A new Mexican gasoline retailer that sells a product described as more environmentally friendly will open its first gas station on June 24 in Morelos.
Wascon Blue will sell Pemex gasoline mixed with ethanol and an additive it calls Blue Power, which was created and tested by engineers at the National Autonomous University and the National Polytechnic Institute.
According to the company’s website, the mixture generates 50% to 70% fewer greenhouse emissions than regular fuel and performs 10% better in terms of mileage, putting it in compliance with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and many European standards.
In an interview with the newspaper El Financiero, Wascon Blue general manager Enrique Olivera Melo said the gas station in Ayala, Morelos, will be the first of 50 to open in two states before the end of the year.
“We are currently in talks with a gasoline retail group so that we can open gas stations in Morelos and Querétaro, which is where we are permitted to distribute our product according to European standards, which has not yet been approved in Mexico City,” said Olivera, a former director of operations at Exxon Mobil.
He added that Wascon Blue plans to invest 20 million pesos (US $1 million) in the construction of two fuel distribution centers in Querétaro and Morelos within the same period.
“Our [first] customers will receive some promotions; we want them to try our alternative and to compare its power and benefits with those of other products.”
He also highlighted that the retailer’s mixture offered customers a purer fuel for a cheaper price.
“. . . they will be getting regular 90-octane gas for the price of 87-octane, or premium 95-octane gas for the price of 92-octane.”
Wascon Blue’s gas stations will be self-service, where motorists will fill up their own tanks.
“This has been approved by the Secretariat of Energy. We hope to have the country’s first such station up and operating this year.”
Mérida chamber of commerce president Salum suggests placing a natural gas supply vessel in Progreso.
There is anger and concern about power outages and natural gas shortages on the Yucatán peninsula even as energy authorities reject the claim that future electricity supply is threatened.
Michel Salum Francis, president of the Mérida chapter of the Mexican Chamber of Commerce, told a press conference yesterday that outages have a severe impact on business, especially the hotel sector, and could even cost lives.
There have already been three widespread blackouts on the Yucatán peninsula this year and yet another outage left the west side of Mérida in the dark on Monday night.
Energy experts have blamed the power cuts on a lack of natural gas to generate power, and the National Energy Control Center (Cenace) said Monday that it intended to declare a state of emergency on the peninsula for that reason. But it backed away from its warning yesterday.
If an emergency was declared, Cenace could prioritize the supply of energy to certain areas of the peninsula’s cities and towns.
Adrián Calcaneo: paying the price for focusing too much on crude oil.
“We’re very angry. It’s not possible that they leave the peninsula without energy,” Salum said, charging that authorities have failed to implement measures and develop strategies to address the region’s power problems.
He said that a supply vessel should be permanently stationed at the port city of Progreso to provide natural gas to power plants in the state of Yucatán.
However, Salum added that he didn’t expect the federal government to do very much to resolve the region’s energy issues, suggesting that Mexico is heading down a similar path to that taken by Venezuela, where there are shortages of a wide range of consumer products, including electricity.
According to the president of the energy commission of the Mexican Employers Federation, companies in the southeast of the country are only operating at 65% capacity because the National Natural Gas Control Center has reduced gas supply.
Edmundo Rodarte said the petrochemical and power generation industries are worst affected, explaining that “we’re fighting to have the supply of natural gas regularized.”
While the Yucatán peninsula needs more natural gas, statistics show that domestic production of the hydrocarbon fell in the first four months of this year to the lowest level since 2005.
CFE’s Bartlett: no worries.
Average production between January and April was just under 4.8 billion cubic feet per day, which is only 0.5% below levels recorded in the same period last year.
However, production levels have been now been declining for five consecutive years, according to the state oil company Pemex.
The Yucatán peninsula is particularly affected by the decreased output because a large part of the energy consumed in the region is generated in power plants that depend on natural gas.
Energy sector specialists told the newspaper El Financiero that declining investment for natural gas production and exploration in recent years, along with the federal government’s historical tendency to favor oil production, are the main reasons behind the reduced output.
“There is an emphasis toward crude fields,” said Adrián Calcaneo, an energy sector analyst at the business intelligence company IHS Markit.
“That means that there is less attention, [although] not abandonment of gas fields. Historically there hasn’t been interest from the government [in gas production and exploration]. Not just this government but also in the past. Now we’re paying the price for not having focused on gas and having focused on crude.”
Edgar Ocampo, an independent energy analyst, said there are significant natural gas reserves in states such as Nuevo León, Coahuila, Tabasco and Campeche but accessing them would involve the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, an extraction technique that has been rejected by the government.
Ocampo predicts that there will be more power outages on the Yucatán peninsula due to a lack of gas and believes that the only way to guarantee electricity supply is to schedule planned power outages.
“In the short term, there’s no other option. They will have to program them, if the demand [for power] is very high and capacity falls, [the answer is] staggered blackouts. No other solution will arrive in less than two or three years,” he said.
“The problem on the Yucatán peninsula is that electricity demand is growing at an abnormal pace. The national average is between 2.5% and 3% annually, [whereas] on the peninsula it’s 4% because there is a very large real estate boom,” Ocampo said, adding that most new homes and other developments have air-conditioning systems that consume large amounts of energy.
In the long term, the analyst said, three are three options to increase power supply to the region: construction of a new electricity transmission line, development of infrastructure to increase natural gas imports or construction of a new stretch of gas pipeline.
While the private sector and analysts are concerned about the electrical supply, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has maintained that the supply is secure and that there is no shortage of natural gas.
CFE President Manuel Bartlett wrote on Twitter yesterday that there is no risk to energy supply on the peninsula, even in peak demand periods, and released a technical analysis to back up his claim.
He also posted an “explanatory note” issued yesterday by Cenace that said that “the declaration of a state of operational emergency” as a result of electricity demand exceeding supply “has no foundation at this time.”
Coffee producers who won a previous Cup of Excellence competition in Mexico.
Looking for an excellent cup of coffee? Wait to see what the judges decide at a coffee competition Friday in Veracruz.
A jury of 23 coffee experts from all over the world will judge 40 Mexican coffees in the seventh Cup of Excellence México competition in Xalapa, the state capital.
The 40 varieties of coffee went through a pre-selection process for which there were 248 entrants, and then were vetted by a jury of Mexican coffee experts. The international jury will choose the top 30 varieties, which will be included in an international auction to take place on August 8.
The auction is an opportunity for producers to sell coffee for more than the market price. In 2017, Veracruz producer Rodolfo Jiménez López sold half a kilogram of coffee for over US $100.
The top three coffees will win the distinction of Cup of Excellence, bringing them to the attention of the world’s top coffee buyers.
Judges at one of the six previous competitions.
“International tasters and buyers even come to visit the farms where the winning coffees are grown, so it opens up a door to the world for the farmers,” Cup of Excellence organizer Amanda Santos Chávez told the newspaper El Universal.
Veracruz has the best representation at the competition with 18 samples of its coffee. Other entries are from Puebla, Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca and México state. In the six competitions that have taken place in Mexico since 2012, coffees from Veracruz have won first place five times, and second place four times.
“This event is very important for coffee producers, because the best coffees come to compete,” Luis Herrera Solis, coordinator of the Mexican Coffee Association, told El Universal.
Judges will select Mexico’s top three coffees.
“Most of these coffees come from very small producers, and because of the training they get, they can produce excellent coffee.”
The Cup of Excellence was founded by the Association for Coffee Excellence in 1999 to help farmers sell high-quality coffee for higher prices.
The first competition took place in Brazil, but coffee producers from other countries quickly joined in. Mexico has been participating in the international competition since 2012, along with 11 other countries.
Beer maker Grupo Modelo is the latest in a slew of Mexican businesses to take an innovative approach to environmentally friendly practices with a new interlocking beer can design that will do away with the brand’s six-pack rings.
The design and campaign for the new “Fit Packs,” a collaboration between the maker of Corona and the United States advertising company Leo Burnett, won a bronze lion Monday at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France.
Marketing vice-president Carlos Ranero of Grupo Modelo’s parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev explained in a short video presenting the campaign that the beverage industry produces over 15 million tonnes of plastic packaging every year, much of which ends up in the world’s oceans, harming plant and animal life.
Ranero pointed out that although other solutions have been tested to eliminate the plastic rings, alternatives inevitably use other materials that also generate waste. To bypass the problem, Corona’s new cans use no packaging to hold them together.
Instead, the company redesigned the cans themselves so that the top of each can screws into the bottom of another, creating a stackable tower of up to 10 beer cans. Ranero added that because of the portable nature of the interlocking cans, it won’t be necessary to use plastic bags to carry them.
Case of Corona? No, make that a stack.
Corona brand director Clarissa Pantoja said the company hopes not only to eliminate its own use of plastic, but to revolutionize the entire beverage industry’s approach to packaging. She said Corona will make its blueprints for the interlocking cans open source so that other companies can also reduce their impact on the environment.
The new Fit Packs are not Corona’s first attempt to scale back its environmental footprint. Earlier this month, the brand launched Desplastifícate (Deplasticize),a campaign that seeks to clean two million square meters of beach this summer in 23 countries.
In another campaign launched in early June, the company teamed up with the environmental organization Parley for the Oceans for the campaign Corona Better World. Consumers in Mexico, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Brazil will be able to trade in three empty PET plastic bottles for one bottle of beer.
Additionally, Corona will clean a square meter of beach for every six-pack sold of a limited edition campaign beer bottled especially for the initiative.
Last year, the brewer tried replacing the plastic in the six-pack rings with a biodegradable product. A pilot program was run in Tulum, Quintana Roo, also in partnership with Parley for the Oceans.
The principal inter-city bus lines in border states will support the federal government in its efforts to control illegal immigration by requiring that passengers present identification for long-distance travel.
In his morning press conference on Tuesday, President López Obrador announced that bus companies will be required to ask passengers for identification.
“We’re asking for cooperation and understanding from drivers, and from passengers, because we’re going to need to ask for identification to buy tickets for long trips on public transportation,” he said. “It’s proven that, on buses, a significant percentage of the riders aren’t from the country, and don’t have any documents.”
The new rule is already being implemented in the state of Tamaulipas, and in the biggest cities in the state of Chiapas. However, bus stations are still not asking for identification in border municipalities in the Sierra Mariscal region of Chiapas, where users of inter-city transit are largely Guatemalan.
Bus stations will accept a variety of documents, including passports, voter identification cards and driver’s licenses. For legal migrants who have other forms of identification, bus companies can decide whether or not to allow them to board.
The new measure has sparked opposition from civil society organizations, charging that it will harm the millions of Mexicans who don’t have identification documents.
An open letter from the Institute for Women in Migration and signed by dozens of other civil society organizations said the measure violates Article 11 of the constitution, which guarantees the right to unrestricted travel in the country without the need for documentation.
“The announcement by [bus companies] Flecha Amarilla and ADO is more evidence that the Mexican state is restricting the rights of the citizens of Mexico, and giving private companies the power to enforce immigration laws,” the letter reads. “In addition, these measures exclude millions of people who live in Mexico who don’t have these documents, and who travel on the highways in different modes of transportation, which includes young people, agricultural day laborers, indigenous people, immigrants who do hold documents, returned or deported Mexicans or people whose voter cards have been stolen, or have expired.”
Big-box retailers are worried that a rollback of regulations for welfare programs will result in more money being directed toward the informal economy.
President López Obrador has said that the government will hand out 201 million pesos (US $10.4 million) in social support funding this year, raising the average family income by 5%. Retailers had expected to see a corresponding increase in sales, but the reverse has been true.
The association representing stores including Chedraui, Soriana, Coppel and Elektra reported sales growth of just 3.2% the first five months of the year, the lowest growth for the period in the last five years.
The National Association of Supermarkets and Department Stores (ANTAD) blamed the lower than expected numbers on new regulations that allow beneficiaries to withdraw cash from welfare cards.
“We are worried that welfare benefits will end up in the informal economy because before there were regulations to prevent the benefits from being turned into cash and being spent on alcohol or cigarettes,” ANTAD president Vicente Yáñez said.
Markets have seen a good start to the year in terms of sales.
The benefits were previously distributed through payment cards that could only be used to purchase certain items in certain stores. Starting this year, however, benefits are deposited on debit cards from which recipients can withdraw cash at ATMs. Yáñez and other experts fear that could lead to more money being directed to the informal sector, where between 40% and 50% of retail sales in Mexico take place.
Alejandra Macías Sánchez, research director at the Center for Economic and Budgetary Research, an NGO, told El Financiero that benefits used to be directed toward female heads of households and that the distribution of benefits to others could be contributing to the decline in sales for big-box retailers.
“Young people and elderly people are getting the benefits, but not female heads of household, as was done under the Prospera program,” she said. “As a woman, you look out for the good of your family. But for a young person or an elderly person, that’s not necessarily the case.”
On the other hand, allowing benefits to be converted into cash has benefited the country’s markets, according to Gabriel Leyva, director of supply and distribution for Mexico City’s Economic Development Secretariat.
“We’ve had a good start to the year,” he told El Financiero. “According to our numbers, there’s been a 40% decline in the waste of goods in the basic basket [of consumer needs].”
Security forces stand watch as an immigration agent speaks with migrants in Chiapas.
A group of African migrants rioted at a temporary shelter in Tapachula, Chiapas, yesterday to demand food, better conditions and the prompt issuance of visas that allow them to travel to the northern border.
Immigration authorities said the incident occurred at around 4:00pm at the front door of a shelter that has been set up on fairgrounds in the southern city to house the large number of migrants currently awaiting the outcome of their visa requests.
The newspaper Milenio reported that members of the National Guard, Federal Police and the navy attended the disturbance and managed to foil an attempted breakout from the facility.
Shortly after, National Immigration Institute (INM) vehicles arrived with additional food supplies, Milenio said.
During the commotion, migrant women complained about the conditions in the overcrowded detention facility and shouted for help.
“We don’t have access to anything and they [immigration authorities] don’t do anything [about it],” one African woman said.
“. . .They don’t let us leave here and we don’t know why. What is the process to leave this place? They don’t tell us anything, they don’t care.”
Another African woman said there are migrants from Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, the Congo, Angola, India and Bangladesh being held at the shelter and complained that there is no food.
Other migrants complained about severe overcrowding, delays in the processing of their visa requests and the inability to communicate with their families.
At the start of this year, the INM issued more than 10,000 humanitarian visas to migrants that allowed them to work in Mexico and access services for up to a year, or travel to the northern border to apply for asylum in the United States.
However, in more recent months, authorities started implementing stricter immigration policies amid increasing pressure from the United States to stop the flow of undocumented migrants from Central America.
The number of arrests and deportations increased and the INM stopped issuing humanitarian visas.
The tougher approach to dealing with the migrants has caused overcrowding at some immigration facilities including the Siglo XXI migrant detention center in Tapachula, where there have been several riots and mass escapes in recent months.
Now, as the result of an agreement reached with the United States to stave off tariffs threatened by President Donald Trump, Mexico has committed to even stricter enforcement against undocumented migrants.
However, even though the presence of security forces has been beefed up in the south of the country, soldiers found themselves outnumbered and outmaneuvered in a confrontation with smugglers and informal merchants at the Suchiate river on the Mexico-Guatemala border on Sunday.
Yesterday, Milenio reported that there was no federal security presence at the river crossing at Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas, where tens of thousands of migrants, including several large caravans, have entered Mexico since late last year.
Mexico and the United States are planning a new US $100-million border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego.
An official with the federal Transportation and Communications Secretariat (SCT) said the new border crossing, to be known as Otay Mesa II, will cover 314,773 square meters and be located three kilometers east of the first Otay Mesa crossing.
Cedric Escalante Sauri explained that Mexican authorities are in the process of obtaining the rights-of-way for the highway that will lead to the crossing and that tenders will be invited to operate the concession.
The Tijuana-San Diego crossing is the busiest along the entire border in terms of private vehicles and pedestrian traffic, according to Escalante.
He said there are 54 border crossings in total and that the value of trade shipped by highway between the nations in 2017 was worth $384.7 million, while $79.9 million in goods were shipped by rail.
Of the eight biggest border crossings Tijuana-San Diego sees the highest volume of passenger vehicles, buses and pedestrians with 30%, 38% and 30% of the total respectively.
In terms of cargo trucks, the Nuevo Laredo-Laredo crossing between Tamaulipas and Texas is the biggest with 2.2 million crossings per year.
Sinaloa deputies vote as supporters and opponents of the bill watch.
Sinaloa lawmakers voted Tuesday against a measure that would have legalized same-sex marriage in the state with 20 votes against and 18 in favor.
Most of the yes votes came from the ruling Morena party, which holds 23 of the 40 seats in the Sinaloa Congress. But six defectors from Morena, along with deputies from the other parties, were able to block passage of the bill.
Catholic Church groups that were on hand for the vote celebrated the outcome, while LGBT groups expressed their anger, at one point breaking down an access door to the state legislature.
Morena Deputy Francisca Abelló criticized the opposition for voting against the bill.
“Those of us who talk about a secular state, the essence of the Mexican constitution, and the Mexican state itself, should ask ourselves, should the state impose administrative and legal regulations on the private lives of individuals?” she said.
PRI Deputy Elva Margarita Inzunza Valenzuela said she was voting against the bill because legalizing same-sex marriage would represent an attack on the family, and that she fears same-sex couples will be able to adopt children in the future.
“This would create an atrocious and uncertain future for our society,” she said. “We cannot accept the questioning of the concept of family, understood as being between a man and a woman. The family is the natural base.”
Legislation allowing same-sex marriage currently exists in 15 states and Mexico City. At least 10 of those states also allow same-sex couples to adopt children. Hidalgo and San Luis Potosí are the most recent states to have legalized same-sex marriage, while lawmakers in Yucatán recently voted down a proposal to do the same.
A 2015 ruling by the Supreme Court found that state laws against same-sex unions were unconstitutional, and recommended that such laws be changed. However, same-sex couples in the 12 states where same-sex unions are banned must still appeal to federal courts to be able to get married.
President López Obrador spoke to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg via video link yesterday and asked him to partner with Mexico to expand internet coverage across the country.
“If you consider it interesting, we invite you to participate to form a partnership. It would be something extraordinary if Facebook helped in the communication, in the connectivity of Mexico, especially for the benefit of the poor,” the president said.
In a video posted to social media, which only shows López Obrador’s pitch to Zuckerberg and not the latter’s response, the president set out the shortcomings of internet coverage.
He said coverage is limited to 20% of Mexico’s territory, where 80% of the population lives.
The other 20% – the country’s “poorest” people – don’t have access, the president said.
“Our intention is to connect all the towns, close to 300,000 locations that don’t have [internet] communication,” López Obrador said.
The president explained that the national electricity grid covers 95% of Mexico’s territory, adding that “we want to take advantage of that infrastructure so that with optical fiber, and possibly antennas, we can communicate.”
“It’s a program to communicate and inform, to improve education and health,” López Obrador said.
He told Zuckerberg that his government’s aim is to implement a non-profit project to provide internet services at very low costs to Mexico’s most marginalized people, adding, “your support is very important for us.”
In a social media post accompanying the video of his remarks, López Obrador extolled the virtues of internet connectivity.
“There’s no need to travel abroad frequently, now we can communicate through video conference,” he said.
The president’s conversation with the 35-year-old Facebook chief follows his announcement last month of the creation of a new state-owned company to provide internet services.
“With all respect, what are we going to say to the companies that have had the [internet] concessions and haven’t connected the country? Step aside because the government is now going to have a company to connect all Mexicans to the internet, that’s the commitment,” López Obrador said at an event in Nayarit on May 11.
The president, an avid social media user, also revealed yesterday that his YouTube channel – on which his daily press conferences are transmitted – will be awarded with a “gold-play button” in recognition of passing one million subscribers.
López Obrador said that his spokesman, Jesús Ramírez, will attend a ceremony at which the “button” will be symbolically conferred.
“I very much thank those from YouTube, Twitter and Face[book], they behave very well, they’re advancing communication a lot and above all the debate is good, sometimes the tone rises, it heats up, everyone participates [and] expresses themselves . . . even the bots participate,” he said.
A report published by Bloomberg in April said that a hate-filled campaign against reporters who question or criticize the president appears to be widely driven by bots.
