Hurricane Zeta has triggered a hurricane warning for portions of the Yucatán Peninsula.
The latest updates from the U.S. National Hurricane Center continues to put Cozumel and the area from Tulum, Quintana Roo, to Dzilam, Yucatán, in Hurricane Zeta’s sights, with hurricane warnings issued for both areas. Hurricane-force winds and heavy rains are expected by Monday evening.
A tropical storm warning is also in effect from south of Tulum to Punta Allen, as well as west of Dzilam to Progresso. Tropical storm-strength winds are also expected to arrive in the area by this evening.
A hurricane warning advisory means that hurricane conditions are expected somewhere within the warning area within the next 12 hours. A tropical storm warning means that tropical storm conditions are expected somewhere within the warning area within 12 to 24 hours.
Zeta is expected to spend tonight and early Tuesday over the Yucatán Peninsula. Zeta’s maximum sustained winds were near 130 kilometers per hour at 3:00 p.m. CST, with higher gusts, but winds could strengthen before Zeta makes landfall. Some weakening is likely while Zeta moves over the peninsula, but it is forecast to strengthen again when it moves over the southern Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday.
Storm surges are possible when Zeta makes landfall, raising water levels more than one meter above normal tide levels.
Zeta was located 145 kilometers southeast of Cozumel at 3 p.m. and moving northwest at about 17 kilometers per hour.
After passing through Mexico, Zeta is predicted to move on towards Morgan, Louisiana, and the northern Gulf Coast, to the Mississippi–Alabama border, by Wednesday.
The president opened an upgraded coal-fired electrical plant in Coahuila on Saturday.
President López Obrador has rejected complaints by a group of United States lawmakers about policies in Mexico favoring state-owned energy companies over private firms, asserting that it is not the role of government to protect private interests.
A group of 43 U.S. senators and representatives wrote to President Donald Trump last Thursday to urge him to find a resolution with the Mexican government that maintains “current market conditions … along with certainty and fairness for U.S. companies operating and competing in Mexico.”
The lawmakers said that actions by the Mexican government “threaten U.S. energy companies’ investment and market access and undermine the spirit of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA),” which took effect July 1.
After noting the benefits the previous government’s 2014 energy reform – which opened up the Mexican market to foreign and private companies – brought to U.S. firms, the lawmakers said that “recent reports indicate that the Mexican government is providing preferential regulatory treatment for [state oil company] Pemex and delaying or canceling outright permits for U.S. energy companies.”
Supporting those “anecdotal experiences” is a leaked memo from López Obrador that directs authorities to use all available resources within the regulatory framework to protect Pemex and the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), they said.
The lawmakers also noted that members of the ruling Morena party have presented initiatives that would roll back the 2014 energy reform and and “seek to relinquish all contracts currently in force.”
“These efforts violate and contradict the spirit, if not the letter, of the USMCA, an agreement among whose primary objectives are to promote growth among the participant countries,” they said before urging Trump to find a resolution.
Speaking at an event in Nava, Coahuila, Saturday, to mark the recommencement of operations of an old state-owned coal-fired power plant, López Obrador said his government would continue to favor Pemex and the CFE over private firms, asserting that the USMCA doesn’t set rules for Mexico’s energy sector.
“In line with the legal framework we have, we are going to give preference to Pemex and the Federal Electricity Commission, let that be clear,” he said.
The Associated Press noted that appearing at the reopening of a coal-powered plant would be “bad optics” for most leaders as much of the world shifts to renewable energy and cleaner gas-fired plants but López Obrador’s remarks indicated that he was unperturbed.
“I am very happy to be here … at the Nava thermoelectric complex, to tell those who defend neoliberal policy that we are not going to retreat one step,” he said.
The president at the coal-fired thermoelectric plant in Nava.
The president said the U.S. lawmaker’s complaints that his government is protecting state-owned companies is a source of “satisfaction” and “pride.”
“What is the role of government? To protect private interests? No! The only businesses that public servants should be interested in are state-owned companies,” López Obrador said.
The president said that his wage isn’t paid by Repsol, a Spanish company he claims received unduly favorable treatment as a result of the energy reform, but rather the Mexican people and for that reason he won’t back down and stop defending the interests of Pemex and the CFE.
The federal government has certainly not been shy in implementing policies that benefit the state-owned firms, which López Obrador claims were neglected by previous administrations.
In May the Energy Ministry (Sener) published a new energy policy that imposed restrictive measures on the renewable energy sector that appeared aimed at restricting its expansion in Mexico.
In addition, the National Energy Control Center (Cenace) suspended national grid trials for renewable energy projects under the pretext that the reliability of supply had to be guaranteed during the coronavirus crisis. Industry groups said that move would affect 28 recently-built wind and solar projects and 16 that were under construction. All told US $6.4 billion in investment, much of it from foreign companies, was to be affected, the groups said.
Both the publication of the Sener policy and the Cenace decree triggered injunction requests from the private sector and environmental groups, some of which have been granted.
According to Kenneth Smith, a former trade official who headed up Mexico’s technical negotiating team in USMCA talks with the United States and Canada, there will likely be many more lawsuits against the government in relation to its energy policies.
In contrast to López Obrador’s view, the USMCA incorporates state monopoly-ending, market-opening measures outlined in the 2014 energy reform, he said.
“There could be cases in which the countries [the United States and Canada] bring lawsuits against Mexico for a violation of the treaty commitments,” Smith said. “Individually, [U.S. and Canadian] companies could also file lawsuits against the Mexican government.”
An unnamed energy sector insider told the newspaper Reforma that three international arbitration processes aimed at having Mexico respect energy sector rules put in place as a result of the 2014 reform are underway and that another is in the pipeline.
“A clash is coming between the current energy policies and the regulatory framework that is protected by international agreements under which investment was made,” the person said.
Echoing the warnings of business leaders and analysts, the secretary of the energy committee of the lower house of Congress warned that foreign investment to Mexico will suffer if the president doesn’t adopt energy sector policies that are more friendly to private firms.
Hernán Salinas Wolberg, a deputy with the National Action Party, said the complaints of the United States lawmakers are completely justified and charged that López Obrador needs to be provided with better advice on energy matters.
“It’s clear that the complaints of the United States legislators are well-founded; they’re justified both by the content of the free trade agreement and by … other instruments,” he said.
“There are two paths here: rectify [policies] … to adapt to the current legal framework [built on the 2014 reform] or modify the legal framework with the disastrous economic consequences that could have for the country,” Salinas said.
“What can be seen with complete clarity is that this fixation that [López Obrador] has on artificially improving the conditions of the CFE and Pemex at all costs, even by breaking international commitments …, will be very expensive for Mexicans.”
Supporters of President López Obrador march in the capital on Saturday.
About 5,700 people took to the streets of Mexico City on Saturday to show their support for President López Obrador during a march to the capital’s central square.
The procession, a response to recent and ongoing protests by the National Anti-AMLO Front (Frenaaa), was dubbed “the march of a million” by organizers but the number of participants didn’t even reach 1% of that number, according to Mexico City authorities.
Supporters of AMLO, as the president is widely known, came to Mexico City from several states including México state, Hidalgo, Michoacán, Guerrero and Chiapas to participate in Saturday’s march, which left the Angel of Independence monument in the early afternoon.
Chanting pro-AMLO slogans and insults directed at Frenaaa and its leader Gilberto Lozano, the staunch advocates of the president marched along Reforma Avenue before reaching the historic center of Mexico City.
The newspaper El Universal reported that the march was led by a man wearing a López Obrador mask who at one stage removed handcuffs from his pockets and proceeded to “arrest” other participants wearing masks of past presidents Enrique Peña Nieto, Felipe Calderón, Vicente Fox and Carlos Salinas.
The federal government is planning to hold a referendum asking citizens whether recent former presidents should face justice for crimes they allegedly committed while in office.
Upon arriving at the zócalo, the march participants were unable to hide their animosity toward Frenaaa members who have been camping out in the central square since late September, hurling insults at them and telling them to go home.
“Out Frenaaa! The zócalo belongs to everyone,” the AMLO supporters shouted in between chants of “Es un honor estar con Obrador” (it’s an honor to be with Obrador).
The march participants subsequently held a rally in front of the National Palace, which flanks the eastern side of the zócalo, at which they called on the Mexican people to continue supporting the president and declared that they would launch legal action against Lozano, whom they accused of harassing López Obrador supporters.
“We’re not going to allow anything or anybody to stop … this grand national project,” said one of the march organizers referring to the so-called “fourth transformation” the federal government says it is carrying out.
“Let’s all unite for our freedom and democracy and against the [attempted] coup,” Óscar Zurita said.
The president cut short his speech when he was heckled by Frenaaa supporters.
A day later, López Obrador received a hostile response from Frenaaa members at an event in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, at which he provided an update on urban improvement projects in the northern border city.
As the president addressed the event, government critics gathered outside the venue, a sports center, repeatedly chanted “López out!” while a group of supporters cheered him on.
With the former attempting to drown him out, the president spoke for fewer than four minutes, asserting that his brevity was due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m going to be brief because there is a lot of passion, a lot of people mobilized here in Nuevo Laredo and we have to take care of ourselves due to the pandemic so that there aren’t infections. … The less time we spend together the better …” López Obrador said.
He told the audience that the government has invested 1.4 billion pesos (US $66.8 million) on infrastructure projects in marginalized neighborhoods of Nuevo Laredo and that it will continue supporting the people of Tamaulipas despite its differences with Governor Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca, one of 10 state leaders who formed a group that is aiming to be a counterbalance to federal power.
“It’s in the public domain that we have differences with the state government but regardless of these differences we have to put the general interest, the interest of the people and the interest of the nation first.”
Speaking before the president, Governor García called on the federal government to make changes to funding arrangements with the states, asserting that Tamaulipas is treated unfairly. He also called on the National Water Commission to ensure that farmers in the northeastern border state aren’t left without water as a result of Mexico’s obligations to the United States under the terms of a 1944 treaty.
López Obrador didn’t address those issues in his brief speech but announcing a water deal with the United States last week said the U.S. had made a commitment to send additional water south of the border in the case of severe drought.
Like many organizations forced to adapt and evolve due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Morelia International Film Festival will be carrying on in its 18th year, but with various concessions.
The festival, renowned for its international connections with the Cannes festival and other European film organizations, will be a hybrid affair this year, with a combination of virtual and live events.
The festival will also be shorter than usual, taking place October 28–November 1. In addition, there will be fewer venues this year, with showings only in Cinepolis theaters in Morelia, according to festival press director Daniela Michel.
“It’s been much more difficult than other years to organize this festival, but we are very clear that the mission is to support Mexican filmmakers,” she said. “We have worked so hard to make this possible.”
Highlights of this year’s festival, including showings of films from around the world, include three film premieres and a restored version of director Alejandro González’s Amores Perros, as well as showings of Oscar contenders Ammonite starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan and Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand and David Strathairn.
It is often said that in challenges are found opportunities. Festival organizers are taking that maxim to heart, seeing the necessity to put on a partially virtual event as a call to make the festival more available to the public than in previous years.
“Festivals at times end up being only for the professionals, those who can obtain accreditations [to attend],” Michel said. “What we have done [this year] is make the festival be as open as possible so that the whole public can attend free digitally. We continue having our association with the Cannes Festival, with the International Critics’ Week at Cannes, with the French embassy, with the Goethe Institute [of Germany], and new this year, with the Televisa Foundation [in Mexico], the UNAM Film Library, and the National Cineteca, showing classic Mexican cinema.”
All this being said, however, Michel stressed that nothing will ever replace the festival’s commitment to live events, once a vaccine has been found and life can go back to normal.
“I believe that there are unique experiences that only can happen at a festival, and those festivals need to have contact with people and the interaction of the cinematic community. This [pandemic] is an unfortunate ‘parentheses’ happening in the world right now.”
A backhoe clears one of eight blockades in Chihuahua on Sunday.
Farmers in Chihuahua opposed to the diversion of water to the United States lifted their almost two-month-long rail blockade on Sunday after the state government agreed to support their demands.
Piles of earth and gravel that were dumped on tracks in eight locations in the municipality of Meoqui on August 26 were removed after state officials met with the disgruntled farmers and pledged to support nine demands set out in a document submitted to the federal government’s Chihuahua delegate.
One key demand is that the Chihuahua government lobby the federal government to release three farmers who were arrested in Delicias on September 8, the day farmer Yéssica Silva was fatally shot and her husband was wounded during an alleged attack on their vehicle by the National Guard after a protest at the La Boquilla dam.
Among the other nine demands are that no more water be diverted to the United States from dams in the Conchos River basin, that the National Guard and army withdraw from dams and deploy instead to insecurity hotspots such as Ciudad Juárez and the Sierra region and that criminal complaints against farmers for damage caused during protests be dropped.
The document also calls for justice for Silva and her husband. The farmers’ decision to lift their blockade was welcomed by the state government.
“By lifting the blockade of the rail tracks in Estación Consuelo, Meoqui, the economic vibrancy linked to the transport of rail freight in this region will return,” it said in a statement.
“The Chihuahua government is delighted with the decision that puts an end to the impact on this economic sector and reiterates its commitment to accompany the state’s farmers in their fight for water.”
The Confederation of Industrial Chambers said earlier this month that the rail blockade was generating losses of 450 million pesos (US $21.4 million) per day. Therefore, total losses during the almost two-month-long blockade likely totaled about 27 billion pesos (US $1.3 billion).
The Chihuahua government said that the incomes of thousands of families in the northern state were affected by the blockade and that its removal will benefit farmers, industry and the railroad industry.
The decision to lift the blockade came three days after the federal government announced that it had reached an agreement with the United States to settle Mexico’s water debt to its northern neighbor. Mexico and the United States have to send water to each other under the terms of a 1944 bilateral treaty.
The federal government’s efforts to divert water to the U.S. from Chihuahua, where many municipalities are in a state of drought, have triggered countless protests by farmers who argue that they will be left without the essential resource.
One of the 'monsters' discovered near the US border.
Authorities in the border region of Ribereña, Tamaulipas, said Sunday they have confiscated six armored tank-like vehicles found hidden under brush in the small community of San Pedro, near the city of Camargo. They are believed to have belonged to cartels in the region.
The vehicles, which police discovered after noting a man carrying a long firearm, contained 1,787 ammunition shells as well as body armor vests, helmets, caltrops, and an explosive device. The man carrying the weapon fired at police upon seeing them and escaped, authorities said.
The area has been the focus of a territorial war between factions of the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas for more than a decade.
Security expert Alexei Chevez told the newspaper Infobae that these tank-style vehicles, often referred to colloquially as “monsters,” are used by cartels either for intense battles or to make a show of force, since they are difficult to maneuver and not easy to hide.
They are bastardized from civilian vehicles to look like military tanks. They are made out of armored money transport trucks and other large vehicles — in some cases garbage trucks. They typically feature turrets outfitted with automatic weapons.
One of the narco-tanks, with a solid looking ram on the front.
Authorities also announced that they had discovered other similarly armored vehicles full of weapons and ammunition in Caborca, Sonora.
The Caborca area is currently a battleground between cartel forces loyal to Ovidio Guzmán, son of jailed cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and the Caborca Cartel, led by Rafael Caro Quintero.
The Health Ministry's Ruy López provides death statistics during Sunday's coronavirus press briefing.
There were 193,170 excess deaths in Mexico between January 1 and September 26, more than 70% of which are attributable to Covid-19, the Health Ministry reported Sunday.
Ruy López Ridaura, director of the Health Ministry’s National Center for Disease Prevention and Control Programs, told Sunday night’s coronavirus press briefing that 139,153 of the excess deaths – or 72% – were judged to have been caused by Covid-19.
The figure is 50,224 higher than the official Covid-19 death toll, which currently stands at 88,924. The main reason for the discrepancy is that Mexico has an extremely low testing rate, and many suspected Covid-19 patients have died without being tested.
López said the figure of 139,153 Covid-19 deaths comes from a preliminary analysis of death certificate databases. The figure includes fatalities for which Covid-19 symptoms were mentioned on death certificates even if they were not identified as the cause of death.
López said the excess death figure was obtained by comparing the number of fatalities between January 1 and September 26 this year to the average number in the same period between 2015 and 2018.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. milenio
There were a total of 718,090 deaths in the almost nine-month-long period, 193,170 — or 36.8% — more than the 2015-2018 average.
Once the excess deaths attributable to Covid-19 are deducted, there were 54,017 additional fatalities above the average level.
López didn’t explain the causes of the other excess deaths but experts in other countries have said that crowded hospitals may be a factor in more people dying from illnesses not related to Covid-19.
Another possible reason is that some people didn’t seek timely treatment for illnesses that turned out to be fatal out of fear of being infected with the coronavirus at the hospital.
The excess mortality rate was highest this year among Mexicans aged 45 to 64, with 63% more deaths than in previous years.
There were 33% more fatalities among citizens aged 65 and above, while the excess mortality rate for those aged 20 to 44 was 18%.
Campeche, the only state with a green light “low” risk rating according the federal government’s coronavirus stoplight system, had the highest excess mortality rate between January and September, with 65% more deaths than the average for previous years.
México state, which ranks second among the 32 states for Covid-19 deaths, ranks second, with an excess morality rate of 64%.
Mexico City – which leads the country for both confirmed coronavirus cases and Covid-19 deaths – and Quintana Roo follow, each having an excess mortality rate of 60% between January and September.
Every state recorded more deaths in 2020 than in previous years but five had excess mortality rates below 10%. They were Durango (4%), Chiapas (5%), Nayarit (6%), Guerrero (8%) and Yucatán (9%).
López said the excess morality rates cannot be used to assess the effectiveness of the pandemic response in each state.
Therefore authorities in states with lower rates haven’t necessarily done a better job in controlling the virus than those with higher rates.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated case tally rose to 891,160 on Sunday with 4,360 new cases registered by health authorities. The official Covid-19 death toll rose to 88,924 with an additional 181 fatalities reported.
Francesca Dalla works on a zombie figure for a movie prop.
Artist Francesca Dalla Benetta’s story shows how an even seemingly fragmented past can come together to make something truly amazing.
Despite being born and raised in Italy, a place synonymous with fine art, Dalla states that the country is “stuck in the 17th century aesthetically, with a culture that is all but dead.”
Although Dalla knew she wanted to be an artist and graduated from art school in Italy in 2003, she says she was unfocused and began working in stage scenery and special effects. However, the field is tightly controlled in Italy, she said. Without the right connections, it would be impossible to go far.
But Hollywood and Mexico gave her a new option: she landed a six-month gig in 2006 working on Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto, which was shooting in southern Veracruz. She was part of a multinational crew but found herself mostly hanging out with Mexicans and learning Spanish. The experience gave her contacts, and she found it quite possible to support herself in Mexico as a freelancer.
She spent many years in Mexico’s film industry, mostly making masks, arm and leg protheses, and fake cadavers. She met and married a Mexican man.
Dalla with one of her sculptures.
In 2009, her work caught the attention of an Italian wax museum, which hired her to make figures. She considers it a major break because during that period, she created entire figures depicting the living and her first work in sculpture.
At the same time, the long hours and extreme competitiveness of movie work was wearing her down. She even ran into Mexicans that resented her as a foreigner working in the country.
She shifted into teaching to pay the bills and began to sculpt. Her first experiments were based off the fantastic creatures she made for the movies, essentially taking what she learned there and applying it to fine art. She began to show her sculptures in 2012. By 2017, they were selling.
She decided that if she was going to be a “real artist,” she needed to move to Mexico City and so left Veracruz. Her home and workshop today are in the working-class barrio of Colonia Moderna, east of the more trendy areas of the city.
She prefers this neighborhood in part because it allows her to have more space at a reasonable price and because the area is less affected by earthquakes, a consideration after Mexico City’s 2017 quake.
Dalla has found success with a particular kind of surrealism. The Italian influence on her work is seen in the traditional European anatomy, with a preference toward the slightly plump figures of Renaissance art.
A nagual-inspired figure.
However, she emphasizes that while proportion is important to her, she tries not to fall into the “trap” of Old European perfectionism. Elements are added to create an otherworldliness.
In one series, there are human figures with animal heads or animal masks. They represent how we present ourselves to the outside world, either to disguise who we are or to demonstrate it. One interesting example is “Little Red Riding Hood,” a figure of a young girl with a wolf’s mask.
Other series have human figures, wholly or in part integrated with flowers and inanimate objects. Considered together, her work creates a kind of personal mythology. Some works have more than a hint of the Mexican concept of a nagual (a shapeshifter), whether that is conscious or not.
Unlike the vast majority of foreign artists I have met in Mexico, Dalla has contemplated conscientiously what it means to be a foreigner in this country. In 2012, she began a project to research the stories of other Italian immigrants to Mexico, in part due to a personal crisis that questioned her resolve to continue living in the country.
Her thought was that if she could find out how other Italians adapted and thrived in Mexico, she could, too. The project interviewed 50 people in the Mexico City area, focusing on questions of identity, resulting in 14 busts and 28 drawings. In the end, it served as a way for her to make peace with the cultural clashes she had been experiencing.
The trials and tribulations of being a stranger in a strange land can often bear artistic fruit. Dalla has taken the best of being both Italian and Mexican to combine them into something that speaks to the human psyche. Despite any complaints she may have about living here, she fervently believes that Mexico allowed her to come into her own.
A recent work which incorporates everyday objects as part of the figure “Guess who I am.”
“Mexico is the place that gave me the opportunity to develop myself as a sculptor and as a mature artist, an aesthetic concept, a career …”
She calls Mexico a “super fertile land,” and while she admits it is clichéd, she finds Mexico surrealist.
“There is something in the air here that makes one realize that anything is possible.”
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 17 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture. She publishes a blog called Creative Hands of Mexicoand her first book, Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta, was published last year. Her culture blog appears weekly on Mexico News Daily.
An armored police vehicle on patrol in Mexico City.
Despite having long played down the presence of the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) in Mexico City, a series of recent moves is making such denials increasingly pointless.
In recent weeks, signs have emerged that the Jalisco cartel is expanding its presence in the capital, largely by allying itself with the Fuerza Anti-Unión to take on the capital’s largest criminal gang, La Unión Tepito.
On October 3, a shoot-out in the borough of Azcapotzalco left six dead and four wounded, with one of the arrested perpetrators telling police they were hired by the CJNG to attack drug dealers associated with the Unión Tepito, according to the newspaper El Universal.
An early October raid at Mexico City’s Central de Abasto wholesale market found tunnels used to move drugs and weapons. City officials said these belonged to the Fuerza Anti-Unión and that they were being supplied with weaponry by CJNG.
Officials have recently made somewhat contradictory statements about the CJNG. On September 18, Security Minister Alfonso Durazo stated that the CJNG had been making incursions into Mexico City and maintained “fragile” agreements with local gangs.
But earlier in September, Mexico City’s Secretary of Citizen Security, Omar García Harfuch, claimed that the CJNG had no significant presence in the capital and that local gangs, such as the Unión Tepito and their enemy the Fuerza Anti-Unión, had been broken up into “atomized cells.” More recently, he identified 14 criminal groups operating in the capital – without including the CJNG.
García’s comments came mere months after his attempted assassination on June 26, when CJNG gunmen shot up his car, hitting him three times and killing his bodyguards as well as a passerby.
InSight Crime analysis
Mexico City officials are sticking to a long-held narrative that the capital remains a cartel-free bastion of safety.
But this is belied by any number of reports: that the CJNG supplies microtraffickers with drugs in nine of Mexico City’s 16 boroughs, that CJNG members are directly extorting businesses in the historic center and that the new Fuerza Anti-Unión leader reportedly maintains strong ties with the CJNG.
Cementing a power base in Mexico City would be a significant step for the group, bringing it one step closer to having a presence in every part of the country.
According to Óscar Balderas, a Mexican journalist and expert on organized crime, the capital has clear attractions for the CJNG. “The country’s logistics are controlled from here … you have the historic center, which is the richest itinerant trade area in all of Latin America, the most important airport in Latin America to be used for drug trafficking and human trafficking, you have financial areas where money can be laundered,” he told InSight Crime.
Pinpointing how long the CJNG has had a presence in the capital is challenging. Suspicions of ties between the CJNG and the Fuerza Anti-Unión have existed since at least 2017, when the National Center for Planning, Analysis and Information for Combating Crime first warned about it.
And this “divide-and-conquer” approach has worked elsewhere. Its nationwide success can be partly attributed to its common tactic of forging alliances with local groups, as seen in Tamaulipas with Los Metros or in Tijuana with remnants of the Arellano Félix organization, who have rebranded themselves as the Tijuana New Generation Cartel.
But displacing the Unión Tepito will not be a simple task. To do so, the CJNG “must break the very deep ties – even familial ones – that La Unión Tepito has in the center of Mexico City … Their only alternatives would be to buy loyalties, and the CJNG has plenty of money to do so, or to force them out with violence,” explained Balderas.
But, he suggested, a violent approach would likely provoke a firm response from law enforcement and spoil one of Mexico City’s key criminal advantages: “the ability to go unnoticed while controlling some of the most profitable criminal businesses in the country.”
Reprinted from InSight Crime. Alessandro Ford is a writer with InSight Crime, a foundation dedicated to the study of organized crime.
People have lost their fear of the disease, says analyst.
October is on track to be the second worst month of the pandemic for new cases of the coronavirus. But the increase in cases this month is not due to a new outbreak of the virus, according to experts who spoke to the newspaper El Universal.
The federal Health Ministry reported 137,559 new confirmed coronavirus cases in the first 23 days of October for an average daily tally of 5,980.
If the same average is maintained during the final eight days of this month, there will be a total of 185,380 new cases in October.
Compared to September, when 143,656 cases were reported – just 6,097 more than the current October total – the average daily case tally is up 25% this month. October’s accumulated tally has already exceeded that of June when health authorities reported 135,425 new cases.
Covid-19 deaths have also increased compared to last month. Health authorities reported 10,666 fatalities in the first 23 days of October for an average daily death toll of 463. The average is 5% higher than in September.
If the same average number of daily reported deaths continues for the remainder of the month, there will be 14,353 Covid-19 fatalities in October, which would be the fourth highest total after July (18,919), June (17,839) and August (17,726).
According to a teacher and analyst at the National Institute of Public Health, the increase in new cases this month is not attributable to a new outbreak of the coronavirus.
“To use the term ‘new outbreak’ is a mistake because the reality is the country never brought the [epidemic] curve down,” said Carolina Gómez Vinales. “Yes, there was a reduction in cases but it wasn’t enough” to keep infection levels down, she said.
Gómez said she believes that the increase in case numbers in October – Mexico’s accumulated tally is now approaching 900,000 – is the result of the relaxation of coronavirus mitigation measures and the failure by many people to follow social distancing recommendations.
“It appears that people have lost their fear of the disease; the streets are full, there is traffic similar to that before the [March to May] national social distancing initiative, there are people in restaurants, in [town] squares, in public places,” she said.
Authorities need to insist on the use of face masks, urges infectious disease specialist.
“We mustn’t forget that we’re in a pandemic, that this isn’t over and if we don’t take care of ourselves it won’t end.”
Alejandro Macías, an infectious disease doctor and member of the coronavirus commission at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), also said that the October increase is not indicative of a new outbreak.
“The increase in the incidence rate … simply corresponds to an uptick [in the current outbreak] because a new outbreak is the reappearance of a disease after control has been achieved,” he said.
Macías acknowledged that control of the virus hasn’t occurred in large parts of Mexico and therefore the increase in new case numbers is not attributable to a new wave of the pandemic.
The doctor, who headed up the government’s response to the 2009 swine flu pandemic, echoed the calls of many experts in saying that authorities need to insist on the use of face masks to help slow the spread of the coronavirus, noting that “there is scientific evidence” that they work.
Macías also urged the government to pay attention to the positivity rate (the percentage of Covid-19 tests that come back positive) in addition to case numbers and hospitalizations, asserting that it is a key indicator of the intensity of the pandemic.
Mexico’s positivity rate is currently just over 40%, a figure that is extremely high compared to many other countries. The rate is elevated because most testing here is targeted at people with serious, coronavirus-like symptoms.
María Luisa Ponce López, a UNAM academic and public health expert, urged people to follow health measures to help slow the spread of the virus. In addition to wearing face masks, she recommended that people refrain from speaking while using public transit to reduce the probability of droplet transmission.
Ponce said the government should only consider issuing a new stay-at-home order as a last resort because of the social and economic ramifications a lockdown would have.
“Reordering a lockdown is an extreme measure; it can’t be ruled out, … other countries are doing it, but stopping economic and social activities can generate problems,” she said.
The academic added that many people would be unlikely to respect a new stay-at-home order because, in addition to the economic need of going out to work, people are “exhausted” with the pandemic and associated restrictions.
“That’s why it’s better to highlight the need to wash your hands, … avoid crowded places and use a face mask if you go out,” she said.
