The new security center caught a kidnapping in process.
The new C5-i security system that went into operation on Wednesday in Michoacán is off to a good start, contributing to the freeing of a mother and her two daughters from kidnappers, officials said.
Through security cameras, C5-i personnel saw a group of men get out of a vehicle on a street in Morelia and enter a family’s residence through a rooftop terrace.
C5-i analysts alerted the police, who were able to enter the residence, located in the Ilustres Novohispanos neighborhood of Morelia, and free the woman and her daughters who were being held against their will. Four suspects were arrested.
Police also confiscated three firearms and a vehicle.
A video obtained by the newspaper El Universal shows the moment of the rescue, when the police enter the residence to free the three victims, who can be seen huddled together, crying out of relief.
“Don’t be afraid, we’re the police,” an officer says in the video.
“You’re safe now, you’re safe now,” says another.
“Don’t leave me alone, please don’t leave me alone,” one of the children can be heard saying, before fainting.
The C5-i system employs 360 analysts to monitor the state through over 6,000 security cameras.
A Canadian woman who suffered serious injuries from a shooting in San Luis Potosí says she received little help from either the Mexican or Canadian governments to get back home.
Hiba Sheikh, of Surrey, British Columbia, was visiting a friend in the central Mexican city when disaster struck at dinner.
“We were sitting and eating and talking [on the balcony], and all of a sudden I hear a big bang, like fireworks sounds,” she told broadcaster Global News.
“When I looked to my right, I saw two guys [on the main floor] firing up in the air, and I was in complete trauma and shock.”
Sheikh, 31, fell to the floor and saw “blood everywhere.” Then she looked at her leg and realized she had been shot.
“It was covered in blood, my dress was drenched in blood, and I was almost passing out,” she said. “I just remember people saying there were two guys shooting outside.”
Bystanders attended to Sheikh’s wounds and kept her conscious while they waited for paramedics to arrive and transport her to hospital.
Sheikh said the bullet pierced through the balcony and hit her in the ankle. It shattered several bones as it passed through the other side of her leg.
There were no other injuries or deaths during the incident. Local police and the state Attorney General’s Office are investigating but no suspects have been identified or detained.
Sheikh said she was primarily worried about getting back home on her flight scheduled for the next day, but she got little assistance from either the Mexican government or her own. She said that Global Affairs Canada did nothing beyond making a phone call.
“They just informed my parents, and that was it,” she said. “I had to travel back on my own and figure that out on my own. The expenses I had to cover on my own.”
San Luis Potosí Governor Juan Manuel Carreras promised Sheikh that the government would cover her travel and medical expenses, she said, but the promise was not kept. She ended up flying back to Canada at her own expense two days after the shooting.
After receiving no help and seeing no justice in the case, Sheikh feels discouraged.
“The guy’s running free and I want justice, because he owes me big time,” she said. “This is not a joke.”
Currently bedridden at home, Sheikh said it could take six to seven months for her ankle to heal and for her to be able to walk freely again.
When she is able to walk, Mexico is one country she’ll never set foot in again.
“I don’t ever want to go back to that country,” she said. “It’s a matter of safety.”
Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú of Guatemala speaks at the Mérida summit.
President López Obrador has told Nobel Peace Prize laureates gathered in Mérida, Yucatán, for a four-day summit that his government is determined to achieve peace in Mexico without resorting to authoritarianism or the use of force.
Speaking at a welcome dinner on Thursday for the attendees of the 17th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, López Obrador said that he is committed to finding a peaceful solution to the violence plaguing the country.
“What we want is to achieve total peace but we don’t want a peace achieved with authoritarianism, with the use of force. We don’t want a peace of graves, we want peace that originates in the delivery of justice, we’ve always said that peace is the result of justice,” he said.
“We have problems of insecurity and violence and [past governments] have wanted to confront the scourge of violence with the use of force, with prisons, with heavy-handed threats and harsher [prison] sentences – even with extremely authoritarian acts – with raids, with massacres, with exterminations and it’s been proven that it doesn’t work, that we have to attend to the causes that give rise to violence,” the president said.
After charging that the idea that people are “evil by nature” is “outdated, anachronistic and conservative,” López Obrador said that his government’s pacification strategy for Mexico includes providing employment and study opportunities for the country’s young people, who he claimed were abandoned by past governments.
Guests pose with President López Obrador at Mérida summit.
He said earlier this week that the government’s welfare programs, the National Guard, the campaign against the consumption of drugs, preventing corruption in the justice system, respecting human rights and confronting arms trafficking were all part of the plan to bring peace to Mexico.
The president told the peace prize winners, among whom were former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and Guatemalan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú, that his administration has an “enormous” task ahead of it in order to “carry out a transformation” of Mexico “without violence.”
But the enormity of the task – Mexico is on track to record its most violent year in recent history in 2019 – doesn’t justify “more of the same,” López Obrador said, again referring to the strategy of past governments to use force to attempt to combat crime.
The president said his election didn’t represent “a simple change of government” but rather “a change of regime,” a reference to the “fourth transformation” he says he is bringing to Mexico.
The peace summit, which commenced on Thursday and will run until Sunday, comes just days after López Obrador sent a proposal to Congress for an amnesty law that would allow some criminals, including young people convicted of minor drug offenses, to be released from prison.
Colombia passed a similar amnesty law in late 2016 that protected guerrilla fighters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, from prosecution for minor crimes committed during the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war.
Former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos issued a warning about amnesty.
Juan Manuel Santos, who was president of Colombia between 2010 and 2018 and the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2016, said on Twitter on December 28, 2016 that Congress’ approval of the amnesty law was the “first step towards the consolidating peace.”
However, asked about López Obrador’s amnesty plan at a press conference in Mérida on Thursday, the ex-president expressed a very different view.
“Amnesty has evolved. The world learned that the clean slate [approach] has more problems than benefits in the long run. But transitional justice . . . returns rights to victims,” Santos said.
Transitional justice includes measures such as criminal prosecutions, the establishment of truth commissions, the payment of reparation for victims of human rights violations and the reform of laws and institutions, including the police, judiciary and military, according to the International Center for Transitional Justice.
Santos also told reporters that the solution to the problem of drug trafficking lies in the lifting of the prohibition of narcotics.
“Prohibition is the source of criminality . . . The world has to evolve toward what happened with liquor in the United States,” the ex-president said referring to the end of prohibition in 1933.
“It’s been 45 years since the war on drugs was declared and the war hasn’t been won. Colombia is the country that has had the most victims and we’re still the main exporter of cocaine.”
Two years after two powerful earthquakes shook southern and central Mexico, repairs of damaged buildings are only 30% complete, the federal government has reported.
At Wednesday’s presidential press conference, Urban Development Secretary Román Meyer Falcón and national reconstruction coordinator David Cervantes provided an overview of the reconstruction progress that has been made since the earthquakes of September 7 and 19, 2017.
More than 186,000 homes, 19,198 schools, 297 hospitals and health care centers and 2,340 historical buildings in 700 municipalities were damaged in the two quakes, Meyer said.
Repairs of homes are 26% complete but by the end of the year that figure is expected to increase to 41%, Cervantes said. Guerrero and Morelos are leading the way in terms of the numbers of houses repaired or rebuilt.
Reconstruction of schools is 59% complete, while only 17% progress has been made on healthcare infrastructure, Cervantes said.
The Secretariat of Public Education said separately that repairs at schools in México state, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla, Mexico City, Morelos, Tlaxcala, Michoacán, Guerrero, Hidalgo and Veracruz are ongoing. The Oaxaca Congress said earlier this month that only 80 of 5,000 schools that were damaged in the 8.2-magnitude earthquake on September 7 have been fully repaired.
Repairs of cultural and historical buildings are 47% complete, Cervantes said, explaining that the various figures equate to overall reconstruction progress of 30%.
Meyer and Cervantes said the National Reconstruction Program has prioritized repairs in areas that suffered the most extensive damage as well as those with high levels of violence and large indigenous populations.
In 2019, the federal government allocated 28.3 billion pesos (US $1.45 billion) for earthquake reconstruction, they said.
President López Obrador told reporters at yesterday’s press conference that his government won’t put a limit on the resources it will provide for earthquake rebuilding, adding that he expects repairs to be completed by the end of 2020 with the exception of some hospitals and churches that require major work.
“Nobody is protected anymore, if fraud was committed . . . the developers must take responsibility . . .” López Obrador said.
Meyer pointed out that fraud wasn’t the only problem with the previous government’s earthquake aid program.
After the new government took office last December, it was discovered that a lot of families whose homes were damaged in one of the two September 2017 earthquakes didn’t receive the financial support they were promised, the secretary said.
“In states such as Chiapas, Morelos and Guerrero, the majority of affected families received incomplete support . . . In Chiapas, one in three families never received resources for reconstruction,” he said.
Cervantes said the government has handed out about 30,000 new stored-value cards to earthquake victims who didn’t receive the support they should have.
In the aftermath of the two devastating earthquakes, the previous federal government announced that people who lost their homes completely would receive financial support of 120,000 pesos (US $6,200 at today’s exchange rate) while owners of homes with repairable damage such as floor cracks or the partial collapse of a wall or roof would get 30,000 pesos.
In an interview with the newspaper El Economista, Cervantes said that unlike the previous government, the current administration is making sure that financial aid gets to the people who need it and is also following up to verify that the money is used for its intended purpose.
However – as the statistics on house repairs indicate – a lot of earthquake victims are still waiting for their homes to be fixed.
Karina Solís, a resident of the southern Mexico City borough of Tláhuac, told El Economista that her home sustained serious damage in the September 19 quake and that she and her family live in constant fear that it could collapse if another strong temblor were to occur.
Solís said that she and other affected residents of the capital who belong to the group United Victims of Mexico City are in a time-consuming and tiring battle with authorities to get them to repair and rebuild their homes and other damaged urban infrastructure.
“My life changed,” Solís said, explaining that if she’s not at work, she’s more often than not meeting with other earthquake victims to discuss what can be done to draw attention to their plight.
María Elena Vargas, a middle school Spanish teacher in the Mexico City borough of Iztapalapa, said that two years after the September 19 earthquake students of the Luis Pasteur 198 Secondary School are still taking classes in makeshift classrooms in the parking lot of a public park because repairs at the school haven’t been completed.
“They have been two years with a lot of difficulty. We’re not working in an optimal environment . . . If it’s difficult for the teachers, for the children it’s worse. When it’s hot the temperature in the prefabricated classrooms goes right up and apart from that they’ve been flooded,” she said.
Meanwhile, memorial services were held on Thursday to remember the victims of the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that rattled Mexico City and central states such as Puebla, Morelos and Tlaxcala.
One of the services was held outside the Unidad Multifamiliar Tlalpan, an apartment complex in southern Mexico City where several people were killed when one of the buildings collapsed. Almost 500 people were killed in the September 7 and 19 earthquakes and thousands more were injured.
In Mexico City and other parts of the country, citizens participated in a mass drill on Thursday in preparation for the next big earthquake. Thousands of buildings in the capital were evacuated during the drill, which is held annually on September 19 – the day that a huge earthquake devastated Mexico City in 1985.
Two years ago, the drill was held in the morning and just hours later, an earthquake struck. However, as a result of the epicenter’s proximity to Mexico City, buildings were already swaying – or falling – when the seismic alarm was activated.
Cancellations of government meetings and conferences have caused a 30% decline in the number of events coordinated by the Mexican Council of Industrial Meetings (COMIR) in the first eight months of the year.
COMIR President Jaime Salazar said the government’s “republican austerity” policy has directly affected the conventions industry, which contributes 1.8% of the country’s gross domestic product and is worth US $35 billion annually.
What’s more, commercial expositions in the automotive, infrastructure and pharmaceutical sectors have seen reductions of up to 25% as of August, due to the decline in domestic consumption.
“There are sectors like construction — which hosts 27 conventions a year in the country — that have had to cut their events budgets by 25%,” said Salazar.
Despite Tourism Secretary Miguel Torruco having emphasized “industry without chimneys,” meaning tourism, there have been no concrete actions to shore up the industry and avoid a bigger drop during the remainder of the year.
“This type of fall — and so we don’t get into polemics, this is very clear — this disaster is a consequence of the cancellation of all the activities and meetings of the federal government beginning this year, this directly hits the conventions industry,” said Salazar.
Mexico City is one of the most important centers for the conventions industry in Latin America, but it is projected to lose its status among the major events hosting cities in the region.
According to predictions by conventions company CWT Meetings and Events, the Mexican capital will be surpassed by Sao Paulo, Bogotá, Lima, and Rio de Janeiro as the main metropolises for organizing conventions.
Still, Salazar remains bullish about the future.
“Although the 2018 presidential elections in the two largest economies of Latin America — Brazil and Mexico — created a cautionary climate, the expectations for 2020-21 are much different: we’re expecting strong growth,” he said.
Latest growth forecast reduction comes from the OECD.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has cut its 2019 growth forecast for Mexico to just 0.5% from an outlook of 1.6% in May.
Published on Thursday, the OECD Interim Economic Outlook noted that “GDP growth has slowed sharply in Mexico this year, in part due to temporary factors such as strikes and higher policy uncertainty.”
The newspaper El Economista noted that the outlook for next year is also below the government’s 2% growth target, on which the 2020 Economic Package is predicated.
The OECD revision is the latest in a long line of downgrades to the 2019 outlook for the Mexican economy, which recorded 0.0% growth in the second quarter of the year.
The OECD also cut its 2019 and 2020 outlooks for Mexico’s largest trading partner, the United States, in Thursday’s report. The U.S. economy will grow by 2.4% this year and 2% in 2020, the OECD said, forecasts that are 0.4% and 0.3% lower, respectively, than those it made in May.
The Paris-based organization also said that “global growth is projected to slow to 2.9% in 2019 and 3% in 2020,” adding that “these would be the weakest annual growth rates since the financial crisis, with downside risks continuing to mount.”
Tropical storm Lorena strengthened to make landfall in Jalisco as a Category 1 hurricane early on Thursday, delivering torrential rain, strong winds and large swells to the Pacific coast of western and southern Mexico.
The system was downgraded soon after to a tropical storm but is expected to regain strength and a hurricane watch is now in effect for part of the Baja California peninsula.
The National Meteorological Service (SMN) said Lorena made landfall 13 kilometers to the east-northeast of Playa Pérula, Jalisco, at 4:00am.
The storm brought torrential rain, wind gusts in excess of 110 kilometers per hour and generated three to five-meter swells. The SMN warned that heavy rain could cause landslides and flash flooding.
The United States National Hurricane Center (NHC) said at 1:00pm CDT that Lorena was offshore about 100 kilometers northwest of Cabo Corrientes, Jalisco, and 415 kilometers southeast of Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur. Although the center of the storm is moving farther offshore, heavy rains continue along the southwestern coast of Mexico.
The storm is moving toward the northwest at 17 kilometers per hour but a turn to the west-northwest is expected tonight, the NHC said.
Lorena is forecast to regain hurricane strength in the next 24 hours and pass near or just south of the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula on Friday night.
A hurricane watch is in effect for the Baja California peninsula between La Paz and Santa Fe, while a tropical storm warning is in effect for Manzanillo, Colima, to Punta Mita, Nayarit, and the Baja peninsula between Los Barriles and Todos Santos.
The NHC said that coastal areas of the states of Michoacán, Colima and Jalisco can expect to receive 13-25 centimeters of rain over the next few days with maximum downpours of as much as 38 cm. The rain could produce life threatening flash floods and landslides.
Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro said on Twitter that Civil Protection services and the navy are attending to people in need but added that there have been no reports of loss of life. The Cuixmala river broke its banks in the municipality of La Huerta and flooded agricultural land, he said.
Baja California Sur Governor Carlos Mendoza Davis said that the state Civil Protection Council will meet in La Paz on Friday to monitor Lorena and advised residents to follow all instructions issued by authorities.
The inauguration ceremony held Wednesday inside Michoacán's new command center.
Federal and state authorities inaugurated a statewide security system in Michoacán on Wednesday that is the biggest of its kind in Latin America.
The C5-i system (short for Command, Communications, Computation, Control, Coordination and Intelligence) connects 11 sub-centers around Michoacán that allow authorities to monitor activities across the state.
Governor Silvano Aureoles told the inauguration ceremony in Morelia, the state capital, that he hopes to collaborate with the federal government on security policy through the C5-i.
“My government will not spare any cost to work and coordinate with the federal government on this strategy,” he said. “These installations are the result of a great effort that we have been making to address this complicated issue.”
He said he supports the deployment of 4,050 additional National Guard troops to Michoacán, but noted that state and municipal authorities also have a role to play in security.
“The National Guard itself has federal responsibilities, and will help us a lot in our local responsibilities,” he said. “But us, the municipal and state governments, need to do our part too.”
The governor also announced that one of the first tasks of the C5-i will be a pilot program to combat homicide.
“Learning from the experience of the anti-kidnapping program, we’re going to start a pilot program to fight homicide,” he said. “We’re also going to invest in the Attorney General’s Office, because it’s another vital part of any strategy against violence and impunity.”
Federal Public Security Secretary Alfonso Durazo praised the governor for his collaboration in creating the system.
“Governor Silvano Aureoles has been a great ally to the federal government in general, but today I want to recognize specifically his commitment to public security,” he said.
Durazo also thanked Michoacán business owners for agreeing to a tax increase of between 2% and 3% to pay for public security efforts.
The C5-i has 360 employees who monitor 18,250 emergency panic buttons in public places and over 6,000 security cameras around Michoacán.
Drug manufacturer's permission to produce cancer medication has been suspended.
A Mexico City children’s hospital is warning yet again of a possible shortage of chemotherapy drugs.
The director of the Federico Gómez Children’s Hospital of Mexico (HIMFG) has warned lawmakers of an imminent shortage of the cancer drug methotrexate. But he claims that the federal health regulator has the capacity to provide an immediate solution to the problem.
During a meeting of the Senate Health Commission at the Mexico City hospital on Tuesday, Jaime Nieto Zermeño told senators, parents of children with cancer and federal health officials that the hospital’s supply of the chemotherapy agent will only last for the next two or three weeks.
However, he said, the pharmaceutical company PiSA could supply the drug to the hospital immediately if its authorization had not been stripped by the Federal Commission for Protection Against Sanitary Risk (Cofepris).
“PiSA . . . has the capacity to supply methotrexate the moment that the commission releases its certificate of good practice . . . The methotrexate problem can be solved so that the children who require the medication are not left without it,” Nieto said.
Cofepris suspended the authorization of a Jalisco-based PiSA subsidiary in May following a bacteria outbreak. But in a statement on August 27, the commission said that PiSA could sell and distribute methotrexate made before the suspension was imposed. Cofepris chief Alonso Novelo didn’t attend the Senate Health Commission meeting.
National Action Party (PAN) Senator Martha Márquez told the newspaper El Universal that the “revealing fact” that emerged from the meeting is that PiSA has the capacity to provide methotrexate but cannot supply it due to the Cofepris sanction.
“That’s why there’s a shortage because they’re the only ones that have produced [the drug],” she said.
Márquez said that directors of other hospitals are also concerned about the shortage of medications but are too afraid to speak out because they believe that doing so could result in them losing their jobs.
She said the National Cancer Institute and the Siglo XXI National Medical Center are among the health care facilities where there are “similar situations” to that in the HIMFG.
The PAN senator added that a Health Secretariat finance official revealed at the meeting that resources are not reaching Mexico’s health institutes as they did in the past.
“He explained that the Secretariat of Finance SHCP used to transfer money to the Health Secretariat after July . . . but we’re now almost in October and that hasn’t happened . . .” Márquez said.
With methotrexate supplies at the former hospital on the verge of running out and PiSA unable to replenish them, the father of a cancer patient receiving treatment at the HIMFG revealed at yesterday’s meeting that at his and other parents’ request, oncology director Luis Enrique Juárez Villegas asked Cofepris to approve an “extraordinary importation” of the drug.
However, the health regulator has not yet responded, Israel Rivas Bastidas said.
He urged Cofepris to reinstate PiSA’s authorization to produce and distribute methotrexate so that child cancer patients can continue to receive the chemotherapy treatment they need.
“A concrete fact is that PiSA has the medication but [the company] is sanctioned . . . If I were the government, I would allow PiSA to release the medications . . . to save the lives of the children.”
Proposing that a bomb be dropped on the Mexico City zócalo during the Independence Day ceremony didn’t go over well in many quarters, and particularly with the Mexican airline Interjet, which has suspended the pilot who made the remark.
The airline temporarily suspended pilot Alí Ximena García and another employee after the former issued the threat on Wednesday.
“A bomb should fall in the zócalo . . . it would help all of us out,” said García in a Facebook post.
Another Interjet employee, Gabriela García Orozco, commented on the post, saying, “I support you.”
In a press release, Interjet said the two employees have been temporarily suspended for further evaluations.
“With respect to the unfortunate statements made by two of our employees, we want to say that following our security protocols, we have temporarily removed them from the airline as we proceed with a series of evaluations,” the airline said.
Alí Ximena García later uploaded a video to Facebook apologizing for her statement.
“I sincerely regret the comment I made, it was an immature comment,” she said. “people who are close to me, my family, my friends, know that I am against violence. I want to offer a sincere apology to my company, which is a great company, to the president, to Mexico, to all the people I truly offended, from the bottom of my heart, I apologize.”
