Investigations have led authorities to believe that Villegas could be an active element in the La Línea gang and that through his influence and staff he procured protection for members of the organization. He is also under investigation by federal authorities in the United States.
The FGR said that joint investigations by various federal security forces led to the district court judge at the Altiplano federal prison in México state to issue arrest warrants for Villegas and two others for their involvement in the massacre and other gang-related crimes.
The three were put into preventative custody for the duration of their trial, which is expected to take four months.
The FGR added that for the purpose of secrecy, the legal status of the other four detainees also in preventative custody will be released at another time.
Despite the arrests, the LeBarón family continues to dispute the government’s claim that the attack was related to the conflict between the La Línea and Los Salazar criminal organizations.
The holiday season is time for young people in towns across Veracruz to dress up as senior citizens and take to the streets to celebrate a tradition called El Viejo (The Old Man), which is believed to date back to 1875.
In the state capital, the youngsters parade through the streets to the sound of drums and trumpets to ask for money from drivers and pedestrians they pass along the way.
In the state’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec region, young men are the ones who don the costumes of both men and women to dance in the streets for a few coins.
In Xalapa, young people are joined by dozens of others from the nearby town of Teocelo to dance around in the dress of their grandparents. They return home around 11:00pm and use the money they earned dancing to buy soft drinks or alcoholic beverages.
In some towns, such as those in the Sierra Altotonga region of the state, the tradition is called Güegües (Old Men in the Náhuatl language), and the youngsters hit the streets at midnight on Christmas Eve and again on Three Kings Day on January 6. They also dance and take along the mandinga, a man dressed as a woman.
Tradición de “El viejo”, vigente entre la población conurbada Veracruz-Boca del Río-Medellín
As opposed to the El Viejo celebrations elsewhere in the state, these kids don’t ask for coins. They give candy to children and adults that come to admire them and receive traditional punch and sweet fritters called buñuelos from women in the neighborhood.
Each municipality and village in the state has its own way of celebrating this nearly 150-year-old tradition, using trumpets, drums, violins or simply whatever they find along the way that will make noise to say farewell to the old year and ring in the new.
Gaytán was run over and stabbed to death by her ex-husband.
A Jalisco woman went to the state’s Center for Women’s Justice 16 times to ask for protection from her abusive husband before he stabbed her to death in front of the governor’s mansion last April.
The state’s Human Rights Commission (CEDHJ) revealed in a report that Vanesa Gaytán Ochoa, 25, first sought help on September 21, 2017. Her last attempt for protection was on April 13, 2019; she was killed 12 days later.
On April 25, Gaytán was going to work when she realized her ex-husband, Irwin Emmanuel Ramírez Barajas, was following her in a vehicle despite three orders that he refrain from making contact with her. When she phoned relatives and her lawyer to relate what was happening, they advised her to go to Casa Jalisco for aid.
Gaytán took a taxi to the mansion but Ramírez caught up with her there and struck her and a government official with his vehicle before stabbing her to death. He was then shot by a security detail.
Ramírez died later in hospital.
An investigation by the rights commission found deficiencies in the way Gaytán’s case was handled by the Center for Women’s Justice. Although she took witnesses with her each time to corroborate the threat against her, the department passed its responsibilities on to other public institutions “despite being aware of the risk” and isolation in which she lived.
“The efforts to prove the degree of participation of the killer were null and void and [the CEDHJ] didn’t even try to locate or inhibit him from carrying out illegal activities,” said the commission in a petition to state authorities.
“Without a doubt this constituted a cause for the aggressions against the victim not only to go unpunished, but also led to [Ramírez] taking her life.”
The commission stated that the three protection orders issued for Gaytán were inadequate, ineffective and imprecise, and did not take into account the previous incidents of gender violence she had suffered at the hands of her husband.
“From the evidence in the case file, it is not observed that the staff of the public prosecutor’s office followed a clear and serious line of investigation aimed at verifying the crime and sanctioning the man responsible,” said the CEDHJ.
The commission requested that state authorities begin inquiries into 12 public officials for negligence.
It also requested support for Gaytán’s mother and son so they could obtain their own housing, receive psychological help and rebuild their lives.
Lastly, the CEDHJ requested that the Jalisco legislature make the reforms necessary to standardize the definition of orders and protective measures in the state.
Former ambassador Mercado, left, and Bolivia's interim president Áñez.
Mexico’s ambassador to Bolivia returned home on Tuesday after that country’s interim government expelled her and two Spanish diplomats for allegedly colluding to help a former government official get out of the country.
The return of ambassador María Teresa Mercado came after Bolivia’s interim president, Jeanine Áñez, announced on Monday that Mercado and two Spanish diplomats had 72 hours to leave the country, declaring them “persona non grata.”
“This group of representatives of the governments of Mexico and Spain have gravely damaged the sovereignty and dignity of the people and the government,” she said.
The Secretariat of Foreign Affairs (SRE) responded in a statement that Mercado – who entered Mexico’s diplomatic service in 1982 and has received awards from other nations – has always complied with Mexico’s foreign policy principles and international law.
It said it considered Bolivia’s decision to be of “a political nature.”
The official who was allegedly going to be helped to escape the country was the interior minister in the government of ousted president Evo Morales, and one of 10 officials who sought and received asylum at the Mexican Embassy in La Paz.
The decision to expel Mercado was the latest development in a dispute between the two countries that began when Mexico granted asylum to Morales after he resigned in November amid accusations of electoral fraud.
The interim Bolivian government said Mexico violated asylum conventions by allowing Morales, who is now in Argentina, to make political declarations while in Mexico.
Providing asylum at the embassy to 10 officials from Morales’ leftist administration also angered officials of the center-right interim government.
It has issued arrests for three of the officials, including former interior minister Juan Ramón Quintana, accusing them of sedition and electoral fraud. It has refused to give them safe passage passes that would enable them to leave Bolivia.
Officials in Áñez’s interim government said the Mexican government has broken diplomatic norms by allowing the asylum seekers in its embassy to engage in political activity and travel in diplomatic vehicles.
Bolivia’s Murillo: ‘We love the Mexican people a lot’ but AMLO not so much.
Mexico in turn accused Bolivia last week of harassing and intimidating its diplomatic staff and described a deployment of more than 50 police and soldiers outside its embassy as “out of proportion” with the provision of security it requested in light of the unrest in the country following the disputed October 20 election.
The government also said that its embassy has been constantly filmed, drones have been flown over it and its diplomatic vehicles have been searched. Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said last Thursday that Mexico would file a complaint against Bolivia in the International Court of Justice against the “siege” on its embassy.
Spain unexpectedly became involved in the tiff last Friday when two of the country’s diplomatic vehicles – driven by masked security officers – tried to enter Mexico’s embassy in La Paz to collect the charge d’affaires. Bolivia accused Spanish embassy staff of trying to extract Quintana and other officials who face charges.
“. . . The hostile conduct [of Mexico and Spain] and attempting to enter the Mexican Embassy in Bolivia in a surreptitious and clandestine way are acts that we cannot allow to happen . . .” Áñez said when announcing the expulsion of the three diplomats.
In response, the Spanish government said it “categorically rejects any insinuation of presumed willingness to interfere in Bolivia’s internal political affairs.”
The Spanish charge d’affaires “was purely making a courtesy visit and vehemently denies there was any aim to facilitate the exit of people holed up inside the building,” the government said.
However, it didn’t explain why the drivers of its diplomatic vehicles were masked and refused to identify themselves to Bolivian police. In retaliation for the expulsion of its diplomats, the Spanish government said Monday it had declared three Bolivian diplomats persona non grata and that they too must leave the country within 72 hours.
Mexico, however, didn’t take any immediate steps to expel Bolivian diplomats, and Interior secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero said the government has no intention of breaking diplomatic ties with Bolivia.
“The embassy of our country in Bolivia continues, we will continue to work inside the embassy, there will be people in charge of embassy business . . .” she told a press conference.
Similarly, Bolivian Foreign Minister Karen Longaric said the interim government wasn’t severing ties with Mexico or Spain but rather wanted the two countries to send new diplomats to replace those who “disrespected the sovereignty of Bolivia.”
Interim interior minister Arturo Murillo told the newspaper El Universal that “we love the Mexican people a lot but reject the hostile attitude of President López Obrador.”
He also said the only reason Bolivian security forces were outside the Mexican Embassy was because there have been threats to set it on fire. Crowds of angry protesters have recently gathered outside the diplomatic mission to demand that Mexico hand over Quintana and the other wanted officials to Bolivian authorities.
“All of Bolivia’s actions have been peaceful,” Murillo said before accusing Morales of having links to drug trafficking and terrorism. The government would seek his extradition from Argentina, he added.
Murillo also accused López Obrador of having a close relationship with the family of convicted drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, citing the government’s decision to release his son Ovidio Guzmán after he was captured in Culiacán, Sinaloa, in October as evidence of his claim.
Despite the antagonism towards the Mexican president, the interior minister said the Bolivian government wants to strengthen the relationship with Mexico.
“It’s a brother country, all we ask for is respect for our people and to be treated as an equal.”
For his part, López Obrador – who characterized the ousting of Morales as a coup – has called on the Bolivian government to respect the right to asylum.
I keep thinking about a conversation at a get-together I attended about a year ago. The person who was talking, a likable, educated college professor, was saying that he didn’t understand why it was necessary to make a special category for “femicide” separate from regular “homicide.”
“Why don’t we call it ‘machocide,’ then, when men are killed?” he wanted to know. “Murder is murder, no matter who the victim is; what’s the use of distinguishing?” He was enjoying the argument in that affable and confident way that men do when they don’t have actual skin in the game.
He wasn’t being nasty about it, but I was irritated. We women are weary of these arguments, but tire of not quite being able to put our finger on fantastic counter-arguments when the topic is so viscerally scary and real for us. Too few of us joined debate club as we should have during our formative years, preferring to direct much of our attention to being liked by boys rather than competing with them on “their turf.” I wish someone had told us we’d still get laid throughout our lives anyway. Oh, the time I wasted!
And here we are today, not quite as good as we’d like to be at arguing what we know to be true, feeling like we’re losing a rigged game over and over again. We simply know the difference between femicide and “regular” homicide because it’s something we can feel deep in our guts and as obviously as splinters in our feet.
Part of our difficulty is the nature of the “rules” of debate. First rule of the game: you can’t take anything personally. Well, with that we’ve already lost. What’s more personal than women being so much more easily killed, and for much less, than men?
Here’s what we know: men are, for the most part, physically stronger than us and when it comes down to it, can physically subjugate us if they decide to do so. Even if they’re not, weapons are fairly easy to get. (Though there’s no data for Mexico, in the U.S. one of the highest risk factors for a woman being killed is the mere presence of a gun in the home where she lives.)
Women are most likely to be killed by a current or former intimate partner — 40% of femicides are committed by them, though that number is believed to be a low estimate. How’s that for sleeping with the enemy? (For men, it’s 5% and of that a majority of those are reported as self-defense.)
It’s no secret that almost no crime in Mexico will be punished, and we have few hopesregarding the importance given to femicides by the justice system. Whoever kills and abuses women is likely to remain free to do so again, and again, and again.
Back to our “discussion,” with the knowledge that it’s only a discussion for the person who doesn’t have any emotions about it. To the other side, it’s a fight for recognition of a grim reality that won’t cease if it’s not acknowledged and taken seriously: the most urgent kind of convincing.
The thing that I knew, of course, is that femicides are indeed different; they’re not simply “regular murder.” There’s a special quality to them, often involving sexual violence.
While all murders, I suppose, can be explained as a fundamental lack of respect for (that particular) human life, there seems to be an extra sneer and shrug reserved for women, especially if they’re deemed to have behaved “badly.”
Ciudad Juárez was famous for a while in the 1990s and early 2000s for the copious numbers of disappeared and murdered women and a justice system that famously would not take them seriously. “She probably just went off somewhere with her boyfriend,” they’d say. Ecatepec has been a more recent ground zero, garnering much attention after the arrests of the “monsters of Ecatepec.”
I live in Veracruz, currently the leading state in Mexico for femicides. My blood turns cold when I think of my daughter. My blood turns cold when I think of myself. How many people are walking around us, in our own communities, with total contempt for the female population? The statistics, the papers, the protests. This must be the way black people feel driving through the Deep South, Trump signs and confederate flags streaming by.
I find it hard to believe that well-meaning men are truly oblivious to the institutional sexism around us, and especially to the fact that it’s woven into the very fabric of our society and culture. And if we can’t get half the population to treat this as the emergency it is, where does that leave us?
I hope that it’s simply privilege that blinds them, and not indifference.
Sarah DeVries writes from her home in Xalapa, Veracruz.
A Mexico City woman whose purse was stolen in a coffee shop on Saturday pulled off a rare feat shortly after the crime took place: she personally caught the perpetrators.
The 37-year-old woman identified only as Érika was drinking coffee with a friend at a Cielito Lindo cafe in a Coyoacán shopping center when another woman sat down at an adjacent table.
The latter then proceeded to reach into Érika’s handbag – which was hanging over her chair – and remove her purse before placing it in her own bag. Video footage shows that the well-dressed woman then got up from her chair and walked away from the table.
While she was carrying out the theft, her accomplice – a man dressed in a suit – was at the cafe counter, where he succeeded in distracting the employees to ensure that they wouldn’t witness the crime.
Érika initially had no idea that she had been the victim of a robbery. However, a short time later she began receiving cellphone notifications from her bank that alerted her to multiple purchases with her credit card.
Érika saw that purchases had been made at a Walmart and Sanborns store in a nearby shopping center and quickly devised a plan to catch the thief.
After watching the cafe’s surveillance footage of the theft, Érika knew exactly who she was looking for and set off to find them using the credit card purchase notifications as clues.
She went in and out of stores like a hunter, the newspaper Milenio said, until she saw the man and woman she was looking for walking calmly through the shopping center with their purchases, including three iPads, in their hands.
Érika said she quickly alerted police and they accompanied her as she angrily confronted the thieves.
“It wasn’t so complicated,” Érika told Milenio. “The key was to act quickly. We have to do something to stop these kinds of criminals.”
She said the thieves, caught red-handed with her bank cards, tried to bribe her and the police to avoid being taken into custody. However, both parties refused the offer and the man and woman – identified as Silvia Vanessa “N.” and José Antonio “N.” – were placed in preventative custody.
Érika said on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon that she was informed that the former had been granted conditional release.
“They spent 70,000 pesos in less than an hour,” she told Milenio.
“The truth is that it made me very angry because we work every day, get up early and get stressed just for someone to come along and take our things . . .” she said, adding that police found that the thieves were carrying about 20 bank cards that “probably weren’t theirs.”
Érika, who works in sales, said that any fear about confronting the thieves didn’t enter her mind because of the anger and adrenaline she felt. She also said she has always dreamed about being a detective and Saturday’s events gave her the opportunity to live that dream.
“I’ve always said that I chose the wrong profession,” she joked.
Jalisco’s heavily contaminated Santiago River is “a powerful example of Mexico’s failure to protect its environment,” according to a report by The New York Times.
Published on Monday, the report said that an analysis of 15 years of efforts to clean up the river found that little progress was made due to “legal loopholes, deficient funding and a lack of political will.”
The Times also said that Mexico will likely be unable to meet the commitment it made to protect its environment as part of the new North American free trade agreement without an overhaul of its “flawed legal framework and a change in the political conditions that allowed the Santiago to become little more than a channel for industrial runoff.”
Farms and factories in the Santiago River basin dump illegal quantities of waste into the river with little penalty, the report said.
River pollution, which includes contamination from several heavy metals, has been blamed for a range of illnesses among people who live near the river including kidney disease and cancer. An eight-year-old boy died from arsenic poisoning in 2008 after falling into a tributary of the Santiago.
Yet there is scant oversight of some 10,000 businesses operating in the area because the National Water Commission (Conagua) has just one inspector in all of Jalisco, the Times said.
Conagua chief Blanca Jiménez said recently that some companies treat their wastewater but conceded that some don’t, “even when they have the economic means.”
In those cases, she added, “the state has to intervene.” However, it rarely does, the Times said.
The report noted that even when Conagua does respond to cases of illegal runoff into the Santiago River, the fines it has the power to impose are too low to act as a deterrent.
Texas-based chemicals company Celanese Corporation was fined just US $4,300 for discharging illegal quantities of waste into the river on 13 separate occasions in the summer of 2015 , according to documents obtained by the Times.
The report also said that the federal environmental protection agency, Profepa, has the power to inspect industrial wastewater, “but rarely does so.”
In December 2018, Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro told reporters gathered at the Santiago River’s contaminated Juanacatlán waterfall that his newly-elected government would invest more than 3.4 billion pesos to tackle the pollution problem.
But the Times said the pledge was a “bold” one given that his power and resources to address the issue are in fact limited.
When Alfaro asked the federal government for funding, he was told that there was no money available even though the federal environment secretary has called the Santiago River an “environmental hell.”
Elizabeth Southerland, a former water expert at Profepa, told the Times that the limited rules in place to protect the river are “totally inadequate to protect aquatic life and human health.”
In turn, the agencies tasked with enforcing them have “few resources and little political support,” the Times said, “making them no match for the country’s expanding industry and growing population.”
In theory, municipal authorities also have power to crack down on polluters but with scant resources and technical expertise they are in fact the weakest link in enforcing regulations, the report said.
The situation does not bode well for residents, one of whom described El Salto, a town on the outskirts of Guadalajara, as a “slow-motion Chernobyl.”
“The government is walking hand in hand with the guilty,” said Enrique Enciso, whose family has been fighting to clean up the Santiago River for more than 10 years.
There's hope for fewer crime scenes, analyst writes.
Things are looking rough from a security standpoint but there are reasons to be optimistic, says an often gloomy analyst.
Violence and crime continued to plague Mexico in 2019 – the number of homicide victims increased 2.7% in the first 11 months of the year to almost 32,000 and literally millions of other crimes, both major and minor, were committed.
Despite the depressing and alarming situation (2019 will almost certainly go down as the most violent year on record), security analyst Alejandro Hope, a frequent critic of the federal government’s security strategy, outlined five reasons for “moderate optimism” with regard to security in the years ahead.
Writing in the newspaper El Universal, Hope asserted that Mexico’s demographics, the evolution of technology, the improvement in the compiling of crime statistics, greater knowledge about security and justice issues and the proliferation of organizations dedicated to the analysis of public policy and security will help reduce criminality.
Below is a summary of his five reasons for being upbeat about the prospects for Mexico.
1. Mexico’s population is rapidly aging, Hope notes, explaining that means that the size of the cohort most likely to commit crimes (males aged 15 to 29) will shrink in relative terms in the near future and in absolute terms in decades to come.
“Multiple scientific studies have found that a reduction in the size of the young male population is associated with a decrease in the crime rate,” he wrote.
The analyst conceded that the effect of the decline on levels of criminality won’t be “very strong” but contended that demographics will “eventually” help to bring about an improvement in Mexico’s security situation.
2. Similarly, the evolution of technology could have a “pacifying effect” in the long term, Hope wrote, arguing that it could make committing some crimes more difficult. He noted that the car theft rate has declined 40% since 2009, asserting that the reduction was in part due to the greater use of technology such as alarms and GPS.
“Something similar could happen with home burglary and cell phone theft [rates],” Hope wrote.
He also said that technology could transform some other crimes by facilitating access to illicit goods and substances. A person in the United States can already buy fentanyl on the dark web from a producer in China, pay for it with cryptocurrency and receive the drug via courier, Hope wrote.
Any increase in such a practice will “reduce the need to have violent distribution networks,” he concluded.
3. Mexico has better crime data today than 10 years ago, Hope wrote, highlighting that both the national statistics agency Inegi and the National Public Security System have improved the quality of the information they compile.
“The country has much better information to begin to make [security] policy based on evidence.”
4. The knowledge base about security and justice issues in Mexico has grown exponentially since the start of the century, Hope wrote, pointing out that there is now a greater number of security experts and that an “impressive cohort” of young people with an interest in the area is studying in the world’s best universities.
“The public debate about the issue will improve enormously in the coming years.”
5. The number of organizations dedicated to the study of security and justice issues has also increased rapidly in recent years, the analyst said, noting that there are both national and state-based organizations and groups that represent victims of crime.
Their existence is “starting to close the main gap in the security and justice system: accountability,” he wrote.
“In summary,” Hope concluded, “the present is horrible but the future could be very different.”
Those of a certain age remember when football player Rosey Grier “came out” as a needleworker in the 1970s. It made a sensation at the time and while he didn’t make embroidery cool for men per se, his size and fierce reputation on the gridiron made most people think twice before making fun of it and him.
In Grier’s case, needlework was therapeutic; in particular, it helped him with his fear of flying. In Mexico, decorating cloth with colored thread is an economic activity still, carried out by women to earn supplementary income for the family.
However, there are cases where the economic value of embroidered goods is sufficient that male family members participate, mostly older men who choose to do it or those who are unable to do more traditional men’s work.
But there are a few places where the income generated by embroidery is enough to change the culture, at least on a local level, and put men to work. That is the case in Santa Rosa de Lima in the Isthmus region of Oaxaca.
Over the past 27 years, Gerardo Gallegos Talín is one of those men. He has perfected his techniques and designs, becoming one of the town’s foremost experts on traditional Isthmus Zapotec embroidery. He, like most other artisans, works at his craft part time, also earning income as a laborer in construction. His time is split about half and half between the two occupations.
Gerardo Gallegos also works in construction.
He started young, at age 20, learning from female family members out of economic necessity when work was scarce. This situation is common enough in Santa Rosa that nearly all the men know how to embroider, and many boys are now learning.
“To be an embroiderer in Santa Rosa is not a woman’s thing, it is nothing more than an economic thing,” Gallegos explains while concentrating on the panel he is working on.
It is a very different situation here than in other communities in the Isthmus such as Juchitán or Ixtaltepec. Despite having similar economic problems, embroidery is still considered women’s work. The only exception to this rule in these communities is with the Muxe, men who dress as women and are treated as such.
Other men in those communities would be ridiculed for doing embroidery, but this is not the case in Santa Rosa. No one considers a man any less a man simply because he knows how to combine colors and stitches well. “Here it is a characteristic of the town and its people. We work as a team with our women and our children. It is family work,” Gallegos asserts.
Some of their pieces represent months of work. A large involved piece may cost about 3,000 pesos in materials but can fetch anywhere from 10,000 to 27,000 pesos (US $530 to $1,430) depending on the quality and intricacy.
Another well-known embroiderer is Rubén Ramírez López, more commonly known as Ta Finu. He has spent 59 of his 72 years embroidering, starting when he was only 13. He is completely self-taught, and took years to develop his craft.
When he began, only 10 men were embroidering, but today over 100 now do so in Santa Rosa and some are doing it full time.
While the men of Santa Rosa are more than aware of attitudes towards embroidering in general, it does not bother Ta Finu or the others because the work allows them to make a living and provide for their children.
“Sure there is some ridicule, but we ignore it. To be an embroiderer is neither easy nor frivolous work. On the contrary, it is very difficult and hard on the eyes and spine.”
Ta Finu and his family work together to produce about 20 traditional outfits with embroidery per year, usually finishing each in a month and a half. They sell their work to clients in various states, often through social media. Many of their clients have been with them for years.
In Ta Finu’s case, the embroidery is profitable enough that other work is done only when there isn’t enough embroidery, not the other way around.
The president and a medal-winning gymnast seen as man and woman of the year.
President López Obrador is the man of the year and gymnast Alexa Moreno is the woman of the year, according to a poll conducted by the newspaper El Financiero.
Forty-six percent of 800 Mexican adults polled earlier this month named AMLO as the man of the year, more than twice the 22% of respondents who nominated billionaire businessman Carlos Slim.
The president had a challenging first year in office – his government failed to reduce violence and grow the economy – but polls indicated that he continues to have strong, albeit waning, support. His position at the center of the nation’s political life is undisputed.
Finance Secretary Arturo Herrera was the third most popular choice for man of the year, receiving support from 7% of respondents, while Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard was fourth, attracting 6% support.
Man and woman of the year selections for 2019. el financiero
With López Obrador deciding not to travel outside Mexico this year, Ebrard represented Mexico on the world stage at the G20 leaders’ summit in Osaka, Japan, in June and the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September. He also played a central role in negotiations with the United States on migration and trade issues.
Some pundits believe that Ebrard’s end goal is to run as a presidential candidate in the 2024 election with the aim of succeeding his current boss.
Asked to name the woman of the year, 32% of respondents cited Alexa Moreno, a 25-year-old Mexicali native who was awarded the 2019 National Sports Prize. The gymnast won a bronze medal at the 2018 World Championships in the vault, becoming the first female Mexican to stand on the podium at the event.
The second most popular choice for woman of the year was Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico City’s first popularly-elected female mayor, who attracted 24% support. Like her close ally López Obrador, the mayor has declared that there is no corruption in her government but she still faces significant challenges in the capital, none of which is more important than combating high levels of violence.
Yalitza Aparicio, the star of Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning film Roma, was nominated by 21% of those polled as woman of the year, while Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero was the pick of 8% of respondents.
The poll also asked respondents to name their Mexican personality of the year and found a clear winner in Cuarón, who won critical acclaim as well as numerous awards for Roma, including the Oscar for best director.
Thirty-six percent of those polled named Cuarón as personality of the year, 21% chose filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, 17% nominated boxer Canelo Álvarez, 11% said boxer Andy Ruiz and 5% picked soccer player Hirving Lozano.
Asked to select the best things that happened in Mexico in 2019, 41% of respondents chose the government’s austerity measures; 25% picked López Obrador’s way of governing; 15% cited the creation of the National Guard; 8% mentioned the signing of the new North American trade agreement; and 7% said economic stability – even though growth stagnated.
