After 11 people were killed last week in the Guanajuato municipality of Apaseo el Alto, Mayor María del Carmen Ortiz wants the navy to send marines back to improve the security situation.
“I would say to the citizens that I am working with delegates to tell them what is happening, and that they aren’t alone, and that I’m doing everything I can to stop this,” she said in an interview with the newspaper Milenio. “The navy should come back, that’s what worked.”
Marines were withdrawn September 1, after which the mayor said she was unaware of the reason.
She stressed that last Thursday’s violence was not new, which she said shows that the security strategy being pursued by the state and federal governments is not working.
“I think that, seeing how the violence has increased, the strategies haven’t worked,” she said. “I think it has to do with communication.”
Security in Apaseo el Alto is carried out under a single-command model, where police are controlled by the state rather than municipal government, but the municipality will be given control of the police at the end of the year.
The killing began early Friday morning when a group of armed civilians attacked three homes in the community of San Juan del Llanito, killing six people. Five of the attackers were killed later in a confrontation with the National Guard.
After the murder two weeks ago of a municipal councilor, the Morena party mayor said she felt abandoned by the state, observing that violence was worsening after improvements had been seen in recent months. The state is governed by the National Action Party.
The mayor’s husband was murdered last year while running for mayor himself. His wife ran in his stead after his murder and won the election.
At least 17 communities in Oaxaca are still isolated because of damage to roads by Tropical Storm Narda, according to Oaxaca Highways and Airports Director David Mayren.
He said that of the 96 roads that were damaged by Narda, only 38 have been completely reopened, while the other 58 have only been partially opened because it has continued to rain.
He noted that the federal government is refusing to pay for fuel for machines and salaries for workers, and that the work is being organized through “internal economies.”
Most of the aid is being delivered to 60 municipalities in the Costa, Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mixteca and Sierra Sur regions.
Oaxaca Civil Protection coordinator Heliodoro Díaz Escarraga said that not all of the aid promised by the federal government has arrived and that emergency declarations have only been authorized for 22 municipalities out of the 122 that require declarations because the government is continuing to evaluate the damage.
Meanwhile, Oaxaca Agriculture Secretary Sofía Castro said that heavy rains from the storm have damaged 70,000 hectares of farmland, while a nine-month drought before the storm had already damaged 57,000 hectares.
A National Geographic reporter from the United States was shot in the leg on Friday while interviewing drug dealers in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.
The state Attorney General’s Office (FGE) said in a statement that the attack occurred at about 7:30pm at a house in the Valle de Los Olivos residential development that was used to sell drugs.
The unnamed journalist was taken to hospital in Juárez but was discharged on Saturday morning and left the Mexican border city the same day for El Paso, Texas, with three colleagues who were also present when the attack occurred.
Jorge Nava, attorney general for the northern region of Chihuahua, said that two members of Los Aztecas, an armed wing of the Juárez Cartel, were also shot by members of a rival gang while speaking on camera to the reporter.
One of the men died at the scene of the crime while the other succumbed to his injuries in hospital.
Members of the National Geographic team told police that they heard two women speaking outside the house after which two armed men broke in and started shooting at the Los Aztecas drug dealers, who returned fire. The reporter was caught in the crossfire.
Nava said that the team arrived in Ciudad Juárez a week before the attack to film a documentary about how violence has changed in the city during the past 10 years.
They sought statistical information from the Attorney General’s Office before arranging the “obviously risky” interview at the address where the attack occurred, he said. The team didn’t ask authorities for protection while working in the city, Nava said.
The attorney general said the house had previously been searched because it was the scene of a double homicide in April.
Nava added that footage from security cameras located in the surrounding area, and that recorded by the National Geographic team, will be reviewed as part of the investigation into Friday’s attack. Police have not made any arrests.
Mexico is the most dangerous country for journalists in the western hemisphere, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Five have been killed in the country in 2019.
Health authorities in Jalisco are stepping up protective measures against dengue fever ahead of the state’s October festivities.
Spraying is being carried out in Zapopan’s Benito Juárez auditorium, venue for the October festivals, where thousands of people will gather daily to enjoy rides, shows, concerts and other activities.
According to the State Workers’ Social Security Institute (ISSSTE), 705 civil servants had contracted dengue as of September 25, of which 15% were infected with the most dangerous strain.
Of those cases, 92 were serious and 17 were severe. The virus was detected in 18 pregnant women, one of whom died, as did the child she was carrying.
The traditional procession and mass for Zapopan’s Virgin of Guadalupe, also known as “La Generala,” will be held on October 12, when over two million people visit churches around the city.
Health brigades have been formed to prevent the spread of the disease in such large crowds.
“At least in the route in Zapopan, from the Plaza Patria to the Basilica, we have three medical assistance tents. They will have medicine for those who show up with symptoms [of dengue] and will be able to treat them,” said Zapopan Mayor Pablo Lemus.
Jalisco has the second-highest rate of dengue cases in the country, surpassed only by Veracruz, and an expert warns that with more rain and warm temperatures, those numbers will continue to rise.
“This has only just begun,” said Ezequiel Magallón, a researcher at the University of Guadalajara. “We’ve still got October to go and, if it doesn’t get cold, [we could continue to see cases of dengue] well into November.”
Recalling a similar outbreak about 10 years ago, Magallón said that a virus like dengue is cyclical, but also attributed the rise to a lack of preparation and the recent intense rains that have caused disastrous flooding and created more mosquito breeding grounds.
“The weather has favored [the mosquitoes]. We should have begun to act in March, when there wasn’t any rain. Furthermore, now there’s a second strain that has evolved and this has worsened the clinical picture.”
Magallón said the virus has evolved to survive in a more complicated environment, adapting to be able to survive inside the mosquitoes that ingest it. He added that spraying is merely palliative, as it only kill mosquitoes in the air and don’t affect breeding grounds.
With cases topping 5,000 infected people in the state, the Secretariat of Health (Salud) issued an epidemiological alert on September 25.
The Mexican peso will lose almost 3% of its value by the end of the year, finishing up at 20.30 to the dollar, according to Gabriel Casillas, president of the Economic Studies Committee at the Mexican Finance Executives Institute and head of economic analysis at Banorte.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Casillas said the peso will decline because of a difficult international situation.
He added that so far this year, the peso’s variance has been minimal because of high interest rates and the fact that President López Obrador’s policies are regaining the trust of international markets.
Casillas also predicted that U.S. President Donald Trump will sign an agreement with China in late December in an attempt to speed up the economy, which will help the peso maintain an average exchange rate of 19.80 pesos per dollar in the first half of 2020.
“Trump needs to avoid a recession,” he said. “That might not lead to a complete agreement with China, but it will lead to some advances in the right direction.”
Casillas added that such an agreement could strengthen the dollar and hurt the peso.
“It’s probable that the Mexican currency will fall to 21.30 pesos to the dollar in the second half of 2020,” he said.
Federal and state security forces have detained 15 members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) in Michoacán.
The arrests were made by National Guard and state police officers in the municipalities of Sahuayo and Ecuandureo.
In Sahuayo, authorities captured 11 alleged hitmen presumed to be operating in the west of the state.
After street pursuits and shootouts, government forces were able to break up the criminal cell involved in trafficking synthetic drugs, extorsion and kidnapping. They confiscated firearms and ammunition of various calibers.
The operation also seized four automobiles, three of which had been reported stolen.
In Ecuandureo, four subjects believed to belong to a CJNG cell were arrested on Saturday. Authorities confiscated six firearms, 78 magazines, two vehicles and five bulletproof vests.
Taxi drivers are protesting across Mexico to demand stricter regulation of ride-hailing services such as Uber, Didi and Cabify.
Taxis affiliated with the National Movement of Taxi Drivers (MNT) began gathering at different points of Mexico City on Monday morning to travel to the Angel of Independence monument on Reforma avenue, from where they were scheduled to converge on the zócalo at 10:00am for a four-hour rally.
The congregation of taxis caused traffic chaos on several roads this morning including Avenida de los Poetas in Santa Fe and the México-Toluca and México-Pachuca highways.
Taxi drivers from the México state municipalities of Ecatepec, Nezahualcóyotl, Naucalpan, Atizapán and Cuautitlán were expected to join their Mexico City counterparts at the protest in the capital’s central square.
Similar protests against the ride-sharing apps were scheduled to take place in cities in 28 states.
Mexico City MNT president Ignacio Rodríguez said in an interview on Monday that ride-hailing services have grown to such an extent that they pose an existential threat to the taxi industry.
“We’re at risk of disappearing as a sector, for us it’s life or death,” he said.
“These services grow without any control. They don’t want to abide by any regulations or any rules and that has an impact on us,” Rodríguez added.
According to the MNT, taxi drivers have to pay a range of fees and fulfill requirements that don’t apply to drivers who work for app-based ride-hailing services.
Rodríguez said that meetings with authorities have failed to yield any progress on establishing a level-playing field for everyone who works in the transportation sector.
“We’ve favored dialogue but seeing the indifference of our authorities, who are still not respecting the transportation law, we decided to protest,” he said.
The MNT leader offered an apology for the “inconvenience” caused by the Mexico City protest but added that taxi drivers “don’t have any other option.”
Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said on Sunday that she didn’t understand why the taxi drivers were protesting again, asserting that authorities have listened to their concerns and are looking at ways they can be addressed.
MNT leaders were scheduled to meet at 1:00pm with federal Interior Secretariat undersecretary Ricardo Peralta to discuss their demands.
The organization’s national leader, Bersaín Miranda, called on President López Obrador to intervene.
“. . . We want him to listen to us, to assist us and not leave taxi drivers in a state of defenselessness . . .” he said.
“We may have neglected . . . the quality of service, we admit and recognize that and apologize to [taxi] users. Our challenge is to improve the quality of service as long as we’re given guarantees [from the government] . . .”
Miranda said that 30,000 taxi drivers in Mexico City alone have stopped working in the transportation sector, the result of competition from multinational ride-hailing services.
Mexico City Security Secretary Jesús Orta Martínez announced his resignation on Thursday after only 10 months in office.
Orta made the announcement in a statement posted to Twitter on Friday.
“Over these 10 months, through consistent, deep efforts, we’ve been able to give the police the capacity it needs to address insecurity in the city,” said Orta.
Orta’s tenure was marked by several high-profile cases, including the murders of Norberto Ronquillo and Leonardo Avendaño. Crime statistics in Mexico City also continued an upward trend during his 10-month tenure.
The Mexico City government said Orta resigned for personal reasons, but the Citizens’ Movement party said that he was pushed out because his security policies had not been successful. In a press release, the Citizens’ Movement celebrated his resignation.
“Allowing Jesús Orta to spend more time in a position with such importance for the residents of the city would have been an even more serious mistake,” they said. “And even though removing him was the right decision, it is worrying that the removal happened without a recognition of the former secretary’s failure to guarantee security in the country’s capital.”
Orta has been replaced by Omar García Harfuch, the head of the Mexico City investigative police. He was sworn in as chief on Friday.
“Omar García Harfuch is the right person with the police experience needed to develop new police capabilities and return peace to the city,” said Orta.
The grandson of the man who was national defense secretary during the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which security forces killed at least 300 students, García, 37, started his law enforcement career in the Federal Police in 2008.
In 2009, he was among a group of Federal Police officers that was investigated by the United States government for involvement in crime, according to information released by Wikileaks.
According to the magazine Proceso, his name turned up in connection with the Guerreros Unidos crime gang, suspected in the disappearance of 43 students in Guerrero in 2014.
His contact information was found in a notebook belonging to gang leader Sidronio Casarrubias.
García has been decorated twice by the Federal Police for merit. He has a degree in law and a master’s in criminal law.
Mexico only has a 4% chance of reducing childhood obesity rates by 2025, according to an organization devoted to addressing the global obesity problem.
The World Obesity Federation (WOF) predicted in the report Atlas of Childhood Obesity that there will be just over 6.5 million school-aged Mexican children with the condition in 2030.
Based on that prediction, Mexico will have the seventh highest number of obese children in a decade’s time, behind only China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil and Egypt. All of the countries except Egypt have higher populations than Mexico.
Published on Wednesday, the WOF report said that 19.9% of Mexican boy aged five to nine were obese in 2016 and that 15% of girls in the same age bracket were suffering from the ailment. The same year, 15.2% of boys aged 10 to 19, and 11.7% of girls, were obese.
The WOF noted that Mexico has policies in place to reduce physical inactivity, reduce unhealthy diet and restrict the marketing of certain foods to children. However, they will not stop obesity rates from rising, the federation predicted.
In 2030, almost a quarter of children aged five to nine, and about one-fifth of youngsters in the 10 to 19 age bracket, will be obese, the report said.
Abelardo Avila, a researcher at the National Institute of Medical Science and Nutrition, warned that the current situation in Mexico is likely even worse because the 2016 statistics cited in the WOF report don’t paint a complete picture of obesity in Mexico.
He said that people who live in poverty are most likely to suffer from the disease, adding that the “metabolic damage” of the disease is six or seven times greater on children who suffered malnutrition while in their mother’s womb.
Avila said that Mexico hadn’t done enough during the past two decades to combat obesity but applauded this week’s approval by the lower house of Congress of modifications to the General Health Law that stipulate that the labels on food and drinks must warn consumers if they contain high levels of calories, sugar, salt or saturated fat.
The researcher said that if additional measures to tackle obesity are implemented, positive results could be achieved during the next 10 years.
Soldiers were detained by cartel operators in Michoacán in May.
Two incidents last month suggest that a passive response by the military when confronted with acts of aggression by citizens could be coming to an end.
During each incident, and in many other similar situations, the army – following instructions not to be drawn into confrontations that could turn bloody – chose not to fight back
Retired military generals said in September that at least some of the aggression towards soldiers could have been ordered by crime groups, while Juan Ibarrola, a newspaper columnist and expert on Mexico’s armed forces, told the Associated Press that gangs often use townsfolk as human shields.
Again, the troops didn’t retaliate in any way, allowing what many people described as a humiliation.
In contrast, President López Obrador praised the troops, declaring that their attitude “was very responsible, very honorable and very brave” and that “prudence is much better than authoritarianism.”
Indeed, López Obrador – who during last year’s presidential campaign used the slogan “hugs, not bullets” to encapsulate what his strategy to dealing with violence would be – has given the army a clear mandate to avoid civilian casualties.
At a gathering of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Mérida, Yucatán, last month, the president reiterated that he was committed to finding a peaceful solution to the violence plaguing the country.
“What we want is to achieve total peace but we don’t want a peace achieved with authoritarianism, with the use of force. We don’t want a peace of graves . . .” López Obrador said.
For the first nine months of his administration, military personnel heeded the president’s advice and refused to fight back when confronted aggressively by citizens.
The Tlatlaya warehouse where more than 20 civilians were executed by the military in 2014.
However, the army’s response to violent incidents in Querétaro and Puebla in early September showed that it could be growing tired of turning the other cheek.
When an army patrol showed up in the Querétaro community of La Llave on September 7 to stop the looting of a train, they were met by cudgel-swinging residents who threw stones at them.
Two soldiers were injured and residents attempted to disarm them. As that was occurring, someone – presumably a soldier – fired gunshots, the army said, although it added that it was unclear exactly who the shooter was.
Two civilians sustained gunshot wounds, while “the officer leading the patrol fired at the ground,” the Associated Press said.
The next day, the army fired warning shots after a group of about 150 people in Acajete, Puebla, attacked soldiers with clubs and stones in an attempt to gain access to a warehouse where merchandise seized by the military was stored inside tractor-trailers.
No one was injured but for the second time in as many days, the army showed that, unlike in the previous nine months, it was prepared to retaliate.
Security analyst Alejandro Hope said the two incidents were evidence that the honeymoon period of army passivity could be over.
That possibility has generated fears that the military could once again commit severe human rights abuses such as it did in 2014, when soldiers executed killed a band of criminals in a warehouse in Tlatlaya, México state.
While Hope believes that the response of the army to the two events last month could foreshadow more military violence, Ibarrola, the newspaper columnist, has a different view.
“I think there is a commitment [in the military] to show the president that the armed forces will not be the ones to start a fire,” he said.
Ibarrola said that drug cartels and other crime gangs sometimes pay housewives and farmers to act as human shields to hinder the army and warned that if a soldier were to kill a citizen, the damage to President López Obrador and his government would be significant.
“. . . If a woman or a child dies and it was a soldier who killed them, imagine, that would change the whole narrative . . . It would be madness,” he said.
The Associated Press noted that there is a “third way” for the army to respond to aggression: the use of dissuasive non-lethal force.
However, the use of tear gas and Tasers has barely been explored by the armed forces and it is unclear what training soldiers have received in order to be able to respond with proportional force.
The Secretariat of Defense didn’t respond to questions from the Associated Press about what non-lethal weapons and means soldiers have to respond to violence and what training they have received.
Hope, however, pointed out that a middle ground approach has not been adopted in the past by Mexico’s security forces.
“This is a structural problem of the Mexican government,” he said. “Law enforcement forces either used excessive force, or did nothing at all.”
