Soldiers wear National Guard insignia in Minatitlán.
President López Obrador issued a call yesterday to members of the new National Guard not to overstep their bounds in the use of force and to respect human rights while in the line of duty.
The president presented a contingent of the new security force during a visit to Minatitlán, Veracruz, in the wake of last week’s massacre of 13 people.
It was the force’s first deployment and evidently a hurried one: secondary laws governing its operation remain to be approved and not all its personnel were wearing the Guard’s new uniform yesterday.
The government has sent 1,059 personnel to three Veracruz municipalities — Minatitlán, Cosoleacaque and Coatzacoalcos.
Speaking to local residents, the president said more vigorous policing was only one measure in a larger plan to restore peace and prosperity to the country’s most troubled areas.
He also said special measures were being taken to ensure the appropriate use of force.
“We are putting emphasis on ensuring that [the National Guard] can carry out their duty of guaranteeing public safety while respecting human rights with a gradual and appropriate use of force so they do not cross the line, and so that human rights are respected at all times.”
Creation of the new force has been widely criticized for being another military presence on the streets of Mexico and a threat to human rights given the record of the military over the last dozen years.
López Obrador said that when he took office, the Federal Police force numbered only 10,000 officers.
In contrast, the army and navy were composed of 220,000 and 65,000 troops respectively, but they could not be used to enforce public security because of constitutional limitations.
“So we said, let’s amend the constitution; we need to create a national guard because public safety is what’s most important.”
Speaking of last week’s attack on a bar that killed 13 people, he told residents they were not alone.
“I have come to tell you that you are not alone; you have the support of your government.”
The president outlined plans to promote economic growth, providing aid to the area’s oil and gas industry, programs for agricultural workers and work and study opportunities for youths to offer alternatives to crime.
The federal government projects that the Santa Lucía airport will cost just 12% of the former government’s canceled project at Texcoco, México state, and will open in June 2021 with a capacity for 20 million passengers a year.
Project chief Sergio Samaniego said yesterday that construction of the airport at the Santa Lucía Air Force Base north of Mexico City will cost 72 billion pesos (US $3.8 billion), whereas the total cost of the Texcoco project – including the demolition of the current airport and that in Santa Lucía – would have been 600 billion pesos (US $31.7 billion).
However, once costs associated with canceling the previous government’s signature infrastructure project are taken into account, the price tag for the Santa Lucía airport increases to 172 billion pesos (US $9.1 billion), or 28.7% of the total projected cost at Texcoco.
The head of the military college of engineers, which will build the project, told a press conference that the Santa Lucía airport — to be named after the revolutionary general Felipe Ángeles — will be “austere in its design, efficient, functional, sustainable, easy to build . . . safe and emblematic.”
Brigadier General Ricardo Vallejo said the airport should be completed by June 2021 and will have a capacity for 20 million passengers in its first year of operation.
He added that the number of passengers using the airport annually could eventually increase to 80 million, explaining that “its maximum potential, its development potential, will be over 50 years.”
The first stage at Santa Lucía includes construction of two runways, a terminal building, a parking lot with space for 4,000 cars, a control tower, a maintenance hangar and a freight terminal, among other facilities.
Vallejo said that a new 46-kilometer highway will allow passengers to travel between the new airport and the existing Mexico City airport in 35 minutes. The road will cost 10 billion pesos (US $527.8 million) and be ready in two and a half years, he said.
The president explained: “I will visit Santa Lucía on Monday but if I tell you that we’re going to start to build the airport I already know what the opponents will reply. They’ll say: ‘Where’s the environmental impact statement, why isn’t the law being respected?’ That’s why it was decided to do the presentation of the project on Monday and construction will begin in June.”
He added that “the bad news” for opponents of the project is that people who live in the area have already been consulted and have given their consent for the airport to go ahead.
The design of the Texcoco airport was rather more ambitious.
“. . . Little by little we’re making progress and in June 2021 we’ll be inaugurating Santa Lucía,” the president said.
During the campaign for the 2018 presidential election, López Obrador pledged that he would cancel the Texcoco airport project should he win election, charging that it was corrupt, too expensive and not needed.
Communications and Transportation Secretary Javier Jiménez Espriú yesterday accused the Mexico City Airport Group (GACM) of negligence and hiding information about irregularities in Texcoco, explaining that the possible embezzlement of 6 billion pesos (US $316.7 million) is being investigated
While still president-elect, López Obrador held a public consultation last October that found almost 70% support to cancel the project and instead build the Santa Lucía airport and upgrade the existing airports in Mexico City airport and Toluca.
López Obrador said that if he didn’t cancel the Texcoco project, the Mexico City and Santa Lucía airports would have closed.
“The construction . . . of the airport in Texcoco was going to mean closing two airports . . . Do you know why? To make deals with the land of the two airports,” he said.
“What they [the past government] was planning . . . was the urbanization of the land. They wanted to build a kind of Santa Fe [an upscale Mexico City business and residential district] on the land of the current airport . . .” López Obrador added.
The president said it was “natural” for people involved in the “corrupt” Texcoco project to be upset, “but we have a popular mandate and we were elected to put an end to corruption.”
Lawmakers in Sinaloa have proposed banning narco ballads and reggaeton music in schools, arguing that they send “decadent messages” to children and adolescents.
The bill presented to the state Congress by Morena Deputies Pedro Alonso Villegas Lobo and Apolinar García Carrera states that school festivals should celebrate Sinaloan folklore rather than songs and dances that “denigrate children and adolescents” with their “erotic, sexual, hateful, discriminatory, misogynistic and homophobic” content.
Narco ballads, or narcocorridos in Spanish, is a subgenre of Mexican norteño music that glorifies and seeks to humanize drug traffickers, while reggaeton, a musical style that originated in Puerto Rico, is infamous for its highly sexualized lyrics.
The proposal to ban the two styles of music is based on a study carried out by researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland that established that listening to reggaeton can lead to sexually aggressive behavior, eating disorders, low self-esteem, consumption of drugs and depression among young people.
Villegas and García say the study shows that young people are particularly vulnerable to being led astray by external influences that send different messages from those sent by authority figures such as teachers and parents.
Reggaeton lyrics can cause boys to see their female classmates as “mere sexual objects” and consequently behave aggressively towards them, they said.
“Young people are very prone to being induced, they’re at a stage when they can be easily persuaded by what’s in their environment, and these kinds of lyrics, these kinds of music that lead them to having a narco culture, a culture in which it’s very natural to abuse women, we’re against that,” Villegas said.
The bill doesn’t yet propose specific penalties that school principals and teachers could face if they don’t follow the law but Villegas said they will be added at a later date. Sanctions could include dismissal or even criminal charges, he said.
The deputy predicted that the proposal will become law because it is supported by all Morena lawmakers in Sinaloa and the party has a majority in the state Congress.
The northern state, especially the capital Culiacán, is considered a hub of Mexico’s narco culture.
A young boy’s candid response to a reporter’s question touched some chords, with the result that one of his dreams — building a sandcastle on the beach — is about to come true.
Early this week a television reporter in Monterrey, Nuevo León, asked young Andrick what he liked to do most during vacations.
“I like to build sandcastles,” he answered, to which the reporter followed up with, “Have you gone to the beach?” “No,” the boy replied.
“How do you build sandcastles then?” the reporter continued.
“Only in my dreams.”
The 16-second clip was posted online and soon went viral, with commenters on social media half-jokingly wondering if they should chip in and send the young boy to the beach.
But others decided to do more than joke about the story.
Broadcaster Multimedios Televisión started organizing Andrick’s dream vacation by approaching possible donors.
Puerto Vallarta Tourism Trust director Javier Aranda Pedredero explained that the broadcaster contacted his organization after first talking to low-cost airline VivaAerobus.
The tourism organization then persuaded the Hacienda Buenaventura Hotel in Puerto Vallarta to join the initiative, which will include Andrick’s family.
Even getting to and from the airport has been taken care of: the car rental agency Avis will provide airport transportation.
The Tourism Trust said everything is now in place to welcome the young boy and his family so they can “enjoy our beautiful beaches.”
But the holiday might not end there.
Andrick has also been invited to travel to Zihuatanejo, Guerrero.
The international trade and investment agency ProMéxico, much reviled and then ordered shut down by the new federal government, was generous with its salaries.
Under the previous government, the promotional agency ProMéxico paid salaries as high as US $21,000 a month to its employees, freedom of information requests reveal.
A report published today in the newspaper Milenio said that a high-ranking official in Washington D.C. earned that amount while two others in London, England, and Switzerland were paid more than 19,000 euros (US $21,200 at today’s exchange rate).
Other generous salaries included 17,000 euros a month for a first secretary posted to Qatar, 200,000 pesos (US $10,500) for a manager of an overseas office, 130,000 pesos for a private secretary and 50,000 pesos for a chauffeur.
Personnel posted to 46 ProMéxico offices in 30 countries in North, Central and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania also received generous benefits, including life insurance, holiday pay, annual bonuses, rent assistance and airline tickets.
ProMéxico also spent big during the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto to rent offices.
In six years, it paid more than 148.7 million pesos (US $7.85 million) to rent offices in 20 cities, Milenio said. Other ProMéxico offices operated out of Mexico’s embassies and consulates.
A public trust fund and a branch of the Secretariat of the Economy (SE), ProMéxico was created by former president Felipe Calderón in 2007.
Before he took office last December, President López Obrador pledged that the agency would be eliminated, taking the view that its offices generated significant expenses yet did nothing that couldn’t be achieved through traditional diplomacy.
Yesterday, he claimed that ProMéxico “doesn’t exist anymore” but the Milenio report said it is still operational.
A recent government human resources document seen by the newspaper says that public servants are still working in the agency’s overseas offices.
ProMéxico was allocated more than 914 million pesos (US $48.2 million) in this year’s budget.
Oil rigs are being frequently targeted by pirates.
Pirates attacked and plundered an oil rig last Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico, locking up the crew while they looked for loot.
Witnesses said at least six men armed with guns and knives boarded the rig at 9:30pm and proceeded directly to the third floor to wake up the crew. After locking up workers in the cafeteria, the thieves wandered freely, looting equipment, materials, money and anything of value they could carry.
The pirates departed at 4:00 am on Monday, when the rig’s captain sent an emergency alert to authorities. The navy responded 4 1/2 hours later. The crew and company lawyers have spent this week in interviews and taking inventory of damaged or stolen items, which have still not been fully identified.
It was not the first heist of this kind in the Gulf of Mexico, where pirate attacks are becoming a growing threat to oil rigs. On March 12, President López Obrador announced that the navy would maintain permanent operations off the coast of Dos Bocas, Tabasco, to protect against pirates that have in the past attacked Pemex oil rigs.
The rig that was targeted Sunday, called Fortius, is anchored several kilometers off the shore of Campeche. When fully staffed it has a total capacity of 150 people, but it is currently manned by a small maintenance team.
The owner, Mexican oilfield services firm Oro Negro, declared bankruptcy in September 2017, and is currently in the middle of a US $900-million negotiation with debtholders over the future of five oil rigs, including Fortius.
The first unit of the National Guard will begin operations today in Minatitlán, Veracruz, President López Obrador announced this morning.
The president reminded reporters at his daily press conference that National Guard units will eventually be deployed to 266 different regions in the country.
“We’re starting in Veracruz . . . the first [unit] that has been established with a sufficient number of elements, with a single command, will be in Minatitlán,” he said.
Other contingents of the new security force will begin operations in Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, and Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, this weekend and by the middle of June, 51 units are expected to have been deployed.
“We reached an agreement that by the middle of June at the latest we’ll have 51 coordinations of the National Guard in operation . . . with 25,000 elements,” López Obrador said.
He cited the south of Veracruz, Cancún, Quintana Roo and Tijuana, Baja California, as locations where the force is urgently needed.
Accompanied by members of his security cabinet, the president traveled today to Minatitlán, where 14 people were killed last Friday during a family celebration at a bar.
López Obrador said this morning he would take the opportunity to express his condolences to the families of the victims as well as hold a public meeting with the city’s residents.
He explained that the meeting was originally intended as a forum for discussion on the government’s welfare programs but added that the agenda has been widened to include security.
“We’re going to give a response to the demand for security. The security cabinet will accompany me and a plan will be presented to protect the public within the framework of the operation of the National Guard,” López Obrador said.
The Minatitlán Chamber of Commerce said yesterday that 300 businesses closed in the city between 2015 and 2018 due to security concerns and that another 40 have shut this year.
In an interview with Milenio Television, state Public Security Secretary Hugo Gutiérrez shifted that blame to Comtelsat, the company responsible for installing and maintaining the cameras.
He said most of the cameras — not just in Minatitlán but the whole state — had failed and that the situation has “cost lives.”
Just 1,600 of 6,500 cameras are in working order, Gutiérrez said, adding that authorities have filed a complaint against Comtelsat with the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR).
As part of the investigations into Friday’s massacre, the secretary said that authorities have had to seek out footage recorded by cameras at homes and business to try to determine the route the perpetrators took to and from the crime scene.
“If our cameras were working, locating those people would be easier,” Gutiérrez said.
“. . . Because of this great fraud, lives have now been lost.”
The jealous tunnel builder after his rescue yesterday.
Overcome by jealousy, a Sonora man attempted to tunnel under his ex-wife’s property to spy on her but his plans went awry yesterday — he became stuck in the tunnel.
Police in Puerto Peñasco were called yesterday afternoon by Griselda Santillán, 58, who said she had been hearing strange noises behind her house during the past week, but had believed they were caused by cats.
But the noises became stranger yesterday, prompting Santillán and a neighbor to inspect her yard. They discovered the mouth of a tunnel and several knives and water bottles. Inside was her ex-husband, who had been trapped for some 24 hours and had been calling for help.
Emergency services personnel spent an arduous 45 minutes rescuing César Arnoldo Gómez Gómez, 50, Santillán’s husband of 14 years.
She told authorities that she had decided to leave him due to his jealous behavior, and had obtained a restraining order against him.
Gómez was hospitalized and treated for dehydration before being taken into custody for violating the restraining order.
Part of the massive bloom of sargassum that has been tracked with satellite imagery made landfall yesterday on the coast of Quintana Roo, depositing tonnes of the seaweed on beaches — and delivering a surprise for local law enforcement.
The seaweed began arriving early in the morning on beaches in Tulum and Playa del Carmen as was forecast by the Cancún-based sargassum monitoring network, based on data provided by the Optical Oceanography Laboratory at the University of Southern Florida.
Municipal workers in Solidaridad — where Playa del Carmen is located — used heavy machinery to remove the mounds of seaweed.
Children play in the seaweed yesterday in Playa del Carmen.
There were tourists on the beaches despite the presence of the seaweed, but tourism businesses in the region fear that the two-week-long Easter vacation could end on a negative note.
Among those tourists was a group in Playa del Carmen who made a call yesterday morning to the 911 emergency service to report the discovery of two mysterious packages wrapped in packing tape and tangled in the seaweed on the beach.
Federal Police officers arrived at the scene and found 4.9 kilograms of marijuana in the packages.
Workers on the roof. Inadvertently cutting an electrical wire cost a Miehle dishwasher.
As we entered the fourth week of our renovation project, it was time to lay out the new electrical plugs and switches.
This was also the time to sort through the existing electrical wiring, much of which looked like multi-colored worms having group sex. Of course, I know that living through a home remodeling project is like living in the wild; you do whatever is necessary to survive.
In keeping with that knowledge, I contacted the electrician I have so successfully used in the past. The first shock was to discover that he wanted way too much money to do the work we now needed. It seems he has been doing work for gringos who were willing to pay exorbitant rates just as long as it was less than “back home.”
So the search for another competent electrician began in earnest.
There is no shortage of men in our area who will look you in the eye and calmly claim to have the requisite skill set of an electrician. Years ago, I discovered that in Mazatlán anyone with a pair of pliers and a roll of tape would proudly claim the title.
Is it wiring or multi-colored worms having group sex?
The bright side is that a person who has not been electrocuted in the first few years of practicing his trade might hold a tenuous grip on electrical theory. After all, this is true Darwinism in action.
Here in Mazatlán the prudent rule of thumb is, rather than listening to a person’s claims of his own great competence, hire someone who has been recommended by a person whose judgment is disinterested, yet tempered by experience.
So we put the word out to our friends and acquaintances that we needed a seasoned electrician. As our list of possibilities dwindled to a couple of choices for various different reasons, including the lack of availability due to the building boom here, the next step was to visit an ongoing project to inspect the workmanship.
It was on one of these workmanship inspections that I encountered a practice so deceptively ludicrous I thought I had fallen down the rabbit hole. With a grin akin to that of the Cheshire cat, the electrician explained that he was replacing all the copper wire in the project we were viewing, not because it was believed to be troublesome in any way, but because it was over 10 years old.
He had convinced the homeowner that copper wire wears out over time and 10 years was the expected lifespan. And thus, all homes needed to have all the wiring replaced after 10 years, regardless of whether any inadequacies existed or not.
I was very tempted to ask the so-called electrician or the homeowner, “Will he come back in 10 years to replace it again?” How many people in the past had trusted this man for his expertise? I politely disengaged myself from this tea party before the mad hatter showed up.
A jumble of wires at the meter box.
Copper wire along with copper pipe are both coveted in this part of the world and either is quickly stolen when left lying about or unsecured. This shrewd electrician did not need to engage in any type of covert theft.
Not only was he being paid for completely unnecessary work, he had also devised a way by which an unsuspecting homeowner would freely hand over kilos of copper wire, believing it to be past its useful life. The beneficiary of this largess would then burn off the insulation and sell the copper to one of the metal recyclers.
As both the electrician search and the demolition work progressed, I discovered one of my peons had worked with an electrician for an undetermined amount of time. He had a vague concept of plugs, switches and lights, plus I had seen that he was capable of running power tools without inflicting serious injuries on himself or others. I made him my electrical helper, after I located my rusty pliers and roll of tape.
Since I had done both residential and commercial electrical work back in my dark and jaded past, I felt I could deal with a few switches and plugs as well as lights and a/c. I mean, how hard could it be?
When electrical work is done in the excessively regulated countries north of the border, it follows a standardized set of guidelines called the National Electrical Code (NEC). These guidelines are religiously pursued because electricity is the most dangerous element in most homes. Think about it — have you ever heard of someone being killed by their plumbing?
Anyway, one of the most important guidelines set forth in the NEC is the proper color coding of all electrical wiring i.e. green for ground, white for neutral, and anything black, red or blue carries line voltage and is hot. This knowledge alone keeps people in the English-speaking world from inadvertently getting zapped by a hot wire.
However, here in the land of tacos and tequila, the color coding of electrical wiring is what I like to call a la fiesta. In other words, a colorful jumble of disorganized wires which can hold exciting surprises for curious gringo intruders.
Another frightening aspect of Mexican wiring is its ability to change color from one point to another. For example, a black wire will leave the breaker panel and run through its conduit to reappear in an outlet box which has all the colors except black. This means the wire has been spliced somewhere in route to the outlet box; this is not a good practice.
The propensity to attach two or three wires to a single breaker is also a common aspect of Mexican wiring. And the list goes on ad infinitum, but you get the idea. Fortunately all the homes in our area of Mexico’s west coast are constructed with bricks, mortar and reinforced concrete. If homes here were built from flammable materials, our entire town would have burned to the ground years ago.
Mexican electrical is not quite as dangerous as dropping a toaster in your bath water, but there can be similar moments. Several days ago I went into our kitchen, one of the few undisturbed rooms of our home, and smelled burning electrical wires.
I immediately killed the power in the panel for that end of the house and broke out my test meter. Of the two legs of single-phase power which feeds the panel, one leg bounced between 268 and 210 volts and the other leg fluctuated between 20 and 70 volts. I had never seen anything remotely like this before, ever.
It seems the demolition crew, on the roof at that time, severed the neutral line from the CFE (the Mexican power company). This caused the power to jump back and forth between the two main feed lines and the line with the highest voltage just happened to be the one which sent power to the kitchen. The fridge and the coffee maker survived, but the blender, microwave and The Captured Tourist Woman’s Miele dishwasher did not.
This incident brought home a reminder that the direct costs of construction in Mexico can be roughly calculated, but the indirect costs can suck pesos like a black hole.
The writer describes himself as a very middle-aged man who lives full-time in Mazatlán with a captured tourist woman and the ghost of a half wild dog. He can be reached at buscardero@yahoo.com.
