The Enquentro residential tower is one of the suspended projects.
The Mexico City government suspended eight massive construction projects worth US $500 million last month, citing building irregularities.
Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum ordered a review earlier this year of all building permits issued in 2017 and 2018 for large real estate developments.
After inspections were conducted at 174 building sites, the government announced on February 7 the suspension of 26 projects, including eight so-called megaprojects.
Among the large projects that have been halted is a US $85-million Hyatt Regency Hotel that was slated to open in the second quarter of 2020.
The Santa Fe Hotel Group announced on February 5 that it had been awarded a contract to operate the hotel that was to be built on Insurgentes Avenue in front of the World Trade Center but the government announcement two days later placed the agreement in doubt.
Impera Reforma, a 47-story tower planned for the capital’s emblematic boulevard Paseo de la Reforma, and a 30-story tower, The Summit, in the Santa Fe business district – two of this year’s most anticipated projects – are also suspended.
The other five suspended megaprojects are three other office towers and two residential developments.
The combined area of the office towers was to be 155,151 square meters – 15.5% of all new office space slated to be added in Mexico City this year – while 650 new apartments were to be built in the two residential developments.
A real estate developer who asked to remain anonymous told the newspaper El Financiero that some companies were undertaking construction projects that were larger and taller than those for which they had received approval.
Other building sector experts suggested that the suspensions could have been politically motivated in some cases.
Guillermo Sepúlveda, CEO of the commercial real estate firm Avison Young México, said the suspensions generated uncertainty among investors and that as a consequence they will take their money elsewhere.
“There will be companies that think that developing [projects] in Mexico City is very complicated and they’ll choose to go to Querétaro, Guadalajara, Monterrey, where there are more investment guarantees,” he said.
A new sinkhole has opened up near the Guerrero town of Pinzán Morado due to an abandoned mine shaft caving in.
The hole is 15 meters deep and 12 meters across and opened up 500 meters from the town, located in the Tierra Caliente municipality of Coyuca de Catalán.
Authorities cordoned off the area and started a risk assessment study but said the new sinkhole does not represent a danger to residents.
Another sinkhole appeared in that town last year. It measured 40 meters across and 100 meters deep.
Close to 30 dwellings and two schools were evacuated in July due to the high risk of collapse caused by the unstable ground.
A resident declared at the time that the Calentana gold and silver mine had operated for more than 25 years before it was shut down four years ago.
The new Jewish documentation and research center in Mexico City.
“If our main objective was to only serve the Jewish community of Mexico City we would have chosen a different location for the center.”
The words are those of Enrique Chmelnik, director of the new Centro de Documentación e Investigación Judío de México (the Center for Jewish Documentation and Research in Mexico) in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma.
“There have always been these windows through which the Jewish community looked out at Mexico and Mexico looked back in at the community. We see this center as a grand doorway between the two.”
We are seated in the center’s sleek and modern glass-walled conference room that looks down over one of Mexico City’s oldest synagogues. Sunshine shimmers through Star of David windows, casting red, blue and yellow shadows on the synagogue’s central atrium, now a library housing hundreds of donated books.
In 1938 this synagogue was the home of the Maguen David Jewish community, the place where their children married, where prayers were recited, and home of the city’s oldest mikveh, or ritual bathtub. As tiny specks of dust glitter among the silent chandeliers, the echoes of the community still vibrate in the walls.
The center’s director, Enrique Chmelnik.
Jewish history in Mexico City is complicated, explains Chmelnik. Despite the fact that most Jews live in similar neighborhoods and are surprisingly unified as a community within Mexican society, the community itself is fractured into several groups.
There have been Jews in Mexico since the country’s colonialization, he says, but an established community that identified strongly with its Jewish heritage really didn’t appear until beginning of the 20th century.
The majority of Jews that immigrated to Mexico came from Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, some seeking religious freedom, others refuge from persecution; some looking for economic opportunities and others, including artists, poets and scholars, encouraged by the Mexican government for their European influence.
In 1912 the inaugural Jewish community was founded here, Sociedad de Beneficencia Alianza Monte Sinai, but 10 years later the first schism erupted when Ashkenazi Jews separated from Monte Sinai to form their own community. Two years later, Jewish immigrants from Mediterranean countries formed the Sephardi community, and in 1938 Syrian Jews from Allepo decided to separate from Syrian Jews from Damascus and form the community Maguen David.
According to Chmelnik, these divisions were incited by arguments over religious practices, hierarchies within the Monte Sinai community and the major cultural differences among the groups. They came from different countries, with different experiences and many different languages. While their religious traditions were similar, there were certain details that the groups felt they couldn’t overlook.
Today, few Mexico City Jews speak Arabic, or Polish or Yiddish and many aren’t religious enough for different prayers to make much of a difference. That’s why the center, which is trying to create a cross-community Jewish archive, thinks it has a good chance at success.
A page from a book by Isaac Berliner illustrated by Diego Rivera.
“Every day we are getting closer to unifying,” says Chmelnik, “and each year there are more cross-community organizations like this one. And I’ll tell you one thing that will definitely put an end the separation at some point in the near future: 70% to 80% of all Jewish marriages in Mexico City are among members of different communities.”
The roots of the archive go back to the 1990s when the Mexico City Ashkenazi Community was celebrating its 70th anniversary as a community. In the process of creating a commemorative book for the event, historians filtered through hundreds of documents and items in the basement of Acapulco #70, an important center for Ashkenazi Jews in Mexico City. What was there was in poor condition and an idea was hatched to preserve the historic documents in an official archive.
In time, the growing collection was added to UNESCO’s World Memory Program and talks began among the various communities to expand the archive’s breadth to not only include documents from the Ashkenazi community, but each of the others as well.
“The idea was to have the entire history of Jews in Mexico under one roof,” says Chmelnik.
By 2015 a communal archive was already in the works, with representatives of each community signing on to the project. Then the September 2017 earthquake hit and Acapulco #70 was damaged beyond repair, but volunteers and members of the community were able to rescue the archive.
Its new building at Cordoba #238 was already in the works and so plans were sped up to move the offices there as quickly as possible.
The new center opened in January of this year, its priority to collect each community’s archives, according to the inter-community agreement, and build the most important Jewish studies center in the country.
“This is a book by Yiddish poet Issac Berliner,” says Chmelnik opening the pages from right to left and landing on an illustration that looks vaguely familiar. “He was a good friend of Diego Rivera and so Rivera illustrated his book for him.”
We are standing among the metal bookshelves within the synagogue’s basement. There’s a chill in the air, which is not just the humidity-controlling air conditioning unit.
Tomes from a Nazi library in Berlin are among some of the archive’s oldest items. The Third Reich’s confiscated books were supposed to “prove” the dangers of Judaism, and therefore justify its eradication.
By the time the allied forces found this stash, most of the books’ owners had been killed. So they sent books, a bundle at a time, to Jewish communities across the globe, including 1,000 to the Ashkenazi community of Mexico City.
Posters protesting World War II are carefully preserved in thick plastic, signs defaming Jews are there along with them. Shelves stacked with photos and marriage certificates tell the history of the communities through the eyes of their members, the unofficial story as Chmelnik likes to say, the one you don’t find in newspapers and meeting minutes.
There are menorahs and mezuzahs of every shape and size, handwritten letters, journal entries – all once belonging to someone who is no longer here to tell their own story.
Authors researching books, community members researching family lineages and students searching for primary sources all find their way to the archive. While a long string of cultural activities fills the center’s docket, research here and in their library is by far their most important service offered to the public.
And while for the time being Mexico City’s Jewish community may remain segmented, this archive will serve as a safe home for the remnants of each of their separate histories, which is the legacy of them all.
Lydia Carey is a freelance writer based in Mexico City.
El Bronco, left: 'lazy southerners;' and Yunes: 'Cut off his tongue!'
Nuevo León Governor Jaime “El Bronco” Rodríguez, known for being blunt, labelled southerners lazy earlier this week. A southerner promptly labelled Rodríguez an idiot and suggested his tongue be removed.
At an event in Monterrey Tuesday, the 2018 presidential candidate said “the north [of Mexico] overcomes adversity while the south and southeast have the blessing of nature but the misfortune of laziness.”
The governor, well-known for using blunt and colorful language, added: “I don’t regret saying it that way because the policy of government must be to encourage those who want to work.”
After a backlash against his comments, Rodríguez said hours later that he had been misinterpreted and had not made any reference to laziness.
“I said that the north has greater adversity and that the south and southeast has greater possibilities, I said blessing, I didn’t say laziness . . .” he said.
One person who wasn’t prepared to let El Bronco’s remarks slide was Veracruz lawmaker and former candidate for governor Héctor Yunes Landa.
In a video posted to his social media accounts, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) federal deputy defended Mexico’s southerners before dubbing Rodríguez a buey – an ox, or in colloquial Mexican Spanish, an idiot.
“It’s true that those of us who live in the south have the blessing of the land but it’s also true that we work it every day. That’s why we’re national leaders in several crops like coffee, oranges, lemons, bell peppers, pineapple and bananas . . . We also have, precisely in my state Veracruz, the largest number of cattle in the country. Cows, bulls and bueyes [oxen] Bronco, like you,” he said.
Yunes also demanded a public apology from the governor and proposed cutting off his tongue – a riff on Rodríguez’s proposal during a presidential debate last year to cut off the hands of thieves.
“We don’t tolerate insults from anyone . . . I demand Bronco that you publicly apologize to Veracruzanos and all Mexicans who live in the south of the republic . . . I regret not having the imprudence that characterizes you but if I had it, as you once proposed cutting off the hands of thieves, I would propose cutting off the tongues of bigmouths,” he said.
Rodríguez is the second former presidential candidate in as many months to offend Mexico’s southern states after 2012 hopeful Gabriel Quadri claimed on social media in January that Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas were a burden on the rest of Mexico.
A new chapter in a decade-long history of a Michoacán business commenced yesterday in Zitácuaro when the first industrial plant in Mexico dedicated to obtaining biogas and generating electricity from nopal, or prickly pear cactus, began operations.
The Nopalimex plant is expected to produce three million liters of biogas every year, enough to meet 50% of the fuel needs of the vehicle fleet operated by the municipality of Zitácuaro.
The company says that a cubic meter of the biogas it produces is equivalent to a liter of gasoline, but is 40% cheaper.
While the main focus of the new plant will be to obtain biogas and electricity, some byproducts will include ethanol, nopal for human consumption, humus and nitrogen-rich water that can be used as a fertilizer.
Governor Silvano Aureoles Conejo said at the plant’s opening ceremony that more municipalities and producers will be encouraged to participate in the innovative energy production initiative.
“I have been promoting this great idea, that we can create a green park from Cuitzeo Lake to Lázaro Cárdenas where we can grow nopal and install several biogas plants along the Siglo XXI highway, boosting the use of this resource,” he said.
The governor’s intention is to have all public transportation vehicles in the state convert to biogas engines, a process that costs between 25,000 and 30,000 pesos (US $1,300 and 1,500) per vehicle.
In April 2018, a Mexican startup called Grin started operations in Mexico City by placing 15 electric scooters on the streets of the trendy neighborhoods of Roma Norte and Condesa.
The scooters, activated for use by a mobile telephone app, proved to be popular so Grin quickly increased its fleet and expanded into neighborhoods such as Nápoles, Narvarte and Del Valle.
Business for the startup’s founders, Jonathan Lewy and Sergio Romo, was good.
But on February 14, the Mexico City government dropped a bombshell: it was revoking the permit that allowed Grin to operate.
Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum told a press conference that day that the company had failed to submit information to the Secretariat of Transport (Semovi) about its operations within the timeframe requested.
Mexico City authorities subsequently removed Grin’s more than 200 scooters from the capital’s streets.
The company quickly denied that it had failed to submit the relevant paperwork on time and four days later, it struck back, filing an injunction request against the government’s revocation of its permit and removal of its scooters.
An administrative court judge sided with Grin, granting a provisional suspension that ordered the government to “abstain from dispossessing the complainant’s scooters” and “to allow it to continue offering its sustainable, individual public transportation service.”
The conflict between Grin and the government flared up again this week after the former said on Twitter that in order to be granted a permanent operational permit, Semovi is asking for “unrestricted access” to scooter users’ “personal information” including trip data “in real time.”
Directing its post to scooter users, Grin added: “Our priority is you. That’s why on February 8, we didn’t give unrestricted access about your location in real time or your personal information.”
In a statement, Semovi promptly responded that it had not asked Grin or any other company that rents scooters or bicycles to provide such information.
Mayor Sheinbaum also weighed in on the issue, telling a press conference that Grin’s claim was incorrect.
“Personal data was never requested. The transportation secretary [Andrés Lajous] would be incapable of asking for it,” she said.
“What was asked for is that the locations of bicycles and scooters be available on an [online] platform, which is the same that was asked of all the companies,” Sheinbaum added.
The mayor would not comment further on the matter because Semovi is currently seeking to overturn the injunction granted to the scooter company.
She added that her government’s aim was to have an orderly city.
On Twitter today, Grin – which is currently operating in Mexico City but without a permanent license – said that “as the only Mexican scooter company, we are more than willing to collaborate with the Mexico City government to achieve an orderly city.”
To that end, the company said it presented to Semovi on February 15 “all the information that the law doesn’t prevent us from presenting.”
Six kilograms of blood samples that had been dumped by a river in Cintalapa, Chiapas, were recovered on Tuesday by local and state authorities.
Neighbors said the bag had appeared on the bank of the Venta river more than 10 days before.
Authorities said contamination of the river with the blood was unlikely.
Municipal health director Ibisnet Rodríguez Meza also said the blood samples presumably belonged to a private medical laboratory that went out of business two weeks before officials recovered them.
The state Health Secretariat said it would conduct a verification of all medical laboratories operating in the municipalities of Cintalapa and Ocozocoautla, and that it would file a formal complaint before the state Attorney General’s office against whomever is found responsible for the improper disposal of the samples.
A spare tire containing meth, found inside a new Ford.
Not for the first time, new Ford vehicles have been shipped from Mexico with drugs stashed inside.
Canadian authorities seized 180 kilograms of methamphetamines that had been concealed in the vehicles’ spare tires.
Ontario police recovered an estimated US $3.4 million worth of the drug, in what is apparently part of a larger international investigation.
The vehicles had been sent by rail and, according to police, there is no doubt the shipments were made by the Sinaloa Cartel.
Authorities were alerted when a Ford dealership in Ontario discovered beige-taped packages lining the inside of the tires.
Police found meth in the spare tires of nine automobiles in four Ford dealerships in the state of Ontario, while other discoveries were made in Quebec and New Brunswick.
Police speculated that drug traffickers probably did not intend for the vehicles to reach the dealerships with the drugs inside.
They said the vehicles came from a Ford manufacturing plant in Hermosillo, Sonora.
No arrests have been made in the case, though investigators said the Ford Motor Company is cooperating fully. Authorities added that the discovery represented “an important interruption in drug trafficking” because of soaring methamphetamine use in Canada.
According to one report, use of the drug in Canada increased 590% from 2010 to 2017.
Similar finds were made in 2017 in the United States. Marijuana had been hidden in the spare tire compartment of brand-new Fords shipped by rail from Mexico.
Marianne Clift immediately after the attack and a week later.
A 68-year-old woman’s taekwondo skills and resilience saved her life during a home invasion and robbery in a Nayarit beach town.
Canadian visitor Marianne Clift was alone in a vacation home that she and her husband had rented in Bucerias when she was awoken in the early hours of February 18 by a man choking her in her bed.
The retired elementary school teacher and church organist, who had studied taekwondo nearly 20 years prior, said she started “kicking like mad” and scratching and jabbing at the assailant’s face and eyes, but could not cry out because her attacker’s grip was so strong.
Then, Clift said she heard a woman’s voice and the man straddling her responding in Spanish, leading Clift to believe that there were two people in the house. When her attacker briefly loosened his grip, she yelled for help — and then she was knocked out by a punch in the face.
When Clift regained consciousness, her attackers were gone, along with her cellphone, money, passport, identification, bank cards, jewelry and keys to the vacation home. Clift later wondered if she had perhaps been left for dead.
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Staggering to the bathroom, Clift saw in the mirror that her eye and cheek were turning purple and blood was gushing from a cut on her cheek.
“I realized I had to get help.”
Unable to open the vacation complex’s front gate without her keys, Clift banged on another tenant’s door. She then walked to the home of a cousin who had a home nearby, where she called police.
Clift received six stitches at the hospital emergency room to close the knife wound on her cheek and was also treated for a second knife wound on her elbow and serious bruising on her chest and arm.
Investigators later told Clift that the attacker had climbed over the fence and used a screwdriver to break in through the locked front door of the home. She recalled that when the police saw the amount of blood in the house, the case was escalated to an attempted murder and robbery.
Clift said that news of her ordeal was especially hard on her family and her husband, who had flown back to their home in Sarnia, Canada, on a short business trip the night before the attack.
Clift found a safe place to stay while she filled out police reports and the Canadian embassy helped her secure a temporary passport and fly home.
Though her stitches came out on Monday and the black eye has faded, Clift’s neck and jaw remain severely bruised from the assault.
A frequent visitor to Mexico, Clift said that up until the attack she and her husband had felt safe in Bucerias, a town of about 17,000, and that their rented vacation home’s 12-foot fence and the proximity of a cousin’s house nearby contributed to their sense of security.
Clift said she does not expect the police to find her attackers.
Back home in Sarnia with her family, Clift said that recounting the story has often led her to laughter as well as tears.
“We’re a tough, resilient family,” the self-described “warrior woman” said.
The Bank of México (Banxico) yesterday slashed its 2019 growth forecast for the national economy, citing an investment slowdown and recent fuel shortages, rail blockades and strikes among the reasons for its revision.
In its fourth-quarter report, the central bank predicted GDP growth of between 1.1% and 2.1% this year – a mean of 1.6%.
The mean is 0.6% lower than that forecast by Banxico in its previous quarterly report when it predicted 2019 growth in the range of 1.7% to 2.7%.
Yesterday’s downward revision was the third consecutive cut the bank has made to growth forecasts in its quarterly reports.
Banxico also trimmed its outlook for 2020 to between 1.7% and 2.7% growth compared to a range of 2% to 3% in its last report.
“Fuel distribution problems; the railway interruption; labor conflicts, particularly in Matamoros and the north of the country; and reduced petroleum production as well as persistent and more pronounced investment sluggishness. These are the elements that result in the revision to the [2019] growth forecast,” said Bank of México governor Alejandro Díaz de León.
The Banxico chief told a press conference that downward trending investment is particularly concerning given its importance to Mexico’s economic well-being.
In its report, the central bank said that if the “current mood of uncertainty that has been affecting investment” continues or deteriorates, more companies will postpone or abandon their investment plans and consumers will reduce their spending.
Another downgrade to the credit rating of Pemex or other state-owned companies would also place increased pressure on growth, Banxico said.
“We think it’s really important to try to protect the ratings and the ratings levels, including both the sovereign rating and those of the various [state] companies,” Díaz de Leon said.
The central bank warned last week about the risk Pemex poses to government finances while financial analysts and institutions have also signalled that the state oil company’s debt – in excess of US $100 billion – is placing pressure on Mexico’s sovereign rating.
In order to increase confidence and certainty and make Mexico a more attractive place for investment, Banxico said, the federal government needs to outline a clear agenda to improve security and the rule of law and to combat corruption and impunity.
The bank also said that it expects slightly slower inflation of 4.1% in the first quarter of 2019 and maintained its outlook for the fourth quarter of the year at 3.4%. The inflation rate will reach the 3% target in the first half of next year, Banxico said.
In the context of the central bank’s prediction of lower growth, economists at the bank Banorte predicted that in June Banxico would cut its benchmark interest rate, which is currently at a 10-year high of 8.25%.
“We expect Banxico to cut the rate by 25 basis points at its meeting on June 27. Additionally, it could cut a total of 50 to 75 points in 2019,” they said.
