Officer Razo with his distinguished service award.
The Mexico City government has announced a Christmas gift for the capital’s police force — a 9% pay increase in the coming year.
In a ceremony at the Police University on the weekend, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced the raise and presented special Christmas bonuses to officers who have shown outstanding service.
“We’re doing everything we can within the limits of the budget in order to create better working conditions for you. For too long the city’s police have been abandoned,” she said.
Sheinbaum gave the award for Distinguished Police Officer of the Year to officer Roberto Gregorio Razo Palacios, 47, who rescued a woman who had been kidnapped. The award comes with 500,000 pesos (US $26,400) in cash.
Three officers received officer of the month awards of 50,000 pesos (US $2,640).
The president of the Citizens’ Council for Security and Justice, Salvador Guerrero Chirprés, congratulated the officers and said it was the first time that an annual award has been presented.
“You have all collaborated in order to arrest 11,627 people this year,” he said.
Police Chief Omar García Harfuch paid respects to the seven police officers who died in the line of duty during the current administration and promoted 1,000 officers.
Mayor Sheinbaum closed the ceremony by summarizing the security strategy for 2020, which will focus on the causes that drive young people to commit crime.
Sunday morning's fire at the market in Cuauhtémoc.
A fire on Sunday in Mexico City’s San Cosme market left 188 stands damaged and the entire market closed for the holiday season.
The cause of the fire, which started around 5:30am, is unknown, but a short circuit is believed to have been the culprit.
Firefighters from five different boroughs were able to put the fire out by 8:00am, but not before it had burned 1,000 square meters of the market.
Over 150 residents in neighboring houses and apartments were forced to evacuate their homes while police set up a safety perimeter around a gas station adjacent to the market.
No deaths or injuries have been reported, but the vendors now find themselves in a difficult situation during one of the busiest shopping seasons of the year.
To offset the hardship, Economic Development Secretary Fadlala Akabani Hneide requested that the Labor Secretariat provide the vendors with unemployment benefits and relocate them to the street to the west of the market to mitigate the loss of December sales.
Monthly unemployment benefits of 2,500 pesos (US $132) will be disbursed to all 252 of the market vendors for six months.
The Cuauhtémoc borough, in which the market is located, will provide tarps for the temporary street stalls and will have discussions with neighboring residents to request that they support the provisional solution.
Private centers are integral to providing treatment.
“Many people are killed inside, others are hurt, mutilated, burned. I know of someone who was buried alive and then dug up as punishment for not following the rules.”
Those are the words of Arturo Ortiz Castro, a substance abuse prevention specialist at the National Institute of Psychiatry.
He’s not talking about Mexico’s toughest jails but rather private drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers that operate without certification and oversight from the National Commission Against Additions (Conadic), a dependency of the federal Secretariat of Health.
“Horrible things” happen to people in private rehab centers, some of whom are admitted against their will, Ortiz told the newspaper El Universal.
“. . . The most significant harm” to the health of people in poorly-run centers, although the least obvious, Ortiz added, comes from emotional abuse.
“There are thousands of [psychological] effects and many of them are not erased for the rest of their lives,” Ortiz said.
Among them, he explained, are depression, loss of self-confidence and the ability to trust others, and memory damage. Ortiz said that anyone looking for a rehab center needs to ask whether it is registered and certified by authorities.
“If they tell you that it is, go ahead. If they tell that it isn’t or that they’re in the process [of registering and certifying the center], forget it,” he said.
The probability that any particular drug and alcohol rehab center is operating without certification is high.
Of approximately 2,300 facilities across the country, just 500 are certified by Conadic, said commission chief Gady Zabicky Sirot.
There are three types of rehab centers in Mexico, he said: clandestine centers that operate “without any kind of control,” centers that are registered with authorities but not certified, and Conadic-certified centers.
Zabicky said that the majority, whether they are certified or not, treat their patients humanely.
However, he acknowledged that he couldn’t rule out the existence of centers that violate the human rights of patients, hold them against their will and provide inadequate or virtually non-existent medical treatment.
Zabicky called on the directors of uncertified rehab centers to approach Conadic to commence the certification process, explaining that would help authorities to weed out those that mistreat their patients.
He said Conadic has no intention to work with the health regulatory agency Cofepris to shut down all private rehab centers that are not registered and/or certified because those that do have their paperwork in order (including government-run facilities) would be unable to meet the demand for addiction treatment services on their own.
“The last thing we want to do . . . is to close these centers because they do . . . meet a very significant part of the population’s needs,” Zabicky said.
“If we said tomorrow that all the centers that aren’t registered will be closed – which in any case we believe is legally very difficult to do – we would have a serious problem with the thousands of people who are receiving treatment [in them] because they would have nowhere [to go] . . .”
A few years ago I bought some tweezers at a chain pharmacy. Idly, I read the packaging and was surprised to note that they were made in Italy.
Since then, but not so idly, I’ve made an effort to note the country of manufacture of many of my purchases. The effort was not a negative one to avoid any specific country, but a positive one to ask, “Why couldn’t this be made in Mexico, or even Guatemala, where I live?”
The question is asked in the context of the urgent acclaimed need for job creation in those two countries that are the source of the bulk of would-be or actual irregular migrants to the United States.
A 2016 Bloomberg inside view of an Apple manufacturing facility in China stated that factory workers at that time averaged between $650 and $850 a month in “take-home pay.” At $750 a month, this would equal almost 150 times Mexico’s less than $5 a day minimum wage, and over twice the monthly salary of a teacher or police officer in Guatemala.
Although comparisons are difficult between countries, especially those with not easily comparable labor benefits and fluctuating exchange rates, it’s probable that the lines would extend around the proverbial block if a business were hiring at $750 a month in either Mexico or Guatemala, as examples.
So why aren’t my tweezers made in Mexico or Guatemala? And my cell phone? And my plumbing fixtures, etc. etc.etc.?
My answer is that they could be.
I recently overnighted in Michoacán, one of Mexico’s most violence-plagued states, dangerous enough to be absolutely off limits for personnel from many countries’ embassies.
While economists in ivory towers equivocated and politicians pondered how much money to allocate to addressing the migration issue, the inhabitants of a tiny tongue-twisting town in central Mexico have achieved unprecedented prosperity, put a brake on emigration, and set an example for the whole nation to emulate.
In 1937 a massive landslide buried key parts of Tlalpujahua, Michoacan’s principal gold mine, Mexico’s crusading and expropriating president Lázaro Cárdenas wielded his pen and made sure the mine would never reopen, and the outlook was bleak.
It’s 2019: the town of fewer than 5,000 is now the fifth largest producer in the world of its niche product, has prospered through exports from a weak peso, armored itself against future domestic downturns by emphasizing foreign sales and has successfully fought off an invasion of its home and foreign markets by inexpensive Chinese imitations.
It has achieved all of this while located in Michoacán, Mexico’s most notoriously cartel-dominated state.
The product is the prosaic Christmas tree ornament.
This op-ed is not about ornaments, but recognizing opportunity and acting on it.
Ebrard confirmed that he accepted Valero’s resignation and said the diplomat is currently undergoing neurological treatment for effects associated with the removal of a brain tumor in 2012.
Valero’s neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Ana Luis Sosa, said that although the tumor was removed, the loss of neural tissue and neurodegeneration associated with age have damaged cerebral tissue in the frontal lobe.
The damage has caused Valero to present atypical behavior such as kleptomania, the recurrent urge to steal without the motives of need or profit.
Valero’s monthly salary as ambassador was 234,000 pesos (US $12,160). The book he attempted to steal cost the equivalent of US $10.
The 76-year-old had showed other behavioral issues such as committing traffic infractions, managing his time poorly and having problems in his personal relationships.
During a long diplomatic career that began in 1970, Valero served as the ambassador to Chile from 2001 to 2004 and has taught political science and international relations at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) and other higher learning institutions.
A day for playing tricks evolved from this biblical tale.
There’s no need to wait until April to play a trick on someone: Mexico’s equivalent of April Fool’s Day is December 28.
Día de los Santos Inocentes (Day of the Holy Innocents) is a day for all kinds of practical jokes but beware of lending money. According to tradition, there is no obligation to pay back anything borrowed on this day.
The tradition is based on a tragic biblical story. According to the Gospel of St. Matthew, when King Herod was warned of the birth of the new king, the baby Jesus, he sent soldiers to kill all boys under the age of 2 to maintain a hold on his kingdom. The children killed on this day are known as the “Holy Innocents.” Jesus escaped the slaughter because his parents were warned by an angel and fled.
The date is set on December 28 in part because it is a few days after the celebration of Jesus’s birth.
But the concept of “a trick” comes into play because King Herod was fooled into believing that he had eliminated the threat, which he had not.
The concept of behaving in a naughty manner dates back to the Middle Ages in Europe, when there was a “festival of the crazies” between December 24 and 31. A blind eye was turned to many kinds of excess but the festival got out of hand in Spain, forcing King Phillip II to ban it. The celebration became a day associated with playing tricks and the practice of borrowing something to be returned on Candlemas, February 2.
Like other Spanish Catholic observances, this made its way to Mexico and has evolved in its own way. There is a phrase recited to those who have been fooled is “Inocente palomita que te dejaste engañar en este Día de los Inocentes, que en nadie debes confiar.” (Innocent dove, you let yourself be fooled on this Day of the Innocents, when nobody should be trusted.)
Today is a special day for Popocatépetl: it is the 25th anniversary of renewed activity at the volcano near Mexico City.
El Popo, as it is also called, is iconic of the Valley of México, along with the dormant volcano Iztaccíhuatl. Its name is from Náhuatl and means “smoking mountain.” Its partner, whose name translates to “white woman” or “sleeping woman,” is a long dormant volcano which resembles a woman sleeping on her back.
The two are important to the city’s identity although most days they are not visible due to pollution.
Popocatépetl is generally an active volcano, but it goes through cycles. It is the most active of Mexico’s volcanos, and with 25 million people living less than 100 kilometers from the crater, it is also one of the most potentially dangerous.
On December 21, 1994, the mountain woke up after 56 years of tranquility to blow ash on Puebla. The eruption caused alarm, especially on the volcano’s northeastern side, which received most of the ash fall and towns in that area were evacuated.
The event prompted Mexico’s National Disaster Prevention Center (Cenapred), with support from the United States National Geological Service, to install stations to monitor the volcano. Today, that monitoring goes on 24 hours per day, and webcams allow the public to view what is going on in real time. The monitoring allows for research and to identify any anomalies in the volcano’s activity.
Most of that activity has been the creation and destruction of domes inside the crater. Ash from different events has regularly reached Mexico City and Puebla, and has fallen in states as far away as Querétero and Veracruz. There have been some lava flows, including one that reached the nearest human settlement, Santiago Xalitzintla in Puebla.
The federal government has also implemented an alert and evacuation system called the Semáforo de Alerta Volcánica (Volcanic Alert Signal) depending on the volcano’s status. Green means that the volcano is not currently active and yellow has three phases which range from some signs of activity to persistent activity in the crater. Red (also called alarm) has two phases indicating activity outside the crater and immediate danger to the surrounding area.
Six patients at the Eloísa Angulo McLiberty Clinic in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, received the best Christmas present they could hope for — the chance to ring the clinic’s bell.
It’s not just any old bell: it’s a special ceremony for inpatients who have been declared free of cancer.
The six, aged 3 to 18, are the third group to perform the act, which came after some three years of treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia at the clinic, part of Chetumal General Hospital.
“Each one has a different story and we celebrate today that they have a happy ending,” said pediatric hematologist and clinic chief Asunción Encarnación Jiménez.
The declaration and ceremony mean that major treatment has ended. As the patients are from different parts of Quintana Roo this has often meant hardship for both patient and family. In one case, a child needed a transplant, which required a transfer to another hospital for eight months before the patient and family could return home.
A happy moment at the bell-ringing ceremony.
The day was special because it means a much more normal life from here on. The six will still need to have monthly checkups for the next 10 years to make sure the cancer has not returned, but the days of hospitalization, chemotherapy and other intensive treatment have ended.
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most frequent cancer for children in Mexico, with a rate of 122 cases for every 100,000 children aged 14 and under. Although the overall five-year survival rate in developed countries is over 90%, it is only between 50 and 65% in Mexico. It is not known whether or how much ethnicity or differing standards of care contribute to the disparity. The average age for diagnosis is 7.6 years of age but it has been found in children under 2.
The clinic treats about 60 children under the age of 18 and has a 63% survival rate. It has reported lacking supplies, including medicines, but no child has gone without chemotherapy because other organizations such as Casa de Amistad and the DIF family services agency have stepped in to buy medicines from abroad.
In 2019, it received 20 new cases and saw four deaths. According to the head of the facility, most children do not die as a direct result of the cancer but rather through complications such as infections.
López Obrador and CEO chief Bartlett tour a geothermal plant Saturday in Michoacán.
The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has drawn up plans to limit private-sector participation in the energy market, according to a media report published Saturday.
The Financial Times said it has seen a CFE blueprint which includes measures that seek to increase the electricity transmission costs on which private companies have based their plans.
Energy experts told the newspaper that if the measures were implemented, they would immediately undermine the economic viability of some private-sector projects.
The Times said that companies producing electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar would be most affected.
Such companies – which produce about 6% of Mexico’s energy – are able to generate power at less than half the cost of plants that run on fossil fuels.
A former energy sector official said that if they are approved, the measures would eliminate energy investment incentives and “absolutely destroy the [electricity] market.”
The CFE didn’t respond to the Times’ request for comment.
The former official said “the main objective” of the measures “is to strengthen the CFE by weakening all features of the market and erasing the independence of [national grid operator] Cenace and [the regulator] CRE . . . regardless of the impact on consumers and costs.”
The ex-official explained that would include getting rid of contracts between private electricity generators and their customers, revoking existing permits and putting up barriers that make it harder for renewable energy companies to enter the market.
The plans are in keeping with President López Obrador’s vision of strengthening the CFE in order to consolidate the state’s dominant role in power generation. The president is an outspoken critic of the previous government’s energy reform, which opened up the electricity and petroleum markets to foreign and private companies.
The president said on Saturday that if foreign investors are not prepared to invest in electrical generation, the government will. He said the private sector currently has 44% of the market and the CFE 56% but the latter could increase its share.
Increased transmission costs could affect the viability of projects such as this solar plant in Coahuila.
“. . . we are going to compete, invest and supply [energy] because now we are prepared . . .”
If business doesn’t invest, López Obrador warned, “we could finish our six-year term with 60 or 70%.”
CFE director Manuel Bartlett said this month that increasing the state’s capacity to generate power was an issue of national security. He also said that part of his job is to “rescue the CFE,” which has debt of US $19 billion and saw its profits plummet 81% in the third quarter.
The measures in the CFE blueprint are the government’s latest attempt to renegotiate energy sector rules, the Times noted.
The CFE launched legal action earlier this year that sought to annul clauses in pipeline contracts it deemed economically unfavorable, while the Energy Secretariat (SE) announced last month that it had decided to grant clean energy credits to old, state-run renewable energy projects.
Six foreign and Mexican renewable energy companies have launched legal action against the Energy Secretariat’s rule change.
Experts told the Financial Times that the measures in the CFE plans would also trigger legal action if enacted.
The Business Coordinating Council, a powerful lobby group, has written to Energy Secretary Rocío Nahle to urge the government to “respect the contractual terms on which electricity supply that has already been contracted is based,” especially the transmission fees.
Experts have also dismissed claims by Bartlett that renewable energy is risky because the sources it relies on – wind and sunshine – are not always available.
The intermittence issue has been “more than overcome in advanced economies,” said a senior official in the renewables sector.
Limiting private investment in the energy sector will result in higher generation costs for the CFE, the unnamed official told the Times, adding that Bartlett’s focus on state energy production is “a dogmatic obsession.”
Verónica Irastorza, a former undersecretary of energy planning, said that “not using renewables to generate electricity cheaply for Mexican manufacturers is just letting a golden opportunity go by.”
Among the renewable projects that could be affected by the CFE measures are a huge solar farm run by Italian company Enel in Coahuila and Latin America’s largest wind farm in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca.
Parlez-vous français? Not yet, but instruction is coming.
Students in 34 secondary schools are going to study French in a pilot program supported by the French government.
Federal Education Secretary Esteban Moctezuma Barragán and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian signed an agreement in Mexico City Thursday to collaborate on the program.
Moctezuma said the government will subsequently seek to extend French language instruction to hundreds of schools across Mexico.
The return of French to public schools “is great news for the country,” he said. “It will be a productive program that will have multiplying effects in the medium term . . . We’re taking an important step to strengthen the bilateral relationship on education.”
The education secretary said the government would like French teachers to attend courses at the Liceo Franco Mexicano (French-Mexican School), which he described as the most important school of its kind in Latin America.
Meanwhile, English language proficiency continues to decline in Mexico.
The 2019 English Proficiency Index compiled by the language training company EF Education First put Mexico in 64th place on the list of 100 countries.
And a study conducted five years ago found that 80% of preparatory school-aged students — their ages are 15 and 16 — had no understanding of English. The research, conducted by the education advocacy organization Mexicanos Primero, also found that 15% of English teachers couldn’t even speak the language.
The French foreign minister signed five other agreements on Thursday which will increase cooperation between the French government and the Mexican secretariats of Labor, Foreign Affairs and Public Administration (SFP).
Eight French companies have committed to participating in the government’s apprenticeship scheme known as “Youth Building the Future” and the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs will assist in the quest to stamp out government corruption.
Le Drian and Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard also signed an agreement in support of “effective multilateralism” to tackle international issues.
“A new page is being written in the bilateral relationship between France and Mexico . . .” Le Drian said.
For his part, Ebrard said that Mexico’s relationship with France “is important for several reasons.”
“The most obvious ones are due to history and the cultural, political and intellectual closeness between Mexico and France that dates back centuries and which has a lot of prospects in the future” he said.
“. . . All these [newly-signed] initiatives are very good for Mexico because we’re beginning a new stage [of cooperation] with France and the European Union. We’re very interested in Mexico occupying the place it should on the international stage and France is a strategic partner in that sense.”
