust all legal recourse“ in their attempt to have the new energy policy revoked. Legal efforts have already resulted in five provisional suspension orders.
A federal judge on Monday issued two such orders against the Cenace measures, which will delay the start of at least 28 wind and solar farms that are required to complete trials before they are able to sell electricity to the CFE.
Administrative court judge Rodrigo de la Peza López Figueroa said that delaying the entry into operation of new renewable energy plants would have a negative impact on society and violate free competition rules.
The Cenace measures “could cause an unjustified rise in prices and a reduction in efficiency,” which would have an adverse effect on electricity customers, he said.
On Tuesday, the judge granted three more provisional suspension orders against the Cenace agreement.
Another hearing at which definitive suspension orders against the measures could be granted will be held Friday.
La Terraza in Mexico City's La Guerrero neighborhood.
It seems that only a pandemic can stop Don Chuy and company from stewing the traditional birria from their native Jalisco, and only begrudgingly at that.
The last time La Terraza de Don Chuy closed its doors — literally — was during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. The 24-hour birria spot reopened Monday after a government-enforced 15-day closure to perform a deep-clean of the restaurant and make other preparations for “the new normal”.
Hungry customers normally spill out of the tiny space to crowd around a few rickety tables on the sidewalk, especially in the wee morning hours, as it’s one of very few places in Mexico City’s La Guerrero neighborhood to get a hot meal in the middle of the night.
But in the new normal there are no tables on the sidewalk and yellow tape reading Precaución stretches across the entrance, where a sign announces take-out service only.
Jesús Uribe — Don Chuy to neighbors and regulars — started the restaurant over 40 years ago, initially opening for 20 hours a day. But as demand grew, the family decided they’d better just keep the doors open all night long.
Birria tacos at La Terraza de Don Chuy.
His son Osvaldo Uribe, who has seen two closures and both due to microbial threats, said that “these situations show us that we’re all in the same boat.”
He said that as history has shown, he can depend on his customers to return, just as they can depend on him and his family to be cooking delicious food all night long, at least to the extent government that health regulations allow.
Currently only serving at 20-30% of normal capacity, they have adjusted their purchasing in order to be able to continue to offer freshly cooked meals. This has lowered costs while maintaining the quality that brought Mario and a coworker in search of their first bites of Don Chuy’s birria in over two weeks.
“I kept checking on Facebook, and finally they said they’d be open today,” said Mario while Osvaldo bagged their order.
Osvaldo Uribe’s tone strongly suggested that without the government order to close they would have continued to serve his father’s stewed beef and goat meat tacos as usual, but they were happy to comply and will continue to do so until things return to normal.
“It’s a slow process, but we’re grateful for the benefit they’ve given us of being able to open up at a limited capacity,” he says, adding that both the family and the employees are glad to reopen.
“It’s like a first step back to normality. This is a difficult situation, but we’re all trying our best to see that it passes as quickly as possible,” he said.
