The addictions center from which youths were taken in Irapuato.
A commando of armed civilians broke into an addictions treatment center in Irapuato, Guanajuato, and kidnapped more than two dozen youths early Wednesday morning.
Initial reports indicate that the attackers were looking for one patient in particular, but took at least 26 in the raid.
Irapuato Mayor Ricardo Ortiz said the exact number was unknown.
“As of now, we have not established how many people were taken against their will, since some witnesses say that some fled on their own [during the attack],” said Police Chief Pedro Cortés Zavala.
Local police and the army were deployed to protect the rehabilitation center after the attack, which was carried out by some 20 to 30 men traveling in four trucks.
An unidentified source in the Attorney General’s Office said four other people were taken from nearby homes and two more were picked up on the street.
The state government said 150 state police officers would be deployed to Irapuato to support security efforts.
Irapuato is a particularly violent municipality in Guanajuato: 258 were murdered with firearms between January and October. There have been 368 investigations into home robberies and 240 for vehicle theft, although there was not a single case of kidnapping reported.
The Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel operates in the region.
Environmentalists and scientists from Mexico and abroad are touring some of the nation’s most polluted places to raise awareness about environmental problems and denounce companies that cause them.
The Toxi-Tour México caravan, made up of representatives from Mexican, United States, Latin American and European environmental, labor and scientific organizations, started its journey on Monday in El Salto, Jalisco, where industrial pollution in the Santiago river has been blamed for the deaths of more than 1,000 people from cancer and kidney failure.
The 10-day tour will also visit pollution hot spots in municipalities including Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato; Apaxco, México state; Atonilco de Tula, Hidalgo; Tlaxcala; Puebla; and Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz. It will conclude in Mexico City on December 11.
At least three million people in those locations suffer health problems due to water, air and soil pollution, according to experts traveling with the caravan.
The Toxi-Tour will “denounce United States, Canadian, German, French, Spanish and Mexican companies” that cause environmental damage, said Andrés Barreda, a representative of the National Assembly of Environmental Victims, which organized the caravan.
The caravan members, including lawmakers from the United States and Europe, are meeting with local environmental organizations in the areas they visit as well as citizens who have been affected by both environmental problems and social conflicts.
In Atonilco de Tula, where the Toxi-Tour will arrive on Thursday, a public forum will be held to discuss environmental problems caused by cement plants, open-pit mines, limestone quarries and oil refineries.
In Tlaxcala on Friday, caravan members will learn about the community proposal to clean up the Atoyac–Zahuapan river basin, while on Saturday they will visit contaminated areas of Puebla city and speak with locals who have been dispossessed of their communal lands.
On December 11 in Mexico City, a final meeting of caravan members will be held after which they will issue a report that details their observations during the Toxi-Tour.
Education Secretary Moctezuma: look to Latin America for comparisons.
Mexico’s results in the PISA mathematics, reading and science tests shouldn’t be compared with those of rich countries, Education Secretary Esteban Moctezuma Barragán said on Tuesday.
Moctezuma told a press conference that Mexico’s results should be compared with those of other Latin American nations rather than OECD member countries.
“One thing that we have to understand is that the OECD is a club of the world’s rich and developed countries . . . If we compare ourselves with similar countries, with whom we have a similar history and which were also conquered by Spain . . . we see that Mexico is in the top places,” he said.
Among nine Latin American nations that participated in the PISA tests (eight Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil), Mexican ranked fourth in reading and third in both math and science.
Emiliana Vegas: political interests hold sway in education policy.
Moctezuma also emphasized that Mexican students fared a lot better than the OECD average in socio-emotional skills.
He highlighted that 83% of students surveyed said they are satisfied with their lives, 96% said they are happy and 89% said they can usually find a way out of difficult situations.
“Mexico is much better than all the other OECD countries on socio-emotional issues,” Barragán said.
“. . . The discussion now is whether things like convivencia [coexistence or togetherness] and second language [skills] will be included in the next PISA tests. If they’re added . . . things will improve,” he said.
Meanwhile, a co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., public policy organization, said the Mexican government’s education policy is geared more towards political interests that students’ learning needs.
“Some things are very concerning from my point of view,” Emiliana Vegas said during an interview at the World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha, Qatar.
She said the decision to disband the National Education Evaluation Institute represented the loss of an autonomous body that could have guided the government on education policy. The Latin America education expert also said that the way in which the government is allocating teaching positions and the agreements it has struck with teachers’ unions are politically motivated.
“It appears that the [aim of the new education] reform is not . . . to serve students better and for all Mexican students to have better quality education,” Vegas said.
“Rather it’s responding more to political interests and political support that might guarantee someone’s continuation of power, greater stability and less strikes in the short term but in the long term it’s bad for the country.”
You’d think we weren’t half of the world’s population.
When I had my baby six years ago I was happy that, despite the horror stories I’d heard about women in the United States being shamed and scolded for breastfeeding in public, I didn’t have to worry about prudish people sexualizing the feeding of my child.
Pretty much everyone that came to the house during that first year saw me feed her without a cover (I was always afraid she’d suffocate and just couldn’t bare to try), and there was nary a glance or mention of the appropriateness of it. I regularly fed her in public as well, with no negative reactions that I ever noticed. People were respectful.
I counted myself lucky to have escaped one more woman-shaming norm prevalent in my own country.
I’ve been puzzled since then to hear of numerous incidents of shaming breastfeeding women in public in Mexico. Even if it’s not the institution itself, individuals from within seem to feel more than at liberty to speak up, like the museum guard at Mexico City’s Modern Art Museum (the museum has since done the right thing and loudly corrected).
Even as Mexico City approved a law to protect breastfeeding women from ridicule, Senator Martha Cecilia Márquez (PAN) was interrupted by Porfirio Muñoz Ledo (Morena) saying that there was “a limit to the tolerance that can be given to a mother and her child” as she spoke before Congress with her baby in her arms.
In my home country of the United States, breastfeeding is an even stickier issue, and it can be hard to separate the ridicule that’s born of religious beliefs about modesty and (especially women’s) “natural sinfulness” and that which is born of simple prudishness paired with a patriarchal framework: we were born of a Puritan culture, after all.
The underlying belief here — and indeed, of much sexual violence against women — is that men are less-than-human animals that simply can’t be expected to control themselves. This is insulting to men, and infuriating to women who are constantly being held to a higher “moral” standard.
Women are routinely blamed for seducing — unwittingly or not — men; people seem to subscribe to the idea that anything about a woman’s exposed body is offensive if it’s not obviously being sexualized for their viewing pleasure.
In the U.S., men and women alike squirm upon seeing an unsolicited breast, and this reaction seems to be “spreading” to Mexico as one of those less-useful cultural imports. Let me tell you, the pressure to both breastfeed one’s babies and always to do so privately is a tall, postpartum-depression-inducing order. And while breastfeeding does certainly have health benefits, plenty of babies raised exclusively on formula do just fine in life.
Based on my own research, the benefits of breastfeeding might not be quite as miraculous as they’re made out to be, and we could all stand to lay off women if they decide not to breastfeed. With a maternity leave of only six weeks after the birth of the child, it’s hardly a mystery why so few women in Mexico choose to do so, let alone are able to do so.
The common thread between shaming women for public breastfeeding and shaming women for formula-feeding is “shaming women.” It’s almost as if strangers were more concerned about telling women what they should and shouldn’t do with their bodies than with the health of their babies.
The truth is that as long as we live in a society that looks upon women as second-class citizens and infantilizes them as frivolous and hysterical, there will always be some gender-wide complaint to lodge against them.
While men could rightfully say they’re criticized as a gender in plenty of ways, what they can’t say is that they’re systematically abused and killed as a result.
Sarah DeVries writes from her home in Xalapa, Veracruz.
Defense chief Cresencio: focus at border is now on arms coming in more than drugs going out.
Guns and ammunition are smuggled into Mexico from the United States inside gas tanks, spare tires and bottles of soft drinks among other things, National Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval revealed on Wednesday.
Speaking at the presidential press conference, the army chief said that the armed forces and custom officials have also detected weapons inside washing machines, televisions and even boxes of chocolates.
Guns are also often concealed in hidden compartments in vehicles, Cresencio said, adding that there have been cases in which gunrunners have attempted to pass weapons off as toys. He cited several specific cases in which illicit cargo has been seized.
At customs in Tijuana, cartridges were detected inside soda bottles, he said, while in San Emeterio, Sonora, 55,000 cartridges, 19 guns and 12 grenade launchers were found hidden in a semi-trailer.
At customs in Sonoyta, Sonora, weapons and cartridges were found under the seats of a bus that entered Mexico from the U.S., and weapons, magazines and ammunition were detected in the gas tank of a pickup truck, he said.
At Nogales, 320 kilometers to the east in the same state, weapons and ammunition have been detected inside car doors, while three guns were found inside a television at customs in Ojinaga, Chihuahua.
The army chief said that vehicles are selected randomly for inspection, explaining that checking all those that cross into Mexico from the U.S. is not possible because of the delays it would generate and the effect it would have on legal, perishable goods entering the country.
Cresencio said President López Obrador had instructed the armed forces to focus more on stopping weapons coming into Mexico than drugs bound for the United States.
“In this administration, the president instructed us to change the direction of inspections at our military security posts. Before all our military posts carried out inspections [of vehicles traveling] from south to north, we were looking to seize drugs, but the president instructed us to change,” he said.
In addition to weapons and ammunition, cash has also been seized since the change was made, Cresencio said.
While cars and trucks are most frequently used for the smuggling of both weapons and drugs, illicit goods are also transported by rail, the defense secretary said. All told, the military has destroyed almost 20,000 weapons that were seized in 26 states across the country this year, Cresencio said.
A .50-caliber rifle hidden under the hood of a car.
López Obrador told reporters that the smuggling of guns and cash into Mexico will be discussed at meetings this week between government officials and United States Attorney General William Barr.
The president stressed on Wednesday that his government will not permit any operations similar to the “fast and furious” gunwalking scandal in which U.S. government officials allowed weapons to be smuggled into Mexico during the administrations of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The aim of the operation was to track the guns to cartel leaders and arrest them.
“The government will now allow any operation like the ‘fast and furious’ [scandal] because that, if you remember, was a flagrant violation of our sovereignty . . .Weapons were allowed to come in [to Mexico] in order to supposedly follow organized crime members but they lost track of those same weapons and it was later shown that they were used to commit crimes. The plan was a resounding failure. Those activities, those agreements will not be allowed,” López Obrador said.
“What we’re proposing is for there to be control of the exit of weapons and dollars on the United States side [of the border] . . . We need to cooperate to strengthen relations on the issues of drugs, migration and arms trafficking . . .” he said.
Barr’s visit to Mexico comes a month after U.S. President Donald Trump offered to help Mexico “wage war” on Mexican drug cartels and a week after he said the cartels will be designated as terrorist organizations.
Rocketing down the Mexico City-Toluca highway at 280 kilometers an hour is OK if you’re one of Mexico’s “eccentric millionaires.”
A video posted to YouTube on Sunday shows a speeding Ferrari driver, driving without a seatbelt, mocking police and bragging about being a millionaire.
At the wheel of the Ferrari 458 Spider, the Mexican man identified as Fer Italia speeds past police officers who smile and wave at him.
The video, titled The Eccentricities of Mexican Millionaires, was posted by Spanish YouTuber Juan Dominguero.
“Good morning, friends!” Italia shouts to Federal Police officers as he passes their patrol car. The officers respond by sounding their siren and waving. Then the driver accelerates and leaves them behind.
LOS MILLONARIOS DE MEXICO Y SUS EXCENTRICIDADES 😱💸
The two then stop to eat breakfast, and take a moment to show a device that covers the license plate.
On the way back to Mexico City, the same officers seen earlier in the video pull them over, but it is not shown whether they issued a ticket.
“The police stopped us again, and I don’t know why!” says Dominguero.
“For going too fast, that’s why! 280 kilometers [an hour]!” says Italia, who describes himself as a “businessman who is killing it in Mexico.”
The video ends with Dominguero posing for photos with the officers.
“Here we have the good police officers always making sure that everything is OK,” he says, smiling. “In the end, we became friends.”
Another of Dominguero’s videos, posted on November 14, shows Alfred Harp Anaya, grandson of well-known businessman and philanthropist Alfredo Harp Helú, competing in clandestine drag races in the Mexico City neighborhood of Santa Fe and bragging about avoiding the police.
Siqueiros' From Porfirismo to the Revolution at Chapultepec Castle.
The murals of Mexico City have become such an integral part of the city’s image it’s hard to imagine a time when they weren’t colorfully decorating the walls of so many public buildings.
The fact is that the majority of these murals were created less than 100 years ago, from 1920 to 1950, when the country and city were promoting public art as a way to empower, educate and enlighten citizens in a post-revolutionary Mexico.
Mexican muralism could be said to stretch all the way back to artistic expressions of pre-Hispanictribes followed by the deeply religious murals created by the Catholic Church to convert local indigenous peoples. But most references to Mexican muralism point to the populist art movement of the early 20th century that was also, in a way, an attempt at conversion.
The post-revolution government of Mexico and in particular the secretary of education at the time, José Vasconcelos, wanted to win over the hearts and minds of citizens to the goals of the Mexican Revolution, to teach them the history of their nation and to instill a sense of pride of their mestizo identity.
He reached out to now-famous figures like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros as well as lesser known painters like Ramón Alva de la Calnal, Federico Cantú, Rufino Tamayo and Dr. Atl (Gerardo Munillo) to help him bring art to the people.
Rivera’s Water, Source of Life at Chapultepec Park.
Each of these painters made their own unique mark on the muralist movement in Mexico and the work of each can be seen on the walls and courtyards of some of Mexico City’s most striking buildings.
A great place to start is the San Ildefenso College, once the National Preparatory School and one of the first muralist projects to be sponsored by the Mexican government. There you can see the larger-than-life murals by Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, Jean Charlot, Ramón Alva de la Canal, Fermin Revueltas and Fernando Leal.
Follow this up with a trip to the Secretariat of Education building where you can see work by Rivera and Siqueiros as well as Raul Anguiano and Manuel Felguerez. This building and its art are just as impressive and infinitely less crowded than the National Palace just a few blocks away.
The latter houses what has become the most well-known mural outside of Mexico, Diego Rivera’s History of Mexico. The central stairwell mural and the subsequent murals lining several hallways took Rivera 22 years to complete and depict centuries of Mexican history following pre-Hispanic tribes through the conquest, independence and revolution, ending with a vision for the post-revolution era.
Since you’re already downtown you might as well stop by and see Rufino Tamayo’s The Birth of Nationalityon the walls of the Bellas Artes, a stunning piece of art deco architecture that also houses murals by Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, Jorge Gonzales Camarena, Roberto Montenegro and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano.
The permanent collection of the National Art Museum, right across the street, has various small pieces (paintings, not murals) by many of these muralists before the they were charged with making these massive public art installations.
Katharsis by José Clemente Orozco at Bellas Artes.
The campus of Mexico’s national university, UNAM, in the south of the city, is also home to a wide swath of public art by muralists. There you can see David Siqueiros’ The people to the University, the University to the People; Juan O’Gorman’s A Historical Representation of the Culture, which covers the exterior of the university’s central library; Rivera’s The University, the Family and Sports in Mexico on the University Olympic Stadium; The Return of Quetzalcóatl by José Chávez Morado on the south exterior wall of the Luis Unikel Library; The Conquest of Energy, also by Morado, on the Alfonso Caso Auditorium; and Life, Death Mestizaje and the Four Elements by Francisco Eppens on the medical faculty building.
While you are south of the centro, stop by the Carrillo Gil Museum in San Ángel to see their ample collection of Orozco’s work.
For a deeper dive into the painters and their lives, there are spaces that still ring with the echoes of their voices and are smudged with their colorful fingerprints. Visit the Anahuacalli Museum created by Diego Rivera to showcase his love of pre-Hispanic culture and filled with ancient artifacts and some of the pre-sketches of his most famous work.
You can also stop by the Blue House where he and fellow painter Frida Kahlo lived and imagine yourself sitting in his sun-lit office dreaming about the next big project. Or head over to the couple’s Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo for a peek at their workshops and into their creative process.
One of my absolute favorite Rivera murals is inside the second section of Chapultepec Park at the Cárcamo de Dolores, once a part of the city’s hydraulic system. Rivera’s mural Water, Source of Life, which once hid below the water line, is one of his most lyrical and beautiful in my opinion.
The Rufino Tamayo Museum, instead of being a collection of his work is actually a collection of the modern and contemporary pieces that this muralist collected during his lifetime. The museum is one of our best for contemporary art and if you want to dig in to Tamayo the artist contact the museum for a separate appointment, as they are the home to his personal archive. Also check out his mural at the National Museum of Anthropology, Mural Dualidad.
The personal library and archive of David Siqueiros is located in the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Polanco which has a museum and a research library open by appointment. Nearby you can see his massive From Porfirismo to the Revolution, in Chapultepec Castle. Check out this list in Spanish for some other lesser-known spots where you can see his work, except for the Polyforum Siqueiros, the site of Siqueiros’ final mural, as it’s no longer open to the public and can only be seen by peeking above a construction fence that now surrounds it.
If you just want to feel the essence of the trend maker, pass by the Ex-Convent of the Merced that Dr. Atl squatted in for a few years, creating his own artists’ colony. There are remnants of his mural Vista panorámica de la ciudad de Puebla on the walls, but unfortunately the ex-convent is currently closed to the public. You could also stop by his tombstone at the Panteon Civil de Dolores here in the city.
These are only a handful of options for creating a full-on muralism itinerary. If you don’t want to go it alone, there are several tours that focus on themovement and its biggest players, including the Mexico a Pie walking tour. Contact local art expert Natalia Zerbato to set up a private tour and for a look at today’s new muralism in Mexico City check out the Street Art Chilango street art tour in the Roma and Condesa or contact local street artist Claudio Erre aka Remix, who brings you along to paint a street mural at his side.
Lydia Carey is a freelance writer based in Mexico City and a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
The police academy in San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León, celebrated its largest graduating class ever, with 100 cadets becoming officers on Wednesday.
In addition to its record size, the graduating class stands out for the education levels among the officers, 74 of whom have bachelor’s or postgraduate degrees in fields such as criminology, psychology, law or engineering.
As cadets, they completed 1,080 hours of training and study, a higher standard than the one mandated by the National Security System (Sesnsp).
San Pedro Police Chief Gerardo Escamilla Vargas said the cadets had to pass 48 subjects in six months of study and training in order to graduate. Subjects included the legitimate use of force, crime prevention and victim services.
Almost a third of the graduates were women.
The graduates will be the best paid in the force’s history, earning 20,000 pesos (US $1,028) a month, the newspaper Milenio reported.
During the graduation ceremony, the graduates demonstrated riot squad tactics, blindfolded arming and disarming of weapons and victim services techniques.
At 2%, the Finance Secretariat's forecast is higher than those of financial institutions surveyed.
Seven banks and brokerages are predicting economic growth of less than 1% in 2020, a new survey shows.
Conducted by economic analysis and forecasting firm FocusEconomics, the survey indicates that Germany’s Commerzbank and Swiss investment bank UBS anticipate 0.9% GDP growth next year.
British bank Standard Chartered, Mexican foreign exchange company Monex and Mexican financial services firm Invex all predict 0.8% growth, while U.S. firm DuckerFrontier is forecasting an economic expansion of just 0.4%.
The most pessimistic outlook comes from the French investment bank Société Générale, which sees zero growth in 2020.
Thirty-five other entities surveyed by FocusEconomics predict growth of 1% or higher next year. The most optimistic outlook came from Germany’s DekaBank, which forecasts 1.8% growth next year.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico predicts a GDP expansion of 1.7%, while the Mexican firms Actinver and GBM Securities both anticipate 1.6% growth. The average forecast of the 42 entities consulted was 1.2%.
Joel Virgen, BNP Paribas’ chief economist for Mexico, told the newspaper El Economista that the French bank is forecasting 0.6% growth in 2020.
He said the bank is still waiting for further details about the National Infrastructure Plan before predicting what impact it will have on the economy.
Virgen said that the economy will face a range of internal risks related to government policy in 2020 as well as external ones such as uncertainty about the new North American free trade agreement.
The economy contracted in both the first and second quarters and grew by just 0.01% in the third, Inegi said.
Meanwhile, the Finance Secretariat’s 2020 economic package anticipates 2% growth next year while the Bank of México’s forecast is a growth rate between 1.5% and 2.5%.
Despite the weak economy, business magnate Carlos Slim last week endorsed the economic performance of President López Obrador and his government, claiming that the foundations have been laid for greater investment and growth in coming years.
A Christmas village in Puebla may be the closest thing to a northern Christmas that exists in Mexico.
From late November to early January, the city of Atlixco boasts the largest arrangement of colored lights in Mexico at an event called the Villa Iluminada (Lighted Village).
The historic center of the city, from the main square to Parque Revolución, boasts millions of Christmas lights strung up on over two kilometers of old buildings public and private, plazas and streets. Many of the lights are set up on over 2,000 figures related to the Christmas season.
In addition, the event includes attractions not necessarily related to Christmas as those from the north know it. One is the Árbol de los Deseos (Wish Tree) where you can leave messages about what you would like for Christmas, a lava tunnel and a train. It even includes a Corner for Lovers, a backdrop for professing your undying affection to that special someone.
One of the highlights of this period is the Desfile de Nikolaus (Nicholas Parade), based on a variant of the Saint Nicholas story. In this version, a young girl was playing with a box when Nicholas, a neighbor, saw her through the window and was curious. He asked her what she was doing with the box and she said, “Playing with my doll.” But the box was empty.
A train is part of the parade at Atlixco’s Christmas event.
The girl also told him that the Three Wise Men could not bring gifts to all children and she was one who did not receive a gift. So she gave herself an imaginary doll.
The next day, the girl opened her box to find a real doll, a gift from Saint Nick. The parade to honor this legend features floats and people in costume and marching bands.
Another major attraction is the Magic Circus, which is new this year.
There is an entrance fee for the parade of between 165 and 270 pesos, but it includes access to a pavilion featuring local and gourmet food. However, the walk around the lighted area is free.
After only seven years, the event is the most important tourist attraction for the municipality, and is expected to bring in over 50 million pesos (US $2.57 million).
This year’s event runs from November 22 to January 6.
