Six of 12 suspects arrested Thursday in Xochimilco. All are presumed members of Los Rodolfos.
The Mexico City Attorney General’s Office (FGJ) is investigating a network of city police officers suspected of providing protection to the drug trafficking gang Los Rodolfos, considered among the main purveyors of violence in the capital.
The criminal organization is known to control over 200 drug dealing locations in the boroughs of Xochimilco and Milpa Alta alone, and operates in the Tlalpan and Tláhuac boroughs as well.
According to investigative reports, police in the network charge 200-500 pesos (US $11-27) per shift in order for gang members to utilize a drug dealing location with impunity.
During investigations, FGJ agents found that when police officers detected their presence, they alerted gang members operating in the area by activating the lights and sirens of their patrol cars, frustrating the operations.
Some officers even investigated the undercover FGJ agents looking into their operations under the pretext that they had “received complaints of suspicious people” captured on the city’s security cameras, the reports stated.
On Wednesday, the FGJ arrested David “El Gnomo” Castillo Hernández, 36, identified as an associate of the Los Rodolfos leader nicknamed “La Cotorra” (the parrot).
The operation carried out in the Xochimilco borough also resulted in the arrest of Víctor Velasco Pereda, who investigations found acted as a direct link between La Cotorra and police, possibly providing weekly cash bribes.
Los Rodolfos is a criminal organization founded by ex-convict Rodolfo Rodríguez Morales after he split off from the Tláhuac Cartel, led by Felipe de Jesús Pérez Luna, aka El Ojos, who was shot dead in July 2017 during a confrontation with marines.
Regardless of the raffle, the plane is still for sale.
The presidential plane will be raffled off, President López Obrador said on Friday, but there is a catch: no one will actually walk away with the luxuriously-outfitted Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
“After analysis, reflection and consultation, the decision was taken. The plane will be raffled . . . and all Mexicans who want to help can participate,” López Obrador said at his regular news conference.
He said that six million tickets will be offered at a price of 500 pesos (US $27) each with the aim of raising a total of 3 billion pesos (US $159.7 million). The tickets will go on sale on March 1 and a draw will be held at the National Lottery building in Mexico City on September 15, the president said.
But no one will win the plane that was purchased by the government of former president Felipe Calderón in 2012 for US $218 million and used by his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto. Instead, 100 winners will each receive a prize of 20 million pesos, López Obrador said.
“We did not want to award a prize that would be a problem. You know, the memes, ‘where would I park it?’” he said.
Tickets go on sale March 1.
The combined prize pool of 2 billion pesos (US $106.4 million) is equal to the value of the plane, according to a sample ticket presented by the president, although it has been valued at US $130 million.
The prizes will not actually be funded by the sale of raffle tickets, according to the director of the Institute to Return Stolen Goods to the People. Ricardo Rodríguez Vargas explained that they will be financed by a fund made up of money seized from criminals.
“In the coming days, we’re going to work very intensely in order to make use of the fund, which contains about 4 billion pesos,” he said.
Despite his declaration that the plane will be raffled off, López Obrador clarified that it is actually still for sale.
“We’re doing all this so that we don’t [have to] sell it off cheaply, so that we’re not in a hurry. In other words, the plane is still for sale,” he said.
López Obrador said that 400 million pesos raised by the raffle will go to the air force, which will be responsible for the maintenance of the plane until a buyer is found. Other funds raised will be used to purchase medical equipment, he said.
“He who buys a number, a ticket, will be helping us to solve the problems we were left by pharaonic governments, both the one that bought the plane and the one that accepted it and used it,” the president said.
“The most important thing is that the money will be used for a very important humanitarian cause.”
López Obrador first floated the idea of holding a raffle to offload the plane last month after it was announced that it would return to Mexico after failing to sell during a period of almost a year it spent at the Southern California Logistics Airport in the United States.
The idea was widely ridiculed, criticized by opposition lawmakers and spawned countless memes, many of which focused on the problem a raffle winner would face in finding a place to park the plane.
The 80-seat aircraft has a full presidential suite with a bedroom and private bathroom. Reconfiguring it for commercial use, which would entail increasing the number of seats to about 300, is not financially viable, according to experts.
López Obrador, who takes commercial flights, has vowed never to set foot on the plane, claiming that it is too luxurious for him to use. “There can’t be a rich government with a poor people,” he often quips.
A study published Wednesday provides new details about the 2016 discovery of the remains of a woman who lived on the Yucatán Peninsula at least 9,900 years ago.
Divers Vicente Fito and Ivan Hernández found the remains, including a deformed skull, in September 2016 while diving in the Chan Hol cave near Tulum, Quintana Roo. The woman was dubbed Chan Hol 3 because the ancient remains of two other people have been found in the same cave.
The study says that the skull of the woman – one of the earliest known inhabitants of the land that is now Mexico – showed signs of three different injuries, indicating that she was hit with something hard.
Deformations in the form of craters that appear consistent with lesions caused by a bacterial relative of syphilis were also found on the cranium.
“It really looks as if this woman had a very hard time and an extremely unhappy end of her life,” Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, the lead researcher of the study, told the science news website Live Science.
The woman may have been expelled from her group and killed in the cave.
“Obviously, this is speculative, but given the traumas and the pathological deformations on her skull, it appears a likely scenario that she may have been expelled from her group and was killed in the cave, or was left in the cave to die there,” said the professor of biostratigraphy and paleoecology at the Institute for Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University in Germany.
While the woman’s skeleton is only about 30% complete, researchers have established that she was approximately 1.64 meters tall and about 30 years old when she died.
Dating the remains was challenging because her skeleton had no remaining collagen, leading researchers to look at uranium-thorium isotopes in a stalagmite that had become encrusted in the woman’s finger bones. The technique, which isn’t considered the most accurate for determining the age of human remains, enabled the formulation of a fairly reliable estimate about when the woman lived.
While the skull deformations have led researchers to believe that the woman had Treponema peritonitis, a disease related to syphilis, study co-researcher Samuel Rennie told Live Science that the possibility that the cranial irregularities were caused by erosion of the skull while in the cave could not be ruled out.
The researchers plan to carry out a CT scan on the skull to help them reach a more conclusive diagnosis about the lesions and trauma it presents, he said.
Rennie also said that Chan Hol 3 had a slightly longer and narrower brain case and face than other ancient people who lived in the land now known as Mexico.
That suggests that there were at least two different groups of humans living here at the end of the last ice age, he said.
“The two groups must have been very different in aspect and culture,” Stinnesbeck said.
“While the groups from central Mexico were tall, good hunters, with elaborate stone tools, the Yucatán people were small and delicate, and to date not a single stone tool was found.”
El Señor de Tila church in Balancan, Tabasco, which will be the first state to offer the "Eight Days" tour packages.
An initiative that will offer eight-day tours around individual Mexican states has the backing of state tourism secretaries, according to the president of the Mexican Association of Travel Agencies (AMAV).
Eduardo Paniagua Morales said that the “Journey Across Mexico in Eight Days” project will be officially launched at the 2020 Tianguis Turístico, an annual tourism industry event that will be held March 22-25 in Mérida, Yucatán.
The initiative, which is being developed by the AMAV, will offer at least 15 eight-day tours featuring 24 “experiences” in each participating state, he said.
Paniagua said that the tourism secretary of Tabasco, which will be the first state to offer the tours, as well as those in Chihuahua and Coahuila have indicated that they are practically ready to support the project.
The Tamaulipas tourism secretary has invited AMAV tour operators to visit that state to identify destinations that can be included, he added.
The AMAV chief also said that tours are being prepared for Quintana Roo, explaining that buses will leave the Chetumal airport twice weekly to transport tourists to destinations including Bacalar, Mahahual, the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, Tulum and Cobá lagoon. A single tour in Quintana Roo will generate an economic spillover of 378,000 pesos (US $20,250), Paniagua said.
He said the AMAV plans to gradually include more states in the program and that meetings with the tourism secretaries of Nuevo León, Oaxaca and Zacatecas have been held to that end.
The aim of the initiative, Paniagua said, is to offer new products to tourists and generate business for hotel owners, tour guides and others who work in the tourism sector. At a national level, the program is estimated to benefit the tourism sector to the tune of 450 million pesos annually, he said.
The president says he believes tourism will not be affected.
Private sector tourism organizations have warned that eliminating long weekends as proposed by President López Obrador would cause economic damage to the tourism sector – but the president himself rejects the claim.
López Obrador announced Wednesday that he would propose a reform at the end of the current school year to eliminate the long weekends known as puentes (bridges) in order to better honor the country’s history.
His proposal will move federal holidays that commemorate historical events to coincide with the actual dates on which they took place, rather than giving the public a day off work and school on a predetermined Monday.
The Federal Labor Law was modified in 2006 so that three historical events – Constitution Day, former president Benito Juárez’s birthday and Revolution Day – are commemorated on the first Monday of February, the third Monday of March and the third Monday of November, respectively, regardless of whether the actual date falls on those Mondays or not.
Many Mexicans take advantage of the long weekends to take short trips with family or friends, especially to beach destinations on the Pacific, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean coasts.
In that context, the National Association of Chain Hotels (ANCH), the Mexican Association of Hotels and Motels (AMHM) and the Mexican Federation of Tourism Associations (Fematur) agreed that López Obrador’s proposal must be stopped.
In a letter sent to Tourism Secretary Miguel Torruco, ANCH President Braulio Arsuaga highlighted the benefits that the most recent puente was expected to generate for the tourism sector.
“To give you an example of the benefits that [long weekends] have brought, allow me to share data that you yourself used. On January 29, you reported that for the vacation period from January 31 to February 3, around 1.6 million vacationers would travel. As a result, hotel occupancy would increase 62.7% and there would be an economic spillover of close to 4 billion pesos [US $214.4 million],” he wrote.
The AMHM said in a statement that getting rid of long weekends “would be a terrible mistake,” asserting that the tourism sector could be “severely” affected.
López Obrador claimed that moving holidays to the actual dates that historical events occurred would help educate people, especially schoolchildren, about Mexican history.
But the AMHM insisted that “there are other ways to raise awareness among our boys, girls and young people.”
“We believe that the elimination [of long weekends] is not a measure that guarantees the desired objective,” the association said.
Fematur president Jorge Hernández said that all tourism sector stakeholders should be consulted before any decision is made, highlighting that, in addition to the economic benefit of long weekends, the holidays afford Mexican families a better quality of life.
At his morning press conference on Thursday, López Obrador dismissed the concerns of the tourism sector, which generates about 9% of GDP and provides employment to approximately 3.8 million people.
“I believe that [tourism] won’t be affected. On the other hand, forgetting the past does affect us,” he said.
The president also stressed that his government is carrying out a range of measures to boost tourism, citing efforts to clear beaches of sargassum and the construction of the Maya Train.
Cleaning up the Santiago River has begun, governor says.
After a decade of ignoring the pollution of the Santiago River, the Jalisco government says it is taking action to clean it and other state waterways.
Governor Enrique Alfaro Ramírez toured a part of the river on Thursday and announced the closure of a company in the municipality of Ixtlahuacán for polluting the waterway.
Governor Alfaro also solicited the help of the National Water Commission (Conagua) and the Secretariat of the Environment to review a list of 29 companies that have been observed to be operating outside of federal environmental regulations for allowed water contaminants.
Called the Macro Excursion, the tour was organized by the governor after a report on the condition of the river by the Jalisco Human Rights Commission (CEDHJ).
The governor spoke out against the commission for its report, claiming his government has already spent “hundreds of millions of pesos” on the cleanup project, which he announced in 2018, days after taking office.
Alfaro announced during the tour that the Jalisco Water Management Secretariat had invested 800 million pesos (US $42.9 million) to renovate 19 water treatment plants, a project expected to be completed by the end of the year.
He said that there needs to be more communication between the government and the CEDHJ, as the latter had been unaware of recent government actions to clean up the state’s water system.
“What we need is a permanent advisory board and today I publicly ratify the commitment by the state government to create this board immediately,” said Alfaro.
He also announced the implementation of a new system of sewage canals, a water rehabilitation program and a statewide registry of water flows meant to identify the presence of heavy metals and other contaminants released by private firms.
The registry was instrumental in identifying the 29 companies up for review for possibly discharging contaminants into the state’s waterways.
“Zero tolerance, that’s the position of the government of Jalisco. We want there to be investment, but we want the investment to be friendly to the environment,” he said.
CEDHJ President Alfonso Hernández Barrón requested that the governor include environmental activists, human rights defenders and citizens on the advisory board to achieve that goal.
One of Mexico’s longest rivers, the Santiago originates at Lake Chapala, south of Guadalajara, and runs 433 kilometers on a northwest course to the Pacific Ocean. It is widely described as the most polluted river in the country.
The sights and sounds of the Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) will return to the Hermanos Rodríguez racetrack in Mexico City for its seventh edition.
Focusing on international DJs and dance producers with such musical styles as house, techno, drum and bass, and dubstep, the event is the largest electronic dance music festival in North America and the largest event of its kind in Mexico.
EDC combines music, art and technology to produce 3D superstructures, glow-in-the-dark environments, fireworks shows and LED-infused figures. Carnival themes and attractions set the tone, with acrobats and costumed figures working the crowds as well as amusement park rides.
As described on the festival’s website, “Each area contained within EDC represents a distinct union of technology and nature, where elements mix to ignite the senses and inspire the imagination.”
Slated for February 28 to March 1, EDC Mexico will have more then 120 artists performing on seven stages, highlighted by DJs David Guetta (France), Armin Van Buuren and Tiësto (Netherlands), Craig Connelly and Jax Jones (England), Zedd (Russia/Germany), Borgore and Vini Vici (Israel), Wuki (US) and Giuseppe Ottaviani (Italy).
The seven main stages — among them kineticFIELD, neonGARDEN, wasteland and bionicJUNGLE — are works of art in themselves, the largest being 120 meters wide and 30 meters high, and another providing 360-degree action to the crowds that surround it.
Major sponsors include Dos Equis, Barcel, Citibanamex, Telcel and Pepsi. The 2019 edition had over 230,000 attendees.
Tickets for this year range from 1,480 to 4,500 pesos.
The Electric Daisy Carnival began as a warehouse party in Los Angeles by founder and CEO Pasquale Rotella in 1997. From then until 2000, it changed venues often as its popularity grew. The first spinoff reached Texas in 2001. Since then versions have been held in Orlando, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Korea, Japan and India as well as Mexico. The various EDC festivals attract nearly one million fans annually.
The flagship event is now held at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. For 2020, that event is scheduled for May 15-17.
A students’ strike at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) now enters its fourth month as unrest has spread throughout the public university system, in some cases leading to heated confrontations with administrators.
Protests to denounce gender violence and sexual assault by professors began on October 2. Since then students at 23 university colleges and preparatory schools under the UNAM umbrella have organized their own strikes to demand something be done, affecting over 161,000 students in all.
The two schools that have been closed the longest are the School of Philosophy and Letters, on strike since November 4, and the National Preparatory School 9, closed since November 12.
Some protests have become violent, leading to vandalism and confrontation between students and administrators.
Masked and hooded students on the rampage.
Students in hoods and masks protested outside the university’s main administrative offices on Tuesday, seeking to open a dialogue with school administrators. The protest turned violent when they were met by security personnel instead.
The students spray-painted graffiti on the building, broke glass doors and windows and set fire to the property.
“The rector’s council decided to stay in the back of the building and they don’t want to come to the door … We consider this a refusal to accept our demands, many of which have been sent without resolution,” said one protester.
The university responded in a statement saying that it “cannot accept in any case the mistreatment and aggression against its professors, nor against the students that do not share the methods of the masked people.”
It called the protests “open provocations” by violent groups and said that “there are large majorities [of students] who want to continue with their classes.”
After Tuesday’s protest became violent, UNAM attorney Mónica González Contró accepted a list of demands presented by the students of Preparatory School 9. Though they thanked her for doing so, the protesters complained that the university’s response to their demands had been insufficient.
President López Obrador appeared to dismiss the students’ claims of violence and sexual assault, saying he believed that the protests were being organized by a “black hand” and called them “a movement without a cause.”
He said that the current unrest is different from past situations, such as the student protests of 1968 that led to the Tlatelolco Massacre, because “we are living in times of liberty, justice, tolerance [and] the search for peace. These are new times because there is no authoritarianism, no corruption.”
The president called for the schools to reopen and for there to be dialogue between administrators and students.
More than 2,000 drones were registered by the Federal Civil Aviation Agency (AFAC) last year as the use of the unmanned aerial vehicles continues to grow across a range of industries.
AFAC aviation director Pablo Carranza Plata told the newspaper Milenio that 2,140 drones were registered in 2019 and predicted that double that number will be added to the registry in 2020. The registration of drones, which is free, has been mandatory since December 2019.
Pilots of drones weighing 25 kilograms or more must also obtain a license. Not having one could result in a fine of up to 403,000 pesos (US $21,600).
Drones were initially used in Mexico mainly for recreational purposes but they are now also utilized in the agriculture, logistics, energy, academic and security sectors, among others.
Police are using the devices to combat crime in states including Guanajuato and Yucatán, while criminals are also flying drones to case homes they plan to burglarize and even smuggle drugs across the northern border into the United States.
“Drones are at the same point where computers were 30 years ago when people started to incorporate them into their work and recreation,” said Víctor Cuadra, founder and operations chief of Drones México, a firm that advises companies about ways in which they can make use of the aerial vehicles.
“[People] are starting to find new uses for [drones]. There are a lot of . . . sectors that are carrying out their own trials and seeing how they could help them,” he said.
Carranza said that the International Civil Aviation Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations, has been working with all member countries since 2010 to help establish regulations aimed at ensuring the safe use of drones by business, government, security forces and private citizens.
In Mexico, the use of drones is prohibited within a radius of 9.3 kilometers from airports and they cannot be controlled from moving vehicles.
Following months of protests, an artists’ coalition has met with federal Culture Secretary Alejandra Frausto, who apologized for unpaid salaries and promised to improve government funding of artistic and cultural projects.
On January 16, unpaid artists protested at the federal Secretariat of Culture building on Avenida de la Reforma, where they cited salaries and other debts due on more than 100 projects.
A week later, the department and artists associated with the group #NoVivimosDelAplauso (We don’t live off of applause) came to an agreement for immediate payment, but only for half of the 4,000 individuals owed money. The other 2,000 would be paid in installments for about a month.
However, the artists’ demands grew, including one to meet with the secretary herself on February 4. At this meeting, she offered her apologies and assured that the issue would be clarified and that monthly meetings and roundtables would be held to resolve other questions.
Frausto promised on-time payments in the future. “I’ll make sure this does not happen again … It was not due to a lack of will; [the situation] put the institution to the test.”
Culture Secretary Frausto.
Federal and state authorities have long hired artists of all kinds for projects. Without such funding, there would never have been a Mexican muralism movement. However, the system for funding artistic projects has long suffered from a lack of transparency, leading to problems with inclusivity and diversity and enabling individuals and organizations to work the system to their favor.
There is also a longstanding tradition of not paying artists on time for contracted work, both at the state and federal levels.
Artist activist Abril Reza said, “They commit institutional violence because they have us under their thumb … We decided to organize and take a count of who we are. We are not fighting [the government], we are pointing out the systemic faults which have had consequences. We are organized because we want things to change.”
The issue came to a head as the last fiscal year was ending and many artists had not seen any money from contracts for projects for the entire year. On December 23, after they’d been told they might not get paid until the end of January, a group of 100 artists protested outside the National Palace. They blocked the main entrances of the building before President López Obrador’s morning press conference.
This particular protest was for monies owed by the Mexico City government, the result of which was a declaration of responsibility by the city’s secretary of culture, Alfonso Suárez del Real, as well as a meeting with Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum. The city admitted at the time that it had no list of artists who were owed money and that its administrative personnel were overwhelmed. At the end of December, Sheinbaum signed an agreement with the group to work on a solution.
While the protests have been most visible in Mexico City, there have been actions in other states as well, notably Chihuahua.
The artists’ group has made similar complaints at the federal level, in particular regarding projects for the Los Pinos Cultural Complex, the National Theater Board, the National Center for the Arts and some other institutions.
