Amid the confusion surrounding the implementation of the federal government’s new universal healthcare scheme, workers of the program it replaces have been left jobless and with an uncertain future.
Former Seguro Popular employees from Mexico City, Oaxaca, Morelos, Hidalgo, Guerrero, Michoacán and México state protested outside the National Palace in the historic center of the capital Thursday morning to demand a meeting with Juan Ferrer, director of the new National Institute of Health for Well-Being (Insabi), and President López Obrador.
Their demand wasn’t met but the disgruntled workers did meet with senior officials from the secretariats of the Interior (Segob) and Health (SS) later in the day.
However, the audiences with Segob strategic affairs director Antonio Navarrete Ruiz and SS administration and finance chief Pedro Flores Jiménez failed to appease the ex-employees, who are seeking termination payments in accordance with the law or employment with Insabi, which is responsible for the new healthcare scheme.
Following the meeting with the former, which took place after more than 300 former Seguro Popular workers transferred their protest to a major thoroughfare that runs through downtown Mexico City, representatives of the ex-employees said that Segob officials “have no idea what’s happening – they don’t even know what Insabi is or what Seguro Popular was.”
Referring to the subsequent meeting with Flores, a Mexico City representative of the former Seguro Popular employees said that “unfortunately, we’re left with questions again, we’re left with uncertainty again.”
César Camargo said the ex-workers were told they have to speak with their respective state governments rather than federal authorities because the former has the authority to contract workers for the Insabi scheme, which commenced January 1.
Camargo accused the federal Health Secretariat of washing its hands of the matter, adding that Seguro Popular workers were not informed that the states would be responsible for hiring Insabi workers. He also said there is no certainty that the former workers will find employment with Insabi, which is facing resistance from governors of several states.
Acting on the federal government’s advice, Camargo said that workers would initiate talks with state authorities on Friday.
Ulises Cortés Maldonado, a union leader in Oaxaca, said that former Seguro Popular workers in that state will continue to protest against the termination of their employment. A sit-in began outside Insabi offices in Oaxaca city on Monday.
Now in its 20th year, the San Pancho Music Festival is set to rock residents and visitors alike in San Pancho, Nayarit, on February 28 to March 1 with 27 bands from across the Americas.
Musicians from Canada, the United States, Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America will perform a wide variety of musical genres, such as blues, rock, jazz, Mexican folk, flamenco, classical and more.
With two stages in San Pancho’s Plaza del Sol, the three-day festival offers continuous music from 5:00pm to after 11:00pm each day and aims to consolidate the town’s status as the cultural heart of the Riviera Nayarit.
Local restaurants and vendors will provide food, drinks and arts and crafts in the plaza so festival-goers don’t have to miss a minute of music to grab a bite to eat.
Donations are welcome, however, as expenses have grown along with the festival itself, which began in 2001 when then-residents John and Patricia Alexander invited 12 local musicians to join the informal jam sessions they held on their back porch.
By 2006 the festival was hosting over 100 performers and it was apparent that it had outgrown the Alexander home. It moved to the Plaza del Sol in 2007 and has only gotten bigger ever since.
A limited number of chairs will be available in the square on a first-come-first-serve basis, so people are advised to bring their own in case they fill up fast.
Visit the festival website for more information, including line ups, artist bios, photo galleries and more.
Puebla tops the list of cities where residents feel unsafe.
Almost three-quarters of Mexican adults feel unsafe in the city where they live, according to a new security survey that found that Puebla is seen as the least safe city in the country.
Conducted by the national statistics agency Inegi in December, the 26th National Survey on Urban Public Security found that 72.9% of respondents across 70 cities believe that the place where they live is unsafe.
The figure is 1.6% higher than that detected by Inegi’s previous survey in September but 0.8% lower than the 73.7% of respondents who said that they felt unsafe in December 2018.
Almost eight in 10 women said they consider their city unsafe, whereas just under seven in 10 men said the same. The difference between genders is similar to that seen in previous surveys.
The perception of insecurity was highest in Puebla, where 92.7% of survey respondents said they felt unsafe.
Located about 130 kilometers southeast of Mexico City, the state capital is not as notorious for crime as some other Mexican cities, making the survey result somewhat surprising.
The percentage of people who said it was unsafe jumped almost 10 points compared to September when Puebla ranked 19th.
The incidence of a range of crimes including homicide, femicide, rape and vehicle theft have increased in recent years but there was no major surge in violence in the last quarter of 2019 that would explain the spike in Mexico’s fourth largest city.
Other cities considered unsafe by at least nine in 10 survey respondents were Tapachula, Chiapas, 92.1%; Ecatepec, México state, 92%; Uruapan, Michoacán, 92%; Fresnillo, Zacatecas, 91.9%; Tlalnepantla, México state, 90.9%; and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, 90.5%.
Located just north of the border with Guatemala, Tapachula is a major transit city for Central American migrants, which could be a factor in the high perception of insecurity.
Ecatepec, part of the Mexico City metropolitan area, is notorious for femicides and other crime, while Uruapan is located in Michoacán avocado country, where drug cartels are extorting growers and gangs of thieves target the crop known colloquially as green gold.
Tapachula, a transit point for migrants, was second worst city in the survey.
Bordering the capital to the north, Tlalnepantla is often cited as one of the most dangerous areas in the greater Mexico City area.
While the perception of insecurity is generally high across the country, there are a number of cities that buck the trend.
Fifteen recorded insecurity perception rates below 50%, with Mérida, Yucatán, and San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León, sharing the title of Mexico’s safest cities.
Just under one in five residents (18.9%) of both the Yucatán capital – ranked second safest city in North America by a business magazine last year – and San Pedro, an affluent municipality in the Monterrey metropolitan area, said they considered their city unsafe.
Rounding out the top five safest cities as judged by the people who live in them were San Nicolás de los Garza, Nuevo León, which is considered unsafe by 31.7% of residents; Saltillo, Coahuila, 32.1%; and Los Cabos, Baja California Sur, 32.7%.
Among the other cities considered unsafe by less than half of residents were Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco; La Paz, Baja California Sur; Tepic, Nayarit; Campeche; and Tampico, Tamaulipas.
The Inegi survey also asked respondents to specify the places in their cities where they felt most unsafe. The top response was bank machines in the street followed by public transit, banks, the streets and highways. More than a quarter of respondents said that they felt unsafe at home, and 29.2% and 39% respectively said they had security concerns at school and work.
The survey found that the navy is seen as the most effective crimefighting force, with 85.5% of respondents saying that it is very or somewhat effective in preventing and combating crime, followed by the army, the National Guard and Federal Police. Less than half of respondents rated state and municipal police as effective in tackling crime.
A third of respondents said that security conditions will remain equally as bad this year as last year (2019 most likely set a new record for homicides) while an additional 28.9% predicted that the situation will deteriorate further in 2020.
Mexico News Daily readers were even more pessimistic. Asked if they believed the security situation would improve this year, 81% said no in the MND Poll published January 6.
A thousand workers cleaned the streets daily in Tenochtitlán (as imagined by Diego Rivera). The obnoxious leaf blower came later.
Many years ago, I taught English in Querétaro, which was then so small you could easily reach every part of it on foot. The first time I crossed the town at dawn, it was dead quiet and I expected to see nothing but empty streets.
To my surprise, I found neither the streets nor the sidewalks empty. It was, in fact, downright dangerous to walk around at that hour because, without warning, gallons of water (clean, fortunately) might come sailing out of any doorway at any time.
This was my first introduction to a curious and charming Mexican custom which, for lack of a better name, I will call the Spotless Sidewalk Syndrome.
In front of every residence, some energetic individual would be scrubbing or sweeping not only the sidewalk but often a section of the street as well and when they were all finished, there was not a bit of dirt — not even a speck of dust, I swear — on any sidewalk in town, and the streets, too, were impeccably clean.
This custom, it seems, goes a long way back in Mexico. It is said that the streets of Tenochtitlán were swept and washed daily by a crew of a thousand street cleaners, who were supervised by health officers and inspectors. While the Aztecs bathed at least once a day, the conquistadores only bothered to take a bath once a year. Cleanliness was definitely not their thing.
“Cleaning” a cobblestone road: with hourly emissions equivalent to over 1,600 kilometers of car travel.
To me, the voluntary daily street cleanup in Querétaro was a shining example of civic pride and civilization and I cringe at what it is turning into in modern times thanks to the Japanese who, in the late 1950s, unleashed upon our planet a device which has frequently been called “the most idiotic invention of all time:” the leaf blower.
The origins of this reverse vacuum-cleaner are shrouded in mystery. Some say it was first developed to disperse agricultural chemicals while others claim it was used to remove debris from delicate Japanese gardens. The inventor is said to be one Dom Quinto, about whom, it seems, not much is known. Perhaps he went into hiding to avoid being lynched by millions of people who can’t stand his contribution to noise pollution.
At any rate, when the device reached the U.S.A. it was, in some areas, at first considered a useful tool for piling up leaves in the late autumn. Although the gizmo was noisy and its emissions excessive, it was considered tolerable because it was used for only a few weeks out of the year.
Then it crossed the border into Mexico, where it was immediately pounced upon as a blessing from heaven, a quick, easy and irresistible solution to the daily task of keeping the ground clean outside one’s door. Designed for use only a few days out of the year, the nerve-racking, noisy leaf blower was transformed into a Power Broom and is now used every single day by countless Mexican workers (a few wearing masks, none wearing earplugs) who are forced by economic necessity to spend eight hours a day pointing a howling and shrieking machine at every speck of dust they find lying on the ground.
I have a neighbor who employs not one but two leaf-blower-wielding gardeners at the same time to lift the dust from the great stretches of concrete pavement surrounding her house. “How could I possibly keep all this clean without these machines?” she told me. “I can’t live without them.”
Unfortunately, the leaf blower was never designed to be a dust mop and thousands of well-meaning users in Mexico are literally stirring up clouds of trouble for themselves and their neighbors.
Continuity: a plaza sweeper in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, carries on an ancient tradition, with the same kind of broom.
All you have to do is to take a look at the contents of what leaf blowers raise into the air. Streets and sidewalks are covered with minute particles of dirt, pesticides, fungal spores, mold, insect eggs, pollen, fertilizers, brake-pad fibers, dried urine, spit and vomit, plus the excrement of dogs and the droppings of birds, mice and bats, just to name a few ingredients.
In addition, lead, arsenic, mercury, heavy metals and other carcinogenic substances have been found in the 5 pounds of particles which a leaf blower launches into the air every hour with the force of a hurricane.
The dust can take hours and even days to settle. These particulates aggravate allergies and asthma. They also contribute to cardiac conditions such as arrhythmia and can cause heart attacks. Moreover, they contribute to pulmonary diseases such as bronchitis, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In addition to the disgusting material the leaf blower lifts into the air, the emissions of its engine are way off the chart. Air pollutants coming out of a gasoline-powered blower for only half an hour are equivalent to those emitted from 885 kilometers of automobile travel (California Air Resources Board).
This means that if your fraccionamiento employs just two men to “dust off” your streets eight hours a day, they will pollute the air every month with the equivalent emissions of a car traveling 680,000 kilometers, nearly twice the distance from Earth to the moon.
As far as gardening goes, experts say the leaf blower is the very worst imaginable device to put near a plant. Wind coming from the nozzle is hot, dry and moving at about 290 km/h, the speed of a hurricane or tornado. It kills soil-dwelling organisms, they say, and is exceedingly harmful to plants.
“No leaf blower for me!” Valentina Ramírez of Guadalajara is happy using a broom.
Last but far from least comes the outrageous noise of the leaf blower, which is as endearing to many people as the whine of a dentist’s drill. Leaf blowers produce a noise level of 70-75 decibels at 15 meters. They can cause hearing loss at this distance and, of course, result in eventual deafness to the operator if, as is so common in Mexico, his ears are unprotected.
The damage caused to bird life has yet to be assessed. According to Francisco León, the man in charge of the Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count in Guadalajara, “Our statistics are beginning to show a drastic reduction in bird life wherever leaf blowers are regularly used. These obnoxious machines are chasing away many birds and possibly other kinds of animals and insects as well.”
Because of all these factors, Mexico desperately needs to find a modern device that will satisfy the demands of the Spotless Sidewalk Syndrome without causing pollution, pulmonary diseases, lung cancer and deafness.
If we have succeeded in exploring distant planets and splitting the atom, surely someone can come up with a quiet, non-polluting way to remove dust and dirt as efficiently as the 1,000 silent street sweepers of Tenochtitlán.
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.
Health officials in San Nicolás de los Garza, Nuevo León, have launched a new weight loss competition to promote healthy lifestyles and combat obesity, primarily among young people.
Participants in the Adiós Gordito! (Goodbye, Chubby!) program will submit to a physical training regimen and nutritional consultancy with the goal of lowering their weight and getting healthier.
The five participants who obtain the best results will win 5,000 pesos (US $267), a six-month membership to a local gym and further nutritional advice.
The program initially planned to accept 35 contestants, but authorities were forced to increase the number of physical trainers and nutritionists after over 100 people signed up on the first day of applications.
Although the program is intended to focus on young people, there is no age limit and it is open to men and women aged 14 to 59 weighing more than 100 kilograms.
Municipal youth director Marco Rodríguez said the program will select 80 participants who will be divided into two groups, since some applicants did not pass certain medical tests or showed cardiac risks or other issues.
Workouts will begin on Wednesday, January 22 at the local Community Development Center. Participants will be given a list of goals every 15 days and will keep track of those they accomplish via a points system that monitors their training stages and eating habits.
This is the municipal government’s first Adiós Gordito! program, but not its first attempt to motivate citizens to lead healthier lives. In the past it has offered property tax discounts to families who participated in a weight loss program.
More than 24 million Mexican adults are considered obese by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Some of Mexico’s cruise ship ports enjoyed a record-breaking year in 2019.
The port at Cozumel, Quintana Roo, welcomed 1,461,778 passengers, more than any previous year, representing growth of 18% over 2018. The number of cruise ship arrivals was up 22% to 403.
Federal Tourism Secretary Miguel Torruco tweeted last July that Cozumel was the No. 1 port for cruise ship passengers in Mexico, welcoming over half (50.8%) of the country’s cruise tourists.
The second most popular port was Mahahual, Quintana Roo, with 18.7% of cruise ship visitors, followed by Ensenada, Baja California, with 7.4%, Los Cabos 6.3% and Puerto Vallarta 5.8%.
Progreso, Yucatán, broke its own record for visitors as 472,263 passengers disembarked from 146 cruise ships, 6.2% more visitors than the previous year.
Port authorities said there was a record number of passengers during the week of December 15-21 when 14,282 disembarked to enjoy the town’s beaches and tourist services.
The Yucatán Secretariat of Tourism Promotion (Sefotur) said there are 24 cruise ship arrivals planned for the month of January.
The government has undertaken several initiatives to improve Progreso’s image and the services it has to offer cruise ship tourists and residents alike.
A 60-million-peso (US $3.1-million) makeover of the port last year included road repairs, underground electrical wiring, new garbage trucks, green recreation spaces and the renovation of the Progreso House of Culture.
Baja California Sur saw an 8.5% increase in tourism in 2019 over the previous year, welcoming over four million visitors thanks to new air connections, more cruise ships and changing trends in travel, state officials said.
One significant factor was a new air route between Los Cabos and London, England, which opened up a new route of connectivity with Europe.
State Tourism Secretary Luis Araiza said he plans to continue attracting more European visitors, but will not neglect the state’s primary markets, the United States and Canada, to which it is connected via 38 air routes.
Ocean-going visitor numbers were also strong: nearly 600,000 visitors to Baja California Sur arrived on cruise ships, around 100,000 more than in 2018.
The trend is expected to continue and expand throughout the state as a new Sea of Cortés cruise that launched this year will bring passengers not only to established tourist destinations like Los Cabos and La Paz, but also to towns like Santa Rosalía, which hasn’t welcomed a cruise ship in eight years.
Increased connectivity led to the construction of 1,393 new hotel rooms in the state last year, and another 2,308 are planned for 2020. Tourism represents 70% of the state’s GDP, with 40% of that concentrated in Los Cabos.
But that concentration is starting to change, said Araiza, who cited millennials as driving tourism to other parts of the state, such as the mining-turned-ghost town of El Triunfo, the Pacific coast Magical Town of Todos Santos and San Ignacio with its cave paintings and lagoon.
To promote tourism in these and other communities in the north of the state, he announced the creation of a new tourist route called Ruta Uno (Route One) with an investment of 10 million pesos (US $534,000).
Araiza also cited conference and sports tourism as other important contributors, because it brings in more revenue than traditional tourism.
He also announced the return of the Mexican stage of the Tour de France to La Paz and a new mountain bike tournament.
Municipalities where homicides have occurred are indicated in blue. el universal
Guanajuato’s wave of violence in 2019 has continued into the new year with 213 murders recorded in just 15 days.
Statistics from the National Public Security System (SESNSP) reveal that Guanajuato led the country in murders in 2019 up to November with over 3,000. The state saw 265 homicides in that month alone.
The Guanajuato Attorney General’s Office said that January’s murders have occurred primarily in the cities of Salamanca, Irapuato, Celaya, León, Apaseo el Alto, Tarimoro and Jaral del Progreso.
Armed men killed seven people in an auto repair shop and scrapyard in Tarimoro on Wednesday afternoon and two men were murdered in a guesthouse in Celaya in an attack that occurred at the same time.
Security forces reported that armed attacks late Tuesday night left 11 people dead and two houses burned in Comonfort, Apaseo el Alto, Celaya, Salamanca, Jaral del Progreso and Irapuato.
The houses in Jaral del Progreso and Salamanca were both reportedly empty when they were attacked and burned. The one in Jaral del Progreso was said to belong to a police officer.
In the face of the widespread violence, Guanajuato Governor Diego Sinhue Rodríguez Vallejo said Wednesday that the National Guard must be on the streets patrolling rather than in their barracks if something is to be done about insecurity.
“It doesn’t do any good to have bases of operation with the soldiers inside them. We need them to go out and keep watch, to do operations, we need them to be out on 24-hour surveillance, not inside their barracks,” he said.
Sinhue said on Monday that he doubted National Guard Commander Luis Rodríguez Bucio’s claim that there are 4,150 National Guardsmen in the state and asked him to specify how many are actually on patrol.
The alleged fraud was conducted by a Monex employee in San Miguel de Allende.
A Mexican financial services company has attempted to resolve a multi-million-dollar fraud involving expatriates and others in San Miguel de Allende with an offer to reimburse them with 60 cents on the dollar.
But two brothers from the United States have chosen legal action instead.
Jim and Ken Karger are among investors from several countries who charge that their savings were stolen from their Grupo Financiero Monex accounts in Mexico. More than 50 retirees in San Miguel discovered early last year that their accounts had been emptied.
An investigation by Mexico News Daily published last June found that an estimated US $40 million from more than 150 Monex accounts belonging to United States, Canadian, British, European and Australian expatriates was stolen via an alleged decade-long Ponzi scheme.
The banker who allegedly defrauded the Karger brothers and other victims, was Marcela Zavala Taylor, an English-speaking woman who provided personal banking services to Monex clients. However, after the millions went missing, she stopped all correspondence with her customers.
Alleged fraudster Zavala.
Monex has denied any responsibility for the fraud, filing a criminal complaint against Zavala and declaring that she acted alone.
Some defrauded customers who settled with the bank, often for amounts much less than their losses, were asked to sign an agreement that blamed Zavala alone for missing funds.
Meanwhile, Monex has continued to argue with other defrauded customers about how much money they should get back, Bloomberg said in a report published on Thursday.
Several victims said they didn’t consider legal action because they believed that any settlement they won would likely be eaten up by lawyers’ fees.
The Kargers, on the other hand, “won’t back down,” Bloomberg reported.
The news agency reported that the brothers, who have a private lending business in San Miguel de Allende, turned down an offer for about 60% of their principal in US dollars, choosing instead to launch legal action.
Jim Karger told Bloomberg that they had cash in a Monex bank account and shares in Apple Inc. and Tesla Inc. in a brokerage account, which was allegedly drained. When the brothers began speaking to Monex about their missing money a year ago, they were told that their account had been in pesos although Zavala had told them that it was in dollars.
As the peso has lost value in recent years, the amount they would get back from the bank if they opted for settlement would be much lower than their initial investment. Instead, Jim and Ken Karger are suing for their principal investment in US dollars, Bloomberg said.
“Most people settled for less than principal because they can’t afford to do what we’re doing,” Ken Karger said. “It may be a long shot, but what we’re doing will punish the bank, which will force them to the table.”
The brothers have also set up a website – bancomonexfraud.com – that is designed to draw attention to their case and help other people who have lost their savings. It features news stories and other information about the fraud allegations against Monex as well as an open letter to chief financial officers responsible for funds in Mexico.
According to Bloomberg, Jim and Ken Karger want their cash but also want to make a point that the Mexican banking system should take responsibility for the actions of employees.
To date, the brothers have spent US $150,000 trying to get back about $1.5 million that they say they lost.
Fraud victims Mauri and Ken Karger.
“This is a cause, and it’s bigger than Jim and me,” said Ken Karger, a retired dentist who lives in Fort Worth, Texas.
Legal actions filed by him and Jim Karger, who had a labor law firm in Dallas before moving to San Miguel 18 years ago, are aimed at having federal financial crimes prosecutors take up their case. The brothers want them to investigate Monex, its employees and Zavala, their one-time personal banker.
They hope that a two-year-old law that says that financial companies can be held accountable for the actions of their employees and agents will help their cause.
“Monex is trying to let everyone believe that Marcela was the only one involved,” Antonio Holguin, an attorney representing the Kargers, told Bloomberg.
“We think she was not the only one responsible. She was using tools of the bank, so the bank as an entity should face criminal charges.”
However, proving that Monex is responsible could take a very long time, according to Kevin Carr, founder of financial technology company Finiden in Washington, D.C. and a former primary representative of the United States Treasury Department Mexico.
He told Bloomberg that cases can take years and that courts often attempt to push opposing parties towards settlement. That makes legal action risky, Carr said.
Monex spokesman Fernando García told Bloomberg via email that the bank has been cooperating with investors and has settled with all but three clients who claimed to have been defrauded.
“It is up to the judicial system to determine those responsible,” García wrote. “Monex Financial Group reiterates that it is an institution that acts with strict adherence to national and international standards.”
Bloomberg said that its attempts to contact Zavala and her lawyer were unsuccessful.
The electrical wiring at 30 of Mexico City’s largest markets is in poor condition and poses a fire risk.
The city government inspected the electrical installations at the markets between January 2 and 14 after fires at the San Cosme, Merced and Abelardo Rodríguez markets in December.
According to a Secretariat of Economic Development (Sedeco) document seen by the newspaper El Universal, authorities detected wiring that was overloaded, in a state of disrepair and subject to overheating, all of which can trigger fires.
Of the 30 markets where wiring was not up to standard, 14 are in the central borough of Cuauhtémoc, 11 are in Venustiano Carranza and five are in Miguel Hidalgo. The government plans to inspect the electrical installations in all of Mexico City’s 329 markets but has given initial priority to 50 large ones.
Economic Development Secretary Fadlala Akabani said that when authorities detect a situation that poses a risk, they make arrangements for the problem to be fixed either through repair or replacement.
“That doesn’t mean that the faults are being corrected at the moment. When we finish [inspecting] the 50 markets, we’ll meet with the [borough] mayors” to develop a plan to modernize electrical installations in each market where problems were identified, he said.
Akabani said the first stage of inspections will finish by the end of this month after which the wiring in the city’s other 279 markets will be checked.
He also said that authorities have removed illegal wiring used by some stallholders to steal electricity, adding that there will be “permanent surveillance” to ensure that they don’t do it again.
Mexico City authorities indicated last month that they would also inspect gas and hydro-sanitary installations at public markets.
Last month’s market fires destroyed almost 1,000 stands at the San Cosme and La Merced markets. Two people died in the blaze at the latter, located in Mexico City’s historic center, while three vendors’ stands were destroyed in the fire the Abelardo Rodríguez market in Cuauhtémoc. Faulty electrical infrastructure was identified as the cause of all three fires.
