Mexico City Security Secretary Jesús Orta Martínez announced his resignation on Thursday after only 10 months in office.
Orta made the announcement in a statement posted to Twitter on Friday.
“Over these 10 months, through consistent, deep efforts, we’ve been able to give the police the capacity it needs to address insecurity in the city,” said Orta.
Orta’s tenure was marked by several high-profile cases, including the murders of Norberto Ronquillo and Leonardo Avendaño. Crime statistics in Mexico City also continued an upward trend during his 10-month tenure.
The Mexico City government said Orta resigned for personal reasons, but the Citizens’ Movement party said that he was pushed out because his security policies had not been successful. In a press release, the Citizens’ Movement celebrated his resignation.
“Allowing Jesús Orta to spend more time in a position with such importance for the residents of the city would have been an even more serious mistake,” they said. “And even though removing him was the right decision, it is worrying that the removal happened without a recognition of the former secretary’s failure to guarantee security in the country’s capital.”
Orta has been replaced by Omar García Harfuch, the head of the Mexico City investigative police. He was sworn in as chief on Friday.
“Omar García Harfuch is the right person with the police experience needed to develop new police capabilities and return peace to the city,” said Orta.
The grandson of the man who was national defense secretary during the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which security forces killed at least 300 students, García, 37, started his law enforcement career in the Federal Police in 2008.
In 2009, he was among a group of Federal Police officers that was investigated by the United States government for involvement in crime, according to information released by Wikileaks.
According to the magazine Proceso, his name turned up in connection with the Guerreros Unidos crime gang, suspected in the disappearance of 43 students in Guerrero in 2014.
His contact information was found in a notebook belonging to gang leader Sidronio Casarrubias.
García has been decorated twice by the Federal Police for merit. He has a degree in law and a master’s in criminal law.
Mexico only has a 4% chance of reducing childhood obesity rates by 2025, according to an organization devoted to addressing the global obesity problem.
The World Obesity Federation (WOF) predicted in the report Atlas of Childhood Obesity that there will be just over 6.5 million school-aged Mexican children with the condition in 2030.
Based on that prediction, Mexico will have the seventh highest number of obese children in a decade’s time, behind only China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil and Egypt. All of the countries except Egypt have higher populations than Mexico.
Published on Wednesday, the WOF report said that 19.9% of Mexican boy aged five to nine were obese in 2016 and that 15% of girls in the same age bracket were suffering from the ailment. The same year, 15.2% of boys aged 10 to 19, and 11.7% of girls, were obese.
The WOF noted that Mexico has policies in place to reduce physical inactivity, reduce unhealthy diet and restrict the marketing of certain foods to children. However, they will not stop obesity rates from rising, the federation predicted.
In 2030, almost a quarter of children aged five to nine, and about one-fifth of youngsters in the 10 to 19 age bracket, will be obese, the report said.
Abelardo Avila, a researcher at the National Institute of Medical Science and Nutrition, warned that the current situation in Mexico is likely even worse because the 2016 statistics cited in the WOF report don’t paint a complete picture of obesity in Mexico.
He said that people who live in poverty are most likely to suffer from the disease, adding that the “metabolic damage” of the disease is six or seven times greater on children who suffered malnutrition while in their mother’s womb.
Avila said that Mexico hadn’t done enough during the past two decades to combat obesity but applauded this week’s approval by the lower house of Congress of modifications to the General Health Law that stipulate that the labels on food and drinks must warn consumers if they contain high levels of calories, sugar, salt or saturated fat.
The researcher said that if additional measures to tackle obesity are implemented, positive results could be achieved during the next 10 years.
Soldiers were detained by cartel operators in Michoacán in May.
Two incidents last month suggest that a passive response by the military when confronted with acts of aggression by citizens could be coming to an end.
During each incident, and in many other similar situations, the army – following instructions not to be drawn into confrontations that could turn bloody – chose not to fight back
Retired military generals said in September that at least some of the aggression towards soldiers could have been ordered by crime groups, while Juan Ibarrola, a newspaper columnist and expert on Mexico’s armed forces, told the Associated Press that gangs often use townsfolk as human shields.
Again, the troops didn’t retaliate in any way, allowing what many people described as a humiliation.
In contrast, President López Obrador praised the troops, declaring that their attitude “was very responsible, very honorable and very brave” and that “prudence is much better than authoritarianism.”
Indeed, López Obrador – who during last year’s presidential campaign used the slogan “hugs, not bullets” to encapsulate what his strategy to dealing with violence would be – has given the army a clear mandate to avoid civilian casualties.
At a gathering of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Mérida, Yucatán, last month, the president reiterated that he was committed to finding a peaceful solution to the violence plaguing the country.
“What we want is to achieve total peace but we don’t want a peace achieved with authoritarianism, with the use of force. We don’t want a peace of graves . . .” López Obrador said.
For the first nine months of his administration, military personnel heeded the president’s advice and refused to fight back when confronted aggressively by citizens.
The Tlatlaya warehouse where more than 20 civilians were executed by the military in 2014.
However, the army’s response to violent incidents in Querétaro and Puebla in early September showed that it could be growing tired of turning the other cheek.
When an army patrol showed up in the Querétaro community of La Llave on September 7 to stop the looting of a train, they were met by cudgel-swinging residents who threw stones at them.
Two soldiers were injured and residents attempted to disarm them. As that was occurring, someone – presumably a soldier – fired gunshots, the army said, although it added that it was unclear exactly who the shooter was.
Two civilians sustained gunshot wounds, while “the officer leading the patrol fired at the ground,” the Associated Press said.
The next day, the army fired warning shots after a group of about 150 people in Acajete, Puebla, attacked soldiers with clubs and stones in an attempt to gain access to a warehouse where merchandise seized by the military was stored inside tractor-trailers.
No one was injured but for the second time in as many days, the army showed that, unlike in the previous nine months, it was prepared to retaliate.
Security analyst Alejandro Hope said the two incidents were evidence that the honeymoon period of army passivity could be over.
That possibility has generated fears that the military could once again commit severe human rights abuses such as it did in 2014, when soldiers executed killed a band of criminals in a warehouse in Tlatlaya, México state.
While Hope believes that the response of the army to the two events last month could foreshadow more military violence, Ibarrola, the newspaper columnist, has a different view.
“I think there is a commitment [in the military] to show the president that the armed forces will not be the ones to start a fire,” he said.
Ibarrola said that drug cartels and other crime gangs sometimes pay housewives and farmers to act as human shields to hinder the army and warned that if a soldier were to kill a citizen, the damage to President López Obrador and his government would be significant.
“. . . If a woman or a child dies and it was a soldier who killed them, imagine, that would change the whole narrative . . . It would be madness,” he said.
The Associated Press noted that there is a “third way” for the army to respond to aggression: the use of dissuasive non-lethal force.
However, the use of tear gas and Tasers has barely been explored by the armed forces and it is unclear what training soldiers have received in order to be able to respond with proportional force.
The Secretariat of Defense didn’t respond to questions from the Associated Press about what non-lethal weapons and means soldiers have to respond to violence and what training they have received.
Hope, however, pointed out that a middle ground approach has not been adopted in the past by Mexico’s security forces.
“This is a structural problem of the Mexican government,” he said. “Law enforcement forces either used excessive force, or did nothing at all.”
Flecha Roja buses were pressed into service by students this week.
Bus service became complicated for travelers — and the bus companies themselves — after students hijacked as many as 60 buses in México state, leaving passengers in the lurch after they were forced off the vehicles.
Students of the Lázaro Cárdenas Normal School, a teacher training college in San José Tenería, have stolen 46 buses from the transportation company Flecha Roja and another 14 from Línea TEO.
Students began by taking 32 buses from Flecha Roja on Tuesday, but appeared to need more by Thursday when they stole another 14. At that point, Flecha Roja had to suspend service on its Mexico City-Santiago Tianguistenco route, and more suspensions soon followed.
“We don’t know their true motive, but they stopped the buses while en route and forced the passengers off, and the situation is getting complicated, that’s why we’ve decided to suspend routes,” said Flecha Roja legal representative Enrique Quintana.
Buses were also stolen on routes between Mexico City and Ixtapan de la Sal, Tenango del Valle, Chalma and Xalatlaco, all in México state.
Normal school students have hijacked buses for many years to meet their transportation needs.
Potters in Oaxaca are addressing air quality problems by building smoke-free, wood-burning kilns in which to fire their ceramic artwork.
The kilns will not only benefit the health of both people and the environment, they will also provide artisans with new knowledge and techniques with which they can renew and strengthen their ceramics traditions.
The fourth such kiln was recently installed in the town of Santo Domingo Tonaltepec, in the Mixteca Alta region, where potters are known for their “chorreado” (drip-stained) style of glaze made with tannins from oak tree bark.
The position and size of the firing chamber, as well as its tall chimney, cause it to draw extremely well, providing efficient combustion and optimal ash distribution.
The Alfredo Harp Helú Oaxaca Foundation (FAHHO), in coordination with its folk art gallery Andares del Arte Popular, will monitor the work of the artisans who use the new kilns. The foundation plans to provide artisans with the resources to build the kilns in order to expand the technology statewide.
One of the National Ceramics School’s kilns, in Metepec, México state.
The project was begun by the National Ceramics School (ENC), which in 2017 contacted Japanese master potter Masakazu Kusakabe. In February of that year, he was invited to conduct a smoke-free kiln workshop in Tapalpa, Jalisco.
The workshop saw the construction of the first kiln of this type in Latin America, and since then one of Kusakabe’s students, Yusuke Suzuki, has worked to spread knowledge of the innovation across Mexico.
The ENC was founded in 2016 thanks to interest by the Tajín seasoning company, which sought to create a space for the conservation, innovation, research and instruction of ceramics in Mexico.
This is the third year of the ENC’s smoke-free kilns project. It has also built the kilns in Guanajuato, Chiapas, Jalisco, Chihuahua, Michoacán and México state.
Thieves gained access to runway area to steal the cash.
Six months after a band of armed thieves stole US $2.4 million worth of United States and Canadian dollars in just three minutes at Guanajuato International Airport, the crime remains unsolved.
Even though the brazen heist took place in a federal zone, the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) delegated the investigation to its counterpart in Guanajuato, the newspaper Milenio reported on Friday. Neither state nor federal authorities have provided an update about the progress of the probe.
On the night of Wednesday, April 3, between six and eight men carried out what one former security official described as “the perfect robbery.”
Using a truck disguised with a fake Aeroméxico logo, the men breached security to enter the runway area, where they intercepted an airport service vehicle that was in the process of delivering the cash to a waiting plane.
The money had arrived at the airport in a PanAmericano armored truck in order to be sent to Mexico City.
The armed men stole 14 of 18 bags of cash from a sole unarmed PanAmericano guard and two airport employees traveling across the tarmac in a luggage transport vehicle.
The thieves then loaded the money into their truck, drove to the perimeter of the airport property and escaped through a wire fence in which a large opening had been cut.
Airport operator Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico said in a statement that the thieves entered the airport, carried out the robbery and left within a period of three minutes.
Shortly after the incident, police found the truck that was used and recovered two of the stolen bags of cash. They later found two more bags of cash in another abandoned vehicle.
Juan Miguel Alcántara Soria, former head of the National Public Security System, claimed that “the perfect robbery” was made possible by “flaws” of the authorities responsible for providing security at the airport – the Federal Police outside the facility and the army in the terminal and runway area.
When the robbery occurred, military personnel were in the baggage collection area. By the time they realized what had happened, the thieves had already left the airport. Federal and state police as well as the army conducted a joint search but made no arrests.
Alcántara told Milenio that the Guanajuato office of the FGR, not state authorities, should be carrying out the investigation into the crime, adding that the absence of progress in the case is an example of the kind of impunity that plagues Guanajuato and the whole country.
More non-smoking signs will probably be going up in Aguascalientes.
A law passed on September 29 in Aguascalientes bans smoking in work places and indoor public locations.
Under the new law, anyone who allows smoking in public places can be fined with up to 4,000 times the Unit of Measure and Update, or UMA — approximately 340,000 pesos or US $17,000 — and jailed for up to 36 hours. The ban also applies to schools, health centers, libraries, public transit and other public places.
Aguascalientes is the 13th state in Mexico to pass a ban on smoking in public places.
Electronic cigarettes, whether or not they contain tobacco or nicotine, are included in the prohibition.
The law was praised by an anti-tobacco organization, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
“While the new law marks a great step forward for tobacco control in Mexico, the national Congress must now follow the example of Aguascalientes and adopt a federal law that would grant all Mexican citizens 100% smoke-free environments, as is already the case in 20 countries in the region of the Americas,” the group said in a statement.
There are 210,000 smokers in Aguascalientes, representing 24.7% of the population, which makes it the state with the second-highest rate of smoking, after Mexico City, where 30.8% of people smoke. However, fewer than half of the smokers in Aguascalientes smoke regularly.
The replacement of the general manager and 10 executives at the Pemex division that sets and monitors petroleum prices is intended to end questionable practices that date back decades, President López Obrador said on Thursday.
“A complete renewal was carried out at Pemex International [PMI]. There was an instruction to clean Pemex International,” López Obrador said.
“Some people had been there for almost 30 years. It was converted into a limited partnership. Imagine, a company that . . . buys and sells petroleum . . . a million barrels a day, they fix the prices through formulas and decide who to sell to . . . and they were completely removed from the government.”
The president said the executives used their own technical expertise as an excuse for making decisions without any input or supervision from the government.
Pemex “is a very important company that we want to keep very close to the government,” López Obrador said. “It shouldn’t be so separate, so unattached . . .”
The state oil company announced last Friday that Ulises Hernández, a former official at Pemex Exploration and Production, would replace Raúl Enrique Galicia as the head of PMI.
Among the other new appointments announced was Armando Mejía Sánchez as head of crude trading.
His predecessor, Víctor Briones, as well as the vice presidents of crude trading and crude analysis, Carlos Islas and Alfonso Mendoza, took the decision to leave PMI, people with knowledge of the matter told the news agency Bloomberg.
The departures came after a disagreement between the former PMI executives and the new leadership team of Pemex led by CEO Octavio Romero.
Sources told Bloomberg that the clash was over an external review ordered by Romero to look at new formulas that were created to set prices for Mexican oil sold to refineries in the United States and other countries.
It came as a result of questions the Pemex chief had about how Mexico’s crude was being marketed by the management team at PMI, according to two people who spoke with Bloomberg. The review, which was opposed by Galicia, has caused delays in presenting oil prices to customers.
Pemex, the world’s most indebted oil company, has seen a decline in its output every year for the past decade and a half.
Representatives of 1 Simple Game at the Google bootcamp in Singapore.
Two video game studios from Mexico were among the beneficiaries of Google’s Indie Games Accelerator (IGA), a program for recognizing and assisting independent video game startups in emerging markets.
Selected developers are flown to Google’s Asia-Pacific office in Singapore to participate in two all-expenses-paid gaming bootcamps with some of the world’s best mentors in the field.
More than 1,700 developers from 37 countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America submitted their most promising video games to IGA and 30 of those developers were selected to go to Singapore, among them two studios in Guadalajara and Mérida.
The former is called 1 Simple Game and began producing video games in 2013. Perhaps its most famous game, Mucho Taco, became a worldwide hit with over two million downloads, and received Apple’s Best of App Store award.
I asked the director of 1 Simple Game, Ovidio Escobedo, for his comments on being selected to go to Singapore.
The founders of Mum Not Proud receiving an award at their university.
“This is the second year Google is doing this,” he told me. “They invite video game studios from around the world to participate in a training seminar aimed at developing our structure as a company, improving our business strategies and much more. So we signed up and submitted some of our published and nearly ready games and we were selected.
The seminar in Singapore took place on July 29 and lasted one week. Our mentors were experts from bigger companies who held full-day work sessions all week long and now we are being given follow-up assistance by those same Google mentors. Then we’ll go back to Singapore in December to see what kind of results come from all this.”
Most likely to benefit from Google’s assistance is 1 Simple Game’s latest creation, Chronoloop, which works on mobile devices. “As its name implies,” Escobedo told me, “Chronoloop is a time-travel strategy game. Players are able to go into the past and change it, improving their abilities in the future. They learn from their mistakes and get better with more and more successes.
“We’ve been working on this game for a year and a half. First of all, it’s very nice looking, but what caught Google’s eye was its complexity of design, its systems. For example, it has a combat system which includes an element of artificial intelligence. Because it’s attractive and complex, the promise of this game is that once someone has it installed, he or she will be playing the game for many months to come.
“By the way, we’ve just opened the door to people who would like to try a preliminary version of Chronoloop. All they have to do is send us an email and they’ll have a chance to play the game before it’s officially released.”
The other Mexican team chosen to attend Google’s “bootcamp,” located in Mérida, Yucatán, goes by the name of Mum Not Proud, a reference to the reaction of typical parents to their children’s pursuit of a career in video game design.
Patricio Bouza and Rodrigo Galaz, far left, of Mum Not Proud, in Singapore.
Working out of their grandma’s bedroom, Mum Not Proud produced a game called BAIKOH, which could be considered a fusion of Scrabble and Tetris — with complications. BAIKOH turned out to be so much fun and so challenging that it was selected as part of the editor’s choice in Google Play and was named Game of the Day three times on the App Store.
So it is no surprise that almost three million people have downloaded it so far.
Although it was not originally intended to be such, BAIKOH can be considered an educational game simply because the more the players improve their vocabulary and spelling, the better they score. Note that BAIKOH stands for Best Artificial Intelligence Killer of Humans. Players say the game is cool, addictive, mesmerizing, clever and delicious . . . “but BAIKOH hates you and lets you know it all the time.” You can download it from Google Play Store.
Mum Not Proud’s Patricio Bouza told me their entire studio consists of only three individuals, students of multimedia design at Anáhuac Mayab University.
“Because we wanted to do video games, we found we had to be self-taught, so each of us became specialized in a different path. You could say BAIKOH was our university and only after two years of experimenting did we feel we were ready to launch it. When we did so, we found it did relatively well.
“So along came IGA, and only a week before the deadline I asked my colleagues: ‘Do you want to try for this?’ They said yes, so we really had to scurry, filling out forms, but what gave us the most trouble was trying to arrange for a visa to pass through the U.S.A. We just couldn’t work it out, but we entered the competition anyway and about a week later, one Saturday morning, they passed me the telephone. ‘It’s Google and they want to talk to you.’
[soliloquy id="91034"]
“Well, my eyes popped because I thought, ‘There’s only one reason why they would be calling me.’ And, yes, they said we had been selected, and I shouted for sheer joy. You know, there aren’t that many people who do video games in Mexico and survive, so we felt it was a real honor for us three here in Yucatán to be representing our country at this international event.
“But we didn’t have those U.S. visas, so IGA moved heaven and earth to route us ‘the long way’ to Singapore, via Mexico City and Amsterdam — a 30-hour trip — but it was all worth it because we learned a lot: our mentors turned out to be people with decades of experience, real war veterans! And now, here in Mexico, we are passing on to our colleagues what we learned in Singapore.”
If you wish to try the games, don’t worry about a language barrier. The two studios are Mexican but their games are in English, the universal language for video games.
Thanks to Google’s reaching out to the young people working in these two Mexican video game studios, I think they have surely reached a point where they can say “Mum Now Proud.”
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.
The “Peace Belt” of civilian government employees that was deployed during the Tlatelolco protest march on Wednesday served its purpose and may be deployed again in future marches, according to Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum.
“We’ll probably do it in a more organized fashion, especially when we have information that there are groups that want to generate violence or aggression,” she said.
She added that the city government will develop a protocol to train civil servants who participate.
The Peace Belt, or cinturón de paz, consisted of 12,000 city employees dressed in white t-shirts who lined the route of the march, which commemorates a 1968 massacre of students in Tlatelolco’s Three Cultures Plaza. Although the Peace Belt outnumbered the roughly 10,000 marchers, they were unable to prevent acts of vandalism by some.
However, Mayor Sheinbaum stressed that the measure was a success because it prevented repression of protesters by the police.
“We’re going to do everything we can not to repress social movements, but at the same time, we need to fulfill the law,” she said.
Sheinbaum also noted that the three masked protesters who were arrested and later released during the march are still under investigation.
“Some organizations that work with the Human Rights Commission say that arrests should be avoided, and to prevent confrontation we release people,” she said. “However, there are investigations open and there will be due process.”
Some government employees criticized the Peace Belt measure for placing them in a situation for which they were not trained.
And former president Felipe Calderón suggested López Obrador put himself at the head of the next Peace Belt.
“Mr. President, the next time you wish to use human beings, risking their lives and safety, to do the work that is your responsibility as head of state but do not do, put yourself at the front. Don’t stay behind the human and metal shields,” he wrote on Twitter.
