The pumping station that was shut down in protest by Yaquis.
Members of the Yaqui tribe closed the Rio Yaqui aqueduct in Sonora for 12 hours Tuesday night, leaving 80% of Guaymas and neighboring Empalme without water.
As a result, Sonora’s Water Commission (CEA) announced it would file a complaint against whoever was responsible, and that it considers leaving thousands without water during a health emergency a criminal act.
CEA executive Sergio Ávila Ceceña said protesters arrived at a pumping station number two, turned off the water and then relinquished control of the station in the morning without incident.
“We don’t have the authority to remove anyone, much less by force, nor do we have the faculty or the capacity to do so,” Ávila said. “As of now, we do not have names. Obviously the people who arrived did not identify themselves with a voter ID, they only stated that they came from of the Yaqui ethnic group,” he explained.
Water supply to Guaymas and Empalme is gradually being restored, officials said.
Yaqui tribal leaders were looking to pressure Guaymas Mayor Sara Valle Dessens to intervene in their dispute with the federal government as they seek compensation for ceding tribal land for the construction of various infrastructure projects.
They are also seeking to force the federal government to fulfill social development commitments for its eight Yaqui towns: Cócorit, Bácum, Vícam, Pótam, Tórim, Huírivis, Ráhum and Belem.
Last week protesters blocked federal Highway 15 and railway tracks in Sonora, stranding 2,176 rail cars.
Adelfo Regino Montes, head of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples, was sent to Sonora by President López Obrador to negotiate with the Yaquis, who have demanded the presence of Sonora Governor Claudia Pavlovich Arellano and Mayor Valle at talks.
Powerful leaders are fond of corruption investigations as a method for eliminating rivals. Instead of low political score-settling, they suggest an appeal to the moral high ground. Think of Xi Jinping’s sweeping purges. Or Vladimir Putin’s imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s top oligarch, on fraud and tax charges.
Mexico’s populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, appears to have taken a leaf from their book. Like Messrs Xi and Putin in the early days, he has made the campaign against corruption a signature theme, and the main targets have been political opponents.
In his boldest move to date, López Obrador has called upon two former presidents from opposition parties, Enrique Peña Nieto and Felipe Calderón, to testify in a scandal over alleged bribes paid by the state oil company Pemex. Emilio Lozoya, a former Pemex chief executive facing charges of money laundering, is cooperating with prosecutors. Almost daily, salacious leaks from what is said to be his testimony fill the Mexican press.
Let there be no mistake: a clean-up of Mexico’s political system is long overdue. For decades, corrupt politicians of all stripes have accumulated great wealth by milking a system that is rotten even by the low standards of the region. Transparency International’s annual corruption perceptions index ranks OECD nation Mexico in 130th place, tied with Mali and Myanmar.
But the way in which López Obrador has pursued his anti-corruption crusade has raised multiple red flags. Testimony from a confidential investigation is drip fed to the media almost daily, conveniently offering the president an opportunity to comment on a process that should be sub judice. The most explosive allegations so far compromise opposition politicians, while evidence of corruption within López Obrador’s government has gone mostly unpunished.
Manuel Bartlett, the powerful head of the state electricity company, denied accumulating a string of undeclared properties. He was exonerated in a probe conducted by a minister who was herself accused of accepting a plot of land from the city government and acquiring several properties while on an academic’s salary. (She denies wrongdoing).
The timing of the Pemex case is fortuitous. López Obrador’s opinion poll ratings were slipping, hurt by his disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic and by one of the emerging market world’s worst recessions. Voters in next year’s midterm elections threaten to rob him of his congressional majority.
“The priority right now is to distract from what is going on in the country, which is all very negative,” said Andrés Rozental, a former deputy foreign minister and now senior adviser at a non-governmental organization in the U.K. “It’s a circus for the people.”
So far, the strategy seems to be working. López Obrador’s popularity has begun to pick up as the Lozoya allegations knock the world’s third-highest coronavirus death toll off the front pages. The opposition is in disarray: a leading conservative governor has dismissed his private secretary after the man appeared in a video purporting to show him counting bundles of Pemex cash.
Calderón has not commented directly on the allegations but has accused López Obrador of waging a campaign of political persecution against him. Peña Nieto has not spoken publicly.
But improving his ratings and keeping his majority are not enough for López Obrador. His real aim is to remake Mexico, sweeping away the free-market, pro-business policies of the past four decades and replacing them with a vision of state-led development from the 1960s, epitomized by a reinvigorated Pemex.
“López Obrador’s political agenda is clear: he will go after the period of Mexican history he considers an aberration,” said Thomas Shannon, a former top U.S. state department official who is now co-chair of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank in Washington.
Key to this agenda is a reversal of the historic reforms passed under Peña Nieto, which opened oil exploration to foreign investment and weakened the hold of the powerful teachers’ union over hiring. If López Obrador can show that bribes greased the passage of the reforms, he can destroy their legitimacy.
“He wants to totally discredit the energy reforms and the education reforms,” said Raymundo Riva Palacio, a leading Mexican political commentator, of the Pemex corruption probe. “This is totally political.”
Former presidents, from left, Salinas, Calderón and Peña Nieto.
In a document submitted to the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) last week, former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya accuses three ex-presidents as well as former government ministers and federal lawmakers of corruption, much of which was allegedly linked to the payment of bribes by Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht.
The 63-page document — submitted to the FGR on August 11 and leaked to media outlets on Wednesday — makes explosive accusations against ex-presidents Enrique Peña Nieto, Felipe Calderón and Carlos Salinas Gortari as well as former cabinet ministers including Luis Videgaray and José Antonio Meade and several former National Action Party (PAN) lawmakers including two who are currently serving as state governors.
Lozoya, who was at the helm of the state oil company between late 2012 and early 2016 – the first half of the previous government’s six-year term, accuses Peña Nieto and Videgaray, the former president’s longest-serving finance minister, of leading a bribery scheme whose aim was to ensure that the previous government’s legislative agenda passed through Congress.
He said he was told by the two men in early 2013 that he would be required to deliver large sums of money to opposition party lawmakers to ensure the passage of the 2013-14 structural reforms, in particular the energy reform that opened up the sector to private and foreign companies.
“I was mainly involved in the approval of the energy reform delivering, through third parties, certain resources in transparent bank bags and [other] bags to senators who were members of the energy committee in the Senate and a federal deputy,” Lozoya wrote in the document, explaining that the money came from bribes paid by Odebrecht in exchange for lucrative contracts.
Former cabinet minister Videgaray, left, and one-time presidential candidate Anaya.
Lozoya said that Videgaray gave him specific instructions about who was to receive bribes.
According to the ex-Pemex CEO, who is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges, six former PAN lawmakers (five senators and one deputy) received payments in exchange for their support of government legislation.
They were Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca, the current governor of Tamaulipas; Francisco Domínguez, the current governor of Querétaro; Ricardo Anaya, a former federal deputy and PAN national president who was the party’s candidate in the 2018 presidential election; Salvador Vega Casillas; Ernesto Cordero; and Jorge Luis Lavalle Maury, a close collaborator of one of the men seen receiving money in the YouTube video.
Lozoya claimed that a group of four former PAN lawmakers including the two current governors acted as a virtual criminal racket by demanding US $50 million for their support of the government’s reforms.
The former Pemex chief said he met with the lawmakers in his office on several occasions on the instructions of Videgaray.
“Their demands amounted to … US $50 million in order to vote in favor of the energy reform. … They asked for appointments and took contractors close to them so that they would be given Pemex contracts. The mentioned legislators had a very aggressive attitude; they even threatened to boycott the energy reform if they didn’t receive their bribes,” Lozoya wrote.
The former oil company chief also accused Peña Nieto and Videgaray of fraud and embezzlement and depicted himself as a victim of their corruption.
“The president and the … finance minister used me to create a criminal conspiracy aimed at enriching themselves, not only by [taking] government funds, but also by extorting money from individuals and companies [and engaging in] fraud and deceit,” Lozoya wrote.
He also claimed that Calderón, Peña Nieto’s predecessor, had a cosy relationship with Odebrecht.
Lozoya wrote that Calderón’s government “put together solid schemes of corruption,” particularly with Odebrecht subsidiary Braskem, a petrochemical company.
He said the relationship between Calderón, who represented the PAN, and Braskem was so close that the former signed a more than 20-year-long contract with the latter authorizing Pemex to sell the Brazilian firm ethane “with an inexplicable discount of approximately 25%.”
Ex-PAN senators Domínguez, García and Lavalle. The first two are currently governors of Querétaro and Tamaulipas.
“In addition, he decided to give such importance to this illicit act that damaged the wealth of the nation that … he invited [Brazilian] president Lula da Silva to the signing of said contract” in 2010, Lozoya wrote.
He said that José Antonio Meade, who served as a minister in both the Calderón and Peña Nieto governments, and José Antonio González Anaya, his successor at Pemex and a Peña-era finance minister, were involved in the scheme to sell ethane to Braskem at a reduced price. Both men were on the Pemex board when the deal was struck.
A lot of PAN politicians received “large sums of money” in connection with the ethane deal, Lozoya said.
Odebrecht and its former CEO Marcelo Odebrecht – convicted and imprisoned on corruption charges – had a close relationship with the Mexican government for a decade, Lozoya said.
“It wasn’t a bribe-contract-bribe relationship. It was a deeper relationship. It was about exercising influence over the president of the republic and the legislature” he wrote.
Carlos Salinas, widely considered one of Mexico’s most corrupt presidents, was also involved in the corruption linked to Odebrecht, Lozoya said, accusing the former leader of acting on behalf of PAN lawmakers even though he represented the once-omnipotent Institutional Revolutionary Party.
The former Pemex chief also accused the ex-president, in office from 1988 to 1994, of influence peddling to try to secure Pemex contracts for his son.
Many of the former officials accused by Lozoya, including Calderón, Meade and Ricardo Anaya, quickly rejected the claims against them.
The leaking of the document comes after Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero said on August 11 – the date Lozoya’s document was submitted to the FGR – that the ex-Pemex CEO had indicated that some US $10 million in bribes paid by Odebrecht was used to fund Peña Nieto’s 2012 election campaign as well as pay off lawmakers for their support.
The FGR said it had launched an investigation into the leaking of the document, whose veracity it confirmed.
Lozoya, who was extradited to Mexico from Spain last month, is awaiting trial on charges related to his role in the Odebrecht corruption as well as Pemex’s purchase of a fertilizer plant in 2015 at an allegedly vastly inflated price.
FGR prosecutors have formally accused him of receiving a payment in excess of US $3 million from the president of Altos Hornos de México, which sold the plant to the state oil company.
Lozoya and Peña Nieto don’t have much reason to smile at present.
In the document he submitted to the FGR, Lozoya said that Peña Nieto and Videgaray negotiated the purchase price with the plant owner and that the two men intimidated him into signing off on the deal.
“It was evident that Luis Videgaray Caso had a personal interest in getting the deal done, either because he would obtain some possible illicit benefit, or to pay off favors from the past,” he wrote.
Lozoya, who has been given protected witness status and was not remanded in preventative custody, is one of two high-ranking members of the Peña Nieto government currently awaiting trial on corruption charges. The other is former cabinet minister Rosario Robles, who allegedly participated in the embezzlement scheme known as the “Master Fraud.”
President López Obrador has described the Lozoya case as “very important” because it will help to shed light on the corruption committed by past government officials. He said last week that Peña Nieto and Calderón should both testify in the case.
“The attorney general has disclosed that two ex-presidents are involved in possible acts of corruption. So what comes next is that they should be called to give evidence and Mr. Lozoya should present proof.”
Hurricane Genevieve was bringing high winds and intense rain to Baja California Sur Thursday morning, as it moved northwest parallel with the state’s Pacific coast.
Effects of the Category 1 hurricane were felt Wednesday and into the early hours of Thursday in Los Cabos on the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula.
According to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, Genevieve was 160 kilometers west-northwest of the tip of the Baja Peninsula with maximum sustained winds of 120 kilometers per hour at 8:00 a.m. local time. The cyclone was traveling northwest at 19 kilometers per hour. Genvieve will remain a hurricane through most of Thursday, forecasters predict, before deteriorating into a tropical storm as it moves over cooler water.
The hurricane warning that was in effect for the area between Los Barriles and Todos Santos has been replaced with a tropical storm warning for Los Barriles to Cabo San Lázaro.
Rains in the area have been nearly incessant since the predawn hours of Wednesday. Flooding temporarily closed the highway between San José del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, and one resident of Cabo San Lucas reported that his rain gauge overflowed at 254 millimeters. Another 50 to 100 millimeters of rain are expected to fall today bringing totals in some areas to 305 millimeters.
An automated observation site near the Cabo San Lucas Marina reported a wind gust of 74 kilometers per hour. Landslides were reported in several areas, several lamp posts were toppled by the winds overnight and people attempting to drive through flooded areas had to be rescued.
Genevieve has generated waves of eight to 10 meters high to pound Baja’s coast. Beaches and ports in Los Cabos have been closed since Tuesday.
Erick Santillán, director of Civil Protection for Los Cabos, said the hurricane was 60 kilometers from the peninsula at its closest point.
An estimated 8,500 tourists are in Los Cabos. On Tuesday, the airport reported 34 domestic and international flights were canceled.
Residents are encouraged to remain in their homes until the tropical storm warning is lifted.
So far, the only casualties reported due to the hurricane are a 15-year-old tourist from Nuevo León and the 30-year-old lifeguard who tried to save her from drowning in Cabo San Lucas Bay.
Public schools in Mexico are currently beginning to impart at least a fraction of the education they otherwise would to their students through educational public television programming.
As Jack Gooderidge wrote a few weeks ago, it’s a good enough effort in our current pinch, but not sustainable or likely impactful long-term. Especially at the lower levels, the purpose of school is just as much about learning to get along with other human beings as it is about learning to read and write.
Private schools, meanwhile, are trying to avoid bankruptcy as scores of families stop paying as a result of their own drastic decreases in income. Others have stopped simply because it doesn’t make economic sense to continue paying for a service that, by definition, cannot be given even close to the extent it’s intended to be. Thirty percent of private school students from last year have simply not re-enrolled, and 25% of private schools are at risk of closing permanently.
So far my daughter has had one day of class (there were apparently technical difficulties on the second day). Today will be the third day, and my first day “at school” with her since she was with her dad the previous two.
I’m a little worried about how it’s going to work. She’ll have around three hours a day of video-conferencing classes, and from what I can tell, either I or her father will need to be there actively participating for most of it.
We also need to get things set up each day: supplies must be bought or gathered and organized (and there are a lot of supplies — it’s first grade, after all); our own schedules must be cleared during that time.
The tablet we bought a few years ago is apparently not up for the job, which means she’ll need to be, when she’s with me, on my computer until we can find or afford another solution. As you know, I work as a writer and translator, and am also in the process of launching a new business. I need my computer, especially when she can be busy with something else for a few minutes.
On top of it, we’re paying the regular full price for her education even though we’ll mostly be imparting it to her in our respective homes while also trying to maintain our regular jobs. We’ve both been lucky enough to keep doing our jobs from home, but how does one both work and serve as elementary school teacher at the same time?
While she’s enrolled now in an excellent school, it’s new to all of us: we signed her up for it back in February when it was clear that her current school had every intention of continuing to raise already-high prices each year — now it feels like that happened in another world!
(The decision to move her came after the director said to me, in the most polite way possible of course, that if I was not OK with the price hikes, then I was welcome to send her somewhere else as there was a long line of families waiting to enroll their children in her place. Is it petty to feel a sense of cosmic justice at this point?)
The above are fairly bourgeoise problems. Many families are facing the exact same issues as we are, so at the very least we have the comfort of not being alone in our struggles. A lot of families, too, are facing far greater problems. Knowing that ours pale in comparison to those of many others keeps us from whining too much, because even though the situation is far less than ideal, at least we’ve got these expensive, inconvenient options.
Many families simply do not, and will slip through the cracks to join the crowd that was struggling with all their might to get their basic needs met even before the pandemic started. Forget education: they need food and safe housing. While valiant efforts are being made by inventive and selfless volunteers to serve this population, many children will simply continue to go without.
It’s hard, in general, to be selfless and generous when you’re struggling, and even those who’ve managed to weather the economic fall-out are likely struggling mentally and emotionally, not an ideal state of mind for being available for rescuing anyone.
In the end, I’m not too worried about my own daughter’s specific situation, other than the general sadness of her not being able to socialize and play with other kids. I worked as a teacher for many years and feel confident in my ability to educate her myself if need be, SEP paperwork or not. I’ve always had the possibility of homeschooling stored away in the back of my mind anyway, as I’d like us to be able to travel in the future without worrying too much about an official school year calendar. They’re simply not the circumstances I was imagining.
These are hard times. None of us knows when all of this will end, nor what things will look like when it finally does. What exactly, and how will we rebuild? In those moments between sighing heavily and pinching the bridge of our noses while we squeeze our eyes shut, when we can let got for a bit and think of creative solutions, let’s not forget to write them down. We’ll need all the ideas we can get.
Sarah DeVries writes from her home in Xalapa, Veracruz.
The responsibilities of Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, the government’s chief coronavirus strategist, could soon be significantly broader.
Under a Health Ministry proposal, the Federal Commission for Protection Against Health Risks (Cofepris) – Mexico’s most important health sector regulatory body – and 12 other health agencies including the National Addictions Commission and the National Blood Transfusion Center will come under the control of the department headed up by López-Gatell.
The coronavirus point man, a Johns Hopkins University-trained epidemiologist, is the head of the Health Ministry’s department of prevention and health promotion.
However, it does not yet appear to be an entirely done deal that López-Gatell will take the reins of Cofepris, which is responsible for approving the use and consumption of medications, food, beverages, dietary supplements and pesticides among other duties.
The newspaper Reforma reported that there is opposition within the federal government to the Health Ministry’s proposal, which has been sent to the National Commission for Regulatory Improvement for approval.
The newspaper said it saw an internal government document that was critical of the proposal, pointing out that regulatory bodies similar to Cofepris in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Colombia are decentralized, independent organizations.
The document, whose exact origin was not divulged, said that if Cofepris came under Health Ministry control, the risk of mismanagement and conflicts of interest in its daily operations would increase.
The regulator’s transparency, confidentiality, independence and impartiality could all be adversely affected, the government document said.
It warned that international bodies such as the World Health Organization could downgrade their rating of Cofepris if it were to be subjugated to Health Ministry control.
The document also said that international “collaboration and authorization schemes” could be adversely affected because Mexico’s importation and exportation of medicines, food and other products that could pose health risks must comply with strict quality and hygiene controls. The implication is that those controls could be compromised if Cofepris is not completely autonomous.
There is also opposition to the Health Ministry’s proposal from several opposition party lawmakers.
Martha Tagle, a federal deputy with the Citizens Movement Party, said that Cofepris’ independence is guaranteed by law and therefore its status cannot be changed via an “internal Health Ministry agreement.”
Reforma reported that Institutional Revolutionary Party deputies Ana Lilia Herrera Anzaldo and Frinné Azuara Yarzábal intended to oppose the Health Ministry proposal on the floor of the Congress.
National Action Party (PAN) Senator Martha Márquez said that the move to put the regulator under the control of López-Gatell was yet another attack on the autonomy of independent government bodies.
Josefina Salazar, a PAN deputy, made her thoughts clear on the Health Ministry proposal in a Twitter post.
“In a move of doubtful legality, they want to turn Hugo López-Gatell into a ‘super deputy minister,’ causing some entities … such as Cofepris to lose autonomy. [It would give] more power to the official responsible for the disastrous management of the pandemic in Mexico,” she wrote.
Fernando Belaunzarán, a deputy with the Democratic Revolution Party, described the plan as a “great gift” to the deputy minister but added that the move would have “grave consequences.”
In an ironic tone, he wrote on Twitter that the coronavirus czar should be given a cake with 60,000 candles because Mexico has almost recorded that number of Covid-19 deaths while López-Gatell has been in charge of the pandemic response.
Miguel Ángel Toscano, a former Cofepris chief, said it would be a “disaster” and “a backward step” to subordinate the regulator to the deputy minister’s department.
“It’s criminal ignorance, … I regret the absurd decision to say the least. While the [rest of the] world strengthens their health authorities, in Mexico they are undermined [and] overpowered. They’re bound to political decisions, not technical ones.”
In Chiapas, sugary drinks can be easier to find than bottled water. marcos arana
Nobody in the world drinks more Coca-Cola and other sugary drinks than the residents of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost and poorest state.
According to a 2019 study by the Chiapas and Southern Border Multidisciplinary Research Center (Cimsur), residents of the southern state drink an average of 821.25 liters of soda per person per year.
Broken down, the immensity of the quantity seems even more astonishing: every man, woman and child in Chiapas drinks an average of 3,285 — yes, three thousand two hundred and eighty-five – 250-milliliter cups of soda a year, according to the study.
The Cimsur study found that the sugary drink consumption rate in Chiapas is more than five times higher than the national rate of 150 liters per person per year.
Residents of the United States drink an average of 100 liters of soft drink a year, the study found, while the global average is 25 liters, just 3% of the consumption level in Chiapas.
Marcos Arana, a researcher at the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition, described Chiapas as the “epicenter” of Mexico’s “soft drink consumption epidemic.”
Consumption of refrescos, as soft drinks are known, is particularly high in the Los Altos region, where the majority of residents are indigenous people who mostly live in rural towns and villages.
Coca-Cola, which has a bottling plant in San Cristóbal de las Casas, is the undisputed “king of kings” in the region’s soda market.
According to the Cimsur study, among the reasons why Coca-Cola and other refrescos are so popular in Chiapas are marketing campaigns in indigenous languages – mainly Mayan – and limited access to clean drinking water.
In a 2018 report, The New York Times said that some neighborhoods in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Los Altos’ regional hub, have running water just a few times a week, forcing many households to buy additional water from tanker trucks.
Coke’s status is such that it is used as an offering in traditional rituals. marcos arana
“So, many residents drink Coca-Cola, which … can be easier to find than bottled water and is almost as cheap,” the report said.
Similarly, Arana, the medical researcher, told BBC Mundo that “Coca-Cola is the most available product in Los Altos.”
“One has to walk a greater distance to buy tortillas or anything else,” he said. “The number of points of sale is excessive, there is no control, and prices are reduced by up to 30%.”
The discount effectively eliminates the federal tax of 1 peso per liter on sugary drinks, which was imposed in January 2014 as part of efforts to reduce consumption and associated health problems such as diabetes and obesity.
Arana said the widespread availability of cheap soda as well as advertising that specifically targets vulnerable Chiapas residents have created an addiction in many people who now see sugary beverages as an everyday necessity rather than a luxury or treat. A 2016 study found that 3% of babies in Chiapas are given Coca-Cola by their mothers when they should only be drinking breast milk, he said.
Unsurprisingly, diabetes is a major problem in Chiapas, claiming more than 3,000 lives in the state per year, according to the Times report.
Jaime Page Pliego, the author of the Cimsur study, told BBC Mundo that he heard from residents of Tenejapa, a municipality near San Cristóbal, that diabetes and heart disease were not a problem there until the construction of a paved road to the town that allowed the easy distribution of soft drinks and junk food.
It’s now customary for Tenejapa residents to drink two or three liters of Coca-Cola while on their lunch break from working in the fields, he said.
Page added that when he asks chiapanecos, as residents of the southern state are called, why they drink so many soft drinks, he usually hears the same answers: “Because I like it; it fills me up; I miss it when I don’t drink it; I can’t stop drinking it.”
“Even diabetics … acknowledge that they keep drinking it. … They can’t imagine life without soft drinks. It’s truly a tragedy,” he said.
Soda, and especially Coca-Cola, has also been given a role in the religious lives of indigenous Mayan people in Chiapas.
Page explained that Coke has replaced pox, a corn and sugar cane liquor, as an offering to the Gods in some traditional indigenous ceremonies and rituals.
Welcome to Tenejapa, Coca-Cola country. marcos arana
“Especially in … healing rituals, [alcohol] was substituted with a soft drink [Coke], which has a sweet smell similar to pox,” Page said. “It has become the main offering for the nutrition of the gods.”
The elevation of the humble Coke to religious artifact has increased its prestige to a point that a person who is offered a different soft drink at a social or political gathering may consider it a slight.
“He who offers Coca-Cola has a good status in the community. If he offers another refresco in areas where this brand dominates, he is seen” in a poor light, Page said.
Arana told BBC Mundo that in order to reduce consumption of sugary drinks in Chiapas, more needs to be done to educate communities about the risks associated with their consumption. He also said that traditional foods and beverages, such as the corn drink pozol, need to be promoted more and that access to water must be guaranteed.
In addition, the researcher said that steps should be taken to reduce the availability of Coke and other soft drinks.
“If the authorities do something like canceling the concession for the production of Coca-Cola in the area or at least [force the company] to reduce the volume of production, it will encourage a more positive future” and help to lessen the addiction to sugar, Page said.
Santiago López Jaramillo, Latin America director of the International Council of Beverage Associations, said the council wants to work with Mexican authorities to address problems associated with excessive soft drink consumption.
Alejandro Prieto took 100 photos of the elusive jaguar for his project Jaguar Story. This is one of his favorites. Alejandro Prieto
For several months, photographer Alejandro Prieto sought to capture images of a jaguar in the wild and had set up camera traps across western and southern Mexico in hopes of getting a picture of one of the elusive big cats.
When he finally got that first image, it showed only the tail of a jaguar, disappearing into the background. But it was a good start.
“For me, it was a huge success,” Prieto reflected in a phone interview. “After that photograph, I started to have more images. I started to be more effective, more successful.”
Prieto ultimately took around 100 images of jaguars in a photographic journey called Jaguar Story. Documenting the endangered big cats in remote areas of such states as Nayarit and Campeche, he also sought to evoke the impact of the jaguar on indigenous and Hispanic culture in Mexico.
“I think I achieved what I wanted,” he said, adding that while it took “more [time] than I was expecting, it was definitely worth it.”
Even though he finished the project several years ago, he remains interested in the jaguar, which he calls “an iconic species.”
A separate photo, “Another Barred Migrant,” shows a projection of a jaguar onto an image of the border wall between Mexico and the US. Created for his Border Wall Project, the photo earned Prieto a wildlife photographer of the year award for 2019 from the Natural History Museum of London — his second straight win in what he calls “the Oscars of wildlife photography.”
More recently, another photo from the project “Roadrunner Approaching the Border Wall” earned a second-place award in the World Press Photo 2020 contest.
A lifelong animal enthusiast, the 43-year-old Guadalajara native has captured images of such diverse fauna as the axolotl, flamingo and sea lion during his career. For Jaguar Story, he turned his lens to a notoriously camera-shy subject.
“I talked to local people who lived in a jungle all their lives,” Prieto recalled. “They had never seen a jaguar their entire life. We would see tracks, marks, and know they were there, but the cats are just too shy. They’re very smart. Before you see them, they see you. That’s why it’s difficult to get to see one.”
The project required a significant degree of preparation and patience. Prieto trekked up mountains and through jungles to set up his camera traps, aided by local residents and researchers.
Guadalajara-born photographer Alejandro Prieto.
“Many places were really very remote,” Prieto said. “We would walk for hours.”
The hours-long walks, the mountain climbs and the jungle excursions eventually yielded that first photograph about five months in. Then more images started flowing as Prieto began to learn more about his subject — such as in Calakmul, home to an archaeological site and the largest number of jaguars in all of Mexico.
“We would start to see signs of jaguars,” Prieto said, such as their tracks, and their urine on trees. “I heard them twice. It happens in their mating season, a really strong noise when the female communicates with the male. It’s a sound you can [hear] from the long distance of a mountain. Hearing this sound is something I will never forget.”
He’s also amazed by how adaptable the jaguar is, able to survive in a variety of terrain, from the desert to the jungle to the mountains. His favorite camera-trapping locations include the Sierra de Vallejo in Nayarit as well as Calakmul.
“This animal needs a lot of terrain to survive,” Prieto explained. “It does not stay in one place. It’s constantly moving.”
Humans have negatively impacted the jaguar’s journey, Prieto said, listing such factors as habitat loss and ranchers who defend their livestock from predators. The number of jaguars has dipped from a “very large” number 30 to 40 years ago to only 3,500 today, he said.
“[People are] taking the environment of a territorial animal that needs a big territory, that is losing the jungles. [People are] taking their habitat, which is still the main problem, not just for the jaguar but most of the wild animals.” And, he said, there have been “decades, as well, of illegal hunting.”
He also noted that if a jaguar kills a rancher’s livestock, the rancher might poison the carcass, which “could kill not just one, but many other predators that feed at the same carcass. [The rancher does] not really care about this.”
Asked whether the jaguar poses a danger for humans, Prieto said, “I think there is no record here in Mexico that a jaguar attacked one single person … I think Brazil has had a couple of [recorded instances], some specific situations.”
He added, “Many, many people think jaguars are dangerous. I have talked to people [who have] killed jaguars, communities [who have] killed them because they thought jaguars were going to attack them. It’s absolutely false. They try to run away from people. It’s something that we [Prieto and the western Mexico-based nonprofit Alianza de Jaguar] try to tell people.”
Historically, jaguars and humans seem to have had a closer understanding of each other.
La Tigrada, a jaguar festival held annually in Chilapa, Guerrero. Alejandro Prieto
“Jaguars are very important not only for pre-Hispanic culture and for Mayans, but very important for some other cultures as well,” Prieto said.
One of his favorite photos is of a jaguar crossing in front of an archaeological site.
“It’s an image I like very much,” Prieto said, adding that it seeks to convey the idea that “the jaguar is an ancient animal, passing in front of a site of ancient culture.”
Some ancient ties have parallels today, such as in jaguar-connected festivals across Mexico. Prieto visited and photographed one — La Tigrada in the town of Chilapa de Álvarez, Guerrero. La Tigrada takes place every August 15, the same day as the Feast of the Assumption. As a Guerrero state website explains, the relatively young festival is a fusion of religion and culture, honoring the Virgin Mary and the Mesoamerican Mother Earth and Tepēyōllōtl — the latter an Aztec mountain god who was turned into a jaguar.
The municipality of Chilapa was described as “one of the most lawless areas of Mexico” by the Los Angeles Times this year. The festival seems like a respite: Prieto describes La Tigrada as a memorable event with such activities as a parade, singing and dancing, with participants wearing unique jaguar costumes.
“They do many different activities,” he said. “Everything is related to jaguars. I think they’re invoking the jaguar gods so they can have good crops, a good rainy season. It’s really amazing because every person does their [own] costume and every costume is different.”
Prieto traveled north for his Border Wall Project and a different look at the jaguar — this time at the dwindling numbers in the region and the environmental impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. According to Prieto, completing the structure will doom the many migratory species native to the area.
“There’s still no wall in the mountains,” Prieto said, referring to the Huachuca Mountains in Arizona and Sonora. “But the intention is to cover them with a wall. Once [they’re] closing off the area with a wall, it will be the end of the jaguar in the U.S. There are only two to three individuals, all males.”
As he explained, jaguars “need to move to survive, they need to move to get water, they need to move to get mates, they need to move to get food, to get the right environment to survive.”
Reflecting on the decline of the local jaguar population, Prieto sought to photograph a jaguar there but could not find one.
“After a certain time, I realized it was going to be impossible,” he said.
As a result, he found an image of a wild jaguar he had previously taken — he said it might be from either Calakmul or San Luis Potosí — and projected it onto a photo of the Mexican side of the wall, near the Huachuca Mountains in Sonora, along the Arizona border. He titled the photo “Another Barred Migrant.”
‘Another Barred Migrant’ won Prieto an international award. Alejandro Prieto
“I wanted to do it in the same place, in the same area, where jaguars crossed the mountains,” Prieto said. “They would cross the top of the mountains, down the mountains, between states.” He described the photograph as “a way to say, these cats are still here, but they will not be able to be [here] any more if [people] continue to do this.”
The Natural History Museum of London took notice, and last year Prieto was among the winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, his second straight time receiving the honor.
“It’s something that really gets me proud,” Prieto said. “At the same time, [it’s] like a platform. Your picture can be shown to millions and millions of people around the world. It’s very, very important to me … What I did with the photograph, my main goal, is to focus on conservation.”
Prieto is now working on a new photographic endeavor with a similar goal: The Gardener, a look at the tapir, which he calls the gardener of the jungle.
Comparing the tapir to “a little elephant,” he said that the species is “very, very important for jungles” because, like a gardener, tapirs “take care of the jungle.” Yet, he said, they are in danger of extinction.
It will be similar to the jaguar project, Prieto said. “Of course, it’s a different situation. Different things are happening to [the jaguar]. But the habitat loss is the same.”
Jennifer Doncsecz and her husband arrive in Cancún. She looks forward to returning for Labor Day.
Mexico’s health and safety protocols appear to be inspiring confidence in travelers, making some feel even safer than they would at home.
That’s the experience travel agent Jennifer Doncsecz had when she visited Cancún’s Hyatt Ziva.
Although she was initially hesitant to make the trip, Doncsecz told Travel Weekly that by day 2 in Mexico “I actually had moments that I didn’t think about Covid — for the first time in 4 1/2 months. I was like, this is really bizarre, I’m not worried about it.” Doncsecz looks forward to her next trip south of the border on the Labor Day weekend.
For Americans, Mexico has become the top post-quarantine destination among the relatively few countries that are accepting American tourists.
Tourism officials, resorts and local governments in Mexico have banded together to implement health protocols, and they are marketing those efforts in order to entice tourists to return.
And for some, the strategy is working. “All of our hotels are now at the maximum allowed occupancy,” said Armin Kaestner of the RIU Hotels chain. “It’s great and it’s not, because [allowable capacity] is only 30%.”
Kaestner reports RIU’s Mexican properties have twice the number of bookings as its properties in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Aruba and the Bahamas.
The Cancún-Riviera Maya region has registered the highest number of bookings, which is not surprising given it has the highest number of hotels in Mexico, but Los Cabos has led the highest tourism rebound on a percentage basis.
“Little by little, things have been getting back to normal. It’s very interesting,” said Rodrigo Esponda of the Los Cabos Tourism Board.
Research shows that arrivals in Los Cabos in July were at 27% of their July 2019 levels, a dismal figure unless you compare it with Cancún, which is at 15%, or Puerto Vallarta which has 18% of the visitors it did last year. It is also a big comeback from April through June’s nearly non-existent numbers.
While domestic travel within the United States tops the post-lockdown list, travel to Mexico comes in second. Ray Snisky of Apple Leisure Group Vacations says August’s Cancún bookings are down just 8% year over last year.
“There’s a real push for people saying, ‘Let me get on this trip before summer ends,'” Snisky says. “I think this close-in booking trend will continue into the fall, although I don’t think it will be as dramatic as in the summer.”
David Lavigne of Delta Vacations says Mexico’s appeal “is a very fluid trend at this point.” Airlines are transporting half the usual number of passengers and hotels are capped at 25% to 30%, but at least they, and most of their beaches, are open.
The Mexican Center for Environmental Law (Cemda) and Greenpeace have obtained a new injunction against federal government measures intended to limit the participation of renewable energy companies in the domestic market.
A definitive suspension order granted by an administrative court judge invalidates an agreement published by the National Energy Control Center (Cenace) in late April that suspended national grid trials for renewable energy projects under the pretext that the reliability of supply had to be guaranteed during the coronavirus crisis.
Cemda and Greenpeace previously won an injunction against the Cenace and Sener measures in late June but the Energy Ministry has indicated that it will challenge rulings against it.
As a result of last Friday’s ruling, the two environmental groups said in a joint statement that renewable energy projects that have already been approved will be able to continue as long as they comply with existing laws and respect the human rights of the residents of the locations where they are being built.
Cemda research coordinator Anaid Velasco said that both the Cenace agreement and the Sener policy constituted a backward step in Mexico’s progress toward the promotion and greater use of renewable energy.
María Colín, a Greenpeace environmental law expert, said the aim of the legal battle against the anti-renewable measures was to guarantee the human right to affordable and accessible clean energy. She also said that community-based renewable projects can help to combat the energy poverty that afflicts millions of households.
Private energy companies, including those in the renewables sector, generate almost half of Mexico’s electricity at much lower costs than the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) but have failed to win over President López Obrador.
He said in May that private companies, including those that generate clean, renewable energy from sources such as wind and solar, have provided “nothing” to the national electricity system.
López Obrador, a staunch nationalist, has pledged to “rescue” the CFE as well as Pemex and appears unperturbed that consolidation of control of the energy market in the state-owned companies will damage private investment.
