Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma avenue is now patrolled every day by 100 female police officers on bicycles.
Since January, the transit officers – most of whom are recent graduates of the capital’s Police University – have been riding up and down the emblematic boulevard to keep a discerning eye on fellow cyclists as well as motorists and pedestrians.
Among the officers’ duties are directing traffic, attending motor vehicle accidents, administering first aid and accompanying the frequent protest marches that make their way along the avenue.
One of the officers, a 19-year-old woman only identified as Jacqueline, told the newspaper El Universal that in a 12-hour shift she rides the roughly four-kilometer distance between the Estela de Luz monument at the entrance to Chapultepec Park and Hidalgo Avenue in the city’s historic center as many as eight times.
Two months after beginning their bicycle patrols, the 100 officers have become well-acquainted with the most common offenses committed by citizens on Paseo de la Reforma.
They include pedestrians not crossing the wide avenue where they should, motorists blocking the bike paths, cyclists failing to obey traffic light signals and electric scooter users riding on the sidewalk.
According to Jacqueline, “a lot of people break the rules not because they want to but because they don’t know” what the rules are.
In addition to issuing warnings to scofflaws, the officers also offer friendly advice, such as telling cyclists not to wear headphones while they ride.
Elizabeth, another 19-year-old officer, said it is the responsibility of all the women on two wheels to set a good example for others.
Supervisor Marlene Yuridia explained that all the new recruits to the special police team received specific training for their roles, which in some cases included riding lessons.
“Some of them didn’t know how to ride a bike,” Yuridia said. “But they were given the training they needed in order to be able to get on, [ride] and not have an accident.”
She added that the officers have built up a good rapport with the more than 3,000 other cyclists who use Paseo de la Reforma’s bike paths on a daily basis.
“The cyclists have congratulated us, they say ‘good morning’ or ‘thank you very much’ . . .” Yuridia said.
However, her police partner said that not everyone appreciates their presence.
“. . . Life in Mexico City is stressful so you can find the most polite people as well as the rudest . . .” Eliana Ilse said.
While so far they have been limited to giving warnings, the 100 female officers will soon receive hand-held devices that allow them to issue fines.
The albino gray whale sighted off the Baja coast. Manuel González
An albino whale has been spotted off the coast of Baja California Sur, a rare phenomenon that was caught on camera.
While the Baja whale watching season is in full swing, albino specimens are quite rare in the region and the March 3 sighting by Manuel González is believed to be the third in the last decade.
Federal environmental authorities recorded the first sighting ever in 2008, nicknaming the albino gray whale Galón de Leche (gallon of milk).
In 2017, there was a second sighting: Galón de Leche had given birth to an albino whale that has been since nicknamed Costalito de Sal (little sack of salt).
Authorities have not confirmed whether the latest sighting is Galón de Leche, its calf or a new specimen altogether.
Prices for Mexican opium gum plummeted by as much as 80% last year due to the rise in demand for the synthetic opioid fentanyl among United States drug users, according to an independent study.
After carrying out field work in the states of Guerrero and Nayarit, the Network of Researchers in International Affairs (Noria) said that prices paid to opium poppy farmers for the gum – the raw material for heroin – had fallen from 20,000 pesos (US $1,050) per kilo in 2017 to between 6,000 and 8,000 pesos (US $315-$420) last year.
However, Noria added that some farmers had mentioned “rumors of prices going even lower, around 4,000 pesos (US $208),” which equates to an 80% decline on 2017 prices.
The report No More Opium for the Masses said that “the dramatic upswing in fentanyl use in the United States is generating a parallel and rapid collapse in the price offered for raw opium in rural Mexico.”
Fentanyl, mainly exported to the United States from China, is 30 to 50 times stronger than heroin, Noria said.
The increasing demand for the drug caused the net value of opium production in Mexico to fall to an estimated 7 billion pesos (US $367.4 million) last year compared to around 19 billion pesos (US $1 billion) in 2017.
The decline in opium income, Noria said, “is causing a series of very serious secondary economic effects” in communities that are dependent on the cash crop.
“Many local peasants are not even making back their investment on the product; many families are losing their sole source of income; the amount of money flowing into the local economy has dried up almost completely; and many are leaving their villages for temporary agricultural work or even to work directly for the cartels,” the report said.
“The Mexican opium crisis looks like it might ruin the poorest areas of rural Mexico for good.”
To provide “a way out” for Mexico’s opium producers, Noria considered two solutions that have been proposed by politicians and non-governmental organizations, among others.
“The first widely-touted solution to the poverty and violence bound up with Mexico’s drug war is the legalization and regulation of opium production for medicinal use. Farmers would cultivate poppies and sell their opium harvests to private pharmaceutical companies, who would then convert the opium to morphine and use it for pain relief in Mexican hospitals,” the report said.
Noria noted that Guerrero Governor Héctor Astudillo and Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez, among others, have suggested that legalization could not only bring economic benefits but also help to stem violence.
However, Noria added that “we do not see legalization as a silver bullet for the problems of Mexico’s opium-growing regions,” explaining that “there are legal barriers to the change” and that “the link between legalization and decreasing violence seems overly simplistic.”
It also said that “Mexico’s capacity for opium production greatly exceeds the country’s demand for legitimate medical use, which suggests that the legalization of opium for medical use in Mexico would not provide adequate demand to offset the economic losses suffered by current producers.”
The second solution was “crop substitution.”
The research organization acknowledged that President López Obrador has “suggested that poppy cultivation in Guerrero could be substituted for maize, in order to provide local peasants with an ‘honest’ way of sustaining themselves and their families.”
However, Noria said that “in countries where crop substitution programs have been implemented, their success has also been limited by one simple fact: illicit drug crops tend to command a higher price, thanks to the laws of international supply and demand, than their legal alternatives.”
Despite the concerns, “if properly researched and managed, both policies could be introduced relatively cheaply and effectively,” Noria said.
“Initially at least, they would help to loosen the grip of organized crime groups on the regions, and tie farmers to licit international markets. In combination with other broader security policies, they could even succeed in integrating these marginalized areas into the country for good,” the report concluded.
One of the world’s fastest luxury vehicles was completely destroyed in an accident yesterday in Mexico City.
The Koenigsegg CCXR Special One, estimated to have cost about 30 million pesos (US $1.57 million) was traveling at an excessive speed on Paseo de la Reforma, according to witnesses, but few details have been made public.
The vehicle was built by Swedish-based Koenigsegg Automotive AB for the royal family of Qatar, and then sold to a buyer in Mexico last October.
Its maximum speed is in excess of 400 kilometers per hour and it can go from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in 3.1 seconds.
Photos of the car had been posted to the owner’s Instagram account under the name @don_koenigsegg while videos have been posted to YouTube showing the car traveling at high speeds in Mexico City.
The vehicle arrived in Mexico last October.
It was the second Koenigsegg to be destroyed in an accident in Mexico in recent years. A CXX Custom Vision was traveling at high speed when it struck a curb on a highway in Tamaulipas and flipped over several times before coming to rest on the median.
The two occupants suffered minor injuries in the 2016 crash.
The vehicle had recently been sold for US $1.4 million, according to reports at the time.
A nearly completed adobe home in Hueyapan, Morelos. Brenda Solano Picazo
For some, the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that shook central Mexico on September 19, 2017 is now a distant memory. But for many others, the effects are still being felt.
While Mexico City received the lion’s share of attention, with videos of crumbling buildings in the massive capital seen worldwide, the communities around the epicenter in Raboso, Puebla, near the border of Morelos, were devastated.
Within a week of the earthquake, while rescue crews still combed through buildings in Mexico City in search of trapped victims, Taller Nuevos Territorios, a network of engineering and design specialists, was already on the ground in some of the most desperate communities of Morelos.
With international and national donations and volunteers, the group raised 80 emergency shelters made with heavy tarps and vinyl siding in the village of La Nopalera within three weeks. Another 49 were raised in Hueyapan. The communities were involved in the process throughout, said TNT coordinator and architect Brenda Solano Picazo.
“We originally raised about 397,000 pesos [US $20,800 at today’s exchange rate], which we managed to get together very quickly,” Solano said. “In the days immediately after the tremor there was a lot of willingness to help. With the project of building homes it has been much more difficult, partly because the amounts we require are much higher. We managed to gather about 325,000 pesos, which covered the cost of one home and one separate bedroom next to another home.”
The dry bathroom of an adobe home in Hueyapan, Morelos. Brenda Solano Picazo
In La Nopalera, Solano said, the Mexican military was fully involved in helping with reconstruction. That help, she said, did not arrive in Hueyapan, so the team decided to direct its focus on what seemed to be a forgotten community.
TNT also directs sustainable private architecture projects (specializing in clean water technologies) in areas of Michoacán and México state, among other places.
Based in Mexico City, it consists of Solano and co-directors Daniel Jaramillo and Claudia Rodríguez, and a small group of architects completes the team. The group’s original idea had been to create multiple adobe homes using local manpower, starting in Hueyapan.
It would seek donations as it had been doing following the earthquake, and rely on training locals how to construct with an endemic material. Beneficiaries would receive a home but nothing comes free.
The condition placed by TNT was that the homes would be built from adobe, not concrete. And that those who benefitted from the homes would be able to participate in their construction in order to learn a new skill. Solano says that the payment TNT had organized for builders was higher than the average take-home salary of a person living in Hueyapan.
The group returned to Hueyapan a year after the deadly quake in order to make good on its promise: to create sustainable, earth-based homes for local people who needed them and who were willing to chip in and assist in the process.
Marcela Ramirez, owner of a new adobe home, and son Omar. megan frye
In December, TNT completed its first adobe home after four months of construction. It was built for Marcela Ramírez, a widow who was left homeless with her infant son as a result of the earthquake. She contributed to the process by providing meals to the building team.
“I want my family to grow up in an adobe home, because that is what we have always had in this community,” Ramirez said. “The material itself is ideal because it’s cool during the day and warm at night. Concrete doesn’t do that. I also want to have adobe because I feel in contact with the earth that way. I want my child to grow up in contact with the earth and in contact with our history.”
Adobe is a natural building material used worldwide and one of the oldest housing materials on record. The basic idea behind adobe is that the materials used (depending on location they can in some cases be animal manure, cornstalks, etc.) are locally sourced and therefore lower cost.
The other benefit of adobe is that it is a thermal material, keeping homes cool during the days underneath intense sunshine (as is common in the high-altitude communities of Morelos) and keeping them warm at night when temperatures drop to near freezing. The material has about an eight-hour release time, meaning that the heat of the day remains through the night and the cool of the night remains during the day.
Traditionally, all homes in Hueyapan and La Nopalera were made with adobe. But over the years adobe has come to be seen as a lesser material because it is associated with being indigenous (an association synonymous with “poor” and “uneducated” since the era of the Spanish invasion in the 16th century) in Mexico’s clearly marked race and class system, and because concrete is associated with progress.
Nevertheless, Solano said that TNT had done calculations that found that using concrete was actually more expensive than adobe. And of course, concrete does not offer the thermal benefits.
Solano, left, and Noé Lucas, right, discuss plans for an adobe home with Jorge Flores. Megan Frye
Following the destruction in small communities like Hueyapan, Solano said, many masons and construction workers raised their prices in order to profit from the demand. And while Mexico’s disaster relief fund, Fonden, did give financial assistance to those who lost their homes in the earthquake, it was at times complicated to access.
People who were deemed to have lost their homes — but only those who were deemed to be the owner of the property — received money deposited into an account that could be withdrawn for labor costs only. They were also given a card with funds on it, but it could only be used at certain government-approved stores.
Back in Hueyapan, TNT hired local farmer Jorge Flores to work on the adobe home. A skilled mason, Noé Lucas, came from México state to serve as foreman. Though Flores is not a carpenter or mason by trade, he said he’s picked up those skills over the past year following the earthquake, when everyone had to jump in with a helping hand.
“What happens is that in this case we needed to bring in a foreman, and he was able to teach the other workers how to build with adobe and of course they were getting paid,” Solano said. “Now, Jorge could easily oversee an adobe construction project.”
Many of the hundreds of homes that were damaged or destroyed in Hueyapan have been reconstructed using concrete, while other groups have come in with earth-based materials as well, including bamboo and superadobe (a twist on traditional adobe but using specific architectural formats and the mineral lime). Still, Solano said, keeping the tradition of adobe housing alive in the community is important.
“Now that people have seen how happy Marcela is with her house, they are also interested in having an adobe home,” she said.
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“Being there and building with adobe is helping to change the perception of adobe. In reality, it doesn’t take that much longer to build . . . than with concrete and ultimately the price is much, much less because the primary component is earth which means that people don’t even have to leave the area in order to obtain the materials.
“As architects interested in earth-based materials, we want to rescue this ancient method of construction. There has been talk about designating Hueyapan as a Pueblo Mágico [magical town], which could mean more tourism and more government interest. Adobe itself is preservation of Mexican history.”
Megan Frye is a writer, photographer and translator living in Mexico City. She has a history of newsroom journalism as well as non-profit administration and has been published by several international publications.
Some new barbed wire placed atop the border wall between Tijuana, Baja California, and San Diego, California, didn’t stay there long: it is now serving to improve security at several area homes on the southern side of the border.
The wire was installed to reinforce the Mexico-U.S. border recently in response to the arrival of thousands of migrants in caravans from Central America.
But the barbed wire is there no more, leading to the belief that thieves on the Mexico side removed it and sold it in nearby neighborhoods, giving residents extra protection against delinquency, presumably by other thieves.
“We know about the theft of barbed wire because United States authorities have requested our help,” said Tijuana police chief Marco Antonio Sotomayor Amezcua.
But his department has not been of much help, he said, because thieves are long gone by the time police arrive.
Houses near the border are now clearly protected with barbed wire of a similar size and what’s more, a type that is not sold in Mexican stores.
Photographs of convicted criminals in Oaxaca are now gracing billboards in the state capital in a campaign to encourage citizens to denounce crime.
“Luis C., 60 years in prison for femicide,” reads one and “Juan Alfredo C., 30 years in prison for rape,” reads another above a message urging people to report crime.
The billboards have gone up at various locations in the Oaxaca city metropolitan area, including Highway 175 in the municipality of San Bartolo Coyotepec and Avenida Universidad near the Autonomous University of Oaxaca and the Plaza Oaxaca shopping mall.
Yesterday, the state secretary of public security announced the completion of crime prevention meetings in Santa María Huatulco, Ocotlán de Morelos and the Cañada region. Local and state authorities hope to generate new strategies to reduce crime.
Gunmen opened fire on this police station in Jáltipan, but no one was inside at the time.
Acts of violence allegedly perpetrated by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) in Veracruz between Thursday and Saturday are a reaction to successful police operations, according to the governor.
One state police officer and at least 11 other people were killed in three days of violence in several municipalities in the Gulf coast state. Fiery blockades were also set up on several highways in an attempt to hinder police operations against the cartel.
“What happened on the weekend was a propagandistic reaction of some criminal groups because we made some important arrests and seizures and they obviously reacted very angrily,” Cuitláhuac García said in a radio interview.
The Morena party governor charged that criminal organizations were allowed to prosper during past state governments and are now responding to the end of their free rein. The Los Zetas cartel has been involved in a turf war with the CJNG in Veracruz in recent years.
García explained that since taking office on December 1, the Veracruz government – in conjunction with the federal government – has implemented a new security strategy.
In Jáltipan, a municipality in the south of the state, armed civilians launched an attack Saturday morning on a state police station, which was unoccupied at the time.
Vehicles were also set on fire on highways in the south of the state to form narco-blockades.
Later in the day, authorities found two dead men inside a pickup truck in Texistepec, a municipality around 80 kilometers southwest of the port city of Coatzacoalcos. A message threatening police was left alongside the bodies.
In Soteapan, also located in the south of Veracruz, the municipal síndico, or trustee, was attacked outside his own home by two armed men on Saturday afternoon. Crisanto Bautista remains in hospital with serious injuries.
On Saturday night, police found four bullet-ridden bodies – including one of a 13-year-old – in the city of Cosoleacaque while in Poza Rica, a municipality in the north of the state, a gunman shot and killed a grocery store owner.
The same night, a pregnant woman was shot and killed after the taxi in which she was traveling was attacked in the northern Veracruz municipality of Álamo Temapache.
Fifty women have now been murdered in the state since Governor García was sworn in – a figure that represents almost one femicide every two days.
Yet more violence was reported in Veracruz yesterday. Two cattle ranchers, one in Atzalán and another in Las Choapas, were found dead and a young man was shot and killed at sports facility in Ixtaczoquitlán, a municipality that borders Orizaba.
A frame from video footage taken at the volcano El Popo, looking down at the crater.
Authorities issued a warning after at least three youths climbed to the top of central Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano, which has seen constant activity in recent months, emitting red-hot rock, ash and gases.
The group of young people recorded and shared a video of their March 12 expedition on social media, showing them at the summit of the volcano, which can be seen releasing gas.
Federal Civil Protection director David Eduardo León Romero said in an interview that his agency had identified the intrepid youths thanks to social media and would get in touch with them to stress the gravity of their actions.
He added that their behavior was “irresponsible and thoughtless” not only for risking their personal safety but that that of authorities who would have been duty-bound to attempt a rescue had the group run into trouble.
El Popo, as it is also known, is one of the most active volcanos in the world and began seeing increased activity in December last year. The volcano is monitored 24/7 by the National Center for Prevention of Disasters (Cenapred), and Civil Protection has issued an official warning to residents to maintain a distance of at least 12 kilometers from the base of the volcano.
Experts agree that the group of young explorers was fortunate not to have lost their lives. Though only light activity consisting of short emissions of gas, vapor and ash were registered on the day of the climb, three days later authorities reported that the newest dome to form within the crater had been blown apart by volcanic explosions on March 13 and 14.
Volcanic risks subdirector Ramón Espinasa Pereña warned that after the volcano resumed its eruptive phase in 1994, getting too close has become dangerous due to the continuous explosions that shoot rock fragments with temperatures exceeding 1000 C.
According to Cenapred, five people were killed on April 30, 1996 while exploring the slopes of tghe volcano while it was in one of its eruptive stages.
Civil Protection’s León Romero stressed that while the current volcanic activity is not an emergency situation, it is important to follow official recommendations regarding approaching the volcano.
Mexico's most expensive cities in terms of housing. el financiero/inmuebles24
Housing prices are up almost 13% in Mexico City this year compared to last, with the average price exceeding 30,000 pesos per square meter.
The real estate website Inmuebles24 said housing prices per square meter in the capital climbed to 33,963 pesos (US $1,760), up 12.9% compared to 2018.
According to marketing head Alejandro García Del Río, Mexico City’s most expensive districts are Miguel Hidalgo, Cuajimalpa and Álvaro Obregón.
But the country’s most expensive housing indisputably belonged to Monterrey, Nuevo León, where the average price per square meter rose to 35,160 pesos (US $1,830), a 6.1% increase.
Housing prices in Guadalajara — third highest nationally after Mexico City — remained stable at an average 31,911 (US $1,660) per square meter, only 1% more expensive than in 2018.
García Del Río predicted that housing prices in all three major cities would almost certainly continue to climb. He added that although the averages took both new and used property into account, new residential housing dominates in the current real estate market.
