Families say victims’ belongings stolen after Oaxaca bus accident

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December 12, 2019

Lozada, left, and Pemex CEO Octavio Romero.

The federal government has ordered the dismissal of the head of exploration and production at Pemex and disqualified him from holding any public position for 10 years for his alleged involvement in the embezzlement scheme known as the “Master Fraud.”

The Secretariat of Public Administration (SFP) said in a statement Wednesday that it filed complaints against Miguel Ángel Lozada Aguilar with the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) in April after an investigation detected that he had likely engaged in criminal activity.

An FGR investigation found irregularities in Lozada’s financial circumstances. He omitted details from his declarations of assets for four consecutive years from 2014 to 2017.

The official’s failure to disclose two bank accounts and the financial benefits he obtained from the ownership of a property violated federal law, the SFP said. Lozada was unable to justify why he didn’t report the details, the statement said.

The SFP said the sanctions complied with a request from President López Obrador to remove officials from Pemex who were involved in the “Master Fraud,” a scheme in which 11 federal agencies diverted billions of pesos in government funds during the administration of former president Enrique Peña Nieto. The scheme employed phony contracts with public universities and shell companies.

The statement noted that López Obrador said in January that if any high-ranking Pemex officials appointed by his government are found to have been involved in the “Master Fraud,” they must be dismissed.

Lozada was notified of the sanctions against him on Wednesday and it will be up to Pemex to remove him from his role, the SFP said.

“. . . The Secretariat of Public Administration will supervise the effective application of the sanctions and be respectful of the decisions . . . taken by other authorities,” the statement said.

“Secretary Irma Eréndira Sandoval Ballesteros reconfirms her commitment to continue combatting corruption and impunity . . . within the framework of the new public ethics that guide the government of Mexico.”

Source: El Universal (sp), Milenio (sp)

Chiapas works to rebuild a lost heritage in handcrafts

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December 12, 2019

The Chiapas Artisans' Museum has 500 pieces on display.

With a large indigenous population that continues to follow centuries-old traditions, Chiapas is one of Mexico’s principal producers of handcrafts.

In the 2019 national folk art competition, the state’s artisans competed against over 1,000 entries from 24 states, taking home eight prizes in the toy, fiber, silver/goldwork, traditional clothing and embroidery categories.

In 1982, Chiapas founded the Ethnographic Museum, which built a collection of over 14,500 handcraft items from all over the state. But a fire in 2002 destroyed the complex along with 6,600 pieces in the collection, the video and book libraries and administrative offices.

Fifteen years later, in 2017, the state invested 58 million pesos (US $3 million) to reestablish the institution, now called the Instituto Casa de Artesanías de Chiapas (Chiapas Handcraft House Institute).

It is considered to be a continuation of the 1982 project, with the same mission of promoting the state’s various handcraft traditions.

However, in a number of ways it is more ambitious. The main facility is a store located in the state capital of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, which sells about 50,000 items per year. There are also branch locations at the city’s airport, two at the archaeological site of Palenque, one in San Cristobal de las Casas and even one at the Mexico City airport.

Also part of the main facility is a new museum, called the Museo de las Artesanías de Chiapas (Chiapas Artisans Museum), is located in the main store. It has a collection of 500 pieces on permanent display that exhibit examples from all of the state’s main handcraft traditions. The museum has another room dedicated to temporary exhibitions, mostly handcrafts from other parts of Mexico in collaboration with Fonart (National Fund for the Development of Handcrafts).

The mission of the institution is to promote the state’s handcrafts, not as merchandise but rather as cultural objects. To this end it provides information to the public on the work and culture behind the works of art for sale, with activities such as presentations, conferences and demonstrations on how crafts such as textiles, wood carving, lacquerware, jewelry and more are made.

The institute has over 25,000 Chiapan artisans registered with it and has programs to support their work in addition to sales. In October 2019, 180 artisans received grants of 4,000 pesos to buy supplies. It sponsors three main handcraft competitions, one of which offers a purse of 591,000 pesos.

Source: Milenio (sp), La Voz del Sureste (sp)

AMLO’s pressers: 53% of his statements were untrue or misleading

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December 11, 2019

True, false or misleading? Fact-checker keeps tabs on AMLO.

More than half of the statements made by President López Obrador at his morning press conferences during his first year in office were false or misleading, a fact-checking initiative found.

At news conferences between December 1, 2018 – the day López Obrador was sworn in – and the same date this year, Verificado said it identified 538 verifiable claims by the president.

Of that number, 240 were true, 150 were misleading, 136 were false and 12 are still under investigation, said Verificado, which was founded by a small group of journalists in 2017.

In other words, 53% of statements made by AMLO, as the president is commonly known, were false or misleading, while 45% were true.

Verificado’s analysis of statements made by the president in the first week of his second year in office found little variation in the percentages: between December 2 and 6, 49% of verifiable claims were false or misleading, while 47% were true.

Among those found to be false were claims about migration, crime, the economy, government welfare, education, Mexican history and the justice system.

On December 2, the president said that monthly deportations of foreigners had fallen to 40,000 from a high of 140,000 in May.

However, Verificado said that official statistics show that only 102,705 foreigners were deported to their countries of origin in the first nine months of the year. The highest number of deportations in a single month was 19,410 in June, the fact-checker said, 86% fewer than AMLO’s claim for May.

The same day, the president said that homicides in Mexico City had fallen to less than four a day compared to six when his government took office.

However, Verificado found that even in the month with the least number of murders in the capital this year – October – the daily homicide rate was just under five. The number of murders in Mexico City has in fact risen this year compared to 2018, the fact-checker said.

On December 3, AMLO claimed that the number of students who enrolled in the first year of high school increased by 20% this year as a result of government scholarships. However, a government reported showed that enrollments only increased by 2%, Verificado said.

Among the other false claims made by López Obrador last week were that slavery was abolished in Mexico just over 100 years ago (it was in fact outlawed more than 200 years ago), foreign direct investment (FDI) was at its highest level ever (statistics for the first nine months of the year show that FDI reached its second highest level ever) and “there is now no impunity” (impunity rates are above 90% in 31 of Mexico’s 32 federal entities, according to a report by the think tank México Evalúa).

Among the president’s misleading claims last week were that no journalist receives money from the government (it did, however, allocate more than 395 million pesos in the 2019 budget to media advertising) and that the minimum wage is higher in China than in Mexico (China doesn’t have a national minimum wage).

One subject on which AMLO didn’t slip up was food importations.

After noting on December 5 that corn is native to Mexico, López Obrador declared that the country buys more foreign corn than any other nation in the world. That statement was found to be true.

Mexico News Daily

Farmers storm Palace of Fine Arts over controversial Zapata painting

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December 11, 2019

Farmers protest the Zapata painting on Tuesday.

About 200 farmers stormed the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City on Tuesday to demand the removal of a painting that depicts a nude and feminized Emiliano Zapata riding a sexually aroused horse.

“Burn it, burn it,” farmers shouted while inside the auditorium and museum in the capital’s historic center.

“It denigrates the personality and career of [revolutionary] General Emiliano Zapata by presenting him in a way that I’m ashamed to describe . . . on a horse, without clothing, with high heels,” said Federico Ovalle, leader of one of the farmers’ groups demanding the removal of La Revolución from the Zapata Después de Zapata (Zapata After Zapata) exhibition.

“. . . Like almost all farmers in Mexico we’re followers of the general and we think that presenting this painting is grotesque, it scorns and shows contempt for the country’s campesinos,” he added.

Antonio Medrano, leader of another farmers’ group, said the disgruntled farmers were even prepared to pay for the painting – “if this thing has any value” – in order to get rid of it.

Farmers scuffle with LGBT community during a protest by the former.

Another farmer described the painting by Chiapas artist Fabian Cháirez as “an insult to our revolutionary leaders, adding “the painting must be removed.”

The farmers said that if the painting and other artworks depicting Zapata that they consider offensive are not withdrawn from the exhibition within two days, they will launch both “radical” and “legal” action.

Descendants of Zapata announced on Monday they will sue Cháirez, as well as the Secretariat of Culture and the Palace of Fine Arts for using the painting in a promotion for the exhibition.

Shortly after the farmers stormed into the palace, director Miguel Fernández Félix addressed the men, telling them that the exhibition represented a variety of views.

He also invited the farmers to look through the exhibition in order to reach a more informed point of view. But they declined the offer and yelled insults at the palace director.

According to media reports, a group of farmers verbally and physically attacked members of the LGBTI community who had gathered outside the palace to show support for the inclusion of the painting in the exhibition that commemorates the 100th anniversary of Zapata’s death.

Later Tuesday, the Secretariat of Culture and the Palace of Fine Arts said in a joint statement that they condemned “any act of violence that violates human rights and freedom of expression and creation.”

Source: El Financiero (sp), El Economista (sp), EFE (sp)

Dolphin Discovery to build new park in Cancún, its 24th

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December 11, 2019

Visitors swim with dolphins at a Dolphin Discovery park.

A Mexican firm that has become one of the world’s specialists on swimming with dolphins has announced the construction of a new park in Cancún. It will be Dolphin Discovery’s largest in the country.

Company CEO Eduardo Albor Villanueva said the US $10-million project will consolidate the firm as the world’s largest dolphin swimming experience company, surpassing United States-based Sea World.

He said the investment will make the Caribbean coast of Mexico the company’s principal source of visitors, welcoming one-quarter of the two million people who visit the company’s parks every year.

The company expects to continue to see 6% annual growth in visitor numbers in Mexico and elsewhere.

Dolphin Discovery began in Quintana Roo in 1994, and since then has grown into a multinational corporation with 23 dolphin parks and nine waterparks in Mexico, the Caribbean, the United States and Europe.

The company announced that it plans to invest US $20 million in new projects in 2020, half of which will go to the new Cancún park, which will be located five kilometers from the airport, near the Hotel Moon Palace, and 20 kilometers from downtown Cancún.

“The project hopes to offer our visitors and the community in general . . . the opportunity to get to know sea mammal species like dolphins, while at the same time promote protection of the environment and marine mammals through interactive programs . . .” reads the project’s environmental impact statement.

The new dolphin park is the first of its kind in two years after a 2017 Green Party initiative placed a temporary moratorium on the construction of establishments that keep marine mammals in captivity.

Source: El Economista (sp)

So far only disappointment over efforts to find thousands of missing persons

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December 11, 2019

The federal government has failed to keep its promises to improve search efforts for missing persons and attend to the high number of unidentified bodies in morgues, according to a citizens’ group and human rights organizations.

People who spoke with the newspaper El Universal blamed a lack of coordination between institutions and austerity measures as factors that have contributed to the government’s failure to meet its commitments.

With more than 40,000 missing persons in Mexico and more than 30,000 unidentified bodies in the nation’s morgues, the government pledged that five regional forensic identification institutes would be built, but progress has only been made on one, located in Coahuila.

In addition, federal authorities said they would allow the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) to visit the country, create 15 new forensic cemeteries, establish a national genetic database and hire more personnel for the nation’s understaffed morgues.

But the government has failed to keep those promises as well, while the establishment of a super commission to conduct a new investigation into the disappearance of the 2014 disappearance of the 43 teaching students has not made any significant progress and dozens of suspects in the case have been released.

Two mothers at a protest organized by Mothers of the Murdered, Kidnapped and Disappeared of Nuevo León.

“They’re moving very slowly,” said the coordinator of the Citizens’ Council of the National Search System.

Grace Fernández Morán said that while President López Obrador talks about improving search efforts and increasing capacity to identify unclaimed bodies “there’s no concrete action and families have the perception that there hasn’t been a real change.”

She said that greater coordination between government agencies is needed to improve search efforts and urged authorities to focus on all missing person cases, not just high-profile ones.

One of the primary demands of the families of missing persons is for the government to open up Mexico’s investigative processes to international scrutiny.

Human rights undersecretary Alejandro Encinas said earlier this year that a visit by the UN’s disappearances committee would be approved but El Universal reported that the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs has not yet completed the necessary paperwork to allow committee members to enter the country.

The legal coordinator at the Prodh human rights center claims that the army – which many people suspect played a role in the disappearance of the 43 teaching students in Guerrero in 2014 – is pressuring the government to refuse to allow the CED into Mexico.

Luis Tapia Olivares said the Prodh center filed legal action last year that sought to compel the government to recognize the jurisdiction of the committee but it failed to achieve its goal.

Tania Reneaum Panszi, executive director of Amnesty International in Mexico, said that international organizations can play an important role in guaranteeing access to truth and justice for family members of missing persons.

She also said that they can offer hope to people who are frustrated by the “slowness [and] negligence” of national authorities.

Two challenges for López Obrador in 2020, Reneaum said, will be to reduce the number of unsolved missing persons cases and to establish a “narrative of truth” about what happened to them.

Source: El Universal (sp)

4 nuclear reactors under consideration by electricity commission

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December 11, 2019

The Laguna Verde plant in Veracruz. HF Studios licensed under CC by 3.0

The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) is looking into building four nuclear reactors.

“We consider it advisable that we install two more reactors at the Laguna Verde nuclear power plant [in Veracruz] and two on the Pacific coast,” CFE thermoelectric generation coordinator Héctor López Villareal told a press conference.

The cost of each 1,400-megawatt (MW) reactor, with a lifespan of about 60 years, would be about US $7 billion, according to CFE estimates.

“The cost of the initial investment is high, but the cost of operation is low while in conventional [combined cycle] power plants . . . the initial investment cost is low and the cost of the operating fuel is high. So it’s a question of diversifying, that’s what we want to do,” said López.

Although the cost of building a combined cycle power plant would be $500 million, the natural gas they burn costs $3 to $4 per gigajoule generated, while a nuclear plant can produce a gigajoule for less than a dollar.

López said the nuclear reactors would diversify Mexico’s electrical grid, lowering its dependence on natural gas, fuel oil and coal.

He added that in the 29 years that the Laguna Verde plant has been operating, there has not been one “serious incident” that released radioactive material into the atmosphere, and none of the workers has been negatively affected.

The two reactors at the plant were put into operation in 1990 and 1995 with an initial installed capacity of 675 MW each. Their capacity was increased to 800 MW each 10 years ago.

Within the first eight months of 2020, López expects to present a feasibility study for the project to CFE director Manuel Bartlett Díaz, the Secretariat of Energy (Sener) and the president.

The announcement comes after Energy Secretary Rocío Nahle García said in September that a study should be conducted to consider the expansion of nuclear power in Mexico.

Source: Forbes México (sp)

Oaxaca water system’s financial woes: only 38% pay their bills

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December 11, 2019

Oaxaca city’s water department is facing a financial crisis as only 38% of users pay their water bills.

Laura Vignon, head of Potable Water and Sewer Services of Oaxaca (SAPAO), said the department is closing the year in the red with a debt of 150 million pesos (US $7.8 million).

She said that a majority of residents aren’t paying their bills despite the city having the lowest water rates in the country.

“While in [places] like Monterrey [Nuevo León] water users pay 250 pesos [US $13] per cubic meter, in Oaxaca they only pay 54 pesos for as much as 20 cubic meters. Nevertheless, 38 of every 100 people registered don’t pay their bills,” Vignon said.

She added that water theft also puts a strain on the system. In the last 11 months, the department has detected and shut down eight clandestine water taps, and those responsible are being prosecuted by the Oaxaca Attorney General’s Office (FGE).

Vignon made a call to delinquent users to pay their bills, announcing that SAPAO will not charge interest in December.

However, many users say they have legitimate reasons to refuse to pay their bills because of poor service: either there was not enough water or it was muddy.

“What good is the water that SAPAO sends us? We can’t even water plants with it because we don’t know what’s in it,” said residents of the Reforma Agraria neighborhood.

Some hotels and restaurants in the city have even opted to purchase their water from private suppliers, paying as much as 900 pesos (US $47) for a tanker truck of water.

SAPAO responded to the complaints in November, saying it had carried out lab tests on water in several neighborhoods.

The department said the discoloration was due to the accumulation of sediment and that it had dealt with problem where it had been identified.

Sources: Milenio (sp), El Imparcial (sp)

Minimum wage commission considers increase to 127 pesos per day

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December 11, 2019