A Veracruz man accused of killing a man he suspected of trying to kidnap his son was released from jail on Monday after his case went viral on social media and sparked hundreds of protests calling for his release.
Ramón Merino will continue the judicial process under house arrest while authorities investigate the case, which is expected to take about three months.
Don Ramón, as he has been dubbed by supporters, was arrested after shooting two men he suspected of trying to kidnap his son. He killed one and wounded another, who was also arrested. A third man fled.
Merino was initially sentenced to a year of preventative custody in prison, but public pressure led a judge to modify the ruling.
“Originally, the attorney general had provided evidence to seek a charge for the crime of homicide, and during the hearing the judge resolved to change the charge to manslaughter,” said the Veracruz Attorney General’s Office in a statement.
According to Veracruz state law, Merino could get five to 12 years in prison if it is found that he began the quarrel that led to the murder, or four to eight years if it is found that he was provoked, and a fine of up to 20,500 pesos (US $1,083).
Upon being released from jail, Don Ramón was met by a cheering crowd of supporters.
“I can’t explain to you how happy I am for your support . . . I love you, I love you and forgive me if I’ve ever offended you, although I don’t think I have because I have always been respectful with everyone in my town. I’m here to serve you,” he said to supporters.
“I’m happy for what I did, because I defended myself,” he added.
On December 8, Ramón Merino received a call from his son who said that he was being followed by men in a truck who wanted to kidnap him. The ex-soldier told his son to come to his house in Acultzingo, Veracruz, where he met the men with gunfire.
When making his statement after his arrest, Merino said that the same men had victimized his daughter a year earlier.
Information about the train in short supply, critics say.
A public consultation on the Maya Train project found more than 92% support among citizens of the five states through which it will run.
But before Sunday’s vote was held, around 20 activists, community landowners, residents and politicians who spoke with the newspaper El Universal in Quintana Roo and Campeche said there was not sufficient information about the project to decide whether it should be built or not.
Indeed, the general director of the National Tourism Promotion Fund, which is in charge of the 120-billion-peso (US $6.3-billion) project, admitted last week that the exact route of the railroad has not yet been determined and that technical and economic viability studies have not yet been completed.
All reports about the project will be available in January, Rogelio Jiménez Pons told a press conference in Tulum, Quintana Roo.
A lot of the concern about the project is concentrated in areas through which the train will run but where there are no existing tracks.
That includes municipalities in Quintana Roo and Campeche between Tulum in the former state and Escárcega in the latter. The Maya Train project intends to build about 500 kilometers of track between the two locations.
Tulum Mayor Víctor Mas told El Universal that he supported the rail project but conceded that there is a lack of detail about it.
“As far as I know, there are three companies working in the municipality, studying the technical part [of the project] . . . soil mechanics, and the environmental part but we won’t have concrete information until a few months from now,” he said.
Activists from the environmental group Tulum Sostenible (Sustainable Tulum) said that such information is vital in order to reach an informed opinion about whether the project should go ahead.
“Tulum is an area of many cavities, an enormous network of subterranean rivers and we’d like to know how they’re going to build such heavy infrastructure over such fragile territory,” said Karla Acevedo.
The president of the Tulum Hotel Association said that more information is needed about the finances of the project in order to determine whether it will be economically viable.
Although the government claims it will boost tourism to Mexico’s southeast, David Ortiz said he doesn’t think the train will attract more visitors to Tulum. Whether higher numbers of tourists will visit other destinations in the region after the project is completed remains to be seen, he said.
In Campeche, an ecologist who has studied the effect of infrastructure projects on the natural environment told El Universal that construction of the new railroad in the municipality of Calakmul could have an adverse effect on flora and fauna.
Alberto González said the Maya Train proposes construction of “wildlife passages” that will enable wild animals to cross from one side of the tracks to the other but he added that “it’s not clear if the animals will use them or not – there are no conclusive studies.”
Calakmul Mayor Luis Felipe Mora Hernández expressed concern about the damage that construction could cause to the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve although he added that local authorities didn’t want to “obstruct” the project.
Sebastián López Vázquez, a community landowner and director of an indigenous persons’ organization in Calakmul, neatly summed up the sentiment expressed by many others in southeast Mexico when asked their opinion.
“They [the government] haven’t given us information all year and that’s what we need first to know the benefits and the bad things.”
After Sunday’s consultation, Jiménez Pons said that work will begin on the project in late March or early April. President López Obrador says the project will generate employment and contribute to greater economic prosperity in the southeast.
He has also said there will be no net negative environmental impact on the region, which is full of jungle, wetlands, wildlife reserves and archaeological sites, because thousands of trees will be planted to compensate for those that are felled during construction of the railroad.
Miss Nanchital 2020 is going for the Miss Veracruz crown.
A contestant in the Miss Veracruz 2020 beauty competition is spreading the message that no obstacle is too big for her dreams: Ana Gabriela Molina de los Santos has no arms.
Molina, who has already won the competition in her hometown for Miss Nanchital 2020, caused a sensation after participating in the presentation of Miss Veracruz contestants last weekend in Xalapa.
“Thank you to everyone, most of all my family who were able to come and those who, despite distances . . . have always shown me their support,” she said in a post on Facebook.
Molina graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology on December 10 and is a motivational speaker, hosting conferences on personal development.
She hopes that her participation in the competition will show others that her disability has not stopped her from chasing her dreams and that if she can accomplish her goals despite having no arms, then anyone can accomplish their own.
“No dreamer is too small and no dream is too big,” she said in another Facebook post.
The winner of the Miss Veracruz 2020 competition will go on to represent the state in the Miss Mexico pageant.
Last year’s Miss Veracruz, Marilú Acevedo, was the first runner-up in the Miss Mexico competition, barely losing the crown to Ashley Alvídrez of Chihuahua.
Trade negotiator Jesús Seade said on Monday that he was “very satisfied” with assurances from the United States government that U.S. attachés in Mexico will not serve as “labor inspectors” to ensure compliance with the new North American trade agreement.
Seade’s remark came after he met with United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in Washington D.C. to resolve a dispute that briefly threatened to upset plans for the U.S. House of Representatives to approve the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
The foreign affairs undersecretary for North America and President López Obrador, among other officials, objected in recent days to implementing legislation sent to the U.S. Congress, saying it represented an attempt to circumvent Mexico’s refusal to allow U.S. officials to carry out unilateral inspections of Mexican workplaces such as factories.
They also said the attaché provision had not been discussed with Mexico. López Obrador said the United States had acted “in a clandestine manner” by sending legislation to Congress that didn’t match the deal reached last week.
Lighthizer clarified in a letter on Monday that up to five Labor Department attachés to be deployed to Mexico will only provide technical assistance and disburse funds to build capacity.
Cervantes: Mexican officials failed to interpret the wording correctly.
“These personnel will not be ‘labor inspectors’ and will abide by all relevant Mexican laws,” the trade representative wrote in the letter addressed to Seade.
On-site verifications will be carried out by independent three-person panels chosen by both parties “when there are good faith questions about whether workers at a particular facility are being denied key labor rights,” Lighthizer wrote.
The Mexican undersecretary told a press conference in the United States capital that the letter “absolutely” put an end to the dispute between the two countries. “This is very categorical: these personnel will not be labor inspectors,” Seade said.
Trade analysts who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity so as to not offend Seade said the squabble between Mexico and the United States over the labor inspector issue reflected domestic politics in both countries.
“The labor attaches’ broad mandate to assist Mexican officials and workers on implementation of Mexico’s sweeping labor reforms may have inflamed Mexican business sensitivities about American influence, which Seade felt obliged to counter,” The Post said.
In the United States, Democrats led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed hard for a USMCA that ensures that labor laws in Mexico are strictly enforced.
“It looks to me like Seade might have some buyer’s regret and didn’t quite understand how much rope he was giving Lighthizer,” one former U.S. official told The Post.
Critics of the government at home said the problem between Mexico and the United States arose due to naivety and a lack of preparation for trade negotiations on Seade’s part.
Economist and political analyst Macario Schettino said in an opinion piece in the newspaper El Financiero that a December 6 photo that showed Seade arriving alone at Lighthizer’s Washington office filled him with “terror.”
“. . . I have no knowledge of mid-level negotiations that are managed by only one person let alone high-level” ones, he wrote.
Schettino said the Mexican government previously had one of the best international trade negotiating teams in the world but all the officials were dismissed when López Obrador took office. He also noted that the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs rather than the Secretariat of Economy now appears to be in charge of trade negotiations.
El Financiero columnist Salvador Camarena said that if the secretariats of the Economy and Labor had been involved in negotiations with the U.S., Mexico would not have been put in the same position.
De Hoyos: Mexico rushed the process.
He charged that López Obrador has given complete responsibility for the relationship with the United States to Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard and his department to the detriment of the country.
“Last weekend was a scene from a (bad) comedy. Seade didn’t know what he negotiated, Ebrard less so and AMLO [was even] worse . . .” Camarena wrote.
Francisco Cervantes, president of the Confederation of Industrial Chambers, told a press conference on Monday that the provision allowing the United States to send up to five labor attachés to Mexico was in the revised version of the USMCA but Mexican officials failed to interpret it properly.
“. . . It was there the whole time, they didn’t put it in at the last minute . . . It’s a matter of interpretation of texts,” he said.
Another error made by Mexico, according to Mexican Employers Federation president Gustavo de Hoyos, is that Mexico rushed into ratifying both the original and revised versions of the USMCA. That weakened Mexico’s negotiating position in the trade talks, he said.
Like the United States, Canada has not yet ratified the USMCA. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday that Canada could be the last country to ratify the trilateral pact due to the country’s parliamentary calendar.
However, he expressed confidence that it will be approved and said that his government would “try to get to it as quickly as we can.”
An approval vote by the U.S. House of Representatives is expected on Thursday but ratification by the Senate is not likely until early next year.
The USMCA, an agreement that will govern more than US $1.2 trillion worth of annual trade between the three countries, will replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which took effect on January 1, 1994.
The environmental approval granted to the proposed Grand Island mega-hotel in Cancún is under review by federal environmental authorities.
The news came just as the Quintana Roo Environment Secretariat (SEMA) revealed that it does not view the project as environmentally viable.
Environment Secretary Alfredo Arellano Guillermo confirmed that his department disapproved of the project during the evaluation by the federal environment department, Semarnat, which approved the project in July.
“At that time . . . we issued a negative technical opinion. The project does not conform to some guidelines, some environmental parameters,” he said.
SEMA’s review of the 10-billion-peso (US $528-million) hotel found that in addition to being noncompliant with urban regulations, it put the area’s mangrove forests at risk.
The coordinator of federal social programs in Quintana Roo, Arturo Abreu Marín, said that technical documentation detailing the project’s effects on local mangroves will be released to the public in the coming weeks.
Head of the National Tourism Promotion Fund (Fonatur), Rogelio Jiménez Pons, confirmed that the project is undergoing a review by Semarnat that will determine whether it proceeds.
“The Grand Island project is under review because I have information that it does not fully comply with environmental stipulations, and if it doesn’t, they have surprised [the president] and it will have to be reviewed. We aren’t going to overlook any environmental law,” he said.
In November, developer BVG World solicited two writs of amparo for the project, alleging the violation of rights without proper court proceedings and illegal search.
The trains are moving again in Michoacán, but for how long?
The solution to railway blockades that disrupt the movement of goods is to enforce the law, suggests the president of Kansas City Southern of México.
José Zozaya said allocating the necessary personnel and jailing protesters who block the rails are the way to get freight moving again.
“We have filed complaints and believe [the protesters] will be held responsible and some may go to jail. Once this happens, I’m sure that they’ll stop going out to block the tracks,” he said.
The federal penal code stipulates a jail sentence ranging from 15 days to two years for anyone blocking railways without inflicting damage. That sentence can be as long as five years if there is damage to the tracks.
Zozaya’s comment came after 10-15 members of the CNTE teachers’ union blocked the tracks in the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, for several days last week, an action which disrupted the movement of around 20 trains.
The company filed complaints against the protesters with the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR).
The Nuevo León Chamber of Industrial Transformation (Caintra) called for authorities to find a solution to the problem, stating that blockades are difficult to deal with even when companies have prior warning of them.
“Caintra is asking for support and is joining the petition with other chambers to resolve a problem that gravely impacts logistics and the industrial sector of Mexico,” said institutional relations director Jesús Francisco López.
The blockade that paralyzed rail traffic in the port was lifted late last week after Michoacán Governor Silvano Aureoles Conejo promised to grant the teachers 2.24 million pesos (US $113,000) to settle outstanding debts with them.
Zozaya said investigations should still be carried out despite the negotiations.
“If the negotiations arrive at a happy ending, we can consider withdrawing the complaints . . . but in the interim, whoever blocks railways should go to jail,” he said.
The mayor of Irapuato has called for action from Guanajuato authorities after 12 police officers were killed in the state in the space of a single week.
The state security strategy has to change, said Ricardo Ortiz Gutiérrez on Monday, adding that the criminals responsible for the deaths of the municipal officers – three of whom were part of Irapuato’s force – have not been held accountable.
“The [state] Attorney General’s Office says nothing and there are no arrests . . .” Ortiz said. “There is a situation of impunity.”
The National Action Party mayor said the attacks on police in the municipalities of Irapuato, Villagrán – where seven officers were killed, Celaya and León have generated fear among police officers in the state and could trigger a mass exodus due to resignations.
Ortiz said that nobody can force officers to remain in the job but added that Irapuato authorities are seeking to provide greater security to police and improve their salaries.
He warned that further attacks on police are possible and urged the Guanajuato government to do more to improve security in the state, Mexico’s most violent in 2019.
The newspaper El Universal reported that 250 members of the National Guard were expected to arrive in Irapuato on Tuesday and that 850 additional guardsmen will be deployed to other municipalities in the region.
However, it also said the state government is planning to withdraw between 60 and 70 state police officers out of 150 who had been deployed to Irapuato to bolster security.
With regard to the police deaths, Guanajuato Security Commissioner Sophia Huett said it was not her aim to criminalize police but it could not be ruled out that some of the slain officers had links to organized crime.
One in particular did not, if bravery awards are any measure.
Security analyst Alejandro Hope said in his regular column for El Universal this week that among the 12 officers killed was an “exemplary” police commander from Irapuato.
Bravery award winner Arellano, one of 12 officers killed in one week.
María Sonia Arellano Mendoza received an award four months ago that recognized her commitment to fighting crime, he wrote.
The 15-year veteran of the Irapuato police was kidnapped along with her husband and son last week by armed men allegedly linked to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
The kidnappers spared the lives of Arellano’s husband and son but not hers. The policewoman’s dismembered body was found on a dirt road on the outskirts of Irapuato.
Hope noted that the deaths of Arellano and the other 11 police officers in Guanajuato – two more of whom were women – are not uncommon. Sixty police officers have now been killed in Guanajuato this year and 409 in 27 states across the country, he wrote.
The figure is just shy of the 421 police deaths recorded last year and well above the 52 police murders in the United States in 2018.
The analyst wrote that attacks on police affect all Mexicans and presented four arguments to support his assertion.
Firstly, “attacks against police facilitate corruption,” Hope said, arguing that faced with the threat of death, officers are more likely to be lured into criminality by gangs that offer them financial incentives.
“In that sense, the attacks . . . undermine the integrity of institutions,” he wrote.
Secondly, in the face of the possibility of attacks, police tactics and the equipment they use become more military-like, Hope said.
“That limits the possibility of community police practices and moves [police] forces away from the public, which ends up reducing the efficacy of public security institutions,” he wrote.
Hope’s third argument was that if officers feel under attack they are more likely to commit human rights abuses or use disproportionate force, and his fourth was that police deaths exacerbate fear among citizens.
“If a police commander can be kidnapped, murdered and dismembered with impunity in broad daylight, nobody can feel safe,” he wrote.
“Given that, the murder of police officers should be considered an extremely serious act that warrants an exceptional response both from the state and society. But that’s not the case . . . An act as brutal as the murder of Commander Arellano went to the inside pages of the newspapers. The matter didn’t have a great impact on social media. It was treated as just one more piece of news. If we don’t care about the lives of police, how can we ask them to protect ours?”
Drug lord's brothers-in-law Ulises and Arnulfo González.
Two leaders of a gang considered to be the financial arm of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) were given prison sentences for drug and weapons charges on Monday.
Arnulfo and Ulises Jovani González Valencia, brothers-in-law to CJNG leader Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, were sentenced in the federal court at the maximum security prison at Puente Grande, Jalisco.
Arnulfo González was sentenced to five years for possession with intent to sell cocaine and methamphetamines, and his brother was given six years for the same charge, as well as possession of firearms.
The brothers were arrested by security forces in June 2018 in Zapopan, Jalisco.
Court documents revealed that in 2016 Arnulfo González established a center of operations in Bolivia where he created a money laundering scheme disguised as a real estate business and built a network of cocaine producers in order to export to Mexico and the United States.
He has since been on the U.S. Treasury Department’s blacklist, as has his brother Ulises, who posed as a real estate investor using false names and credentials to move illicit funds.
With the two behind bars, seven of 18 González Valencia siblings have been arrested for drugs, money laundering and organized crime.
One of the brothers, implicated in the Panama Papers, is in jail in Uruguay for money laundering. Gerardo González was arrested in 2016 when Uruguayan authorities seized over US $10 million worth of real estate. His extradition to the United States was approved in 2017, but appeals have kept him in Uruguay.
Abigael “El Cuini” González was arrested on drug trafficking charges in Puerto Vallarta in 2015. Although the United States has requested his extradition, a writ of amparo has kept him in the El Altiplano federal prison in México state since then.
In 2017, police in Brazil arrested José “La Chepa” González. His extradition has also been requested, but he remains in prison in Brazil.
Elvis González was arrested after being hospitalized for a traffic accident in Jalisco in January 2016 but was later released due to insufficient evidence.
Rosalinda González, wife of cartel boss El Mencho, was arrested on organized crime and money laundering charges in 2018 but was released on bail only three months later.
The United States will not send “labor inspectors” to Mexico to ensure compliance with the new North American trade agreement, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in a letter responding to concerns from the Mexican government.
Addressed to Mexico’s chief negotiator, Jesús Seade, Lighthizer wrote that the U.S. government included language in the implementing legislation sent to Congress that authorizes up to five attachés from the Department of Labor to work with Mexican officials, workers and civil society groups on the implementation of Mexican labor reform.
The attachés will provide technical assistance and disburse capacity building funds, he said.
“These personnel will not be ‘labor inspectors’ and will abide by all relevant Mexican laws,” Lighthizer wrote.
The trade representative added that the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) “allows an independent, three-person panel chosen by both parties to request on-site verifications in any of our three countries when there are good faith questions about whether workers at a particular facility are being denied key labor rights.”
Lighthizer stressed that “those verifications will be conducted by the independent panelists not by the labor attachés.”
The new trade pact is a “great agreement” for the United States and Mexico, he wrote. “I look forward to working with you and your colleagues to ensure that the agreement enters into force as quickly as possible.”
The letter comes after Seade accused the United States of preparing USMCA legislation that didn’t reflect the modified trade agreement signed by Mexican, Canadian and U.S. officials last week.
The Secretariat of Foreign Affairs said that it could reject any U.S. diplomats posted to carry out inspections because the accreditation of labor attachés can only proceed with the consent of the host country.
Seade told a press conference on Monday that the United States has now “perfectly” clarified its intention with regard to supervision of labor laws in Mexico.
In a Twitter post, he reiterated that Mexico will never allow labor inspectors to operate in Mexican workplaces.
Wharf construction under way in Salina Cruz, Oaxaca.
Frequent highway blockades on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec threaten to undermine a 107-million-peso (US $5.65-million) project to boost the capacity of the port in Salina Cruz, Oaxaca.
Work on a new wharf that will allow two container ships to be unloaded simultaneously is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
The project, which started in April after being put out to tender during the administration of the previous federal government, is the first upgrade to the Salina Cruz port since it was built in 1980.
However, port director Ricardo Tapia Ríos told the newspaper El Universal that highway blockades erected on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec due to social conflicts have the capacity to “hold back the investment” in the port.
Civil Protection specialist Tore Knape Macías said there were 216 blockades on the Pan-American and Trans-Isthmus highways between January 1 and December 11 this year. He said the frequency of blockades has generated concern among business owners who rely on the Salina Cruz port to import or export goods.
Corn and fertilizer are among the products whose transportation has been held up due to lengthy blockades. Tapia explained that the port has lost business due to the risk that shipments will be delayed.
One such delay in October cost a shipper of corn to Chiapas US $10,000 a day for the month that a ship was held up. First it was rain and then it was wind that delayed unloading the ship’s 30 tonnes of cargo. But then it was further delayed by highway blockades. The process that should have taken seven days took 30.
Port director Tapia said he hoped that the federal government’s social programs will help to reduce conflicts in the south of Oaxaca and eliminate the blockades.
There are concerns about the impact that the railroad and port expansion projects will have on the environment and communities in the Isthmus region.
The indigenous group El Istmo es Nuestro (The Isthmus is Ours) and Maoist organization Sol Rojo (Red Sun) have both indicated they will support local communities in their opposition to the project.
Javier Aluz of the latter group said in November that the people of the Isthmus will continue their “agenda of resistance” against the trade corridor project, which he said was part of an agenda of “imperialism” in the region.
