'With healthy distance, we can continue socializing,' AMLO advised.
Despite the growing spread of Covid-19 in Mexico and the official commencement on Monday of the government’s social distancing initiative, President López Obrador has urged Mexicans not to stop going out.
López Obrador made the remarks on Sunday while seated alongside the owner of a restaurant in Oaxaca city.
“Don’t stop going out, we’re still in the first stage [of the coronavirus outbreak]. I’ll tell you when not to go out,” he said in a video posted to his Facebook account.
“If you can do it and you have the financial means, keep taking your family out to eat, to the restaurants, to the fondas [cheap diners] because that strengthens the family economy and the working class economy,” López Obrador said.
“We don’t do any good, we don’t help if we bring ourselves to a standstill in an exaggerated way without rhyme or reason. We’re going to continue living normal lives and at the [appropriate] time the president will tell you when we have to stay at home but not yet. With healthy distance, we can continue socializing,” he added.
“We have to be prepared and not think that it [the coronavirus pandemic] won’t affect us. It could affect us, the problem could get bigger but we’re prepared and we’ll get through it.”
The president’s advice contrasts with that of Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum who last week urged citizens to stay at home and on Sunday announced the closure of movie theaters, sports centers, bars and nightclubs among other spaces that attract crowds of people.
Earlier in the video, the president asserted that Mexicans shouldn’t be afraid of the growing outbreak of Covid-19 in Mexico because the country is prepared for it.
“Mexicans, because of our cultures, are very resistant to all of the calamities. We’ve always gotten through them and on this occasion we’ll get through it. Our people are the holders and inheritors of ancient cultures, great civilizations, and in that lies our strength. Let’s not panic,” he added.
The video was one of several López Obrador posted to social media during a weekend tour of Oaxaca, where he attended an event to commemorate the 214th anniversary of the birth of former President Benito Juárez and inspected the progress made on two highway projects.
Interjet announced on Sunday that it will suspend service on its international routes beginning on Tuesday due to border closures in response to the global Covid-19 pandemic.
The airline said in a press release that it will suspend service to the United States, Canada, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, but service among its 30 domestic destinations would continue as normal.
“We’re going through the worst health crisis in our modern history, which will bring with it big economic and social changes across the globe. Our company has been in close communication with airport and health authorities in Mexico and those countries to which we fly, always putting health and safety first,” said the company.
Interjet director general William Shaw regretted that political decisions to close borders are affecting the service it provides, but said that safety comes first.
“For Interjet, the most important things are the safety and wellbeing of our passengers and collaborators,” said Shaw.
The company said it has been using high-efficiency particulate absorbing (HEPA) filters, which fully clean and replace the air in the cabin every three minutes, to keep its flights as sanitary as possible.
It did not specify when it would resume international flight service.
The Mexican peso fell to a new record low against the United States dollar on Monday as the coronavirus pandemic continues to take a heavy toll on economies around the world.
One US dollar was selling at banks for as much as 25.52 pesos on Monday morning, Citibanamex reported. It is the first time ever that a greenback has cost more than 25 pesos.
The financial group Monex said that the peso is facing “considerable stress” due to the economic impact of Covid-19 around the world. As the pandemic worsens, investors have rushed to free themselves of high-risk currencies, such as the peso, in favor of the U.S. dollar, which is regarded as the ultimate safe-haven currency.
The financial group Banco Base noted that the US dollar had strengthened against a basket of major currencies in overnight trading between Sunday and Monday.
Until mid-February, the Mexican peso had been one of the best performing emerging-market currencies in the world, and President López Obrador often touted its stability as evidence of his government’s sound economic management even as growth in Mexico stagnated.
But as Covid-19 spread to more and more countries and the number of cases began accumulating at a frighteningly fast pace, the peso began to waver.
The peso has weakened during each of the past 16 trading sessions, the news agency Reuters reported, making it the worst performing emerging-market currency in the period.
The price of Mexico’s export crude has also taken a significant hit in response to falling demand due to the coronavirus pandemic and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, while last week was the worst the Mexican stock exchange has seen since 2008.
The central bank said that the coronavirus pandemic would have a negative impact on growth prospects this year but did not announce a new forecast after cutting its outlook to 0.5-1.5% in late February.
However, Investment bank Credit Suisse and the Bank of America have both cut their forecasts for the Mexican economy in 2020. The former is predicting a 4% contraction this year while the latter anticipates that GDP will shrink by 4.5%.
The Maya Museum in Cancún is one of those that can be visited online.
Even before authorities issued decrees on the weekend ordering many public facilities to close, Mexico’s museums began postponing events and shutting down facilities in response to Covid-19. As of Monday, all museums in Mexico City were closed until at least April 20.
Although many of Mexico’s cultural institutions have not quite caught up to the 21st century, there are some online resources available, almost all of which are provided by museums related to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).
Granted, seeing a photograph of a painting or a pyramid pales in comparison to having it in front of you. But it’s still good to know you can see some of what you’re missing while you sit at home in coronavirus quarantine.
INAH has a portal site that enables online views of select rooms from 56 of its 162 facilities. Many of these are from its flagship National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, but there are others from regional museums and archaeological sites in various parts of the country. Some sites require Adobe Flash to be enabled.
Some of the virtual tours are impressive and worth viewing with or without a national emergency.
National Anthropology Museum
The most important cultural museum in the country, this is Mexico’s answer to the Smithsonian or the British Museum. To visit all of its 22 exhibition halls requires at least two days. The virtual tours focus on the most popular rooms, in particular its pre-Hispanic and regional ethnographic collections.
Palace of Fine Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes)
This is not a museum per se, but Mexico’s premier cultural center. It is a main attraction for the city because of its French-inspired architecture and murals by Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo and others.
Cancún Maya Museum
This is one of INAH’s newest museums, opened in 2012, with avant-garde design inspired by Mayan building columns from the 8th to 16th centuries. The lobby holds modern artworks, while the interior contains artifacts from various parts of Quintana Roo as well as the sites of Chichén Itzá (Yucatán) and Palenque (Chiapas).
Templo Mayor
This was the main temple of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire. It was thought for centuries to lie beneath the Mexico City cathedral until its accidental discovery in the 1970s. After much consideration, historic colonial-era buildings were demolished in order to excavate this center of pre-Hispanic religious life.
Museum of the Cultures of Oaxaca
This museum is located in the former Santo Domingo church and monastery of Oaxaca city. It is dedicated to the history of the state, with many original artifacts from the pre-Hispanic period up through the Mexican Revolution. It also has collections dedicated to documenting the various indigenous cultures that have a very strong influence on the state’s identity.
Cuauhnáhuac Regional Museum
This museum is located in Cuernavaca, using the original Náhuatl name of the city before it was Hispanicized. The building is better known as the Palacio de Cortés (Hernan Cortés’ Palace), after the conquistador who ordered its construction in the 16th century. It was the seat of his and his descendants’ rule as the Marquis of Oaxaca until the 17th century.
The museum is dedicated to the history and culture of the state of Morelos, especially its history as a major sugar cane producer in the late 19th century. One major attraction is a mural by Diego Rivera called History of Morelos, Conquest and Revolution, completed in 1930.
The collapse occurred around 6:00 p.m., and was caught on video by a number of people who had been filming the sudden and intense hailstorm.
“Get out! Get out!” yells one man who caught the entire collapse on video. He can then be seen helping people make their way out of the ruined structure.
Clara Brugada, borough president of Iztapalapa, where the market is located, told the news outlet Telediario that there were no reports of injuries. However, reporters from other media have said that there were at least two people injured.
“I heard a loud crash, [and] when I saw that the structure that supported the roof was beginning to bend, I ran with my family to get away,” said Gonzalo Flores Martínez, who rents a booth in the market’s fresh flowers section.
He said that upon inspecting the fallen roof, the hail appeared to be different from normal. Instead of frozen precipitation, it looked and felt more like “plastic or balls of water with glue.” The sticky hailstones stacked up on the roof of the market and the weight became too much for the structure to bear.
Flores said that Brugada visited the collapsed market and, after a brief tour of the scene, admitted that she didn’t know what to do. Several market vendors became angry, insulted her and even attacked the two police officers escorting her.
He asked for the help of Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum “or another responsible public servant who really wants to help us, because the losses are in the millions of pesos.”
His lost merchandise and that of other vendors will be recouped through the insurance included in the 220-peso (US-$8.75) rent they pay per square meter of market space.
Another vendor, Juana Hernández, estimated her losses to be around 18,000 pesos (US $716). “But the worst part was the fright from seeing how the roof was coming down on us,” she said.
Mayor Sheinbaum said that the city would conduct an investigation into the collapse and assured vendors that they would receive government support.
A banana plantation just outside Ciudad Hidalgo provides jobs to many asylum seekers. Lexie Harrison-Cripps
Asylum applications in Mexico take several months to conclude, during which time asylum seekers must navigate a complex administrative system, geographic restrictions and xenophobia and are likely be denied access to basic needs such as employment, shelter, safety, education and health.
These represent the unofficial barriers preventing people from seeking asylum in Mexico.
Those who do survive and receive formal refugee recognition must wait months before they are given paperwork by the National Immigration Institute (INM) that formally allows them to work and leave the state in which they applied for asylum.
In 2019, Mexico came under pressure from the United States to reduce the flow of migrants passing through Mexico from the south to the north.While many reports focus on the United States as a destination, what is life like for those who seek asylum in Chiapas, where many asylum seekers applied for protection.
A residential area outside Ciudad Hidalgo where many asylum seekers from Central America are housed. Lexie Harrison-Cripps
Last year, 65% of asylum requests (45,726 out of over 70,000) were made in the state. The refugee agency responsible for processing asylum applications, COMAR, is grossly underfunded and is therefore accumulating a significant backlog of claims. This keeps applicants trapped in a state with poverty levels of 70% and extreme poverty at 20%, but ultimately placates the United States government and avoids the imposition of trade tariffs.
“On average, the asylum application process takes around seven months,” confirmed Florian Heopfner of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), during which time applicants must prove that they have not left the state in which they applied.
Not only does this restrict employment options for the asylum seekers, it also places considerable stress on the local population, which can lead to xenophobia, explained Heopfner. In order to alleviate the stress, the UNHCR has been working on a relocation and employment program for both asylum seekers and recognized refugees. Five-thousand people were successfully relocated to other parts of Mexico last year with a goal to relocate 20,000 people this year.
To date, the program is seen as a success.‘Those relocated last year contributed 40 million pesos [US $2.1 million] in taxes,” said Heopfner, “which is almost double the COMAR budget for the same period,” making the program financially viable for the government.
Asylum seekers are entitled to a unique registration key (known as a temporary CURP) which they can use to access employment, healthcare and education. However, a recent UNHCR study found that only 2% of asylum seekers in the neigbouring state of Quintana Roo had a CURP, said Heopfner.
Following the successful completion of the asylum application process, a refugee must apply for a permanent CURP in a process that can take months, leaving them without employment opportunities or access to health insurance.
Any one of these reasons can force asylum seekers and recognized refugees to work for employers who don’t demand papers. Yurgen, 28, explained that a construction site in Ciudad Hidalgo doesn’t demand papers, but only pays 150 pesos for an 11-hour day, with the opportunity to earn another 100 pesos if they work until midnight.
In order to address unemployment for asylum seekers, the government launched a social emergency program that provides employment opportunities such as cleaning, gardening or carpentry projects. Workers earn 198 pesos a day.
Work details are randomly allocated, regardless of skill. Trecoria, a 55-year-old Honduran woman works as a cleaner from about 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. six days per week, which equates to around 40 pesos per hour.
She rents accommodation in Ciudad Hidalgo with her daughter, niece and her niece’s three children for 1,400 pesos per month. The six of them share two mattresses, considered a luxury by her colleagues who sleep on Acapulco-style wire chairs. Despite this obvious hardship, she said she was happy to be in Ciudad Hidalgo and has no intention of leaving Chiapas for the U.S.
Also in the cleaning program was a 42-year-old Guatemalan, who asked not to be named. She and her family fled to Mexico in November after the Mara 18 gang killed her brother-in-law and threatened her family; they received asylum in February. She lives in a basic two-room structure with no doors or windows, tucked at the back of a quiet neighbourhood outside Ciudad Hidalgo. She and her husband rent the space for 1,500 pesos per month.
In the cool shade ofthe auditorium in Ciudad Hidalgo one morning in March, dozens of workers from the program waited for their paychecks.As attractive as employment in the social emergency program sounds, the checks come sporadically.
“Payments are due every 15 days but it isn’t uncommon to wait for days before we are paid. In December, the whole month passed without payment,” confirmed Isaac from El Salvador.
A boatman poles a makeshift inflatable raft from the banks of Guatemala toward Mexico. Many migrants have been ferried across the river aboard such rafts. Lexie Harrison-Cripps
Most people are living hand-to-mouth and so even a few days without payment is problematic. “We have to borrow money [when they don’t pay us],” he explained. “It can be a problem when we need money to get to the COMAR office.”
One man in his late 40s explained that he had not been paid for weeks. He had been told that his name “was not in the system” and he would have to continue working while they resolved the matter.His colleagues nodded as he spoke, while they listened out for news of whether or not they would be paid that day.
As time passed, groups were called over and given the news about whether or not they would be paid. By 1:00 p.m. those left in the auditorium were told to return tomorrow; there would be no further payments that day.
A coordinator of one of the work details who asked not to be named explained that she buys water or food for the workers who frequently faint from dehydration and hunger in temperatures up to 35 C. At times “workers are not given tools,” the coordinator said, and “have to use their hands to clean or collect leaves from the street.”
While in the asylum process, applicants must sign on to prove that they remain in the state. The law requires a weekly signature but COMAR chief Andrés Ramírez has relaxed the requirements to require a signature once a fortnight.
Not everyone in the family has to sign. One person can act as the family representative but time spent in the line is time away from work.
The process consumes hours of civil servant time and poses a security risk for asylum applicants, who are often hiding from crime gangs. Anyone searching for a person “need only wait outside the COMAR office knowing that their target must show up at least once in any 14-day period,” confirmed Heopfner.The presence of gangs, such as the Maras, is widely recognized in Tapachula and is evident by graffiti tags throughout the city.
COMAR received over 70,000 applications in 2019 of which 14,234 were concluded and 81% were offered protection. Of those, 73% were recognized as refugees and 7% were given complementary protection (a watered down form of asylum offered when an individual does not meet international criteria).
Looking at this from an international perspective, Ramirez’ department has reason to boast. The European Union, according to statistics agency Eurostat, had a 41% recognition rate in 2019. The United States imposes an annual cap on refugee recognition, which was 30,000 for 2019 and is 18,000 in 2020.
COMAR is underfunded and understaffed and “was only able to survive last year with the financial support of the UNHCR,” said COMAR chief Ramirez.Although the 2020 budget was increased by 7 million pesos to 27 million, “this is only 40% of what the agency needs in order to function efficiently and clear the backlog of claims,” said Heopfner of the UNHCR.
This is the second of a two-part series that examines the unofficial barriers that serve to discourage people from filing claims for asylum.
Cochoapa El Grande, where anyone with half a chance in life leaves.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from deportees, it’s that deportation is the easy bit.
Being handcuffed and forcibly returned to Mexico, be it through a border door or a plane deeper into the country, is bearable. Few are treated with respect and many are treated inhumanely, but over the years I’ve spent covering the plight of returning migrants, the vast majority have the same attitude: “Fair enough, you got caught. What else did you expect?”
Take David, whom I met in Guadalajara earlier this month. He’s from Cochoapa El Grande, in Guerrero state, the most impoverished municipality in Mexico. I’ve been there too.
It’s a mountain town, a two-hour drive up into the pine-jungled hills above Tlapa. Half an hour up the route, the asphalt comes to an end and the bright orange dirt road, cut at a right angle out of the hillside and furrowed by the streams of these sierras’ constant drizzle, takes you to the arches at the entrance to the town.
It looks much like any other town in this area. Adobe walls where the rock plaster has been chipped away, exposing the large rounded slabs. The colorful bubble-lettered graffiti promoting the visit of a music band two months ago. The town square, lined with topiarized square bushes and the see-through glass box containing jicama, chile powder and wasps.
Below the town there’s an enormous social housing development. One hundred identical houses built by a federal government stand in eight identical lines. The houses are deserted. Their windows smashed. You can see children running in between them.
It’s not because they’re bad. It’s because the town itself is underpopulated. Anyone with half a chance in life leaves. What good’s a roof over your head if there’s no work outside your door?
Cochoapa El Grande is impoverished for a reason: it’s two hours up a dirt road from Tlapa. There’s agricultural work, but profits are eaten up just getting the product to the commercial center. A bad road moves produce slowly, eats up more diesel, and damages the peaches (the main crop) along the way.
“Wouldn’t the housing money have been better spent on putting a proper road in?” I ask a local.
“Different ministries,” he shrugged.
Cochoapa El Grande is struggling even more. Like much of Guerrero, clandestine opium poppy production has for a long time been a major source of income. The opium fields produce at least two harvests a year: the wet season and the dry season.
The dry season opium is the best. It’s thicker, more concentrated, and when I first covered the industry four years ago, sold for US $1,500 a kilo.
But Fentanyl – synthesized opium – a hundred times stronger and far easier to produce, has ripped the bottom out of the market.
David, our deportee in Guadalajara, knows all about that. “A kilo of dry season gum is at $250 now,” he told me.
“There’s no other way to make money, so I had to try to cross the border.”
He went to Tijuana, hired a coyote guide, and crossed into Arizona. He got in. It was only at a Tucson McDonald’s that he got unlucky. A cop stood beside him in the line and watched his unusually ravenous hunger with suspicion when his quarter-pounder arrived.
He was sent to Guadalajara for that reason. To get him a thousand kilometers from the border makes it harder to get back. But don’t think that puts him off.
“I’ve already left my village,” he said. “I can’t show my face there again. People are depending on me.”
He would rest a day or two in Jalisco, before taking off again.
Back to Tijuana.
Back to the border.
“I know I can get in, because other people have done it,” he said, relaxing into the anonymous interview. “For me it’s either death in the desert, or life in the United States.”
Fair enough, he’s got half a chance. What else did you expect?
Alasdair Baverstock is a freelance foreign correspondent and reporter for CGTN who has covered Mexico and Latin America for nearly a decade. You can follow him across social media at @alibaverstock.
I caught up with Jesús Aguilar, or Polo to his friends, over a delicious breakfast buffet in Tapachula, Chiapas. Polo had been my driver in 2018 when I was reporting on the migrant caravan, so I was keen to catch up with him to hear how Tapachula had changed since then.
“Tapachula isn’t the same town that it was. The main difference.” he explained, “is the level of crime.” In his view, the issue isn’t that migrants are committing crime, it could just as likely be Mexicans. The problem, he said, “is the growing perception that migrants are the culprits.”
Polo had recently taken on some Cuban migrants to work in his business. He couldn’t speak highly enough of their work ethic. They consistently go beyond what is expected. They bring with them “an attitude of wanting to work hard to lift themselves out of poverty.”
Polo had shown that same work ethic with me years before when we worked together.His role quickly went beyond driver to become my bodyguard, fixer and ultimately friend.He would turn up each day with some new item, such as a sun hat, a snack or an energy drink, that might help to get us through that day.
Our conversation moved to Chiapas and Polo is so proud of his beautiful part of Mexico. He leans in and tells me the best kept secret in Chiapas is the town of Comitán. It has everything you could want: waterfalls, ruins and perfect weather from day to night. Don’t worry, Polo, your secret is safe with Mexico News Daily.
Mangroves are protected until the government decides to build a refinery.
In southern Mexico, as in other similar climatic zones throughout the tropics, an extraordinary feature of the environment works tirelessly away upon the coast. Across countless marine shorelines and river estuaries you’ll find them doing what they can to reverse man-made climate damage. Here are the world’s greatest carbon scrubbers; their value, until recently, has been unquestionable.
The mangroves that exist in the tropical climes of the Caribbean and Central America are a vital feature of the region’s natural arsenal against carbon — aquatic trees that are adapted to harsh coastal conditions and absorb carbon dioxide for long-term storage, a unique process that makes them some of the most valuable resources in tackling the carbon crisis.
Their ability to effectively filter polluted seawater as well as oxygenate the air led to them being declared a protected entity, beyond the reach of large-scale companies capable of mass deforestation of areas heavily populated by mangroves.
Since then however, the conversation around the preservation of these sites has begun to regress, the tipping point being when President López Obrador offered the green light to Pemex to begin construction on a US $8-billion oil refinery over mangroves in Dos Bocas, Tabasco.
Following a disappointing downturn for Pemex amid plunging oil prices and ebbing investor confidence, AMLO — as the president is popularly known — hurriedly approved the project in his home state. Almost immediately following the go-ahead, large swathes of mangroves began to vanish from satellite imagery.
Mangroves at Dos Bocas, before and after.
Seemingly ignoring the imposition of a $700,000 fine from the National Security, Energy and Environment Agency (ASEA), the third-party incriminated continued to plow through the protected areas. Following a “conditional permit” to proceed with the project, Pemex was made aware that all further development was dependent on the immediate halting of mangrove deforestation.
But in an almost incestuous continuation of the government’s relationship with its state oil company, a blind eye has been turned to further pillaging of the mangroves on Tabasco’s coast. While the government professes to condemn Pemex’s actions, it continues to wave on the development of its newest refinery, a project which in the words of its own regulatory body for such matters, must not threaten the survival of protected mangroves. It is a perpetual paradox, and one that in all the confusion of the matter, may fall under the radar of the casual observer.
The evidence is clear to see. Roadways encroach farther and farther into the forest to allow vehicle access to the refinery, and existing clearings grow in size, incrementally removing swathes of the mangroves.
The campaign of deforestation in the area is, perhaps most importantly, being taken before the government’s official permit allows it to do so, and after the severe fine and reprimand it received from the environmental regulatory body. Pemex is already getting started, and perhaps the administration is afraid of intervention should any loose spanners end up in the proverbial works, threatening the longevity of the project.
López Obrador is ideologically a leader from a different age when it comes to the environment, focused almost exclusively on economic development with nary a glance or policy towards the current environmental crisis. As such, with Pemex in need of a boost, and AMLO’s campaign promise to save the country’s national oil company still echoing in the wind, all regulation is cosmetic in the face of the oil giant’s needs.
This reality is currently sitting at odds with a parallel pressure weighing on AMLO’s presidency, the importance of truly tackling Mexico’s carbon contribution as other leaders in the region continue to make similar commitments and Mexican cities show levels of pollution regularly exceeding target averages.
It is these two factors that continue to inform AMLO’s arguably erratic legislative activity: he supports Pemex’s building of an $8-billion refinery but insists the trucks that carry the oil must run on clean diesel. He offers a vast swathe of coastal land for said refinery but attempts to simultaneously protect the mangroves under threat, while ultimately rolling over after an apparent struggle, seemingly beaten back by the desperate needs of the economy.
Mexico’s environmental regulator is unlikely to pursue any meaningful action against those responsible for the destruction of the mangroves. Soon after the permit to develop the refinery was offered, the executive director of the ASEA, Luis Vera Morales, stepped down in protest, only to be replaced by Ángel Carrizales López, a diplomat who was once a close aide to AMLO.
This isn’t the first time that Carrizales López has been nominated by AMLO for a position in a regulatory body, but it is the first time he hasn’t been rejected by lawmakers, the position at the ASEA not requiring legislative approval. The fresh-faced leader has already committed to canceling the original $700,000 fine on the Pemex third party and is said to be hopeful of a relationship on good terms with the president, an attitude that could foster apathetic distraction from the conservation issues in question.
The president of the Mexican Center for Environmental Law, Gustavo Alanis-Ortega, has echoed an ongoing frustration leveled at the AMLO administration, saying that “If they are indeed breaking the law [at Dos Bocas], this shows that there is no real commitment to legality and the rule of law.”
This all mirrors a dynamic that has repeated itself since López Obrador took office: a prioritization of pragmatic action over environmental red tape. The Maya Train, a project that will run a network of trains throughout the southeast, was hurried, and it refused numerous times to await the analysis of an environmental impact report.
The same motivation at play in that ongoing saga is being revealed here as well, as the hope remains that legacy and demonstrable successes will eventually overshadow the methodological gray areas and drown out the nit-pickers with their clipboards.
Essentially, the green light the government has given Pemex is closer to amber. This is, at least, the message the government is trying to send, toeing both sides of the line until it can claim victory for an economic boost while simultaneously accepting its fair share of praise for taking on the environmental recklessness of the oil industry.
While it is true that the government has not provided explicit support for development of the mangrove zone, it has offered the industry an area rich in mangrove ecosystems. Is there really a difference? The government would say yes but in fact they’d rather not say anything at all.
A worker at a transit station in Nuevo León sprays disinfectant.
Health officials confirmed that a patient who died in Durango on Thursday tested positive for Covid-19, making him the second person in Mexico to die of the disease.
The man was 74 years old and suffered from hypertension.
“Yesterday we mentioned a suspicious death in the state of Durango. The result was confirmed as [Covid-19],” Health Ministry epidemiologist José Luis Alomía told a press conference on Friday.
He said that at that moment there were 203 confirmed cases and 606 suspected cases of Covid-19 in the country. Of the hospitalized patients, 2% are in critical condition.
Contact tracing on the patients led to the identification of 66 people with symptoms, of whom 27 tested positive for the coronavirus. They have all been isolated and are undergoing treatment.
As for how long Mexico can expect to be affected by the coronavirus, officials from the Health Ministry gave conflicting forecasts on Friday.
Alomía told the press conference that cases would peak in April or May. He said that the country is currently 22 days into Phase 1 of the virus’s cycle, which could last four weeks in total.
Phase 2, in which the highest number of cases is expected, will last about three weeks, he said, but added that it all depends on how people behave during the crisis. If the public does not practice effective methods of social distancing, the phases could last longer.
However, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell told a reporter from Grupo Fórmula on Friday that Mexico will see the most cases in June.
“We have to prepare ourselves for a long epidemic,” he said, but added that the government has a positive outlook on the situation.
“We’re very hopeful that we will slow down transmission and in the moment that the [virus] spreads, which is going to happen, it won’t be so intense,” he said.
López-Gatell predicted that a decline in the number of cases could be seen in July or August, but the pandemic could continue until October.
The head of the national commission of high-specialty hospitals, Gustavo Reyes Terán, urged citizens with symptoms related to Covid-19 to remain at home and contact authorities in order to conduct the proper testing.
He said this remain-at-home procedure is important to keeping space available in high-specialty hospitals for more serious cases and ensuring that their emergency rooms do not become saturated with patients.
