An attempt to oust a female lawmaker from the presidency of the Morelos Congress descended on Friday into a misogynistic attack.
Speaking in the Congress, independent Deputy José Casas said the complaints by lawmaker Tanya Valentina Rodríguez against her removal were like the “squeals of a pig.”
He also charged that women should stay in the kitchen rather than enter politics.
Casas is part of a 13-member block of deputies that is trying to replace Rodríguez as leader of the Congress.
A deputy with the Labor Party, Rodríguez accused the 13 deputies of holding a “clandestine” session of Congress on Thursday at which they intended to vote in favor of relieving her of her duties.
However, the deputies decided not to bring on the vote because they weren’t guaranteed of getting majority support to oust the Congress president.
Rodríguez told the newspaper Reforma that she will file complaints against Casas with both the Human Rights Commission of Morelos and the Institute of the Woman.
Female lawmakers protested against the lawmaker’s misogynistic remarks by holding up placards in Congress that denounced the “political violence” to which they are subjected.
Democratic Revolution Party deputy Estephany Santiago rejected Casas’ claim that Congress is not a place for women.
“The spaces that women occupy to represent other women are the result of a tireless struggle,” she said.
“The state Congress must take action and . . . impose a sanction on José Casas; that’s not the way to speak about women.”
Amid the furor, Casas attempted to make amends for his sexist remarks.
“My respect to all women in the kitchen, I come from a proud cooking family in Tres Marías . . . This isn’t an issue of misogyny,” he said.
Schools in six Chihuahua communities were closed after a gunfight between rival criminal organizations left two men dead earlier this week.
It was the second time in a month that schools in Las Pomas, El Largo Maderal, Chuhuichupa, El Oso, Santa Rita and Mesa del Huracán were forced to close due to violence related to organized crime.
The clash occurred in the community of Las Pomas, where 60 armed members of the criminal group known as La Línea arrived to attack a rival gang, according to the Chihuahua State Security Commission.
The attack was widely announced by the cartel and its presence in the area was evident before the attack, prompting citizens in Las Pomas and other communities in the municipality of Madera to post on social media and implore the government to intervene.
Many said they feared for their lives after they were ordered by armed civilians to remain in their homes.
Despite State Security Commissioner Óscar Alberto Aparicio’s declaration that officers were dispatched to the area as soon as they received reports, citizens claim that federal and state authorities ignored their pleas until nightfall.
The security commission released a statement saying it had initiated an operation in coordination with the army, Federal Police and National Guard in search of those involved.
Local media reported that one of the two victims of the shootout was Francisco “El Jaguar” Arvizu, plaza chief of the Sinaloa cartel in the region. However, Aparicio said the identities of the two men have yet to be confirmed.
Authorities also found seven vehicles at the site of the clash, three of which were completely burned.
Police forces will maintain their presence in the area to protect citizens and search for those involved in the shootout, Aparicio said.
Enjoy your own private pool at Hacienda el Carmen.
Double-digit growth is predicted in visitor numbers this year to rural Jalisco, where an overnight stay at a historical hacienda or manor is one of the unique experiences on offer.
Both Mexican and foreign tourists are increasingly willing to pay rates of between 2,500 and 10,000 pesos (US $130 to $520) a night to stay at properties that provide a rich experience full of culture, history and art, according to a report in the newspaper El Economista.
Antonio Gutiérrez Martín, president of the Association of Haciendas and Manors of Jalisco (AHCJ), said that visitors who opt to stay at such properties can expect much more than just a place to lay their heads.
“For example, in the city of Sayula, you could have a rate of 2,500 pesos [per night] but that doesn’t mean that they’re only going to give you a bed and a bathroom. It implies a complete experience, your senses – sight, smell and touch – will be awakened . . .” he said.
Gutiérrez added that visitors to Sayula, a municipality about 120 kilometers south of Guadalajara, can visit the house where acclaimed writer Juan Rulfo was born.
Sampling regional specialties such as cajeta (caramelized goat’s milk) and ponche de granada (pomegranate punch) and visiting workshops where knives are handmade by skilled artisans are also popular attractions in Sayula, he said.
Returning to the subject of unique, traditional accommodation, Gutiérrez said that the target market for historical haciendas and manors is people aged 40 years and older.
“Due to the rates we charge, it’s not easy tourism, it’s tourism in which the standards are quite high,” he said.
“We have rates of up to 10,000 pesos. For example, there are rooms at Hacienda El Carmen in Ahualulco de Mercado [a municipality 75 kilometers west of Guadalajara] where it’s quite an experience . . . [having] a private space with a private pool and spa,” Gutiérrez said.
He said that AHCJ data shows that 80% of people who stay at the organization’s 40 properties are Mexicans and the other 20% are foreign tourists.
The latter mostly stay at properties in or around the better-known tourist destinations of Tequila and Puerto Vallarta, Gutiérrez explained.
People who choose to stay at the haciendas and manors in Jalisco can expect a high-quality and memorable experience, the AHCJ chief added.
“. . . We have committees that review quality standards of each of our associates and that means there is a guarantee that the experience will be positive.”
The military's heavy machinery may soon be put to work.
Federal judges have now annulled five of seven suspension orders that have delayed the start of construction at the Santa Lucía airport.
A judge of the Fifth Collegiate Tribunal in Mexico City overturned one suspension order on Tuesday and judges of the 10th Collegiate Tribunal rescinded four more on Thursday.
All of the repealed court orders were obtained by the #NoMásDerroches (No More Waste) collective, which has filed close to 150 injunction requests against the US $4.8-billion project at the Santa Lucía Air Force Base in México state.
The collective said in a statement that two judges of the 10th Collegiate Tribunal voted in favor of annulling the suspension orders that were reviewed yesterday, while one opposed their revocation.
The judge who voted against the repeal of the injunctions, #NoMásDerroches said, was Jorge Arturo Camero Ocampo.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar announced on Thursday that the Federal Judiciary Council had suspended Camero over questionable financial dealings, which President López Obrador said included receiving an 80-million-peso bank deposit.
The #NoMásDerroches collective, a group made up of civil society organizations, law firms and individual citizens, said the “removal” of the judge “precisely hours after he decided to vote against” the annulment of the suspension orders was proof of pressure being exercised by the federal government for the airport issue to be “resolved according to its interests.”
The collective called on the Supreme Court to hear the remainder of the government’s applications to revoke the suspension orders it has obtained to ensure that the rulings are impartial and in “strict accordance with the law.”
“Today more than ever the independence of the federal judicial power and the principle of the separation of powers are essential for the preservation of the rule of law,” the group said.
“. . . We appeal to the Supreme Court to promptly resolve . . . this case of national importance.”
The accident scene Friday morning in San Juan del Río.
Nine people are dead after a transit bus driver in Querétaro attempted to race a train to a level crossing and lost.
Another 13 people were injured in the accident that occurred Friday morning in La Valla, a community in San Juan del Río.
A state police official said the 21-year-old driver of the bus made a “reckless” attempt to reach the crossing before the train. “He will have to answer for this terrible incident,” he said of the driver, who was injured but in stable condition.
The bus was left lying on its roof after the train swept it off the tracks.
The Mexico City government offered a public apology on Thursday to a woman who was jailed for almost seven years after she was wrongfully arrested on charges of kidnapping and homicide.
Lorena González Hernández was detained in September 2008 for involvement in the abduction and murder of Fernando Martí, the 14-year-old son of businessman Alejandro Martí.
She spent six years, 10 months and 11 days in prison although she was never convicted of the crime.
The Mexico City Attorney General’s Office (PGJ), led at the time by former mayor and current senator Miguel Ángel Mancera, accused González, a Federal Police officer, of belonging to a criminal group called La Flor, which it alleged was responsible for the abduction and murder.
However, the group didn’t actually exist and was actually a fabrication by corrupt PGJ officials.
Human Rights Commission head Luis Raúl González applauds González at Thursday’s event.
In 2009, federal authorities arrested three members of a kidnapping ring called Los Petriciolet who were charged with abducting and killing Fernando Martí. They in turn implicated a woman who subsequently confessed her guilt.
However, it wasn’t until July 15 of this year that González, who always maintained that she was innocent, was finally released from prison after a judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with the case against her.
At an event in the capital yesterday, Mexico City Attorney General Ernestina Godoy issued an apology to González.
Godoy acknowledged that she was arrested illegally and that her rights to due process and presumption of innocence were violated.
The Mexico City government – led by Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard at the time – fabricated evidence supposedly provided by non-existent witnesses, the attorney general said.
“The arbitrary detention of Lorena was made based on an anonymous text [sent] to the Attorney General’s Office . . .” Godoy said.
Rafael Guerra, chief justice of the Mexico City Superior Court – which had remanded González in preventative custody – also offered an apology.
“It’s my responsibility to offer a public apology and a promise, the promise to commit all the public resources within our reach to achieve a consolidation in the field of human rights,” he said.
The government apology was based on a recommendation by the National Human Rights Commission, which said that González was a victim of arbitrary detention, fabrication of guilt and inhumane treatment.
González accepted the apology from Godoy but later told reporters that she couldn’t forgive the officials responsible for her almost seven-year imprisonment.
“I accept the apology but . . . I don’t forgive the damage they caused us. I see my son, my mother and my siblings and there are consequences, there are still consequences in my life so I don’t forgive [them] . . .” she said.
Asked whether she considered then attorney general Mancera to be the main person responsible for what happened to her, González said that she doesn’t “accuse him directly.”
She also said she didn’t know whether then-mayor Ebrard was aware at the time of all the injustices she suffered.
“Those who instructed the judge [to remand me in custody], those who planted non-existent testimonies, they’re the ones who are directly responsible . . .” González said.
Students help themselves to vehicles on the Morelia-Pátzcuaro highway.
Students from the Vasco de Quiroga teacher training college in Tiripetío, Michoacán, hijacked at least 10 vehicles on the Morelia-Pátzcuaro highway on Friday morning.
Armed with machetes and sticks, the students blocked the highway near the Tiripetío school, about 25 kilometers from Morelia.
The hijacked vehicles included buses and cargo trucks, according to state police. Presumably they were to carry students to Morelia for a demonstration demanding funds for their school.
The students forced passengers to get off the buses and find another way to reach their destination.
State police tried to approach the students, but the latter repelled them by throwing rocks.
After seizing the vehicles, the students took them to the Tiripetío school.
Students at rural teaching colleges in México state and Puebla also hijacked buses this week. The students have similar demands of state and federal governments, which include scholarships, better funding for the schools and automatic job placement after graduation.
According to sources in the Michoacán state government, the CNTE teachers’ union is behind the hijackings.
Little bowls were carved into the rock of a Jalisco riverbed at least 800 years ago.
Jalisco archaeologists keep digging up strange, new — and at the same time very old — things in the vicinity of the town of Arandas, located almost exactly 100 kilometers due east of Guadalajara.
First there was the discovery of more than 1,200 often very complicated horizontal petroglyphs along the shores of a small lake east of Arandas called Presa de la Luz, suggesting that the site may have been used as an astronomical observatory over a thousand years ago.
These discoveries are described in an elegant, 154-page coffee-table book entitled El Santuario Rupestre de los Altos de Jalisco (The Rock-Art Sanctuary of the Jalisco Highlands).
One of the authors of the book, archaeologist Rodrigo Esparza, called me to describe a new and even more curious discovery, this one located only 14 kilometers north of Presa de la Luz.
“For the moment we are calling this site Los Pocitos, ‘The Little Bowls,’ and we’re going to go study the place next week. Want to join us?”
A few of the pits display chisel marks.
Well, I could hardly say no to an offer like that, and a week later Esparza drove me to a place called Sauz de Cajigal where we met with several other archaeologists, including two from Japan who have taken a great interest in the area around Arandas.
“Before the others arrive, I’d like you to have a look at the local museum,” said Esparza.
“Museum?” I queried. “I couldn’t even find Sauz de Cajigal on the map and there’s a museum here?”
Thus it was that I met Pancho Navarro, a local collector who, Esparza told me, “has managed to rescue countless artifacts that would otherwise have been spirited away to other countries. These range in age from very old pieces from 500 BC, found in shaft tombs, to artifacts from colonial times.”
Pancho took me on a quick tour of his museum, which is filled not only with artifacts like figurines, obsidian blades and pottery, but also faded photographs and posters, phonographs and typewriters, stuffed animals, life-size human figures and all sorts of items related to the Cristeros war.
I should mention, in addition, that every one of those items in the museum has a story, and that Don Pancho speaks English very well. On top of that he also sings in English. “Credence Clearwater Revival songs are my specialty,” he told me, “and I would be happy to sing a few for any of your readers.”
Francisco “Paco” Rodriguez brushing out bowls.
From the Sauz de Cajigal Museum we drove 10 kilometers and parked. “From here it’s all on foot,” the archaeologists told me.
We started up a slope covered with young agaves. carefully watching where we walked, because the needle-like tip of an agave leaf is coated with an irritant and once you’ve been stuck, you can expect pain for days.
Where the agaves ended, we came to the legendary “barbed-wire fence with which every adventure in Mexico begins.” Fortunately, right up against this particular fence there’s a stone wall, making it relatively easy to climb over.
Now that there were no more agaves underfoot, we had no problems to contend with except for thorn bushes with needles four centimeters long!
After walking about a kilometer, we found ourselves on top of a ridge overlooking a long ravine. “Teruaki Yoshida is down there with another team,” Esparza told me. “He’s from Tokai University in Japan and he’s investigating a shelter cave in that ravine known as La Cueva del Raso. Although El Raso was a bandido, this cave’s treasure is not the monetary kind.
“On the wall, there’s a set of petroglyphs: geometric figures, like spirals. What’s unusual — in fact possibly unique — about these figures is that they are not rock paintings but engravings. “All other cave art I’ve ever heard of,” said Esparza, “was drawn or painted, so we think these grabados are pretty important.”
The Sauz de Cajigal museum.
We continued walking for a few minutes more and suddenly archaeologist Francisco Rodríguez put down the load of brooms he was carrying and shouted, “Welcome to Paleolithic Park!”
I shaded my eyes and looked into the flat river bed below us. Oh yes, now I could see them: hundreds of little dots stretching off into the distance. Then I blinked and looked down at my feet only to discover that the pocitos were right here in front of me as well. “Oh wow!” I said. “They’re everywhere!”
From this vantage point, I noticed that the plethora of dots followed a shape something like an upside-down Y. On close examination, I could see that each dot was really a little bowl or cup carved into the rock. Each small hole was about 11 centimeters in diameter and four to six centimeters deep. Almost everywhere they were neatly aligned in rows.
“Pocitos [little pits] like these are not uncommon in this area,” Esparza told me, “but normally you see only one or two, always carved more carefully than here, with a nicely rounded bottom. As for their age, perhaps they probably date back to sometime between 900 and 1200 AD. We think the stone bowl is a prayer for rain, just like the spirals you find all over the world. An isolated bowl we understand, but this,” he said gesturing,”this is something else. Here what count are numbers.”
Esparza was hoping that today’s project, photographing the 400-meter stretch of little cups from a drone and capturing precise data about them with LIDAR (Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging) technology, might reveal something we had all missed, perhaps a shape that can only be appreciated when seen from far above, like the Nazca lines.
Which meant it was time to get to work, sweeping the whole area clean and brushing leaves and twigs out of each individual pocito, so the LIDAR would register a perfect record of what was carved in the rock.
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Cleaning out all those holes proved to be a long, slow job, but finally we finished it. Precise measurements were now taken with a special kind of ultra-precise GPS and reference points were chalked on the rock.
Meanwhile, with no more bowl cleaning to be done, I wandered down to the far end of the 400-meter-long stretch of pocitos and began counting them, just for the fun of it. Well, what I was doing was more estimating than counting, but I kept at it and in the end reached a grand total of 1.792 little holes.
Then, when everything was ready, the archaeologists started shouting, “Clear the area! Everybody out!” and the drone rose into the air and began to create its precise and detailed map of the now spotless pock-marked river bank. Once I had this map in hand at home, I did a recount of the holes and came out with 1,803 bowls carved in stone.
The area around Arandas now had three unusual archaeological sites: the 1,200 horizontal petroglyphs around Presa de la Luz, the engravings inside La Cueva del Raso and the nearly 2,000 (according to me) carved bowls at Los Pocitos.
Without a doubt, this little corner of Jalisco is destined for fame in the annals of archaeology. At the moment, it’s quite complicated to visit any of the sites I’ve described here, but I suspect that will not be the case for long.
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.
Mexico has the highest rate of workplace stress in the world, according to the Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare (STPS) and the International Labor Organization (ILO).
Labor specialist Oddette Murillo said that STPS data reveal that 75% of Mexican workers suffer from work-related stress, higher than China, 73%, and the United States, 59%.
The news comes on the eve of a new labor law intended to reduce occupational burnout caused by stress and violence in the workplace. The World Health Organization (WHO) added burnout to its International Classification of Diseases in May of this year.
Experts say workplace stress can lead to a number of harmful behaviors and disorders, such as gastrointestinal problems, increased caffeine, tobacco and/or alcohol use, migraines, insomnia, muscular pain, and even family problems like divorce.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has estimated that 43% of Mexico’s workers suffer from burnout. The OECD also found that Mexicans work an average of 2,255 hours a year, 492 more than workers in other countries.
Vacation time could be a factor. Mexico’s General Labor Law guarantees workers only six vacation days a year, while other Latin American countries, such as Brazil, Panama, Peru, Cuba and Nicaragua, guarantee workers a total of 30.
One requirement of the new rules requires employers to keep registries of psychosocial risk factors identified in their workplaces, including violent and traumatic events. Companies that fail to comply could face fines ranging from 20,000-400,000 pesos (US $1,000-$21,000).
At least a hundred rounds of ammunition were fired at the home of Guaymas Mayor Sara Valle Dessens on Thursday afternoon.
The attack occurred around 5:00pm at the mayor’s family house on Almagres street in Guaymas’ Paseo de Las Villas neighborhood. No one was home at the time, and there were no injuries. The house and a car belonging to the mayor’s son were damaged.
According to the magazine Proceso, Mayor Valle does not live at the house and does not often visit because of threats she has received.
Security forces responded to the attack and are searching for perpetrators who reportedly fled in several vehicles.
The violence is believed to be related to a conflict between two splinter groups of the Sinaloa Cartel: the Salazar clan and Los Chapitos. The Salazar group has been known to commit arson and shooting attacks such as that on Thursday.
