Missing guns and AWOL traffic cops are among the concerns identified by the army after its inspection of Acapulco’s municipal police force.
The National Defense Secretariat (Sedena) discovered that police are short 342 of 1,771 assigned firearms after federal and state security forces disarmed the police last week because of suspected infiltration by organized crime.
The spokesman for the state security agency Guerrero Coordination Group told a press conference that Sedena had given Acapulco Mayor Evodio Velázquez Aguirre a Monday deadline to explain the absence of the firearms.
However, as of today Velázquez is no longer mayor: his three-year term ended yesterday when he was replaced by Adela Román Ocampo.
The investigation into the Acapulco police department also found that close to half the port city’s traffic police never show up for work despite receiving a paycheck every two weeks.
The state Attorney General’s office is now attempting to locate the 202 missing officers.
Other irregularities that only 674 of the municipality’s 1,309 police officers have been certified and evaluated despite claims to the contrary by outgoing mayor Velázquez.
The police chief himself was not certified. The Guerrero Coordination Group said it had advised the mayor twice that Max Lorenzo Sedano had failed the evaluation test, but nothing came of it. Sedano resigned his post last week.
Acapulco has long held the title of the most violent city in Mexico as organized crime gangs fight over control of the city, causing some 700 homicides per year.
The United States and Canada reached a last-minute deal yesterday to maintain a trilateral trade accord in North America, ending negotiations that dragged on for over a year.
Under the updated pact, the United States will have greater access to Canada’s dairy market and both Mexico and Canada will be protected from any future auto tariffs that their neighbor imposes on imports up to a quota of 2.6 million passenger vehicles annually.
To be known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) instead of NAFTA, the new accord will preserve a dispute resolution system that Canada fought to maintain to protect its lumber industry and other sectors from United States anti-dumping tariffs, Canadian and U.S. sources told the news agency Reuters.
However, United States tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum were not lifted as part of the agreement.
The deal also requires a higher proportion of auto content to be made in high-wage areas where workers are paid at least US $16 per hour, in order for vehicles to qualify for tariff-free status.
The rule is designed to bring more auto sector jobs to the United States as it will make it harder for large manufacturers to operate cheaply in Mexico.
Its inclusion in the revised pact is seen as a big win for United States President Donald Trump, who called NAFTA “one of the worst trade deals ever made” and has pledged to return auto sector jobs to the U.S.
In a joint statement, the United States and Canada said the updated pact, which will govern more than US $1.2 trillion worth of trade between the three countries, would “result in freer markets, fairer trade and robust economic growth in our region.”
Most of its provisions, however, won’t start until 2020 after legislatures in Mexico, Canada and the United States have approved the new deal.
The announcement of the new agreement ends more than a month of uncertainty about whether Canada would join the pact that Mexico and the United States reached on August 27.
Leaders of all three countries were upbeat about the new trilateral treaty.
“The modernization of the trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States ends 13 months of negotiations and achieves what we proposed in the beginning: a win-win-win agreement,” Mexican President Peña Nieto wrote on Twitter.
After a late-night cabinet meeting in Ottawa to discuss the new deal, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters “it’s a good day for Canada.”
Trump, who repeatedly threatened to terminate the 24-year-old pact, posted a glowing two-part assessment of the updated agreement to his Twitter account early this morning.
“Late last night, our deadline, we reached a wonderful new Trade Deal with Canada, to be added into the deal already reached with Mexico. The new name will be The United States Mexico Canada Agreement, or USMCA. It is a great deal for all three countries, solves the many . . . deficiencies and mistakes in NAFTA, greatly opens markets to our Farmers and Manufacturers, reduces Trade Barriers to the U.S. and will bring all three Great Nations together in competition with the rest of the world. The USMCA is a historic transaction!”
At a later press conference, Trump said that “this landmark agreement will send cash and jobs pouring into the United States and into North America.”
It’s “good for Canada, good for Mexico,” he added, praising both Trudeau and Peña Nieto who he called a “terrific person.”
Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo, Mexico’s chief negotiator in the drawn-out and often-contentious talks, also took to Twitter to praise the new deal.
“The new trilateral trade agreement in North America is a state-of-the-art instrument that will bring great economic benefits to Mexico, Canada and the U.S.,” he wrote.
Jesús Seade, who participated in recent negotiations as the trade representative for president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, added his support for the new deal.
“We celebrate the trilateral agreement. It closes the door on trade fragmentation in the region. NAFTA 2 will provide certainty and stability to Mexico’s trade with its partners in North America . . .” he wrote on Twitter.
Speaking in Madrid, Spain, Foreign Affairs Secretary Luis Videgaray said the inclusion of Canada in the agreement was “fundamental” in order to maintain the advantages of having a common North American market.
“It’s important for the economic relationship and competitiveness to have the same rules, in that sense it’s something we’re delighted with, we’re excited,” he said.
Videgaray also said that it was pleasing that a so-called sunset clause was not included in the new agreement.
The proposal was pushed by the United States and would have seen a modernized pact automatically expire after five years if it wasn’t renegotiated.
“This five-year idea eliminated certainty but now this [six-year] revision mechanism is good because it eliminates uncertainty,” Videgaray said.
The foreign secretary said that a deal had been reached in time for the current government to sign it but added that the ratification process would take place in the Senate next year.
He also said he was proud of having worked with Mexico’s negotiating team, including López Obrador’s representatives.
“It’s remarkable how Mexico closed ranks [to achieve] something good for the region and particularly for Mexico,” Videgaray said.
Both the Mexican peso and the Canadian dollar made small gains against the U.S. dollar on news of the updated agreement.
A speeding ticket turned into a rather worse infraction for a driver in Hidalgo on Friday when he was identified as a regional leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).
The man, identified by the authorities by his first names, Francisco Javier, was traveling between the towns of Tulancingo and Tejocotal when he was stopped for speeding.
Police discovered he had an outstanding arrest warrant for homicide in the state of Guanajuato and was a priority target for officials in that state.
The suspect, also known as “H1,” has been linked to kidnapping, drug trafficking and extortion among other criminal activities and identified as the CJNG leader in southern Guanajuato.
Police described his behavior on Friday as “strange and aggressive” and said he could not produce identification. They said he offered the officers a bribe to allow him to continue on his way before becoming violent, at which point he was arrested.
Guanajuato and Veracruz led in homicide numbers in September, according to a tally kept buy the newspaper Milenio. In the former, a territorial feud over drug trafficking and petroleum theft between the CJNG and the Santa Rosa de Lima gang is blamed for the violence.
There were 251 assassinations in each state during September.
One of those was the murder yesterday of a hotel owner in San Miguel de Allende. Businessman Isaías Gómez was shot five times by a man on a motorcycle, and died at the scene.
Gómez officially opened a new hotel called Tierra y Plata in the city yesterday, as well as a restaurant called Miguelina.
A species of rabbit endemic to Mexico has been declared extinct in the vicinity of the Nevado de Toluca, a volcano in México state.
Researchers from the Center for Biological Sciences at the Autonomous University of the State of México (UAEM) concluded that the volcano rabbit is extinct after carrying out an exhaustive study in 2017.
The disappearance of the species, also known as teporingo or zacatuche, serves as a wake-up call to humanity about the failure to conserve the volcano rabbit’s habitat, the researchers said in an article published by the National Autonomous University news portal UNAM Global.
A lot of the species’ habitat has been lost due to the clearing of forest for agricultural purposes, especially the cultivation of potatoes, but increasing urbanization has also played a role in the rabbit’s decline.
The teporingo, the world’s second smallest rabbit after the pygmy rabbit, has been considered endangered since 1966 and several studies carried out in the 1980s, ‘90s and the first decade of this century warned of its likely extinction.
It was officially listed as an at-risk species in 1994, said Esther Quintero Rivero, an official at the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio).
The same year, Alejandro Velázquez and Francisco J. Romero published a book entitled El Conejo Zacatuche, tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de la Ciudad de México (The Zacatuche Rabbit, so far from God and so close to Mexico City) that outlined an ambitious management plan for the species but almost a quarter of a century later it hasn’t been adopted in México state, said UAEM biologist Alma Abigail Luna Gil.
The last confirmed sighting of the species at Nevado de Toluca occurred in August 2003 when just a single volcano rabbit was observed.
Quintero said that the loss of the teporingo rabbit would cause a range of problems in the ecosystem, while UAEM researcher Octavio Monroy Vilchis said that studies have already confirmed that the presence of other vertebrates in the Nevado de Toluca area is declining.
Volcanic activity today at El Popo. webcams de méxico
Activity at El Popo is continuing to increase as a result of the September 19, 2017 earthquake, whose epicenter was close to the active volcano located in central Mexico.
Ana Lillian Martín del Pozzo, an academic at the National Autonomous University’s Institute of Geophysics, said in a press release that the activity currently being recorded is the greatest since Don Goyo, as the volcano is known colloquially, “woke up” in 1994 after remaining dormant for 70 years.
“The Popocatépetl Volcano is showing a lot of activity and it’s on the rise. A sign of that is the increase in exhalations and volcano tectonic earthquakes, the latter in an order of magnitude greater than that seen in the last 24 years,” she said.
Ramón Espinasa Pereña, a deputy director of volcanic risks at the National Disaster Prevention Center (Cenapred), said that “within months, a year, or the day after tomorrow” there could be even greater activity than that observed to date.
Martín said that a spike in activity at El Popo has been recorded over the past month and reached a peak on September 20 although there was another significant emission yesterday.
The volcanologist said that a group of geologists collected ash samples last Sunday that will be analyzed to help determine exactly what is happening inside Don Goyo.
“. . . This volcanic activity is different from that presented in other periods. These explosions indicate that the volcano is changing, magma is adjusting, and now we know that due to these small explosions, magma has risen . . .” Martín said.
Espinasa said the increased activity at El Popo was inevitable but added that last September’s earthquake had probably caused it to come on more quickly.
The day after the 7.1-magnitude quake there were 286 volcanic exhalations from Popocatépetl, the highest number ever recorded in a single day, although daily emissions had begun increasing long before the temblor struck.
The good news is that it is possible to predict an imminent large eruption of El Popo via a monitoring network consisting of six stations located within the volcano. The Institute of Geophysics will place a further four stations deeper inside its crater in the coming weeks.
Nevertheless, Martín warned people living within the vicinity of El Popo to be alert to the dangers posed by increased volcanic activity and to act in accordance with instructions from specialized authorities such as Cenapred.
A yellow, phase 2 alert is currently in place for the volcano, meaning that the release of water vapor and gas plumes is to be expected.
The Autonomous University of Morelos is close to bankruptcy.
Ten of Mexico’s public universities are on the brink of collapse, staff and government officials have warned, a situation that can only be resolved with emergency funding of 4 billion pesos (US $213.7 million).
The institution at most imminent risk is the Autonomous University of Morelos, which could collapse financially as soon as next week. Rectors at San Nicolás Hidalgo, Michoacán, and Tabasco have warned that their institutions could follow suit “in a matter of days.”
By November, the schools will be falling like dominoes: the universities of Zacatecas, Nayarit and Sinaloa will find themselves in a similar situation, said Antonio Guzmán Fernández, rector of the Zacatecas Autonomous University (UAZ), and Zacatecas congressman Alfredo Femat Bañuelos.
UAZ needs 200 million pesos ($10.7 million) to pay salaries and year-end bonuses for the remainder of 2018, and a similar amount to pay taxes and social security.
The 4 billion pesos required to stave off the financial collapse can only be allocated by the federal Finance Secretariat whose chief, José Antonio González Anaya, has been summoned by a congressional committee to discuss the situation on Wednesday.
IMSS hospital in Puerto Vallarta failed to provide adequate attention.
Inadequate medical attention at a Puerto Vallarta IMSS hospital led to the amputation of a newborn baby’s arm, the National Human rights Commission (CNDH) has found.
In a recommendation letter addressed to IMSS chief Tuffic Miguel Ortega, the commission charged that the patient’s right to health protection had been violated through a series of actions and omissions by the medical and nursing staff at the Zone 42 General Hospital.
The baby girl’s mother filed a formal complaint before the CNDH, explaining that she arrived at the hospital during her 38th week of pregnancy. A C-section was ordered and her child was born but doctors ordered that the child be kept in the nursery because she had difficulty breathing.
“The mother noticed that the child had a black spot surrounded by red on her left hand,” said the CNDH in a statement. The mother was given restricted access to the child even after several medications and treatments were administered to the infant. A round of antibiotics was ordered, but the medications had to be shipped from Guadalajara.
Then “the mother noticed that the black spot was tough to the touch, after which she was not allowed to have physical contact with her child.”
The commission investigation found that the lesion turned into a serious infection, but medical staff never ordered special care or treatment. The infant was later transported to the Western National Medical Center in Guadalajara where several studies and procedures were ordered, but to no avail.
“On the contrary, the fingers of her hand turned black because the tissue was dead.” At this point, doctors in Guadalajara decided to amputate the baby’s left arm above the elbow.
The CNDH stated that “the lesion was caused by a lack of the required medical instruments.”
The agency issued 12 recommendations, including inscribing the girl and her parents in the national victims’ registry, which would grant all three access to an assistance and damage reparation fund that will provide the child with medical care for life.
The IMSS must also establish a trust fund through which the child’s access to rehabilitation would be guaranteed.
The health institute must also guarantee the best possible personal and social development of the girl and access to education up to and including university.
BP was the first foreign company to enter the retail gasoline market in Mexico.
British Petroleum (BP) reached an agreement with the Mexican government in February to pay a vastly reduced fine for environmental damage following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, a watchdog group alleges.
The corporate transparency group PODER said yesterday that BP secretly negotiated to pay Mexico US $25.5 million, a tiny fraction of the US $60 billion it paid in compensation in the United States.
In exchange, the government dropped its lawsuit against the oil and gas conglomerate for the Gulf of Mexico spill.
“The Mexican government always preferred to reach an out-of-court settlement with the company, ignoring the interests of the fishing communities that were affected,” said PODER, which conducted a two-year investigation of the secret negotiations together with news website BuzzFeed.
“Not a single peso has gone to an affected Mexican,” BuzzFeed said, adding that reports by several scientific institutions were classified by the government, keeping the public in the dark about the extent of the environmental damage.
The government has never made a public announcement about the dismissal of the lawsuit or the payment, of which over US $15 million has already been paid, the news outlet said.
The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, located about 800 kilometers from Mexican territory, exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 workers and spilling 793 million liters of oil.
It is considered the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry and affected huge stretches of coastline in both the United States and Mexico. Tens of thousands of animals are estimated to have been killed by the disaster.
While authorities in the United States were quick to respond, their Mexican counterparts were much slower despite experts warning that they needed to act.
Meetings between officials from BP and the federal government took place as President Peña Nieto’s landmark energy reform was opening up Mexico’s oil sector. Those discussions ultimately resulted in an agreement that released the former from any damages caused by the spill in Mexican waters.
BP has been a significant beneficiary of the reform, winning exploration and drilling rights for five oil blocks at government auctions and signing contracts for two natural gas pipelines.
It was the first foreign company to open gas stations in Mexico under the 2014 reform and has plans to increase its presence from the 279 stations it has already opened to 1,500 by 2021.
Government communications obtained by PODER and BuzzFeed showed that BP had explicitly linked “good business” with a “friendly” settlement deal during meetings with Mexican officials.
A brief on a meeting between BP and the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs (SRE) on August 18,2017 — six months before the settlement was reached — said that “BP reiterated its interest in reaching a friendly and final resolution to the conflict, given the good business environment in Mexico.”
Meanwhile, more than 10,000 Mexican fishermen are pursuing legal action against BP in a Louisiana court in an attempt to win compensation, PODER said.
“The quality of life of people on the [Gulf of Mexico] coast has worsened since the spill due to the decline in fishing,” the transparency group declared.
The drone pilot and alleged thief arrested in Mexico City.
For both cops and robbers, drones can be useful tools. Mexico City police arrested a man this week who used the devices to monitor his targets’ homes and plan his robberies.
But it was a miscalculation that put Francisco Alejandro Martínez Segovia, 42, in the hands of the authorities. He was found yesterday inside an apartment in the southern borough of Coyoacán by a very surprised homeowner.
The woman’s screams alerted neighbors, who called police.
After his arrest, Martínez admitted that he had broken into at least 20 other homes and apartments throughout Mexico City.
He was found carrying a pistol, Cartier jewelry valued at over 600,000 pesos (US $32,000), special lock-picking equipment and two drones.
He told authorities that he used the drones to make sure the coast was clear before breaking in.
Police chief Raymundo Collins Flores told a press conference that the case was the first in which a thief had employed a drone.
But organized crime has been using the unmanned aerial devices for years. A study entitled Drones: Technology at the Service of Transnational Criminal Organizations, reported there was widespread use of drones by organized crime on both sides of the Mexico-United States border.
It cited Mexican estimates that drug-carrying drones operated by Mexican cartels made 850 flights into the U.S. between 2012 and 2017, outflanking efforts by authorities to stop them.
The author in the shark tank: they were not vegan sharks, but they were not hungry either.
The year I settled in Mazatlán, 2006, was the same year I began my questionable avocation as a writer. Prior to my move to Mexico, the longest thing I had ever written was a detailed shopping list for a home improvement project. I began writing about my new life when I was prompted by a friend to send emails back to Idaho detailing my romp through Mexico, and I complied.
I would also post my musings on a Mazatlán forum, which is where my future editor found samples of my writings and recruited me to write a column for her monthly arts and entertainment magazine.
The following is from notes I made after a publicity stunt my editor cooked up in October of 2011 to bring attention to a new addition at our local aquarium.
It was a balmy afternoon in October when my editor contacted me and inquired as to my swimming abilities. My response was to quickly ask her why she wanted to know.
The years which have given me wisdom have taught me that answering a question with a question will buy time without automatically committing to something stupid or expensive. I am actually a skilled swimmer and very at home in the water, but was thankful to have kept that detail to myself when she voiced her request.
Hitching a ride on a shark.
She was planning a feature story about the new expansion of our local aquarium, and needed my help to add some color to the article. She then eagerly admitted she wanted to put me into a shark-infested aquarium tank to further the cause of gonzo journalism in Mazatlán. In my mind the only color I could see was red — blood red.
So I suddenly made loud hissing and crackling noises, while holding the phone at arm’s length, telling her she was breaking up. I then closed the phone and returned it to my pocket. After about five seconds, I retrieved the phone and switched the damn thing off, thus giving myself ample time for several Pacificos and a bit of contemplation.
Actually I thought it would be interesting to see a shark up close sometime. I just didn’t want it to be the last thing I ever saw.
It was during that contemplation portion of my afternoon, while I was sharing a few beers with friends at a beachfront watering hole, that the editor appeared at our table and elaborated on her plan. When my drinking buddies caught the drift of what I was being asked to do, they howled with laughter.
I suddenly realized if I declined this swim in front of my buddies, my manhood would be irreparably damaged. Ah-ha. I had just been set up by my clever editor.
My dip in the tank was scheduled to take place on a Wednesday morning, while the place thronged with visitors. Walking around the huge glass-walled tank the week before, I counted 10 sharks ranging between four and eight feet in length. Viewing a large tank of predatory fish is one thing; joining them in their own environment is quite another.
Bodie Kellogg with a ‘harmless’ shark.
I scanned the viewing area for the banner announcing that a gringo would be fed to the fishes the following Wednesday; nothing like blood and body parts to draw a crowd.
However, my reputation for death-defying acts being of value to me, I did not back out. On the fateful day I was met by Paulina, the aquarium media person. She handed me a clipboard with a sheet, asking me to fill out some type of legal consent form. It absolved the aquarium from any liability resulting from my dip in the tank.
First off, I never expected such a document existed here in the land of zero liability; consent to potential dismemberment? This was just great, even the aquarium was admitting this thing could go horribly wrong.
I took the clipboard and began to fill in the little boxes. When I came to the question which asked me who to contact in case of an emergency, I naturally wrote DOCTOR . . . . I am no fool; my significant other knows nothing about attending to massive flesh wounds.
My editor was stationed in the viewing area, camera in hand. If I lived through this I wanted proof. If the attempt proved fatal, the coroner would appreciate a visual record of the mishap. If there are coroners here.
All the while Paulina was doing her best to assure me that the 10 sharks circling in the tank were quite harmless. Ya, right, vegan sharks — I don’t think so. But she did assure me they’d just been fed large amounts of food and wouldn’t care about me.
After changing in the staff locker room, with fins and mask in hand I walked to the roof ladder and ascended to the entry point of the tank. There was a ladder in the center of the roof, and it dropped about six feet to a small metal platform several inches above the water.
When I reached the platform I encountered the aquarium’s resident shark handler; this was a very encouraging sight. Not because of the company I would have in the tank, but because he looked to be devoid of any serious scar tissue. The fact that this kid was undamaged meant it was either his first day on the job, or I would actually survive this thing with my major body parts intact. I chose to cling to the latter scenario.
I dropped into the 85-degree water, dove down about six feet and began swimming in the same counterclockwise direction as the tank’s inhabitants. I was hoping that my bright red swim trunks would distinguish me from any type of common food source.
The shark handler was quite adept at gently restraining one of these large creatures so I could stroke it and get a real up close and personal look. The mouth of a nurse shark, even a six-footer, is rather small with only a single row of teeth. It was, however, big enough to consume a hand or foot. For the next 40 minutes I intermingled with these docile but fearsome looking creatures, while I was actively transcending my galeophobia.
The handler would swim alongside the fish and place one hand on the belly, the other gripping the main dorsal fin. Those actions allowed the shark to pull him along. It took me several attempts to hitchhike a short ride on a passing shark, but the eventually successful result was deeply satisfying.
While the shark was loosely in my grasp I could feel the tremendous muscularity that rippled through its body; I was riding along with 250 pounds of very solid fish.
The skin on the back and sides of a shark is slightly rough, like a 200-grit sandpaper laid over a pliable leather substrate, while the belly is as soft and smooth as a baby’s bottom. When I released the fin and let my hands run along the length of the shark’s body, it would give a powerful flick of the tail to rid itself of the unnatural encumbrance.
With burning lungs, I would resurface, gulp some precious air and return to the carousel of cruising sharks; this turned out to be a truly top-notch experience.
Since that time I have returned to the shark tank on several other dubious occasions. The last dip in the tank was with the Mazatlán representative for the Sinaloa Tourism Board. The male bonding that occurs while swimming with carnivorous fish has forged a lifelong connection; we have become los hermanos del tiburón — the brothers of the shark.
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 [email protected].
