Friday, May 2, 2025

AMLO says he’s unaware of corruption probe implicating ex-president

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López Obrador: unaware of an investigation.
López Obrador: unaware of an investigation.

President López Obrador has denied any knowledge of a corruption investigation into his predecessor Enrique Peña Nieto as The Wall Street Journal reported.

Citing an unnamed senior Mexican judicial official, The Journal reported on Wednesday that the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) is investigating Peña Nieto as part of a case against former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya, who was arrested on corruption charges in Spain last week.

The official said that the FGR has evidence that the corruption of Lozoya – who is accused of benefiting financially from Pemex’s purchase of a fertilizer plant at an allegedly inflated price and receiving US $10 million in bribes from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht in exchange for a lucrative refinery contract – “reaches to the highest level.”

“The extradition and [any possible] confession of Lozoya are elements that together with ongoing investigations will decide if the former president is charged in the future,” the official told The Journal.

Speaking at his regular news conference on Thursday, López Obrador said that just because The Wall Street Journal reported that an investigation is taking place, doesn’t make it a fact. The newspaper’s reports “are not always accurate,” he said.

Peña Nieto: prosecuting the former president could be good for the ruling Morena party at the next presidential election.
Peña Nieto: prosecuting the former president could be good for the ruling Morena party at the next presidential election.

The president added that the FGR is now autonomous of the government and therefore has no obligation to inform him of the investigations it is conducting.

López Obrador nevertheless charged that Peña Nieto approved of the state oil company’s purchase of “junk” fertilizer plants at inflated prices and other “juicy business” that members of his government allegedly engaged in.

However, he said that the government would not file a criminal complaint against the former president unless the people of Mexico indicated that was what they wanted.

López Obrador has floated the idea of holding a public consultation to ask citizens if recent past presidents – whom he accuses of all manner of corruption – should stand trial.

“We’ve said that we would only present a complaint against former presidents if the citizens ask us to because we think that we should look forward,” he told reporters on Thursday.

However, the senior judicial official told The Journal that “any case against former presidents” would be brought by the FGR “as an exercise of autonomy, not as a result of President López Obrador’s consultations – they are two worlds: the political and the judicial.”

The Journal, which said that it was unable to reach Peña Nieto for comment while acknowledging that he has denied corruption allegations in the past, noted that if the ex-president is prosecuted, it would be the first time that a modern Mexican president faced corruption charges in court.

Jorge Chabat, a political analyst at the University of Guadalajara, told The Journal that if Peña Nieto were to stand trial, it would happen near the end of López Obrador’s six-year term and likely benefit the ruling Morena party at the next presidential election.

“Bringing Peña Nieto to court would be a political life preserver for this government,” he said.

The former president’s six-year term between 2012 and 2018 was plagued by corruption scandals including the so-called “master fraud” scheme in which government agencies allegedly diverted billions of pesos in public money via shell companies, and the “white house” affair, in which Peña Nieto’s now ex-wife purchased a mansion built by a favored government contractor.

The stench of corruption lingering over Peña Nieto and the Institutional Revolutionary Party government he led was seen as a major factor in López Obrador’s landslide victory at the 2018 presidential election.

Source: Milenio (sp), El Universal (sp) 

Couple detained in Fátima’s murder; husband wanted ‘young girlfriend’

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The couple were arrested in México state Wednesday night.
The couple were arrested in México state Wednesday night.

One of two suspects arrested in the abduction and murder of 7-year-old Fátima Cecilia Aldrighett Antón has confessed that she abducted the child because her husband wanted “a young girlfriend.”

Fátima’s body was found in southern Mexico City last Saturday.

The Mexico City Attorney General’s Office (FGJ) said that police supported by the National Guard detained a man and a woman on Wednesday night at an address in the México state municipality of Isidro Fabela, located about 50 kilometers northwest of the capital.

Mario Alberto R. and Gladis Giovana C., a married couple and parents of three young children, were subsequently transferred to FGJ offices in Mexico City. The latter is believed to be the woman who was captured by security cameras with Fátima outside her school before she disappeared on February 11.

She told investigators that she kidnapped the child fearing that her husband would follow through on a threat to sexual abuse their own children. When she delivered the child to her husband, she said, he dressed her in clothes he had recently purchased and painted her fingernails.

Gladis Giovana confessed that she strangled the victim with a belt.

If found guilty of kidnapping and killing the minor, the couple will likely spend the rest of their lives in jail.

FGJ spokesman Ulises Lara explained that they were identified by a search of their southern Mexico City home, where police seized identification cards, photographs, clothes and other personal items.

The FGJ said in a statement that Isidro Fabela municipal police and México state police were alerted to the whereabouts of the suspects by a local resident who had apparently seen images of the couple that were released earlier on Wednesday.

The police interviewed the couple and determined that they could be the people sought by Mexico City authorities in connection with Fátima’s abduction and murder, the statement said. The couple offered a bribe to the police in an attempt to avoid arrest, the FGJ added.

Fátima, who was laid to rest on Wednesday, is believed to have known the man and woman although she had no blood relation to them. Authorities are investigating whether the female suspect once lived in the same house as Fatíma’s family, as the deceased girl’s mother said, and whether there were any problems between them.

Two of the couple’s children attended the same school as Fátima, according to parents of students at the Enrique Rébsamen primary school in the southern Mexico City borough of Xochimilco.

According to a report by the newspaper El Financiero, neighbors of the couple said that Mario Alberto R. worked as a bicycle taxi driver in an area near the limits of the boroughs of Xochimilco and Tláhuac, where Fátima’s beaten body was found.

Neighbors described the family as “strange and quiet,” indicating that they wouldn’t engage with or even say hello to their neighbors. They also said that Mario Alberto had drug problems.

Prior to their arrest, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum told a press conference that the couple had fled Mexico City on Saturday, possibly after dumping Fátima’s body.

The girl’s mother told the newspaper Milenio that she couldn’t believe that the woman accused of the abduction and murder of her daughter is the same person that lived in her home for several weeks, explaining that she didn’t appear to be a “psychopath” or to have “cold blood” and an “inhumane heart.”

Magdalena Antón said that she met Gladis Giovana C. at the home of a man who sells tamales in her neighborhood.

“She was apparently escaping from her husband because he had wanted to beat her and set her on fire. I said to her: ‘OK, don’t worry, come to my house,’” Antón stated, adding that she asked the woman to pay 300 pesos (US $16) per month rent.

Asked whether she ever had any disagreement or problem with the female suspect, Antón responded that she hadn’t although she said that her brother and the woman had clashed.

“Probably her husband is the murderer because I don’t think she’s capable,” she said. “But she was his accomplice, she took my daughter, didn’t she? In the end, both of them have to pay.”

Source: El Universal (sp), El Financiero (sp), Milenio (sp) 

Million-peso reward offered for culprit in acid attack on Oaxaca musician

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Saxophonist and acid attack victim Ríos.
Saxophonist and acid attack victim Ríos.

The Oaxaca Attorney General’s Office (FGE) has offered a 1-million-peso (US $53,000) reward to anyone offering information leading to the arrest of a former public official believed to be responsible for an acid attack on a saxophone player from Huajuapan de León.

The ex-state deputy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Juan Antonio Vera Carrizal, is suspected of having orchestrated an attack with corrosive acid against María Elena Ríos on September 29 of last year.

In addition to the reward, the FGE solicited help from federal authorities in the search for Vera and requested that Interpol issue a Red Notice in order to extend the search beyond Mexico’s borders.

Oaxaca Attorney General Rubén Vasconcelos Méndez said that arrest warrants were issued in December for Vera and two other unidentified men for the charge of attempted femicide.

He told a press conference that his office has sufficient evidence to determine that Vera ordered the attack that was carried out in Huajuapan de León. Another two men arrested in connection with the case in December told authorities last week that Vera gave them 30,000 pesos to attack the victim.

“We have sufficient data to believe that [Vera] was the author of the incident, and it’s not just us. The issuance of an arrest warrant implies that a judge considers there to be sufficient data for probable responsibility,” he said.

He added that his office believes the arrest of Vera will quickly lead to the apprehension of the other two unnamed suspects.

Vasconcelos released a wanted poster bearing a photo of the ex-legislator and businessman with his personal information and the reward offer. The poster lists his age as 56 and states that he has black hair, almond-colored eyes and weighs 80 kilograms.

The saxophonist’s family members said that they knew the culprit was Vera since the moment of the attack. Ríos has been convalescing in her family home since January 21 after being treated by burn specialists in Mexico City.

The PRI has begun the process of officially expelling Vera from the party.

Oaxaca Governor Alejandro Murat spoke about the case after meeting with President López Obrador in the National Palace in Mexico City on Tuesday. He announced the reward and requested the assistance of the media and the public in Vera’s capture.

He said that the FGE’s telephone lines are ready and waiting for tips from the public, adding that he hopes collaboration with citizens will lead to Vera’s arrest and “send a clear message that there is no impunity when the rights of any Mexican woman are violated.”

“The best way is to arrest these people,” he added.

Source: Reforma (sp)

Power commission reports 22% surge in unpaid debt

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cfe

There is good news and bad news for the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE): the public utility cut its losses due to electricity theft and technical problems by 8.5% last year but its bad debts increased by more than 20%.

Guillermo Nevárez, director of the state company’s distribution division, told a press conference that the CFE had overdue customer debt of 55 billion pesos (US $2.9 billion) at the end of 2019, a 22% increase compared to the end of 2018.

About 87% of that amount is owed by customers in just seven states: México state, Mexico City, Tabasco, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Chiapas and Veracruz. A significant proportion of the debt corresponds to municipal governments that have failed to pay their bills for electricity used to light streets and operate pumping stations.

Nevárez said some debtors have claimed that they are entitled to a “clean slate” for past debts after the CFE last year canceled 11 billion pesos in debt owed by more than half a million customers in Tabasco who joined a “civil resistance” movement against the public utility that began more than two decades ago.

However, the distribution chief stressed that most customers have an obligation to pay for the electricity that they’ve used. Nevárez added that almost 60% of customers in Tabasco whose debt was forgiven are now paying their bills.

Adding to the CFE’s woes is that it lost 54.84 billion pesos last year due to technical problems associated with electricity transmission, and power theft. On the bright side, the figure is more than 5 billion pesos lower that the 60 billion lost in 2018.

Just under half of the losses – 25.94 billion pesos – came from theft. Electricity is commonly stolen in Mexico via illegal hook-ups known colloquially as diablitos (little devils) and meter tampering.

Nevárez said that organized crime is also involved in power theft in many parts of the country.

Source: Expansión (sp) 

Xochimilco’s endemic axolotl to appear on new 50-peso bill

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An unofficial replica of the new 50-peso banknote that has surfaced on social media.
An unofficial replica of the new 50-peso banknote that has surfaced on social media.

The axolotl, a species of salamander endemic to Mexico City’s Lake Xochimilco, may be endangered but it recently got some news that could give it something to smile about.

The Bank of México (Banxico) announced that the amphibian will grace the new series of 50-peso notes to be put into circulation in 2022.

Accompanying the grinning creature will be an ear of corn and an image of farmers tending crops on the famous chinampas, or manmade islands used for agriculture.

The obverse side of the bill will feature an image commemorating the founding of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire at the time of the arrival of the Spanish.

Two banknotes in the new family of bills planned by Banxico have already been put into circulation. The new 500-peso note began confusing citizens in August 2018 with its resemblance to the 20-peso note: blue-colored and donning the face of beloved 19th-century president Benito Juárez.

The new 200-peso note went into circulation in September of last year. It’s still green, but switched out the face of feminist poet Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz for those of Mexican independence heroes Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos.

But fans of “The Tenth Muse,” as De la Cruz is affectionately called, need not worry, for she isn’t gone for good. She will adorn the new 100-peso note. Opposite her face will be an image of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacán and México state.

The new 1,000-peso note will feature the 33rd president of Mexico, Francisco I. Madero, Revolution-era feminist Hermila Galindo and revolutionary Carmen Serdán. A jaguar will stalk its reverse side next to an image of the ancient Mayan city of Calakmul.

Banxico has plans for a possible 2,000-peso bill, but it will only be released if economically necessary. Should it be put into circulation, poets Octavio Paz and Rosario Castellanos will be on the bill.

The new family of bills will soon lose a member, as Banxico is planning to gradually take the 20-peso note out of circulation and replace it with a coin. It will both commemorate Mexican independence and enshrine the crocodiles and mangrove forests of the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve in Quintana Roo.

Source: El Universal (sp)  

Reported cases of femicide up almost 60% in Mexico City last year

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police line

Femicides increased almost 60% in Mexico City last year, making the capital the 11th worst entity in the country for the crime, according to data from a national crime watch group.

Presenting a 2019 Mexico City crime report on Wednesday, the director of the National Citizens’ Observatory (ONC), Francisco Rivas, said that the number of femicides – crimes in which a woman or girl is killed on account of her gender – rose to 68 in 2019 from 43 the year before, an increase of 58%.

As a result, Mexico City recorded the 11th highest number of femicides among Mexico’s 32 states in 2019, seven places higher than it ranked in 2018.

ONC statistics show that femicides increased by more than 50% in 10 of the capital’s 16 boroughs. Xochimilco, a borough in the south of the city best known for its canals and the colorful boats that ferry visitors along them, recorded the highest number of femicides last year whereas it ranked seventh in 2018.

Rivas also said that the number of rape cases increased by 4.33% in Mexico City last year, highlighting that the per capita rate in the capital was above the national average for the second consecutive year. There were 16.58 rape investigations per 100,000 residents in 2020, ONC data shows.

Rivas asserted that violence against women has “deep roots” in Mexico and that statistics don’t paint a full picture of the problem.

“What we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg; there are … entire communities where we never find out about the crimes committed against women,” he said.

“They are not … only victims of physical violence but also psychological and economic violence,” Rivas said, adding that many women live in situations that make it difficult for them to report the abuse they have suffered.

He also said that legal protocols that stipulate that all murders of women must be investigated as femicides are not observed in many parts of the country. Therefore, femicides – of which there were 1,006 victims last year, according to official data – are almost certainly underreported.

The publication of the ONC Mexico City crime data comes just after two femicide cases in the capital that have shocked Mexicans across the country.

Ingrid Escamilla, 25, was stabbed to death by her 46-year-old domestic partner on February 8 after which he skinned and disemboweled her body in an attempt to dispose of the evidence. A week later, the body of 7-year-old girl Fátima Aldrighett was found inside a plastic bag in southern Mexico City four days after she was abducted outside her Xochimilco primary school.

Both cases triggered an outpouring of anger and condemnation in a country where an average of 10 women are killed every day.

Days after Escamilla’s death, women’s groups took to the streets of Mexico City to protest at the National Palace and outside the offices of a newspaper that published leaked photos of the woman’s mutilated body.

Speaking at his morning press conference on Monday – the day authorities announced Fátima’s murder – President López Obrador said that “neoliberal policies” of past governments were to blame for the high number of femicides, charging that they caused a “social breakdown” and “a profound crisis in loss of values.”

Responding to the president’s claim, Rivas said that “there is no evidence that neoliberalism generates violence,” adding “one of the characteristics of the majority of neoliberal countries is that they are the safest in the world.”

Source: Milenio (sp) 

Microsoft to invest US $1bn toward expanding Mexico’s digital potential

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Microsoft CEO Nadella.
Microsoft CEO Nadella.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that the company will invest US $1.1 billion in Mexico over the next five years.

“Today I am very excited that we are announcing a new $1.1-billion investment over the next five years, focused on expanding access to digital technology for people and organizations across the country,” he said in a video presented at President López Obrador’s Thursday morning news conference.

The investment will include the creation of a new data-center region in Mexico to “deliver comprehensive, intelligent, secure and trusted cloud services to help every organization really get an advantage and drive the digital transformation.”

The president of Microsoft’s Latin America division, César Cernuda, said that the investment plan, called Innovate for Mexico, will include the construction of three state-of-the-art laboratories to lead to new breakthroughs in digital services and technologies.

The labs will drive a “solid educational program” directed at university students, said Cernuda.

“With this, higher education teachers and students in every field of study will strengthen their knowledge and reinforce the skills required by society and the current and future labor market,” he said.

He added that a consulting council will be created in conjunction with the Mexican Business Council (CMN) with the goal of “sharing experiences of digital transformation in order to attend to the needs of the people and the market.”

Also part of Innovate for Mexico will be an initiative to support conservation efforts for the endangered shortfin mako shark in collaboration with the organization México Azul.

The company will provide technical support in the form of open-source software that will help monitor the species and analyze its habitat and migration routes.

President López Obrador said that the announcement was good news for the country because it will drive technological development in several fields.

Source: El Financiero (sp)

Parents of cancer patients sever talks over medications shortages

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Parents claim a lot of lives are at risk.
Parents claim a lot of lives are at risk.

A group of parents of children with cancer has broken off talks with the federal government, claiming that their concerns about a shortage of medications are not being taken seriously and that officials have lied to them.

Members of a group of 31 parents that has been meeting with officials at the Interior Ministry (Segob) announced after a meeting on Tuesday that they saw no point in continuing discussions about the lack of pediatric cancer medications that has plagued Mexico’s public health system for months.

“The president needs to come out and acknowledge that there are no medications,” said Omar Hernández.

“He can’t speak with us in private, accept that there is a shortage and then appear at his morning news conferences and say the opposite. We can’t continue with these round table discussions at which they appear to be pulling our leg; they promise that there will be medications but they don’t arrive at the hospitals,” he said.

Israel Rivas Bastidas, another father of a child with cancer, said that the federal government has “let us down” and asserted that continuing to meet with Segob and health officials is pointless “if they don’t carry out what they tell us” they will.

“We think that they don’t understand that it is a complex situation. … The lives of a lot of children are at risk,” he said.

Rivas also said that the parents asked officials to show them the supply of medications they claimed the government has purchased but their request was ignored.

“We demanded that they take us to where the medications are, whether that’s Cofepris [the Federal Commission for Protection Against Sanitary Risk] or the airport. We wanted to see that the medications exist but they turned a deaf ear,” he said.

Parents of cancer sufferers also said that they were disappointed that Interior Minister Olga Sánchez had not attended all the meetings to listen to their concerns about the lack of a range of life-saving drugs including chemotherapy agents and immunosuppressive medications.

“The Interior Minister Olga Sánchez agreed to be at all the meetings – lying to us is a lack of respect,” said Rivas.

“She was at the first meeting but a deputy minister arrived at the second one and there were no medications [to announce]. At the third meeting, we were promised the medications for yesterday [Monday] – they’re taking us for a ride,” he said.

The parents said that that they will continue to file lawsuits aimed at compelling the government to provide an adequate supply of medications for children with cancer and other serious medical conditions.

In response to the complaints, a high-ranking Segob official who met with the parents on Tuesday turned to a well-worn political tactic: he passed the buck.

“The solution is not [the responsibility] of the Interior Ministry, it’s of the Health Ministry,” Fausto Razo said.

For his part, President López Obrador – who has blamed the shortage of medications on resistance from pharmaceutical distributors to the government’s new centralized purchasing system as well as corruption in hospitals and supply problems with drug companies in China and India – responded to the latest complaints as the disgruntled and anxious parents might have expected.

Speaking at his regular news conference on Wednesday, he said that the government is doing “everything that we have to do” to ensure that patients – especially children with cancer – have the medicines they need.

“We have supply now and there won’t be a shortage. Of course, we’re going to solve this problem completely,” López Obrador said.

He also charged that political interests are behind the protests. “There is political opposition to the changes, there is resistance … leaders of political parties are encouraging these movements …”

Source: El Universal (sp), La Jornada (sp), Infobae (sp) 

A pair of brutal femicides elicit fear and rage at systematic gender abuse

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Fátima's mother, María Magdalena Othón.
Fátima's mother, María Magdalena Othón.

This has got to stop.

News of two brutal femicides this past week has floored many people, especially women. This is saying a lot, as news of extreme violence is par for the course at this point. But the constant stream of dead girls and women is chilling. The combination of female fear and rage in the air is palpable.

This isn’t about just a few bad apples; this is a systematic problem. When femicides are reaching 10 a day, it’s a wide societal complication, not a conglomeration of a lot of coincidentally similar psychological profiles.

AMLO’s assertion that the culture of neoliberalism is to blame sounds absurd on its surface and is certainly tone-deaf: not to mention a chauvinistic culture (which also exists in many societies in which neoliberalism isn’t the name of the game) as a factor is a huge oversight. Nevertheless, he certainly wouldn’t be the first person to draw a link between a cut-throat capitalist economy and gender abuse.

The first shocking example (this week, anyway) was of a young woman stabbed to death and then flayed by her much older boyfriend following an argument. The second, heartbreakingly, was a 7-year-old girl who was picked up outside her school. Though we don’t yet know all the details, a woman is the one who picked her up; she was found dead in a trash bag four days later.

Why are so many women winding up dead? One might argue that men are winding up dead too, but it’s different, and this is why: men are typically killed when they are involved in crimes; women are often killed simply because of who they are, with their romantic partners accounting for the majority of the perpetrators.

Back to the child, whose name was Fátima: we can’t prevent all violence. We can’t prevent all bad things from happening. But we can take reasonable precautions.

We don’t know the details of why, but the girl was waiting outside the school to be picked up unsupervised.

For goodness sake, can’t we agree to not have children wait outside for their parents alone? I’m not sure what the circumstances were here. Was it common for that school to allow children that young off the premises without a parent? It seems wildly irresponsible, but we don’t yet know everything that happened.

Teach your children a code word (do not write it down) that someone who is assigned to pick them up must know and say to them, and practice it. We don’t know if this was the case, but I suspect that if this girl willingly got into a vehicle, it’s no doubt because the woman told her she’d been sent by her mother to get her.

And finally: can we please stop gasping and acting all scandalized by graffiti that angry protesters leave? After all, there’s never outrage when men in gangs do it. And it could be that I just don’t notice, but the people who are outraged by the spray paint curiously don’t seem to be outraged by the femicides and abuse of women.

Spray paint can be cleaned off, statues and buildings can be erected again, glitter can be washed out of one’s hair. But no one can be brought back from the dead.

Rest in peace, sweet Fátima. We will bring justice to the system that let this happen.

Sarah DeVries writes from her home in Xalapa, Veracruz.

Plan underway to recover bodies of 63 miners lost in Coahuila disaster

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A memorial to the miners who lost their lives in the explosion.
A memorial to the miners who lost their lives in the explosion.

On the 14th anniversary of an explosion at a Coahuila coal mine that killed 65 miners, Labor Minister Luisa María Alcalde outlined on Wednesday the progress made in preparations to recover the bodies of 63 of the miners and the steps that still need to be taken.

A methane explosion at the Pasta de Conchos mine in the municipality of San Juan de Sabinas killed all of the miners working the night shift in the early hours of February 19, 2006. The explosion trapped the miners underground and only two bodies were ever recovered.

For years, relatives of the victims pleaded for efforts to be made to retrieve the other bodies but the mine owner, Grupo México, insisted that conditions were too dangerous to do so. However, President López Obrador wouldn’t be deterred, announcing on May 1 – International Workers’ Day – last year that he had ordered a recovery operation.

“This is a humanist government. So we are going to carry out this action,” he said.

Speaking at the president’s press conference this morning, Alcalde said that the ministry she leads formed a group in May 2019 called the Committee for Reparation and Justice at Pasta de Conchos.

The committee, she said, summoned mine rescue experts and the family members of the deceased miners and put together a file of more than 1,000 pages that outlined all the details of the mine disaster.

The next step, Alcalde explained, was to translate all the information into English before submitting it to mining experts in the United States, Germany, China and Australia.

Fourteen mining experts from those countries and seven from Mexico subsequently came together to discuss the contents of the file before concluding that the recovery of the 63 bodies was technically possible, the minister said.

Alcalde explained that the expert group concluded the bodies could be recovered by building a new tunnel into the mine. In order to do that, she added, the experts said the government would have to carry out preliminary testing to determine the current state of the mine.

The Mexican Geological Service (SGM), a government agency, began the necessary tests in October and will present its conclusions in March, the minister continued. Alcalde said that the SGM has already identified a location from which the construction of the recovery tunnel can possibly commence.

She said that the government will open a tendering process to find a company to carry out basic engineering work for the construction of the tunnel and predicted that work on it will start in October this year. She didn’t indicate how long the tunnel would take to build nor estimate when family members might be able to receive the remains of their loved ones.

Alcalde’s update on the recovery mission comes a day after Grupo México, the country’s largest mining company, announced that it would cede the concession for the Pasta de Conchos mine to the government in order to facilitate the recovery efforts.

In a statement sent to the Mexican Stock Exchange, the company said that it was relinquishing control of the mine in response to a request from López Obrador.

Source: El Financiero (sp)