Video captured the ambassador taking a book of a shelf at a Buenos Aires bookstore.
Mexico’s ambassador to Argentina has been recalled after media outlets published a video that shows him shoplifting a US $10 book from a famous bookstore in Buenos Aires.
Óscar Ricardo Valero Recio Becerra was ordered to return to Mexico on Sunday by Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard.
“I have asked the ethics committee to analyze the case of the ambassador in Argentina who is accused of stealing books in a famous bookstore. For now, I have ordered him to return home. If it is proven that the video is true, he will be removed from his position immediately. Zero tolerance for dishonesty,” Ebrard wrote on Twitter.
A security camera at the El Ateneo bookstore in the Argentine capital recorded footage on October 26 of Valero hiding a book inside a newspaper before setting off an alarm as he exited the store.
The ambassador’s possessions were checked by a security guard who found that he had attempted to steal a biography of 18th-century Italian adventurer, author and playboy Giacomo Casanova. The bookstore called the police but Valero was not arrested due to his diplomatic immunity.
The Argentine news website Infobae, the first outlet to publish the video of the ambassador’s shoplifting attempt, said the price of the Casanova biography was the Argentine peso equivalent of 189 Mexican pesos or US $10. In contrast, Valero’s monthly salary is 234,000 pesos (US $12,160).
President López Obrador appointed the 76-year-old as ambassador earlier this year, reviving a diplomatic career that began in 1970.
As a foreign affairs undersecretary in the 1980s, Valero played an important role in the Contadora Group, an initiative launched by Mexico, Colombia, Panama and Venezuela to promote peace in war-stricken Central America.
He served as Mexico’s ambassador to Chile between 2001 and 2004 and also worked for many years as a political science and international relations academic at the National Autonomous University.
The Natura Riviera Cancún, an Apple Leisure Group property.
The travel and hospitality conglomerate Apple Leisure Group announced on Friday that it has put investments worth between US $500 and $600 million on hold due to a range of factors, including a lack of tourism promotion by the federal government and lower visitor numbers from the United States.
CEO Alejandro Zozaya told a press conference that four or five projects have been “put on pause,” explaining that the company has the land and necessary permits to build new hotels but for now construction won’t go ahead.
He said the government’s decision to disband the Tourism Promotion Council (CPTM) and the consequent lack of marketing of Mexico abroad resulted in lower profits for the hotel industry this year.
“Hotels weren’t as profitable in 2019 as in 2018 and 2017,” Zozaya said.
“. . . The closure of the CPTM has hit us, it’s one of the factors that has hurt Mexico. Tourism from the United States has decreased,” Zozaya said.
Alejandro Zozaya of Apple Leisure Group: supply growing faster than demand.
He said that another factor in Apple’s decision was that the supply of hotel rooms is growing faster than demand.
“When demand doesn’t grow at the same pace as supply, [room] rates go down but operational costs haven’t fallen,” Zozaya said.
The strength of the US dollar and higher electricity rates have in fact caused them to rise, he said.
The CEO charged that tourism hasn’t been a priority for federal governments for many years even though the industry contributes to 8% of GDP. However, Zozaya added that the private sector needs to do a better job of informing the government about the importance of tourism to the economy.
To that end, representatives of the sector have met with officials from the Tourism and Foreign Affairs secretariats as well as the president’s chief of staff, Alfonso Romo.
“We’re looking for a joint effort to promote tourism in Mexico and we see some strong potential in the collection of taxes that we’re [currently] missing out on . . . We see opportunities in cruise ships and taxes should be placed on digital platforms such as Airbnb,” Zozaya said.
Although Apple is putting some of its projects on hold, the CEO said the company will still open six new hotels in Mexico by the end of next year.
The conglomerate currently has 33 hotels in 15 Mexican destinations, most of which are AM resorts in Cancún, the Riviera Maya and Cozumel. It is also a large provider of charter flights, transporting one million international passengers a year to Mexico.
Some tourism investors have big plans for Mexico, although the 100 billion pesos (US $5.1 billion) that has been earmarked for tourism infrastructure spending in the government’s National Infrastructure Plan is not scheduled to be spent until 2021-2022.
One of the trailers in the accident on the Siglo XXI highway.
Five people are dead from exposure to ammonia after an accident involving a tanker truck Friday night in Guerrero.
The five were traveling aboard a bus on the Siglo XXI highway when it was trapped in a toxic cloud of ammonia released when the tanker, a double tractor-trailer, rolled over and blocked the highway in La Unión.
Twenty-one other passengers aboard the bus were hospitalized for ammonia poisoning, as were several rescue workers, and residents of the area were evacuated from their homes.
Emergency crews worked through the night to clean up the ammonia spill. The accident was blamed on a mechanical failure.
Adalid and the man who ate tacos thanks to the boy's generosity.
An eight-year-old boy has been lauded on social media after spending 70 pesos he won in a lottery game to buy tacos for an old man selling candy.
In a Facebook post on Thursday, Karen Espinosa of Uruapan, Michoacán, wrote that she and her son Adalid were eating at a taquería when a viejito (old man) came in to sell lollipops to customers.
Seeing that he was having little success making sales, Adalid decided to give his lottery winnings to the candy vendor so that he could buy something to eat.
“I saw the viejito arrive to sell [lollipops] but nobody bought from him. He looked very sad and hungry,” Adalid told the newspaper El Universal.
“When I gave him the money, I saw that he only bought one taco so I asked my mom if we could buy him more so that he could eat well,” he added.
Espinosa agreed and the old man ended up eating three tacos: two bistec and one chorizo.
Adalid said that the man was crying as he ate, which in turn caused him to shed a few tears too.
“I cried because I saw him cry, I saw him wiping away his tears. When he finished [eating] he thanked me and gave me a hug,” he said.
Espinosa told El Universal that she knew that her son had a big heart but she was still surprised when she saw him hand over all the money he had won. He already had plans about where and how he was going to spend it, she said.
“As a mom, it fills me with joy. When I saw him go over to the man to give him the money, my heart melted . . .” she said.
In her Facebook post, Espinosa wrote that “sometimes as a mom I ask myself if I’m doing my job well . . . but actions like this provide answers to all my doubts.”
As of Saturday, the post had generated 211,000 reactions and been shared 105,000 times.
Among the comments from people who shared the post were: “God bless this beautiful big-hearted boy;” “We need more people like this this;” “Beautiful gesture;” and “This boy has found the true meaning of life.”
López Obrador thanked Trump during a visit Friday to Tabasco.
United States President Donald Trump said on Friday he would “temporarily hold off” on the designation of Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations at the request of President López Obrador.
“All necessary work has been completed to declare Mexican cartels terrorist organizations. Statutorily we are ready to do so,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
“However, at the request of a man who I like and respect, and has worked so well with us, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, we will temporarily hold off this designation and step up our joint efforts to deal decisively with these vicious and ever-growing organizations!”
How long the U.S. president is prepared to delay the designation and what form the increased security cooperation between the two countries will take is unclear.
Trump said in an interview last week that he had been working on the terrorism designation for 90 days and that he would “absolutely” go ahead with it. Justifying his intention, the U.S. president said that 100,000 people a year die from the consumption of drugs smuggled into the country from Mexico.
US Attorney General Barr, left, met with López Obrador on Thursday.
His assertion that cartels would be classified as terrorists came after a spate of cartel attacks including the massacre of nine Mexican-U.S. citizens in Sonora on November 4.
Responding to Trump, López Obrador said last week that Mexico was prepared to cooperate with the United States to combat organized crime but stressed that it would not accept a U.S. intervention.
Speaking late on Friday in Tabasco, the president applauded Trump’s decision to postpone the designation, stating that it showed that he had taken Mexico’s opinion into account.
“I also very much respect President Donald Trump because he’s showing with actions that he is respectful of Mexico, respectful of our people and respectful of our national sovereignty,” López Obrador told reporters at the site of the Dos Bocas refinery.
“Mexico is a free, independent and sovereign country, our constitution is very clear that we don’t accept intervention . . .” he said.
“That’s why we thank President Trump for respecting our decisions and for choosing to maintain a policy of good neighborliness, a policy of cooperation with us. He will always have, on our side, an open, frank, extended hand to continue moving forward together for the sake of our peoples and the good of our two nations.”
All necessary work has been completed to declare Mexican Cartels terrorist organizations. Statutorily we are ready to do so. However, at the request of a man who I like and respect, and has worked so well with us, President Andres Manuel @LopezObrador_ we….
The president reiterated his commitment to reducing violence by creating jobs and well-being and eliminating corruption and impunity rather than through the use of force against criminal groups.
Trump’s postponement of the terrorism designation came a day after U.S. Attorney General William Barr met with Mexican officials, including López Obrador and Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard.
The president described the meeting with Barr as “good,” writing on Twitter that “as a lawyer, he understands our constitution requires us to adhere to the principles of cooperation for development and nonintervention in foreign affairs.”
The Foreign Secretariat said in a statement that “security priorities” for both Mexico and the United States were discussed as were issues including “cooperation in arms trafficking, money laundering, international drug flows and how to deal with transnational crime.”
Also on Thursday, Ebrard said in a television interview that if the United States went ahead with the designation of cartels as terrorist groups, people living in the areas where they operate could seek asylum in the U.S. on the grounds that they have a credible fear of persecution.
“They could come to the United States and say, ‘I come from a place where there’s terrorism,’ and [the U.S.] would have to grant them credible fear,” he said. “It would be a very bad deal.”
An undated photograph by Joaquín Urbina. museo del estanquillo
Photographs of middle and upper-class citizens, literary figures, politicians, circus performers, singers, as well as objects from 1860 to 1910, when photography became popular in Mexico, are on display at an exhibition in Mexico City.
Mirror Out of Your Skin is a collection of photographs that celebrates the 180th anniversary of the arrival of the daguerreotype in Mexico.
Over 700 photographs are divided into 36 thematic groups and in chronological order beginning in 1860.
The taking of portraits was commercialized in that year with the use of glass photographic plates that allowed people to make copies of small portraits known as “cartes de visite” (visiting cards in French).
“The exhibition is also a homage to 19th-century Mexican photographers who gave the image to Mexicans, both the powerful and those in the middle class who could afford to have their photo taken,” said curator Gustavo Amézaga Heiras.
Carmen Mondragón, who later became a model, painter and poet, in 1896.
Also on display will be a number of objects and pieces that give an account of how the phenomenon of photography permeated daily life at the time. It will include objects like photo albums and original pieces of furniture featured in the pictures.
Amézaga said the exhibition also includes the albums of prominent businessmen and the health records of prostitutes from 1868, which are normally housed in the Miguel Lerdo de Tejada Library in Mexico City.
Critic and art historian José Antonio Rodríguez, who participated in a pre-inaugural viewing of the exhibition, said Mexico is a country that really took to photography.
“We are one of the few countries that has photographic power. We don’t have economic power, we have terrible social problems, but we are a photographic powerhouse,” he said.
Rodríguez added that the 19th century in Mexico was complex, an era that saw great changes in photography.
The exhibition is on until next April at the Museo del Estanquillo (Museum of the Little Shop) at Isabel La Católica 26 in Mexico City’s historic center.
Cheering news: López Obrador celebrates oil discovery with Pemex workers in Tabasco.
Pemex announced on Friday that it has discovered a huge oil deposit in Tabasco that could yield 500 million barrels of crude.
State oil company CEO Octavio Romero said Pemex could confirm the existence of a “giant deposit” at the Quesqui field, located in Huimanguillo.
“With the analysis of information provided by this well and seismic data in the area, we can confirm today the existence of a giant deposit equivalent to 500 million barrels of crude oil in a 3P reserve,” he said. A 3P reserve is made up of deposits that are proven, probable and possible.
Speaking at the Quesqui field alongside President López Obrador, Romero said that the discovery was the largest since 1987 when a 536-million-barrel deposit was found in Tabasco.
He also said another well is being drilled at Quesqui that could contain an additional 200 million barrels of crude.
The Pemex chief said Pemex is aiming to extract 69,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude and up to 300 million cubic feet of gas from the site in 2020. Romero predicted that yields will increase to 110,000 bpd of crude and 410 million cubic feet of gas in 2021.
The large oil find is welcome news for the government, which has pledged to revive the heavily indebted state oil company.
López Obrador said on Friday that Pemex, which has seen its oil output decline for more than a decade, was in “a very bad state” when his government took office but claimed that it is now “bouncing back because there is no corruption and it is being managed very well.”
Obesity rates among both children and adults have increased in towns with populations below 100,000, according to a survey presented on Friday.
Conducted by the National Public Health Institute, the National Health and Nutrition Survey for towns with fewer than 100,000 residents – where 80% of Mexico’s poorest people live – found that 15.3% of children aged between 5 and 11 in such towns were obese in 2018 compared to 12.4% in 2012.
Among adolescents aged 12 to 19, the obesity rate rose to 14.2% last year from 10.5% in 2012, while the rate among adults increased to 33.6% from 31%. The survey found that the prevalence of obesity continues to be higher among women.
On the brighter side, the survey found that the combined overweight/obese rate for children younger than 5 declined to 6% in 2018 from 9.5% six years earlier.
It also found that people who are not beneficiaries of any government food programs are more likely to be obese than those who are. Food aid programs assist four in 10 families that lack sufficient food, the survey said.
It added that “obesity is more common in vulnerable populations due to the coexistence of factors such as unemployment, the high availability of food with low nutritional content, low levels of food security and reduced access to health services.”
Combating obesity is one of the greatest health challenges not just in small impoverished towns but across the nation.
A report published by the World Obesity Federation (WOF) in October said that Mexico only has a 4% chance of reducing childhood obesity rates by 2025. By 2030, there will be just over 6.5 million school-aged Mexican children with the condition, the WOF predicted.
A study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published late last year said that close to four million adult Mexicans joined the ranks of the obese between 2012 and 2016. In 2012, 20.5 million adults were considered obese but by 2016 the figure had increased to 24.3 million.
Of the 150 countries assessed by the FAO, Mexico ranked sixth in terms of the percentage of the population that is considered obese.
Soft drink producers have committed to reducing the calorie content of the drinks they make and sell in Mexico by another 20%.
ANPRAC, the national soft drink makers’ association, said in a statement that drinks made at the 120 bottling plants it represents will have one-fifth fewer calories by 2024.
The association noted that its members, among whom are Coca-Cola Femsa, Coke-bottler Arca Continental and Grupo Peñafiel, have already reduced calories in their beverages by 55% over the past 10 years, meaning that some products on shelves in 2024 will have 75% fewer calories than they originally had.
ANPRAC said it will also continue to develop new products that are available in a range of sizes to suit consumers’ needs.
“We’ve [already] launched 172 new low-calorie and no-calorie products with the aim of offering options for all lifestyles,” the statement said.
A 1 peso per liter soda tax designed to reduce consumption was introduced in Mexico in 2014 and was raised to 1.17 pesos per liter in 2018.
However, Mexico – where millions of people suffer from obesity, type 2 diabetes and other conditions linked to diet –continues to be one of the world’s largest soda consumers.
“It can’t only be about paying more taxes, there needs to be more information for the people,” he said.
The next day, the lower house of Congress passed 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 Senate approved the modifications in late October, meaning that health-risk warnings should soon begin appearing on products whose consumption is considered harmful to human health.
Slave mother and child and a henequen plant. K Turner
While paging through an archaeological guide to western Mexico, I came upon a cryptic reference to a long-abandoned train station near the small town of San Marcos, Jalisco, located 80 kilometers west of Guadalajara.
It said, “Yaquis were once sold here (as slaves) for 25 centavos a head . . . Around the station were located concentration camps where hundreds of indigenous people died of hunger and disease.”
When I asked my Mexican friends whether they had ever heard of such a thing, they asked me if I had ever heard of a book called Barbarous Mexico by an American named John Kenneth Turner.
I found the book and because it had been published in 1911, I was able to read all of it online at Wikisource. Despite the title, I quickly learned that the book is not an attack upon the Mexican people, but an exposé of the atrocities committed against many of them by President Porfirio Díaz during 34 years of repeated “unopposed reelection.”
One of the worst schemes of the Díaz government, says Turner, was the provocation of the Yaqui Indians to rebellion in order to clear them out of Sonora so their land — rich for both mining and agriculture — could be sold to Americans.
Roll call at sunrise on a slave plantation. K Turner
The Yaquis were put on boats at Guaymas and shipped to San Blas, where they were forced to walk over 300 kilometers to San Marcos. Here were large concentration camps where families were broken up. Individuals were then sold inside the station and packed into train cars which took them to Veracruz. Another boat ride took them to Progreso in Yucatán, from which they were taken to the plantation which would be their tomb.
John Kenneth Turner, a reporter for the Los Angeles Express, first learned about this business in 1908 from several Mexicans locked up in the local county jail.
“What are you accused of?” he asked them.
“Invading a friendly country,” they replied.
“What country is that?” he asked.
“Mexico,” they answered.
Women in Bull Pen. K Turner
Turner inquired as to why they would want to invade their own country.
“Because the constitution has been suspended and awful things are happening.”
When he asked for concrete examples, the jailed Mexicans told him that great numbers of people were being bought and sold like cattle and forced to work on sisal plantations until they dropped dead — even though Mexico had abolished slavery many years before.
Turner was determined to see for himself and traveled to Mérida where he passed himself off as a rich man anxious to invest in the lucrative henequen hemp business.
Here he discovered that the Yaquis were indeed slaves in the worst sense of the word, beaten bloody every morning at roll call, forced to work in the blazing sun from dawn to dusk on little food, locked up every night and beaten again if they failed to cut and trim at least 2,000 henequen leaves per day.
The Yaqui women, separated from their families, were forced to “marry” Chinamen and every baby born on the plantation was worth up to $1,000 cash to the owner. At least two-thirds of the Yaquis arriving in Yucatán were dead before the end of the first year of such treatment.
Collage in memory of Yaquis who died at San Marcos. K Turner/ Firstpeople.us/J Pint
Turner was able to interview some of the slaves. One man with a baby on his arm said he was plowing in his field when the soldiers came. “They did not give me time to unhitch my oxen,” he said.
“Where is the mother of your baby?” inquired Turner. “Dead in San Marcos,” replied the young father. “That three weeks’ tramp over the mountains killed her.”
Indeed, Turner’s informants agreed that “the crudest part of the trail was between San Blas and San Marcos “where women with babies fell down on the roadside, never to get up again.”
It would first appear that those who must have grown rich from these atrocities were Porfirio Díaz, his relatives and cronies, but the book points out that more than half the sisal was shipped to the U.S.A. and Turner accuses wealthy families such as the Hearsts, the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims of having profited the most from the expropriated lands of the Yaquis and Mayas as well as the “Flaming Hell” of the henequen plantations.
The Yaqui people were famed for being hard-working and strong. Between 1904 and 1909, according to Turner, around 15,000 of them were rounded up, forced along the tortuous route to Yucatán and enslaved. Despite their extraordinary strength, most of them died within the first year on the plantations, raising questions of whether they were the victims of genocide.
After years of abandonment, the San Marcos train station was renovated and turned into a cultural center. In my opinion, the building ought to be a memorial to the Yaquis, but there is not even a plaque commemorating the pain and sorrow suffered there.
[soliloquy id="95778"]
Today, few citizens of the area are aware of the atrocities which took place in the train station. Eighty-year-old Juan Díaz of San Marcos remembers stories of “false promises made by President Porfirio Díaz” in those times and recalls that those who took the bait “were rewarded by becoming slaves in the henequen plantations.”
Others say they remember rumors that Yaqui Indians had been sold in the place. Nevertheless, not one of the 10 histories of San Marcos found in the local library mentions a word about the mistreatment of Yaquis in the area.
Turner’s book raised eyebrows at the time of its publication and has even been called “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of slavery in Mexico.” As it is filled with passion and indignation, it might not be considered objective. A more scholarly treatment of the same subject, however, was published by Duke University Press in 1974.
This is Development and Rural Rebellion: Pacification of the Yaquis in the Late Porfiriato by Evelyn Hu-Dehart, a professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis.
Hu-Dehart confirms the great majority of Turner’s claims, with the notable exception of his assertion that the Yaquis were essentially peaceful. “The Díaz government did not provoke the Yaqui rebellion, but inherited it,” says Hu-Dehart, who points out that the Yaquis inevitably sided with anyone fighting the authorities and refused to accept any deal giving them less than the one thing they wanted: complete autonomy in their lush corner of Sonora.
Interestingly, Hu-Dehart’s unemotional paper provides hard evidence for what might seem Turner’s most controversial accusation: that the government of Porfirio Díaz deliberately attempted the genocide of the Yaqui Indians. She quotes the words of General Lorenzo Torres to the chief of the Yaquis in 1908: “The government is . . . disposed to exterminate all of you if you continue to rebel.”
If you are traveling along Highway 4 in the state of Jalisco, perhaps visiting the Great Stone Balls of Ahualulco, or the Guachimontones (Circular Pyramids) of Teuchitlán, you might want to stop at the San Marcos train station, which is just 420 meters off that road, to reflect on the barbarous events which took place there and perhaps wander in the beautiful eucalyptus grove next to the old building.
All traces of the Yaquis’ passing have been obliterated, but their decomposing bodies probably helped give life to those tall, proud trees and perhaps they are the best memorial of all to the many souls who were murdered at San Marcos.
To find the train station, patiently type “N20.77867W104.18994” into Google Maps. It’s a 75-minute drive from the west end of 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.
