German engineering and technology company Bosch will invest between US $90 and $100 million in 2021 to modernize 12 production lines.
Automotive plants in San Luis Potosí and Aguascalientes and two research and development centers will benefit from technological upgrades.
Last year Bosch invested $87 million in Mexico despite the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw its domestic sales earn $2.7 billion, a 20% fall on 2019.
The pandemic caused a two-month closure, rupturing the entire supply chain, according to Gonzalo Simental, vice president of finance at Bosch. Sales to third parties in Mexico fell by 23% last year.
Despite the fall in sales, Bosch president René Schlegel said the company’s investment strategy will continue. “You can see the way we invest, there’s constant investment in technology, buildings, production of goods, development and people … I think that stability is good news for Mexico,” he said.
He added that Bosch has expanded its workforce through the pandemic with 17,200 staff at the end of 2020: a 5% increase on 2019.
Eduardo Pérez, vice president of taxes and foreign trade, spoke of the importance of Bosch’s Mexican infrastructure. “In the automotive sector there are big plans to continue on the same path. San Luis Potosí is the second most important plant that we have … Aguascalientes, particularly for brake systems that are important for the industry, has been growing steadily year after year. That part of the Bajío, where these two plants are located, is a central point in the automotive sector and will continue to grow in 2021,” he said.
He added that in 2021 Bosch will launch thermo-technology products, and its power tools business will launch a wide range of cordless products.
Bosch entered Mexico in 1966 with a manufacturing plant in Toluca, state of México. It now has a corporate development center, headquarters and 12 manufacturing plants in the country.
Mexico’s real Covid-19 death toll is almost triple the federal government’s official total, according to a new analysis by a United States health research center.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine published an analysis on Thursday that shows that 617,127 people have died from Covid in Mexico.
The figure is 183% higher than Mexico’s official death toll, which rose to 218,007 on Wednesday.
The research center noted that many Covid-19 deaths go unreported because countries only report deaths that occur in hospitals or among patients with a confirmed infection.
Large numbers of Mexicans have died at home without being tested for Covid-19, and Mexico’s testing rate remains very low at about 51,000 tests per million people, according to German statistics portal Statista.
The IHME also said that weak health reporting systems and low access to health care magnifies the challenge of accurately counting all Covid-19 deaths.
According to its analysis, which was based on excess death rates in countries around the world, Mexico has recorded the third highest number of Covid-19 deaths after the United States and India. The IHME estimates that the United States has actually had more than 905,000 Covid-19 fatalities, about 56% higher than its official death toll, and that more than 654,000 people have succumbed to the disease in India, an increase of about 184%.
Globally, Covid-19 has caused approximately 6.9 million deaths, the IHME said, a figure more than double what official numbers show. According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the global death toll is currently about 3.25 million and Mexico ranks fourth for fatalities behind the United States, Brazil and India.
“As terrible as the Covid-19 pandemic appears, this analysis shows that the actual toll is significantly worse,” said Dr. Chris Murray, IHME’s director.
“Understanding the true number of Covid-19 deaths not only helps us appreciate the magnitude of this global crisis, but also provides valuable information to policymakers developing response and recovery plans,” he said.
“Many countries have devoted exceptional effort to measuring the pandemic’s toll, but our analysis shows how difficult it is to accurately track a new and rapidly spreading infectious disease. We hope that today’s report will encourage governments to identify and address gaps in their Covid-19 mortality reporting, so that they can more accurately direct pandemic resources.”
A rendering of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport.
The head of Airports Council International (ACI), the sole global trade representative of the world’s airports, has heaped praise on the construction of the new Mexico City airport, describing the progress made to date as “incredible.”
In an interview with the aviation news website A21, ACI director general Luis Felipe de Oliveira also said that the new airport could one day completely replace Mexico City’s existing airport, the AICM, due to its potential for expansion.
Both he and Rafael Echevarne, ACI’s Latin America chief, said that there are challenges to overcome before the airport can begin operations, such as ensuring that airspace is managed to operate concurrently with the existing Mexico City and Toluca airports and making it easily accessible for passengers.
However, after visiting the site of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA), currently under construction at the Santa Lucía Air Force base, they were both impressed with the progress made by the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena) in building the facility, which is slated to open in March 2022.
“We’ve been big critics of the process because we never imagined that they were going to deliver what they’re doing,” de Oliveira said, apparently referring to the government’s decision to scrap its predecessor’s Mexico City airport project and start from scratch at a different site.
“We’ve seen business models in Latin America in which they promise a lot but deliver very little. But here, what they’ve done in two years is incredible. The construction is simple and modular but it flows and it’s well thought out. Sedena has learned a lot about airports in a very short time,” he said.
De Oliveira said that the AIFA won’t initially have the capacity to replace the AICM but could in the future because it clearly has the potential to expand.
“They’ve created an airport that is a kind of mirror, and it can be replicated on the other side [of the Air Force site], which would double the infrastructure” and create the kind of international hub airport Mexico needs, he said.
Initially at least, the AIFA is slated to operate in conjunction with the AICM and the Toluca airport as part of a three-pronged plan to meet rising demand — at least before the coronavirus pandemic — for airline services in the Valley of México metropolitan area.
Some aviation experts have questioned the viability of operating the AIFA and the AICM simultaneously due to their close proximity to each other. But Echevarne said the limited airspace issue can be overcome.
“We know that there are critics of the reconfiguration, but airspace shouldn’t be an obstacle. There are ways to organize all that; there is technology, and there are places in the world that are more complicated. With the will, it can be solved,” he said.
Echevarne and de Oliveira noted that the AIFA is quite far from Mexico City — about 50 kilometers north of the capital’s downtown — and therefore quick transportation connections will be essential. To that end, the federal government is building a new highway to the Santa Lucía airport and also plans to extend an existing suburban railway line to the site.
Although AMLO ran on a leftist platform that emphasized aiding the poor and vulnerable, programs intended for them have disappeared, Zambrano says.
The leader of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s former party has accused the president of recreating the old Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime he fought for decades to replace.
Speaking at an event in Morelia, Michoacán, to mark the 32nd anniversary of the foundation of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), Jesús Zambrano declared that the raison d’etre of his party — which AMLO, as the president is commonly known, represented at the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections — remains the same: “to put an end to anti-democratic, populist, centralizing and dictatorial practices.”
Zambrano, a former federal deputy, said the foundation of the PRD in 1989 — AMLO, also a former PRI member, was one of the founders — was the result of a fight for democracy and a response to the old political regime of the PRI, which implemented a quasi dictatorship for much of the 20th century before being voted out of office in 2000.
The PRI didn’t respect minority groups and controlled sham elections from the Ministry of the Interior, he said, explaining that it was in that context that the PRD came into being.
“And now, in the middle of 2021, 32 years after our birth, López Obrador and [the ruling party] Morena have returned to rebuild that old regime, accentuating its worst practices,” the PRD national president said.
President López Obrador and Democratic Revolution Party leader Jesús Zambrano in happier times, when they were close colleagues.
At the 2018 elections, Morena fooled millions of people, leading them to believe that it was a leftist party, Zambrano said. But now many of them have realized that the ruling party is not leftist at all but rather an enemy of democratic practices, the division of powers and social justice, he said.
(The Congress, in which Morena leads a majority in both houses, recently approved a law backed by the president to extend the term of the Supreme Court’s chief justice, an AMLO ally, even though it appears to be in clear violation of the constitution.)
“It’s enough to see how Morena abolished [public] trusts that benefited millions of people and helped the development of the country; they cut the budgets of both institutions and social programs,” Zambrano said.
The party leader also criticized López Obrador and Morena for perpetuating the militarization of public security, giving the military control of the nation’s ports and centralizing the purchase of medications, which he claimed has caused widespread shortages of drugs, including those used to treat children with cancer.
Zambrano also charged that Morena, under the guise of austerity and the push to eliminate corruption, has modified the structure of public administration, making it less effective and a shell of its former self. Institutions, government programs, shelters for women who are victims of violence and state-run childcare centers have all disappeared, he said, claiming also that AMLO is attempting to destroy bodies that have played a crucial role in democratizing Mexico, such as the National Electoral Institute.
“López Obrador assumes himself to be the bearer of morals that he doesn’t have,” Zambrano added.
“… This government has been unable to resolve problems. On the contrary, it has made them worse; it’s only focused on causing division and trying to win elections. … The president behaves … like the boss of a gang, not a head of state,” Zambrano said.
Despite Zambrano’s claim that many citizens who supported Morena in 2018 are now aware that the party is not what they thought it would be, the ruling party nevertheless has a commanding lead in the polls ahead of the June 6 elections, at which the entire lower house of Congress will be renewed.
Some political observers believe that López Obrador will become even more authoritarian in the second half of his six-year term — especially if Morena, as expected, wins convincingly in the midterm elections — and even seek to change the constitution so that he can remain in power beyond 2024.
The president himself has repeatedly ruled out that possibility, and even signed a written undertaking in March 2019 that he would not seek reelection. He reiterated last month that when his term as president ends, he will retire to his ranch in Palenque, Chiapas, where he intends to write a book.
The vehicle in which the two shooting victims were traveling near Caborca, Sonora.
The National Guard opened fire on two agents of the Sonora Attorney General’s Office Wednesday, killing one and wounding the other in what appears to have been a case of mistaken identity.
The incident occurred yesterday afternoon on a dirt road near the Ejido San Isidro, about 30 kilometers from the city of Caborca. The victims were José Ramón Reyes, 37, and his sister Verónica Reyes.
Early reports indicate that the two were riding in an SUV when they were attacked by guardsmen, who evidently believed the vehicle was that of a local criminal leader. At least seven shots were fired at the front windshield with high powered firearms.
José Reyes died at the scene while his sister was admitted to hospital with a bullet wound in the arm.
Several civil society organizations were quick to release a statement calling into question the value of deploying the National Guard in the state, claiming that the only result has been to generate more violence.
Police guard the scene where the dead bodies of landowners and activists Jesús Robledo Cruz and María Jesús Gómez Vega were found.
A couple opposed to a mining company’s operations in Sonora was murdered last week and 13 other anti-mining activists were threatened, triggering a call for government protection from an organization that defends the rights of people affected by mining.
The Mexican Network of People Affected by Mining (Rema) said in a statement that community landowner José de Jesús Robledo Cruz and his wife María de Jesús Gómez Vega, opponents of the firm Penmont, a subsidiary of Grupo Peñoles, were murdered on April 29 in the municipality of Puerto Peñasco.
The organization said it had no doubt that the murders were committed by people in cahoots with Penmont, owned by billionaire businessmen Alberto Baillères, and Rafael Pavlovich Durazo, uncle of Sonora Governor Claudia Pavlovich. Rema claims that Pavlovich Durazo illegally seized more than 1,800 hectares of land from community landowners.
Penmont has a mine in Caborca, which landowners say encroaches on their land, an ejido known as El Bajío.
Rema said the bodies of Robledo and Gómez were dumped with a sign that made threats against 13 other ejidatarios, or community landowners. Those landowners are clearly at “high risk,” the group said.
The landowners at El Bajío say that Penmont illegally encroached on their land and have polluted it as well.
The murders occurred within the context of their demand for Penmont to comply with “multiple legal rulings” to pay rents to the ejidatarios “for the illegal occupation of their lands,” return illegally extracted gold to them and pay compensation for environmental damage, Rema said.
It noted that it was not the first time Robledo and Gómez were targeted. They were abducted and tortured in 2017 by hooded and armed men wearing army attire. It also said that landowners have been harassed and suffered acts of violence since 2002, when Penmont first entered El Bajío.
The organization said it took legal action against Penmont and was granted several rulings in its favor but “none of them have been executed.”
“On the contrary, since the first moment of complaint, acts of violence such as … intimidation, arbitrary detentions, homicides, abductions, forced disappearances, the use of public force, dispossession and forced displacement increased,” Rema said.
Robledo, as president of El Bajío, led the landowners’ defense of their ejido against the mining company’s encroachment, the organization said, putting him in direct opposition to “powerful people who are guarantors … in this country for murder and dispossession: Alberto Baillères, a powerful mining businessman and Rafael Pavlovich Durazo, a criminal protected by his niece, the current governor of the state.”
Penmont issued a press release denying any connection to the couple’s deaths.
“Penmont categorically rejects the assertion or insinuation of any kind of link with the criminal acts of this weekend,” the company said in a statement. “It rejects violence in any form and trusts the justice system with the resolution of problems.”
Billionaire Alberto Baillères is one of the owners of Penmont Mining.
Rema demanded that the federal government “assume its historical responsibility” and protect citizens as well as supervise the actions of the Sonora Attorney General’s Office, which it claimed is complicit with the violence perpetrated against El Bajío landowners.
It also demanded the implementation of protection measures for the 13 landowners who were threatened as well as for other El Bajío ejidatorios and their families.
For a country in which the president says every morning that corruption and impunity are no longer permitted, the murders and other acts of violence against community landowners opposed to mining are “shameful,” Rema said.
“The death of each defender of land is a wound that the political class will not be able to heal, hide or clean,” it said.
Matola's Belize Zoo and Tropical Education Center is credited with having helped spark a greater environmental awareness in the nation.
The year is 1983. Surrounded by a small menagerie of injured rare wild animals, Sharon Matola has a decision to make.
The animals in her charge are unable to take care of themselves in the wild, and they are in the middle of the Mexico-Belize tropical forest with no real access to help or provisions.
After stints as a Mexican circus performer, jungle-trained member of the air force and a wildlife documentary filmmaker, Matola “was at a crossroads,” she was to tell the Washington Post later of that moment.
“I either had to shoot the animals or take care of them because they couldn’t take care of themselves in the wild.”
There and then she made the decision that was to shape the rest of her life until her sad and untimely death of a sudden heart attack on March 21 at the age of 66.
Sharon Matola in her younger days at the Belize Zoo, which she founded.
These days, Matola’s life has rightly become legend, but this was not something she could know as she was constructing rudimentary shelters for a veritable ark of animals on a shoestring budget in the early 1980s.
But, whatever the obstacles, onward Matola drove, displaying the signature never-say-die attitude that was to mark her next 40 years caring for animals and advocating aggressively for the protection of the Mexico–Belize jungle — the largest contiguous tropical forest in the Americas outside of the Amazon.
Back then, at the very beginning, it started with nothing more than a pitched sign announcing the arrival of the “Belize Zoo,” later evolving into the Belize Zoo and Tropical Education Center.
Initially charging a nominal entry fee and relying on local restaurants to send bored patrons her way, Belize Zoo struggled in its early years, raising chickens to supplement costs. Four decades after its inception, however, the sanctuary is one of Belize’s biggest tourist attractions: before the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on tourism across the globe, the zoo hosted 75,000 visitors a year.
Crucially, half of these visitors were Belizean. The center is, in great part, credited with having awoken an environmental consciousness in the nation.
Markedly different than your average controversial zoo, at Belize Zoo, animals were rehabilitated and remained in their natural habitats rather than locked up in small pens. Today, there are now more than 45 species at the zoo, including the emblematic tapir, coatimundis, and white-lipped peccaries — all keystone species in Mexico’s southern jungle.
A jaguar lounging at the Belize Zoo. Some have called Matola the Jane Goodall of jaguars for her efforts to save them from extinction. From Belize Zoo Twitter
Her greatest work, however, was in her activism, which straddled Mexico and Belize and which awoke in her the greatest passions when defending the wildlife of the Maya Forest Corridor. She famously never suffered fools gladly and would happily take offending businessmen and politicians to task in very public settings.
One of her biggest fights in the early days was to spearhead a grueling five-year campaign against the construction of the Chalilo Dam on the Macal River.
A landmark movement, it was the first environmental case to appear before the Court of Appeal of Belize, where Matola argued that building the dam would destroy animal habitats in the heart of the Maya forest corridor running through part of Belize, northern Guatemala, and southern Mexico.
The ecosystem is scientifically recognized as one of the world’s most important ecological systems and is home to rare species such as the scarlet macaw, a bird for which Matola was internationally recognized as a leading researcher.
Much to Matola’s disappointment, the attempt to reverse the building permission was unsuccessful, and the dam was constructed in 2005. Moreover, and likely to her even greater chagrin, she was right about the negative impact of the dam on the Selva Maya, where the pressures of modernization are already being felt by declining wildlife levels.
However, while Matola’s attempt to combat the building of the dam may not have had the success she had hoped for, and won her more than a few enemies, her legacy nonetheless remains vitally important to the southern jungle and the people of Belize — a people she was to call her own when she took nationality in 1990.
Matola, who loved to play guitar, plays at an event in 2019 at which the US ambassador to Belize honored her as their woman of the year.
Matola’s resourcefulness and ability to make do with the bare minimum extended into all facets of her life: the rough-hewn wooden hut in which she lived at the zoo contained only the essentials for survival, and she shared her bathing pool with a crocodile.
Likewise, at a conference in Miami in 1984, Matola — having no money for expenses but an abundance of determination — put an out of order sign on a toilet door and operated from there, walking around with a photo album to speak to anyone who would listen.
Though Matola’s legacy, and the impact of her loss, will be most felt in her home in Belize, it will also be felt across the natural spaces of southern Mexico and Central America. The Selva Maya ecological corridor, to which Matola dedicated years and years of her life protecting, is under a greater threat than ever before: increasing global temperatures, deforestation and the encroachment of huge development projects such as the Maya Train are threatening huge swathes of land that will be irrecoverable once lost.
Where nature is concerned, there are no borders. The great, unique body of life which is our home exists as a single, interconnected entity, and it needs its defenders now more than ever. Last month, with the untimely death of Sharon Matola, nature took a hit.
Shannon Collins is an environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think tank. She writes from Campeche.
Residents of Homún, Yucatan, have been protesting the operations of Producción Alimentaria Porcícola, an industrial hog farm, almost since it opened.
A group of conservation organizations, scientists, doctors and public health experts have filed a legal brief with the Supreme Court (SCJN) to support a case against a 49,000-head hog farm in Yucatán.
Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, filed a friend of the court brief on Wednesday on behalf of itself, the Center for Biological Diversity, Coastal Carolina Riverwatch, Greenpeace México, Waterkeeper Alliance and 13 experts.
The groups asked the SCJN to uphold a 2018 Yucatán court decision which, on environmental grounds, suspended operations at the farm, located about 50 kilometers southeast of Mérida near the Mayan town of Homún.
The court will hear the case later this year.
The environmental groups said in a statement that their brief supports constitutional claims raised by Maya children who oppose the pig farm’s approval and operation.
Citing arguments to be presented in the lawsuit, they said the decision to allow the massive facility in “an ecologically sensitive area” near Homún “violates the Mayan children’s rights to a healthy environment and to autonomy as indigenous people.”
The groups said their amicus curiae brief details “substantial scientific evidence about the grave and irreversible harm to human health and the environment associated with industrial hog operations.”
The harm includes “contamination of water, including naturally occurring freshwater wells known as cenotes; emission of noxious air pollution; the spread of dangerous pathogens and contribution to climate change,” they said.
Hannah Connor, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that pollution from industrial pig farms “has already disproportionately degraded huge swaths of indigenous land and water in the Yucatán Peninsula.”
Adding another “mega-operation” will “overwhelm this fragile ecosystem with farm animal excrement and noxious gases,” she said.
Dr. Jill Johnson, an assistant professor of preventative medicine at the University of Southern California who joined the brief, noted that “numerous scientific studies provide evidence that industrial hog operations release contaminants into neighboring communities, where they affect the health and quality of life of neighbors.”
The farm was closed in 2018 by court order. If it were to reopen, the conservation groups say it would generate over 272 million kilograms of urine and feces annually.
She said that such operations have been associated with increases in asthma symptoms, blood pressure and stress and anxiety among residents living nearby.
Offensive odors would also likely affect people living near the Homún pig farm if the SCJN allows it to resume operations.
According to the conservation groups, the farm is expected to generate over 272 million kilograms of urine and feces annually, an amount, they said, more than that generated by the human population of Tijuana, a city of more than 2 million people.
The pig waste “will be stored in uncovered pits and then disposed of on nearby fields, a practice employed by many industrial animal operations in the United States,” the groups said.
Dr. Ana Maria Rule, an assistant professor of environmental health and engineering and director of the exposure assessment lab at Johns Hopkins University who also joined the amicus brief, said that hurricanes could cause the waste pits to overflow.
“The Yucatán Peninsula is frequently impacted by hurricanes, which will likely cause this facility’s waste pits to overflow,” she said. “It has happened in the United States several times in recent years …”
Kelly Hunter Foster, senior attorney for Waterkeeper Alliance, said that extensive scientific research has shown that industrial-scale pig farms that use waste pits and land disposal of urine and excrement can contaminate groundwater, pollute surface waters and emit hazardous gases into the air.
The environmental organizations noted that “the Ring of Cenotes Geohydrological Reserve, located in Homún on a site of global and ecological importance, is especially vulnerable to pollution” from the farm, owned by the company Producción Alimentaria Porcícola, or PAPO.
Guillermo Zúñiga Martinez, an attorney with Earthjustice, said the SCJN has an obligation to not allow the farm to resume operations until it installs advanced waste treatment technology.
“Mexican and international law require authorities to apply the precautionary principle, and the message of the precautionary principle is clear: we must stop unacceptable risks before harm occurs,” he said.
“… Authorities shouldn’t wait for children to get sick before acknowledging what everyone knows to be true: advanced waste-treatment technology is necessary to protect people and the environment, and this facility must adopt functional advanced technology before operations resume.”
The Producción Alimentaria Porcícola farm site.
The environmental organizations’ statement noted that the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace México last month submitted a separate request to Mexican authorities “urging that they respect the sovereign right of indigenous communities under Mexican law and basic human rights, including self-determination and consultation, on the permitting and operation of industrial hog operations in the states of Yucatán, Campeche and Quintana Roo.”
The two groups asked that the federal government accept a complaint from 21 Mayan communities that requests a moratorium on all approvals of new industrial hog operations, as well as the expansion of existing operations, until the rights of the Mayan people and ongoing damage to air and water quality, biodiversity and human health are respected and resolved.
In an environmental impact statement submitted to environmental authorities in Yucatán, PAPO acknowledged that its farm could cause some moderate impacts to the environment. However, the company said that it had a range of tools at its disposal to mitigate those impacts. PAPO said that urine and feces will be sent to “a treatment system with a biodigester, aeration pond and a chlorination tank.”
Once the waste has been treated, it will pose no contamination risk, company representative Ricardo Díaz Montes said in 2018.
The farm’s establishment in Homún has divided residents: many oppose it on environmental grounds, but others support it because of the jobs it will generate. The company has said that a fully operational farm would support 75 full-time jobs.
International passenger numbers remain low at the Puerto Vallarta airport.
U.S. airlines have increased flights to Puerto Vallarta-Riviera Nayarit, although they normally sees a dip in May before the summer high season.
Fourteen airlines have been operating an average of 47 flights a day, according to the operator of Puerto Vallarta International Airport.
Some winter routes have been reactivated, such as those of Alaska Airlines and Delta Airlines from Portland, Seattle and Salt Lake City.
The bump in demand comes after U.S. health authorities relaxed travel protocols for fully vaccinated citizens on April 2. Those who have received two doses no longer need to take a Covid-19 test prior to traveling unless required by the international destination, and are not required to self-quarantine when they return.
More than 53% of the U.S. population have received their first vaccine dose; only Israel and the United Kingdom have administered a first shot to a higher proportion.
“Given that the United States is well advanced in its vaccination process, what we are now seeing is that some airlines are beginning to operate routes that are generally active only in the winter,” said Marc Murphy, managing director of the Riviera Nayarit Conventions and Visitors Bureau.
The Riviera Nayarit reactivated tourism at the beginning of June and has gradually permitted an increased capacity. Establishments are currently allowed to operate at 70%.
Meanwhile, international passenger numbers at the Puerto Vallarta airport remain low compared to two years ago. There were 168,300 passengers in April, 45.7% fewer than the April 2019 figure of 309,800.
A mural by Desiderio H. Xochitziotzin of Tlaxcalans fighting at the battle of Tenochtitlán with Hernán Cortés' army. Tlaxcalan warriors are using Spanish swords. All photos by Bob Cox
Five hundred years ago, Hernán Cortés was marching from Tlaxcala on his way to the final defeat of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. Because the role of Tlaxcala in the story of the Conquest is absolutely pivotal, the state has an awkward place in the culture of modern Mexico.
Today, Tlaxcala is Mexico’s smallest state, living in the shadows of its much larger neighbors, Mexico City and Puebla. From the pre-Hispanic to the modern period, it has a long history of fighting to remain a distinct entity.
This struggle is behind its role in the Conquest. Cortés did not achieve this feat with a few hundred soldiers, some horses and firearms. He sized up the political situation in Mesoamerica and took advantage of the Aztecs’ Achilles heel: how much they were hated by their neighbors.
He started by allying himself with the peoples on the Veracruz coast. After learning of Tlaxcala’s long struggle to remain independent of the sprawling Aztec Empire, he went there with his new expanded forces.
Despite its proximity, Tlaxcala had not been taken over by the Aztecs, at the price of constant warfare and a trade embargo that crippled the economy. Simply put, the Tlaxcalans had more than enough reason to want the Aztec Empire wiped out.
Leaders of the Tlaxcalan Confederacy by Desiderio H. Xochitziotzin. Tlaxcala was not an empire but rather a confederacy of four “manors” each ruled by a lord.
That did not mean they ran to join Cortés. When the Spanish reached the Tlaxcala border, they sent emissaries to ask permission to enter and meet with the Tlaxcalan lords. They received no answer.
Cortés entered anyway, sparking a series of battles that demonstrated the power that the Spanish had and convinced the Tlaxcalans to negotiate.
It was not an easy position for them to be in. On the one hand, you have a rival empire that is wearing you down, and on the other, you are confronted by a people you know nothing about and who has technology way beyond yours. It may simply have been a question of “Which was the lesser evil?”
For Cortés, an alliance with the Tlaxcalans was crucial. It would give him a base from which to attack the heart of the Aztec Empire. Tlaxcala not only knew the enemy well but was still a formidable power in its own right.
A treaty was worked out. At its most basic, it allowed Tlaxcala to maintain a separate identity in the coming colonial order, but they did have to pledge allegiance to the Spanish king and accept Catholicism.
They were also promised privileges that other indigenous peoples would not have, including keeping their names. This is why if you come across a Mexican with a Náhuatl family name (e.g. Desiderio H. Xochitziotzin), they have Tlaxcalan heritage.
Tlaxcala was given special privileges by the Spanish because they fought with Cortés. That gave them a reputation in modern-day Mexico as traitors. By Desiderio H. Xochitziotzin.
After securing the alliance, Cortés set out for Tenochtitlán to meet Moctezuma. That round ended with the Night of Sorrows (La Noche Triste). Cortés and his men were routed from the city by its residents, who also murdered their emperor.
What was left of the Spanish and their allies limped back to Tlaxcala in the summer of 1520. Cortés did not really know what the reception would be. Not all of the Tlaxcalan leaders were amenable to the alliance with the Spanish, and now Cortés showed that he was not invincible.
In addition, the new Aztec emperor, Cuitláhuac, opened diplomatic channels, offering to end the trade embargo if the Tlaxcalans would sever their ties to the Spanish and join them. It was debated by the Tlaxcalan leadership. Had they accepted, it would have been the end of Cortés.
But they remained with the Spanish, mostly likely due to their burning hatred of the Aztecs. They probably didn’t trust the Aztecs to keep their word either.
After licking his wounds and reaffirming his alliance with Tlaxcala, Cortés was able to leave again for Tenochtitlán on December 28, 1520, accompanied by Tlaxcalan warriors. Tenochitlán fell on August 13, 1521.
Tlaxcala’s strategic importance bought it pledges from Cortés. However, the Spanish were not all that good at keeping their promises either.
Mural of the Battle of Atlixco by Desiderio H. Xochitziotzin. This battle with the Aztecs led to Tlaxcala suffering under a trade embargo before Cortés’ arrival.
The Tlaxcalans had to fight to get colonial authorities to recognize their rights on various occasions, including direct appeals to the Spanish Crown. One of these appeals resulted in the Tlaxcala Codex, which documents the alliance from the Tlaxcalans’ perspective.
Before the 20th century, it was these privileges, along with roles that Tlaxcalans played in expanding New Spain both northward and southward that caused much of the resentment against them.
The idea of the Tlaxcalans as traitors came with modern ideas of indigenous identity, basically placing the state and its residents in the same category of La Malinche, Cortés’ indigenous interpreter.
But the truth is that there was no “pan-indigenous” identity before the arrival of the Europeans, no more than there was a pan-European identity. Like everywhere else, Mesoamerican peoples had conflicts among themselves that defined their world.
Over the centuries, Tlaxcala lost its privileges and even almost disappeared. After independence, it was once integrated with Puebla and once with the province of Mexico (which included México state and Mexico City).
But efforts to regain separate status were successful, and it is now one of the sovereign states of the Mexican Republic — politically secure, but not so much culturally.
Tlaxcalan warriors by Desiderio H. Xochitziotzin.
There are jokes and internet memes stating that the state does not really exist because it is easy to overlook geographically and with such major cities nearby. Like Puebla, Toluca, Querétaro and Cuernavaca, it is close enough to the capital to be part of the growing megalopolis, but rapid growth has come here only recently.
Though not as strong as in the recent past, the moniker of “traitor” still creates a stigma that is difficult to live with, says University of Tlaxcala anthropologist Juan Carlos Ramos.
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 18 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture in particular its handcrafts and art. She is the author of Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta (Schiffer 2019). Her culture column appears regularly on Mexico News Daily.
