Puerto Vallarta hoteliers have rejected a decision by the Jalisco government to take over responsibility for collecting the lodging tax paid by overnight visitors to the Pacific coast resort city.
Governor Enrique Alfaro Ramírez announced on January 28 that the state government would audit and restructure the Puerto Vallarta Tourism Trust (Fidetur), a municipal body that currently collects the 3% room tax. As a result, the Jalisco government will collect the tax, Alfaro said.
Álvaro Garciarce Monraz, president of both Fidetur and the Puerto Vallarta Hotel Association, told the newspaper El Economista that hotel owners are worried about where the money will end up.
Fidetur collected 143 million pesos (US $7.7 million) from the lodging tax last year that was used to promote Vallarta as a tourism destination both within Mexico and abroad, he said, adding that an agreement is needed between the trust and the government to allow the former to continue using the revenue.
“We’re very worried that these resources will be used in a different way,” Garciarce said.
He stressed that he had no concern about the audit of Fidetur and rejected any suggestion that the state government was carrying it out because it has suspicions about the trust’s use of the funds it collects.
“We’ve had audits every year and we’ve always gone very well. We don’t have a problem with that,” Garciarce said.
The hotel association chief said an increase of 60% in arrivals at the Puerto Vallarta airport over the last five years was due to the promotion that Fidetur has been able to carry out with room tax revenue. The revenue has increased 5-8% annually in the same period, Garciarce said.
For his part, Jalisco Tourism Secretary Germán Ralis Cumplido said that the state government is planning to audit all autonomous public organizations and trusts, not just Fidetur in Puerto Vallarta.
“There is a review process that I believe is healthy; [its purpose] is to make better use of public resources,” he said.
Ralis said that the room tax revenue collected by the state government will be used not just for tourism promotion but also to invest in tourism infrastructure in Vallarta, Jalisco’s premier tourism destination.
A scene from Quetzalcóatl: 'Mexico has many legends.'
Who needs Disney when Mexico’s rich history is already full of vibrant and exciting stories to tell?
That’s the opinion of Aranza Zu López, director of the musical Quetzalcóatl, The Legend, a spectacle of dance, costumes and lights that she believes can compete with such Broadway giants as The Lion King.
“Mexico has no need to make anything up. We don’t need Disney stories. We have so many legends, stories and a wonderful past and present,” she said.
Her show has presented the history of Mexico — from Aztec creation myths to the arrival of the conquistadors — to fascinated audiences both at home and across the globe, telling the story in what López calls the universal language of dance.
The show has only one singer, Fabiola Jaramillo, who performs five songs in Náhuatl and Spanish. The production also includes the recital of a poem composed by Aztec poet, ruler, architect and warrior Nezahualcóyotl. Other than that, the story is told with music, lights and body language.
“It was controversial, of course, … because the concept is very different from what we know as musical theater. We’re accustomed to seeing Broadway shows with everything [told] through song and theater. Not here. Here everything is told through dance, with 50 dancers and no dialogue,” López said.
After opening in Poland, Quetzalcóatl, The Legend took the story of Mexico to other countries in Europe, as well as China, South Korea and Japan, before returning to the western hemisphere to tour Mexico and other countries in Latin America.
“The original intention was to tell both Mexico and the rest of the world that the country is not about violence, narcotrafficking [and] pollution, but history, legends, smells, colors — all the diversity and talent that we have,” she said.
She stressed the importance of relaying her show’s message to Mexicans as well as to foreigners.
“It is a Mexican show, with Mexican talent, so we aren’t neglecting domestic stages. … We have been to many cities, some with problems of violence, like Tampico [Tamaulipas]. They told us not to go there but we did because the message we bring is profound and touches lives,” she said.
López is now preparing to take the show to Las Vegas, Nevada, and is also putting together a new presentation focusing on one of the most famous women in Mexican history, Frida Kahlo.
The federal government has detected irregularities of more than 544 billion pesos in the spending of the administration led by former president Enrique Peña Nieto.
The alleged misuse of the funds – US $29.3 billion at today’s exchange rate – was uncovered by the Secretariat of Public Administration (SFP) via 2,500 audits of spending by the Peña Nieto government, which was in office between 2012 and 2018.
Presenting the audit report on Thursday, Public Administration Secretary Irma Sandoval said that the amount of resources in question is greater than the entire federal budget allocated annually for education and health, which receive more funds than any other areas.
In the report, “we reveal how resources that should have been used for the well-being of the people were squandered,” she said, adding that the SFP has initiated administrative proceedings where appropriate.
The audits looked at spending across a range of areas including health, education, infrastructure and tourism.
Sandoval said that irregularities to the tune of about 19 billion pesos were detected in spending on the construction of the previous government’s airport project at Texcoco, México state.
President López Obrador, who long asserted that the US $13-billion project was corrupt, canceled construction of the airport after a public consultation held a month before he took office in December 2018.
The questionable expenditure includes 6 billion pesos in advance payments that the government is currently trying to recover and an additional 6 billion pesos that were used to pay for work that remains unaccounted for, Sandoval said.
Among the most emblematic cases of corruption, the secretary said, was a change to the plan for the Puerto Vallarta-Manzanillo highway that released coastal land to a tourism developer; a 1.44-billion-peso overrun on two highway projects in Puebla and Veracruz; and the “improper transfer” by the Institute of Administration and Appraisal of National Assets of 2.44 hectares of land at a federally owned scientific facility to two companies and two individuals.
The property transfer cost the public coffers some 940 million pesos, Sandoval said.
“There is another very well-known case related to the former general director of Pemex Fertilizers, Édgar Torres Garrido, in which irregularities were identified in the buying and selling” of a fertilizer plant owned by Grupo Fertinal, she said.
Sandoval: 2,500 audits have been conducted.
The state oil company’s purchase of that plant, located in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, and a fertilizer plant in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, are under investigation by the federal government, which claims that they were bought at highly inflated prices.
Former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya was arrested in Spain this week on charges related to his role in the US $475-million purchase of the latter, a transaction from which he allegedly received close to $4 million himself.
For embezzling public money, Torres Garrido was disqualified from holding public office for 15 years and fined 3.8 billion pesos, Sandoval noted.
The SFP said in a statement that it has opened more than 400 “proceedings of administrative responsibility or reports of irregularities” in relation to the questionable spending it detected during Peña Nieto’s government.
“With regard to penalties of bidders, suppliers and contractors … 81 files were resolved in 2019,” the secretariat said, adding that fines totaling almost 23 billion pesos were imposed in 63 of the cases.
The government has made the elimination of corruption a priority since it took office in late 2018. López Obrador frequently rails against his predecessors and has floated the idea of holding a public consultation to ask the Mexican people if Mexico’s five most recent past presidents should be put on trial for their alleged corruption and other wrongdoings.
The government’s highest profile corruption-related arrest to date is that of Rosario Robles, a cabinet secretary in the Peña Nieto administration who is currently in prison awaiting trial on charges linked to the so-called “Master Fraud” embezzlement scheme. Eleven federal agencies are suspected of diverting billions of pesos of public money through shell and illegal companies between 2013 and 2014.
Mexican families with epileptic children at FMCAM in Guadalajara.
A few days ago, I attended a seminar called Hemp & Learn in Ajijic, Jalisco. I was persuaded to go by one Juan Álvaro Cortés of Guadalajara who, it seems, runs a belt-manufacturing company on weekdays and spends his weekends transforming the lives of epileptic children through the Fundación Mexicana de Cannabis Medicinal A.C. (FMCAM), a non-profit organization that advises the parents of children with epilepsy.
“We’ve helped more than 400 children,” Cortés had told me in a telephone interview. “You really should come and investigate what it’s all about.”
I did. In fact, I arrived early at the seminar venue, Hotel Danza del Sol, which gave me an opportunity to interview María López (not her real name), the mother of one of those 400 epileptic children.
I was astonished at what she told me:
“I have an 11-year-old girl and she has had epilepsy since she was 8 months old. In spite of that, she was doing really well, at first. But then it was discovered that she had a brain tumor and they operated. This was five years ago.
“The operation provoked a dramatic loss of motor functions. She could no longer speak, she could no longer walk and she couldn’t even take solid food anymore, only liquids. So we went to many, many neurologists. We looked for help from the best doctors in Houston and San Francisco. …
“Well, we got no results from any of them, so we turned to homeopaths and then to shamans … even to brujos [shamans]! But she didn’t get better.
“Then some friends of ours told us about medical cannabis in Colorado. So we packed our bags and went to Colorado Springs, to Charolotte’s Web, which was started because of the problems of a child similar to our own.
“They said, ‘Yes, we have a cannabis extract that could help your daughter, but we’re not quite ready to bottle it and sell it legally.’ And they wouldn’t let us have it, which was very hard to take, because our daughter was getting worse and worse. But they began working with the Stanley brothers, solved their problems and then they phoned us: ‘Now we can sell it legally.’
“However, they couldn’t ship it to Mexico because here it’s still illegal, so I had to fly to Colorado — more than once! — and each time, hide it in my suitcase and run the risk of being caught and imprisoned.
“And we gave it to our little girl … not just like that, of course. We had the help of a doctor in the U.S.A. with 30 years of experience in this, and he did a series of tests before prescribing the right amount for our child.
The Knox family studies and promotes CBD. Amanda Lucier, Washington Post
“So we gave it to our daughter and we saw an immediate change. She had been convulsing 30 times a day and the number went down: 15 convulsions, then a few days later 10, and so on. Today she still has some convulsions, but she is 80% better.
“As far as her cognitive abilities go, the change was instant. She had been staring out at nothing — she had been ‘somewhere else’ — and now she was with us again … and this took place the very first time she took [cannabidiol].
“Her motor coordination also improved: now she walks better and has much better hand-eye coordination. This didn’t just change my daughter’s life; it changed the lives of every single member of our family.”
After speaking with María, I still had all morning ahead of me to learn more about cannabidiol, CBD for short, and exactly why it seems to be so effective in alleviating everything from pain to insomnia … including cancer, of course.
But first I have to mention the stigma. CBD is extracted from cannabis. Despite the fact that it doesn’t get people high, this raises the eyebrows of some individuals who suspect that “medical marijuana” is just a strategy invented by drug addicts to get legal access to their favorite weed.
Well, the seminar I attended not only established the legitimacy of CBD as a medicine but also explained precisely why it is said to alleviate such a wide variety of health problems.
So I invite you to forget, for a moment, that CBD has anything to do with marijuana and to note the discoveries and observations of the people who give this seminar — which will be repeated in numerous places in Mexico.
The first team that spoke was composed of “the Doctors Knox,” a family of MDs from the state of Oregon. They told us that years ago medical researchers were curious as to why cannabis could affect people in so many ways. They soon discovered that all human beings have receptors in the walls of the cells of all their body parts “which control balance among all bodily functions.”
If a person has a migraine or is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the body tries to alleviate the problem by producing chemical messengers that are dispensed to those receptors, fitting into them like keys into locks and bringing the body back to harmony.
This, the Knoxes pointed out, is a system for restoring balance that is found in every human being on Earth and has been part of our makeup since we first crawled out of the primordial slime.
Now, I would think that such a basic and marvelous self-healing program would be named something like “The Holistic Harmony System.” But to my surprise I learned that is is officially called the Endocannabinoid System or ECS, and we now know it regulates immune response, liver function and the production of insulin, among other things.
What? Why would such an important system be called that? Well, amazingly, no one knew we had such a system until researchers happened to ask exactly why cannabis affects people. So, following proper scientific custom, the system was named after the substance that provoked the study.
[soliloquy id="101194"]
During the second half of the seminar, Dr. Philip Blair, a retired U.S. Army colonel demonstrated how CBD, marketed as hemp extract, helped restore the balance and harmony of the Endocannabinoid System in specific individuals who had been suffering from anxiety, depression, insomnia and PTSD.
The improvements in these people’s lives appeared to be just as dramatic as those experienced by María’s child and I found it a bit difficult to understand why cannabis is still listed in some places as a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance with “no currently accepted medical use.”
The next Hemp & Learn seminar will take place at 9:30 a.m. on February 15 at the NH Collection Hotel in Colonia Providencia, Guadalajara. For questions about CBD or about future Hemp & Learn seminars in your area, call 333 968 7805, either in Spanish or in English.
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.
CORRECTION: The phone number for the Hemp & Learn seminars has been corrected.
Senior citizens in Naucalpan, México state, grew angry after the local welfare office had them waiting in the street over eight hours only to be told that they would have to come back another day to receive their benefits.
“They’re treating us like beggars,” some shouted as others became weak from standing outside all day long.
The senior citizens had begun to line up around 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, but by 4:00 p.m. they still had not received their payments and were told they would have to return another day.
Town councilman Anselmo García Cruz called the treatment of the senior citizens “inhumane and irresponsible.” García presides over the commission on senior citizen services for the municipality, a northwestern suburb of the capital.
“It’s chaos. People were fainting because they had been given appointments in the morning, and now [at 4:00 p.m.] they’re being told that they still won’t be paid. It’s outrageous that they’re being given this beggar’s treatment,” he said.
The federal Welfare Secretariat’s “68 and Over” program is charged with distributing monthly welfare payments of just over 2,600 pesos (US $140) to people aged 68 and older. García accused the Naucalpan office of lacking organization.
Having learned that they’d waited all day in vain, many of the senior citizens threatened to set up a roadblock on the busy Periférico Norte highway that connects Naucalpan with neighboring Mexico City.
A Russian-made helicopter that is already part of Mexico's fleet.
Mexico could feel the wrath of its northern neighbor if it buys helicopters from Russia as that country’s foreign minister claims it is considering.
Under United States law, Mexico could face sanctions if it goes ahead with the purchase, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday.
Hugo Rodríguez, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, made the assertion in response to a question from a lawmaker during a hearing Thursday of the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.
“Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently announced that Mexico was in talks to purchase Russian-made helicopters. If that were to proceed, would it risk sanctions by the United States under section 231 of the CAATSA Act?” asked Democratic Party Representative Dean Phillips at the hearing to assess U.S. security assistance to Mexico.
The CAATSA Act is the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, a law promulgated by U.S. President Donald Trump in 2017 that has imposed sanctions on Iran, North Korea and Russia.
“We have looked into that; we obviously saw that readout of the meeting between Foreign Minister Lavrov and [Mexican] Foreign Secretary [Marcelo] Ebrard,” Rodríguez told Phillips. He was referring to the meeting between the two men in Mexico City last week, after which Lavrov said that the Mexican government was looking at proposals to purchase helicopters from Rosobronexport, the state-owned Russian agency responsible for the import and export of defense products.
“We read it with great interest and it is concerning to us. Based on our initial investigation, it appears that such a sale would potentially trigger sanctions under CAATSA,” he said.
“Have we made our position clear to our Mexican friends?” asked Phillips.
“I believe we have at the embassy level. … At the Washington level, we have raised this as an area of concern with our counterparts in Mexico City to raise with the government of Mexico,” Rodríguez said.
The news agency AFP reported that after the official’s appearance before the foreign affairs subcommittee, it was told by an unnamed source at Mexico’s Secretariat of Foreign Affairs that the government is not in fact negotiating with Russia to purchase helicopters.
Before he took office in December 2018, President López Obrador announced the cancelation of a contract to purchase helicopters from United States firm Lockheed Martin in order to save money.
The Mexican military already has an extensive fleet of Mil Mi-17 Russian-made helicopters.
To celebrate International Condom Day — strategically observed the day before Valentine’s — health officials and others handed out around 100,000 condoms on the Mexico City Metro on Thursday.
“Around six million people travel daily on the Mexico City Metro, which makes it an ideal space for the promotion of health within the reach of everyone,” said the Metro in a press release.
The distribution was organized in a joint effort by the city’s Secretariats of Health and Inclusion and Wellbeing, the Institute of Youth (Injuve), the Human Rights Commission and various private initiatives.
The Insurgentes Metro roundabout was host to various sexual health activities, such as workshops on how to use contraceptives, short educational films on HIV and talks about the stigmatization of people with the disease.
The day also marked the launch of an Injuve campaign titled “If you want to have sex, you must have condoms,” which aims to promote safe sex.
Injuve director Beatriz Olivares Pinal said that as part of the campaign the institute will distribute free erotic kits that include both male and female condoms, sex toys, spermicide and lubricants.
Olivares added that the institute’s Sexual Health Clinic offers fast and free screenings for HIV and syphilis. In 2019 Injuve carried out 3,756 screenings, of which 44 resulted positive for HIV and 19 came back positive for syphilis.
The central bank cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-point to 7% on Thursday, citing a weak economy and global uncertainty among other factors.
The five Bank of México (Banxico) board members voted unanimously to reduce the benchmark rate by 0.25%. It is the fifth consecutive time that the bank has lowered borrowing costs.
Greater slack in the economy, the current levels of inflation, the outlook for inflation and the recent behavior of external and domestic yield curves were taken into account in the decision to reduce the benchmark rate, Banxico said in a statement.
The cut came two weeks after the national statistics institute announced that GDP had contracted by 0.1% in 2019, the first decline since 2009, the year of the world financial crisis when GDP fell 5.3%.
The annual inflation rate rose to 3.24% in January but remains within the bank’s target range of 3% give or take a percentage point. However, the central bank said that it expects inflation to be “moderately above” the forecasts it published in its last quarterly report.
Banxico also said that the balance of risks for the global economy is skewed to the downside due to a range of factors of uncertainty, “including the effects of the recent outbreak of coronavirus.”
China, where the outbreak originated, is the world’s second largest economy and an important trade partner of Mexico.
Taking into account “the most recent information” about the state of the economy both in Mexico and globally, the Bank of México said that it expected domestic GDP growth in 2020 to be lower than the 0.8% to 1.8% range it forecast in its last quarterly report. Analysts consulted by the central bank have cut their outlook for this year to an average of 1% growth.
Bank of México Governor Alejandro Díaz de León confirmed in an interview with the newspaper El Financiero that the growth outlook for this year will be lowered in the next quarterly report, which will be published on February 26.
“Given the accumulated weakness [of the economy] and the most recent economic activity information, we anticipate that gross domestic product will grow at a slower pace than we predicted in the previous quarterly report,” he said.
Díaz de León declined to flag future interest rate cuts, stating that the bank board will continue to evaluate the prevailing economic conditions, including growth levels and inflation, and adjust rates accordingly.
For their part, analysts from the bank BBVA are forecasting a benchmark interest rate of 6% by August this year.
Alberto Ramos, chief Latin America economist at Goldman Sachs, said that he hoped that Banxico will continue to cut rates in the first half of 2020 due to the “persistent and weak” economic conditions, an “anchored” exchange rate and an inflation rate that remains within the target range.
Love isn’t the only thing in the air on Valentine’s Day in Mexico. The holiday also brings in quite a bit of money to a number of sectors of the economy.
Valentine’s Day is expected to generate more revenue than Three Kings’ Day this year, according to the National Chambers of Commerce, Services and Tourism (Concanaco Servytur).
The association foresees the day of romance generating over 22.8 billion pesos (US $1.2 billion) in revenue, a 3.2% increase over last year.
“This is one of the [most] important celebrations for the Mexican economy. It even surpasses the earnings generated on Three Kings’ Day, which this year were 17.5 billion pesos,” said association president José Manuel López Campos.
He said that the only holidays with higher economic impact are Mother’s Day, which generated 47 billion pesos in revenue last year, and Father’s Day, which brought in over 25 billion.
The association estimates that the average lovebird will spend between 300 and 3,000 pesos on a gift, although there are certainly those sweethearts who will spend quite a bit more.
As the holiday falls on a Friday this year, celebrations could extend into the weekend, bringing in more revenue for restaurants, recreational businesses and, of course, hotels.
Concanaco Servytur expects the hotel sector to see a 3.9% increase over last year. Cinemas, theaters, amusement parks and other recreational businesses should enjoy a 3.7% increase, while restaurants, cafés and alcoholic beverages should see a 3.6% increase and electronics a 3.1% jump.
“The sales of flowers, candies and chocolates also increase 2.8%, clothing and shoes, 2.7%, [and] jewelry, 2.4%,” said López.
The website Tiendeo.mx, which aggregates sales and product offerings, has seen marked spikes in searches for a number of products deemed essential for celebrating Cupid’s special day.
These include a 190% increase in searches for jewelry, 120% for chocolates and a 54% leap in searches for condoms.
A collection of travel trunks recently unveiled by famed French designer Louis Vuitton bear the distinctly fanciful imagery of artisans from Oaxaca communities.
For the collection, displayed during the Zona Maco art-and-design 2020 event in Mexico City, Vuitton engaged painters from the small town of San Martín Tilcajete to intervene by illustrating likenesses of the state’s signature animal figurines upon them.
Entitled The Colorful Journey LV, it included six trunks with different designs and a similarly decorated image of a classic VW Beetle. The purpose was to introduce a new line of products combining the French house’s well-known product with Mexican creativity, combining “the heritage and craftsmanship of two cultures,” according to a press release.
Louis Vuitton hired Natalia Herrera, director of Atelier Cultural in Mexico, to curate the project. Herrera states that she chose the studio due to its work and the social and economic impact the project can have on its young painters.
Waldo Hernández, the director of Taller Casa Don Juan, stated, “We are happy to participate in this venture. Not only has it been a great challenge to work with the materials, but … it is also an important opportunity to show the world our work. Emigration has diminished in our community thanks to projects like these …”
Because of the extreme detail involved in depicting the figures, each case takes about a month to paint.
Although there have been problems in recent years associated with the use of elements from traditional Mexican handcrafts and folk art by different designers, Vuitton assures that the artists’ collaboration will fall under “fair trade” and will follow Mexican law.
In a press release the company said, “Clients will work directly with craftsmen from Taller Casa Don Juan’s workshop …” under the project name of “Los Maestros Artesanos de Oaxaca de Juárez” (Master Craftsmen from Oaxaca de Juárez). “This project has been created under the highest parameters of respect and good practices in the federal copyright laws and the law for safeguarding knowledge, identity and culture of indigenous communities.”
Meanwhile, another workshop in Tilcajete put out a statement disassociating themselves from the collaboration. According to a statement issued on February 8 by artisans Jacobo and María Ángeles, “some people have confused the decoration used in these pieces with our work, [due to] a regrettable ‘coincidence’ [their quotes] in the use of patterns, colors and figures of our workshop published on their social media.”
Although the workshop stated that they do not hold Louis Vuitton responsible for the similarity, and are not opposed to collaborations in their community, they nonetheless asserted, “It is the responsibility of legal experts to analyze if there is a violation of any law related to copyright or intellectual property …”
The statement was covered on February 9 by the magazine México Desconocido, which questioned the appropriateness of the project, referring to past problems with designer Carolina Herrera and with Vuitton himself last year.
Louis Vuitton was questioned by the Secretariat of Culture of Mexico in July 2019, when embroidery on chairs by the designer bore a resemblance to patterns from Tenango de Doria, Hidalgo. The secretariat wanted to know if the company had an arrangement with artisans there, and although Vuitton stated that that was the case, the chairs were taken off the market anyway.
México Desconocido also covered a response by Casa Don Juan, which begins, “We do not plagiarize. We inherit!”
“You argue that our works look similar. … In effect, everyone in the town makes these rabbits, coyotes, jaguars and serpents because they are our animals. Who did it first? This we would have to ask our parents and grandparents.”
Although the Mexican press is calling the figures “alebrijes,” which is the more commonly used name, Louis Vuitton has opted to call them “tonas” and “nahuals,” explaining that they “… are the combination of two powerful animals connected to the day and year in which a person is born.”
