Flecha Roja buses were pressed into service by students this week.
Bus service became complicated for travelers — and the bus companies themselves — after students hijacked as many as 60 buses in México state, leaving passengers in the lurch after they were forced off the vehicles.
Students of the Lázaro Cárdenas Normal School, a teacher training college in San José Tenería, have stolen 46 buses from the transportation company Flecha Roja and another 14 from Línea TEO.
Students began by taking 32 buses from Flecha Roja on Tuesday, but appeared to need more by Thursday when they stole another 14. At that point, Flecha Roja had to suspend service on its Mexico City-Santiago Tianguistenco route, and more suspensions soon followed.
“We don’t know their true motive, but they stopped the buses while en route and forced the passengers off, and the situation is getting complicated, that’s why we’ve decided to suspend routes,” said Flecha Roja legal representative Enrique Quintana.
Buses were also stolen on routes between Mexico City and Ixtapan de la Sal, Tenango del Valle, Chalma and Xalatlaco, all in México state.
Normal school students have hijacked buses for many years to meet their transportation needs.
Potters in Oaxaca are addressing air quality problems by building smoke-free, wood-burning kilns in which to fire their ceramic artwork.
The kilns will not only benefit the health of both people and the environment, they will also provide artisans with new knowledge and techniques with which they can renew and strengthen their ceramics traditions.
The fourth such kiln was recently installed in the town of Santo Domingo Tonaltepec, in the Mixteca Alta region, where potters are known for their “chorreado” (drip-stained) style of glaze made with tannins from oak tree bark.
The position and size of the firing chamber, as well as its tall chimney, cause it to draw extremely well, providing efficient combustion and optimal ash distribution.
The Alfredo Harp Helú Oaxaca Foundation (FAHHO), in coordination with its folk art gallery Andares del Arte Popular, will monitor the work of the artisans who use the new kilns. The foundation plans to provide artisans with the resources to build the kilns in order to expand the technology statewide.
One of the National Ceramics School’s kilns, in Metepec, México state.
The project was begun by the National Ceramics School (ENC), which in 2017 contacted Japanese master potter Masakazu Kusakabe. In February of that year, he was invited to conduct a smoke-free kiln workshop in Tapalpa, Jalisco.
The workshop saw the construction of the first kiln of this type in Latin America, and since then one of Kusakabe’s students, Yusuke Suzuki, has worked to spread knowledge of the innovation across Mexico.
The ENC was founded in 2016 thanks to interest by the Tajín seasoning company, which sought to create a space for the conservation, innovation, research and instruction of ceramics in Mexico.
This is the third year of the ENC’s smoke-free kilns project. It has also built the kilns in Guanajuato, Chiapas, Jalisco, Chihuahua, Michoacán and México state.
Thieves gained access to runway area to steal the cash.
Six months after a band of armed thieves stole US $2.4 million worth of United States and Canadian dollars in just three minutes at Guanajuato International Airport, the crime remains unsolved.
Even though the brazen heist took place in a federal zone, the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) delegated the investigation to its counterpart in Guanajuato, the newspaper Milenio reported on Friday. Neither state nor federal authorities have provided an update about the progress of the probe.
On the night of Wednesday, April 3, between six and eight men carried out what one former security official described as “the perfect robbery.”
Using a truck disguised with a fake Aeroméxico logo, the men breached security to enter the runway area, where they intercepted an airport service vehicle that was in the process of delivering the cash to a waiting plane.
The money had arrived at the airport in a PanAmericano armored truck in order to be sent to Mexico City.
The armed men stole 14 of 18 bags of cash from a sole unarmed PanAmericano guard and two airport employees traveling across the tarmac in a luggage transport vehicle.
The thieves then loaded the money into their truck, drove to the perimeter of the airport property and escaped through a wire fence in which a large opening had been cut.
Airport operator Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico said in a statement that the thieves entered the airport, carried out the robbery and left within a period of three minutes.
Shortly after the incident, police found the truck that was used and recovered two of the stolen bags of cash. They later found two more bags of cash in another abandoned vehicle.
Juan Miguel Alcántara Soria, former head of the National Public Security System, claimed that “the perfect robbery” was made possible by “flaws” of the authorities responsible for providing security at the airport – the Federal Police outside the facility and the army in the terminal and runway area.
When the robbery occurred, military personnel were in the baggage collection area. By the time they realized what had happened, the thieves had already left the airport. Federal and state police as well as the army conducted a joint search but made no arrests.
Alcántara told Milenio that the Guanajuato office of the FGR, not state authorities, should be carrying out the investigation into the crime, adding that the absence of progress in the case is an example of the kind of impunity that plagues Guanajuato and the whole country.
More non-smoking signs will probably be going up in Aguascalientes.
A law passed on September 29 in Aguascalientes bans smoking in work places and indoor public locations.
Under the new law, anyone who allows smoking in public places can be fined with up to 4,000 times the Unit of Measure and Update, or UMA — approximately 340,000 pesos or US $17,000 — and jailed for up to 36 hours. The ban also applies to schools, health centers, libraries, public transit and other public places.
Aguascalientes is the 13th state in Mexico to pass a ban on smoking in public places.
Electronic cigarettes, whether or not they contain tobacco or nicotine, are included in the prohibition.
The law was praised by an anti-tobacco organization, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
“While the new law marks a great step forward for tobacco control in Mexico, the national Congress must now follow the example of Aguascalientes and adopt a federal law that would grant all Mexican citizens 100% smoke-free environments, as is already the case in 20 countries in the region of the Americas,” the group said in a statement.
There are 210,000 smokers in Aguascalientes, representing 24.7% of the population, which makes it the state with the second-highest rate of smoking, after Mexico City, where 30.8% of people smoke. However, fewer than half of the smokers in Aguascalientes smoke regularly.
The replacement of the general manager and 10 executives at the Pemex division that sets and monitors petroleum prices is intended to end questionable practices that date back decades, President López Obrador said on Thursday.
“A complete renewal was carried out at Pemex International [PMI]. There was an instruction to clean Pemex International,” López Obrador said.
“Some people had been there for almost 30 years. It was converted into a limited partnership. Imagine, a company that . . . buys and sells petroleum . . . a million barrels a day, they fix the prices through formulas and decide who to sell to . . . and they were completely removed from the government.”
The president said the executives used their own technical expertise as an excuse for making decisions without any input or supervision from the government.
Pemex “is a very important company that we want to keep very close to the government,” López Obrador said. “It shouldn’t be so separate, so unattached . . .”
The state oil company announced last Friday that Ulises Hernández, a former official at Pemex Exploration and Production, would replace Raúl Enrique Galicia as the head of PMI.
Among the other new appointments announced was Armando Mejía Sánchez as head of crude trading.
His predecessor, Víctor Briones, as well as the vice presidents of crude trading and crude analysis, Carlos Islas and Alfonso Mendoza, took the decision to leave PMI, people with knowledge of the matter told the news agency Bloomberg.
The departures came after a disagreement between the former PMI executives and the new leadership team of Pemex led by CEO Octavio Romero.
Sources told Bloomberg that the clash was over an external review ordered by Romero to look at new formulas that were created to set prices for Mexican oil sold to refineries in the United States and other countries.
It came as a result of questions the Pemex chief had about how Mexico’s crude was being marketed by the management team at PMI, according to two people who spoke with Bloomberg. The review, which was opposed by Galicia, has caused delays in presenting oil prices to customers.
Pemex, the world’s most indebted oil company, has seen a decline in its output every year for the past decade and a half.
Representatives of 1 Simple Game at the Google bootcamp in Singapore.
Two video game studios from Mexico were among the beneficiaries of Google’s Indie Games Accelerator (IGA), a program for recognizing and assisting independent video game startups in emerging markets.
Selected developers are flown to Google’s Asia-Pacific office in Singapore to participate in two all-expenses-paid gaming bootcamps with some of the world’s best mentors in the field.
More than 1,700 developers from 37 countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America submitted their most promising video games to IGA and 30 of those developers were selected to go to Singapore, among them two studios in Guadalajara and Mérida.
The former is called 1 Simple Game and began producing video games in 2013. Perhaps its most famous game, Mucho Taco, became a worldwide hit with over two million downloads, and received Apple’s Best of App Store award.
I asked the director of 1 Simple Game, Ovidio Escobedo, for his comments on being selected to go to Singapore.
The founders of Mum Not Proud receiving an award at their university.
“This is the second year Google is doing this,” he told me. “They invite video game studios from around the world to participate in a training seminar aimed at developing our structure as a company, improving our business strategies and much more. So we signed up and submitted some of our published and nearly ready games and we were selected.
The seminar in Singapore took place on July 29 and lasted one week. Our mentors were experts from bigger companies who held full-day work sessions all week long and now we are being given follow-up assistance by those same Google mentors. Then we’ll go back to Singapore in December to see what kind of results come from all this.”
Most likely to benefit from Google’s assistance is 1 Simple Game’s latest creation, Chronoloop, which works on mobile devices. “As its name implies,” Escobedo told me, “Chronoloop is a time-travel strategy game. Players are able to go into the past and change it, improving their abilities in the future. They learn from their mistakes and get better with more and more successes.
“We’ve been working on this game for a year and a half. First of all, it’s very nice looking, but what caught Google’s eye was its complexity of design, its systems. For example, it has a combat system which includes an element of artificial intelligence. Because it’s attractive and complex, the promise of this game is that once someone has it installed, he or she will be playing the game for many months to come.
“By the way, we’ve just opened the door to people who would like to try a preliminary version of Chronoloop. All they have to do is send us an email and they’ll have a chance to play the game before it’s officially released.”
The other Mexican team chosen to attend Google’s “bootcamp,” located in Mérida, Yucatán, goes by the name of Mum Not Proud, a reference to the reaction of typical parents to their children’s pursuit of a career in video game design.
Patricio Bouza and Rodrigo Galaz, far left, of Mum Not Proud, in Singapore.
Working out of their grandma’s bedroom, Mum Not Proud produced a game called BAIKOH, which could be considered a fusion of Scrabble and Tetris — with complications. BAIKOH turned out to be so much fun and so challenging that it was selected as part of the editor’s choice in Google Play and was named Game of the Day three times on the App Store.
So it is no surprise that almost three million people have downloaded it so far.
Although it was not originally intended to be such, BAIKOH can be considered an educational game simply because the more the players improve their vocabulary and spelling, the better they score. Note that BAIKOH stands for Best Artificial Intelligence Killer of Humans. Players say the game is cool, addictive, mesmerizing, clever and delicious . . . “but BAIKOH hates you and lets you know it all the time.” You can download it from Google Play Store.
Mum Not Proud’s Patricio Bouza told me their entire studio consists of only three individuals, students of multimedia design at Anáhuac Mayab University.
“Because we wanted to do video games, we found we had to be self-taught, so each of us became specialized in a different path. You could say BAIKOH was our university and only after two years of experimenting did we feel we were ready to launch it. When we did so, we found it did relatively well.
“So along came IGA, and only a week before the deadline I asked my colleagues: ‘Do you want to try for this?’ They said yes, so we really had to scurry, filling out forms, but what gave us the most trouble was trying to arrange for a visa to pass through the U.S.A. We just couldn’t work it out, but we entered the competition anyway and about a week later, one Saturday morning, they passed me the telephone. ‘It’s Google and they want to talk to you.’
[soliloquy id="91034"]
“Well, my eyes popped because I thought, ‘There’s only one reason why they would be calling me.’ And, yes, they said we had been selected, and I shouted for sheer joy. You know, there aren’t that many people who do video games in Mexico and survive, so we felt it was a real honor for us three here in Yucatán to be representing our country at this international event.
“But we didn’t have those U.S. visas, so IGA moved heaven and earth to route us ‘the long way’ to Singapore, via Mexico City and Amsterdam — a 30-hour trip — but it was all worth it because we learned a lot: our mentors turned out to be people with decades of experience, real war veterans! And now, here in Mexico, we are passing on to our colleagues what we learned in Singapore.”
If you wish to try the games, don’t worry about a language barrier. The two studios are Mexican but their games are in English, the universal language for video games.
Thanks to Google’s reaching out to the young people working in these two Mexican video game studios, I think they have surely reached a point where they can say “Mum Now Proud.”
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.
The “Peace Belt” of civilian government employees that was deployed during the Tlatelolco protest march on Wednesday served its purpose and may be deployed again in future marches, according to Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum.
“We’ll probably do it in a more organized fashion, especially when we have information that there are groups that want to generate violence or aggression,” she said.
She added that the city government will develop a protocol to train civil servants who participate.
The Peace Belt, or cinturón de paz, consisted of 12,000 city employees dressed in white t-shirts who lined the route of the march, which commemorates a 1968 massacre of students in Tlatelolco’s Three Cultures Plaza. Although the Peace Belt outnumbered the roughly 10,000 marchers, they were unable to prevent acts of vandalism by some.
However, Mayor Sheinbaum stressed that the measure was a success because it prevented repression of protesters by the police.
“We’re going to do everything we can not to repress social movements, but at the same time, we need to fulfill the law,” she said.
Sheinbaum also noted that the three masked protesters who were arrested and later released during the march are still under investigation.
“Some organizations that work with the Human Rights Commission say that arrests should be avoided, and to prevent confrontation we release people,” she said. “However, there are investigations open and there will be due process.”
Some government employees criticized the Peace Belt measure for placing them in a situation for which they were not trained.
And former president Felipe Calderón suggested López Obrador put himself at the head of the next Peace Belt.
“Mr. President, the next time you wish to use human beings, risking their lives and safety, to do the work that is your responsibility as head of state but do not do, put yourself at the front. Don’t stay behind the human and metal shields,” he wrote on Twitter.
More than 500 insects can be found in Mexican cuisine.
Interested in exploring gastronomic opportunities in the insect world? An upcoming exhibition will probably provide all the necessary information.
“The Art of Eating Insects” opens at Mexico City’s San Ildefonso College on October 9 to highlight communities that consume insects, as well as the history and future sustainability of the practice.
It will include 180 pieces from 23 research collections, including scientific illustrations, paintings, historical objects, photographs, video and mixed media presentations.
Also on display will be many specimens of insects eaten in Mexico, such as grasshoppers, atta ants (as in leaf-cutters), honey ants, escamoles (ant eggs), chicatanas (flying ants that appear after the first rains) and aquatic bugs called ahuautle, among others.
A press conference held to announce the event was told there are 1,950 edible insects in the world, of which Mexico incorporates 545 into its cuisine as part of traditional diets.
San Ildefonso expositions curator Carmen Tostado Gutiérrez said the idea for the exhibit came from talks with the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio) about Mexico’s cultural heritage and a growing interest in eating insects.
Its goal, however, is to create historical and ecological awareness of what we eat.
“It’s more than an invitation to eat insects,” said Tostado, “it’s about knowing where this culinary tradition comes from, how it was created throughout the course of history . . . It’s more of an invitation to reflect on what we’re eating and the impact it has on the environment, questioning our role, consumption and personal attitudes on a daily basis.”
San Ildefonso executive coordinator Eduardo Vásquez Martín highlighted the exhibition’s goal as a tribute to the environment and to show the public the role insects play in it. He hopes the exhibit will encourage more people to try Mexican insect recipes.
The exhibition will also have illustration workshops for children, courses for the general public and 3-D insect modeling classes, all with the goal of contributing to the solution of environmental degradation.
It will run Tuesdays through Sundays from 10:00am to 6:00pm until February 2.
A house in Guaymas that came under attack by a commando.
Public schools have been closed in the Guaymas-Empalme valley in Sonora after a series of violent incidents that left two people dead and one missing.
The violence started early Thursday morning when armed civilians attacked several homes in Guaymas. The first incident happened at 3:30am on Thursday, when the aggressors killed a 27-year-old man in the Morelos Ejido. At 7:00am, the commando killed a 51-year-old man, wounded another person and kidnapped a third at the Francisco Márquez Ejido. The attackers also set fire to several houses.
Sonora state police said they are working with federal and local authorities to find those responsible.
“We’ve interviewed several witnesses, we’ve collected evidence from the crime scenes and we’ve deployed people to the area,” the state Attorney General’s Office said in a statement. “We’re also looking for the person who was kidnapped.”
Police found .223-caliber and 7.62×39mm shell casings at the scenes, both of which are banned for civilian use in Mexico.
A Supreme Court justice under investigation for allegedly transferring more than 100 million pesos to foreign bank accounts resigned on Thursday in a move that surprised his colleagues and political observers.
Eduardo Medina Mora, a former federal attorney general and security secretary who also served as ambassador to both the United States and the United Kingdom, is the first Supreme Court judge to resign since a 1994 constitutional reform that established the court in its current form.
The 62-year-old judge didn’t cite any reasons for his decision to step down in a resignation letter to President López Obrador.
Presidential spokesman Jesús Ramírez said that López Obrador accepted Medina’s resignation and that it will be sent to the Senate for analysis.
According to the constitution, the resignation of a Supreme Court justice must be submitted to the president and, if accepted, sent to the Senate for approval. A judge can only resign for “grave reasons.”
Media reported in June that Medina had allegedly transferred 103 million pesos (US $5.3 million) to bank accounts in the United States and United Kingdom between 2016 and 2018.
The government’s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) announced soon after that it was collaborating with the U.S. and U.K. governments to investigate 32 transfers made by the judge, who was appointed to the court for a 15-year-term by former president Enrique Peña Nieto at the start of 2015.
Two weeks after the media first reported the transfers, Medina said they only amounted to 7.5 million pesos (US $384,000) and were consistent with his income.
He claimed that the figure reported was inflated because some of the transfers he made in pesos were assumed to have been in US dollars, which would make their value close to 20 times higher.
Medina, who voted in favor of the legalization of gay marriage, marijuana and abortion during his four and a half years as a justice, has also come under suspicion for his close relationship with Juan Collado, a high-profile lawyer currently in preventative custody on charges of involvement in organized crime and money laundering.
The newspaper Reforma reported that Medina’s resignation on Thursday took several Supreme Court justices by surprise because they had worked with him earlier the same day.
If the Senate approves the resignation, López Obrador must send a short list of three candidates to Congress from which a new judge will be selected.
Medina’s successor will be the third justice nominated by the president since he took office last December. He will have the opportunity to make a fourth appointment to the Supreme Court’s 11-judge panel in 2021 when the 15-year term of Justice José Fernando Franco concludes.
At his regular news conference on Friday, López Obrador addressed questions about Medina’s abrupt resignation.
“What’s the motive of this resignation? I believe that the justice wants to deal with the complaints filed [against him]. I don’t know if one or two or how many complaints have been filed, that’s in the hands of the federal Attorney General’s Office [FGR]. We’ve been respectful and we don’t involve ourselves in these legal issues . . .” he said.
