An illustration prepared by the municipality shows what a Tesla patrol vehicle will look like.
A mayor in San Luis Potosí has announced the purchase of 15 of the modernistic new Cybertrucks manufactured by Tesla Inc.
Adrián Esper Cárdenas of Ciudad Valles said he reserved the trucks by making a deposit of US $1,500 with his own money, equal to a month’s salary.
“I reserved 10 two-motor and five three-motor models,” he said at a press conference after placing the order. “We’ll take a photo and send it to [Tesla CEO] Elon Musk, see if he gives us a discount.”
Esper said he did not consult his constituents about the purchase but said his decision to buy the electric vehicles for police, trash collection and other uses was “common sense.”
“It’s not about speed, because we don’t want speed. What we’re looking for is torque in order to haul water pipes, the garbage trailers. They’ll have twice the loads of a normal truck,” he said.
Tesla’s new Cybertruck.
Although the models Esper ordered come with price tags of $49,900 and $69,900, he claimed they would generate savings as high as 24 million pesos ($1.2 million) annually, since the trucks require little maintenance and no gasoline to operate.
“The important thing is that regardless of the fact that the cost can be a little high, the benefit is that if you don’t have to perform maintenance or put gas in them, you’ll be able to save 24 million pesos a year, and with that you’ve paid back half of the investment,” he said.
Tesla founder Elon Musk unveiled the Cybertruck on November 21, and despite a gaffe in which the vehicle’s windows failed to be as unbreakable as he claimed, orders for the truck are reportedly in the hundreds of thousands.
A reserve price of just US $100 has driven preorder numbers as high as 250,000, according to a tweet by Musk on Tuesday.
The Cybertruck launch included a video of the truck winning a tug of war against a Ford F-150 and dragging the competition up a hill. A Ford executive responded by challenging the Cybertruck to an “apples to apples” rematch, and Musk said he would be happy to oblige.
Although Tesla’s market share is down around 7% since the unveiling of the Cybertruck, the gambling community likes Tesla’s chances in the rematch with Ford. Online bookmakers were offering five to two odds that the Cybertruck would win out again over the F-150.
Ford later responded that the tweet was a joke and said it plans to release a hybrid F-150 next year and an all-electric version in the next few years.
I recently had a chance to visit the town of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, capital of the Mexican state of Chiapas. If you’re not quite sure where Chiapas is, it’s no wonder.
You see, Mexico is located in North America, but Chiapas is not. How this could be possible, I’m not sure, but to my surprise I discovered that Tuxtla is in Central America . . . and so was I!
The word Tuxtla, I learned, is a corruption of Tuchtlán, “The Place Where You Find Rabbits,” though I have yet to see one hopping along any of the streets I’ve visited. As for “Gutiérrez,” I asked numerous people who live here just who this individual was, and drew a blank every time.
At first I assumed Gutiérrez must have been a Spanish conquistador, but upon investigation I learned that Joaquín Miguel Gutiérrez Canales had been a military man who then served as governor of Chiapas off and on between 1830 and 1835, at which point he was apparently thrown out of office.
A 2.5-kilometer-long path takes visitors to 80 attractions.
Here it must be mentioned that in those days Chiapas was a sort of break-away chunk of Guatemala and its inhabitants were facing three choices: a. join up with Mexico; b. stay with Guatemala; or c. go for independence.
Joaquín Miguel Gutiérrez was pushing for Chiapas to become a Mexican state, and even though he had lost his job as governor, he was undaunted in his crusade and went ahead to form his own guerrilla band. It was long thought that he was eventually killed in a battle, fighting for his cause. New information, however, has come to light regarding the demise of Gutiérrez.
Ricardo Cuéllar Valencia relates, in El Heraldo de Chiapas, that one day, in 1838, in an effort to raise funds, Gutiérrez sent men to Hacienda Santiago, owned by a certain Esteban Figueroa, demanding money, horses and cattle. Señor Figueroa was not at home, but his wife Cecilia told the men: “Go and take the animals, if you want, but as for the money, my husband Esteban keeps it hidden and I don’t know where it is.”
According to Esteban Figueroa’s great-grandson, says Valencia, the band of intruders then tied up Doña Cecilia, suspended her from a tree branch and beat her, but to no avail. At last they left her still hanging in the air and made off with all the hacienda’s animals.
When Esteban Figueroa came home and heard all the gruesome details from his wife, he gathered a large party of men and went off to the church in Tuxtla, where they found and shot Joaquín Miguel Gutiérrez.
The official version of his death, however, showed Gutiérrez dying in battle for the cause of Mexicanization, and in 1848 his paternal surname was added to the name of the capital.
A fox takes a look around his jungly home at the Tuxtla zoo.
Having thus learned a tiny fraction of Tuxtla’s history, I wanted to have a look around and decided to head for the local zoo which, I understood, had been called, back in 1979, “The Best Zoo in Latin America,” far ahead of its time in respect to treating animals decently.
Well, I was not disappointed. Zoológico Regional Miguel Álvarez del Toro, affectionately known as ZOOMAT, struck me as quite unusual, first because every single one of its 1,600 animals is native to Chiapas. Then there is its location. Most zoos I’ve seen look as if their architects started with a flat, featureless plot of ground which was subsequently landscaped.
Here in Chiapas, however, you have jungle everywhere and it appears they chose one of their finest tropical forests, put in paths and transformed it into a zoo so beautiful that a walk through it would be utterly delightful even if you never saw a single animal.
A third thing I really like about this zoo is that many of its inhabitants are not behind fences or walls at all, but run about just as free as the visitors. Fortunately, there are plenty of signs reminding people to stay on the walkways at all times, and the result is that you are quite likely to discover, or be discovered by, creatures you have never seen or heard of before, such as the endangered Guatemalan black howler monkey or the critically endangered guaqueque or Mexican agouti, a rabbit-sized rodent with a big black rump, which I bumped into over and over.
Then again, you might find yourself suddenly engulfed by a whole family of noisily chatting chachalaca birds crossing your path on their way to who knows where, clearly letting you know that it is they who own this place while you are merely a guest.
Chiapas has one of the greatest diversities of wildlife in the Americas, with more than 700 species of birds, 209 species of mammals and more than 200 of reptiles. It’s famous for its species of regional fauna such as wild boars, black jaguars, toucans, macaws and of course quetzals, all of which you can see in this zoo.
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And let’s not forget the nocturnal animals: ZOOMAT certainly hasn’t. To see them in semi-darkness, you first step through a rope curtain into a dimly lit room where you are urged to do nothing for a while so your eyes can adjust to the dark. Then you are asked to keep silent as you enter a long, wide tunnel with window after window giving you a rare opportunity to observe animals like the tepezcuintle (lowland paca), the martucha (kinkajou or honey bear), the cacomixtle (ringtail) and, of course, murciélagos, bats, all doing their thing in the murky twilight.
ZOOMAT is open Tuesday to Sunday from 8:30am to 4:30pm. That is not a typo: it closes unusually early because the path is 2.5 kilometers long and getting everyone out must be quite a challenge. On top of that, the tall trees and dense foliage bring darkness well before sunset.
So, if you would like to be among ZOOMAT’s 450,000 yearly visitors, I suggest you go there as early as possible and psychologically prepare yourself for spending most of the day within its boundaries. After all, if you dedicate only four minutes to visiting each of the zoo’s 80 attractions, that alone would take over five hours.
Tuxtla has such a fine zoo due to the untiring efforts of novelist, painter, poet and biologist Miguel Álvarez del Toro, who has been called “the first Mexican conservationist.” In his lifetime, Álvarez del Toro, who was born in Colima, also managed to get four areas of Chiapas designated as biosphere reserves and is considered the founder of the state’s emblematic Sumidero Canyon National Park, which I hope to describe in Part 2 of “A Glimpse of Chiapas.”
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.
Many new hotels, such as this Grupo Vidanta property in Los Cabos, will be built under new infrastructure plan. But will the total investment be enough?
An extra US $50 billion a year is needed in infrastructure spending in order to meet the nation’s needs and the federal government’s investment target, attendees at an engineer’s conference said this week.
Speaking at the National Civil Engineering Congress the same day, the president of the Mexican College of Civil Engineers said the investment in 147 projects over a period of five years is insufficient.
Ascensión Medina Nieves described the agreement between the government and the private sector as being of “the greatest importance” but expressed disappointment that the size of the investment isn’t bigger.
“With these investments, we’ll get close to 3% of the country’s GDP, far below what is recommended internationally for emerging countries like Mexico, which is between 5% and 8% . . .” he said.
The government is targeting the former figure of 5% of GDP.
Reyes Juárez del Ángel, president of the consultancy firm FOA Consultores, and other conference attendees said that about US $70 billion per year is needed in infrastructure investment to reach that figure. However, total investment is only projected to be US $20 billion per year.
Juan Luis Flores, a managing partner at Valorum Capital, was among those who agreed that the planned investment was insufficient, while an expert on public-private partnerships expressed doubt that all of the PNI projects announced on Tuesday will go ahead.
“Will the support that is being offered [in the agreement] really be given?” Francisco Treviño asked, pointing out that the projects have not yet been put out to tender or obtained financing.
The “great Achilles heel,” he added, will be obtaining public resources to prop up private projects that turn out to be unprofitable.
At the same conference, Communications and Transportation Secretary Javier Jiménez Espriú said the 147 projects announced on Tuesday represent only a first step in the infrastructure plans for the country.
Both the government and the private sector could invest more, he said, explaining that the latter has identified 1,600 potential infrastructure projects.
The government, however, already has an ambitious infrastructure agenda. Among the large projects it plans to build during President López Obrador’s six-year term are a new Mexico City airport, an oil refinery on the Tabasco coast and the Maya Train railroad on the Yucatán peninsula.
A Mexico City judge has been suspended after releasing a man suspected of involvement in the murder of his ex-wife this week.
Judge Federico Mosco ordered the release earlier this month of Juan Carlos García, former CEO of Amazon in Mexico, from preventative custody after downgrading charges against him from attempted murder to domestic violence.
García’s wife, Abril Pérez Sagaón, accused her then husband of attempted murder in January, saying that he attacked her with a baseball bat while she was asleep.
According to media reports, Mosco questioned the intent of the crime allegedly committed by García, saying he could have killed her if he wanted.
Pérez was killed on Monday while in Mexico City to attend a meeting linked to a custody battle with her ex-husband. A motorcyclist ambushed the vehicle in which she was traveling, shooting her dead in front of two of her children.
A relative of the victim told the newspaper El País: “He [García] has enough money to hire a hitman. We have no doubt it was him.”
At his morning press conference on Friday, President López Obrador criticized Mosco for releasing García and said it was unfortunate that the victim hadn’t been afforded protection.
“It’s very regrettable, reprehensible, that these things happen . . .” he said.
López Obrador said he was confident that Supreme Court Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar would take up the matter and sanction the judge, who also released a doctor who is accused of raping a female patient.
Hours later, the president of the Mexico City Superior Court announced that Mosco and another judge who made rulings in the case against García had been suspended. Rafael Guerra Álvarez said the decision was taken so as to not obstruct ongoing investigations into the crimes against Pérez.
Authorities are currently seeking to re-arrest García in connection with the murder of his ex-wife.
The Mexico City government has not yet said whether it will investigate Pérez’s death as a femicide, a crime in which a woman or girl is killed on account of her gender and which often includes sexual violence against the victim.
The murder occurred on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which was commemorated in Mexico City with a march by more than 3,000 women.
Ten women are killed on average every day in Mexico, making the country one of the most dangerous for females in the world.
Climber Brad Gobright fell to his death in Potrero Chico.
A professional rock climber died Wednesday after falling over 300 meters while climbing at El Potrero Chico in Nuevo León.
Brad Gobright, 31, of Orange County, California, was climbing Sendero Luminoso, about an hour northwest of Monterrey, when he and his climbing partner fell after their rope became stuck.
His partner, Aidan Jackson, fell into a bush that broke his fall and prevented him from falling farther.
The U.S. State Department confirmed the climber’s death in an official statement.
“We offer our sincerest condolences to his family on their loss. We are closely monitoring local authorities’ investigation and are providing all appropriate consular assistance. Out of respect to the family during this difficult time, we have no further comment,” the department said.
Renowned climber Alex Honnold, subject of the Oscar-winning 2018 film Free Solo, eulogized his friend and former climbing partner in a post on Instagram.
“He was such a warm, kind soul — one of a handful of partners that I always loved spending a day with . . . I’m just sad for Brad and his family. And for all of us who were so positively affected by his life. So crushing. Brad was a real gem of a man. The climbing world lost a true light,” he wrote.
The Sendero Luminoso climb attracts thousands of climbers a year from all over the world. At 850-900 meters high, it requires two days of climbing to reach the top.
Gobright reached the heights of rock climbing fame in 2017 when he and fellow climber Jim Reynolds broke the time record for summiting El Capitán in Yosemite National Park in California. The two completed the 914-meter climb in two hours, 19 minutes and 44 seconds.
The opposition has provided little counterweight to AMLO's efforts to transform Mexico.
President López Obrador has governed with little political opposition in his first year in office, allowing him to engage in a gradual molding of Mexico’s institutions to his liking.
López Obrador and a coalition led by the party he founded, Morena, won a landslide victory in the July 2018 elections, leaving older, more established political parties weak and in disarray. Their condition has changed little since.
They have struggled to recover and form a cohesive opposition that provides an authentic counterweight to the policies the president and Morena are implementing to achieve the so-called “fourth transformation” of Mexico.
The Institutional Revolution Party, or PRI – Mexico’s omnipotent political force through much of the 20th century – went through a bitter and sometimes hostile process to elect a new national leader and general secretary as part of renewal in the wake of its crushing defeat last year.
As a result, a lot of the PRI’s focus has been inward rather than on López Obrador and Morena.
Piedra Ibarra, right, is the new head of the human rights commission, and close to the president.
Many of its most prominent members, such as former interior secretary and current Senator Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong and ex-foreign affairs secretary Luis Videgaray, have not been particularly vocal against the government’s policies and agenda.
The conservative National Action Party, or PAN – the second largest party in terms of seats in Congress – has also struggled to shape itself into a strong opposition.
One factor might have been the death of Rafael Moreno Valle – who was the party’s leader in the upper house – in a helicopter accident last December. The loss of Moreno caused the PAN to “lose its way” as the main opposition force, the newspaper Milenio said.
The PAN has managed to stop or negotiate some legislative proposals introduced by Morena but most of the time the ruling party has got its way.
The right-leaning party also lost one of its two past presidents of Mexico when Felipe Calderón jumped ship after his wife, Margarita Zavala, failed to win the nomination to be its presidential candidate in last year’s elections.
The power couple have created their own political movement, México Libre, and have attracted some PAN members to their cause but the organization was unable to attract enough prospective followers to create a quorum at its last two meetings.
Other smaller opposition parties, such as the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) and the Citizens’ Movement (MC) have only a very small number of lawmakers in both houses of Congress, meaning that their capacity to oppose the government’s agenda is extremely limited – at least on their own.
Together, however, senators from all four do have the capacity to block proposals that require a two-thirds majority for approval.
One such opportunity presented itself this month when the Senate was asked to confirm the appointment of an activist, Morena party member and longtime ally of López Obrador as the new head of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH).
If senators of the four parties had voted as a bloc, the Morena-led coalition would have fallen at least eight votes short of the two-thirds majority required to install Rosario Piedra Ibarra who, according to many opposition lawmakers, is unsuitable for a role that monitors the government for abuse because of her proximity to the president and her admiration for him.
However, some opposition lawmakers supported Piedra’s appointment in the secret ballot and her appointment was confirmed by a single vote.
Many opposition lawmakers and government critics saw her elevation to CNDH chief as yet another example of López Obrador’s efforts to bring more government agencies – even supposedly autonomous ones such as the rights commission – under his control.
Tagle: the country is polarized.
“The administration’s appointments since taking office show a desire to diminish independent institutions, to sap them of their importance by putting them in the hands of people who are very close to the government or who are unqualified for the job,” Citizens’ Movement congresswoman Martha Tagle told the magazine Americas Quarterly.
In his first year in office, AQ noted, López Obrador has also appointed the wife of a close personal adviser to the Supreme Court, dismissed the head of an agency that evaluates social policy after the technocrat penned an opinion piece critical of the government’s budget cuts and pushed through appointments of allies to two energy regulatory agencies even though they apparently lacked the technical experience required for the roles.
In addition, Morena has presented proposals to reform the National Electoral Institute which could give presidential appointees more control over the agency and the way in which future elections are run.
The recent resignation of Supreme Court justice Eduardo Medina Mora amid allegations of corruption means that López Obrador will have the opportunity to name four of the 11 sitting judges by 2021. His four nominees will be able to block some constitutional challenges that need eight votes to be upheld.
Attempts by presidents to exert influence over institutions are not new but López Obrador – who has promised to transform Mexico and end corruption and cronyism – has “repeated old patterns, perhaps with less concern for appearances,” Rodolfo de la Torre, director of the Mexico City-based think tank CEEY, told AQ.
The disorganized and fractured opposition parties have shown themselves to be incapable of putting the brakes on the president and his agenda whose apparent aim is to increase his executive power.
Tagle, the MC lawmaker, said that building an alternative agenda for Mexico is difficult because of the prevalent political polarization in the country.
“Right now our political discourse is all or nothing, for or against,” she said.
“There’s no allowance for intermediate positions, or for being critical without being considered ‘against’ the government . . . A constructive opposition agenda is hard to build on that kind of polarization.”
Turtles arrive on a Tamaulipas beach to lay their eggs. Not all of them make it due to fishing nets.
Fishing nets killed 125 sea turtles off the coast of Tamaulipas earlier this month.
A spokesperson for the Tamaulipas Parks and Biodiversity Commission said most were green sea turtles.
Carlos Alejandro Garza also said that a number of nets have been found on the La Pesca and Tepehuajes beaches in Soto La Marina in recent weeks.
The nets stop the turtles while on their way to the beaches to lay eggs, drowning them when they become trapped.
Personnel from the Natural Protected Areas Commission (Conanp) performed autopsies on the turtles at the La Playa Sea Turtle Conservation Center on November 23, and ascertained that all died from drowning after becoming trapped in the nets.
There have been several reports of dead sea turtles trapped in nets since November 11.
Another 12 turtles were found dead on beaches at Miramar on Thursday. An official in Ciudad Madero said an autopsy revealed that one of the causes of death was the ingestion of plastic.
Heavy rains from Cold Front No. 18 have killed one person and flooded dozens of communities in Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Sonora and Baja California.
The death occurred in the municipality of Guadalupe y Calvo, Chihuahua, when a woman was swept away by the current while attempting to cross a flooded stream on Thursday.
Floods, overflowing rivers and landslides forced the evacuation of 150 people in the municipalities of Batopilas, Chínipas and Urique, triggering a request by Chihuahua Civil Protection for an emergency declaration to obtain federal resources.
Sinaloa Governor Quirino Ordaz declared a state of emergency in a number of communities in that state, where 12,000 people were affected by the rains and classes have been canceled in schools in 18 municipalities.
The worst flooding in the state was in Mazatlán, which saw an estimated 91 millimeters of rain during seven hours. Vehicles were swept away by floodwaters and the historic center and many other areas were under water on Thursday morning.
Rains caused highway damage across northern Mexico.
Traffic was stalled on the Mazatlán-Culiacán highway, which was closed on Thursday due to flooding.
Dozens of people in Tijuana, Baja California, were evacuated from their homes, where heavy rains caused landslides and flooding and closed schools.
Riviera Maya hotels won’t raise their rates during the end-of-year vacation period in a bid to attract more tourists from Canada and the United States.
Riviera Maya Hotel Association vice president Andrea Lotito said the price-hike embargo will remain in place for more than 46,000 hotel rooms until June next year as part of a strategy to boost visitor numbers to Mexico’s Caribbean coast.
Insecurity and the annual arrival of sargassum have damaged the region’s image, she said.
“. . . It’s difficult to attract tourists from the United States and Canada precisely . . . due to the negative publicity,” Lotito said.
She added that the rise in popularity of vacation rentals (on sites such as Airbnb) have also hurt the Quintana Roo hotel industry.
Hotels have been seeing lower occupancy levels in most destinations in 2019.
Mexican Hotel and Motel Association (AMHM) president Juan José Fernández Carillo said on Wednesday that the outbreak of violence in Culiacán, Sinaloa, triggered by an operation to catch one of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s sons and other violent acts elsewhere in the country have given Mexico a bad name.
Speaking at the AMHM national meeting in Tampico, Tamaulipas, he claimed that international security perceptions of Mexico are on a par with countries that are at war.
“That’s why national and foreign tourists don’t travel. The decline in [hotel] occupancy in all destinations . . . doesn’t just affect hotel owners but also businesses and [service] providers that live off tourism. The federal government is responsible for security and must improve it,” Fernández said.
The hotel association chief also said that hotel owners are also struggling due to the downturn in the economy and high electricity prices.
“There are hotels that paid 300,000 pesos before but this year [electricity] increased to 1.2 million pesos. They can’t invest or promote themselves because the services [they have to pay] are expensive.”
Soon to be a terrorist organization? Probably not, experts say.
United States President Donald Trump’s assertion that he will designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations is election rhetoric and unlikely to happen, according to some experts.
Trump said in an interview Tuesday that he has been working on the designation for the last 90 days and that it “absolutely” will happen.
However, a visiting academic at the Mexico City university CIDE told the newspaper Milenio that he doubted that the designation will take place.
“It has to be looked at with a lot of skepticism but that doesn’t mean that Mexico cannot come across problems,” said Alexis Herrera, who specializes in security issues.
“In the end, it’s a call for intervention in the internal affairs of a country that has sovereign policies and it’s also a call [to the Mexican government] to take a clear position on the issue [of cartels],” he added.
Herrera said that the failed operation to capture El Chapo’s son, Ovidio Guzmán López, in Culiacán, Sinaloa, last month and the massacre of nine members of the LeBarón family near the Sonora-Chihuahua border in early November gave Trump the opportunity to make his terrorism designation declaration.
Another academic, Ibero University researcher Javier Urbano, said he expects the U.S. president to continue his hardline rhetoric towards Mexico and drug cartels in an attempt to leverage a political advantage in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.
He said that whether the designation happens or not, Trump’s remarks are damaging to the Mexican government, which has favored attacking cartels’ financial structures over using direct force against them.
“They [the United States government] are discrediting the anti-drug trafficking policy in our country. That’s not what the president [Donald Trump] is saying explicitly [but] it’s implied. That leaves the government of Mexico in a highly questioned and criticized position,” Urbano said.
He added that Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard will be forced to enter into negotiations with U.S. authorities to ensure that Trump’s claim doesn’t become a reality.
In an interview with the newspaper Reforma, an organized crime expert at the Washington, D.C. think tank Brookings Institution said that designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations wouldn’t give the U.S. government any new tools with which to fight them.
“The United States already has the same range of tools [to use] against the cartels without the need of a [terrorism] designation,” Vanda Felbab-Brown said. “Furthermore, it would restrict other kinds of policy measures.”
She pointed out that Mexican cartels are subject to the U.S. Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, that prohibits people from providing material support to foreign criminal groups.
Cartel assets in the U.S. can also be seized and bank accounts can be frozen in accordance with the act, which became law in December 1999.
Writing in El Financiero, journalist Raymundo Riva said neither the White House nor the U.S. Department of State was aware of plans to make the terrorist designation, and described it as another action by Trump that was neither analyzed nor planned.
