Dressed for the coronavirus, a cleaner wears a 'smile.'
On the eve of the official conclusion of federally mandated social distancing, the coronavirus continued to take its toll.
On Friday there were 3,227 new cases of Covid-19, for a total of 84,627, and 371 deaths, bringing that total to 9,415.
Mexico’s fatality rate is currently 11.1, significantly higher than the global rate of 6.2.
In all, 246,026 people have been tested for the disease in Mexico and the actual infection rate may be much higher.
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell told Friday’s coronavirus press briefing that there were 16,209 active cases, 4,027 of whom were in Mexico City. The total is down by 106 from Thursday.
México state followed with 2,071, Puebla with 751, Tabasco with 748 and Baja California 674.
It’s clear from the energy and detail in the stories he tells me that Eddie Mendoza has been cooped up for quite some time.
The head of Direct Relief Mexico has mostly spoken with his 11-month-old son, his wife and the doorman at his building in the last few months. All other talk has been diligent negotiating to get medical supplies to where they’re needed during the coronavirus pandemic.
So far the U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to procuring medical supplies when disaster strikes has imported 350,000 surgical masks, 30,000 face masks and 10,000 goggles. The numbers on next week’s shopping list also run into the hundreds of thousands.
Eddie’s story truly is a paragon of how immigration should work in a system in which wealth inequality is an inevitable component. And it begins at the epicenter of the struggle for migrant workers’ rights in the United States.
Raised by migrant farmworkers in and around Delano, California — where labor organizers César Chávez and Dolores Huerta held their famous strikes that led to the founding of the United Farm Workers of America — Mendoza’s young life was a balance between working in the grape fields and school and extracurricular activities.
“My dad ended up finding us a little house, a little shack with one room, not even a kitchen, a radio console for a table and a bathroom,” he says with evident nostalgia. There were holes in the floor and no heat in the winter, but the five of them made lasting memories in that house.
He tells me the tragicomic anecdote of how his brother came to be nicknamed “El Mofles” (Mufflers) for the time their dad accidentally ran him over in the family car, hitting him in the head with the muffler (he survived, obviously). He puts me in that car with his dad early in the morning before the fog has cleared, on the way to pick grapes. Crimson, Thompson, seedless, red globe. He remembers all the names, remembers how to prune and graft.
He speaks fondly of the rich Mexican culture that found solidarity in the southern California migrant communities located in places with names like Linnell Camp and Earlimart.
And it’s this love for his Mexican culture, food and people that ultimately led him to where he is today: at the helm of Direct Relief’s efforts to get safe medical supplies and medications to the hospitals that need them most in order to fight Covid-19.
He actually led the entire initiative to bring the U.S. disaster relief nonprofit south of the border in 2014, after five years of liaising with governments, nonprofits, businesses and hospitals. Memories of road trips back to Zacatecas growing up led him to move to Mexico City to run the operation from there in 2016.
On his agenda next week: purchasing 285,000 surgical masks, 15,750 N95 masks, 610 boxes of gloves, 10,000 face shields and 80,000 surgical gowns. Not an easy task in a market rife with faulty products and money laundering schemes.
Boxes of medical supplies en route to hospitals in Mexico.
“During Covid, what we’ve been doing is validating vendors. There’s been a lack of product available in the market, and because of that there’s a lot of garbage product,” he said.
Direct Relief Mexico’s three-person team (including him) has to verify products and vendors all the way down the supply chain in order to obtain effective equipment.
“There are a lot of doctors trying to do good, but they don’t have the tools. You wouldn’t send a farmer out into the field without a hoe,” he says.
The other major disaster his organization has seen since coming to Mexico was the pair of earthquakes in September 2017, one of which left Juchitán, Oaxaca, in ruins. However, despite the magnitude of the damage, those two quakes killed 468 and injured over 6,300. According to the latest data, Covid-19 has killed over 9,000 people and infected over 84,000 in Mexico so far.
Direct Relief has also worked to get direly needed cancer medications during a protracted shortage that has gotten so bad that nine parents of kids with cancer began a hunger strike on Wednesday to demand the government finally fix the problem.
“Thank you for helping me get my medications,” says a young, smiling, noticeably healthy boy in a video Eddie shows me from his WhatsApp account. “I’ve finished my treatment. Thank you for everything.”
As the coronavirus pandemic lays bare those parts of the institutions of both countries rendered ineffective by everything from bureaucracy to political infighting to bruised egos, Eddie’s leadership during the crisis is a shining example of how the public and private sectors could behave and interact in order to get better results.
His approach is simple, but effective. Friendly, but professional. “Working in conjunction to create mutual strengths,” he describes it. And being detailed enough to make everything “stupid proof” so that the right supplies get to the right hospitals at the right time.
And the proof is in the hundreds of thousands of units of personal protective equipment his organization has procured for doctors and nurses in hospitals so understocked that staff have gone on strike to demand they be properly equipped.
Eddie emails me the following day to send photos and purchasing figures and says thank you for the opportunity for a regular conversation. I too am grateful for the chance to sit in the shade and tell stories from the past and muse on what we’ll do when we’ve returned to whatever normal is going to be.
All of us could take a cue from Eddie when it comes to how we interact with each other again. If we manage all of our relationships, from the personal to the inter-institutional, with good intentions and the ultimate goal of mutual benefit, we just might see large-scale positive results proportional to what he has achieved during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I want to show Mexico that if you trust, you can accomplish big things.”
Álvarez is the highest paid Mexican athlete for the fourth year in a row.
Although the coronavirus pandemic has affected his 2020 earnings, professional boxer Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez ranked in the top 30 of the 100 highest-paid athletes in the world as compiled by Forbes magazine.
The 29-year-old pugilist from Jalisco pulled in US $37 million over the last 12 months, $35 million in salary and $2 million more in sponsorships.
Canelo’s only fight during that period was against Russian Sergey Kovalez on November 2 of last year. He won that fight to become the light heavyweight champion of the world and a four-division champion, having won titles in three other weight classes.
This is the boxer’s fourth year in a row as the highest-paid Mexican athlete in the world.
But he could have climbed a bit higher on the list had the coronavirus not brought the boxing world to a halt. Canelo earned $75 million in 2019, his highest-paying year since beginning his boxing career in 2005.
The coronavirus has affected Canelo Álvarez’s earnings, which were down from $75 million in 2019.
He signed a $365-million, 11-fight contract in 2018 with online sports streaming service DAZN, a payday that comes out to just over $30 million per fight.
Despite such numbers, Canelo still has quite a way to go to reach the world’s top three. Although he hasn’t ranked No. 1 since 2018, Swiss tennis legend Roger Federer topped the Forbes list this year with a whopping $106.3 million in paychecks and sponsorships.
Soccer players Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi rounded out the top three with $105 million and $104 million, respectively.
Up against other boxers, Canelo comes in fourth after heavyweights Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder, all in the top 20 with earnings ranging from $46.5 million to $57 million.
As other popular fighting leagues like the WWE and UFC begin to organize closed-door events, the boxing world is hoping it can do the same, and there’s a possible Canelo fight in the works.
The tapatío (Jalisco native) was forced to postpone a fight scheduled for May 5, which he and promoter Golden Boy Promotions hope will take place in September, with or without an audience.
“We’re going to discuss it … with DAZN, with Canelo, with everyone involved … [and] if Canelo approves and is willing to do it and we can make it work for everyone involved, we’ll do it,” Golden Boy Promotions president Eric Gómez told BoxingScene magazine.
All that remains is to find Canelo an opponent. The most likely candidate is Englishman Billy Joe Saunders, who himself told BoxingScene that if they fight in an empty arena, it’ll be like competing on his home turf.
“He’s in my world. He packs stadiums. I fill half of Stevenage football ground. … Big fighters like that, … if he throws a shot and misses, the crowd can get behind him. That plays an effect with the judges and everybody watching the fight. But if it’s silent … you’ve got to focus on that fight even more,” said Saunders.
Meanwhile, Canelo hasn’t let his guard down for a second. Although he’s currently separated from his trainer Eddy Reynoso due to the pandemic, Canelo is continuing to work out at his training camp in San Diego, California.
The México state warehouse in which hundreds of boxes of face masks were found.
The México state Attorney General’s Office (FGJEM) has recovered almost a million stolen face masks along with the semitrailer that had been transporting them.
The 638 boxes containing 957,000 N95 masks were found in a warehouse in an industrial park in Tultitlán, north of Mexico City. The stolen goods were valued at 60 million pesos (US $2.7 million).
The tractor-trailer was hijacked on Wednesday, for which the FGJEM opened an investigation and obtained a search warrant for the Tultipark II industrial park. The personal protective equipment (PPE) had been packaged with GPS locators, facilitating its quick recovery.
Search warrant in hand, the FGJEM coordinated with the National Guard and state and municipal police to carry out the search operation.
The Tultipark II industrial complex is jointly owned and operated by real estate developers Parks and E-Group. Mexico News Daily contacted the developers to ask how stolen PPE ended up in one of their warehouses, but both declined to comment.
A steady increase in the number of Covid-19 cases has meant a greater number of less than hopeful municipalities.
The number of Covid-19-free “municipalities of hope” has shrunk by more than half in just 10 days as the infectious disease continues its incursion into virtually all corners of the country.
The federal government initially identified 324 municipalities that hadn’t recorded a single Covid-19 case and didn’t border any with known cases.
The municipalities were given the green light to lift coronavirus restrictions on May 18 and get back to work and school, although most chose not to.
Now, there are just 145 “municipalities of hope” left as the other 179 – 55% of the total – have either recorded a coronavirus case or adjoin one where the disease has been detected.
Thirty-seven of the erstwhile beacons of hope fall into the former category while the other 142 are in the latter.
As a result, Hidalgo, Michoacán, San Luis Potosí and Yucatán no longer have any “municipalities of hope.”
Of the remaining 145, 104 are in Oaxaca; there are nine in each of Guerrero and Puebla; Sonora has seven; five are located in Veracruz; Chihuahua, Jalisco and Nuevo León have three each; and there is one “municipality of hope” in each of Chiapas and Tamaulipas.
Manuel Suárez Lastra, director of the Institute of Geography at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), said that the reduction in numbers is evidence that the pandemic is continuing to expand across Mexico’s territory.
“The number of Covid-19 cases is increasing, … the contagion that started in urban areas has moved to rural areas,” he said, adding that it’s expected that the disease will eventually reach practically all of Mexico’s almost 2,500 municipalities.
Mauricio Rodríguez, an academic in UNAM’s Faculty of Medicine, said that residents of some communities in marginalized “municipalities of hope” have not been adequately informed about how they can protect themselves against infection.
A study by UNAM academics also found that 75% of Mexico’s municipalities are critically, very highly or highly vulnerable to an outbreak of Covid-19 because they have a high percentage of residents aged over 60, have large indigenous populations, lack hospital services and medical personnel and/or are economically disadvantaged.
Coronavirus case numbers and deaths have grown rapidly since the federal government declared the start of phase three of the pandemic on April 21. More than 80,000 people have now tested positive and just over 9,000 have succumbed to the disease, according to official data.
The national social distancing initiative concludes Saturday but every state except Zacatecas has been allocated a red light on the government’s stoplight system to determine which coronavirus restrictions can be lifted and where, meaning that nonessential activities will not recommence on Monday in the vast majority of the country.
One might think Mexican immigrants in the U.S. would be sending less money home to their families as a result of the coronavirus.
The 11.2 million people of Mexican origin living in the United States together send upwards of US $38 billion to Mexico each year. This money, called remittances, supports the basic necessities and financial investments of 1.6 million Mexican households – some 10 million people.
In March, analysts at BBVA bank predicted that migrant remittances to Mexico could fall as much as 21% because of stay-at-home orders and record unemployment in the U.S. Instead, remittances reached a record high in early 2020, the Bank of México recently reported. Mexico received $4.02 billion in March 2020, a 35.8% increase over March 2019.
In early May President López Obrador, thanked “our migrant countrymen” for sending record remittances in this difficult period, calling them “living heroes.”
How is this possible, when the unemployment rate in the United States is 18.6% and swaths of the American economy are still shut down? My research on remittances finds three reasons.
With all the talk of the U.S. economy being “closed,” certain sectors are still going strong – particularly, as Mexican American community organizers Rodrigo Camarena and Lorena Korusias wrote in City Limits, those staffed by the Mexican workers doing “some of the toughest jobs in our economy.”
Mexican immigrants are more likely than other workers to be employed in the construction, maintenance, service and production industries, according to U.S. Census data. These are all “essential” sectors of the pandemic economy, though many pay barely above minimum wage.
Employment during this crisis has sustained households that are dependent on every paycheck, both in the United States and back home in Mexico.
These jobs – which require people to leave home and interact with other people – have also disproportionately exposed the Latino population to Covid-19. In New York City, the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, 34% of all Covid-19 fatalities are Mexican or Latino, while Latinos make up just 27% of the city’s population.
As of May 23, 1,036 Mexicans living in the United States had died of the virus, according to Mexican consular records.
Community advocates attribute the disparate rates of infection and mortality among Latinos to their high-risk working conditions, lack of access to government aid, language barriers and discrimination. These issues are particularly acute for indigenous Mexicans in the U.S.
Juana González works 10 hours a day, six days a week alongside other agricultural workers to help produce America’s pandemic food supply. Brent Stirton/Getty Images
The rise in remittances is also due, in part, to a steep decline in the value of the Mexican peso, according to a recent report by the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies, or CEMLA.
In early March, the purchasing power of $1 rose from 19.42 to 25.35 pesos, a 30.5% increase in just three weeks. That means every U.S. dollar sent to Mexico goes farther. During that same time, the CEMLA report says, the average remittance transfer by Mexican migrants in the U.S. increased from $315 to $343.
This particular increase in sending occurred before shelter-in-place orders took effect in major immigration hubs like California and Texas. In the report, CEMLA economic statistics manager Cervantes Gónzalez says migrants took advantage of favorable exchange rates before the economy began closing to maximize their families’ purchasing power.
On March 23, Mexico began its own gradual shutdown, with the government closing schools, halting many kinds of nonessential business and requiring most people to work from home.
That’s not possible for the estimated 56% of Mexicans who work as domestic laborers, in agriculture and in other informal jobs that lack social security. Their incomes have simply disappeared during the pandemic.
The decline in economic activity in Mexico may have compelled family members working abroad to send more money home, says Gabriela Siller, head economist at Banco Base, a Mexican bank.
Remittance senders have always felt obligated to their loved ones back home, research shows. It’s likely such feelings of care and responsibility would only increase in a crisis such as Covid-19.
In 2019, the World Bank estimated that global remittances exceeded $550 billion – a massive wealth transfer. And the U.S.-Mexico remittance corridor is one of the world’s most significant, with Mexico being the third-largest receiver of remittances.
So far, it’s also proving to be remarkably durable. Remittances from the U.S. are down in many other Caribbean and Latin American countries.
There’s reason to think cash transfers to Mexico will stay strong. Feelings of familial obligation won’t change due to the pandemic, and the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Mexican peso remains favorable for remittance senders. These factors should keep funds flowing south.
But this financial relationship may still suffer as a result of Covid-19. Soaring unemployment in the U.S. is hitting Latino service workers and small businesses hard, as are Covid-19 infections. Eventually, wage loss and sickness could force even the most loving, responsible and reliable person to send less money back home.
Swedish furniture and home accessories retailer Ikea will begin online sales in Mexico in the fall but it is unclear when the company’s first bricks and mortar store will open.
Malcolm Pruys, Ikea’s CEO in Mexico, told the news website Expansión that the company is going ahead with its plan to begin e-commerce sales in the fall but the opening of the first store in Mexico City could be delayed.
Pruys said last May that the company planned to open the store near the Benito Juárez International Airport in October of 2020. However, the CEO says now that he can’t say when the long-awaited store will open.
“If I gave you a date, I’d be lying,” Pruys said.
He said that the company is doing all it can to stick to the plan to open in October but added: “I can’t say that we won’t be delayed.”
Construction has been halted due to the coronavirus pandemic but Pruys said that hasn’t overly upset Ikea’s expansion into Mexico because the company always considers different eventualities in its plans.
He explained that the company’s 110-strong workforce is still working despite the coronavirus crisis, although they’re no longer in the office but in their homes.
Pruys said that he was aware that Ikea will arrive in the Mexican market at a time when the retail industry will be forced to make adjustments in order to operate in a Covid-safe economy.
However, the company has experiences in other countries that will help it in Mexico and has already developed protocols for contact-free home deliveries, he said.
Given that disposable income will fall for a lot of people as a result of the coronavirus-induced economic crisis, purchasing new furniture and other home accessories will likely not be a priority for many.
However, Pruys said that the coronavirus lockdown may have changed people’s relationship with their homes, so there will be an opportunity for Ikea to speak to them about how they can make improvements to their living spaces.
“A lot of people would have spent a lot more time at home and when you spend a lot of time at home you see it quite differently,” he said.
“I wonder if everything I have makes me happy, if I’m well organized, if I have a good couch, if I’m comfortable and relaxed. … There is a great opportunity for us to speak to people about how we can help them with this and how we can improve their homes,” Pruys said.
He added that Mexicans’ confidence in buying online appears to have increased as a result of the pandemic and stay-at-home orders.
“What I see most in the streets at the moment are the vehicles of companies like Mercado Libre and Amazon.”
Ikea is investing approximately US $500 million in Mexico to build its new store, an e-commerce warehouse and a production plant. The company’s retail project leader in Mexico said last year that the store will employ between 300 and 350 people.
Pruys has said previously that Ikea is planning to open more stores in other Mexican cities but didn’t specify when or where.
Laptops are fine for vacations, but long hours of use can cause back pain.
In the year 2003, more than 9,200 non-government workers missed a day or more of work because of typing or keyboarding related injuries, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics.
In 2008, the situation was exacerbated as sales of laptop computers overtook those of desktops for the first time. Today, according to Guadalajara yoga master Paul King, things are getting much worse, as more and more people are turning their laptop into their principal workhorse while confined to their homes because of Covid-19.
“People are now working at laptops for long hours, although this is not what they were designed for. The ergonomics of a laptop are quite different from those of a desktop. In the former, the keyboard and screen are very close together and not easily separable. This means, even if you work at a table or desk, you are looking downward, rather than forward.
“Typically your lumbar is convex instead of its natural concavity, shoulders are rounded forward, your chest is collapsed, and the back of the neck is permanently extended. This posture spells potential long-term health problems for anyone who regularly works for hours on a laptop.”
King says you can improve this situation by investing in an external keyboard and raising the level of the laptop screen, for example by placing it on top of a stack of books, so you are looking straight at the screen. Your feet should be flat on the floor and both your forearms and your thighs should be parallel to the floor. Sit upright, weight in the center of your sitting bones, neither pressing the lumbar forward nor allowing it to collapse back. If this is difficult to maintain, maybe use a lumbar support.
Raise laptop to eye level and use external keyboard. Put those old dictionaries to good use!
“Of course this set-up works well for people who can touch type,” he comments, “but if you can’t and you still need to look down at the keyboard, the problem remains.”
What can happen to you if you work like this for a long time? “In the short term you may get a headache or feel stress in your neck and shoulders. If your upper back and neck muscles are contracted for a long time, and circulation to your heart is reduced by your collapsed chest, the flow of blood and oxygen to your whole body is reduced. As a result, you are not working at your optimum health and intellect level. In the long run you could end up with spinal problems.”
King says that modern people are losing the natural curvature of their neck. Looking down a lot causes the muscles in the back of the neck to elongate. If people spend a lot of the day in this position, the muscles lose their elasticity and computer users may get what is called a “flat neck,” with possible pain and compression of the disks.
So what can you do if you work at a keyboard all day? “I recommended that you take a break at least once an hour and do certain simple exercises,” says the yoga instructor. The only “prop” you need is a simple, straight-back chair.
1.Sit forward on the chair, reach behind you and grab the lower part of the chair’s back with both hands. Press down with the hands and lift the chest while rolling your shoulders back. Try to make your upper back concave. You can also look up to release the back of the neck.
2. The spinal twist: sit sideways on the chair with your feet and knees together and grab the upper part of the chair’s back with both hands, elbows wide apart. Now you can twist your trunk easily, using one hand to push and the other to pull. When you do this, turn the abdomen first, then the chest and finally the head. On each inhalation focus upon lengthening your spine upwards, and then continue the twist on each exhalation. “Twists are so beneficial for both the spine and the abdominal organs,” adds the yoga expert. “It’s always best to do each of them twice.”
Exercise 3: Fully extend your arms and trunk parallel to the floor. Paul King, IYOGA
3. Place your hands on the back of the chair and walk away so as to fully extend your arms and trunk parallel to the floor. Maintain this posture for a while, and with each exhalation lengthen the sides of the trunk more. This creates space between the vertebrae.
4. Finally, to correct the typically bad spinal position of people who have been sitting for a long time, you can, while seated, separate your feet and lean your chest forward between your knees. Place your fingers on the floor and let the weight of your trunk and head sink towards the floor. Breathe into your lower back and allow the spinal muscles to relax as the back lengthens and rounds. To go deeper you can clasp your hands behind your neck, until your head is lower than your knees.
The five chair exercises, King told me, will help correct problems of posture caused not only by laptops and desktops, but also by smartphones. Typing with both thumbs on a tiny keyboard close to the chest, he says, causes one to look down more sharply and to hunch the shoulders and upper back even more.
“This little workout,” concludes King, “will help you correct problems of posture and keep your spine mobile and healthy. Another thing that’s good to do is to rest your eyes by going outside and looking at distant objects.”
Paul King mentioned that all of the above exercises are in the spirit of B.K. S. Iyengar, founder ofIyengar Yoga, which is practiced by millions of students around the world. It is a form of yoga that emphasizes correct alignment and uses various props to make postures more accessible.
In 1952, Iyengar met and befriended the famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The story of this very unlikely meeting —which changed Menuhin’s life — is told in The Yoga Teacher and the Violinist. Menuhin eventually arranged for Iyengar to teach in London, Switzerland, Paris and elsewhere, resulting in the subsequent popularity of yoga in the West. In 2004, Iyengar was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He died in 2014 at the age of 95.
[soliloquy id="112353"]
One of Iyengar’s contributions to yoga was his application of exercises to health problems like chronic backache, high blood pressure and insomnia. Paul King says: “It’s never too late to start yoga.” His school, iYoga Studio, is located in Guadalajara.
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, for more than 30 years and is the author of A Guide to West Mexico’s Guachimontones and Surrounding Area and co-author of Outdoors in Western Mexico. More of his writing can be found on his website.
Cuts won't affect the operation of the institutions but will help stamp out corruption and abusive practices, López Obrador said.
Members of the scientific and academic communities have criticized the federal government’s newly-announced budget cuts and hit back at President López Obrador’s claim that they are corrupt and guilty of committing abusive practices.
The Finance Ministry said last week that 75% budget cuts would apply this year to a range of federally-funded institutions including the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt), the Center for Research in Teaching and Economics (CIDE) and the Center for Investigation and Advanced Research (Cinvestav).
López Obrador made his corruption allegation against scientists and academics at his morning press conference on Wednesday while attempting to justify the cuts. He said that the cuts won’t affect the operation of the institutions but will help to stamp out corruption and abusive practices.
“Whenever a measure like this is taken they say … ‘the researchers will be left without [money to buy] food.’ … That’s the way it always is in order to maintain the abuse, the cronyism, the nepotism, all the scourges of politics,” López Obrador said.
He charged that researcher are not exempt from committing acts of corruption, asserting that “it’s completely proven” that there were “abuses” at Conacyt.
The president is dismantling the nation’s scientific structure, charged biologist Antonio Lazcano.
“Money for medicines was stolen, what more can we say?” López Obrador said.
The president questioned the morality of scientists who have criticized the government’s budget cuts and compared them to the cientificos who advised Porfirio Díaz, the former Mexican president who led the country in a dictatorial manner for more than 30 years in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Antonio Lazcano, a biologist at the National Autonomous University, described the cuts and the president’s attack on the scientific community as a surprise, although it’s not the first time López Obrador’s administration has reduced funding for science.
“I think that the government’s current anti-intellectual attitude is absolutely surprising,” he said, adding that it is equally surprising that Conacyt director María Elena Álvarez-Buylla has not spoken out against it.
Lazcano charged that Álvarez-Buylla has become “an ally” of the government’s anti-science “attitudes” rather than a defender of the scientific community.
Speaking at a conference, the biologist said he was unaware of the reason why López Obrador sees scientists in such an unfavorable light and warned that he is dismantling the nation’s “scientific structure,” which was built up over many years.
“A lot of us were astonished when he started to characterize researchers in a completely unfair way, as if we were social parasites enjoying [high] salaries, trips and privileges,” Lazcano said.
For his part, noted archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma described the situation as “really worrying.”
“The president has made declarations [against the academic community] on other occasions but they now gain strength because of the [budget] cuts the Finance Ministry is ordering,” he said.
Matos, head of the archaeological team that excavated the Templo Mayor site in Mexico City in the late 1970s and early ’80s, said that the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has already suspended some of its activities as a result of the 750-million-peso (US $33.7-million) budget cut it will face.
Some projects could be canceled, he said, describing the budget cuts as regrettable.
Matos criticized the government for pouring money into its large infrastructure projects, such as the Maya Train and the new Pemex refinery on the Tabasco coast, at the same time as it is taking resources out of science and culture.
Cinvestav is one of the scientific research agencies whose budget has been cut.
“Oil will run out one day, culture won’t,” he said.
Eusebio Juaristi, a chemist who won the National Science Prize in the late 1990s, said the cuts to the educational and research centers, such as CIDE and Cinvestav, will affect both academic staff and students.
There will be minimal if any progress made on research projects without adequate funding, he said.
“I believe that [the impact] will be very serious, not just for the development of the researchers but also for the development of the students,” Juaristi said.
Julieta Fierro, an astrophysicist, said that “taking away … the operational budget – just like that – is a mistake.”
She rejected López Obrador’s claim that the scientific community is corrupt, pointing out that its members are subjected to rigorous evaluation.
“Our students evaluate us, … the journals in which we write evaluate us, … the institutions where we work evaluate us, Conacyt evaluates us, so it would be very difficult for us to be crooks,” Fierro said.
“I don’t doubt that there are people who are but I don’t believe it’s the majority. … Science is very rigorous and in order to have a good salary, evaluations are needed and an evaluation obviously measures the rigor of the research one does,” she said.
Elisa Servín, a historian at INAH, said it was unconscionable that López Obrador is labeling scientists corrupt at a time when they are working to save lives by developing a vaccine against the new coronavirus.
“How is it possible that at a time like this the president says that science is [a pursuit] of the corrupt?”
The Naucalpan notary in an altercation with his wife.
As emergency calls related to domestic violence surge, two high-profile cases have been reported in México state.
Horacio Enrique Jiménez López, a former state deputy and senior official with the city of Naucalpan de Juárez, was arrested for allegedly beating his wife and kidnapping her on Thursday.
Jiménez, 58, was arrested after a call was placed to police about a man beating a woman inside an SUV.
Also yesterday, and also in Naucalpan, after a video of notary public Horacio Aguilar Álvarez de Alba mistreating his wife went viral, Aguilar issued a public apology on his Twitter account, pleading for forgiveness from his wife, the governor and society in general.
Aguilar is an ordained deacon in the Catholic Church and had been previously accused of attempted rape by 10 alleged victims.
The video shows Aguilar and his wife fighting outside their home as the man struggles to force his wife to give up a set of keys.
“I am not going to give them to you: it is my house and you cannot throw me out,” the woman says. Later he pulls on the waistband of her pants. “You’re hurting me,” she yells as a man films the incident on his cell phone.
“I take this opportunity to offer a sincere apology to the wronged person, both personally and as a member of the Mexican army,” Aguilar wrote in his apology. “If the facts are put to the consideration of the competent authorities, I will submit to any fair resolutions that they may issue.”
Emergency calls due to domestic violence are way up in Mexico during the coronavirus pandemic, spiking to 400,000 911 calls in April alone.
