Property owners who block access to beaches could soon incur fines of more than 1 million pesos.
The Senate unanimously approved a reform to the General Law on National Assets on Monday that sets fines ranging from 260,640 pesos to 1.04 million pesos (US $11,800 to $47,200) for owners of coastal properties who prevent, restrict, obstruct or place conditions on access to beaches. By law all beaches in Mexico are public.
Fines can be issued if fences, barriers or buildings prevent entry to a beach or if property owners, hotel security staff or other hotel personnel block access when there is not an alternative public path to the coastline.
Repeat offenders could be stripped of permits that allow them to access the beach from their properties.
“The restriction of access to beaches … by owners of properties adjacent to the federal maritime land zone represents an act of discrimination against citizens,” said Mónica Fernández, a senator with the ruling Morena party.
She said that some owners of coastal properties treat the beach as their own private land when in fact it belongs to the nation.
Antonio García, a senator with the Democratic Revolution Party and president of the upper house’s tourism committee, said the reform will help to put an end to the discriminatory practices of some property owners.
He also said that it will strengthen the tourism industry, which has been decimated this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re guaranteeing the right to recreation and also strengthening the tourism industry. … The tourism industry is the sector that has been hit the hardest by the pandemic; more than 10,000 small businesses have closed … due to a lack of economic activity,” García said.
After approval by the Senate, the reform was sent to President López Obrador for his endorsement prior to publication in the government’s official gazette.
Hotel owners have previously been warned by the government that their properties could be closed and demolished if they don’t comply with orders to grant access to public beaches.
The director of the federal office of maritime law zones said last December that one hotel project in Cancún, Quintana Roo, was demolished because it would have blocked public access to the beach.
The protest followed the arrest of a couple who had refused to buy food and drinks from Mamita’s Beach Club while they were enjoying the white sand and turquoise water of the Caribbean coast.
Guadalupe Hernández of the Ateneas squad says she was struck by a hammer.
Mexico City policewomen responding to Monday’s International Safe Abortion Day protest say they were attacked with Molotov cocktails and hammers without reason in an hours-long skirmish with abortion-rights activists.
“It was the demonstration with the most direct attacks on us. They did not care that we were women and attacked us like that when they claimed to be our defenders. They directly threw Molotov cocktails at us and hit me with a hammer, they didn’t mind hitting you in the head,” said Guadalupe Hernández, deputy director of the Environmental Police, a detachment that is part of the all-women Ateneas squad that was in charge of policing the march.
An estimated 1,000 women participated in the demonstration, which they hoped would end in the zócalo, or city square, where another group of protesters demanding President López Obrador’s resignation has been camped out since last week.
Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said police asked that marchers hand over objects that could be used as weapons before entering the square, but they refused to do so and their access was blocked.
A small contingent of irate protesters then attacked shield-bearing police with metal pipes, paint, sticks, rocks, hammers, and Molotov cocktails, authorities say.
Sheinbaum said 44 police officers were injured in the clash.
Hernández said the tendons in her hand were injured during the demonstration. “We only asked that they march in peace and out of respect They hurt us and attacked us without reason. The only thing left for us was to protect ourselves, but we did not deserve the attack,” she said.
Ateneas’ deputy director Gabriela Torres Sánchez said the attacks began with protesters hurling a Molotov cocktail at police, setting 10 officers on fire. Ateneas officers do not carry any kind of weapon, she said, and although police have been accused of using tear gas on marchers, authorities insist the chemical cloud that was seen came from fire extinguishers as police sought to defend themselves.
“The only thing they did was attack, break glass and hit colleagues who are also women, mothers,” she said.
Yesterday, President López Obrador praised Sheinbaum’s handling of the demonstration, saying her administration acted with “great responsibility, with great prudence.”
He also appealed to activists to keep their protests peaceful. “You cannot solve anything with the use of violence, that is not advisable. You cannot confront violence with violence, you cannot put out a fire with fire,” he said. “You have to fight peacefully and that is the only thing that we recommend.”
Zarazúa lost the first set and was down in the second, but then turned things around for a stirring come-from-behind victory over the reigning Australian Open champion (File photo)
Mexican tennis player Renata Zarazúa fought hard but was eliminated in the second round of the Roland Garros French Open on Wednesday, losing to the tournament’s third seed Elina Svitolina.
Zarazúa, ranked 178th in the world, took on the Ukranian, ranked fifth-best, on her birthday and in her first-ever Grand Slam appearance. Although Zarazúa managed to win the second set 6-0 in just 29 minutes, Svitolina took the first and third, knocking the Mexico City native out of competition.
The 23-year-old lost the serve twice as the duel began and appeared nervous, committing double faults, but recovered to sweep the second set. However, it was not enough to propel her to victory. Throughout the match, Svitolina had just six unforced errors compared to Zarazúa’s 18.
“Renata played very well, hit good shots and forced me to take risks. Then I was able to regain control of the game,” said the Ukrainian.
Despite the disappointing result for Zarazúa and her fans, the tennis player’s mere appearance in the second round of a Grand Slam tournament marked a historic moment for Mexican tennis.
On Monday she defeated French wildcard player Elsa Jacquemot 6-1 and 6-2, making her the first female tennis player from Mexico to advance to the second round at the French Open in 20 years.
Zarazúa, who has a record of 201 wins and 151 losses in singles matches, came close to winning the Mexican Open in Acapulco earlier this year.
A National Autonomous University (UNAM) mathematician has warned that the national coronavirus positivity rate is no longer declining and that the outbreak could soon worsen.
“At a national level, the positivity rate [the percentage of Covid-19 tests that come back positive] was coming down but now the trend is changing. It went from going down, which is desirable, to stagnating at … 40%. … To consider that the epidemic is controlled, the positivity rate needs to reach 5%,” Arturo Erdely told the newspaper Milenio.
Mexico’s positivity rate is very high compared to most other countries because testing is mainly targeted at people with serious, coronavirus-like symptoms.
Only about 13,000 people per 1 million residents have been tested for Covid-19 in Mexico compared to about 315,000 in the United States, 84,000 in Brazil and 52,000 in India. Mexico has the fourth highest Covid-19 death toll in the world behind those three countries.
Erdely said the positivity rate in Mexico City, the country’s coronavirus epicenter, has increased from 30% to 34.5% over the past two weeks, an uptick he described as “worrying.”
The positivity rate in Mexico City, April 18 to September 28.
“The positivity rate was coming down but now it’s changed and it’s trending upwards. There is variability from one day to the next and from one week to the next but … when the average has been increasing for more than a week you can say that the trend is changing and [the positivity rate] is increasing. While in the case of Mexico City it’s increasing below the national average of 40.3%, it’s been rising and it’s about 34.5%, … which I think is concerning,” he said.
The UNAM academic said the positivity rate is the most important statistic to understand how the pandemic is evolving and the one that the World Health Organization watches most closely. But the federal government has never attributed sufficient importance to it, Erdely claimed.
While the national positivity rate is currently below the level seen in April and May – when it exceeded 50% – it shows that the pandemic has not significantly decreased, he said.
There are signs that new case numbers – which have been on the wane for about two months, according to the federal Health Ministry – could soon begin to rise, Erdely said.
He said that an uptick in case numbers could become even worse if the federal government doesn’t send clear messages about coronavirus mitigation measures such as the use of face masks.
“It’s very complicated. If [economic and social] activity increases, it’s impossible that infections won’t increase. So that [the outbreak] doesn’t get out of control, it’s essential to continue … taking care; social distancing, not going out if you don’t need to, the use of face masks, everything,” Erdely said.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico reported by day. milenio
Meanwhile, the Health Ministry reported Tuesday that Mexico’s accumulated case tally had increased to 738,163 with 4,446 new cases registered.
But while new case numbers have trended downwards this month and last, several thousand continue to be reported on a daily basis.
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, Mexico’s coronavirus czar, has frequently asserted that the pandemic will be long and warned last week that a new wave of infections could begin in the middle of October, coinciding with the beginning of the flu season.
Mexico also continues to record hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities every day. The Health Ministry reported an additional 560 on Tuesday, lifting the official death toll to 77,163.
The real number of people who have succumbed to the infectious disease in Mexico is almost certainly much higher.
The department store chain Coppel will invest 6.3 billion pesos (US $191.7 million) to open 423 new stores over the next four years, according to the company’s director of real estate.
Domingo Soto said in an interview that Grupo Coppel eventually plans to have more than 2,000 stores.
Founded in Sinaloa in the early 1940s, the chain currently has 1,561 stores. Once the 423 new ones have opened, it will be just 16 short of the 2,000 mark.
Soto said that Coppel has the capacity to meet a wide range of consumers’ needs because “we have 30 different businesses” within a single store.
The chain sells products ranging from motorcycles to baby clothes, offers banking services and is a travel agency as well as a department store. It also operates nine clothing stores under the Fashion Market brand.
Coppel’s stores were able to remain open during the suspension of nonessential business activities in April and May due to the coronavirus precisely because it offers banking services through its BanCoppel division.
As a result, the company was able to continue selling goods to in-store customers at a time when other department stores were limited to online sales.
With people spending more time at home due to the pandemic, online shopping is growing quickly in Mexico and Coppel hasn’t missed out on its share of the increasingly lucrative market.
CEO Agustín Coppel said recently that online sales now make up for more than 10% of total sales whereas before the pandemic they only accounted for 2%.
Ricardo Anaya returns just in time for the elections.
The man who ran for president under a right-left coalition against Andrés Manuel López Obrador has ended more than two years of silence with a scathing rebuke of the election winner’s performance.
Ricardo Anaya, a former leader of the National Action Party (PAN), also labeled López Obrador a megalomaniac in a video message posted to social media on Monday, a week after announcing that he had decided to return to public life.
Anaya began by taking aim at the president’s use of the term “fourth transformation” to describe the change he says his administration is bringing to Mexico.
He charged that López Obrador has no right to say that his government is carrying out a transformation that is just as momentous as Mexico’s independence from Spain, the 19th century liberal reform known as La Reforma and the Mexican Revolution.
“The first thing that has to be pointed out is that no political movement can claim a place in history it hasn’t won,” Anaya said.
‘The most dangerous thing is that [the president] believes his strategy is the correct one even when everything indicates the ship is sinking.’“Not even [former president] Benito Juárez dared to assert that he was the protagonist of the second transformation. He won that place in history with his actions,” he added.
Anaya asserted that “the most concerning feature” of the way in which López Obrador interprets the history of Mexico is his “megalomania – his delusions of grandeur in other words.”
He went on to claim that “history teaches us that extreme vanity and pretensions of greatness lead to large errors that turn into catastrophes and disasters.”
“History teaches us that a megalomanic leader doesn’t listen, doesn’t change his opinion. He always thinks he is right and even in the face of contrary evidence he always has other ‘other information,’” Anaya said, using one of López Obrador’s favorite terms when confronted with information he doesn’t agree with or which portrays his administration in a negative light.
“The most dangerous thing,” he added, is that a megalomaniac never corrects his course because “he believes his strategy is the correct one even when everything indicates the ship is sinking.”
Anaya insinuated that the president is like a “madman” driving down a busy highway in the wrong direction while thinking that everyone else is going the wrong way.
“We all know how that ends,” he said before footage shows a car traveling in the wrong direction colliding head on with another vehicle.
Anaya, who was runner-up in the 2018 election with just over 22% of the vote (López Obrador garnered 53% support), asserted that his motivation for speaking out against the president was “profound concern” for “the damage” he is doing to Mexico.
“It’s you who is going to pay dearly for all his follies,” he warned.
The former federal deputy urged López Obrador’s collaborators to stop maintaining a “complicit silence” and “brown-nosing” the president.
Government officials close to the president have a responsibility to make him see his errors and the negative impact they are having on people’s lives, Anaya said.
“On the life of he who has no job, on the life of he who has no income, on the life of he who today has a member of his family who is sick or has already lost a loved one.”
Anaya appears to be positioning himself as a leading voice of the conservative National Action Party.
Anaya slammed López Obrador for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he said many experts have described as the biggest global crisis since World War II.
“At the beginning of the worst crisis of the century he addressed the nation to say this,” he said before the video cut to footage of López Obrador urging people to continue hugging each other because “nothing will happen.”
Anaya also criticized the president for not setting an example by wearing a face mask and practicing social distancing.
(López Obrador has seldom been seen wearing a face mask and continued to hold rallies and get up close and personal with his supporters in the early days of the pandemic).
Anaya, who appears to be positioning himself as a leading voice of the conservative party at a time when López Obrador and the ruling Morena party are dominating Mexico’s political landscape, also took aim at the decision to build a new state-owned oil refinery on the Tabasco coast, a move that has been criticized by many experts who say that the project diverts funds from Pemex’s more profitable exploration business.
“Let’s remember that he [López Obrador] insisted on the whim of spending money on a refinery instead of helping you when you most needed help,” Anaya said, taking a swipe at the government’s scant financial support for individuals and businesses amid the coronavirus-induced economic downturn.
“We’ll sadly remember that he didn’t live up to expectations in these historic times,” he said before concluding that despite what he sees as López Obrador’s poor leadership and bad government Mexico will overcome the adversity it faces.
Anaya’s return to the national political scene comes eight months before elections in June 2021 at which the lower house of federal Congress will be renewed and voters will elect municipal and state representatives.
The 41-year-old, who has just written a book called The Past, Present and Future of Mexico, has not publicly declared any intention to stand as a candidate at next year’s elections but his renewed enthusiasm for discussing national politics publicly might be a sign that he has one eye on putting his hand up to run for president again in 2024.
López Obrador will withdraw to his ranch in Palenque if he loses support.
President López Obrador issued a challenge to his detractors Tuesday: he will resign if 100,000 people attend a protest against him and opinion polls show that he has lost support.
“How are authoritarian governments overthrown? With the people, with large protests; people go out to the street – hundreds, thousands, millions. In my case, at the first protest of 100,000 and when I see that I don’t have support in the polls, [I’ll go] to Palenque, Chiapas. I won’t even wait for the revocation of mandate [vote],” the president told reporters at his morning news conference.
“I’ll see you there [in Palenque] because I have principles, I have ideals.”
López Obrador has a ranch in Palenque, a town in the northeast of Chiapas well known for its archaeological site of the same name, and has said previously that he would retire there if people come to the view that they don’t want him as president anymore.
“I’m not going to be like some presidents who have 10%, 15%, 20% approval in their countries and they’re still [in power],” he said in March. “How can one govern without the support of the citizens?”
The 2004 march for peace drew as many as 350,000 people to the zócalo.
To formally test his support, AMLO, as López Obrador is best known, intends to hold a referendum in 2022 to ask citizens if they want him to continue as president until the end of his six-year term in 2024.
An organization known as the National Anti-AMLO Front has held numerous protests in recent months and some of its members are currently camping out in Mexico City’s central square, the zócalo.
But the president appears unperturbed by the people currently protesting against him in the zócalo – their numbers are only in the hundreds, less than 1% of the 100,000 threshold AMLO set in order for him to resign.
However, should there be a demonstration by 100,000 people or more it would not be the first time in Mexico City’s active history of protests and demonstrations.
A march in 1968 over the Tlatelolco massacre attracted an estimated 250,000 people.
A march for peace in 2004 was attended by 200,000, according to conservative estimates, and 350,000 by others.
Another march calling for a stop to violence was held in 2008 and drew 200,000, according to estimates by police.
Thieves stole US $8.5 million worth of gold from the Gallo mine in Sinaloa in 2015.
Mexico has a new security force to protect the nation’s mines from drug cartels, the government announced Monday.
The first 118 mine guards, who will be equipped with assault rifles, graduated from a special training course and will be tasked with “solving the attacks by organized crime in this economic sector,” Security Minister Security Alfonso Durazo said.
“Today concludes a pioneering and highly relevant course in the increasingly broad profile in the training of the members of the federal protection service,” Durazo said at the officers’ graduation ceremony. “We know that the security of these facilities is delicate and requires high specialization. In coordination with the Ministry of the Economy and the industrial chambers, specialized strategies have been created for the mining regions.”
Foreign-run gold and silver mines have long been subject to extortion by drug cartels, and in recent years criminal organizations have also stolen minerals or semi-refined metals from the mines.
In 2015, a drug cartel stole around 4.5 kilograms of gold and silver from a mine in northern Mexico. The British-owned Fresnillo mining company, which operates three mines in Mexico including the largest silver mine in the world, reported that the theft occurred near its Herradura mine in Sonora when armed men carrying high-caliber weapons stopped a company vehicle and stole the ore.
That same year, thieves stole 7,000 ounces of gold worth US $8.5 million from the Canadian-owned El Gallo 1 mine in Mocorito, Sinaloa.
In 2018, the Canadian company Pan American Silver temporarily reduced some operations at its mine in northern Mexico due to safety concerns.
The company noted that its employees had experienced safety problems on the roads leading to the mine in a remote part of Chihuahua, a region plagued by criminal groups. At one point, employees hid in the mine, fearful to leave due to threats from armed groups, and some employees were evacuated in private planes.
And in April 2020, Minas de Oro Nacional, a subsidiary of the Canadian firm Alamos Gold, was the victim of a daring theft of 1,000 ounces of silver and gold when five armed men subdued security guards and loaded their booty into a waiting small plane in an attack that took less than 10 minutes.
The decision to form a special squad of mine police was made at a summit on mining security held in May.
Some 2.6 million Mexicans are employed in the mining industry. In 2019, Mexican mines produced 244 billion pesos (US $11.25 billion) worth of ore.
Informal sector jobs regained in the table at left; formal sector jobs at right. The first column in each indicates total jobs lost. In green are jobs recovered by month. Numbers represent millions of jobs. el economista
Mexico’s jobs recovery continued in August but fewer people returned to work than in previous months, data shows.
According to a survey conducted by the national statistics agency Inegi, 653,000 people returned to work last month. Many of those who re-entered the workforce had been laid off due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The number of people who re-entered the workforce in August is less than half the number who went back to work in July and just over one-tenth the number who regained employment in June.
Of those who went back to work last month, 71% had informal sector jobs without access to benefits and 29% were in the formal sector.
According to Inegi, a total of 14.1 million people lost their jobs in the formal and informal sectors between March and May due to the suspension of nonessential business activities and the government’s advice for people to stay at home.
About 10.4 million of those jobs were in the informal sector and 3.7 million were formal.
Approximately 7.2 million informal sector workers have returned to their jobs since June, a figure that accounts for about 69% of those who found themselves unemployed due to the pandemic.
The jobs recovery has been slower in the formal sector. About 1.6 million of those workers have returned to their jobs since June, 43.5% of those who were laid off.
Counting both informal and formal sector workers, 8.8 million people – 62% of those who lost their positions earlier this year – are now back at work.
The unemployment rate, according to Inegi, is 5.2%, slightly lower than the 5.4% rate in July but 1.9% above the March level.
Employment in the agricultural and industrial sectors increased by 2.3% and 1.4%, respectively, in August but commercial sector jobs including retail declined by 3.9%.
Overall, the labor market is improving albeit slowly, said Jonathan Heath, deputy governor of the Bank of México.
David Kaplan, a senior labor market specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank, said the recent job numbers – despite the improvement – “have been disappointing.”
According to Gabriela Siller, head of economic and financial research at Banco Base, there is a risk of a second round of job losses even though most sectors of the economy have now reopened.
Another concern is that many of the jobs that have been recovered pay low salaries, which doesn’t bode well for the increase in consumer spending the economy needs to bounce back from a near 20% decline in the second quarter of the year.
The prevalence of low salaries together with an employment rate still below pre-pandemic levels “represent a significant challenge for a recovery in private consumption,” said Juan Carlos Alderete, director of economic analysis at Banorte.
“It seems that the recovered jobs have been [those] with lower remuneration, which might be explained by companies’ necessity to control costs,” he said.
The Abortion Day march turned violent when protesters were denied access to the zócalo.
An estimated 1,000 women took to the streets of Mexico City Monday to mark International Safe Abortion Day and lobby for reproductive rights, some clashing with police as they attempted to march to the zócalo, the capital city’s central square.
Abortion rights activists began assembling around 2 p.m., chanting slogans such as “Abortion yes or abortion no, that’s for me to decide,” as they marched along Avenida de la República accompanied by Grupo Atenea, a women’s police brigade charged with keeping order during protests, marches and other public events.
But when the protesters reached Alameda Central park, police blocked their access to the zócalo.
The protesters responded by shoving at police shields, hitting them with hammers and metal pipes and throwing fireworks as they demanded to be allowed to proceed.
Police reportedly launched tear gas in order to retain order, triggering claims of police violence.
Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum defended the police’s actions, observing that the protesters were invited to continue their march peacefully if they handed over objects that could be used as weapons, but they refused to do so.
One of the reasons they were not permitted to proceed to the zócalo and protest in front of the National Palace, she explained, was that another group of protesters — supporters of Frenaaa, an organization calling for President López Obrador’s resignation — has been camping out there since last week.
The mayor also denounced yesterday’s violence. “The feminist movement deserves all our respect and sympathy, what we do not agree with is violence. We cannot accept violence of any kind. It is the obligation of every government to protect people, regardless of their beliefs,” Sheinbaum said, noting that 44 people were injured during the protest.
Less volatile demonstrations also occurred yesterday in at least 23 states.
In Pachuca, Hidalgo, pro-choice activists held informational sessions, staged a performance and broadcast the events live from the Plaza Independencia before setting off on a march.
Women in Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, held a rally on the beach and placed a purple bandana on a statue of former president Lázaro Cárdenas.
In San José del Cabo, Baja California Sur, women decorated statues of the city’s founding fathers in the town square with green sashes and signs reading “Only I decide for my body” and “Take your rosaries out of our ovaries.”
More than 200,000 abortions have been performed in Mexico City since it became legal in 2007. Since September 2019, when abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy was legalized in Oaxaca, the states of Puebla, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí and Guanajuato have tried and failed to pass bills decriminalizing abortion.
Around 47,000 women die annually after undergoing unsafe abortions, Amnesty International says.
