The government has earmarked 20 billion pesos to fix things like this.
A federal transportation official said there are big spending plans for non-toll federal highways, 22% of which are in bad shape.
Cedric Escalante Sauri said the highways have been poorly maintained, especially those in the states of Veracruz, Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero.
The infrastructure undersecretary at the Transportation Secretariat said immediate attention is required on long stretches of highway that have been damaged by climate conditions and use.
“The largest portion of the budget for highways will go to service and maintenance of non-toll highways; we have close to 20 billion pesos (US $1 billion).”
He added that the investment doubles that of previous years, calling it the most significant investment ever made in the history of highway maintenance in Mexico.
Escalante said the federal budget for all the nation’s highways totals 42 billion pesos (US $2.2 billion). In addition to the 20 billion pesos for non-toll roads, 9 billion will go toward construction and modernization, 8 billion to access and rural roads and 5 billion pesos to other needs, such as signage.
Oaxaca will be a special focus, with funding going to improving access roads to 50 municipal seats. In total, 138 municipalities in the state do not have paved access roads, compared to 300 in the entire country.
Construction Industry Chamber president Eduardo Ramírez Leal said the federal government has invited regional businesses to participate in the highway revitalization plan, which should be considered as important as the administration’s other large infrastructure projects such as the Dos Bocas oil refinery and the Maya Train.
One goal of the government’s national development plan is to guarantee that at least 90% of the nation’s 40,590 kilometers of federal non-toll highways are in good condition by the end of the government’s term in 2024.
At Colegio IMI in Guadalajara, every student has an iPad.
Fresh winds are blowing through the stuffy halls of academia. A few days ago, I got to see these changes with my own eyes when I visited a little private school in Guadalajara called Instituto México Inglés (IMI).
“We don’t use textbooks here,” I was told by director Luis Medina. “Every one of our students has an iPad. And we don’t have exams anymore because the Apple system we use shows us each student’s production and progress literally moment by moment.
“As for teachers, we don’t use that word anymore. The members of my staff are coaches, who do their best to help our students carry out their own research. And we don’t have an old-style curriculum either. Instead, we present our students with a monthly challenge and they investigate it. This month’s challenge is ‘How to Resolve a Crisis.’”
To understand how a little school in Mexico reached this point, let’s pause a moment to reflect on what education has meant for most of the world’s history.
The traditional model of a school is a place where students come to sit at the feet of a teacher. The teacher expounds his or her knowledge of a subject and the student hopefully absorbs it or at least takes copious notes on the subject. Although the system has been around forever, it is highly inefficient simply because memorizing the words of a master is not enough to guarantee understanding of a subject. Awareness comes from personal investigation, from hands-on encounters.
In the previous millennium, knowledge was locked up in books and the best overview of what humanity had learned during its entire history could be found in encyclopedias.
Students write questions in English. Lying on the floor is permitted.
Then came the internet and search engines. Today no one would run to their bookshelves and open a dusty volume of the Britannica in order to investigate the concept of “bullying.” Likewise, no one would open their once highly esteemed Merriam-Webster to find out what an MP4 file is.
They would turn to Google. We would all turn to Google! So why would we send our kids to school and expect them to learn from textbooks?
“Already in 2005 we had an inkling of this,” Luis Medina told me. “An organization based in California did away with individual textbooks for math, history, etc., producing a course of subjects unified in a single printed volume which came in monthly installments.
“By 2015, however,” continued Medina, “it was clear that nothing in printed form could come close to offering the richness and timeliness of what Google was making available to everyone. This was when we decided to adopt an approach developed by Noel Trainor and Noemí Valencia in Morelia, Michoacán, called Knotion (Knowledge in Action).
“This is a true innovation because it is really learning in action, learning directed towards real life. There are now 70 Knotion schools in Mexico (and one in Guatemala) and already Knotion has been recognized at an international level as providing one of the best models for education in the world.”
“The founders of Knotion,” continued Medina, “have created an approach which replaces the study of ‘subjects’ like history and math with the investigation of challenges, with problems to be solved. The latest challenge is called Crises and the Resolution of Conflicts and the students are spending 20 days working on it. Naturally biology, history, geography, etc. all come into play when you dig into a subject like this.
IMI students query a representative of Condusef about financial problems.
“While investigating conflict resolution, some of our students heard about a Mexican government organism called Condusef, which means National Commission for the Protection and Defense of the Users of Financial Services. So what did the kids do? They went on the net to check it out and then got on the phone, called Condusef and asked for the email address of their delegate for western Mexico ‘because we need to interview her.’
“These are fourth-graders, 10 years old! Well, they were told to fill out a form for this and those kids went right ahead and filled it out and sent it in and as a result, a committee of eight of our students went to Condusef here in Guadalajara to ask them questions about how they are protecting people from financial abuse.
“This in turn made the kids realize that most people don’t know how to manage and save money, so they sent teams out to financial institutions like Banorte and La Caja Popular and they came back and presented what they had discovered to their fellow students . . . so, these students ended up teaching the other ones and thanks to the technology we use, they could share what they learned through videos, recordings and photos, with everyone learning from everyone else.”
Medina pointed out that in such a situation the teacher can’t be the teacher because he or she is not an expert on economy. The teacher becomes a co-researcher, a kind of guide and catalyzer, so Knotion uses the word coach instead of teacher.
“In a Knotion environment,” says Medina, “students gain competence not only in ‘hard skills’ like science and history, but they also become masters of ‘soft skills’ like communicating, problem solving, developing projects, teamwork, innovation, leadership and creativity — and all of these are what 21st-century companies are looking for in an employee.”
How, you might ask, was an approach developed in Morelia recently ranked in London among the top 10 educational systems in the world?
Playing chess is part of the program at IMI.
“How did it all begin?” I asked co-founder of Knotion, Noemí “Mimy” Valencia.
“We started our own little school 24 years ago,” she told me. “We started it for our own daughter. We had moved away from Mexico City and wanted to live in the country, but we couldn’t find a school that met our expectations. My husband Noel Trainor and I both had had the opportunity to study in schools that fostered our curiosity and creativity and empowered us. So when we saw that our little girl wouldn’t have that opportunity in Morelia, we started our own school and right from the beginning we and the other parents had one essential question: what’s best for the kids?
“That is what has been taking us on this journey, figuring out what kind of world we are living in, the kinds of skills and competencies our kids need in order to face the world we adults are leaving behind, and the kind of citizens that the world needs in order to become a better place. We are striving for a new humanity with different patterns of thinking and behaving and understanding. We want to create a new generation characterized by compassion, by tolerance and by social commitment, so they can really make a difference.”
Are they succeeding in this? Here is the opinion of a Knotion coach Cristina Pratts:
“The most important thing is to develop children who are autonomous, self-taught, who are forever curious and wanting to learn, and I think Knotion does this. From the very first moment they catch them and make them want to keep going, to know more, more and more.”
And here is what a Knotion parent, Lorena Rodríguez, has to say:
“I am overwhelmed by what I see happening in this escuela. In primary and secondary school they are doing the kind of research that — in my day— would have been carried out in graduate school.”
[soliloquy id="78242"]
Finally, as I finished my visit to IMI, Luis Medina casually mentioned that representatives of three of Mexico’s best universities had recently visited him, each one to quietly encourage him to send his graduates to their institution, “and all of them offered to give my students scholarships,” he told me with a proud smile, “100% scholarships!”
Now if you are looking for a mark of success, I think that pretty well takes the cake.
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.
Seasonal job opportunity in Quintana Roo: sargassum shoveler.
Pay: 5,000 pesos (US $260) a month for eight hours of work per day.
Conditions: harsh.
Since seasonal invasions of the smelly and unsightly brown seaweed began to increase in 2015, hoteliers in Cancún have been forced to employ so-called sargaceros to keep the resort city’s white-sand beaches clean.
Sargassum shovelers typically start their eight-hours shifts under the strong Caribbean coast sun at 6:00am and work throughout the day, gathering the seaweed into large piles with spades and pitchforks and then removing it from the beach using nets.
“It’s a frustrating job because what’s cleaned in eight hours, nature returns in 45 minutes,” said Roberto Cintrón, president of the Cancún and Puerto Morelos Hotels Association.
He described sargaceros’ work days as “very exhausting,” pointing out that one cubic meter of wet sargassum can weigh more than 250 kilograms. Six men are needed to move a net filled with the seaweed, Cintrón said.
“It’s very tiresome for us; after a while your back hurts and your muscles can’t take it anymore,” said hotel employee Alexis Esquivel.
“A little bit of help from the government wouldn’t be bad,” he added.
“Every day is a struggle that never finishes, it’s very difficult,” said Jorge Estrella, a hotel lifeguard who also works as a sargacero.
In addition to being frustrating and physically draining, the job of a sargassum shoveler is also stinky – the smell of the decomposing seaweed is often compared to rotten fish.
But someone has to do it.
With the arrival of more than one million tonnes of sargassum predicted this year, and claims that authorities are not doing enough to combat the problem, more sargaceros than ever are likely to be required this year.
Applications accepted at most hotels located on the Mexican Caribbean coast.
DogHero provides an accommodation service for pet owners.
Dog owners look for accommodation options for their pets now have their own special Airbnb in Mexico.
The Brazil-based startup DogHero streamlines the process of obtaining dog-sitting services, putting dog owners in contact with hosts that can look after their pets while their owners are on vacation or at work.
The service launched in 2014 in Brazil and arrived in Mexico last year. Less than 12 months later, DogHero has proved a success, says its co-founder and CEO, growing at a faster pace than it did in its home country.
Eduardo Baer told the newspaper El Economista that the firm is planning to invest US $7 million in Latin America, and 20% of that will be allocated to the service in Mexico.
” . . . We are very pleased with the reception, that is why we decided to invest, because here in Mexico we grew twice as fast as we did in Brazil. For us, this means that we are providing a service that Mexican users like.”
The service is currently available in 11 cities, including Guadalajara, Monterrey, Querétaro and Cancún, but DogHero intends to expand throughout the country.
The expansion will also bring a wider array of services DogHero has already implemented successfully in Brazil, such as pet insurance and training. Bauer said they are planning to run a trial of those services in Mexico by late summer.
The labor secretary provides an update on the scholarship program Friday morning.
Just four months after its implementation, a federal youth training and scholarship program has already signed up over half a million beneficiaries, more than half-way to its goal of reaching one million by the end of the year.
Labor and Social Welfare Secretary Luisa María Alcalde said today that the “Young People Building the Future” program has signed up 501,559 youths, 378,650 of whom are now receiving a monthly scholarship of 3,600 pesos (US $190).
Alcalde said 75,507 businesses, 70% from the private sector, have signed on to the program as tutors, another aspect of the program that provides specialized training to 18 to 29-year-olds.
Another goal is to discourage young people from involvement in organized crime. Alcalde said the program has been implemented in 100% of the communities identified as fuel theft hotspots.
She added that on average, participants are 23 years old, 20% have a bachelor’s degree and 58% are women.
The program, which has a budget of 40 billion pesos, is available in 92% of the country’s municipalities, with the highest enrollment numbers in Chiapas, with 81,120, Tabasco with 57, 720 and Veracruz with 49,959.
Mexican flag carrier Aeroméxico has been ranked third in the world by AirHelp, an online platform that helps air passengers get compensation from airlines when their flights are canceled, delayed or overbooked.
The AirHelp Score 2019 ranking of global airlines is based on three factors: on-time performance, service quality and claim processing.
Aeroméxico ranked third behind Qatar Airlines and American Airlines, obtaining an overall score of 8.1 points out of 10.
Broken down, that score shows that the airline obtained 7.8 points in on-time performance, 8.4 in service quality and eight in claim processing.
Government data showed that Aeroméxico’s on-time performance rate was 91.1%.
Aeroméxico was the only Mexican airline among the 72 whose performance was measured.
Business groups, a credit rating agency, the European Union and petroleum sector analysts have spoken out against the federal government’s decision to scrap the bidding process for the new oil refinery in Tabasco and build the project itself.
President López Obrador said yesterday that the bids received by the government for the Dos Bocas refinery had been rejected on the grounds that they were too high and because the companies’ estimated timeframes to complete the project were too long.
Instead, the state oil company and the Secretariat of Energy (Sener) will build the refinery, he said.
The Mexican Employers Federation (Coparmex) urged the government to reconsider its plan in consideration of the risks it could generate for Pemex and the nation’s public finances.
López Obrador said the refinery will cost no more than US $8 billion and be ready in May 2022 but Coparmex warned in a statement that there is ample evidence that the project won’t be all smooth sailing for the government.
‘Things could go wrong,’ warns Coparmex chief.
“Things could go wrong,” the business group said:
When the most indebted oil company in the world decides to undertake on its own a project of this magnitude in a line of business (refining) that has historically been unprofitable.
When specialist international companies decide not to participate under the conditions proposed by the government, warning of much higher costs and a longer execution time.
When the government has little or no experience in building refineries.
When the world is rapidly moving towards the replacement of fossil fuels with those that are friendly to the environment.
The Confederation of Chambers of Commerce, Services and Tourism (Concanaco) was also critical, stating that private companies could be dissuaded from investing in Mexico as a result.
Moody’s Investor Services said the move will place increased pressure on the finances of Pemex – it already has debt of US $106.5 billion – and the government.
“The fact that the project is advancing under the supervision of Pemex and the Secretariat of Energy is another task for the Pemex management team, which is already struggling to stop the decline in the production of crude and upgrade the existing refineries,” said Peter Speer, a senior vice-president at Moody’s and leading Pemex analyst.
Potential delays in the project and cost overruns pose risks both to the state oil company and the government, he said.
Klaus Rudischhauser, European Union ambassador to Mexico, said the government’s decision to take charge of the project sends a bad signal to international companies that are looking at the possibility of participating in the large infrastructure projects proposed by the López Obrador administration.
“I don’t know whether replacing a bidding process with national investment is a good response, I have my doubts,” he said.
Rudischhauser said that there is interest in European countries to participate in projects such as the Maya Train and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec trade corridor but stressed that it is essential to have clearly-defined international tendering processes.
Petroleum sector experts including former Pemex officials told the newspaper Milenio that the government’s decision was “bad news,” stating that the state oil company and Sener don’t have the technical capacity to carry out the refinery project.
Former Pemex refining director Juan Bueno Torio said the state-owned entity isn’t a construction company and doesn’t have the technology required to complete the project, while analyst Ramsés Pech said the private sector should invest in smaller refineries in strategic locations in order to improve the supply of fuel.
Opposition lawmakers were also critical, arguing that Pemex doesn’t have the necessary experience to build the refinery and contending that the US $8-billion budget will be insufficient.
In contrast, the ruling party’s leader in the lower house called the move a “brave decision.”
Mario Delgado said that putting Pemex in charge of the refinery project was just as ambitious as former president Lázaro Cárdenas’ creation of the state oil company.
Ricardo Monreal, leader of the Morena party in the Senate, expressed confidence that the López Obrador will fulfill his promise to build the refinery in three years without exceeding the budget, and called on others to show the same faith.
“I’ve known him for years, he’s perseverant and he’s going to achieve it,” he said.
It’s Mother’s Day in Mexico but 40,000 moms whose sons and daughters are missing have nothing to celebrate.
Thousands of mothers of the missing will march in at least 23 cities today to draw attention to their ongoing struggle to locate their children in a country where rates of violence remain stubbornly high, thousands of unidentified bodies lie in morgues and hidden graves are regularly discovered.
It will be the eighth consecutive year that mothers and other family members of missing persons take to the streets to demand that authorities increase their efforts to find their loved ones.
In Mexico City, the National Dignity March will begin at the Monument to the Mother and conclude at the Angel of Independence, located on the capital’s emblematic Paseo de la Reforma boulevard. Simultaneous marches are planned for 22 other Mexican cities.
Among the participants in the Mexico City march will be members of a collective from Coahuila known as United Forces for our Missing.
“. . . We have nothing to celebrate,” said spokesperson María Elena Salazar.
Mothers march in Monterrey, Nuevo León.
“Even though we have other children, one of them isn’t with us. While we don’t know what happened, we can’t let this date go by unnoticed.”
Salazar called on the federal government to treat all missing persons cases equally and not just focus on “emblematic cases,” such as the disappearance of 43 teaching students in Guerrero in 2014.
“We have a new government and we continue to demand that it help us and listen to us. It shouldn’t seek [to solve only] emblematic cases . . . we all have the same necessity,” she said.
In Veracruz, where crimes including homicides and kidnappings have spiked recently and a secret cemetery was discovered last month, Lucía Díaz, founder of the Solecito Collective, said that mothers of the missing will march today in the port city of Veracruz.
During a previous march, the collective received a macabre gift: a sketch of the location of a mass clandestine grave at Colinas de Santa Fe, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Veracruz city. The remains of 300 people were exhumed from the site.
However, Díaz said that the state’s top prosecutor is not offering the same support to the hundreds of collectives in the state that are made up of family members of the disappeared.
“The attorney general [Jorge Winckler] doesn’t make the slightest effort to hide his repudiation toward us,” she said.
Announcing the federal government’s search commission funding in February, human rights undersecretary Alejandro Encinas described Mexico as an “enormous hidden grave.”
“It’s estimated that there are currently 40,000 disappeared persons, more than 1,100 clandestine graves and around 26,000 unidentified bodies in morgues . . . that gives an account of the magnitude of the humanitarian crisis and the violation of human rights that we are confronting,” he said.
Palace of Mayan Civilization could itself become an archaeological site.
Mexico is a “public works cemetery,” according to President López Obrador, replete with incomplete highways, bridges, schools and prisons, among other abandoned infrastructure projects.
But there is no sector with more unfinished projects than health: there are 250 abandoned medical projects in Mexico, including 57 hospitals.
Corruption, budget shortfalls, a lack of interest from governments and community opposition have all contributed to the high number of white elephants in the country, the newspaper Milenio said in a report.
One such project is a cancer hospital in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, whose construction began in 2014 during the administration of former governor César Duarte, who fled Mexico in early 2017 to avoid corruption charges.
The project had an initial budget of 235 million pesos (US $12.2 million) but current Governor Javier Corral says that 624 million pesos (US $32.5 million) is needed to finish it and purchase the equipment required for it to operate.
The Zapotillo dam in Jalisco, halted by injunctions.
During a visit to the hospital in August last year, then president-elect López Obrador said that the former Chihuahua government had tried to give the impression that the project was finished.
“It has a façade [but] it’s set design, it’s as if it were finished but inside it’s a dead project,” he said.
“All over the country, there is a public works cemetery, that’s the bitter reality,” López Obrador added.
Health Secretary Jorge Alcocer recently described Mexico’s incomplete hospitals and medical clinics as “scandalous monuments of incompetence, corruption and influence peddling.”
Among the other unfinished and abandoned projects are:
• A federal high-security prison in Tamaulipas that was to cost 640 million pesos and house 1,640 inmates was halted a year after construction began due to structural flaws. It was 30% complete at that point and had cost 250 million pesos.
The Tamaulipas prison halted due to construction issues.
• The Zapotillo dam in Jalisco was considered a priority project by the National Water Commission 14 years ago. It has cost over 20 billion pesos and is 85% complete but has been halted by injunctions obtained by opponents of the project.
Among them are residents of three communities that would be submerged upon completion of the dam.
• The Palace of the Mayan Civilization in Yaxcabá, Yucatán, was to have been a signature project for Ivonne Ortega, governor from 2007 until 2012, and was announced as the most important cultural center in the southeast of Mexico.
But today the half-finished project — perhaps doomed to become an archaeological site itself — lies abandoned after costing the treasury more than 300 million pesos.
• The second stage of the Chicoasén hydroelectric project in Chiapas, considered a strategic project by the Federal Electricity Commission when it began in early 2015, was halted after violent protests over the removal and trucking of materials and opposition from communal landowners who claim they are still waiting for compensation for the first stage of the project, built in the 1980s.
It was projected to cost US $400 million but costs have risen by another $200 million, putting its viability in doubt.
Nayarit’s ‘signature project’ is an unfinished network of irrigation canals.
• Another “signature project” was the Canal Centenario in Nayarit, announced by then-president Enrique Peña Nieto and then-governor Roberto Sandoval in 2013. The network of irrigation canals in the north of the state was to deliver water to 43,000 hectares of agricultural land and cost 7 billion pesos.
The project is now just 15% complete and there don’t appear to be funds available for its completion. Both Peña Nieto and Sandoval are now out of the picture.
New eyes are keeping permanent watch over Hidalgo: a high-tech security bunker officially opened in the state this week.
The Control, Command, Communication, Computer, Quality and Intelligence Center — C5i for short — is located in the municipality of Zapotlán de Juárez, near the state capital, Pachuca.
Built on 36,836 square meters of land, the circular bunker has three different levels, two of which are underground, and the capacity to accommodate almost 300 employees.
The C5i will serve as the nerve center for the statewide security strategy known as Hidalgo Seguro (Safe Hidalgo).
The facility boasts a monitoring room with a video wall that can be divided into 510 separate screens. Security specialists will continually observe images sent to the center from more than 5,000 surveillance cameras located in different parts of Hidalgo.
Multiple screens keep an eye on things in Hidalgo.
They will notify police in cases of crime or emergency services when citizens require assistance.
The private sector has plans to install an additional 5,000 C5i-linked security cameras in Hidalgo to take the total to 10,000.
The center will also receive alerts from 1,255 panic buttons strategically-positioned in different parts of the state and 30,000 community alarms that have been installed in neighborhoods with high rates of crime.
In addition to state security personnel, officials from the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR), the Federal Police, Civil Protection and a range of other agencies will also be stationed at the bunker, which has been described as having the appearance of a flying saucer or a Star Wars spaceship.
As part of wider efforts to combat insecurity in Hidalgo, where petroleum theft in particular is a problem, the state has put new camera-equipped police cars into service, 350 for state police and 143 for municipal forces.
Twenty new drones and a tactical aircraft are also supporting anti-crime operations in the central Mexican state.
The command center could be out of Star Wars.
The C5i replaces the C4 center, which at the start of Governor Omar Fayad’s administration in September 2016 was operating with just 64 cameras.
At yesterday’s inauguration, which President López Obrador also attended, Fayad said that the C5i has the “most sophisticated” information system of any security center in Latin America.
Although fuel theft is a problem, in which at least seven criminal organizations are engaged, the state hasn’t seen anywhere near the levels of violence in Guanajuato, where the crime is believed to be behind much of the violence that made that state the deadliest in Mexico last year.
In contrast, Hidalgo recorded the third lowest per-capita homicide rate in Mexico last year behind only Yucatán and Aguascalientes.
