Friday's blockade on the Mexico City-Puebla highway.
The navy says it is collaborating with civilian authorities who are investigating the disappearance of four people in Tlahuapan, Puebla, whose bodies were found Friday in nearby Nanacamilpa, Tlaxcala.
Naval officials said marines encountered a group of people taking fuel from a Pemex pipeline but failed to follow regulations.
“According to preliminary inquiries, the performance of the naval personnel was contrary to legal regulations,” said the navy in a statement, advising that the personnel involved are in custody.
Tlahuapan residents accuse marines of the forced disappearance of four of the people arrested for stealing fuel.
Residents mounted a blockade in protest on Friday on the busy highway between the state capital and Mexico City.
I’m on my 385th step to the top of the Malinalco archaeological site and while my lungs are protesting, it’s easy to see why the original settlers, and afterwards the Mexica Indians, decided this was a good place for a lookout.
The entire green valley is spread out before me on all sides and even though the early inhabitants’ thinking was more strategic than scenic, the view is delightful.
Located in the México state town of Malinalco, this archaeological site is peculiar for its rock-cut architecture (only found here and in places like Petra, Jordan, and Ellora, India) and I attest to its uniqueness. The Cuauhcalli temple or House of the Eagles was built right into the side of the hill, with intricate forms cut around its entrance and giant eagle-head stone seats inside.
While you aren’t allowed to enter the inner sanctum, there is a replica in town at the Dr. Luis Mario Schneider University Museum if you want to get a better feel for the place. The entire complex was used as a training ground for the Mexica, where they would battle to the death with captured prisoners and be initiated as eagle warriors, their septum pierced through to announce their new status.
Four hundred and twenty-seven steps lead up to the site, a fact proudly pointed out to me twice by the single employee at the visitors’ center below — a hundred or so just to the entrance. During a weekday, with tourist crowds dispersed, you weave and wander along alleyways in town to get there, feeling quite like Alice in Wonderland, wondering what might be coming next.
Another view of the Mexica temple.
Malinalco is not a place shouted about in international guidebooks, but most Mexico City residents know it as a rural respite just a few hundred miles from the city limits. Unlike towns similarly close – Valle de Bravo, Cuernavaca, Avandaro – Malinalco has not lost its small-town charm. Despite a handful of good restaurants and a few antique shops and galleries, the town is mainly residential, sunbaked under the heat of the central Mexico sunshine.
For travelers who need lots of in-town activities you will only last a few days, but for folks who like to sit on the plaza, have an ice cream and people watch, you might find yourself looking at property by the end of the day. That said, if you plan right you can make Malinalco a mellow base from which to explore lots of nearby nature.
The Obraje waterfalls (Cascadas del Obraje) are about an hour from town in the Parque Ecoturístico Cienega de San Antonio which is way off the map. If you go on your own a good GPS and some direction-asking Spanish are a must, but there are also local tour groups that take groups, including Maliemociones which will set you up with rappel gear for a misty descent.
There are also nearby biking and hiking trails and once you get tired of all the physical exertion, the Ruta de Mezcal (Mezcal Route), a project hoping to encourage mezcal making (and drinking) in this area.
For this we suggest you go with a guide because the route is not well developed enough yet to be easy on your own. You’re also not too far from the monarch butterfly reserve in México and Michoacán states.
If you want to stick to the sidewalk, Malinalco has some lovely churches, including its most impressive — an Augustine monastery built in 1540.
Malinalco’s Augustine monastery.
At the time of this writing there are several churches closed due to 2017 earthquake damage, but enough are open that you can get your fill: see the Capilla de la Soledad, Capilla de San Pedro, Capilla de Santa Mónica, and Capilla de Santa María.
Every day at the south end of the main plaza a handful of street food stands and market vendors set up, but Wednesday is the big market day with a double row of stands along the plaza’s east side.
The area is famous for nieves (fruit ice cream with a water base), cecina (a type of dried, salted beef used for tacos and other dishes), and trout and other freshwater fish from the dozens of rivers and streams leading into the valley.
Los Placeres restaurant and the Puente de Mali are two of the better restaurants downtown and there is also the French-inspired chef’s menu-only restaurant at Hotel Casa Limon. For a more relaxed ambiance the La Casa de Valentina has a thousand and one items and an adorable patio, and the Tzolkin Café, a coffee shop right on the square, has good vegetarian food, coffee from Veracruz and local craft beer.
There several nice hotels in town, but it’s really more an Airbnb kind of place. Lots of lovely homes and villas will make you feel like a rich weekender. Outside of town I’m fond of the Canto de Aves hotel, a secluded, romantic property with seven or so adobe and wood cabins, each deliciously furnished. For a clean, inexpensive option try Hotel Santa Mónica just steps from the main plaza.
The museum previously mentioned, Museo Universitario Dr. Luis Mario Schneider, was the collection of scholar and longtime Malinalco resident Luis Schneider and has a historical rundown of the area represented with old photographs, indigenous artifacts and samples of flora and fauna. It’s easy to visit in under an hour.
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I also personally recommend the Day of the Dead in Malinalco. The local cemetery overflows with families on October 31 and November 1, decorating the graves of their loved ones, and most of Malinalco’s churches have public altars.
On the 31st you can catch the Recorrido al Mictlán, a roving Day of the Dead festival where young people from each of the town’s neighborhoods make giant paper maché puppets and dance through the streets.
You’ll find that during the week many shops and restaurants are closed, but the town also has fewer tourists so it’s give and take. This is a quiet retreat kind of place and a gateway to local nature more than a hip scene, a nice place to relax for a few days or pass through on your way to or from Mexico City.
Lydia Carey is a freelance writer based in Mexico City.
A diver swims near one of the eight vehicles at the bottom of Cabo San Lucas bay.
As many as 1,000 tires and eight vehicles are among tonnes of garbage lying beneath the surface of the ocean off the coast of Cabo San Lucas in Baja California Sur.
But an ambitious clean-up program is aiming to remove most of the refuse to avoid damage to the marine environment, although the cars appear likely to stay.
Hurricane Odile in 2014 and tropical storm Lidia in 2017 swept large quantities of rubbish into the Cabo San Lucas bay via the Salto Seco arroyo, including steel structures, refrigerators, stoves, gas tanks and PVC pipe.
Now, the Natural Protected Areas Commission (Conanp), in coordination with the local diving association, the municipal government and the Secretariat of the Navy (Semar), intends to remove the garbage before it degrades and contaminates the sea off the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula.
Since the middle of last month, divers have been working every Sunday to extract the unwanted objects from the seabed while authorities and volunteers have been picking up trash strewn along the shoreline.
A school of fish near a vehicle on the seabed.
Miguel Alighieri, a diver and president of the advisory council for the Cabo San Lucas Protected Area (APFF), told the newspaper Milenio that some garbage has already been removed but a lot more still remains.
“More than 30 divers and boats from different companies are helping us to remove what’s left from tropical storm Lidia . . . We still have a large number of tires, we estimate that there are between 500 and 1,000 still under the water,” he said.
Alighieri explained that some of the estimated eight cars lying on the seabed have become artificial reefs and most likely won’t be removed due to the difficulty of doing so, and because they don’t pose a contamination risk or a threat to boats.
“It’s probable that [removing them] won’t be necessary because they’re not at sea level, they’re [at depths of] between 10 and 30 meters . . .” he said.
María Josué Navarro Sánchez, a Conanp deputy director responsible for the Cabo San Lucas AFFF, said that clean-up efforts have so far focused on Playa Médano, the most popular beach in the resort city.
She said the objective of the operation is to get the garbage out of the water before it degrades or drifts to other parts of the bay. Navarro also highlighted the danger the trash poses to marine life.
“There are a lot of animals that confuse these particles [with food] and they can eat them . . . Pieces of plastic have been found in the digestive tracts of fish, birds and mammals,” she said.
“. . . That’s why it’s important to maintain our ecosystem clean, not so much for tourism activities but because of the collateral [environmental] damage . . .” Navarro added.
The Conanp official stressed that even if the clean-up program is successful in removing most or all of the garbage from the water, that won’t be the end of the pollution problem because people are continuing to use normally dried-up stream beds as a dump for their garbage. When there is a storm, Navarro explained, the waste is carried to the sea.
She said that authorities are working to raise awareness of the problems that are generated by the disposal of trash upstream and stressed the importance of protecting the environment of the Cabo San Lucas Protected Area because it is the “economic livelihood” of the majority of the city’s population.
President López Obrador announced yesterday that a controversial gold mining project in Baja California Sur will not go ahead because of environmental concerns.
The president had said previously that the proposed Los Cardones open-pit mine project, located within a buffer zone of the Sierra de Laguna biosphere reserve in the municipality of La Paz, would be put to a public consultation but that plan has now been scrapped.
“I was in La Paz a few months ago and people were asking me to define my position about the mine. The time to define my position has now arrived and I can tell the people of Baja California Sur [that I say] no to the mine,” López Obrador said at a government event in Cabo San Lucas.
The president explained that he doesn’t support the mine “because we have to look after paradise, not destroy paradise.”
López Obrador added that in order for Baja California Sur residents to be able to continue making a living from tourism, “we have to take care of the environment,” and in order to have adequate water supply, “we have to take care of the water in the subsoil.”
Citizens and some politicians have opposed the mine project on the grounds that it could have a negative impact on groundwater in the Sierra de Laguna reserve and because in 2017 a federal tribunal quashed an environmental permit that had been issued for it.
In September last year, residents demanded that then president-elect López Obrador commit to stopping the mine from going ahead, but at the time he was non-committal and instead proposed a consultation.
Yesterday he explained that a public vote, such as those held on the new Mexico City airport and a thermal power plant in Morelos, wasn’t necessary because unlike those projects the mine wasn’t started during the administration of the previous government.
This project, López Obrador said, “would be up to me to start but I say no and that’s within my powers.”
The open-pit mine was to be built by Desarollos Zapal, a subsidiary of Invecture, a Mexican firm linked to Grupo Salinas.
According to the company, the site of the mine has estimated reserves of 1.2 million ounces of gold.
Crime scene tape at the Sophia bar Thursday night in Cuernavaca.
The Morelos state government has removed the Cuernavaca police chief after a bar shooting this week killed two people and wounded 10 others.
Security Secretary José Ortiz Guaneros announced the removal of José Trinidad González Flores after at least two assailants opened fire in the Sophia bar on Thursday night.
One of the dead was the daughter of an official with the state education institute.
In a statement on Twitter, Ortiz said that González had been incapable of containing systemic violence in Cuernavaca in any meaningful way. The former police chief’s replacement has not yet been announced.
The state government also released a statement urging bars to report threats or extortion attempts, which many speculated might have been a factor in Thursday’s attack, and to implement extra security measures, like panic buttons, video cameras and pat-downs of patrons.
In solidarity with the victims of the attack in the Sophia and as a protest against insecurity in the city, several popular bars and nightclubs in Cuernavaca, including Morgana, Janis and The Noise, announced that their doors would remain closed this weekend. They urged the government to take concrete action against crime in the state capital.
Interior Secretary Pablo Ojeda Cárdenas told a press conference that Morelos does not have enough police to effectively combat the crisis of violence in the state. He said the state will ask President López Obrador for an additional 250 police elements to reinforce security in Morelos.
The Guerrero state Congress voted unanimously in favor of the new security force.
Lawmakers in Guerrero and Campeche unanimously approved yesterday the proposal to create a national guard the day after it passed the lower house of the federal Congress.
A simple majority of Mexico’s 32 state congresses must ratify the proposal in order for the new security force to be created.
In Guerrero, one of Mexico’s most violent states, there was no debate about the federal government’s plan to create the new force, which will initially be made up of just over 60,000 members, including Federal Police officers, military police and naval police.
By voting in favor of the proposal, all 31 deputies present in the state Congress yesterday expressed confidence that the deployment of the force will help to reduce spiraling rates of violence in the country.
Congress president and Morena party Deputy Antonio Helguera declared in an interview after the vote that it was “mission accomplished.”
The lawmaker warned, however, that federal authorities must take care to ensure that the national guard maintains total respect for human rights while working to combat insecurity.
A range of non-governmental organizations and the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) have warned that the creation of the guard will perpetuate a failed militarized crime-fighting strategy first implemented by former president Felipe Calderón in 2006, and result in more human rights violations being committed by the armed forces.
In order to win support in federal Congress for the constitutional amendments required to create the national guard, the government agreed to modify its proposal so that the security force will have a civilian command rather than a military one.
Members of the military will only be permitted to carry out public security tasks for a period of five years after the security force’s creation.
Those recruited for the national guard will lose their military fuero or immunity and be tried in civilian courts if accused of committing abuses or human rights violations.
On Thursday, the federal Chamber of Deputies approved the national guard proposal with only one lawmaker voting against it.
Security Secretary Alfonso Durazo said that he hoped that state congresses would complete the ratification process within four months.
Durazo also said he hoped that through intense recruitment the size of the national guard would increase to 150,000 by the end of the year although he acknowledged that 360,000 members would be the ideal number.
However, some security experts have expressed skepticism that the creation of the force will be successful in combating insecurity in Mexico.
“Operationally, it doesn’t change anything,” Mexico City security analyst Jaime López Aranda told The New York Times, referring to the dual civilian and military policing model.
Asked whether the national guard would reduce crime and violence, he responded: “Of course not. It’s the same people doing the exact same stuff.”
What to do about transit thieves who want to steal your cell phone? Fool them with a fake one.
A spike in robberies on transit buses in a Puebla city neighborhood sparked the ingenuity of local entrepreneurs, who are selling fake mobile phones as decoys to fool thieves.
Urging transit riders to “take no risks,” the vendors are selling the devices at 50 pesos and up (US $2.60).
According to some social media users, the fake phones are plastic cases with a cardboard mockup of an actual phone inside.
A Route 10 bus can be seen in the background of a photo that appeared on social media showing a sidewalk sign advertising the phone. The route runs between the southern Puebla neighborhoods of Los Álamos and Los Héroes which, according to residents, has seen an increased number of robberies.
The sign says, “For assaults on public transit!”
According to the National Survey on Urban Public Security (ENSU) conducted by the national statistics institute Inegi, 75% of the population 18 and older feel insecure in their cities, and transit buses are among the places where they feel the most insecure.
Standard & Poor’s lowered its credit rating outlook for Mexico from stable to negative yesterday, stating that there was a one-in-three chance of a downgrade over the coming year.
The ratings agency maintained Mexico’s sovereign rating at investment grade status of BBB+ but said in a statement that President López Obrador’s plans to reduce the role of private enterprise in the energy sector and increase spending on the debt-laden state oil company raised concerns for government finances.
“The new strategy for the energy sector places an added burden on the already highly indebted government-owned energy company Petróleos Mexicanos [Pemex],” S & P said.
“The combination of Pemex’s weak financial profile and a more active role in the energy sector could raise the risk of higher contingent liabilities for the sovereign,” it added.
There are fears that the US $5.5 billion bailout of Pemex won’t be enough and that the government will have to fund additional rescue packages, which would further impact on its own financial health and increase borrowing costs.
S & P also said that “poorer than expected” economic growth and increased centralization of decision-making under López Obrador could weaken Mexico’s macroeconomic stability.
Growth is expected to slow further this year, according to forecasts by the Bank of México, the International Monetary Fund and private financial institutions.
In its fourth-quarter report, the central bank said this week that an investment slowdown and recent fuel shortages, rail blockades and strikes were among the reasons why it reduced its 2019 growth forecast to between 1.1% and 2.1% compared to a prediction of 1.7% to 2.7% in its previous report.
S & P said that it could return its credit rating outlook to stable within the next year but stressed that the government needs to manage the economy effectively, maintain moderate fiscal deficits and boost investor confidence.
The state oil company contributes around 15% of total government tax revenue but has debt in excess of US $100 billion and its oil production has declined for 14 consecutive years.
López Obrador has vowed to decrease Mexico’s dependency on petroleum imports and rescue not just Pemex but the entire energy sector.
Announcing the government’s rescue package on February 15, the president stressed that if Pemex needs more funding to reduce its financial burden and strengthen its capacity to invest in exploration and production, “there will be more support.”
Responding to a question about Standard & Poor’s revised outlook, López Obrador told reporters in Chihuahua today that he was unconcerned.
“We’re going very well . . . If the country is growing, we’re fine and in a good mood . . .”
A crowd helped themselves to the contents of an overturned beer truck in Guadalupe, Zacatecas, yesterday.
People of all ages were attracted to the free beer after the accident occurred on the Zacatecas-Aguascalientes highway.
A crowd that included children and senior citizens soon arrived and some carried away entire crates of beer while others gathered the cans left strewn on the road.
Federal Police attempted to contain the pillaging but they were overwhelmed by the crowd until more police arrived.
Criticism of the looting appeared after photos of the incident were posted on social media. Some criticized the pillaging by adults who also allowed their children to participate in the theft.
A traffic accident in Baja California Sur yesterday left seven people dead and another seriously injured.
State Civil Protection undersecretary Carlos Godínez León said the accident occurred around 9:00am on the busy Cabo San Lucas-Todos Santos highway and involved several cars, two pickup trucks and a semi-trailer.
Of the seven people killed in the accident, five were taxi drivers on their way to La Paz to meet with legislators and present their case against a new state transportation law.
The highway was closed for several hours after accident.
