Four artists are collaborating with the government of Juchitán, Oaxaca, to paint 100 murals as part of efforts to beautify the earthquake-ravaged municipality.
Houses fell like dominoes in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec municipality when an 8.2-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Chiapas just before midnight on September 7, 2017. Not only were many homes and other buildings destroyed but also most of the murals painted by two artists’ collectives in the preceding years.
In that context, the government led by Morena party Mayor Emilio Montero Pérez launched a project called “100 murals for Juchitán” that is aiming to have all the artworks completed by the end of its three-year term in 2022.
Jesús Vicente Lagunas, one of the four muralists hired by the local council, told the newspaper El Universal that 45 murals have already been painted, explaining that they feature “characters and trades of the city – men making huaraches [traditional sandals], women embroiderers and cooks … children playing marbles and flying kites.”
Municipal urban art director Jesús Vicente Lagunas said that the aim of painting the murals is to beautify Juchitán and remind residents of the people “who give and have given their best for society.”
Francisco Toledo, the Juchitán-born artist who died last year, is featured on one of the new murals.
The four artists working on the government initiative have already painted murals featuring icons of Juchitán, such as iguanas and embroidery, at the recently rebuilt 5 de Septiembre Market, he said.
While the “100 murals for Juchitán” project is adding much-needed color to the streets destroyed by the 2017 earthquake, not all residents are happy about it.
Some local artists, such as muralist David Orozco, say that they were not invited to participate in the project.
“They’ve hired people without a background in muralism. I have more than 20 years [experience] and I feel excluded. I believe that [a project with] public resources should include everyone,” he told El Universal.
In contrast, a 53-year-old food vendor who features in one of the murals couldn’t be happier.
“Of course I’m happy. My children are happy and my neighbors were surprised when the young men finished painting me,” Guadalupe Vásquez Felipe said.
Beatles drummer Ringo Starr will perform in Mexico City later this year.
Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band will perform at the National Auditorium in Mexico City on October 20.
Promoter Ocesa Total announced on Monday that the Beatles’ drummer will return to Mexico to present his new studio album What’s My Name, which was released in October 2019.
Toto guitarist Steve Lukather, Men at Work frontman Colin Hay, Santana singer Gregg Rolie, saxophonist Warren Ham, drummer Gregg Bissonette and guitarist Hamish Stuart will accompany Starr on stage.
Pre-sale tickets will be on offer March 2 and 3 while remaining seats will be available from March 4. Prices range from 480 pesos to 3,580 pesos (US $25-$187).
The concert will be Starr’s first in Mexico since 2015 when he performed the Beatles’ classics “Yellow Submarine” and “With a Little Help from My Friends” as well as his solo hit “It Don’t Come Easy” at the National Auditorium, located on Reforma Avenue next to Chapultepec Park.
Since the breakup of the Beatles, the Liverpool native has released 20 solo studio albums as well as several live recordings with the All-Starr Band. During his long musical career, the 79-year-old also collaborated with musical legends such as B.B. King, Keith Moon, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty.
But Ringo Starr will forever be best known for playing in the Beatles alongside John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney, who last played in Mexico in 2017.
The couple sought in the death of a child in Quintana Roo.
A child in Quintana Roo died last week from injuries sustained from the ingestion of hydrochloric acid just a day before her mother won back custody of her.
Kimberly Berenice Chi Bautista, 8, died on Tuesday, February 18 from septic shock and acid burns on her esophagus.
Authorities in Cancún are looking for the girl’s father, identified as José Chi, and stepmother, whose identity has not been released. The latter is believed to have forced Kimberly to drink the poisonous substance. Both are considered fugitives.
The girl’s mother, Rocío del Carmen Bautista Maldonado, says that Chi abandoned her and Kimberly to go live with another woman. He later filed for custody, and Bautista lost guardianship of her daughter in June of last year.
She had been petitioning the courts to win back custody since then, and was finally awarded it the day after her daughter was pronounced dead. She was made aware of the girl’s death when she went to pick her up from state authorities.
Bautista accused the girl’s father of being responsible for her death. Kimberly’s body showed several signs of physical abuse, and neighbors had told Bautista that they were aware of the girl being beaten continually.
She also claimed that her complaints against Chi had not been processed earlier due to corruption and nepotism in his favor within the state Attorney General’s Office.
Federal and state police prepare to take over in San Juan de los Lagos.
Authorities in Jalisco disarmed the entire municipal police force of the city of San Juan de los Lagos on Monday due to suspicions of collusion with organized crime.
State security coordinator Macedonio Tamez Guajardo reported on Monday that the 160 officers were disarmed earlier that morning and were being transported to the state police academy, where they will undergo training and loyalty tests.
State police, National Guard and army troops are meanwhile carrying out security operations in San Juan de los Lagos, located about 140 kilometers northeast of Guadalajara.
Tamez said that the government currently does not have concrete evidence to bring charges against any officers, nor have any been dismissed from their posts, but the decision to disarm them was based on credible intelligence reports.
The federal Attorney General’s Office currently has an open investigation into the force.
“[There is] intelligence, from both state and federal [entities], regarding the possible infiltration of organized crime into this force, … enough to legally back up the intervention of the state government into the force,” he said.
The Jalisco government said that it does not rule out the possibility of such infiltration in other municipal police forces, as federal intelligence teams currently have a number of investigations open in the state.
“With this we hope to return to peace and tranquility, not just in this municipality, but in the whole region,” said Tamez, who added that similar interventions may be carried out elsewhere in Jalisco.
Police in Chihuahua are on high alert after a series of attacks on security forces in the state on the weekend.
Authorities reported on Sunday that there were three attacks in Ciudad Juárez and one in the capital city of Chihuahua, the latter of which was a strike on the security detail of Governor Javier Corral outside his home.
The attacks in Juárez led to one police officer being wounded, while security forces in the capital reported one alleged attacker wounded and two officers injured. One of the officers was hit 12 times but nevertheless was reported to be in stable condition.
Governor Corral and state Attorney General César Augusto Peniche told a press conference on Monday that the attacks were meant as intimidation and vengeance in response to a series of operations that led to the arrests and deaths of members of criminal gangs.
Peniche said that the first operation in the series was carried out in the northwest part of the state and led to the arrest of two people linked to the criminal group known as Los Jaguares, associated with the Sinaloa Cartel.
Another operation led to the arrest of a third person linked to Los Jaguares, as well as the seizure of nearly 3,000 rounds of AR-15 ammunition, 7,936 rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 546 .50-caliber cartridges and six magazines.
Another operation in the city of Cuauhtémoc led to the arrest of six presumed members of the criminal group known as La Línea, an armed wing of the Juárez Cartel.
A group of armed men attacked a police station in Chihuahua city just three hours after Monday’s press conference. One officer was wounded and three people were arrested in the attack.
Construction of a bridge on the highway to the coast more than two years ago.
Two long overdue highway projects in Oaxaca remain on track for completion in 2022, Governor Alejandro Murat said on Monday.
Former presidents Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto all made commitments to complete the Barranca Larga-Ventanilla highway, which will connect Oaxaca city to Puerto Escondido on the Pacific coast, and the Mitla-Tehuantepec highway, which will better connect the state capital to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. However, none of them kept their word.
Murat, an Institutional Revolutionary Party governor in office since December 2016, said that his administration has made efforts to complete the highways but has faced “a lot of bureaucratic and financial problems.”
However, with Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president, the governor continued, there is now the “political will and conditions” required to complete the projects.
Murat said that the concerns of all of the communities and organizations that opposed the projects have been listened to and addressed and that there is now no impediment to completing the highways.
A new 12-kilometer stretch of the Barranca Larga-Ventanilla highway has just been completed and another 26-kilometer section is expected to be finished in June, he said. The first section of the Mitla-Tehuantepec highway is on schedule to be completed in March, the governor added.
Murat visited the completed section of the Barranca Larga-Ventanilla highway on Saturday with Finance Ministry investment chief Jorge Nuño Lara and the technical operations director of the state development bank Banobras, Sergio Sánchez.
During the visit, the governor said that the project was on the “right path” and progressing at an “appropriate speed,” adding that it was possible that López Obrador would visit Oaxaca in March to inaugurate the new section of road.
With an investment of 8.3 billion pesos (US $433.6 million), the Barranca Larga-Ventanilla highway will substantially reduce the travel time from Oaxaca city to Puerto Escondido, from six to 2 1/2 hours.
For the Mitla-Tehuantepec highway, López Obrador signed an agreement last year with businessman Carlos Slim, under which companies owned by Slim will build much of the road with an investment of 8 billion pesos, while the federal government will invest 3 billion.
The president has made investing in Mexico’s south and southeast a priority for his administration.
Among the government’s largest infrastructure projects are the development of a trade corridor across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec between Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, and Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, construction of a new oil refinery on the Tabasco coast and construction of the Maya Train railroad on the Yucatán Peninsula.
A video in which former soccer star and current commentator Luis Roberto Alves is seen showing off his erect penis to a presumed lover was leaked online and circulated on social media in June 2018.
Two months later, Alves’ brother, Jóse Carlos Alves, lodged an application to trademark a word used by Zague – as the former Mexico national team player is commonly known – to describe his penis, the newspaper El Universal reported on Monday.
“Look at how I have it hard for you. Look at how my dick is, impresionanti,” Zague says in the video that was leaked during the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.
Attempting to cash in on the video that quickly went viral, Jóse Carlos Alves filed an application with the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) for the commercial rights to the word impresionanti – apparently an intentional mispronunciation of the Spanish word impresionante, which can be translated into English as impressive, awesome and unbelievable, among other flattering adjectives.
El Universal, which obtained access to the trademark application, reported that the company Zague y Compañía intended to use the word impresionanti in the areas of advertising and business administration. It is unclear whether IMPI has approved Alves’ application.
A screenshot from the ‘impressive’ video.
El Universal also reported that another company attempted to trademark Zaguiñazo Impresionanti, a play on the former soccer player’s nickname coupled with his now-famous descriptor for his penis. A Mexico City-based firm intended to use the two words to market products such as condoms and vibrators.
However, lawyers for Zague successfully challenged registration on the grounds that the proposed trademark made a clear reference to their client.
More than a year and a half after the scandal, Luis Roberto Alves’s former wife has finally spoken out about the ordeal she went through after the leaking of the video that ended her marriage.
In an appearance last week on the television program La Última y Nos Vamos, the journalist and television presenter Paola Rojas said that she hadn’t wanted to speak about the events previously because they still cause her pain and her first instinct was to protect her children.
She admitted that dealing with the ordeal in public has been “brutal” before breaking into tears when describing how her privacy has been invaded. Rojas said that people in the public eye know that they will have to give up a certain amount of their privacy but asserted that her “intimacy” was also invaded.
“It was as if the door to my bedroom was opened and a lot of people came in. … They wrote me things [on social media that were] so, so obscene,” she said.
“I didn’t realize the extent of the damage that all those obscene messages were doing to me,” Rojas added, explaining that she also got sick and had to be operated on twice.
After the program host suggested that other people in the same situation could have been driven to suicide, she responded: “I didn’t even consider it because I love life. … I always have the resolve to enjoy the moment. … Tests [in life] are … to learn and to grow.”
Beetles, crickets, winged ants and other bugs may not be your idea of tasty snacks but experts say they could stave off an impending world food crisis. A community garden in Mexico City will host a festival to celebrate that very notion.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), overpopulation, water scarcity and deforestation are driving the world toward a global crisis and insects may be the only way out.
Although for many in the western world entomophagy — the practice of eating insects — is a stomach-churning idea, indigenous people in Mexico have included bugs in their culinary traditions for millennia. Most species are very high in protein as well as fatty acids and vitamins A, D and E.
Those who need to catch up will find the perfect introduction to the practice at the 2020 Festival of Edible Insects at Huerto Roma Verde, a community garden in Mexico City’s trendy Roma Sur neighborhood.
Chefs at the event will offer a wide variety of recipes inspired by pre-Hispanic kitchens, using such creepy-crawly ingredients as fireflies, worms, grasshoppers, scorpions, ant eggs, stinkbugs, tarantulas and more.
They will be served up in tacos, gorditas, sopes, tlayudas, and other tortilla-based Mexican favorites, and even in drinks like chocolate and pulque, a fermented drink made from the sap of the agave plant.
Don’t worry if you have no idea what to order. Chefs will be there to help offer suggestions like tlayudas (oversized quesadillas from Oaxaca) made with beetles called copoaches, scorpion tacos, salsas made with flying ants called chicatanas and fritters called buñuelos made with ground-up grasshoppers.
Other don’t-miss dishes include snail ceviche, spider tacos, gorditas made with agave worms, ant eggs called escamoles flavored with a piquant herb called epazote and, of course, chapulines, or fried grasshoppers.
The festival will be held at Huerto Roma Verde on March 13-15 from 1:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. each day. Admission is just 10 pesos (US $0.50).
The Iztapalapa hospital will be torn down over the next six months.
The military is preparing to demolish a Mexico City hospital 2 1/2 years after it was irreparably damaged by a pair of earthquakes.
The Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) General Hospital 25 served over 400,000 residents of the capital’s Iztapalapa borough, who since the quakes of September 2017 have had to go to medical centers in the neighboring cities of Texcoco and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, in México state.
IMSS general secretary Javier Guerrero García announced the demolition as well as the construction of a new facility at a ceremony on the grounds on Monday, where he mourned what was lost in the quakes.
“As a result of the earthquakes of September 2017, this building stopped functioning … after 46 doctors’ offices were damaged and 272 beds were lost. We also lost six X-ray rooms,” he said.
He added that the loss of the facility “affected the work of 225 doctors and 431 nurses who attended 9,000 emergencies and carried out 750 surgeries per year.”
There was an open tender for the new hospital in 2019, but none of the offers was accepted so IMSS decided to sign a deal with army engineers from the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena) for the construction of the new hospital.
“The armed forces have the support of 70% of the citizens and are here to protect the people from threats and disasters and to support the health of citizens,” he said.
Guerrero did not say how much the new facility will cost, but that it would be completed in two years.
The demolition will take about six months to complete. Due to the dangers presented by the geological makeup of the ground, a former lake bed, the new hospital will have fewer floors than the previous seven-story structure.
Cat gets the sense that her plane is late — by about 10 years.
She’d always fancied the idea of Tulum, its quiet beaches, the progressive culture open to visitors of all kinds, a vacation spot untouched by the expanding reach of global tourism. Touching down first on the tarmac and then on the sands of the shorefront, she feels, though, that the winds have changed.
Now she reclines by the sea, watching the waves trickle in … “It’s nice,” she muses, raising a beer to her lips, “it just doesn’t feel … I don’t know …”
Cat is 26, currently on a WorkAway through Latin America, and had never managed to get down to Tulum before now. The trip has been pending in her brain for a long time but now she’s here she smiles through a muffled sigh as it seems, though pleasant, not quite what it was cracked up to be.
Cat is far from alone. The phenomenon of Tulum used to be well-known, the mysterious getaway for hipsters and beatniks, but it now reveals itself as a case study in the power of perceptions and notoriety. In building a reputation that was impossible to maintain in the face of an international marketplace, the Tulum we once knew was never destined for longevity. But the idea of Tulum seems to live on regardless; visions of a near-deserted paradise and spiritual awakenings linger, but the reality is nebulous. What really happened here?
A stretch of Tulum’s untouched coast.
To understand where Tulum has arrived, we have to look back to the inception of the Yucatán tourism machine. Before the 1970s, the entire peninsula was an annexed portion of Mexico, jutting out from the mainland at such an angle that its cultural separation almost made sense. Small, provincial communities dotted the region, and cities like Mérida, Campeche, even Cancún, had yet to begin their emergence into cultural hotspots.
But the indisputable success of the government’s ambitious project to convert sporadically populated, jungle-lined coast into a stretch of picture-perfect, sun-kissed tourist stomping ground galvanized the groundswell in support of the whole region’s rebrand. Despite a few muted labor pains, the Riviera Maya was born.
From then on, the momentum has been unstoppable, as the Riviera morphed into one of the most popular tourist destinations worldwide. Levels of arriving visitors have never failed to rise, but throughout the area’s tenure as vacation wonderland, people have demanded Cancún’s climate without its chaos. Tulum found itself, quite by accident, filling this gap, its pristine beaches placating the sun-searchers without the Darwinian struggles for reclining loungers.
The antithesis to Cancún, of course, was Tulum’s humble slice of coastal beauty where you could order a beer without being coaxed into a 40% tip and walk it back to the pool without tripping over a topless real estate agent who didn’t quite make it back to his hotel room the previous night. Wander back from the beach in Tulum and you may instead happen upon a massage hut with the offer 90 minutes for 40 pesos, the price of an ice cold chelada.
But Tulum ended up garnering a reputation that would become even more integral to its identity. It became a favorite destination for travelers, not tourists. Its jungle yoga classes, crystal-clear underground cenotes, locally run restaurants serving traditional Mayan recipes, had all paved the way toward a truly countercultural utopia; a melting pot for the strange and the adventurous. If you were looking for hedonism and revelry, you’d find that up the coast.
“Stay here and be still” became Tulum’s rallying cry. People did, and in the years that followed the Riviera Maya’s unveiling, Tulum achieved the almost unattainable combination of interest, tranquility, and relative obscurity.
A street in Tulum makes the best of the new visitors.
It was in this goldilocks state that Tulum hovered for the best part of 30 years. It was Cancún’s arch-antagonist, and became an almost ethereal concept of paradise to people who had heard the name. But, perhaps inevitably, the idea of Tulum was overtaken by its reality. In the last 10 years, social media influencers have flocked upon the town’s quiet beaches, bringing with them their hordes of followers, beginning the rolling process of expanding the Tulum name.
In other contexts this would be positive, but for Tulum, whose name recognition comes from its lack of name recognition, this posed a problem. As ever-growing numbers of curious tourists emerged from the Cancún compounds in search of something marginalized, brutalist design hotels, chain coffee shops, and beachfront vendors sprang up to service the need. Tulum’s niche receded overnight with the tide, and the hidden gem of the Riviera Maya began its journey to insipid, capitalist dwelling place.
Laura, a political adviser from Campeche, recalls this downward spiral, having frequented the town in its heyday. “You used to feel at peace here, and there was a sense you had happened upon something very special,” she explains. “I used to get that feeling every time I arrived.” But now Laura’s tone starts to shift: “Everything is expensive, everyone wants to rip you off, the rich have bought all the houses, clubs, restaurants … It’s just another millionaires’ playground!”
To sit back on the beach in Tulum now, the culmination of its struggles are all visible in one form or another. Remnants of its past glories as provincial paradise remain — the yoga classes, the cenotes which are fairly untouched if a little more busy — but there is an overriding sense of a community that’s conspicuously hankering for the past.
Since the influx of tourists grew and multiplied, Tulum has shifted its values. It tends not to think twice about a millionaire converting beachfront property into a nightclub, or DJs commanding the shore during the nights, even less so about the descent of its previously unimposing seaside culture into overbearing money-machine. Tulum will now take whatever it can, a product of a gradual wearing of its original sense of seemingly unsulliable identity.
It seems to be becoming clearer by the day that success is simply unsustainable when it comes to tourism, and that bohemian hideaways tend to have a limited half-life. We become forced into the question of whether truly successful hot-spots can ever survive their own prosperity.
I ask this of Cat, and after a moment of thought she replies, “everyone wants to be in on something special, everyone, until it just isn’t quite so special anymore.”
