Armed with a police weapon, the woman fires on passing motorists.
A storm of accusations came down on Aguascalientes municipal police after a woman stole an assault rifle from an open patrol car and fired on passing motorists on Saturday, wounding three.
The woman, identified as Gabriela N., had no trouble stealing the loaded weapon, as the patrol car’s doors were open and the vehicle unoccupied.
The municipal police officer had reportedly entered a nearby Oxxo convenience store to buy a soft drink. His apparent negligence caused indignation and sparked a spate of angry reproaches from state authorities.
State Public Security Secretary Porfirio Sánchez Mendoza denounced the lack of professionalism in the city’s police force and accused it of not following protocol or supervising its officers.
“The state Secretariat of Public Security has always carried out the tasks for which it is responsible, and when necessary in total coordination with the municipal police, despite the fact that its chief [Antonio Martínez Romo] doesn’t always follow state public security laws relating to [inter-agency] coordination,” he said.
He added that in 2019 the state Attorney General’s Office received 120 complaints against Aguascalientes police officers for robbery, abuse of authority and bribery, demonstrating a failure to supervise officers and an obvious lack of ethics.
Aguascalientes Governor Martín Orozco Sandoval urged the city’s mayor, Teresa Jiménez, to take responsibility for Saturday’s incident. He had already met with her in October to warn her that municipal police executives and officers “were not performing their duties.”
After firing on motorists, Gabriela N. was shot in the leg by police and taken to a local hospital for treatment.
She appeared in court on Tuesday on charges of attempted homicide, assault and robbery and was ordered held in custody.
A mother of three, Gabriela N. has a history of theft. She was presumed to be under the influence of drugs at the time of the incident.
The three victims of the shooting spree did not suffer serious injuries and have been reported in stable condition.
A patient is treated at a Moons clinic in Mexico City.
A Mexico City-based startup has secured US $5 million in financing to expand its chain of dental clinics.
Specializing in clear aligners – plastic orthodontic devices that provide an alternative to metal dental braces – the company Moons has received funds from Jaguar Venture, Foundation Capital and Tuesday Capital as well as individual investors in Latin America.
Now, Moons is aiming to attract even more funding by participating in a program run by Y Combinator (YC), a Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator.
Moons co-founder and CEO Tommaso Tomba told the technology news website TechCrunch that the company applied to the program because of YC’s access to capital and ability to open doors in the United States.
“In Latin America access to capital to build long-lasting companies is still relatively limited compared to the U.S., so we think it makes sense to YC [to include us in their program] so that they can help us with investors and attracting talent going forward,” he said.
Moons already has 18 clinics in Mexico and two in Colombia but the company plans to expand rapidly in the latter country and open clinics in other Latin American nations, Tomba said.
He explained that the company offers free initial consultations at which orthodontists examine patients’ teeth to determine if they are good candidates for clear aligners.
For a suitable individual, Moons can develop a treatment plan and consultation schedule, and provide the patient with a 3-D printed aligner for about US $1,200.
The price is far lower than that offered by other clear aligner vendors, Tomba said, adding that Moons is providing treatment to more patients in Mexico than its U.S.-based competitor Invisalign.
The co-founder said that he decided to base the company in Mexico partly because of the high demand for aligners and partly because he had experience in the country as an employee of Linio, an online shopping platform.
Tomba added that Moons has ambitions to move beyond the dental market, explaining “we plan to go into other healthcare verticals – always with the core tenet of providing high-quality healthcare and making it accessible.”
Former Major League Baseball pitcher Narciso Elvira Delgado was murdered along with his son in Veracruz on Tuesday.
Elvira, 52, and his son Gustavo, 20, were shot dead by armed men traveling in two vehicles in the municipality of Medellín de Bravo.
Elvira began his career in the Mexican leagues and pitched for the Milwaukee Brewers in 1990 before playing in the professional leagues of Japan and South Korea.
He threw a no-hitter for the Osaka Buffaloes in June 2000, the only Mexican player ever to do so in the Japanese league. With the Samsung Lions in South Korea he won a championship game and led the league in earned run average.
Nicknamed the “Whip from Cocuite” during his time in the Mexican leagues, he was one of only two pitchers to throw two no-hitters in a single season when he played for the Campeche Pirates in 1999.
After his retirement from baseball, Elvira returned to his hometown of Cocuite, Veracruz, where he raised cattle and produced sugar cane. His quiet life there was interrupted in June 2015 when he was kidnapped. His captors returned him more than two weeks later after a ransom was paid.
Both Mexican leagues and the Hermosillo Naranjeros lamented the ex-pitcher’s murder on Twitter.
“The sport is in mourning, we regret the terrible departure of an excellent pitcher,” the Mexican Pacific League said in a tweet.
A 13-year-old student was caught with an Uzi submachine gun in his backpack at a secondary school in General Zuazua, Nuevo León, on Tuesday.
The 9-millimeter weapon was discovered as parents and teachers carried out a backpack search before school. The gun was not loaded.
Teachers took the student to the school’s administrative offices, and the school principal notified police and called the boy’s parents.
Identified only as Jonathan, the student said he had found the weapon in the street while walking to school that day. He was taken to the Attorney General’s Office in Monterrey so authorities could begin investigations into the gun’s origin.
The “Safe Backpack” operation had been applied randomly in Nuevo León schools since a 15-year-old student shot a teacher and three classmates at a school in Monterrey in January 2017. The student took his own life in the attack and the teacher died of serious injuries weeks later.
Threats of school attacks have increased in the state since the Torreón shooting. In some cases authorities have seized knives and identified the sources of the threats, mostly on social media.
Government workers called servidores provide aid to citizens.
Drug cartels, fuel theft gangs, community conflicts and insecurity in general are hampering the delivery of the federal government’s social programs in 50 municipalities, according to an official report.
Obtained via a freedom of information request by the newspaper El Universal, the Welfare Secretariat report says that government employees responsible for conducting censuses to determine who is eligible for government support and explaining to citizens how they can register for programs have suspended their activities or only carry them out intermittently in high-risk municipalities.
Eighteen of those are in Puebla, 14 in Oaxaca, 11 in Tamaulipas, five in Chiapas and one each in Sonora and Durango.
A main aim of the social programs, which offer employment to disadvantaged people and provide payments for pensioners, the disabled and students, is to address the root causes of crime and violence, such as poverty and lack of opportunity.
Ironically, crime and violence are hindering the delivery of the very government support whose intention is to combat them.
El Universal reported that some servidores, or national servants, as the employees tasked with promoting the social programs are known, have been mugged and even attacked with firearms. One government worker was shot and killed in Puebla, while another sustained a gunshot wound in a separate incident in the same state.
The safety of the national servants has also been threatened by political and social conflicts that plague some communities, according to the report.
In Puebla, criminal groups involved in the robbery of trucks and the theft of fuel from pipelines pose the main threat to the government employees, although drug gangs also have a presence in the state. The social program workers are closely watched by gang members and have been warned not to attempt to enter certain communities.
Among the 18 municipalities where the national servers have been unable to complete their work are state capital Puebla, fuel theft hub San Martín Texmelucan, and Tepeaca, which is part of the Red Triangle, a region notorious for the tapping of petroleum pipelines.
In Oaxaca, community and agricultural conflicts have proved to be the main impediment to the work of the employees, the report said.
Other factors that have kept the workers from carrying out their duties within the state include the high rate of homicides, the threat posed by armed men and the presence of hidden graves.
Santiago Xanica: no feds allowed.
The Welfare Secretariat report said that national servants have been unable to enter the municipality of Santiago Xanica since September because a group called the Defense Committee of Indigenous Peoples has placed a blanket ban on the entry of security forces and federal government workers.
“We find ourselves in a position of not being able to attend to that municipality because the safety of the nation’s servants would be placed at risk,” the report said.
In San Pedro Ixcatlán, located on the banks of Lake Miguel Alemán, the discovery of “several clandestine graves on islands that belong to the municipality. . . create uncertainty and suspicion among residents towards [government] personnel carrying out fieldwork,” the Welfare Secretariat said.
Among other Oaxaca municipalities where the delivery of social programs has been affected are Juchitán, Tlaxiaco, San Francisco del Mar and Soyaltepec.
In the northern border state of Tamaulipas, the presence of armed groups involved in drug trafficking and other criminal activities has interrupted the work of the national servants in 11 municipalities including Mainero, Villagrán, Hidalgo and Miguel Alemán, all of which border Nuevo León.
However, Nuevo Laredo, located across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas, has proven to be the most difficult municipality in which to work.
Of the 115 most problematic locations that have been identified, 33 are in Nuevo Laredo. The city, a stronghold of the Northeast Cartel, is “controlled by organized crime,” the Welfare Secretariat said.
As is the case in Oaxaca, violence generated by community conflicts is the main barrier to the delivery of the government’s social programs in Chiapas.
Social conflicts and the presence of “apparent organized crime” have prevented national servants from going into eight communities in the municipality of Bochil, while they have been unable to enter five towns in Pueblo Nuevo Solistahuacán due to a territorial conflict.
In Chiapa de Corza, residents won’t let the government workers in because “they don’t want federal support,” the Welfare Secretariat report said, while the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which has long had a testy relationship with President López Obrador, refuses to allow social program employees into the municipality of Tila.
The national servants have also been prevented from entering two communities in Acalá that are controlled by the National Front of Struggle for Socialism.
In Nácori Chico, Sonora, the work of the social program promoters has been made difficult by a turf war between rival criminal gangs, while the workers have been warned not to enter some parts of Tamazula, Durango.
The army seized drugs from a plane flown by narcotraffickers for the second time in two days in Quintana Roo.
The National Defense Secretariat said the air defense system detected an unauthorized aircraft flying over international waters on Tuesday, destined for Cozumel from Argentina.
Planes from the Mexican Air Force forced it to land at the airfield in Mahahual where two Bolivian citizens on board were arrested.
Military personnel on the ground seized around a tonne of a white substance believed to be cocaine; the nature and exact amount remains to be determined by authorities.
The market price of the confiscated drugs is estimated at 224.6 million pesos (US $12 million).
The seizure and arrests were the second such military actions in as many days. Military personnel seized cocaine and guns from a plane forced to land on the highway near Chetumal early Monday morning. One soldier was killed and three wounded in that operation.
More than 1,000 kilos of chiltepín peppers valued at more than 1 million pesos (US $53,000) were stolen from a private home Saturday in Sonora.
Businessman Braulio Navarro Salcido said he had left his home, located in the Centenario neighborhood of Hermosillo, early in the day and on returning noticed that the front door had been forced, as well as the garage door. Once inside, he saw that the product he had stored in 47 sacks had vanished.
One witness said he had seen a pickup truck in the crime victim’s garage, as well as a van parked outside. The thieves apparently needed more than one vehicle to haul away the “red gold” due to the large volume.
After filing a report with the Attorney General’s Office, Braulio remained confident that the thieves would be nabbed, as a cache of that scale was unique in the chiltepín market, a business he’s been in for around 40 years.
The peppers had been purchased from harvesters in the Sierra Alta and several communities on the Sonora River for eventual sale in Tijuana, Mexicali, Culiacán and Los Mochis.
The chiltepín is harvested from wild plants in the Sonora desert. It can be hotter than the habanero but its strength can vary, depending on the weather conditions under which it grew.
When classes got out for winter break this year in Xalapa and it seemed as if half the city emptied from one day to the next, the municipality, in a rare and shocking show of logic, got to work on fixing some of the more gaping craters in our city’s roads.
I don’t mean to be condescending. It’s just that I’m exactly as weary and cynical as most residents of this city are nowadays. We’ve come to expect as a matter of course the rapid deterioration of the infrastructure and snail-paced repairs using the equivalent of Dollar Store-quality materials that only last until the next heavy rain comes.
We know that we’re just as likely to have an accident from driving too close to the person in front of us as we are from swerving to miss something in the road that shouldn’t be there. This problem isn’t unique to Xalapa, but it is solvable.
As a driver now, I spend a lot of time memorizing where the unpainted speed bumps are on my regular routes, and where the biggest potholes typically sprout, over and over again. I know what “lane” (I use the term “lane” loosely, as it’s actually rare to see painted divisions) to be in on my way home from my daughter’s school to avoid falling into a gaping crater and possibly winding up in China.
As anyone who reads my column has probably deduced by now, I care a lot about both sustainable aesthetics and function. Needless to say, I’m a frustrated but hopeful resident.
Xalapa is beautiful. Situated high in the cloud forest, its gorgeous views of both the Pico de Orizaba and the Cofre de Perote in the distance and green spilling over onto everything that will stand still for more than two days are enough to make you feel like you’re in an urban Fern Gully. Some parts are positively Avatar-esque.
Add to that copious amounts of delicious coffee, the best food in the country, and the city’s artsy and academic vibe, and you’ve got the potential for paradise (I’m biased, of course).
So why can’t we go all the way? I used to assume that the state of Veracruz, for whatever reason, was simply incapable of well-thought-out and fast infrastructure projects, but then I saw Orizaba and I’m doing a terrible job at stifling my jealousy. Why can’t we have nice things, too?
Don’t get me wrong, we’re tentatively making progress. When I returned this month after a couple of weeks in the U.S., several of the streets had been patched up and smoothed over. Great!
Other areas of the city have received or are receiving durable hydraulic pavement rather than the Dollar Store-variety asphalt that’s typically slabbed on the streets, complete with the underground installation of those unsightly cables.
Many of the new projects in the city are being undertaken specifically with pedestrians in mind: expanding and rehabilitating sidewalks, making them handicapped-accessible, adding bike lanes, etc. I just hope we don’t forget that the ability for cars to get around safely is also a big part of making a place safe for pedestrians.
So without further ado, here are my uninvited suggestions to my city and other similar ones for making things as awesome as they should be:
Get that hydraulic pavement everywhere! Really, we have got to stop using cheap materials that wash away with the first rain to repair anything — what’s even the point? We’ve got some great homegrown “green” ideas as well. One other writer suggested that it’s about making sure there’s always work to do but honestly, I think there are enough needed repairs in this city to keep people busy for decades.
If we’re going to have speed bumps everywhere, let’s at least make sure they stay painted so unsuspecting drivers slow down when they’re meant to rather than hitting the roof of their car as they rush over.
We need big, easy-to-read signs indicating two things on every. single. block: the name of the street, and whether or not the street is one-way (once in a while I can’t tell, and have to wait until someone coming from the other direction yells and gestures at me).
For goodness sake, let’s paint some lanes on our major roads — driving should involve as little guesswork as possible about where you should be.
The stoplights need to be retimed based on current traffic patterns rather than the original ones from when they first went up.
Designate a reasonable amount of parking. If we need more parking garages, we need more parking garages. The cars that are in the city aren’t going away, so it’s time to figure out a way to accommodate them.
Every neighborhood in this city knows what it needs: repaired roads, updated official signs, designated parking, repairs of lamp posts, safe places for kids to play. Let’s institutionalize neighborhood organizations that can report problems that need fixing, and even make suggestions for neighborhood beautification projects like more plants and trees or murals.
Experts and workers in the areas needed could be sent by the city to work with the people in the neighborhood, and it could double as a training program for those interested in urban development. A simple lunch could be offered to volunteers, and other benefits for the neighborhood — such as paint for the outside of people’s houses, or trees — could be tied to the number of volunteers that participate.
The real test will be upkeep. And if things aren’t going to be done well the first time around, all we’re doing is throwing money away, anyway. As a friend recently said, “Xalapa has stayed in the 90s.” What he meant is that not a lot of serious updating has been done to the city’s infrastructure since then, and I think he’s right.
Convivencia (coexistence) and participation in civic life is already built into the culture. It’s time to take advantage of that for the betterment of our cities.
Sarah DeVries writes from her home in Xalapa, Veracruz.
The last six years were the six hottest on record in Mexico and climate change is to blame, according to the heads of the National Metrological Service (SMN) and the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC).
The hottest year in the period – and in the almost 70 years since temperature records were first kept– was 2017 when the average temperature across the nation was 22.6 C, 1.7 degrees higher than average of 20.9 C over the period since records were first kept in 1953.
The title of second hottest year ever was shared by 2016 and 2019, both of which recorded an average nationwide temperature of 22.4 C – 1.5 degrees higher than the long-term average. The other years in the six-year period exceeded the average nationwide temperature by at least 1.2 C.
“As a planet, we’re one degree above the average that existed in the period from 1850 to 1900, and remember that the goal has been set to [not exceed a temperature increase] of 1.5 C,” SMN chief Jorge Zavala told a press conference last Wednesday.
“In Mexico’s case, 2019 was the second hottest year; we had an average temperature in the country of 22.4 C nationwide – this includes maximums and minimums of each day and in each region,” he said.
In a subsequent interview with the newspaper Milenio, Zavala said that the fact that six of the past 10 years were the hottest in the last 70 made it possible to conclude that the high temperatures were indeed attributable to climate change.
INECC general director María Amparo Martínez Arroyo offered a similar assessment.
“. . .What’s happening in the rest of the world is also happening in Mexico, we’re going through the process of global warming,” she said.
“All countries, including Mexico, have to accelerate their [emission reduction] actions in order to meet the Paris Agreement because we’re already seeing a very clear trend” that temperatures will likely continue to rise, Martínez added.
SMN forecaster Reynaldo Pascual Ramírez told Milenio that temperatures have been rising in Mexico since 2005, with only one year – 2010 – bucking the trend.
He said that most parts of the country experienced hotter weather last year than in 2018 although some regions including the Sinaloa coast and the states of Sonora, Baja California, Guerrero and Oaxaca didn’t see temperatures rise.
“. . .But it was hotter in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Zacatecas and the entire Huasteca. . .” Ramírez said, referring lastly to a region that encompasses parts of several states including Tamaulipas, Veracruz, San Luis Potosí and Hidalgo.
The forecaster also said that a severe drought affected eastern Mexico last year, highlighting that the region normally receives regular rainfall.
The National Water Commission said in September that two-thirds of Mexico was in drought of varying severity after almost 20% less rain than normal fell between in the first 8 1/2 months of last year.
Raúl Pacheco, a water management expert at the Mexico City research university CIDE, said in October that climate change will cause periods of drought to lengthen and that Mexico’s cities have to adapt to that reality.
“It’s important for cities to adapt to the lack of water and to do that they need a plan . . . They must invest money and there must be coordination between environmental agencies and those working on climate change . . .” he said.
Carlos Slim Helú, one of Mexico’s and the world’s leading entrepreneurs, turned 80 today.
Slim’s business education started when he was young: his father gave him and his siblings a bank book along with his allowance, as the story is told on carlosslim.com. From then on, Slim saw savings and investment as an integral part of his life and eventually rose to become one of the world’s mightiest business magnates.
Slim ranked 11th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at the end of last year, with a fortune valued at US$61.5 billion, to which he added $6.72 billion in the past year.
His realm embraces the telecommunications, infrastructure, energy and building sectors, among others, thanks to such firms in his possession as Telmex-Telnor, the subsidiaries of América Móvil; and the conglomerate Carso which runs such companies as Grupo Sanborns, Carso Infrastructure and Construction (CICSA), Grupo Condumex and Carso Energía.
The market value of his companies added up to $82 billion, a 2.5% jump over the past five-year period, according to Bloomberg.
It isn’t just his astronomical net worth that sets the business magnate apart, but also his proximity to key political figures, among them President López Obrador.
Slim has successfully forged agreements with the current administration, as was the case when his companies IEnova, TC Energía and Grupo Carso renegotiated gas pipeline contracts with the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE).
In addition the businessman has also demonstrated interest in working on infrastructure projects initiated by the current government, such as the National Infrastructure Investment Accord.
The reality is quite different for his telecommunications firms, however, as the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) has mandated the splitting up of Telmex-Telnor to form a new company, which cannot be subsidized, as a result of measures that were put into effect in 2017.
Another disciplinary action is in store for Telmex on the same basis that could result in a fine of up to 5 billion pesos.
