Pemex stations have been closing for lack of fuel. Now they're also being closed for selling the stolen variety.
Federal financial investigators have identified 13 Pemex gas stations in Tamaulipas that stopped buying gasoline from the state oil company in 2016.
The Financial Intelligence Unit at the Secretariat of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP) has detected that 13 Pemex gas stations in Tamaulipas stopped buying gasoline from the state oil company in 2016.
The Secretariat of Finance has filed formal complaints against the owners of the gas stations, charging them with operating with illicit resources, a crime related to fuel theft.
Three of the offending gas stations are located in Reynosa, three more in Matamoros, two in each of the municipalities of Valle Hermoso, Río Bravo and San Fernando and one in Guerrero.
A Finance Secretariat spokesman said that 12 of the stations were shut down on January 8, and the bank accounts of the 13 Pemex franchise-holders have been frozen.
The investigations into illegal fuel sales are also looking at five companies elsewhere in Mexico, where another 10 bank accounts have been frozen for activities related to fuel theft.
The number of people in Mexico officially registered as missing has exceeded 40,000, according to the National Search Commission.
Roberto Cabrera Alfaro, the commission’s outgoing chief, told a press conference yesterday that there are 40,180 people on the National Registry of Missing and Disappeared Persons.
“This registry, which is still under construction, contains the digital identity of each missing person. It includes their name, photograph, biometrics [and] fingerprints,” he said.
The number of cases is 12,657 higher than it was in February 2013, near the start of former president Enrique Peña Nieto’s six-year term.
Former interior secretary Alfonso Navarrete announced in October that there were 37,485 missing persons, meaning that the figure has increased by 2,695 in just three months.
Security forces including police and the military have been accused of carrying out enforced disappearances during the previous administration, including the high-profile case of 43 students who disappeared in Guerrero in 2014.
Cabrera, who announced his resignation earlier this month, also said that information in the Plataforma México criminal database shows that federal authorities have fingerprint records of 36,708 deceased persons who haven’t been identified.
He described the situation in Mexico with regards to the number of missing persons and unidentified corpses as “terrible.”
Since the National Search Commission was created just over a year ago, it has identified 400 corpses, Cabrera said, some of which had been in government morgues for more than 10 years.
The discovery of mass hidden graves in Mexico is common and identifying bodies is often challenging for forensic authorities.
In September, authorities in Veracruz exhumed at least 166 skulls and other human remains from 32 hidden graves located on a property in the center of the state.
Cabrera said that a database established by the commission contains 50,000 genetic profiles created from DNA samples provided by family members of missing persons and bone remains.
“The information must go through several verification processes. However, it constitutes an important step forward in the consolidation of a National Forensic Data Bank,” he said.
Parents held in chains on schoolgrounds in Michoacán.
Four parents have been released from custody after being detained by community police for opposing the closure of a bilingual elementary school in La Cofradía de Ostula in Aquila, Michoacán.
Officials from the Secretary of Public Security negotiated the release of the parents, three of whom had been held in chains and publicly displayed as a form of punishment.
La Cofradía is an indigenous community and governed and policed according to traditional laws and customs. The parents were detained on Tuesday, but state authorities were unaware of the situation until photographs surfaced showing three of the parents chained to posts on the schoolgrounds.
State police established a dialogue with community leaders yesterday to negotiate the release of the parents. In a statement, the SSP urged communities that are governed according to traditional laws respect established human rights.
The Michoacán Human Rights Commission told reporters that it has opened an investigation into the “presumed violation of human rights” of the parents opposed to the school’s closure. The commission explained that the violation consists of deprivation of the “right to personal security and integrity.”
Migrants cross a bridge this morning from Guatemala.
Between 1,000 and 1,500 Central American migrants entered Mexico illegally at the southern border early this morning, one day after another large group crossed into the country legally and in an “orderly” way.
The migrants crossed the border at Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas, just before 5:00am and continued walking towards the city of Tapachula without stopping to register their entry into Mexico.
Yesterday, the National Immigration Institute (INM) said that 969 migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua crossed into Ciudad Hidalgo after they were given identification bracelets by Mexican officials.
The bracelets must be kept on until they formally register with authorities.
However, today’s cohort didn’t wait for immigration officials to give them bracelets and according to some media reports, they broke down a barrier to cross into Mexico.
Marco Antonio Cortéz, a 37-year-old Honduran migrant traveling with his wife and two children, told the news agency Reuters that “the road today was open,” adding “they didn’t give us bracelets or anything, they just let us pass through Mexico migration.”
Ana Laura Martínez de Lara, INM director of migratory control and verification, said yesterday that once registered, migrants who meet the requirements to stay will be issued with humanitarian visas that allow them to work in Mexico and access services or travel to the northern border to apply for asylum in the United States.
The visas are expected to be issued within five days, but migrants who crossed the border today appear unwilling to wait.
The group that crossed yesterday remains in Ciudad Hidalgo waiting to be transferred to a shelter where they will be provided with meals and have access to medical services. As with past caravans, there are a lot of children traveling with their parents or other relatives.
Martínez de Lara said the migrants who entered Mexico at the official border crossing yesterday did so in a “very orderly” and respectful manner in contrast with a clash at the same crossing in October that left one Honduran man dead.
A Honduran man working as a boatman on the Suchiate River told the news agency AFP that he had taken around 100 people on rafts made of inflatable tires and wooden slats.
Earlier this week, Alejandro Encinas, undersecretary for human rights, migration and population in the Secretariat of the Interior, said the federal government was determined to avoid any repeat of violence at the southern border and warned that migrants would not be permitted to “bang down the door.”
However, “he who enters in a regular manner will have no impediment,” he said. It remains to be seen what approach the government will take towards those who entered illegally today.
The decision to grant visas to the migrants who crossed legally yesterday makes good on President López Obrador’s pledge to allow Central Americans to work in Mexico as part of a strategy to stem the flow of people to the United States.
In exchange, López Obrador has made it clear he wants the U.S. to invest in southern Mexico and Central America to stimulate economic development and help keep people at home. Migration should be an option not a necessity, he often says.
The Mexican and United States governments last month agreed to work together on a development plan to curb migration and the latter pledged to contribute US $10.6 billion but most of that funding is not new because it will be allocated from existing aid programs.
Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard will meet United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later this month to discuss the migration issue, which has strained bilateral relations.
Thousands of migrants who traveled to Mexico as part of several caravans in the final months of 2018 remain stranded on Mexico’s northern border as they wait for the opportunity to apply for asylum with U.S. authorities, who have introduced a “metering” system that limits the number of cases they will hear on a daily basis.
In support of the U.S. government’s “Remain in Mexico” plan, the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs announced last month that Mexico would take back some non-Mexican migrants who have requested asylum in the United States while they await the outcome of their claims.
United States President Donald Trump continues to argue that the only solution to the arrival of migrant caravans, illegal immigration and drug flows across the Mexico-U.S. border is to build his long-promised wall.
“Another big caravan heading our way. Very hard to stop without a Wall!” he wrote on Twitter today.
Trump remains locked in a bitter battle with the Democratic Party over US $5.7 billion in funding for the wall that he wants Congress to approve. The standoff has partially shut down the United States government for almost a month.
Vallarta Botanical Garden is 24 kilometers south of Puerto Vallarta.
After guiding me around a unique cloud forest of maple trees and giant ferns in a remote corner of western Mexico, botanist Miguel Cházaro casually remarked, “By the way, there’s a botanical garden near here you really must see. It was started by an American and it’s unique.”
Well, “near here” took six hours to get to, plus six hours back, and I ended up reaching home at midnight, but I must admit the eminent botanist was right: the Vallarta Botanical Garden truly is a must-see, no matter where you find yourself in Mexico. The place is located 24 kilometers south of Puerto Vallarta, along Palms-to-Pines coastal highway 200.
Step out of your car and you’re in the jungle. We were visiting in July and everywhere we went, hundreds of “skippers” fluttered all around us. These, explained a sign in English and Spanish, are Hesperiidae butterflies, smaller than most and given to skipping, flitting, darting and zig-zagging, from which they get their popular name.
Clouds of them danced all around us as we began our tour of the Botanical Gardens, which cover an area of eight hectares, crisscrossed by pathways with exotic names like The Vanilla Trail, Jaguar Trail and Guacamaya Trail, leading to even more exotic-sounding places like The Jungle Overlook, The Swinging Bridge, Tree Fern Grotto, The Garden of Memories and The Giant Strangler Fig Tree.
And everywhere you go, every step of the way, there is lush vegetation: sensuous tropical flowers, bizarre, creeping vines and gargantuan trees which soar to amazing heights in this tropical climate. Here you will find orchids — an amazing multitude of orchids.
There are even orchids that resemble anything but orchids, plus a few that (to our great surprise) exude alluring perfumes. And, of course, there was the tastiest of all orchids, Vanilla planifolia, whose vines grow abundantly there (and you can buy the beans or extract in their store).
One of the 1,901 varieties of Anthurium flowers.
Here, too, are cocoa pods growing before your very eyes and attached directly to the tree trunk. Each pod holds 20 to 60 seeds, the main ingredient in chocolate. There are also rare cacti of every sort, exotic “Purple Island” waterlilies, red ginger, once exclusively reserved for Hawaiian royalty and such a huge collection of anthuriums that we wondered whether they had found all 1,901 types. Along that line, the gardens have so many thousands of species that no one has even tried to count them.
When you need to take a break in your exploration of the gardens, you can cool off with an exotic drink at the Hacienda de Oro Restaurant, which also houses a most impressive Natural History and Cultural Museum.
This amazing project came into being thanks to Robert Price, founder of the botanical gardens, who kindly took time to chat with me at the restaurant over frosty glasses of incredibly refreshing and delicious drinks. One of these contained chaya and chía, while the other was a combination of iced lemon-grass tea, tapioca and ginger, sweetened with agave nectar.
“Some of our visitors suspect we have spiked these two drinks with frog’s eggs,” quipped the curator of these gardens.
Robert Price, who was born in Savannah, Georgia, told me he came to Puerto Vallarta in 2004, planning to stay for only six months. Fortunately for us and for Mexico, someone knocked on Price’s door one day, selling orchids. “Those orchids were absolutely incredible: gorgeous,” says Price, “and I asked the man where he had found them. ‘In the mountains,’ he told me . . . and eventually he brought me to this very place. I took one look and said to myself, ‘This is where I want to stay!’”
Now all Price needed to do was figure out how to make a living in the middle of a jungle. “Well,” he says, “I noticed there were no botanical gardens along the coast and that seemed surprising to me. But I love nature and the idea of starting my own botanical garden came into my head. So, I researched the internet to find out how to do it. And this is the result. I think this is what I was sent here to do.”
Exotic “Purple Island” water lilies.
By chance a friend of mine just returned from a visit to the garden. I asked Susan Street for her impressions.
“It took some doing,” she told me, “to convince my sons, their father and their girlfriends to abandon the beaches of Puerto Vallarta long enough to try something new: a visit to the Vallarta Botanical Garden, which turned out to be a 40-minute drive from Puerto Vallarta’s downtown area. We only spent a few hours there, but boy did we wish we could have gone back the following day!
“There are so many trails to follow, plants and trees to admire and delicious food to devour! Each of us wanted to spend quality time in specific parts of the garden, but instead we stuck together and took it all in as a group. The bougainvillea were gorgeous, the vanilla plants all budding, the variety of cacti mind-boggling!
“We topped everything off, of course, with lunch at the Hacienda de Oro restaurant. We devoured scrumptious fish and shrimp tacos while sipping on vanilla and raspberry mojitos.
Then, wonderful organic coffee topped everything off as we awarded ourselves with more wandering through the gift shop, purchasing bamboo straws, cacao products and vanilla extract, in addition to a free dark-chocolate bar given to us upon presenting a coupon clipped from the visitors’ guide. A day to remember, and a visit I can’t stop recommending to friends.”
Another visitor went on a tour of the place with Leonardo, their botanist, and claimed it was the highlight of her stay in Puerto Vallarta, “the best botanical gardens guided tour we experienced — ever!”
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So I hope by now you will agree with me that this amazing place is well worth a visit, even if it requires a 12-hour detour!
• Vallarta Botanical Garden is a non-profit, charitable organization “dedicated to those who work to preserve the beauty of the Earth, and who labor to teach others the value and wonder of their environment.” According to its website it’s open daily, 10:00 to 6:00, but closed on Mondays from April to October. The entrance fee is 200 pesos per person, kids four and under free. The telephone number is (322) 223-6182.
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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.
At least 26 trains have been halted by teacher blockades that went up earlier this week in Michoacán.
On Monday, teachers affiliated with the SNTE and CNTE unions blocked railroad tracks in Lázaro Cárdenas, Guacamayas, Nueva Italia, Caltzontzin and Pátzcuaro to demand payment of money they claim they are owed by the state government.
The blocked trains are made up of 2,288 railcars carrying cargo cars as well as 96 tankers of gasoline intended for distribution in the region to relieve fuel shortages resulting from President López Obrador’s strategy to combat petroleum theft.
Blockades were also set up in Tiripetío, Maravatio, Piedad and Yurécuaro, but were taken down on Thursday morning. The CNTE revealed in a conference that teachers are owed more than 7 billion pesos (US $366.49 million).
The president of Kansan City Southern de México old reporters that while he was not opposed to the protests, teachers should not block essential thoroughfares or cause damage to the local and national economies.
An official with the shipping company Maersk Line agreed and added: “We’re waiting for the government to resolve this problem; we’re not the ones with the power to negotiate.”
An artist’s sketch of Joaquin Guzmán at a 2018 pretrial hearing in New York.
Elizabeth Williams via AP
The trial of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has exposed just how powerful Mexico’s cartels really are.
The trial has now run for two months. On January 15, a Colombian drug trafficker who worked for Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel from 2007 to 2013 testified that Guzmán paid former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto a US $100-million bribe while he was in power, a charge Peña Nieto’s office denies.
It was just the latest allegation of the cartels paying off high-ranking politicians in Mexico, presumably to exert influence over the government.
Guzmán is charged with drug trafficking, murder, kidnapping and money laundering – crimes he allegedly committed over the past quarter-century as head of the Sinaloa Cartel, the western hemisphere’s most powerful organized crime syndicate.
With its witness accounts of extreme violence, political corruption, international intrigue and entrepreneurial innovation, Guzmán’s trial is a telenovela-style explainer on why a wall is unlikely to stop the lucrative U.S.-Mexico drug trade.
Founded in Mexico’s Sinaloa state in the 1990s, the Sinaloa Cartel now distributes drugs to some 50 countries, including Argentina, the Philippines and Russia.
Determining the scale of Guzmán’s global empire is difficult, since gangsters usually don’t keep books and charts of accounts. But his 2016 indictment in the U.S. sought forfeiture of more than $14 billion in proceeds and illicit profits from decades of narcotics sales in the U.S. and Canada.
The cartel controls perhaps half of Mexico’s drug market, with annual earnings of around $3 billion. Mexican estimates suggest that each month it moves nearly two tonnes of cocaine and 9,000 tonnes of marijuana – plus heroin, methamphetamine and other substances.
Illegal drugs are a highly lucrative business.
In 2016, the year El Chapo was captured in Mexico, the wholesale price for a gram of cocaine was approximately $2.30 in Colombia and $12.50 in Mexico. The same gram had a wholesale cost of $28 by the time it got to the United States. In Australia, that same gram of cocaine fetched $176.50 wholesale.
Drug prices rise significantly during transit as intermediaries demand compensation for the risk they assume in getting the product to consumers.
Guzmán after his capture by Mexican marines in January 2016. AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo
Retail prices per gram of cocaine are even higher, reflecting the addition of even more middlemen: $82 in the U.S. in 2016 and $400 in Australia.
This liability markup is one reason why some prominent policy experts and even conservative economists call for legalizing and regulating illicit narcotics. Keeping drugs illegal is what makes them so profitable for the people who traffick them.
Illegality is also what makes the drug business so violent.
Running an illicit operation, cartel leaders must both enforce their own business agreements and protect themselves from authorities and competitors.
They do so using a combination of violence, threats and bribes.
At least eight armed groups worked under Guzmán’s command in Mexico, according to Mexican government reports, attacking competitors and killing defectors.
Guzmán also bribed as many politicians, police officers and prison guards to stay in business.
His elaborate disappearances from Mexican high-security prisons are the stuff of legend. In 2015, Guzmán escaped jail by riding a motorcycle through a lit, ventilated mile-long tunnel constructed underneath his cell.
The Sinaloa Cartel didn’t become the world’s biggest supplier of illicit drugs by coincidence. It has flourished because the United States is the world’s biggest consumer of illicit drugs.
Mexican cartels serve Americans’ “insatiable demand for illegal drugs,” as Hillary Clinton once said.
Despite President Donald Trump’s focus on Mexican drug traffickers, his former chief of staff, John Kelly, has admitted that the U.S. is part of the problem.
“We’re not even trying,” he told Congress in 2017, calling for more drug-demand reduction programs.
Kelly added that Latin American countries chide American authorities for “lecturing [them] about not doing enough to stop the drug flow” while the U.S. does nothing to “stop the demand.”
Trump’s continued insistence on securing the southern border with a wall seems to disregard the economic forces driving the drug trade and diminish Mexican cartels’ innovative distribution strategies.
A high-tech border fence constructed in Arizona long before Trump’s inauguration has proven virtually useless in stopping drugs from crossing into the U.S.: Mexican smugglers just use a catapult to fling hundred-pound bales of marijuana over to the American side.
“We’ve got the best fence money can buy,” former DEA chief Michael Brown said to The New York Times in 2012, “and they counter us with a 2,500-year-old technology.”
Then there’s the other ancient technology perfected by Guzmán: the tunnel.
Officials have discovered about 180 cleverly disguised illicit passages under the U.S.-Mexico border. Many, like the one Guzmán used to escape prison, are equipped with electricity, ventilation and elevators.
Trump has admitted that anyone could use a rope to climb over his wall, but believes that more border guards and drone technology would prevent infiltration.
Corruption is not an exclusively Mexican trait.
Over the past decade some 200 employees and contractors from the Department of Homeland Security have accepted nearly $15 million in bribes to look the other way as drugs were smuggled across the border into the United States, The New York Times has reported.
Some U.S. officials have also given sensitive law enforcement information to cartel members, according to the Times.
“Almost no evidence about corrupt American officials has been allowed at [El Chapo’s] trial,” New York Times reporter Alan Feuer said recently on Twitter.
Nato and the Huachix: music that celebrates the huachicoleros.
“El poblano pasó de ser camotero a huachicolero . . .”
With those words, which translate into “the man from Puebla went from being a sweet potato vendor to a fuel thief,” Puebla singer Tamara Alcántara begins a song that celebrates the culture of fuel thieves in the Red Triangle, a region of Puebla notorious for the high incidence of petroleum pipeline taps.
“The truth is that the huachicolero is like the devil, everyone knows that he’s around but nobody has seen him,” she continues.
With the federal government’s anti-fuel theft strategy in full swing, huachicorridos – ballads that tell the stories of fuel thieves – are beginning to garner greater attention from the Mexican public although many of them have been around for years.
Taking a cue from narcocorridos, a subgenre of norteño or northern Mexican music that glorifies and seeks to humanize drug traffickers, huachicorrido lyrics often assert that the fuel thieves are not acting out of malice but necessity, á la Robin Hood.
Nato y los Huachix - Del Triangulo Rojo (Estudio 2017)
“I’m from the Red Triangle, 100% poblano, they call me the sucker and with that I agree because I suck the pipes to help my people,” sings the front man of a group from Puebla called Nato y los Huachix in a 2017 huachicorrido called Del Triángulo Rojo (From the Red Triangle).
A song by a group called Komando 357 is dedicated to the prominent Puebla fuel thieves known as El Bukanas and Kalimba.
“. . . I’m here to sing to all the people who have a great time fucking over Pemex . . . Pemex belongs to the Mexicans so that means it’s ours, instead of letting the gringos fuck it over we’re better off fucking it over ourselves.”
It’s not just corridos, or ballads, that have been given a huachicol reinterpretation but also cumbia, a dance and style of music originally from Colombia.
A song called La Cumbia Huachicol was released during protests against the January 2017 gasolinazo, as the steep gasoline price increase was known.
“Gasolinazo, I use huachicol [stolen fuel], gasolinazo, I use huachicol,” goes the refrain of the song.
Among other aspects of the so-called “huachicolero” culture are altars dedicated to the Santo Niño Huachicolero, or the Holy Infant Huachicolero.
With President López Obrador now cracking down hard on fuel theft and thus threatening huachicoleros‘ livelihoods, prayers to the Santo Niño are likely at an all-time high.
Amid the tangle of wires there might be one or two illegal hook-ups here.
It’s not just fuel thieves who are costing Mexico billions of pesos a year.
The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) announced today that during the first half of 2018, it lost revenue of 25.7 billion pesos (US $1.35 billion) due to electricity theft via illegal connections.
The amount of power stolen represents 5.7% of all the electricity it distributed in the six-month period, the CFE said.
But the bad news doesn’t end there.
Luis Bravo, the state-owned company’s director of corporate communications, said that an additional 5.9% of energy – equivalent to 34.25 billion pesos (US $1.8 billion) in monetary terms – was lost in the same period due to technical problems associated with its transmission.
All told, the CFE saw 59.95 billion pesos (US $3.15 billion) wiped off its bottom line due to “technical and non-technical losses.”
Bravo told a press conference that the CFE is carrying out an analysis to determine where the majority of electricity theft is taking place and once that has been established, measures will be taken to combat it.
“Is the process painful? Yes. Does it take time? Yes, but it’s necessary to do it,” he said.
Bravo stressed that new CFE chief Manuel Bartlett is committed to rescuing the company and returning it to its social calling.
Bartlett, an 82-year-old former governor of Puebla and federal interior secretary, whose appointment at the helm of the CFE was criticized by many, said last year that he would seek to introduce “social rates” that could see people on low incomes obtain government subsidies to offset their electricity costs.
An organization that promotes sustainable tourist destinations has named Querétaro’s Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve one of the top 100 most sustainable destinations in the world.
The only Mexican destination on the list, it was selected by Green Destinations in recognition of the conservation and sustainable tourism efforts of the Sierra Gorda Ecological Group, Sierra Gorda Ecotours and local and state governments.
The fourth edition of the Top 100 Sustainable Destinations selected the winners based on an analysis of efforts to encourage local communities to participate in tourism and environmental protection, as well as attractions for visitors.
The Sierra Gorda reserve will be recognized at Berlin’s International Tourism Fair in March.
The Sierra Gorda is part of the Western Sierra Madre, and its 383,000 hectares make up 32% of the state of Querétaro. It was officially declared a biosphere reserve in 1997.
On average, the reserve welcomes 218,000 tourists annually, representing economic spillover of 1 billion pesos.
The Sierra Gorda takes in semi-deserts to cloud forests, boasts mountains from 200 to 3,000 meters above sea level and is home to 100 different species of mammals, 300 kinds of birds, 650 different types of butterflies, and a large variety of other fauna, reptiles, amphibians, fish and vegetation.
