This 55-meter cargo vessel is probably suitable for transporting fuel—legal or otherwise.
Cars, real estate, watches and boats will go on the block on November 10 at the federal government’s fifth auction of assets seized from criminal organizations.
The director of the Institute to Return Stolen Goods to the People announced on Friday that 45 lots with a combined starting price of 32.5 million pesos (US $1.7 million) will be on offer at the Mexico City auction at Los Pinos, the former presidential residence that the government has converted into a cultural center.
Ricardo Rodríguez Vargas said the funds raised will be used to buy musical instruments for children in Oaxaca who play in bands.
A Mustang, Corvette and cars made by Jaguar and Mercedes will be among 24 vehicles up for grabs, Rodríguez said, as will a Volkswagen beetle with a starting price of just 2,000 pesos (US $105).
Of nine properties to go under the hammer, seven are in Sinaloa and will have starting prices between 1.2 million and 11 million pesos, he said.
A 1995 Narco-Beetle.
The official said that bidding for 10 luxury watches will begin at prices 50% below their real value and that for the first time, the government will offer boats for sale. Two cargo vessels that also have the capacity to transport fuel will be on the block, Rodríguez said.
Tickets for the auction costs 100 pesos and can be purchased at convenience stores and supermarkets. Bids will also be accepted via telephone.
“Those who participate help because these resources go to noble causes, just causes . . .” President López Obrador said at his morning press conference.
Proceeds from previous government auctions were to go to disadvantaged communities, addiction centers and road work.
“Great grandmas and 5-year-olds” hike up from Amatitán to the cross once a year.
I have been describing interesting trails in western Mexico for around 35 years.
The very first I wrote about was the long, steep sendero leading to Las Piedras Bola, Jalisco’s Great Stone Balls, a site so unusual and curious that it actually made the cover of National Geographic back in August of 1969.
The hike to the Piedras was memorable because our guide, a 10-year-old boy, managed to get us lost just long enough for the first feelings of panic to tingle the hairs on the back of my neck.
I decided then and there it was my sacred duty to make my routes so obvious that my readers would be able to reach their destination entirely on their own.
For years I drew trail maps (with lots of landmarks) to show the way until at last, handheld GPS units came along, making it a whole lot easier to record and follow trails, step by step.
Hiking along the trail, well marked except at two crucial points.
Now I’m happy to report another milestone for hiking in Mexico: the (Spanish-only) web page of Senderos de México, an organization dedicated not only to helping people find their way along Mexico’s vast network of rural trails, but also to rescuing, rehabilitating and preserving ancient footpaths, some of them in use before the arrival of the conquistadores.
“The problem,” says Javier Michel Menchaca, one of the organization’s founders, “is that mechanization is reaching remote communities and many of our nation’s great old trails are simply vanishing.”
This realization prompted the founding of Senderos de México five years ago and the rehabilitation and sign-posting of numerous trails, 10 of which are listed on their website.
As for standardizing trail information, they have consulted with similar organizations in the United States and Spain to create a national system that will make it easy for people to understand distance, difficulty and direction of a trail as well as the attractions hikers might see along the route.
The trail-marking system they have chosen is the Grande Randonnée (GR) code used in France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. This extremely simple system consists of two parallel bars of color to show you’re on the right trail. These are painted on trees and rocks with “eco-friendly” paint.
Right-angle versions of the bars indicate a left or right turn. If you should see the two bars crossed, however, it means you’ve wandered off the right path and you’d better backtrack. Here in Mexico, Senderos is using white and red bars for long trails and white and yellow for short ones.
View to the north, from the cross.
I decided to test the efficacy of this system by visiting a site recently signposted by Senderos. This is a steep hill called El Cerro de Amatitán, located 32 kilometers northwest of Guadalajara. Its peak is 1,793 meters (just over a mile) high and the cerro is famed for its beautiful vistas.
I had my eye on two Senderos trails up to the top of the mountain, one from the north and the other from the south.
“This,” I told my hiking partners, “will be a real test of the trail signs. We’ll go up the mountain one way and come down the other and if we survive, it means the system really works.”
We headed for the town of Amatitán, parked where the trail called “El Sendero del Agave” begins and, voilá, immediately spotted yellow and white stripes painted on a small rock. This sendero takes you through fields of blue-green agaves around to the south side of the mountain and then leads you to the top.
Our path was actually an old road — older than we could imagine, in fact. Alongside it we soon came to a plaque explaining that we were walking along what used to be called El Camino Real, once upon a time the royal road leading from Guadalajara to the port of San Blas, and paved with stone “Roman style.”
After a rather long meandering walk along wide dirt roads through agave fields, we reached the base of the Cerro de Amatitán and there the ubiquitous and handy trail markers suddenly ended.
Says John Pint, “Every good hike begins with a fence or a gate.”
Unfortunately, exactly at that point heavy maleza (brush), stone walls and barbed wire were sealing off our access to the mountain. Try as we might, we could not find a convenient connection between the road we had been following and the trail heading up the mountainside.
“Senderos de México forgot to tell us we’d need a machete,” I cried to my compañeros as I battled through the two-meter-high brush — sprinkled with an abundance of thorn bushes, I might add.
At last I clambered over the formidable combination stone wall and barbed wire fence, only to find my friend Rodrigo Orozco munching an apple next to a thick tree — with white and yellow stripes on it.
“Yippee!” I shouted, “we’re back on the trail!”
Well, back on the trail only in a manner of speaking. You see, that lovely trail lasted only 10 minutes and did not appear again until we reached the very peak of the mountain. Fortunately, the signs continued guiding us, painted on rocks and trees.
“I now have a new understanding of the word sendero,” I told my fellow hikers. “It means ‘way’ in the vaguest possible sense, which may or may not include a path.”
Senderos de México volunteers marking a trail in Centinela Park, Guadalajara.
Well, bushwhacking our “way” up Cerro Amatitán was doable, but slow because the difference in altitude from the bottom to the top was 519 meters.
Sweating profusely, we finally reached the very pinnacle of the mountain, which offers a splendid view in every direction.
In a few minutes we arrived at a huge cross, the object of a yearly pilgrimage which, I told my compañeros, “is made by just about everybody in Amatitán, including great-grandmothers and 5-year-olds.”
With this consoling thought, we headed down the northern side of the hill, still guided by the white and yellow trail markers — only this time there really was a trail!
The views on the north side were much more stunning than those we had seen on the way up, but we dared not gaze upon them while walking because that trail I was so delighted to be on just happens to be strewn with billions of small, nearly round stones.
Yes, hiking on the north side was like dancing on ball bearings, and we had to watch our every step.
[soliloquy id="93182"]
Once again the Senderos markers guided us all the way down to the base of the mountain and then, alas, once again seemed to disappear. “So how do we get into Amatitán?” we asked ourselves when we ended up facing a high wall.
We began scouting around and soon Rodrigo shouted: “I found a gate in the wall, let’s go this way!”
Well, Rodrigo’s gate turned out to be locked and guarded by a whole lot of cows as well as a sea of thick, black — well, let’s call it mud. Now thoroughly pooped out (in every sense of the word), we dragged our tired bodies through the “mud,” climbed over the fence, slogged through even more goo on the other side and came to yet another stone wall, this one even higher than the last and cleverly combined with a barbed-wire fence.
Ah, yes, it just isn’t a real Mexican hike without stone walls and barbed wire!
Eventually we staggered into town, weary but triumphant: we had conquered the mountain and survived not one but two senderos!
Here I must mention that, despite the above description, I do greatly appreciate the hard work of Senderos de México and its many, many volunteers to put up all those signs, but it certainly would have been nice to have a good old-fashioned map as a backup!
I suggest that once you have found a trail you like on the Senderos website, you then search Wikiloc for a detailed map just in case one of those crucial trail signs has mysteriously evaporated.
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, for more than 30 years and is the author of A Guide to West Mexico’s Guachimontones and Surrounding Area and co-author of Outdoors in Western Mexico. More of his writing can be found on his website.
A Toluca rail car: auditors have found spending irregularities.
The Federal Auditor’s Office (ASF) has detected “erratic and discretional” conduct in the use of public resources in the final year of the government of former president Enrique Peña Nieto.
In a report submitted to the lower house of Congress on Thursday, the ASF said that 60% of all budget funds approved by lawmakers in 2018 were reassigned without proper justification. The total amount of funds in question is 3.62 trillion pesos (US $189.5 billion).
“In the stages of exercise and control [of budget funds], an erratic and discretional tendency was detected,” the ASF said, explaining that spending was not “equal or similar” to that approved by lawmakers.
The ASF found irregularities in spending on a number of infrastructure projects including the canceled Mexico City airport, the unfinished Mexico City-Toluca train and the new Guadalajara train.
Just under 1.6 billion pesos (US $83.5 million) paid to airport contractors was questioned by the ASF as was 272.2 million pesos spent on the Mexico City-Toluca train.
Among the irregularities detected in spending on the latter project were improper and duplicate payments and the adjustment of costs that had been agreed to with contractors.
Spending of 315.4 million pesos on the Guadalajara train, including payments for unforeseen costs, was flagged as questionable by the ASF.
Chief auditor David Colmenares told lawmakers that the ASF detected 933 separate cases of suspicious spending that could result in the filing of criminal complaints.
He said that spending that the ASF had never previously looked at was considered in the audit of the 2018 public accounts.
That included an inspection of the financial records of municipal governments as well as those of all 31 states and Mexico City in order to establish how they used federal resources.
The ASF said the use of 28.86 billion pesos (US $1.5 billion) by state and municipal governments needs to be clarified.
The ASF also reported that ISSSTE, the State Workers’ Social Security Institute, recorded a loss of 3.98 billion pesos in 2018 and that the government-owned National Lottery was running a deficit of 6.1 billion pesos at the end of last year.
RC planes will take to the skies above Torreón in November.
There will be lots of small planes buzzing around the Laguna region in Coahuila next month at the 2019 Del Norte Fly Fest in Torreón.
The event is expected to bring 400 pilots of radio-controlled (RC) airplanes and 2,500 invited guests.
State tourism undersecretary María Eugenia Villarreal Abisaíd said that the event will be a big economic boost for the city, filling around 800 hotel rooms per night.
“We’re very happy to have this event,” she said. “It’s the second year we’ve done it. It’s a specialized, private event, but we’re looking to open it up to the general public in 2020.”
The Fly Fest will bring RC pilots from Coahuila and 10 other states as well as a special guest from the United States.
Freestyle world champion Jase Dussia from Michigan will participate in the freestyle competition, which will be accompanied by music and judged on the artistic and technical skills the pilots can display in a period of four minutes.
The Fly Fest will take place on November 15-17 in the municipality of Matamoros, part of the Torreón metropolitan area.
Design of the Altar Shelf draws on Barragán's signature geometric style.
The personal art collection of eminent Mexican architect Luis Barragán is on display at his house in Mexico City.
Designed with the architect’s signature geometric style in mind, the temporary shelves used to display the pieces were created by local design studios Sala Hars and AGO Projects.
Called the Altar Shelf, the construction is a symmetrical, four-sided piece meant to display Barragán’s collection of paintings, statues and artifacts from all angles.
“Our intention was to create a setting that allows the viewer at all times, and from all angles, to see the pieces from sides that have never been accessible to the public, providing a new reading of the work as a constellation.”
Drawing on forms Barragán himself used in his work, the pyramidal Altar Shelf “pays subtle homage to the architect’s broad ideas and inspirations — from the famous floating stair to the religious imagery within the house.”
The curation of the pieces follows no particular order, contrasting with the rigid, geometrical formation of the display apparatus. Other paintings and sculptures are set along the walls surrounding the Altar Shelf.
Barragán was born in 1902 in Guadalajara. His work focused on bright, bold colors and their interplay with geometry and light. A devout Catholic, his beliefs are reflected in the religious imagery adorning his house.
He completed his home and studio in 1948, and in 1980 he was awarded architecture’s most coveted trophy, the Pritzker Prize. The home-studio has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004.
It is just one of many structures the architect designed in Mexico City, along with the Casa Gilardi, with its walls of striking primary colors, the pastel pink Casa Prieto López and the gold-paneled chapel at the Capuchinas Sacramentarias convent.
The installation is part of an exhibition called Emissaries for Things Abandoned by Gods, which features work by contemporary artists from all over the world in other rooms of the house. It began in September and runs until December 15.
The house is located at Gral. Francisco Ramírez 12-14, Ampliación Daniel Garza.
Tourism for the Day of the Dead festivities is expected to provide a significant economic boom this weekend.
Hotels are currently reporting 75.8% occupancy rates nationwide, and the tourism sector is expected to see an influx of almost 2 billion pesos (US $104 million).
Federal Tourism Secretary Miguel Torruco said he anticipates 829,000 Mexican citizens will travel for Day of the Dead.
He added that Mexico City hotels should see 87.5% occupancy thanks to 85,000 tourists visiting the nation’s capital, bringing 85.6 million pesos (US $4.5 million) to the city’s accommodations sector.
Mexico City has the highest number of hotel reservations in the country for the Day of the Dead weekend, according to Booking.com.
“The Day of the Dead celebration has become a huge opportunity for people to get away and live the experience in other parts of the country, without being an official holiday,” said Ezequiel Rubín, country manager at the travel website Despegar.com.
Bacalar, Quintana Roo, Taxco, Guerrero, Tequisquiapan, Querétaro and Valle de Bravo, in Mexico State are some of the Pueblos Mágicos (Magical Towns) with the most reservations in the country.
In Michoacán, Morelia, Pátzcuaro and Uruapan have reported 100% hotel occupancy rates, according to state Tourism Secretary Claudia Chávez López. She said the Noche de Ánimas (Night of Souls) festival is expected to bring 200,000 foreign and domestic tourists to the Lake Pátzcuaro region.
She said hotels are expected to be full despite the state’s high levels of insecurity.
Tourist destinations in Guerrero have reported 90% occupancy rates due to an expected 300,000 visitors between Friday and Sunday.
State tourism undersecretary Noé Peralta Herrera said the anticipated number of visitors could easily be surpassed since many have vacation homes, rent condos or stay with friends and family who live in the state.
“Although we don’t officially have an exact figure for how many people will stay at their own properties, rent rooms on mobile applications or stay with family or friends, the economic influx they will generate is also very important for thousands of families who directly or indirectly depend on the tourism industry in Acapulco, Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo and Taxco,” Peralta said.
Canadian textile giant Gildan Activewear has announced that it will move its Mexico operations to countries where it can take advantage of cheaper production costs.
The move will cost 1,700 jobs in Mexico.
The company will relocate its manufacturing to cheaper production centers in Central America and the Caribbean. It is also building a large complex in Bangladesh to meet demand for the Chinese and European markets.
“Upon analyzing our future cost structure, we feel that we can lower costs significantly by limiting our facilities,” CEO Glenn Chamandy told analysts.
Mexico has seen its competitive manufacturing capacity eroded after a series of threats from U.S. President Donald Trump, the Bloomberg news agency reported.
However, Mexico has made a strong effort to focus on more sophisticated operations in recent years, becoming an important production center for the automotive industry and attracting investment in the aviation sector.
Based in Montreal, Gildan Activewear created a global textile production chain that includes everything from thread to ready-to-wear clothing, which allowed it to compete with other industry giants like Fruit of the Loom and Hanes.
The company’s two facilities in Mexico came with its acquisition of Alstyle Apparel, a U.S. company that, like Gildan, sold personalized shirts and sweaters.
The company currently sees growing opportunities in the private brands market, as retailers look for their own proprietary brands, according to experts.
Thousands of bodies and no one knows who they are.
There are more than 30,000 unclaimed and unidentified bodies as well as an unknown number of skeletal remains in Mexico’s morgues, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) said on Thursday.
There is “a crisis in the area of forensic identification,” the commission said, because morgues lack the resources, staff and equipment to properly examine the bodies they receive.
High homicide numbers during the past decade have contributed to the accumulation of the huge number of corpses. Many were found in hidden graves used by criminal organizations to dispose of the bodies of their victims.
The CNDH said that albums of photographs should be compiled when hidden graves are excavated in order to document clothing and other items that could aid in the identification of bodies.
One trailer containing 157 bodies was left on a property on the outskirts of Guadalajara, Jalisco, last year, drawing the ire of local residents who complained of fetid odors. The state’s forensics chief was fired by then governor Jorge Sandoval Díaz over the case.
The Guadalajara morgue has left some unidentified bodies to decompose for as long as two years before autopsies were carried out. Others have buried corpses in common graves but some have faced criticism because they didn’t collect tissue samples first.
Adriana Michelle Álvarez Orozco, a 16-year-old who disappeared in Jalisco in November 2017, was left in the Lagos de Moreno morgue in Jalisco for almost two years without being identified.
Family members searched for the girl since her disappearance but had no luck finding her until October 12 when a woman, the mother of one of Álvarez’s friends, recognized her in a photo held by Jalisco authorities. The girl’s mother was notified and finally able to recover her body.
The National Search Commission said in January that there are 40,180 missing people in Mexico. The highest profile missing persons cases is the 2014 disappearance of 43 teaching students in Iguala, Guerrero.
Three of the pieces that were sold by auction Wednesday in Paris.
Another auction of pre-Hispanic artifacts went ahead in Paris, France, on Wednesday despite the objections of the Mexican government.
Auction house Sotheby’s put 74 pieces on the block and 44 were sold for a combined total of 1.78 million euros (US $2 million).
Archaeological experts with the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) determined that 57 pieces, described as “Pre-Columbian treasures from an important French collection,” were from Mexico.
Of that number, 35 were deemed to be genuine pre-Hispanic artifacts of the Mayan, Teotihuacán, Zapotec, Olmec and Mexica cultures while 22 were assessed as recently manufactured fakes.
INAH became aware of the auction on October 8 and immediately filed a complaint with the federal Attorney General’s Office and informed the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs and Interpol.
Olmeca mask that sold for US $181,000.
However, the efforts to stop the auction and have the Mexican artifacts repatriated ultimately failed.
“The auction took place like the others,” said INAH chief Diego Prieto. “France has a legal framework that isn’t favorable to the recovery of this heritage.”
An Olmec perforator made out of jade yielded the highest price at yesterday’s auction, selling for $209,000. A stone Olmec mask was bought for $181,000 while two Teotihuacán masks went for $153,000 each.
A terracotta ornament featuring five heads and said to originate from Veracruz sold for $125,000 while a Mayan vase went for $111,500.
Prieto told the newspaper La Jornada that the Mexican government will continue to speak to French authorities with a view to recovering objects that it says rightfully belong in Mexico and never should have left the country.
He said the government will do what it can to strengthen international treaties and agreements that aim to stop the illicit trade of cultural artifacts.
Prieto said that INAH has managed to recover artifacts from Italy, Germany and the United States and hopes to recover an additional 80 objects before the end of the year.
Engine manufacturer Cummins is preparing to move more production to Mexico.
United States automotive manufacturer Cummins has confirmed that it will move some of its operations from China, India and Brazil to Mexico.
The decision was made to meet stipulations in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and to respond to tariffs recently imposed by the United States.
Cummins Latin America vice president Ignacio García said that once the USMCA enters into force, the heavy transport industry will be obliged to increase its regional content from 62% to 75% over a seven-year period.
This stipulation is forcing supply companies to move operations currently in China and other countries outside of North America to within the treaty’s signatory nations.
García said the process will also include moving some production from the United States to Mexico, such as its filters division, for which Mexico is seen as more productive than its neighbor to the north.
“We’re moving lines of filtration production from the U.S. to Mexico and expanding the plant in Ciudad Juárez in order to meet demand for diesel fuel injection in the Americas,” said García. “The tariffs levied by the U.S. on Europe and China are helping this process; it makes companies look to Mexico as a place where they can relocate production lines to supply the U.S. market.”
“We’re currently at 62% regional content, but this will rise to 75%. Looking at the constituent parts, there are the smelting plants in Brazil and Germany, steel crankshafts in Brazil, copper radiators from China, and fuel components that come from India, and we’re analyzing all those products.”
The U.S. company already has two plants in Mexico, one in Ciudad Juárez and the other in San Luis Potosí. Its operations in Mexico are primarily involved in refurbishing, while its U.S. plants produce new motors.
However, a new niche for Cummins in Mexico is the production of filters and fuel systems for the whole world. It also has plants for fuel injection gas treatment, crankshafts and high-powered engines.
“We have to maximize the potential of these plants,” said García. He stated that the demand in China will continue to rise, but it is necessary to increase regional production in North America.
“We have seven years from the beginning of the USMCA. There’s still time, but we have worked with companies in China, India and Brazil in order to begin to understand how to open plants in Mexico and the U.S. and move product.”
