Officials at Attorney General's Office got bodies mixed up.
The family of a Guatemalan migrant whose remains were found in a mass grave in Tamaulipas was given the wrong body by Mexican authorities seven years ago.
Relatives have been mourning over someone else’s disappeared family member ever since.
According to documents accessed by the newspaper Reforma and dated November 18, 2011, then attorney general Marisela Morales identified the body, which was given to family members in Guatemala in March 2012.
But Argentinian forensic anthropologists discovered in 2014 that the body had been misidentified, and the remains of the family’s loved one remained in the Forensic Sciences Institute in Mexico City.
The family has still not been notified of the error. The body they buried will have to be exhumed to be properly identified and conveyed to its true relatives.
The story is only coming to light now despite the fact that three previous attorneys general — Jesús Murillo Karam, Arely Gómez and Arturo Elías Beltrán — as well the current administration had full knowledge of the error.
The Argentinian team participated in efforts to identify 314 bodies found in secret graves in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, and Cadereyta, Nuevo León.
The team carried out its own studies despite the Attorney General’s Office having done so previously. When it discovered the mistaken identity the team passed the information on to then attorney general Murillo.
The director of the department’s genetic laboratory at the time, Martha Acela Valdéz, said the Guatemalan government was made aware of the mistake in 2016, but did not want to reveal the error for fear of being seen as irresponsible.
“We were in the Mexican Embassy in Guatemala and they told us, ‘Well, the family already has a body to mourn, so what difference does it make if we say anything or not?’” she said.
Acela says she handled the case in Guatemala until the end of 2016, when she was demoted from her post.
“It is a complete lack of responsibility, let alone a lack of empathy, but the negligence of the state in remaining quiet — and that’s what has happened up to now, no one has said a thing — is a political issue,” she said.
Acela added that she fears those responsible might want to place the blame on her, although she claims that she always insisted that the case be brought to light.
The wife of former Veracruz governor Javier Duarte, who is serving a prison sentence for corruption, was arrested in London, England, on Tuesday, federal authorities said.
The Attorney General’s Office (FGR) said that United Kingdom police arrested Karime Macías and that she will face an extradition hearing. They explained that she could either be held in custody while the extradition process takes place or released and placed under supervision.
Macías is wanted in Veracruz for her alleged participation in an embezzlement scheme that diverted 112 million pesos (US $5.9 million) from the state branch of the DIF family services agency to shell companies during Duarte’s term in office.
A state judge issued a warrant for her arrest in May 2018 while federal authorities said in October 2018 that they were investigating Macías for fraud and filed an application for her extradition from the United Kingdom.
Macías fled to the U.K. in 2017, claiming in a letter to the Veracruz Attorney General’s Office that she was forced to leave the country because of “persecution” in Veracruz.
Alongside her three children, she is believed to have lived a life of luxury in the English capital despite Interpol issuing a red notice for her arrest.
Duarte, who ruled the Gulf coast state between 2010 and 2016, is serving a nine-year prison sentence for money laundering and links to organized crime. The Federal Auditor’s Office said in 2016 that irregularities in the use of public funds during Duarte’s government were the worst it had even seen.
Marco Antonio del Toro, a lawyer for Macías, said in an interview that his client submitted herself voluntarily to U.K. authorities. He said she received a notice last Friday to present herself “and did so punctually.”
Del Toro described the warrant issued in Veracruz for Macías’ arrest as “illegal,” adding that his client will fight against extradition to Mexico and hopes to do so without being remanded in custody.
Illegal logging has been a major threat to the butterflies' survival.
Degradation of the forest has diminished by over 25% in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve compared to the 2017-2018 season, says the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Forest degradation in 2018-2019 decreased to five hectares from 6.7 in the previous season.
“Forest degradation decreased due to the reduction of large-scale illegal logging,” said WWF Mexico director Jorge Rickards in a statement. “Nor were there serious storms like those that affected the reserve in 2016.”
Illegal logging discovered on 1.43 hectares last year declined to only 0.43 hectares.
“We’ve been able to conserve the core area thanks to the pledge made with neighboring communal lands, indigenous communities and the brigades, who are paid to keep watch on the forests . . . We also create economic opportunities so that the reserve can be a source of . . . development for people.”
Drought was one of the primary causes of forest loss documented in the reserve, according to monitoring carried out by the WWF-Telmex Telcel Foundation Alliance, the Natural Protected Areas Commission (Conanp) and the Institute of Biology at the National Autonomous University (UNAM).
Conanp has taken 1,280 tactical actions to counter illegal logging in the area with the aid of surveillance by the National Guard.
Telcel’s head of marketing and social responsibility, Sergio Patgher, said the alliance has planted millions of trees in 13,501 hectares of monarch hibernation areas since 2003. The project has utilized 13 local nurseries, generated 300 jobs and created a network of 32 mushroom nurseries in the region.
“The involvement of society is important . . . . In July 2019, thanks to the support of over 1,000 volunteers from Telcel and WWF and families from Puebla, Querétaro, Guadalajara, Morelia, León and Mexico City, we planted 15 million oyamel fir trees in the Monarch Butterfly Reserve, as part of the public awareness campaigns carried out by the alliance,” Patgher said.
In addition to the conservation actions, the alliance has planted flower gardens along the butterflies’ migration routes in Chihuahua, Mérida, Morelia, Hermosillo, Monterrey and Tijuana.
The 56,000-hectare reserve is home to 132 bird, 56 mammal, 432 plant and 211 fungus species, and the basins of the region filter water into the Cutzamala water system for over 4.1 million people in Mexico City and the metropolitan area.
It borders the states of México and Michoacán and lies 100 kilometers northwest of Mexico City.
Historically high levels of illegal logging in Mexico have been a major threat to the survival of the monarch butterflies. Another has been the loss of reproductive habitat in the United States due to land-use changes and the use of pesticides to kill milkweed, on which the butterfly lays its eggs.
The Baja California municipalities of Playas de Rosarito, Tijuana and Tecate have asked the state and federal governments to issue a disaster declaration due to the wildfires that destroyed 204 homes last week.
The fires also caused three deaths and burned 10,000 hectares of land, most of which is located in Ensenada.
The National Forestry Commission (Conafor) reported that two fires are still active outside of Ensenada, and firefighters are on the verge of putting out the fire in Tecate.
State authorities warned that the Santa Ana winds, the weather phenomenon that fanned the fires that broke out last Thursday, are expected to pick up again on Tuesday and Wednesday, creating the possibility of more fires.
State Civil Protection director Antonio Rosquillas Navarro said that 114 houses have burned in Tecate, 62 in Playas de Rosarito and 28 in Ensenada. His department estimates that an average of four people lived in each affected home.
“Rosarito and Tecate gave me their petitions for the disaster declaration. Tomorrow morning we will receive Ensenada’s, and then we’ll have the document ready for the governor to sign . . . on Tuesday. It will be sent to the federal government via an online portal,” Rosquillas said.
The declaration will seek aid to rebuild houses and reforest land that has lost native vegetation, but first it will have to be reviewed and approved by a number of government departments, including the secretariats of Finance and of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development.
Conafor legal representative Francisco Ávalos Hernández said that some of the worst damage has been seen in San José de la Zorra, where 7,300 hectares have burned. He also stated that he doesn’t believe the fires started naturally.
“The fires weren’t caused just by the wind,” he said. “There is undoubtedly a human factor in all of this.”
Both Ávalos and Rosquillas urged residents not to discard lit cigarette butts, light fires or dump trash on empty lots.
“Despite the requests for prevention, we see that people don’t follow the recommendations, but we’re going to continue insisting that they take precautions,” Rosquillas said.
Tijuana Mayor Arturo González Cruz has declared a pre-alert ahead of this week’s anticipated winds. He said that 71 houses and 3,500 hectares of meadowland have already burned in his municipality.
Trucks block the Mexico City-Querétaro highway Tuesday morning.
Truckers were set to strike in all 32 states on Tuesday to pressure the federal government to meet a range of demands including a ban on double semi-trailers and lower prices for fuel and tolls.
Drivers affiliated with the Mexican Alliance of Transportation Organizations (Amotac) planned to begin setting up blockades on highways across Mexico at 8:00am.
Major roads into Mexico City including the Periférico ring road and the México-Toluca, México-Puebla and México-Cuernavaca highways were expected to be blocked this morning.
Amotac president Rafael Ortiz Pacheco said on Monday that before the new government took office last December, Communications and Transportation Secretary Javier Jiménez Espriú pledged to remove double semi-trailers from circulation.
However, the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (SCT) has continued to grant new plates to the vehicles, he said.
“We feel very neglected by the [transportation] department and that’s what motivated the decision to come out and protest,” Ortiz said.
The Amotac chief claimed that double semi-trailers have been granted permits and plates without being subjected to mechanical inspections to ensure that they are equipped with anti-lock braking systems and GPS, and that they comply with emissions standards.
The truckers’ association is demanding the enforcement of SCT Norm 012, which stipulates that double semi-trailers must travel exclusively in the far-right lane with their lights on, keeping a distance of 100 meters from other heavy vehicles and not exceeding 80 km/h.
Amotac, which represents 65,000 drivers, criticized the SCT for failing to keep a promise to install weighbridges on federal highways to regulate the loads carried by double semi-trailers.
Ortiz asserted that the vehicles represent unfair competition for regular semis because they can transport double the freight at a similar cost.
“. . . We’re against double semi-trailers. The SCT said during the presidential campaign that they would be removed from circulation due to lack of safety but they changed their mind and now they’re giving them permits and license plates, which represents unfair competition. We’ve demonstrated their lack of safety, [but] they didn’t care in the past government” and this one doesn’t seem to care either, he said.
Amotac members are also demanding that the government make more trucking licenses available, improve safety on the nation’s highways, put an end to high prices charged by tow truck services, reduce the price of fuel and tolls and stamp out abuses perpetrated by federal, state and municipal police.
The Museo Anahuacalli, a project to which architect Juan O'Gorman contributed.
The modern art era — 1860 to 1970 — was a time of revolution, growth and intense political upheaval in Mexico.
While chaos of post-independence and then post-revolution societies created inequality, instability and deep scars on the nation, it was also a time of passion ignited by politics, flourishing of social and artistic movements and an artistic effervescence that demonstrated a hunger for expression and faith in the future of the nation.
“I think we can consider the modern art era in Mexico as consisting of work created between two periods when art was being used to build new nationalism — after Independence (1810) and after Revolution (1910),” says local art buff and guide Natalia Zerbato.
“This period can be thought of as ‘ending’ around 1968 with the students’ movement and the changes brought on by neoliberalism. Art became more political and much closer to what we consider contemporary art,” she says.
Zerbato believes that so many things happened during this period that even though muralism was the most famous form to come out of the era, the artists that Mexico now considers central to the national heritage are all from the 20th century, proving that this period was the most important.
“These are now the artists seen as examples of Mexican art outside Mexico,” she says.
With few tours or books dedicated to modern art in Mexico in general — as opposed to muralists specifically — modern art junkies might be at a loss to know where to see more than just murals in Mexico City.
To get your fix and see the wide spectrum of art from the era, here are a few places and resources you shouldn’t miss.
Architecture
An indispensable resource for discovering architectural gems of the city is the Mexico City Architecture Guide, which breaks the city down by sections and gives short snippets about some of Mexico City’s most iconic buildings.
To focus on the modern art movement post-1900, don’t miss architect Luis Barragan’s more famous constructions — his studio and house, the Iglesia de la Santa Cruz del Pedregal and Convento de las Capuchinas.
Worth a look is painter and architect Juan O’Gorman’s Frontón Mexico next to the Monument to the Revolution — another architectural jewel of the era.
O’Gorman also designed a handful of buildings that you might also consider visiting — the Museo Anahuacalli and the Museo Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo.
Architect Mario Pani has a large collection of work still visible in Mexico City. He designed several housing developments exemplary of this era, as well as the iconic Conservatorio Nacional de Música (National Music Conservatory) in Polanco.
For a more aimless search, just wander the neighborhoods of Roma and Condesa for their incredible art nouveau and art deco homes from architects such as Ernesto Buenrostro and Francisco Serrano.
Or take a stroll down Reforma avenue, originally designed and built by Maximiliano I and expanded and shaped by francophile president Porfirio Díaz at the turn of the century.
Colonia Juárez, between the historic center and Roma/Condesa, was developed around the end of the 19th century and is another place to gawk at Porfirio-era styles. A stop by the Bellas Artes and the Palacio de Correos downtown is also a must.
The Porfirio-era Palacio de Correos.
Visual arts
Much of our memory of Mexico’s modern period is dominated by some of the country’s biggest names in art — Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo and Frida Kahlo.
The muralists were invited by Mexico’s post-revolution government to paint public spaces and teach the history of the country through art. Lesser known pieces — before they were household names — can be viewed in the collection of the Museo Nacional de Arte.
For some of Rivera’s cubist pieces check out the Dolores Olmedo Museum, the permanent collection of the Tamayo Museum and rotating exhibits of the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Chapultepec Park.
Opened in 1964, the MAM building — designed by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Carlos A. Cazares Salcido — is reason enough itself to visit, but there are also the wide-ranging permanent collection and well-curated temporary shows.
MAM has the biggest collection in the world of Remedios Varo, the famous Spanish surrealist that made Mexico her home in the 1940s, as well as other surrealists that were her contemporaries such as Leonora Carrington, another refugee turned Mexican daughter.
The Galería de Arte Mexicano just hosted an exhibit of work by famous Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo and the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil has several pieces of Leopoldo Méndez in its collection.
Méndez is often considered the modern successor of José Guadalupe Posada, engraver of Mexico’s famous CatrinaLa Calavera Garbancera, one of the country’s greatest artistic treasures. Many of Posada’s pieces can be seen at the El Museo Nacional de la Estampa (the National Stamp Museum) in the historic center.
The work of modern era photographers can be more difficult to locate. Your best bets are temporary MAM exhibits or chance retrospectives. Look for Manuel Álvarez Bravo and his wife, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Nacho López, Héctor García and some of the more famous photographer transplants such as Tina Modotti, Edward Weston and Kati Horna.
If you would rather not go it alone, Zerbato offers a Frida and Diego Art Tour through Context Travel as well as a version of the company’s Making of Mexico tour with a specific focus on art. She’s also happy to design private tours — contact her for details.
Lydia Carey is a freelance writer based in Mexico City and a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
The chaos reflected a confused, overmatched government.
Amid a wave of national and international criticism for his handling of the Culiacán meltdown last week, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador faces the toughest public security test of his presidency.
But his approach over the first 11 months of his presidency leaves him little room to maneuver, and there is little evidence that his analysis of the crisis bears much resemblance to reality.
López Obrador, who is popularly known as AMLO, has largely built his political identity on his opposition to the militarized security policy, which is associated above all with the administration of Felipe Calderón. During his 2018 campaign, AMLO’s most famous promise was to attack organized crime with “hugs, not bullets.”
Lest anyone confuse that slogan with a simple bit of irony, upon ascending the presidency AMLO made noises about negotiating with criminal groups and repeatedly intimated that he would ratchet down the pressure on drug traffickers.
In short, the message from Mexico’s president was that they would be given a greater degree of freedom, but he expected them to respond by reducing their acts of violence.
Unfortunately for AMLO, the gangs did not react as he hoped. Violence, which had been trending upward during the latter years of the administration of former President Enrique Peña Nieto, has continued to tick upwards; the first six months of 2019 were the most violent half-year in the nation’s recent history.
The explosion of violence was concentrated in specific areas that seemed to undercut AMLO’s arguments about his policy’s efficacy. Some of his first steps upon taking office were to cut down on fuel theft, a longstanding practice that criminal groups have begun pursuing on a near-industrial scale.
Instead of tamping down on the bloodshed, these policies helped turn once-tranquil Guanajuato, ground zero for fuel theft, into the most violent state in the nation. In both Guanajuato and Tijuana, another area where murders have skyrocketed, recent narcomantas – banners hung by drug cartels looking to communicate with the population, their rivals, or the state – have threatened AMLO directly.
InSight Crime analysis
Beyond the rhetoric, there has been a lack of logic underlying many of the actual policy shifts that AMLO has pursued. He announced the creation of a new federal police force, the National Guard, and he secured passage of a constitutional amendment formalizing the deployment of the military in domestic security.
Neither of these stratagems has paid off; the National Guard has thrown the federal police apparatus into disarray, as officers are reassigned and agencies redeployed, and the constitutional change was viewed as a betrayal of AMLO’s deepest principles.
Moreover, even the rhetoric emanating from the head of Mexico’s government has lacked consistency. During the summer, for instance, he adopted a more aggressive posture in a series of public speeches, chastising criminal groups for their acts of violence and repudiating any idea of negotiating with them.
The disconnect between AMLO’s rhetoric and his policies has created a persistent sense of incoherence, which culminated in last week’s events in Culiacán. The chaos reflected not only a confused, overmatched government, but also a criminal group that may well have been under the impression that its leaders no longer faced any threat from government pressure.
A scenario in which both sides are not abiding by the same informal rules of the road lends itself to miscalculations, which can have deadly consequences.
The recent developments have left AMLO’s administration and its supporters without much of a rhetorical leg to stand on. The president’s defenses of his decision to release Ovidio Guzmán have been vague and unconvincing, and appeared entirely untethered from any broader strategic decision.
His surrogates’ efforts at justification — including arguments that this represents the demise of the narco-state that prevailed under Calderón, and suggestions that the United States was behind the incident — have bordered on the fantastical. AMLO has dismissed the complaints as byproducts of political opposition, but journalists and analysts from across the ideological spectrum have denounced his performance.
The most basic problem facing AMLO is that his longstanding rhetoric has now backed him into a corner. From the very beginning of his campaign, AMLO promised that a security policy built around military de-escalation and attacking the social drivers of organized crime would, in short order, end the bloodshed of the past decade. He ridiculed his predecessors and his opponents, leaving his audiences with the impression that only an idiot or a crook could fail to tame Mexico’s security challenges.
But now it is AMLO who is perched upon the hot seat, and the root causes of Mexican insecurity are no more tractable than before.
And with a strategy built on a series of half-measures and fantasies, the flaws in his approach have grown unmistakable.
Reprinted from InSight Crime. Patrick Corcoran is a contributing writer for InSight Crime, a foundation dedicated to the study of organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean.
PInk flamingos are being counted on Yucatán peninsula.
A Mexican startup is using drones to aid conservation of the pink flamingo on the Yucatán peninsula.
Ornitronik, a company founded by National Autonomous University biology graduate Esaú Villareal, has developed an automatic observation and detection system that uses drones to count flamingos and monitor their behavior.
Called FlaminGO!, the system can capture a single image of as many as 1,000 flamingos in 30 seconds. The automatic census of the flamingo population saves time and drones can count birds in areas that are difficult to reach.
Data and images that the system collects are passed on to public and private organizations that can use the information to develop better conservation plans for the pink flamingo, which is classified as an endangered species.
DJI, the company that makes the drones used in the Ornitronik system, said in a statement that FlaminGO! helps to understand the behavior of flamingos, adding that the size of their population is indicative of the health of the ecosystem in which they live.
The system can identify information such as where Yucatán peninsula flamingos rest and nest, the company said.
Villareal said that care is taken to ensure that the use of drones in flamingo habitats doesn’t disturb the species.
“It’s important to consider that the use of drones for the monitoring of wild fauna has to be carried out with knowledge and ethics so as to not to disturb any species. There are some groups [of flamingos] that are more susceptible to stress and their well-being must come first,” he said.
Villareal said that he plans to use the FlaminGO! system to conduct accurate censuses of other animal species in Mexico.
According to DJI, the drone system, which makes use of thermal vision technology and zoom, is between 90% and 95% accurate.
A skeleton surfaces in a street in Tláhuac, Mexico City.
Giant skeletons have left their graves and crawled out of the streets in the Mexico City borough of Tláhuac to celebrate the Day of the Dead.
Photos of the colossal bones went viral on social media along with the mistaken comments that the artists had been attempting to draw attention to potholes in the road.
But members of the Indios Yaocalli cultural collective who designed the figures said there were no potholes, but simply rocks and concrete placed around the protruding limbs to make it appear as though the skeletons were crawling out of the ground.
“No, they’re not potholes, they’re rubble from a construction site across from the neighbor’s house . . . the neighbors had the ingenious idea to add that detail,” one of the collective’s members told the newspaper El Universal.
He said they installed the skeletons in the street to preserve traditions, both of the festivities of the Day of the Dead and of the art of working with paper mache.
“The most important thing is to continue conserving our traditions,” he said. “We are proud to be from Tláhuac, to be from Mexico.”
Chief financial officer Velázquez: sizable loss but less debt.
Pemex recorded a loss of 87.85 billion pesos (US $4.6 billion) in the third quarter but the beleaguered state oil company also reported that it has cut its debt for the first time in more than a decade.
Chief financial officer Alberto Velázquez said in a call with investors that the company’s third-quarter loss can be mainly attributed to two external factors: lower prices for Mexican crude and a stronger US dollar.
Prices for Mexican export crude were down 16.7% between July and September compared to the same period last year, falling to an average of US $55.10 per barrel from $66.20.
Velázquez said the dollar bought on average 4% more pesos in the third quarter of this year compared to the same period of 2018.
More than 35 billion pesos in foreign exchange-related losses were absorbed by Pemex between July and September, the company said in a report sent to the Mexican Stock Exchange on Monday.
In contrast, a positive exchange rate helped Pemex record an unusual profit of 26.8 billion pesos in the same quarter of 2018.
Other factors that contributed to the near 88-billion-peso loss were a decline in export volumes and reduced sales in Mexico’s retail fuel market.
Foreign sales fell just under 22% and domestic revenue declined by almost 20%. Pemex formerly had a monopoly in retail fuel sales but the previous government’s energy reform opened up the sector to private gas stations.
All told, Pemex’s revenues fell more than 88.6 billion pesos to 350.5 billion pesos in the third quarter, a 20.2% decline compared to the same period last year.
The state oil company also said in its report that its debt has fallen by 6.1% this year to US $99.6 billion.
Pemex had debt of $106 billion at the end of last year and has faced pressure from credit rating agencies to make its financial position more sustainable.
Velázquez said that market operations in September that refinanced US $20 billion in liabilities were crucial in achieving debt reduction this year.
“For the first time in over a decade, the company’s net debt was reduced,” he told investors.
“That operation has lowered Pemex’s refinancing risks in international markets and strengthened the company’s short and medium-term finances.”
However, the third quarter loss is indicative of the company’s ongoing challenges. Energy sector analysts have criticized the government’s plan to revive Pemex, whose oil output has been in decline for more than 10 years.
Many have spoken out against President López Obrador’s decision to put an end to joint ventures between Pemex and private companies, known as farm-outs.
Presidential chief of staff Alfonso Romo said in September that the government will cede the business of exploration and oil production in deepwater reserves to the private sector, seemingly confirming a report published in the Financial Times in late August that said that President López Obrador was poised to reopen private exploration in deepwater oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico.
