More than 1,000 kilos of chiltepín peppers valued at more than 1 million pesos (US $53,000) were stolen from a private home Saturday in Sonora.
Businessman Braulio Navarro Salcido said he had left his home, located in the Centenario neighborhood of Hermosillo, early in the day and on returning noticed that the front door had been forced, as well as the garage door. Once inside, he saw that the product he had stored in 47 sacks had vanished.
One witness said he had seen a pickup truck in the crime victim’s garage, as well as a van parked outside. The thieves apparently needed more than one vehicle to haul away the “red gold” due to the large volume.
After filing a report with the Attorney General’s Office, Braulio remained confident that the thieves would be nabbed, as a cache of that scale was unique in the chiltepín market, a business he’s been in for around 40 years.
The peppers had been purchased from harvesters in the Sierra Alta and several communities on the Sonora River for eventual sale in Tijuana, Mexicali, Culiacán and Los Mochis.
The chiltepín is harvested from wild plants in the Sonora desert. It can be hotter than the habanero but its strength can vary, depending on the weather conditions under which it grew.
When classes got out for winter break this year in Xalapa and it seemed as if half the city emptied from one day to the next, the municipality, in a rare and shocking show of logic, got to work on fixing some of the more gaping craters in our city’s roads.
I don’t mean to be condescending. It’s just that I’m exactly as weary and cynical as most residents of this city are nowadays. We’ve come to expect as a matter of course the rapid deterioration of the infrastructure and snail-paced repairs using the equivalent of Dollar Store-quality materials that only last until the next heavy rain comes.
We know that we’re just as likely to have an accident from driving too close to the person in front of us as we are from swerving to miss something in the road that shouldn’t be there. This problem isn’t unique to Xalapa, but it is solvable.
As a driver now, I spend a lot of time memorizing where the unpainted speed bumps are on my regular routes, and where the biggest potholes typically sprout, over and over again. I know what “lane” (I use the term “lane” loosely, as it’s actually rare to see painted divisions) to be in on my way home from my daughter’s school to avoid falling into a gaping crater and possibly winding up in China.
As anyone who reads my column has probably deduced by now, I care a lot about both sustainable aesthetics and function. Needless to say, I’m a frustrated but hopeful resident.
Xalapa is beautiful. Situated high in the cloud forest, its gorgeous views of both the Pico de Orizaba and the Cofre de Perote in the distance and green spilling over onto everything that will stand still for more than two days are enough to make you feel like you’re in an urban Fern Gully. Some parts are positively Avatar-esque.
Add to that copious amounts of delicious coffee, the best food in the country, and the city’s artsy and academic vibe, and you’ve got the potential for paradise (I’m biased, of course).
So why can’t we go all the way? I used to assume that the state of Veracruz, for whatever reason, was simply incapable of well-thought-out and fast infrastructure projects, but then I saw Orizaba and I’m doing a terrible job at stifling my jealousy. Why can’t we have nice things, too?
Don’t get me wrong, we’re tentatively making progress. When I returned this month after a couple of weeks in the U.S., several of the streets had been patched up and smoothed over. Great!
Other areas of the city have received or are receiving durable hydraulic pavement rather than the Dollar Store-variety asphalt that’s typically slabbed on the streets, complete with the underground installation of those unsightly cables.
Many of the new projects in the city are being undertaken specifically with pedestrians in mind: expanding and rehabilitating sidewalks, making them handicapped-accessible, adding bike lanes, etc. I just hope we don’t forget that the ability for cars to get around safely is also a big part of making a place safe for pedestrians.
So without further ado, here are my uninvited suggestions to my city and other similar ones for making things as awesome as they should be:
Get that hydraulic pavement everywhere! Really, we have got to stop using cheap materials that wash away with the first rain to repair anything — what’s even the point? We’ve got some great homegrown “green” ideas as well. One other writer suggested that it’s about making sure there’s always work to do but honestly, I think there are enough needed repairs in this city to keep people busy for decades.
If we’re going to have speed bumps everywhere, let’s at least make sure they stay painted so unsuspecting drivers slow down when they’re meant to rather than hitting the roof of their car as they rush over.
We need big, easy-to-read signs indicating two things on every. single. block: the name of the street, and whether or not the street is one-way (once in a while I can’t tell, and have to wait until someone coming from the other direction yells and gestures at me).
For goodness sake, let’s paint some lanes on our major roads — driving should involve as little guesswork as possible about where you should be.
The stoplights need to be retimed based on current traffic patterns rather than the original ones from when they first went up.
Designate a reasonable amount of parking. If we need more parking garages, we need more parking garages. The cars that are in the city aren’t going away, so it’s time to figure out a way to accommodate them.
Every neighborhood in this city knows what it needs: repaired roads, updated official signs, designated parking, repairs of lamp posts, safe places for kids to play. Let’s institutionalize neighborhood organizations that can report problems that need fixing, and even make suggestions for neighborhood beautification projects like more plants and trees or murals.
Experts and workers in the areas needed could be sent by the city to work with the people in the neighborhood, and it could double as a training program for those interested in urban development. A simple lunch could be offered to volunteers, and other benefits for the neighborhood — such as paint for the outside of people’s houses, or trees — could be tied to the number of volunteers that participate.
The real test will be upkeep. And if things aren’t going to be done well the first time around, all we’re doing is throwing money away, anyway. As a friend recently said, “Xalapa has stayed in the 90s.” What he meant is that not a lot of serious updating has been done to the city’s infrastructure since then, and I think he’s right.
Convivencia (coexistence) and participation in civic life is already built into the culture. It’s time to take advantage of that for the betterment of our cities.
Sarah DeVries writes from her home in Xalapa, Veracruz.
The last six years were the six hottest on record in Mexico and climate change is to blame, according to the heads of the National Metrological Service (SMN) and the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC).
The hottest year in the period – and in the almost 70 years since temperature records were first kept– was 2017 when the average temperature across the nation was 22.6 C, 1.7 degrees higher than average of 20.9 C over the period since records were first kept in 1953.
The title of second hottest year ever was shared by 2016 and 2019, both of which recorded an average nationwide temperature of 22.4 C – 1.5 degrees higher than the long-term average. The other years in the six-year period exceeded the average nationwide temperature by at least 1.2 C.
“As a planet, we’re one degree above the average that existed in the period from 1850 to 1900, and remember that the goal has been set to [not exceed a temperature increase] of 1.5 C,” SMN chief Jorge Zavala told a press conference last Wednesday.
“In Mexico’s case, 2019 was the second hottest year; we had an average temperature in the country of 22.4 C nationwide – this includes maximums and minimums of each day and in each region,” he said.
In a subsequent interview with the newspaper Milenio, Zavala said that the fact that six of the past 10 years were the hottest in the last 70 made it possible to conclude that the high temperatures were indeed attributable to climate change.
INECC general director María Amparo Martínez Arroyo offered a similar assessment.
“. . .What’s happening in the rest of the world is also happening in Mexico, we’re going through the process of global warming,” she said.
“All countries, including Mexico, have to accelerate their [emission reduction] actions in order to meet the Paris Agreement because we’re already seeing a very clear trend” that temperatures will likely continue to rise, Martínez added.
SMN forecaster Reynaldo Pascual Ramírez told Milenio that temperatures have been rising in Mexico since 2005, with only one year – 2010 – bucking the trend.
He said that most parts of the country experienced hotter weather last year than in 2018 although some regions including the Sinaloa coast and the states of Sonora, Baja California, Guerrero and Oaxaca didn’t see temperatures rise.
“. . .But it was hotter in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Zacatecas and the entire Huasteca. . .” Ramírez said, referring lastly to a region that encompasses parts of several states including Tamaulipas, Veracruz, San Luis Potosí and Hidalgo.
The forecaster also said that a severe drought affected eastern Mexico last year, highlighting that the region normally receives regular rainfall.
The National Water Commission said in September that two-thirds of Mexico was in drought of varying severity after almost 20% less rain than normal fell between in the first 8 1/2 months of last year.
Raúl Pacheco, a water management expert at the Mexico City research university CIDE, said in October that climate change will cause periods of drought to lengthen and that Mexico’s cities have to adapt to that reality.
“It’s important for cities to adapt to the lack of water and to do that they need a plan . . . They must invest money and there must be coordination between environmental agencies and those working on climate change . . .” he said.
Carlos Slim Helú, one of Mexico’s and the world’s leading entrepreneurs, turned 80 today.
Slim’s business education started when he was young: his father gave him and his siblings a bank book along with his allowance, as the story is told on carlosslim.com. From then on, Slim saw savings and investment as an integral part of his life and eventually rose to become one of the world’s mightiest business magnates.
Slim ranked 11th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at the end of last year, with a fortune valued at US$61.5 billion, to which he added $6.72 billion in the past year.
His realm embraces the telecommunications, infrastructure, energy and building sectors, among others, thanks to such firms in his possession as Telmex-Telnor, the subsidiaries of América Móvil; and the conglomerate Carso which runs such companies as Grupo Sanborns, Carso Infrastructure and Construction (CICSA), Grupo Condumex and Carso Energía.
The market value of his companies added up to $82 billion, a 2.5% jump over the past five-year period, according to Bloomberg.
It isn’t just his astronomical net worth that sets the business magnate apart, but also his proximity to key political figures, among them President López Obrador.
Slim has successfully forged agreements with the current administration, as was the case when his companies IEnova, TC Energía and Grupo Carso renegotiated gas pipeline contracts with the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE).
In addition the businessman has also demonstrated interest in working on infrastructure projects initiated by the current government, such as the National Infrastructure Investment Accord.
The reality is quite different for his telecommunications firms, however, as the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) has mandated the splitting up of Telmex-Telnor to form a new company, which cannot be subsidized, as a result of measures that were put into effect in 2017.
Another disciplinary action is in store for Telmex on the same basis that could result in a fine of up to 5 billion pesos.
The president presents raffle ticket design at today's press conference.
President López Obrador presented on Tuesday the design of a raffle ticket for the presidential plane even as he admitted that there is no certainty that the raffle will go ahead.
Projected on a screen at the president’s morning news conference, the 500-peso (US $27) ticket features an image of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner used by former President Enrique Peña Nieto and is emblazoned with the words “Premio Mayor Avión Presidencial,” or Top Prize Presidential Plane.
According to the ticket, the “Grand Special Drawing” will be held on May 5 to commemorate the 158th anniversary of the Battle of Puebla in which the Mexican army defeated invading French forces.
However, López Obrador clarified that the date was tentative and explained that a final decision about the sale of the plane will not be announced until February 15.
The National Lottery could raffle the plane off by selling six million tickets to raise 3 billion pesos (US $160 million), López Obrador said on January 17, explaining that the amount would cover the estimated US $130-million value of the plane.
The idea was widely ridiculed and spawned countless memes but López Obrador nevertheless asserted on Tuesday that the raffle would “very probably” go ahead. He also said that he has received “a lot of support” for the raffle, explaining that “the people” want to participate.
Reading from the ticket, he told reporters, “[The ticket price] is a contribution for medical equipment and hospitals where poor people are attended to free of charge.”
López Obrador suggested that the National Lottery could sell two million tickets to the general public and that the remaining four million could be bought by 100 or 200 companies.
If the plane isn’t sold in the coming days, he added, “we’ll continue with this plan. . .the raffle is very probably going [ahead].”
The president ruled out the possibility of there being any problems with the plane being raffled off because it belongs to “the people of Mexico.”
Asked about an article in the National Lottery Organic Law that stipulates that only cash can be offered as lottery prizes, López Obrador said that his administration was looking at ways to ensure that the raffle is legal.
“To proceed, a complete adjustment to the legal framework has to be made,” he said. “For example, the payment of taxes has to be resolved because the winner of a prize has to pay a tax.”
López Obrador also said that when the final decision about the sale of the plane is announced next month, the government will present the “official history” of the luxuriously-outfitted Dreamliner, which was purchased for US $218 million in 2012 but not delivered until February 2016.
The rundown, he explained, will include information about how much it cost his administration to keep the plane at the Southern California Logistics Airport while a buyer was being sought, because the figure disseminated by the media is “exaggerated.”
Family members of missing butterfly conservationist Homero Gómez González have been the victims of an extortion campaign related to his disappearance.
“They have been extorting the family with alleged photos and [the family] has been depositing money,” said Michoacán Governor Silvano Aureoles at a press conference on Monday morning.
“We’re going to find him. I hope we find him alive,” the governor said.
He added that he will meet with members of the Michoacán Missing Persons Search Commission later this week.
Gómez’s brother Juan said that Homero was last seen on January 13 at a fair in the town of Ocampo with Mayor Roberto Arriaga Colín and other municipal officials. He left at around 9:30pm and was not seen or heard from afterwards.
Juan said he was unaware of what happened to his brother or whether he had received threats before his disappearance, as Homero Gómez was reserved about such matters.
He added that they are not ruling out any clue or line of investigation.
“The authorities are working and I hope that they do their job well so that this doesn’t go unpunished like so many cases, not just in Michoacán but nationwide,” he said.
Migrants in Caravan 2020 at the southern border last week.
The National Immigration Institute (INM) is investigating 20 internationally active migrant-smuggling networks believed to be operating in Mexico.
“These criminal networks take advantage of people’s transport needs to charge them amounts that can rise above 200,000 pesos (US $10,600) per person,” the institute said in a press release issued on Sunday.
The networks provide transportation and shelter for the primarily Central American migrants to reach their destination, most often the United States, offering up to five attempts.
The office said that it is committed to fighting such cases of people smuggling, as well as maintaining a safe, ordered and stable migration system.
The first migrant caravan of the year reached the Mexico-Guatemala border on January 20. Around 3,000 mainly Honduran migrants were stopped at the international bridge at Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas.
Migrants cling to a truck as they attempt to head into Mexico.
Despite the government’s efforts to hold the migrants back at the border, as many as 1,000 crossed into Mexico on Thursday, marching over seven kilometers toward Tapachula, Chiapas, before being blocked by National Guard troops who fired tear gas at them.
As many as 1,000 migrants entered the country legally on the weekend and were taken to migration facilities. Although their cases for asylum or employment are being evaluated, authorities said that the majority of them will be deported.
As of Monday, the immigration institute had deported more than 2,000 migrants from the so-called Caravan 2020 in nine days.
And according to reports yesterday, immigration agents will be busy once again at the end of the week. The self-designated Devil’s Caravan is expected to bring more migrants Friday from El Salvador.
There is a “high risk” of a cartel insurgency in Mexico this year, according to a non-governmental organization that analyzes violence around the world.
The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) said in its report Ten Conflicts to Worry about in 2020 that Mexico is facing a deteriorating security situation and continues to suffer “unprecedented levels of criminal and drug-related violence.”
Under the subheading “What to watch for in 2020,” the NGO said that Mexico is confronted with “an increasingly complex, fragmented and multipolar criminal market and a resolution to these structural problems is unlikely in the short term.”
The situation increases the possibility of “intensified conflict” this year, the ACLED said, anticipating that “brutal everyday violence” will continue to plague the country.
Several “particularly brutal” attacks last year have raised concerns that Mexico’s notorious drug cartels are “increasingly adopting insurgent techniques,” the ACLED said.
The response of the Sinaloa Cartel to an operation in October to capture a son of convicted trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was a prime example.
In an unprecedented show of force, the cartel virtually seized control of Culiacán after the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán López, outmuscling state and federal security forces and forcing authorities to take the decision to release the suspected criminal leader in order to avoid a bloodbath on the streets of the Sinaloa capital.
The retaliatory attack raises fears that cartels are stronger than the military, the ACLED said.
Indeed, Mexico’s most powerful criminal organizations have large arsenals of military-grade weapons at their disposal – and are not afraid to use them.
In contrast, the federal government continues to pursue a so-called “abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not bullets) security strategy that favors addressing the root causes of violence with social programs rather than combating it with force.
Culiacán: one of several ‘particularly brutal’ attacks last year.
To support its “high risk” of insurgency thesis, the ACLED noted that security forces also came under attack last October in Michoacán and Guerrero.
The very next day, the army came under attack in a community just outside the Guerrero city of Iguala. Fourteen suspected members of the Guerreros Unidos, a crime gang that allegedly murdered the 43 students who disappeared in Iguala in September 2014, were killed along with one soldier.
Further substantiating its insurgency prediction, the ACLED noted that nine members of a Mexican-American Mormon family were murdered in an ambush on a rural road in Sonora on November 4 and that a cartel “launched a military-style invasion” into the town of Villa Unión, Coahuila, on November 30.
The Coahuila attack, believed to have been committed by the Northeast Cartel’s military wing Hell’s Army, precipitated an hours-long gun battle with state and federal forces, leaving 22 people dead.
The ACLED asserted that “in addition to high levels of impunity, untrained security forces, and the general weakness of public institutions, the escalation of violence can be partially attributed to the fragmentation of cartels caused by law enforcement campaigns targeting their leaders . . .”
It said that splinter groups are competing violently over the existing drug trade but also diversifying their criminal activities by engaging in kidnapping, extortion, fuel theft and human trafficking.
The NGO also acknowledged that “by some accounts,” President López Obrador’s assumption of power may be linked to increased rates of violence because complicity between public officials and criminal groups has been undermined, “spurring uncertainty amid a struggle for new arrangements.”
In addition, it noted that critics argue that López Obrador has been unable to develop a coherent and effective security policy to fight cartel violence.
For his part, the president has conceded that his administration has not yet been able to reduce homicides but he and other senior officials have expressed confidence that the government’s social programs, along with the deployment of the National Guard, will soon achieve positive results.
To deflect growing criticism of the government’s approach to tackling the record high levels of violence, López Obrador maintains that the poor security situation is inherited.
“. . . I want to make it clear that we’ve been left with the aftermath . . . of a mistaken and corrupt security policy,” he said on January 22.
Mexico’s notorious drug cartels possess a secret communications weapon to complement their arsenal of assault rifles and machine guns: the messaging service WhatsApp.
United States Attorney General William Barr said in July last year that criminal organizations are making use of applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram to coordinate their criminal activities because their encryption makes it extremely difficult if not impossible for authorities to monitor the communication.
Now, federal security officials have told the newspaper Milenio that drug traffickers in Mexico use WhatsApp as their main means of communication. The unnamed security cabinet officials said they’ve discovered that criminals prefer to make calls via the app because they know that authorities can’t listen in on their conversations.
Judges can authorize the tapping of suspects’ phones – authorities’ primary espionage technique for years – but by using WhatsApp, cartel members and other criminals can avoid eavesdropping by Mexico’s intelligence agencies, Milenio said.
One example of a drug cartel’s use of the Facebook-owned messaging service was during a federal security operation last October aimed at arresting a son of convicted drug trafficker and former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
According to Milenio, the Sinaloa Cartel used WhatsApp to organize its aggressive response to the capture of Ovidio Guzmán López, who was subsequently released to avoid even more bloodshed on the streets of Culiacán.
Messages leaked by recipients show that the cartel offered people 200 pesos (US $10) to join the operation to free the suspected trafficker, while WhatsApp was also used to order gunmen to stop their attacks once Guzmán López had been released.
The inability of authorities to intercept the cartel’s communication in real time due to its encryption gave the criminal organization a tactical advantage, Milenio noted.
Four months prior, the U.S. attorney general said at an international cyber-security conference that an unnamed Mexican drug cartel had used WhatsApp to coordinate the logistics of drug shipments and plan the murders of several police officers.
Barr said that if authorities had been able to legally access the cartel’s communication on the app, the lives of the police could have been saved.
If law enforcement authorities don’t have the capacity to obtain legal access to encrypted communication, the chances of waging a successful war on drugs is reduced, he said.
A study last year revealed that 77 million Mexicans use WhatsApp. Most are aged between 21 and 30.
