Pink-colored water of Oaxaca's Manialtepec lagoon.
The water in a Oaxaca lagoon that is famous for its bioluminescence started changing color on Tuesday and is now a deep shade of pink.
Scientists are not sure about the cause of the color change at Manialtepec lagoon, which is located about 15 minutes away from the coastal city of Puerto Escondido, but suspect it is related to a change in the microorganism population in the water.
The lagoon is known for its glowing bioluminescence, which is caused by the decomposition of certain algae. According to biologist Alejandra Torres Ariño, the color change is probably related to a change in the composition of organisms present in the lagoon, which itself could be caused by a change in salinity or fertilizer runoff from recent rains in the state.
Torres, who teaches at the Universidad del Mar, said she is waiting for results to come back on tests to determine what organisms are present.
“At first glance, it doesn’t seem toxic, but we need to make sure . . .” she said.
Studies are under way to determine why the lagoon’s water has turned pink.
However, Torres noted that although the phenomenon is probably not a threat to human health, it is destructive to the ecosystem because it means the lagoon is being invaded by organisms that are not native to the region. The high nutrient load makes it hospitable to invasive species, she said.
The phenomenon is similar to another event that occurred in Bajos de Coyula, Oaxaca, in 2016, when a biological reaction caused lagoons to turn red and purple. Torres said that the cases appear similar, but could be caused by totally different phenomena.
Chapo country, where agroforestry may replace narco crops.
The federal government will extend its agroforestry employment program to parts of the country where illicit crops are grown, such as Badiraguato, Sinaloa, the birthplace of convicted drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
President López Obrador said on Wednesday that the decision to expand the Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life) tree-planting program to such areas was made because the government has seen that farmers are willing to give up growing illicit crops and cultivate legal ones, such as corn and beans, instead.
The president also highlighted the success of the program to date, stating that timber-yielding and fruit trees have already been planted across more than 500,000 hectares by over 200,000 people.
“It’s the largest job creation program in the country, possibly in the history of Mexico, not just in the countryside . . . never were 200,000 workers hired in one program in one year . . . It’s definitely the best [program] of its kind in the world,” López Obrador said.
He said the program’s budget will increase to just over 25.1 billion pesos (US $1.3 billion) in 2020 from 23 billion this year, and that the aim is to provide employment for 400,000 people and plant trees on one million hectares.
Welfare Secretary Albores presents a report at Wednesday’s presidential press conference.
“Why abandon the countryside?” López Obrador asked.
“Why do the campesinos have to go to try to make a living elsewhere . . . on the other side of the border, if they can do it in their communities? It’s a paradox, it’s a contradiction to have natural resources, wealth, with people who are poor due to abandonment, due to a lack of attention to the countryside. So, we’re going back to the countryside, that’s helping a lot,” he said.
People employed by the Sembrando Vida program are paid 5,000 pesos (US $255) per month.
López Obrador highlighted that the government is also supporting similar tree-planting programs in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as part of a strategy to reduce migration.
Welfare Secretary María Luisa Albores, who has responsibility for Sembrando Vida, said the program will be extended to municipalities in the Golden Triangle, a notorious drug producing region that extends across parts of Durango, Sinaloa and Chihuahua.
She said the program has already had success in the Durango municipality of Topia.
“We were at an ejido [agricultural cooperative] in the Topia valley, where all the land was covered with drugs,” Albores said.
“Today the people tell us that it has decreased, that 90% of people are working on the Sembrando Vida agroforestry system. Between 5% and 10% are still sowing illicit crops, I’m talking about [opium] poppies and marijuana, but that’s going down . . .” she said.
Albores said that 229,091 people are registered in Sembrando Vida, a figure that represents 99.6% of the government’s target to create 230,000 jobs through the program this year.
She explained that it is operating in 362 municipalities in eight states, and that one in three people planting trees are women.
The Welfare Secretariat has an agreement with the Secretariat of National Defense to supply it with 100 million saplings that are grown at 12 army-run nurseries, Albores said.
Mahogany, cedar, cacao, rubber, cinnamon and soursop are among the trees currently being planted.
Liana Jara is one of the people recently reported missing. She was last scene October 5.
A federation of business groups in Tamaulipas has issued an alert in response to a big increase in kidnappings in border cities, calling for urgent intervention by the government.
Federation president Julio César Almanza Armas described the border city of Matamoros as a “red zone,” as kidnappings there have risen sharply in the last two weeks.
“The Matamoros Chamber of Commerce is aware of actions against some businesspeople, professionals, who have been kidnapped in the last two or three months, and that is worrying,” said Almanza.
He also implored businesspeople in the most affected cities to take additional precautions and be more careful with their routines and schedules as much as possible, emphasizing that criminal groups no longer make distinctions between economic classes, putting all of society at risk.
Among the kidnapping victims are a well-known local doctor, manufacturing plant supervisors, business owners and female students who have disappeared during daylight hours in busy areas. In some cases, victims have been released following several days of captivity but relatives did not wish to reveal ransom terms, if any, reported Breitbart Texas.
Almanza mentioned a rumor about a possible criminal gang-imposed curfew that recently made the rounds on social media in Matamoros.
“There is a difficult situation, such as the one on social media last night, when people talked about a curfew at 8:00pm,” he said, although the claim was refuted by the local government.
Citizens in Matamoros have called for a demonstration on Saturday in the town’s main square to raise awareness of the kidnappings and overall insecurity in the city.
One of the designs that have surfaced of the new airport.
The Santa Lucía airport will become a “white elephant” in just “a few years,” according to the leader of a business group who claims that President López Obrador’s decision to build it was made on a “whim.”
Speaking out after a federal judge overturned one of eight suspension orders against the US $4.8-billion project, the president of the National Chamber for Industrial Transformation (Canacintra), José Enoch Castellanos, declared at a press conference on Tuesday that “we disagree” with the construction of the airport.
He called for “common sense” to prevail before public money is spent on the project, claiming that the airport won’t generate any “added value” for Mexico.
“There’s no point having strict austerity and even cutting jobs if the money [saved] is going to be invested in a black hole that will have no use,” Castellanos said.
The Canacintra chief claimed that the project is based on “fantasies” and “good wishes” rather than good planning as occurs for infrastructure projects in countries such as Singapore and China.
Canacintra chief Castellano: ‘investing money in a black hole.’
“I have no doubt that projects like the [Isthmus of Tehuantepec] interoceanic corridor, which has been analyzed for years, can represent opportunity for Mexico,” Castellano asserted, adding that the same can’t be said about the Santa Lucía airport.
López Obrador made the decision to build the airport at the Santa Lucía Air Force Base in México state after canceling the previous government’s partially-built airport project at Texcoco.
The cancelation came after a controversial and legally-questionable public consultation last October that found almost 70% support to terminate construction of the new Mexico City International Airport.
But López Obrador claimed that the project was corrupt, too expensive and being built on land that was sinking.
It is expected that around 18 million passengers will use the Santa Lucía airport in its first year of operations but its planned capacity is for 100 million passengers annually, although little detail has been provided to show how that will be achieved.
López Obrador announced the same month that construction would begin on April 29 but commencement has been delayed due to legal action filed against it by a collective that believes that reviving the Texcoco project is “legally possible.”
Employees of at least 30 public universities stopped work on Wednesday to demand additional funding from the federal government. But President López Obrador is adamant that no further money will be provided.
Among the workers who confirmed their participation in the strike were professors and administrative staff at the autonomous universities of Nayarit, Zacatecas, Morelos, Tabasco, Oaxaca, Michoacán, México state, Sinaloa and Chiapas, said Enrique Levet Gorzope, secretary general of the National Confederation of University Workers.
Most of the universities say they have insufficient funds to pay their employees’ salaries and/or benefits.
The Autonomous University of Nayarit has had a 1.8-billion-peso (US $92-million) budget deficit since 2017, the newspaper Milenio reported.
If the government doesn’t provide additional support to cover the wages of 4,700 teaching and administrative staff members, the workers have threatened to continue their work stoppage indefinitely, leaving 25,000 students without classes.
The autonomous universities of Zacatecas and Morelos say they lack funds to pay the salaries of 3,000 and 6,000 employees, respectively.
José Carlos Aceves, a union leader at the Sinaloa Autonomous University, said there is no money to pay end-of-year bonuses to staff.
About 167,000 students at the university, which has campuses in Culiacán, Mazatlán, Los Mochis and Guamúchil, will be affected by today’s strike.
The rector of the Guerrero Autonomous University, Javier Saldaña Almazán, said he currently has enough funds to cover salaries but two unions that represent more than 5,000 workers at the university decided to join the job action anyway.
University employees plan to converge on the lower house of Congress in Mexico City on Friday to stage a protest aimed at placing pressure on lawmakers to increase tertiary education funding.
However, López Obrador told reporters at his regular news conference on Wednesday that his government won’t give in to “blackmail” even if the whole country is shut down by strikes.
University funding can’t be increased above the inflation rate, the president said, because the government has a policy of austerity that must be respected.
“. . . There has to be order in budget management . . . We have to behave responsibly because if money is given away willy-nilly, we’d have to go into deficit, [raise] taxes, borrow money, increase the debt like it was before, and we’re not doing that now,” López Obrador said.
The president claimed that a lot of public universities have mismanaged their budgets and distributed funding irresponsibly.
A Mexican grandmother has won over both the bellies and hearts of millions of fans with a new Mexican food cooking show she hosts on social media.
Doña Ángela of Michoacán launched her YouTube channel called De mi rancho a tu cocina (From my farm to your kitchen) on August 19, and since then her cooking videos have accumulated over 20 million views and 1.3 million subscribers.
With her own particular style and pleasant demeanor, Doña Ángela demonstrates how to make traditional Mexican dishes, specializing in those of her home state of Michoacán, using traditional cooking methods and utensils.
Her viewers especially love the way she address them and how she explains the processes in a friendly and simple way. She also gives tips on gardening and how users can source their own ingredients.
She has taught viewers to make homecooked delights such as squash with pork, steak and nopal cactus, eggs with red chile and the traditional coffee called café de olla, among others.
Gorditas de Comal De Mi Rancho a Tu Cocina
Doña Ángela’s charisma has even caught the attention of viewers in the United States and Canada, and she has been contacted by users wanting to translate her videos into English so that her recipes can reach an ever wider audience.
Her YouTube channel currently has 16 videos, the majority of which boast 1-3 million views, and her Facebook page has nearly half a million followers.
Many drivers were overcharged fees by their 'agents,' according to the city's mayor.
Among the participants in Monday’s protest against app-based ride-hailing services were leaders of taxi driver associations who benefited from a billion-peso scam carried out during the previous government, according to the Mexico City mayor.
Claudia Sheinbaum told a press conference on Tuesday that while Héctor Serrano was transportation secretary in the administration led by ex-mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera, taxi drivers paid at least 1.26 billion pesos (US $64.4 million at today’s exchange rate) more than they should have for taxi licenses, license plates and vehicle inspections.
The mayor said that taxi group leaders who acted as agents for the drivers they represented charged double for procedures carried out at licensing centers. Some of the centers operated by the Mexico City Transportation Secretariat were also in on the scam, Sheinbaum claimed.
The agents charged drivers 6,000 pesos (US $305) for new licenses, plates and vehicle inspections when the real cost for each was 3,000 pesos, Sheinbaum said.
Therefore, each taxi driver paid an additional 9,000 pesos that went into the pockets of their “agents,” the mayor added.
She said that most of the self-enriching procedures were carried out at the El Coyol and La Virgen licensing centers, both of which her government has closed.
“Many of those that protested were those who dedicated themselves to coyotaje [crookedness], to the handling of all these procedures,” Sheinbaum said.
“They’re angry because we digitalized everything,” she added, explaining that taxi drivers can now lodge all required paperwork themselves on an online platform.
“. . . We know who they [the corrupt agents] are and in due course their names will be provided . . . Their peeve is . . . that they no longer have the extra money they got [before]” Sheinbaum said.
The Morena party mayor, a close ally of President López Obrador, said the Attorney General’s Office and the city comptroller are investigating the corruption scheme that left more than 100,000 taxi drivers out of pocket.
“A lot of those who benefited . . . want to go back to the past . . . but they’re over already, the fight against corruption is serious,” Sheinbaum said.
Senior officials have resigned from the banking regulator because of the law.
The lower house of Congress on Tuesday passed an austerity bill backed by President López Obrador that puts limits on government spending and bans high-ranking civil servants from working in private companies they regulated for a period of 10 years.
The Federal Law of Republican Austerity, which has already been modified and approved by the Senate, was supported by 321 deputies of the coalition led by the ruling Morena party while 124 opposition lawmakers voted against it. It will now be sent to the president for promulgation.
The law stipulates that “for no reason” shall bonuses or any other additional remuneration be paid to officials beyond what is established by the federal budget.
It bans the creation of special government trusts, which have been criticized for their lack of transparency, the refurbishment of government offices for “aesthetic” purposes and the purchase or lease of vehicles whose value exceeds US $19,000. The law also gets rid of the generous pensions paid to former presidents.
Former high-ranking officials will be barred from working in companies they regulated or in which they could use privileged information to which they were privy in their government roles for 10 years, twice as long as the ban that is currently in place.
The new “cooling-off” period is one of the longest in the world. López Obrador has called the revolving door between government and the private sector a “cancer of corruption.”
However, opposition lawmakers were critical of the 10-year ban.
Ricardo Flores, a deputy with the conservative National Action Party (PAN), said it was a violation of the right to “work freedom” and could potentially be a breach of the constitution.
Fernando Galindo Favela of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) said the ban is a violation of civil servants’ rights and charged that it was designed as a “means of political control.”
Half a dozen top officials at the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV) quit in the weeks leading up to yesterday’s vote and more officials are planning to resign before López Obrador signs the bill into law, the news agency Bloomberg reported.
Current and former officials who spoke with Bloomberg said the imminent approval of the austerity law was the main reason for the resignation of those who have already left the CNBV.
Galindo predicted that “the quality” of the public servants that will remain in the government “will be really bad.”
In contrast, Morena Deputy María de los Ángeles Huerta said the law will make the government more efficient and “austere” and bring the era of “golden bureaucracy” to an end.
“For this task, inevitably some sacrifices are required but the waste, secret allocations [of public funds] and kickbacks will come to an end . . . There will be a new dimension of ethics and morals in the federal administration, with which neither the PRI nor the PAN are familiar because they only had wasteful and corrupt governments,” she said.
Mario Delgado, Morena’s leader in the Chamber of Deputies, said the austerity law will be “another tool to combat corruption and serve the people, not economic interest groups.”
Teacher training students in México state today began releasing 92 bus drivers who were held hostage for nearly a week when students hijacked their buses.
The Interior Secretariat (Segob) negotiated an agreement with the students of the San José Tenería school on Tuesday after five days of negotiations. The students hijacked as many as 60 buses last week to attend protests and call attention to their grievances.
Upon reaching an agreement, Segob undersecretary Ricardo Peralta said he was sure that the problem was resolved, but as of early Wednesday morning the students had yet to release any of the drivers.
A representative of a national highway transportation organization denounced the students’ failure to honor the agreement.
“As of now, the drivers still haven’t been released and the situation remains the same,” he said early on Wednesday. “Things haven’t changed, with the distress of the drivers and without knowing what conditions they are in . . . it appears that the authorities are learning how difficult it is to negotiate with criminals.”
But students began freeing buses and their drivers later in the morning and by noon 10 buses had been released.
Undersecretary Peralta lamented that the students had made the decision to “hijack buses and kidnap people as a means of pressuring the government in order to be heard.”
“These are the things we have to change; the young people are surprised to have a negotiating table because they aren’t used to it. They’re used to being received with blows and tear gas, that’s why they utilize these means . . .”
As part of the deal struck with Segob, the students were obliged to release the hostages and cease to occupy highway toll plazas.
For its part, the government promised to pay teachers for backpay still not received and continue to hold monthly talks with students and teachers of the Lázaro Cárdenas Normal School in San José Tenería, among other stipulations.
Most of the stolen buses belong to the Flecha Roja bus line.
The Puebla state Congress has approved legislation proposed by Governor Miguel Barbosa that maintains criminal penalties for abortion and a ban on same-sex marriage.
After rejecting a bill that would decriminalize abortion with a near-unanimous vote, lawmakers approved another bill to reduce the maximum criminal penalty for women who obtain abortions from five years’ imprisonment to one year.
Another bill passed by the Congress changed some of the language of a law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, but maintains the ban on same-sex marriage.
In practice, same-sex marriage is legal in Puebla because of a 2015 Supreme Court decision which ruled same-sex marriage bans by the states were unconstitutional. However, a court order from a judge is necessary for same-sex couples to get married.
Deputy Rocío García Olmedo, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), criticized deputies with the Morena party, which controls the governor’s office and a majority in the Congress, for failing to legalize abortion and same-sex marriage.
García had previously introduced legislation that would have legalized same-sex marriage to bring Puebla into compliance with the Supreme Court decision. After the Congress refused to take up her proposal, she said she will file a lawsuit against the ban.
Labor Party Deputy Juan José Espinosa said that he will report Puebla’s Morena deputies to the party’s national office for their “betrayal” of Morena’s ideals.
“Today, the Fourth Transformation in Puebla made a mistake,” he said. “I remind all of my fellow members of the Juntos Haremos Historia [Together We Make History] coalition who betrayed the trust placed in us, that the people will remember, and the people will punish us.”
The Labor Party was one of the partners in the Morena-led coalition that swept the polls in July last year.
Espinosa added that he fears maintaining a same-sex marriage ban on the books could encourage hate crimes.
