For many graduates, their salaries don't meet their expectations.
Graduates of public and private universities earn an average of around 10,400 pesos (US $490) a month, a study by the Universidad del Valle de México (UVM) has found, with women earning 22% less than men.
UVM’s National Survey of Graduates 2020 interviewed 10,036 students about their professional trajectory after graduating from college.
The study is intended to help authorities formulate public policies to align higher education with the economic and social needs of the country and help universities design an updated educational offering based on market needs.
This in turn is to help students choose their field of study based on updated information on demand for skills, employability and income.
And as in previous years, the disparity between male and female graduates continues to be noticeable as men are still better paid, have better benefits and are more employable than women in Mexico. In their first job after graduation, 27% of men were paid more than 8,000 pesos (US $376) a month, compared to just 18% of women.
Salaries across the board were not what many students hoped for: 54% of those surveyed said they were not earning what they had expected.
Only 17% of all graduates earned more than 15,000 pesos per month, and 5% said they earned less than 1,500 pesos, the survey found.
Private university graduates say mechanical engineering and metallurgy careers are the best paid with an average salary of 16,394 pesos per month.
Of those who attended a public university, chemistry majors were the best paid at 13,465 pesos per month.
Graduates are also finding it increasingly difficult to find work. In 2005, the study found that 40% of those interviewed found it difficult or very difficult to find a job after leaving school. In 2019 that number jumped to 56.5%.
One-third of study participants said they pursued a college education to improve their standard of living, while 27% said they went to college because they enjoyed their field of study.
Students tend to stay in the same state in which they studied, with only 17% moving elsewhere after graduation, and four out of 10 surveyed said they worked while going to school
Social sciences, administration and law (35%) and engineering, manufacturing and construction (25%) were the areas of study with the highest number of graduates, followed by health-related degrees at 12%, natural and computer sciences with 10%, and education or the arts and humanities 6%.
Not surprisingly, only 24% of arts and humanities graduates found work in their fields, whereas 74% of those who studied a health-related field were able to find related work.
Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco has won the Leoncino d’Oro Award at the Venice Film Festival for Nuevo Orden, a film depicting a dystopian version of Mexico in the not-so-distant future.
The honor is one of several collateral awards at the festival and was presented by the Youth Jury, composed of 28 film-lovers between 18 and 25 from each of the countries in the European Union. The film is also in contention for the prestigious Golden Lion grand prize, which will be awarded Saturday evening.
Franco is no stranger to the awards stage. New Order, as the film is called in English, is his sixth feature film as director. Previous efforts have also won him prizes on the international film festival circuit, including a best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival for the 2015 film Chronic starring Tim Roth, and a Cannes Jury Prize for April’s Daughter in 2017.
New Order, which stars Diego Boneta, Naian González Norvind, Mónica del Carmen and Dario Yazbek Bernal, tells a tale of inequalities and political and social conflicts as the upper class in Mexico is replaced by a militaristic regime. It delves into racism, classism, poverty and wealth in ways that are uncomfortably reflective of the current unrest in several parts of the world, critics say.
The film opens with an opulent party for the wedding of an upper-class couple from Mexico City, which is interrupted when a legion of desperate people massacre the guests, marking the beginning of an insurrection in the streets that ends in a violent military coup that plunges the country into fascism.
Teaser trailer de Nuevo orden — New Order subtitulado en inglés (HD)
Unflinching cinematography depicts shocking and brutal scenes of assaults, rapes, executions, torture, blackmail and corruption.
“It’s a dystopian movie to say, ‘Let’s not get there,'” Franco, 41, explained.
Reviews have been universally positive so far.
“Audiences might conceivably be divided on the vicious gut-punch of Franco’s approach, but as a call for more equitable distribution of wealth and power, it’s terrifyingly riveting,” the Hollywood Reporter writes.
“At its heart, it argues that social inequality is presently so great that violence is inevitable. It’s set in Mexico, but it could be anywhere,” says Cineuropa.
The film was screened Thursday night and drew a standing ovation from the audience and critics. The following morning Franco learned he had received the Youth Jury prize, and by this afternoon, Mexico time, he will know if New Order will be awarded the Golden Lion.
“You never should think about awards because you will be disappointed if they don’t happen,” Franco says. “I’m already happy seeing how things went and I hear that the film is considered daring and strong; they say that it is my most commercial film with a universal theme.”
After Venice, Franco goes to the San Sebastián Festival in Spain September 18.
Eight states have been assessed at medium risk for the coronavirus. milenio
For the first time since the federal government introduced its stoplight system to assess the risk of coronavirus infection, none of Mexico’s 32 federal entities will be classified as a “red light” maximum risk state as of Monday.
The Health Ministry’s director of health promotion, Ricardo Cortés, announced Friday that as of Monday there will be eight “yellow light” medium risk states and 24 “orange light” high risk ones.
For a two-week period starting September 14, Campeche, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Morelos, Quintana Roo, Sonora, Tamaulipas and Tlaxcala will be yellow light states.
The risk level was downgraded from orange to yellow in Morelos and Quintana Roo while the other six states are already at the medium risk level.
Coronavirus cases and deaths reported by day. milenio
The government of Quintana Roo has established its own guidelines to determine which coronavirus restrictions can be eased and when and as a result downgraded the risk level in the northern half of the Caribbean coast state at the start of this week, a move that allowed beaches, gyms and archaeological sites to reopen at reduced capacity.
Of the 24 states that will be orange as of Monday, four – Tabasco, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Veracruz – are currently yellow while one, Colima, is red.
Cortés said that the infection risk level had decreased in Colima but increased in Tabasco, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Veracruz, according to the stoplight system, which considers 10 different indicators to determine the stoplight color allocated to each state.
The 10 indicators are:
The Covid-19 effective reproduction rate (how many people each infected person infects);
Estimated case numbers per 100,000 inhabitants;
The weekly positivity rate (the percentage of Covid-19 tests that come back positive);
Total case numbers;
The number of coronavirus patients per 100,000 inhabitants;
Hospital occupancy rates for general care beds;
Hospital occupancy rates for beds with ventilators;
Hospital admission trends;
Covid-19 mortality rate (deaths per 100,000 inhabitants); and
Covid-19 death trends (whether the number of deaths per week is increasing or decreasing).
Mexico continues to record thousands of new coronavirus cases every day and hundreds of Covid-19 deaths but Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, who’s leading the government’s pandemic response, said last week that it was possible that the vast majority of the 32 states could switch to green light “low” risk by the end of the month.
The government’s strategy to combat the pandemic was heavily criticized this week by six former health ministers who outlined in a report a range of ways to “correct” the course, which included ramping up coronavirus testing and making face masks mandatory across the country.
López-Gatell, who has played down the importance of testing and been a somewhat reluctant advocate of mask use, mocked the “illustrious ex-ministers,” saying ironically that they should patent their “innovative” formula.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated tally of confirmed coronavirus case increased to 658,299 on Friday with 5,935 new cases registered. The Health Ministry estimates that there are 41,025 active cases across the country while the results of 87,210 tests are not yet known.
The official Covid-19 death toll passed 70,000 on Friday with an additional 534 Covid-19 fatalities reported. Confirmed deaths now total 70,183, the fourth highest tally in the world after the United States, Brazil and India.
'It's a trashy publication, without ethics,
professionalism or scruples,' president says of the newspaper.
President López Obrador delivered a scathing rebuke of the newspaper Reforma on Friday after it published a story on its front page about the alleged embezzlement of 223 million pesos (US $10.5 million) by members of the government in the municipality where he was born.
Published under the headline “223 million pesos disappear in AMLO’s homeland,” the report said that the Tabasco state Congress repudiated the Morena party government of Macuspana after it detected the missing funds and replaced it with a three-member municipal council.
Reforma reported that the mayor of Macuspana, located about 50 kilometers southeast of Tabasco, and more than 20 members of the municipal government, including López Obrador’s sister-in-law, resigned last week as a result of their alleged corruption being uncovered.
Speaking at his morning news conference on Friday, the president criticized Reforma for publishing the story because the alleged corruption hasn’t been proven.
López Obrador said his communications coordinator had spoken with Tabasco Governor Adán Augusto López, who also represents the ruling Morena party, and that he confirmed that the resignation of the Macuspana mayor and other members of the council was not related to the alleged corruption.
“There is not yet any embezzlement declared by the state auditor’s office nor by the [Tabasco] Congress,” López Obrador said.
He called Reforma a “trashy publication” and a “bulletin of conservatism” and charged that the newspaper is a protector and sponsor of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, widely considered one of Mexico’s most corrupt presidents.
López Obrador stressed that his criticism was of the highest echelons of Reforma not its reporters and press workers.
The president took aim at the Mexico City-based broadsheet for suggesting that he was involved with the alleged wrongdoings of his sister-in-law, who was the municipal trustee, noting that they published a photo of him with her.
“It’s a classic case of underworld journalism,” he said.
“Reforma is a bulletin of conservatism, … it has no scruples. It’s a trashy publication, without ethics, without professionalism. Imagine … dedicating eight columns to something that is not proven. … Don’t go and say tomorrow that I’m defending my sister-in-law or that … I’m attacking free speech. I’ve said with complete clarity [that] if any family member [of mine] commits a crime, he or she must be prosecuted, whoever it is,” López Obrador said.
“The people don’t want cronyism, nepotism, none of those blights of politics. … Imagine if I’d protected my family members, the council [of Macuspana] wouldn’t have disappeared.”
The president claimed that the real reason why Reforma published its story about corruption in his native Tabasco was to sully his name. “This is vile journalism, … as they are conservatives and very hypocritical … they act in an immoral way.”
López Obrador has criticized the newspaper frequently since he took office in late 2018, asserting that it is part of the prensa fifi, or elitist press, and a bearer of neoliberalism, which he derides as the cause of many of Mexico’s problems.
Staff members at the state workers (ISSSTE) hospital in La Paz, Baja California Sur (BCS), are denouncing health protocol violations that they say put patients at risk for exposure to the coronavirus.
A complaint sent to the Metropolimex news agency said coronavirus patients are mixed with people who are at El Conchalito hospital for other ailments.
The letter said ISSSTE hospitals across the state are poorly organized and are lacking federal support.
“More than 100 ISSSTE health workers have tested positive for the SARS-COV-2 virus due to mismanagement and the faulty hygiene control that is needed to prevent the spread of the disease in the hospital,” one of the doctors said.
The hospital’s medical, administrative and cleaning staff requested the intervention of the state’s Ministry of Health and Senator Víctor Castro Cosio, who was recently discharged from the same hospital after testing positive for Covid-19.
• In Los Cabos, executive president of the hotel association, Lilzi Orcí, reported that not a single tourist has tested positive for the coronavirus, thanks in part to strict protocols for both guests and staff that hoteliers are following. Massive testing of hotel personnel has helped detect workers who are positive but asymptomatic so that they can safely self-isolate, she said.
• Tourism among the extremely wealthy has diminished during the coronavirus pandemic, but not as much as one might think, BCS Noticias reports.
According to statistics from the Los Cabos Tourism Trust (Fiturca), 19,871 tourists traveled to Los Cabos in private planes between January and June, a 33% drop compared to the same period in 2019. However, things are picking up. In June, 2,336 passengers arrived in private planes, just 16.2% below 2019 levels. Between January and June, 23,745 commercial passengers arrived at the Los Cabos International airport.
• As of Thursday, BCS had recorded 8,620 accumulated cases of the coronavirus and 400 deaths.
Beaches full, theaters empty
During the first week beaches in La Paz reopened, hundreds of citizens vied for their piece of sand, sometimes waiting hours to be admitted to popular sunbathing spots such as Balandra and Tecolote beaches. Rows of cars lined the entrances well before the beaches opened at 11 a.m. Some cars started queuing up at 6 a.m. to make the 30% capacity cutoff.
It’s not the same for theaters, though. Theater companies would be glad if would-be beach-goers decided to trade their day at the beach for a day at the movies.
Cinemas in the state are now allowed open at 40% capacity, but they are having trouble filling just 10% of their seats, BCS Noticias reports.
A manager at Cinemex in San José del Cabos said attendance has been drastically low, at just 7% capacity during the week with 15% on weekends.
Funeral business booming
Pre-pandemic, a funeral home in San José del Cabo said it would conduct around 15 services a month; now they are doing as many as 30 services every two weeks.
In 2019, 136 people died in the municipality. As of September 8, 199 people have died in 2020, and at least 50% from the coronavirus.
Per the state’s Ministry of Health, bodies must be buried or cremated as soon as possible, and visitation is not permitted. When someone dies, the body goes directly to the crematorium or the cemetery. Burials cost around 20,000 pesos (US $940), and cremations around 15,000 (US $705).
Despite the uptick in business, the unnamed funeral service said they are not offering any coronavirus specials, BCS Noticias reports.
Los Arcos up for auction
La Paz’s once famed Hotel Los Arcos will be auctioned off to pay debts owed to its former employees, Diario El Independiente reports. Five buildings owned by the Coppola family will be sold after members of the BCS Gastronomic Union won a series of injunctions against their employers.
Employees of the hotel have been on strike since November 2008 and have been unable to reach an agreement with the owners, pioneer hoteliers in the state.
The debt owed the 78 employees is around 120 million pesos (US $5.6 million), representing 12 years of lost wages. The auction of the emblematic waterfront hotel, which was built in the 1930s, should take place within the next six months.
Iconic Hotel Los Arcos to go on auction block.
Sea lions die mysteriously
Around 150 decomposing sea lions were found washed up on the shore last week in Cabo San Lázaro, Excélsior reports.
This could be one of the largest mass deaths of the protected species in Mexico.
Last Friday three environmental inspectors from Mexico City were sent to investigate the deaths and take samples for laboratory testing.
At first, it was thought that the sea lions could have died due to the presence of red tide, but there have been no alerts for toxic algae blooms in the region.
Marine mammal experts told Excélsior that the sea lions may have been trapped in large tuna nets.
The Gulf of Ulloa region is known for the thousands of loggerhead turtles who have died over the years after becoming entangled in fishing nets, nearly causing the United States to impose a trade embargo on Mexico in 2015.
Caught
Fishermen suspected of carrying illegally caught clams attempted to flee the National Guard after a patrol pulled them over on Tuesday in Puerto San Carlos.
The men, driving a red pickup pulling a panga, drove away at a rapid rate of speed and the patrol unit gave chase, ramming the truck on its left side, which caused it to flip over. The crash occurred in a neighborhood where residents helped the suspects hide from the officers.
Eventually, one of the suspects and his illegal clams were taken into custody.
And a man in the Navarro Rubio neighborhood of La Paz was caught with 2,200 doses of illicit drugs, the Attorney General’s Office reported. The search of a house turned up 2,125 doses of methamphetamine and 100 doses of marijuana. A 27-year-old was taken into custody.
Award-winning interactive app for studying the solar system in your living room.
The appearance of Covid-19 has forced almost all the world’s schools to switch to remote learning. For many of them this may have been quite a challenge, but not for Luis Medina, director of Guadalajara’s IMI College.
“It was no problem,” Medina told me. “It took only an hour to make the switch and things are going really well. Instead of firing teachers, I had to hire more staff.”
Not only is the college coping during the pandemic but, according to Medina, “Students are learning better than ever and they love it.”
Medina’s school is one of a network of over 150 Knotion schools, founded in Morelia, Michoacán, which have replaced traditional textbooks, teachers and curricula with iPads, coaches and a monthly challenge that transforms students into investigators and researchers.
“Knotion schools, which have spread from Mexico to Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia and El Salvador, have a complete technological and pedagogic infrastructure for distance learning, so our students can achieve 100% academic success even if they’re quarantined at home,” said Medina.
Luis and Lucy Medina receive award for continuous innovation in learning and teaching.
Mexico’s public schools would like to see similar results from their nationwide program to teach via television and YouTube. They use music, animation, puppets and dynamic, attractive instructors but, suggests Medina, they still follow the traditional lecture approach where the teacher is omniscient, a walking encyclopedia, and the student is expected to be a sponge with “no creativity, no critical thought, no different ideas — in fact no ideas at all.”
Private schools in Mexico are also having a tough time dealing with remote learning. “Their problem,” says Medina, “is that they had long been looking at technology as the enemy of education. They saw cell phones as distractions, social networks as competition and the internet as full of lies. Now they are putting a camera in front of a white board, but it’s still the teacher explaining away and the student is still expected to regurgitate a summary of the teacher’s wisdom.”
This isn’t the way people learn, points out Medina, and as a result the children turn to parents to explain what they didn’t learn from the teacher. The parent reacts by saying “Hey, wait a minute! Why am I paying the school to educate my children when I have to do it myself? I’m working here from home and I can see that my kids aren’t learning. I’m not going to pay the full tuition anymore.”
This notion, says Medina, is now spreading all over Mexico exponentially … and has given rise to the creation of micro schools. A group of families hire a teacher (and there are tons of them out there with no job) who goes to one of the homes and works with six or eight kids of mixed levels, charging much more money than that teacher could ever earn in a normal school. “Of course,” adds Medina, “they’ve worked it out so the kids will get credit for those classes.”
The newspaper Excélsior reports that 25% of the private schools in Mexico have already shut down permanently and 40% of the public schools are closing their doors. The private colleges can’t pay rent, maintenance, etc. At the same time, they can’t fire their teachers because they would have to give them decades of severance pay. So their only choice is to declare bankruptcy.
“What this means,” comments Luis Medina, “is that just here in the state of Jalisco, 10,000 teachers will be unemployed — and things will be getting much worse in the next few months.”
Happy parents and students at IMI College in Guadalajara.
At IMI College things are quite different. “We’ve never had parents complaining that their children aren’t learning. One reason is because our teachers no longer operate as teachers, but rather as coaches or facilitators. The kids check their instructions for the day’s activities and the coach tells them what they will be trying to accomplish. Then everybody puts their shoulder to the wheel!”
Medina tells his teachers they should think of both themselves and the students as apprentices. “The students don’t have to wait for the teacher to tell them what’s what. Instead, the students and the teachers pose questions, just the way Socrates did. If you ask Google the state capitals, you’ll find them immediately, but if you ask Google a really deep question, a question that invites reflection and critical thinking, you’re not going to get a quick and simple answer.”
What do parents see when their children are learning remotely? Says Medina: “They see their child talking and participating, not sitting there listening to a teacher drone on. No, that child is working with his companions; they are sharing their findings; they are saying, ‘I’ll take the photos and you’ll do the editing and Bernardo will publish it on social media.’
“They know how to dialog, how to communicate, how to resolve problems. So the parents find their kids are no longer complaining that they’re not learning, but quite the opposite: they see their kids totally involved. Instead of asking their parents to explain something, they’re saying, ‘Hey Mom and Dad, I’m investigating water consumption and I think we should try to participate in this challenge, to see if we can reduce the amount of water we use at home. I want to look at our old water bills to see how many cubic meters we’re using and then I’ll document the changes we’ll be making month by month and I’m going to publish all of it on the web.’”
“The parent hears this and says, ‘Wow, my little girl is taking action!’ And all this may be tied to a study of mathematics: maybe they are studying volume, how to transform milliliters into cubic meters. So this is math, but math applied to life.”
Medina says his students are learning a lot from a system called Augmented Reality. On the screen of their iPad they see things in their environment such as a table or a sofa, but the image is enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information. On their table they may see a detailed representation of a river cutting its way through a landscape. They may now be asked to plan the construction of a dam on the river. By trial and error they discover that placing the dam at one point might produce great benefits or huge problems, and they can see the results of their choices with their own eyes.
[soliloquy id="122513"]
Augmented Reality makes it easy for IMI students to study chemistry, physics or biology right at home. “This week,” Medina told me, “our seventh-graders were dissecting a virtual frog. They open their iPad and there they see the frog on their desk. Then they anesthetize it and use a scalpel to open it up and go deep inside it, to study its heart and its lungs. In physics, they were working on a Tesla coil. They learned how to connect the components together correctly and to measure amps and volts. For chemistry they use the Virtual Chemistry Lab developed by experts at Carnegie Mellon whose aim was to ‘create learning environments where college and high school students can approach chemistry more like practicing scientists.’
“This week in chemistry they were making aspirins. So they were using different chemical reagents and they had to play around with them to figure out what percentage of each they needed for creating an aspirin.”
Medina contrasts the challenge to make an aspirin with the standard approach where the students sit and listen to a teacher spouting formulas and talking about phenyl salicylate and Erlenmeyer flasks. “Our students set up their Augmented Reality lab on a table. They take a good look at the beakers and flasks and they play around with the reagents and then they say, ‘Chispas! So that’s what happens when I mix these two together.’ And yes, maybe they do blow up the whole lab — it happens — but there’s no harm done and there’s a lot they learn.”
Knotion school students use Augmented Reality to investigate chemistry one day and perhaps go looking around inside the pyramids of Egypt the following day, using x-rays to examine a mummy. They can also study a black hole while sitting in their kitchen, not only looking at it, but figuring out how it works.
“Because of all this, we are not affected by the pandemic,” says Luis Medina. “and we have a long waiting list of parents who want to send their children to us. We’ve done so well that our little college was named an Apple Distinguished School, meaning that it is considered one of the most innovative schools in the world … and, in fact, we were one of three Mexican schools recently invited to participate in a virtual global meeting organized by Apple — and that is something we are really proud of!”
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, for more than 30 years and is the author of A Guide to West Mexico’s Guachimontones and Surrounding Area and co-author of Outdoors in Western Mexico. More of his writing can be found on his website.
A candidate for the national leadership of the Morena party will push to change the name of the state of Tabasco to “Tabasco de López Obrador” in 2024 in honor of the president, who was born in the state.
The idea comes out of a proposal Alejandro Rojas Díaz Durán made several months ago that would amend the constitution to allow López Obrador to run for governor of Tabasco once his presidential term is over.
The amendment would allow Tabasco residents to “take advantage of the experience, knowledge and trajectory of those who have been holders of the federal executive power,” Rojas argued when he presented the motion to Congress in January.
Governor Adán Augusto López Hernández rejected the proposal. “We know the president. He is not inclined to be honored with streets, monuments or anything like that. The best we can do is help the fourth transformation, the rest is not of the greatest importance,” he said.
The campaign is intended to encourage people to eat out at their local eateries.
An initiative supported by the national restaurant association Canirac, Coca-Cola and others is helping thousands of small eateries survive the coronavirus-induced economic downturn.
Called Tu Cocina Local (Your Local Kitchen), the program provides training to staff at fondas (small, informal eateries), taquerías (taco restaurants) and torterías (sandwich shops) on the implementation of health measures that reduce the risk of coronavirus infection and make diners feel safe.
The idea is that the restaurants will attract more customers if they are seen to be taking people’s health and hygiene seriously.
The initiative has also provided social distancing screens, face shields and washable tablecloths to more than 50,000 small food businesses.
In addition, it has launched a digital campaign to encourage people to return to their local fondas, taquerías and torterías, which account for 95% of all restaurants in Mexico, according to Canirac.
More than 30,000 are at risk of closing permanently due to a downturn in sales, the restaurant association says. Tu Cocina Local aims to help as many as possible remain open and thus keep thousands of people in work.
One restaurant owner who has benefited from the program is Rocío González Díaz.
“El Volcancito is a family business. We’re the third generation. Approximately nine people work here and nine families depend on [their employment]. The pandemic has affected us in an economic sense,” she said.
González said sales fell and that she was unable to meet some costs but nevertheless she was able to keep her inexpensive eatery open.
“We didn’t have to close because the government allowed us to open at 30%. Tu Cocina Local has helped me a lot with tablecloths and partitions [to separate diners]. That’s helped a lot in terms of making customers feel safe,” she said.
In addition to Canirac and Coca-Cola, the companies Mondelēz México, Unilever, Kimberly Clark and Ragasa are supporting the initiative, which was launched in June.
Montiel gets a hug from an emotional Jesús, grateful for having a TV to attend classes.
Attending classes in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic can be complicated if you don’t have a computer or television, which is a problem for many.
But a Veracruz teacher is doing what she can to help her students continue their studies through the federal government’s “Learn at Home” program, initiated at the start of the school year to avoid reopening schools. Eliana Montiel is gathering donated TVs.
One of her students is 8-year-old Jesús Castellanos, whose television and school supplies were damaged during a recent flood. The third-grader broke down in tears when his television was delivered. “I am very grateful because the teacher has made many efforts for me, she teaches me many things,” he said before giving Montiel a long and loving hug.
“I was very concerned … knowing that many students would not have a place to watch their classes,” Montiel said. “What I always try for is that no student is left behind, that everyone advances, each according to their learning pace, but that no one is left behind, much less due to economic circumstances.”
And so the 29-year-old teacher launched the initiative on Facebook and got a near-immediate response from people offering analog and digital televisions to her low-income students. Donated sets now crowd her living room.
The young teacher drives through the neighborhoods of the city of Veracruz to collect the sets which allow her students to study alongside 30 million others in Mexico who have been distance learning since the school year began on August 24.
Classes in the “Learn at Home II” program are taught by television and internet although teachers can also organize sessions by video call. Adapting to the new learning and teaching format has been a challenge.
“I believe that the pandemic has a radical impact … because it is the first time in the history of education in Mexico that we have experienced a teaching-learning process through TV,” Montiel says.
“I felt a great responsibility and empathy for those people who may not have the means.”
Mexico opted for televised classes because 94% of households have a TV set, compared to 70% or 80% of homes that have internet. The government will also provide children with free textbooks.
According to UNESCO, 24 million students could drop out of school around the world due to the impact of the pandemic.
Almost 1.4 million foreign visitors came to Mexico in July, the highest level since March, but numbers were still way down compared to the same month last year.
Just over 1.39 million international tourists visited during the month, according to the national statistics institute Inegi, 66.6% fewer than a year ago. Their spending in Mexico totaled US $490.4 million, a decline of 77.4% compared to July 2019.
While visitor numbers and tourism revenue in July were both very low compared to a year ago, they were considerably higher than figures for previous months.
Foreign visitor numbers declined from about 3.8 million in February to 2.8 million in March before plummeting to just 800,000 in April. They recovered slightly to 900,000 in May and 1 million in June but remained more than 70% lower than in the same months of 2019.
Unlike many other countries, Mexico hasn’t prevented air travelers from entering the country during the coronavirus pandemic nor forced them to go into quarantine.
Tourism’s slow recovery, by the numbers. el economista
Tourism revenue declined from more than $2.3 billion in February to almost $1.4 billion in March before slumping to just $131 million in April, a 94% decline compared to the same month last year. Revenue recovered slightly in May and June to $154 million and $231 million, respectively, but tourism income was still around 90% lower than the same months of 2019.
In the first seven months of 2020, visitor numbers were 11.9 million lower than in the same period of 2019 and tourism revenue was down more than $8.2 billion, according to Inegi data.
Cruise ships, which dock in ports including Acapulco, Cozumel and Puerto Vallarta, haven’t brought any passengers to Mexico for months.
The tourism industry, which normally contributes almost 10% of GDP, has been decimated by the pandemic and is likely to take years to recover.
In light of the sharp downturn in tourism over the past several months, the Mexican Federation of Tourism Associations (Fematur) called on authorities to provide financial support to the sector.
“The harshness [and] severity … of the dramatic decline in tourism activity recorded and reported by Inegi during the months of the pandemic should serve [as a reminder] to financial authorities to reconsider the need to design a special support program for the tourism industry,” Fematur said in a report.
The federation said that Mexico needs tourism to alleviate the economic crisis, which it predicted would worsen in the coming months.
