AMLO suggests investigation into what stores pay grocery baggers

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November 8, 2019

Barzonistas at a LeBarón family ranch last year. — Barzonistas at a LeBarón family ranch in April 2018.

A criminal organization has been mentioned as a possible suspect in Monday’s ambush of a Mormon family in which nine women and children were killed.

But the LeBarón family of Chihuahua has few friends among members of a farmers’ group called El Barzón.

The family’s ranch was attacked last year by neighboring farmers who claimed that illegal water wells had been drilled on the property.

More than 100 members of El Barzón broke into the LeBarón family’s walnut farm in the municipality of San Buenaventura in April 2018.

Video footage shows a convoy of pickup trucks entering the La Mojina ranch, where barzonistas, as the members of the farmers’ group are known, set a house and warehouses on fire, destroyed 11 water wells and ran over small walnut trees.

El Barzón farmers at La Mojina, a LeBarón ranch, in April last year.

Another video shows the pickup trucks traveling along a dirt road on the ranch before confronting members of the LeBarón family.

According to Julian LeBarón – who provides a voiceover to the footage broadcast by television station Televisa – the barzonistas broke down fences to enter the ranch.

LeBarón said that members of his family tried to stop the farmers and talk to them but they responded by shouting “racist” and “xenophobic” remarks at them.

He said the barzonistas subsequently began throwing stones, after which his brother fired warning shots into the air and ground.

The LeBarón family, part of a breakaway Mormon community that has lived in northern Mexico for decades, has allegedly drilled more than 2,000 water wells on its ranches without the permission of the National Water Commission (Conagua) or by obtaining permits through the payment of bribes.

Conagua said that 740 wells were closed in Chihuahua in 2016 and 2017 because they had been drilled illegally.

Momento del enfrentamiento entre familia LeBarón y barzonistas - En Punto con Denise Maerker

Watch this video on YouTube

In 2018, Conagua data showed that 14 of 61 aquifers in Chihuahua were overexploited. Several of them are located in municipalities where the LeBarón family owns ranches.

Before the ranch attack, El Barzón claimed that the LeBarón family planned to drill 50 new wells on the property for the irrigation of walnut trees, which require significant amounts of water.

The farmers’ group has long claimed that the LeBarón family’s illegal use of water resources will leave communities without any. The family denies any wrongdoing.

After last year’s attack at San Buenaventura, the then leader of El Barzón, Eraclio Rodríguez (now a federal lawmaker with the ruling Morena party), said that he and other members of the farmers’ group received death threats from the LeBarón family.

“They told us that our heads now had a price on them. We asked the authorities to intervene as soon as possible,” he said.

There has been some speculation that the attack on Monday that left three women and six children dead could be linked to the long-running water dispute.

However, federal authorities have said that La Línea, a gang with links to the Juárez Cartel, may have mistaken the vehicles in which the women and children were traveling for those of a splinter cell of the Sinaloa Cartel known as Los Salazar. Family members reject the hypothesis.

President López Obrador said on Friday that a special team has been formed to investigate the case, which triggered an offer from United States President Donald Trump to help Mexico “wage war” against the cartels.

“. . . They’re analyzing all the hypotheses, all of them, nothing is ruled out, they’re gathering information,” the president said.

“. . . There is nothing that prevents a thorough investigation . . . There is no limit because of an agreement with any criminal or political group or because of vested interests . . .” López Obrador declared.

Source: La Jornada (sp), Milenio (sp)

National Lottery director aims to eliminate 540-million-peso deficit

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November 8, 2019

The National Lottery's headquarters in Mexico City.

The National Lottery plans to eliminate its 540-million-peso (US $28-million) deficit with austerity, efficiency and honesty, according to the institution’s general director, Ernesto Prieto Ortega.

Almost a year into his term, Prieto dreams of the lottery returning to its glory days and being able to make donations that benefit all Mexican citizens.

“The lottery has greatly supported the Mexican state,” Prieto said in an interview with the newspaper El Universal. “In the age of Benito Juárez, for example, they did three drawings for the construction of the Mexico-Toluca railway, which was made possible by lottery and government resources.”

With its 250th anniversary coming up on August 7, 2020, the National Lottery is one of Mexico’s oldest institutions, and the pending birthday has encouraged lottery and government leaders to revive the struggling organization.

“The president gave us two instructions: the fusion of the National Lottery with the Public Assistance Forecasts office in order to improve economic conditions and have funds for public assistance, and that we take care of lottery ticket vendors, not leave them unprotected.”

In order to achieve liquidity, Prieto enacted austerity measures, such as reducing the salaries of high-ranking employees and cutting unnecessary office costs, like floral arrangements, meals and rental cars.

Prieto’s strategy also includes creating new lottery products, such as selling tickets online, and renewing interest in the lottery among young people.

“Another strategy to bring in more money is to reach people aged 18-40 because they aren’t buying lottery tickets, and many don’t even know about it. So we’re sponsoring the apprenticeship program ‘Youth Building the Future’ to get more young people to buy lottery tickets.”

Said Prieto, “What we hope to be able to do is generate resources in order to be able to make donations again.”

Of the lottery’s eight products, only one made a profit last year, and that was just 2.1%, or 12.8 million pesos, according to the Federal Auditor’s Office.

Source: El Universal (sp)

Mammoth traps near Mexico City are first ever found

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November 8, 2019

Mammoth bones that were found in a trap in México state. edith camacho, inah

Two mammoth traps have been found in Tultepec, México state, demonstrating that hunters in the late Pleistocene era used more sophisticated hunting methods than previously thought.

The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said this week that the traps are the first to be discovered anywhere in the world.

Workers found the 1.7-meter-deep pits in January on a municipal property about 40 kilometers north of Mexico City while preparing the land for a garbage dump.

During a 10-month excavation by INAH archaeologists, more than 800 bones from at least 14 mammoth skeletons as well as the jawbone and two vertebrae of a camel and the tooth of a horse were found in the traps, which were built about 15,000 years ago.

Archaeologists detected a spear wound on the front of one of the mammoth skulls they found.

Mammoth remains near Tultepec, México state. — Mammoth remains in Tultepec, México state. Luis Córdoba Barradas, inah

It is believed that hunters may have steered the now-extinct mammals into the traps using torches and branches.

Archaeologists previously thought that hunters only killed mammoths when they were easy targets because they were hurt or had been trapped naturally in swamplands or mud.

INAH director Diego Prieto said the discovery “represents a watershed, a turning point in what until now we imagined to be the interaction between hunter-gatherers with these huge herbivores.”

Luis Córdoba Barradas, leader of the excavation team, said that archaeologists believe that there could be three more mammoth traps in the area.

INAH archaeology coordinator Pedro Sánchez Nava said the site won’t be opened to the public but the remains will go on display at the Mammoth Museum in Tultepec.

A mammoth skeleton was previously found in Tultepec in 2016 just two kilometers from the site where the traps were discovered.

Bones from 14 mammoth skeletons have been found. Luis Córdoba Barradas, inah

Remains of the extinct mammals, ancestors of modern-day elephants, have also been found in other parts of Mexico including Puebla and Jalisco.

Source: El Universal (sp), BBC (en)

Self-government, lack of personnel among prison problems

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November 8, 2019

A Mexico prison: rights commission identifies deficiencies in many.

Self-government, insufficient personnel, poor hygiene and deficiencies in health services and rehabilitation programs are among the problems in Mexico’s prisons, according to a report by the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH).

CNDH president Luis Raúl González Pérez said that despite legal efforts, corruption and impunity prevail in the Mexican prison system.

“. . . there is an enormous gap between the semantics and the reality,” he said. “The rule of law in Mexico is weak. There is indifference toward compliance with the law, and one of its effects is impunity and the other is corruption.”

The institution’s 2019 assessment of penitentiaries inspected 203 of the country’s 309 prisons, which account for 94% of the total prison population. It included male, female and mixed-gender facilities.

A third of all state facilities were found to operate under self-government or collaborative government with prison authorities.

Insufficient staffing was found in 72% of state prison facilities, and in about two-thirds there were cases of prisoners processing other prisoners along with deficiencies in equipment and hygiene in the living quarters.

The study also found significant deficiencies in the prevention and attention to violent incidents in half of the facilities inspected, and bribery and corruption in 40% of them.

Insufficient personnel were found in 16 of the 17 federal prisons, and many were found to be lacking in health services.

The federal facilities with the poorest ratings in the study were in Durango, Veracruz, Jalisco, Michoacán and México state.

The worst among state prisons were those in Reynosa, Tamaulipas; Huixtla, Chiapas; Zihuatanejo, Guerrero; and Zacatlán and Tecamachalco in Puebla.

Source: Milenio (sp)

Behave yourselves, AMLO tells students as losses near 500 million pesos

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November 8, 2019

President López Obrador told teacher training college students who have blocked railways and hijacked delivery vehicles in Michoacán to behave themselves as businesses reported losses of 500 million pesos (US $26 million).

He also called for authorities to speak with the protesting normal school students and listen to their demands.

“Open a dialogue, the government should be open to dialogue, so that the situation doesn’t affect third parties and we don’t end up as the oppressors, like previous administrations,” he said.

“But at the same time, we all need to act responsibly, all of us need to behave ourselves.”

Protests by students of the Vasco de Quiroga Rural Normal School in Morelia on October 21 have spread to Uruapan and Arteaga, also located on the railway line.

Businesses report that 19 trains have been blocked on the Lázaro Cárdenas-Morelia line, halting the movement of almost 1,800 shipping containers full of products, including Pemex gasoline.

Spokesperson for the state’s Industrialists’ Association, Diana Pinette, said the auto industry has been hit hard because the stoppages have detained the delivery of 2,357 new vehicles.

Head of the association, Carlos Alberto Enríquez Barajas, requested that López Obrador crack down on the protesters.

In addition to blocking tracks, the students have also hijacked delivery vehicles, taking four more on Thursday on the Morelia-Pátzcuaro highway.

Two of the vehicles were property of the La Violeta chain of supermarkets, and were reported to have been carrying over 500,000 pesos (US $26,000) worth of groceries.

Michoacán Attorney General Adrián López said his office has received 25 complaints against the students, but ruled out using public force to remove the blockades.

The federal Attorney General’s office (FGR) has opened an investigation into the students’ activities.

Meanwhile, students of the Lázaro Cárdenas del Río Normal School in Tenería, México state, seized a toll booth on the Toluca-Atlacomulco highway to protest promised dialogues that they say never came to fruition.

Sources: Reforma (sp), Milenio (sp), Milenio (sp)

Leak blamed for alerting Mexico City cartel leader to search

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November 8, 2019

'El Cindy' and Liliana Pérez after their arrest in August.

Corruption among Mexico City police may have thwarted the arrest of another cartel leader.

The head of the Tláhuac Cartel was able to avoid arrest this week because he was probably informed of a police operation ahead of time.

According to an official report obtained by the newspaper Milenio, Carlos “El Cindy” Alejandro N. was notified of a search warrant the day before it was to be carried out at his home in Mexico City borough of Tláhuac on Wednesday.

A witness told authorities that at 11:00am on Tuesday “El Cindy” and a woman approached him in a black Mazda pickup truck outside the residence.

They asked the witness to accept rental payments for them while they were away, “since they knew there would be a raid on the house . . . so they wouldn’t return for a few days . . .”

The couple took various possessions from their apartment, including clothing.

Upon hearing the witness’s testimony, the Mexico City attorney general has opened an investigation into a possible leak of information pertaining to the operation.

During the search, police seized a black backpack containing 100 bags of “green plant material with characteristics of marijuana” and a blue plastic bag with 90 bags of the same substance.

The witness told authorities that the house is owned by the cartel leader’s wife, Diana Karen N., known as “The Princess of Tláhuac,” the daughter of the cartel’s founder, Felipe de Jesús “El Ojos” Pérez Luna.

Pérez Luna was shot dead during a confrontation with marines and police in Tláhuac in July 2017.

Diana Karen is currently in jail for a drug trafficking conviction.

“El Cindy” was arrested on August 29 along with Liliana Pérez, another daughter of “El Ojos,” in an operation that police said would dismantle the cartel’s command structure. However, he was released less than two months later.

Police corruption was blamed last month when the leader of the Unión de Tepito Cartel avoided arrest during a raid on a cartel bunker.

Source: Milenio (sp)

Profits not excessive, say analysts, after AMLO urges moderation

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November 8, 2019

Minero, left: government doesn't understand business; AMLO: profits should be reasonable.

Profits made by companies in Mexico are not excessive, analysts said after President López Obrador urged moderation from the private sector.

“The private sector should, of course, do business, it’s their main role but at the same time seek reasonable profits, respect the legal framework and pay taxes, all that helps a lot,” López Obrador said on Thursday.

Data shows that company profits in Mexico are not excessive compared to those made in other countries in the region and beyond.

In the third quarter of 2019, the average profit margin of the 35 largest companies listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange was 7.19%, the newspaper El Financiero reported.

During the past decade, the average profit margin of the 35 companies included in the S&P/BMV index has been 7%.

Comparable indexes in Argentina, Brazil and China showed that third quarter profit margins were 17.3%, 9.3% and 7.5% respectively.

In Chile and Japan, profit margins were lower than Mexico between July and September but only slightly. Their profit margins were 6.6% and 6% respectively.

Jacobo Rodríguez, director of financial analysis at Black Wallstreet Capital, told El Financiero that the profits of large companies operating in the United States exceeded expectations in the latest reporting period and are greater than those made by companies in Mexico.

According to data from Bloomberg, the average profit margin of the companies listed on the S&P 500 index is 9.92%.

“The objective of any company is to be profitable so I don’t think that profits [in Mexico] are excessive,” Rodríguez said.

“In recent years, [companies] have tried to be more socially responsible but I don’t think that’s related to profit generation,” he added.

Juan Carlos Minero, chief investment officer at Black Wallstreet Capital, said the government is ignorant about how the private sector operates.

“The problem is that the government, mainly López Obrador, doesn’t understand finances, doesn’t understand profits, and that’s what business is,” he said.

Source: El Financiero (sp)

State wants to revive Tijuana desalination plant

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November 7, 2019

The Colorado River-Tijuana aqueduct: not enough water.

Tijuana needs a desalination plant for its long-term survival, said a senior official with the Baja California Public Services Commission (Cespt).

Less than a week after being sworn in by new Governor Jaime Bonilla, Rigoberto Laborín Valdez told a press conference that desalination is the only solution to Tijuana’s water supply problem.

Strategies proposed in the past, such as improvements to the aqueduct from the Colorado River to Tijuana and recycling water, are not viable alternatives, said Tijuana’s new Cespt delegate.

The official said that even if work on the aqueduct boosts water flows from the Colorado River in Mexicali to between 185 and 190 million cubic meters per year, that quantity will only meet demand until 2024.

“What are we going to do [after that]? Does Tijuana come to an end? Do we tell people not to come? We have to seek viable alternatives. We have until 2024; a desalination plant takes three years to build . . .” Laborín said.

Such a plant, proposed previously by former governor Francisco Vega, is an “imminent necessity” and the only “viable alternative so that this city can survive,” he said.

The Cespt chief said the aim would be to build a plant that can provide 6.6 cubic meters of desalinated water per second, which he claimed could meet the needs of five million people, more than double Tijuana’s current population.

“We have to plan 50 years in advance. This vision is to solve a fundamental problem in the long term . . .” Laborín said.

If the project goes ahead, it will be the second desalination plant in the northwest part of Baja California.

Construction of a privately-funded plant began in March 2018 in Playas de Rosarito, 20 kilometers south of Tijuana. The project was expected to be completed by 2021.

Source: Reforma (sp)

World’s view of Mexico very positive: AMLO’s chief of staff

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November 7, 2019