Kansas City Southern is looking for a 26% increase in speed this year.
Three railroad companies will invest US $604.7 million this year in areas including infrastructure, technology and new trains.
Grupo México, the parent company of both Ferromex – the largest rail freight firm in Mexico – and Ferrosur, has announced investment of $466.7 million.
The money will be mainly spent on maintenance, improving operational efficiency, track construction and upgrading locomotive operating systems.
Ferromex/Ferrosur planning director Alberto Vergara said that the Altamira terminal at the terminus of the railroad between Altamira, Tamaulipas, and Monterrey, Nuevo León, will be upgraded to allow it to handle greater volumes of freight.
For its part, Kansas City Southern de México has announced spending of $128 million in 2020. The investment will primarily be used to increase the speed at which the company’s trains can run and improve security, said executive operations director David Eaton.
“This year will be the year of security and speed,” he said. “Security is an obligation, not an option.”
The United States-based railway company is aiming to increase the speed of its trains by 26% in order to reduce transport times for freight such as fuel, chemicals and auto parts.
Ferrovalle, a firm that operates in central Mexico, expects to spend about $10 million this year.
“In the specific case of Ferrovalle, the investment will be 190.5 million pesos divided in three areas: infrastructure, technology and [new] trains,” said operations director Conrado Muciño.
The phantom mountain, as viewed from Mount Tláloc.
The massive influx of tourists to a México state national park each February to observe a phenomenon that involves a trio of volcanic peaks represents a threat to the habitat of the highly endangered volcano rabbit, says the Natural Protected Areas Commission (Conanp).
More than 3,500 people climbed Mount Tláloc in the Iztaccíhuatl-Popocatépetl National Park last weekend to view the phenomenon known as montaña fantasma (phantom mountain) in which for a period of just 15 minutes at sunrise, the Malinche volcano in Tlaxcala, the Pico de Orizaba volcano in Veracruz and the Sierra Negra volcano in Puebla appear to merge on the horizon to form one continuous mountain range.
The phenomenon, which only occurs for five days each year in February, marked the start of the new year in central Mexico in pre-Hispanic times.
Visitor numbers to watch the montaña fantasma phenomenon from the peak of Mount Tláloc began to grow in 2012 and exploded in 2017 due to growing awareness generated by social media, the newspaper Milenio reported.
After last weekend’s influx, Conanp said that the large number of visitors damaged alpine grasslands inhabited by the volcano rabbit, a species endemic to Mexico known also as the teporingo or zacatuche.
The teporingo, the world’s second smallest rabbit after the pygmy, was declared extinct last year in the vicinity of the Nevado de Toluca, a volcano in México state.
Conanp also said that shrubs such as the long-living juniper, known as enebro azul, were trampled on and even used by visitors to make bonfires.
Amado Fernández, director of the Iztaccíhuatl-Popocatépetl National Park, said that Mount Tláloc doesn’t have the necessary infrastructure to receive the thousands of visitors that flocked there last weekend. In fact, it is only equipped to welcome a maximum of 200 visitors per day.
Fernández said that more needs to be done to distribute visitors across the five days during which the montaña fantasma can be observed.
While more than 2,000 witnessed the phenomenon on Saturday morning and approximately 1,500 did the same on Sunday, just 15 people were on the peak of the mountain on Wednesday, the final day in which the three volcanos appear to merge.
“Unfortunately, all the promotion … is for the weekend; that’s the problem we have,” Fernández said.
“So the invitation is to try to enjoy the phenomenon when there are less people at the site. … The most important thing is to conserve the ecosystems and all the biodiversity,” he said.
A woman gives birth outside a health clinic in Aquila.
In what the state Secretariat of Health is calling a “fortuitous birth,” a woman from Aquila, Michoacán, was forced to deliver her child on the sidewalk outside the local government clinic due to an alleged lack of personnel on Wednesday.
Aurelia Ramírez Reyes had planned to have her daughter in the hospital in the town of Coalcomán, nearly four hours away, but the girl decided to come early.
When Aurelia’s water broke outside the Aquila clinic, she lay down on the sidewalk, where people from town helped. With their assistance, she gave birth on a towel and covered by a blanket, without any help from trained medical personnel.
The Michoacán Secretariat of Health (SSM) reported that Aurelia and her daughter were in stable condition.
It said that mother and child were going to be transferred to a hospital in the nearby town of Coahuayana to be examined by specialists and that the department is “carrying out internal investigations in order to avoid that these cases keep happening.”
The SSM also said that it will determine if there was any violation of established procedures on the part of the clinic’s staff.
“We have also taken steps to ensure that the Aquila Health Center has permanent doctors and nurses on staff,” it added.
Wednesday’s birth was the second such case in Michoacán this month. On February 2, Elvia Ascencio was forced to give birth without medical supervision in the waiting room of the General Hospital in Los Reyes.
The SSM called it a “spontaneous birth,” despite the woman being in the hospital awaiting medical attention.
Governor Silvano Aureoles Conejo announced an investigation into the incident, but no results have been released.
The family of an innocent man shot to death by Tamaulipas state police have put the mishap that killed him in the public eye with bumper stickers that declare the young man’s innocence.
“Accredited state police. Don’t shoot. I’m Daniel. Don’t kill me, I’m innocent,” read the stickers they handed out to the residents of Río Bravo after Juan Daniel Ortiz was killed on February 7.
The officers reportedly confused Juan Daniel, 23, with a suspect for whom they had been searching. He had gone out to buy beer for a family gathering when police opened fire on his truck near his parents’ home.
His parents, María Guadalupe and Diego Ortiz, said that their son was an exemplary young man. He had recently graduated from the Technological University of North Tamaulipas with a degree in engineering.
They appeared in a video posted to Twitter on February 9 in which they recounted the young man’s final moments, during which his father had called him and heard him pleading with police not to shoot him.
Engineering graduate Ortiz and the bullet-riddled vehicle in which he was killed.
“I got there and said to them, ‘My son is innocent, my son is innocent.’ But they continued to shoot at him and I didn’t get any closer because they were going to shoot me too. My son didn’t have weapons, he didn’t have anything, he was alone,” his father said through tears.
He and his wife claimed that the police tried to plant a gun on Juan Daniel in order to justify having shot an unarmed man.
Juan Daniel’s friends and family hope that the bumper sticker campaign will help prevent other such tragic incidents with police in the area. In addition to the stickers, they also encouraged people to write personalized messages with shoe polish on their windows.
“Baby on board. Don’t shoot. We’re a family, not criminals,” read one such message.
Tamaulipas Governor Francisco Cabeza de Vaca told reporters that the case is being investigated and said that those responsible for the innocent man’s death will not go unpunished.
“If there were errors, if there was excessive force, the law will be applied. The state Attorney General’s Office is carrying out investigations and there will be no restrictions on them … Any errors committed by authorities will have consequences,” he said.
Juan Daniel’s was the third case of an extrajudicial killing by Tamaulipas state police in less than a year. The Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee called out state police in September of last year for two incidents of alleged mistaken identity that led to the deaths of nine people.
A Mexican electrical goods and energy company is now also an automaker: Grupo IUSA officially launched a range of four electric and hybrid vehicles on Wednesday at the Latin American Mobility Summit in Mexico City.
The vehicles are a compact car, an SUV, a hybrid-electric van and a passenger bus. Sales director Agustín Ortega said that all the vehicles are manufactured at IUSA’s plant in Jocotitlán, a México state municipality about 120 kilometers northwest of Mexico City.
“The plant has the capacity to manufacture up to 20 vehicles a week, depending on the model. They’re 100% Mexican designs and we want to expand the business, depending on demand,” he said.
Ortega said that IUSA began its automotive project a year ago with the aim of capturing a segment of the growing electric vehicle market. The models presented on Wednesday are tailored to the needs of the market, he said.
Called IIK, the compact car has a range of 440 kilometers before it needs recharging while the SUV, called ATL, has a 310-kilometer range. The hybrid van can travel up to 400 kilometers with a full tank of fuel and a fully-charged battery, while the 40-seat 100% electric bus has a 200-kilometer range.
IUSA vice president Juan Carlos Peralta told the news agency NotiPress that the company was motivated to move into the electrical vehicle sector to help reduce air pollution in Mexico and the related health problems it causes.
“[We are] presenting our family of vehicles to attend to the problem of … pollution [caused by] vehicles with internal combustion engines. This is our solution to the problem,” he said.
Established in 1939, IUSA produces a range of energy-related products including solar panels at a factory next to the México state automotive plant.
Former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya – arrested on Wednesday in the south of Spain – was part of a scheme designed to “loot” Mexico, according to Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero.
Gertz told the newspaper Reforma that the state oil company’s purchase of a disused fertilizer plant in Veracruz for the allegedly vastly inflated price of US $475 million when Lozoya was CEO – a transaction from which the ex-official allegedly received millions of dollars himself – was one of a series of fraudulent cases in which the former official was involved.
“I don’t believe that this is an isolated case … It was conduct that was repeated in a very structured way with the aim of looting the country. I don’t see any other way to describe it,” he said.
Lozoya, CEO of Pemex between 2012 and 2016, allegedly received $10 million in bribes from Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht in exchange for the awarding of a lucrative contract for work on the state oil company’s refinery in Tula, Hidalgo.
The government alleges that $4 million of that amount came his way in March 2012 when the ex-official was working on the campaign of former president Enrique Peña Nieto, and some of the funds were allegedly funneled to the campaign, an accusation still under investigation by authorities.
Pemex’s purchases of other fertilizer plants when Lozoya was CEO, including one in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, owned by the company Fertinal, are also under investigation.
The head of the government’s Financial Intelligence Unit said Wednesday that Lozoya was part of a sophisticated money laundering ring that transferred tens of millions of dollars to several countries. His arrest means that “the party is over,” Santiago Nieto said.
Information supplied to Spanish authorities by the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) alleges that Lozoya benefited from fraudulent activity to the tune of $280 million.
Acting on an international warrant obtained by the Mexican government for Lozoya’s role in the purchase of the Veracruz fertilizer plant, Spanish police arrested the former Pemex CEO in the southern port city of Málaga as he left an upscale residential estate in a taxi.
When he was stopped by police, Lozoya reportedly showed them a fake driver’s license issued in Mexico City.
He appeared in a Spanish court on Thursday via video link and refused immediate extradition to Mexico. Judge Ismael Moreno ordered Lozoya to remain in provisional custody on the grounds that he is a flight risk and told him that the charges he faces warrant up to 15 years imprisonment in Spain.
Gertz Manero, left: ‘looting the country; and Nieto: ‘party’s over.’
Mexico now has a period of 40 days within which it can formally seek the extradition of Lozoya to Mexico.
Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said Wednesday that the department he heads will seek to move quickly in order to have the former official returned to Mexico, where warrants have been issued for his arrest on charges of bribery, criminal association and conducting operations with resources of illicit origin.
Shortly after the announcement of Lozoya’s arrest, his lawyer in Mexico said that his client is convinced that the case against him has no foundation.
Javier Coello said later that there is “conclusive” evidence that Lozoya “didn’t manage on his own” the fraudulent activities of which he is accused.
“In the purchase of the plants, I can guarantee that the [former] president Peña [Nieto] was well-informed, he was part of the pact,” he said.
Asserting that “everything” will be revealed in due course, Coello said that he approved of the government’s intention to “clear all this up and combat corruption.”
However, he added that there shouldn’t be “selective justice” – everyone involved in corruption should be held to account.
Reforma reported that former finance and foreign affairs secretary Luis Videgaray and two other former Pemex CEOs, including Lozoya’s successor José Antonio González Anaya, could also be implicated in the corruption of which the ex-official is accused.
Coello said that he would travel to Spain on Thursday and advise him to fight against extradition to Mexico because he’s been made “an icon of corruption here.”
Gertz said that it was unclear how long the process to extradite both Lozoya and the owner and president of the company that sold the Veracruz plant to Pemex – who was arrested in Spain last year – would take.
As things currently stand, Mexico can only apply for Lozoya’s extradition in connection with the case against him for the purchase of the fertilizer plant, he said.
However, the attorney general added that the FGR will seek to broaden the extradition case against him to include other alleged crimes, including the taking of bribes from Odebrecht.
La Chopería is one of the restaurants that have closed in Celaya.
The violent culture of extortion in Guanajuato continues to wreak havoc on local businesses, particularly in Celaya’s restaurant and food services sector.
According to the national restaurant association Canirac, a total of 19 restaurants have closed down since the beginning of 2019. The city saw 15 businesses close last year and four have already shuttered this year.
Canirac director Helen Anaya Sanromán said that the problem is most serious in Celaya, but it is also a concern in other cities, such as Irapuato and Salamanca.
She said that the organization had over 100 affiliated businesses in Celaya, but that number has recently dropped to around 85.
“We have to motivate them and help them in order to reactivate the sector,” she said.
She lamented the closure of so many businesses, many of which had well-established reputations in the city.
“Yes, it’s sad,” she said, adding that some businesses closed simply out of the fear of violence and extortion generated by alarmist chain messages shared on social media.
“With much sadness we announce that we are joining the businesses that have closed due to the insecurity that exists in the state and in the city,” posted the bar and restaurant La Chopería, which closed its doors on February 3.
The situation in Celaya caused dozens of tortilla makers to close in August of last year to protest the culture of extortion and demand government action. Other businesses such as hardware stores, grocery stores and auto repair shops soon followed suit.
Extortion was also the presumed cause of the closure of a Ford dealership in the city after an attack by armed civilians damaged multiple vehicles and left the owners with multi-million-peso losses.
State authorities created a special task force in August to deal with reports of extortion and so far this year the Celaya police force has hired at least 50 new officers. Police Chief Miguel Ángel Simental said they have identified areas where they will apply a new security strategy.
A group of armed men reportedly left a burning tire in front of the local government offices on Wednesday morning with messages related to organized crime.
Simental said police are on the case and getting results and that the fire and messages need not create panic among the public.
Another relative of José Antonio “El Marro” Yépez Ortiz, presumed leader of the Santa Rosa de Lima fuel theft and extortion cartel, has been arrested as authorities attempt to disassemble the gang’s power structure.
His niece, Denise Yépez Pérez, was brought in on weapons charges in Apaseo el Alto on Tuesday.
National Guard troops detained Yépez, 22, and another woman of the same age identified as María Fernanda Mejía after neighbors called 911 to report the presence of armed civilians in the area.
The soldiers saw two armed men on the street upon arriving and followed them to a nearby house. The men reportedly escaped, but Yépez and Mejía were found with a cache of high-caliber weapons.
The two young women were aboard a red Hyundai SUV without plates that had been reported stolen in Celaya in November 2019. Upon seeing the National Guard troops, they threw down the rifles they were holding and submitted to arrest.
Among the weapons in the arsenal were three AK-47 and three AR-15 assault rifles, among other guns, as well as various rounds of ammunition and bulletproof vests.
Business leaders dined on tamales last night and coughed up 1.5 billion pesos for AMLO's raffle.
Mexico’s business elite ponied up 1.5 billion pesos Wednesday night to purchase tickets in the raffle President López Obrador announced last week to cover the costs of maintaining the unwanted luxury jet of his predecessor and purchase medical equipment.
Over a dinner at the National Palace of tamales de chipilín, a tamal stuffed with the leaves of an aromatic legume, and atole de chocolate, a hot corn-based beverage, López Obrador asked some 150 company owners, chief executives and business group leaders to commit to purchasing four million of the six million 500-peso (US $27) tickets that will be offered in the raffle.
The president said Thursday morning that about half of those who attended committed to buying tickets.
The businesspeople – among whom were Mexico’s richest individual, Carlos Slim Helú, and the heads of companies including broadcaster Televisa, the airline Interjet, cinema chain Cinépolis and bread maker Bimbo – were given copies of a letter of intent that gave them the option of checking boxes to voluntarily commit to buying tickets worth 20, 50, 100 or 200 million pesos.
The head of state development bank Banobras, Jorge Mendoza, made it clear that any money spent on raffle tickets would not be tax deductible.
The businesspeople who committed to buying tickets placed their signed letters of intent in a tómbola, or lottery machine.
After the two-hour dinner, the president of paper and cardboard company Bio Pappel told reporters that the majority of businesspeople had made a commitment to purchase raffle tickets.
“There was no pressure, the president was very clear. He said: ‘I thank you for coming, this is a commitment that you should make [but] no one is obliged to because business owners already comply with the payment of taxes,” Miguel Rincón Arredondo said.
José Zozaya, president of railroad company Kansas City Southern de México, also said that López Obrador didn’t attempt to force the dinner attendees to buy tickets, stating that there was no “obligation” but rather “a request.”
Bosco de la Vega, president of the National Agriculture Council, said that he had made a commitment to purchase tickets but didn’t reveal how many he would buy. Asked whether the tamales were the most expensive he had ever eaten, he responded: “Until now, yes.”
Carlos Bremer, CEO of a financial services company and director of a youth sports foundation that last year paid 102 million pesos for a Mexico City mansion formerly owned by accused drug trafficker Zhenli Ye Gon, joked that he and other businesspeople would have to leave their offices and sell their tickets on street corners.
Slim, a telecommunications mogul who turned 80 late last month, said that he had “of course” made a commitment to purchase raffle tickets because the money raised will be used for a good cause.
Antonio Suárez of canned tuna conglomerate Grupomar said that he wouldn’t buy 40,000 tickets – the minimum number listed on the letter of intent – but committed to buying a few thousand and gifting them to his employees.
López Obrador first floated the idea of holding a raffle to offload the presidential plane used by his predecessor Enrique Peña Nieto in January. He announced last Friday that a raffle would go ahead but said that the plane wouldn’t be up for grabs but rather 100 people would win prizes of 20 million pesos (just over US $1 million) each. The president is determined to sell the luxuriously outfitted Boeing 787 Dreamliner but has had no luck in finding a buyer.
As part of wider cost-cutting measures implemented by his government, López Obrador flies coach on commercial airlines when he travels long distances within Mexico.
Shalom and Adrian LeBaron take flowers to a funeral of two murdered teenagers. Behind them are Bryan, left, and Julian LeBaron. lexie harrison-cripps
Four members of the LeBaron family continued their campaign this week to tackle violence in Mexico by making an impromptu visit to Guerrero to support the parents of two teenagers who were murdered near Iguala on Sunday.
The LeBaron family had no personal connections to the teenage victims or their family but were moved to show their support when Julian LeBaron heard from local radio host, Moisés Ocampo Román, that children are being killed in Guerrero. LeBaron was accompanied by his cousin Bryan, aunt and uncle Adrian and Shalom, and local activist José Díaz Navarro.
The LeBarons met with the parents of Alexis Robles Bahena, 16, and Adilene, 14, who were killed on Sunday night as they were packing their taco stand into their father’s car on the road from Cocula to Iguala. Masked gunmen held down the father, Pedro Franco, while killing the two children; Franco’s life was only spared for lack of bullets.
The LeBarons have been campaigning for justice since nine members of their family were killed in a brutal assault in November last year in Sonora. Adrian LeBaron, who lost his daughter and four grandchildren in the attack, said “when this happened to my children and grandchildren, it woke me up to the reality.”
The family also visited the Cocula garbage dump where the government claimed the missing 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were killed. As part of a prepared speech Adrian LeBaron said they came to the dump “so that people would not forget.”
At the site, local journalist and activist Ignacio Suárez Nanchez pointed out flaws in the government’s official version of events. Julian LeBaron responded, “The first victim of crime in Mexico is the truth.”
The 43 students went missing on September 26, 2014 near Iguala in Guerrero. According to the former federal government’s version, the students were killed by gang members after they were handed over to them by corrupt municipal police.
Summarizing the purpose of the family’s campaign, Adrian LeBaron said “we will keep going until there is no pain, until there are no victims, until we are invited to a party in the village and not to a funeral.”
Five Federal Police trucks with around 50 officers escorted the family at all times.
Journalists grilled family members as to why the police were guarding them and not the local people. Bryan LeBaron responded, “You are right. It’s not fair to guard us while the towns are abandoned. I don’t know the reason. But if we, who have the voice and to whom you are listening, don’t raise that voice for other victims then we are cowards.”
This was the LeBarons’ second visit to Guerrero in the past few days. On Saturday, they attended a peace march in Chilapa. “It was the first time in five years that the people had taken to the streets,” said Navarro, who also confirmed that “the march would not have been possible without the presence of the LeBaron family.”
Due to the level of crime in Guerrero, the United States advises against any travel there and has banned U.S. government employees from traveling to the state.
