News that the right-wing coalition partner of the Morena party will preside over a congressional culture committee has sparked an angry reaction from the nation’s artistic community.
The Chamber of Deputies yesterday approved accords that will see the conservative Social Encounter Party (PES) in charge of two committees, one that is responsible for culture and cinematography and the other for health.
Leading the barrage of criticism was playwright, director and journalist Sabina Berman, who blamed the move on the Andrés Manuel López Obrador-led Morena party, which leads a coalition with a majority in both houses of Congress.
“The PES, an ultra-conservative, anti-diversity, anti-women, anti-freedom party will preside over the committees of health, culture and cinematography. Oh, Morena, what a mistake and what ingratitude: artists drew you more votes than the PES,” she wrote on Twitter.
“It’s an insult to culture from Morena, it’s a slap in the face to Mexican culture, it’s unacceptable,” she added in an interview.
“It reflects a complete lack of awareness of what culture is, it’s contempt, it’s a great disappointment . . . That the PES [will lead the culture committee] is a sign that the coalition dominated by Morena saw this committee as an accessory, a bargaining chip and without any importance for its political strategy . . . Opposition will be key.”
Playwright Flavio González Mello added his voice to the criticism, charging that the so-called fourth transformation — a term used by López Obrador to emphasize the change he says he will bring to Mexico — will not extend to artistic pursuits.
“. . . Culture and cinema will continue to be the crumbs of the feast,” he said.
Actress Lilia Aragón expressed her opposition to the move in a short and sharp Facebook post: “PES? WHY?”
Others to voice their outrage and disappointment at the move included renowned art curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, editor Deborah Holtz, writer David Miklos, filmmaker Víctor Ugalde and cultural director Alejandra Frausto.
The decision to include the PES in the coalition led by the leftist Morena party was widely questioned before the July 1 elections.
The Social Encounter Party, known for its anti-abortion stance and opposition to gay rights, only contributed 2.7% to López Obrador’s overall tally of 53% of the popular vote and earlier this month its registration was annulled because it failed to attract 3% of the vote.
However, largely due to proportional representation allocations, the PES currently has 64 lawmakers in the federal Congress, 56 in the lower house and eight in the Senate.
Salary increases at Mexico’s statistics agency have sparked a caution from president-elect López Obrador, who warned yesterday that by law no public official will be allowed to earn more than him and fines will be imposed if the law is violated.
The future president’s remarks came in response to news that the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi) last week increased the salaries of its employees.
The Inegi president now receives a monthly salary of just over 198,000 pesos (US $10,500), a 7,500-peso raise and 90,000 pesos more than the wage López Obrador has said he will be paid.
The Morena party leader, who has already outlined a range of other austerity measures his administration intends to adopt, explained that the Public Servants’ Federal Remuneration Law approved by the lower house of Congress earlier this month prohibits salaries higher than 108,000 pesos (US $5,725).
“There is not going to be anyone who earns more than the president because it’s in the law and he who breaks the law is going to be sanctioned. It doesn’t matter who it is, nobody is above the law,” López Obrador said.
Mario Delgado, Morena coordinator in the Chamber of Deputies, stressed that the salary hikes approved by Inegi will be temporary, explaining that they would soon have to be reduced.
However, the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s lower house leader René Juárez Cisneros defended Inegi, stating that “no law has entered into force” that prohibits it from adjusting its employees’ salaries.
Inegi president Julio Santaella said the organization hadn’t done anything wrong and has no intention of violating the law.
“We’re going to stick to the law . . . We’re going to see how it goes and what margin we have,” he said.
Santaella added that Inegi is autonomous with regard to the management of the funds it is allocated and that their use “adheres to the current legal framework.”
The Inegi board, which approved the salary increases, said that its sole objective was for personnel to maintain their current levels of purchasing power.
The case of the disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college in Mexico remains unsolved four years later.
The unsolved disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college in Mexico four years ago put the level of collusion between the country’s organized crime groups and security forces on stark display, but questions remain as to whether the incoming administration will be able to tackle it.
On the evening of September 26, 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College disappeared in the city of Iguala in the western state of Guerrero.
A few months later, in January 2015, the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto said that police in Iguala had arrested the students and handed them over to a local crime group known as the Guerrero Unidos.
One of the group’s leaders later testified that he ordered the students to be killed and their bodies later burned in a trash dump in the nearby town of Cocula, a version of events that investigations conducted by independent experts have cast serious doubt on.
One theory as to why the Guerreros Unidos would target a group of students says that one of the buses the students had taken to travel to a protest was allegedly carrying a heroin shipment, which ultimately prompted the deadly response from security forces and members of the criminal group.
The investigation into the whereabouts of the 43 students has been marked by irregularities and mismanagement. A March 2018 United Nations report accused the Mexican government of fabricating evidence and torturing many of the individuals it arrested into confessing to involvement in the crime, in addition to trying to cover up these abuses.
Shortly after winning the election in July, president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador requested an international team of experts to return to the country to continue an investigation largely dismissed by Peña Nieto and ordered the creation of a truth and justice commission to reopen the case.
InSight Crime analysis
The case of the missing 43 students will undeniably be Peña Nieto’s darkest legacy as he leaves office and López Obrador replaces him in December. But whether the incoming president will be able to both solve the case and effectively reform the security forces that so often help facilitate criminal activities in the country remains to be seen.
Aside from showcasing the Mexican government’s inability, or unwillingness, to adequately investigate and handle crucial evidence in a high-profile investigation, the Ayotzinapa case also illustrates the depth of collusion between organized crime groups and security forces.
Family members and supporters of the missing 43.
As Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández and her colleague Steve Fisher uncovered, drug traffickers associated with the Beltran Leyva Organization kept local and federal security forces in Iguala on their payroll, and ordered them to recover the shipment of heroin that was allegedly on the bus the students had taken that fateful night in September 2014.
The students seem to have been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Uncovering what happened to them would mean shining the spotlight on security forces’ collusion with organized crime groups — and the government turning a blind eye to it — something that would have further contributed to the widespread disapproval of Peña Nieto’s fight against crime and drug trafficking.
In an effort to strengthen the institutions directly affected by organized crime, López Obrador promises to ensure the county’s police force is better trained, better paid and more professional.
This is a welcome step as Mexico’s police are largely overworked, underpaid and understaffed, which can at times leave them entirely dysfunctional and more susceptible to corruption and infiltration from organized crime groups.
But while addressing the shortcomings within the police is needed, it likely won’t entirely eliminate the corruption within these institutions that crime groups so often rely on to operate.
“It’s not enough to just have a police force that is better trained and better equipped to fight organized crime,” Christy Thornton, an assistant professor in sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University, told InSight Crime.
“This doesn’t take away the financial incentive for crime groups to move drugs through these areas, which comes from demand in the United States. As long as that incentive exists, crime groups will seek collusion from security forces or at least the guarantee that they’ll look the other way.”
As InSight Crime previously reported, López Obrador will have to “avoid grand solutions” and instead focus on the many moving parts that impact Mexico’s security situation if things are to improve.
One of the most important places to start, according to Jaime López, a security policy consultant and former Mexican police officer, is “strengthening internal oversight mechanisms [within security forces] throughout the country.”
So far, López Obrador has failed to provide a concrete plan for how he might attempt to improve oversight mechanisms and other factors that could reduce levels of corruption within the country’s security institutions.
“The new administration might be able to push for coordinated efforts in this direction, but it would take a much more detailed diagnosis and more specific strategies than what we have seen so far,” López added.
López Obrador seems to have the political will to find the answers that Peña Nieto’s administration failed to regarding the 43 missing students, but rooting out the corruption within the country’s security institutions that helped facilitate this egregious crime may prove to be a much harder task.
Reprinted from InSight Crime. Parker Asmann is a writer with InSight Crime, a foundation dedicated to the study of organized crime.
A senator has apologized after being caught by a photographer in a racy cell phone chat during a Senate session.
A photo published by the newspaper El Universal shows the screen of Senator Ismael García Cabeza de Vaca’s cell phone during an appearance in the Senate by Finance Secretary José Antonio González Anaya.
But the country’s financial situation was not on the mind of the senator from Tamaulipas.
In the group chat entitled “Three Amigos,” an image of a scantily-clad young woman appears beneath which one of the chat’s participants, Manito, wrote: “Give me the pimp’s cell phone [number], don’t be mean, I want to screw her already.”
García responded: “That makes two of us.” Both used pig emojis during the chat.
Later yesterday, the newly-elected National Action Party senator took to Twitter to apologize for his actions.
“I offer a sincere apology for the offensive way in which I expressed myself in a private chat during the Senate session,” he wrote.
“I shouldn’t have participated in a clearly misogynistic conversation, much less so with those words. Beyond an inappropriate joke, I never had any other intention.”
Senate President Martí Batres, of Mexico’s soon-to-be ruling Morena party, said the matter would be reviewed by the upper house’s legal team, which would recommend action if necessary.
A 20-year-old university student identified as Fer Moreno later claimed that it was her photo that appeared in the senator’s chat but she didn’t know how it got there.
The photo had appeared on the woman’s Instagram account three days ago.
“At first I thought it was a joke then I realized that it had really happened, that it was true and that it was me in the photo,” Moreno told broadcaster Carlos Loret de Mola.
“I was inundated with a thousand messages to my social media insulting me, [saying] ugly things. Then I realized what had happened,” she said. The student rejected any suggestion that she was a prostitute, describing herself as a “normal girl.”
She also warned other women to take care with their social media accounts but defended her right to publish whatever photos she wished.
Patricia Mercado, a senator with the Citizens’ Movement party, described García’s conduct as “degrading and offensive.”
Kenia López Rabadán, a senator with the same conservative party that García represents, said all senators, “and in a strict sense men,” should show greater respect for all people, including women.
“I understand that it was a personal and private comment but . . . we all have to be wise with what we write, even more so if you’re a public official . . .”
During the election campaign, García — who is the brother of Tamaulipas Governor Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca — said that if elected, he would promote laws that guarantee respect for women, the newspaper El Universal reported.
You will soon need a license or registration to fly one.
Flying a drone without a license will become punishable with a potentially stiff fine in two months, but foreigners needn’t apply.
Updated regulations on the remotely piloted aircraft systems, which take effect on December 1, follow those established by the United Nations International Civil Aviation Organization.
The main one is that pilots of drones weighing 25 kilograms or more must obtain a license and not having one could result in a fine of up to 403,000 pesos (US $24,000). One of the requirements for getting a license is Mexican citizenship.
The smaller classes of drones don’t require a license but do require registration which, according to the newspaper El Financiero, also requires Mexican citizenship.
The project director of the drone pilot training academy Amacuzac told the newspaper Vanguardia that licensing is necessary for safety reasons.
Luis Salazar Brehm said drone pilots might not be aware of the risks they present to manned aircraft.
“Knowing how to fly a drone is important because we are going to occupy the same air space as manned aircraft . . . and can get a plane in trouble.”
Drone pilots must know where they can and cannot fly, he said.
The updated regulations come at a time when the drone industry is expanding beyond recreational or promotional activities into agriculture and courier service and other applications, Salazar explained.
The new regulations have been established by the Civil Aviation Agency (DGAC), part of the federal Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (SCT).
López Obrador met today with the families of the missing Ayotzinapa students.
Mexico’s new government will investigate “everyone” involved in the disappearance of 43 teaching students four years ago today in Iguala, Guerrero.
President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador met today with the families of the students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College and assured them that the truth will come out through an investigation that will go as far as to examine the roles of the army and the Federal Police.
The current federal government claims that corrupt municipal officials turned the students over to a criminal gang that killed them and incinerated their bodies.
At a press conference after their two-hour meeting, López Obrador said it was agreed that judicial authorities be called on to reaffirm a court order to implement a truth commission, a move the current government has resisted.
If a commission has not been established by December 1, when the president-elect takes office, he will create one by decree, López Obrador vowed.
The government’s investigation into the case has been widely criticized by international experts, human rights organizations, Mexican journalists and the students’ families. Many people suspect that the army may have played a role in the students’ disappearance.
In June, a federal court ordered the creation of a truth and justice commission to undertake a new investigation, ruling that the one carried out by the federal Attorney General’s office (PGR) “was not prompt, effective, independent or impartial.”
However, the government has launched legal action against the court’s order to create the commission, arguing that it is impossible to do so.
There is “a real, legal and material impossibility” to create the commission, the PGR said in June.
Alejandro Encinas, who will be an Interior Secretariat human rights undersecretary in the new government, offered his own pledge yesterday that a truth commission will be created.
“If the current government doesn’t comply [with the court order], we will implement it. It’s a matter of political will and an act of justice,” he said in a radio interview.
Meanwhile, current students of the Ayotzinapa college attacked military installations in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, yesterday as they renewed protests against the authorities’ failure to solve the case.
The students arrived in the state capital at around 5:00pm and participated in a march and rally before making their way to the army barracks where they threw Molotov cocktails, fireworks and stones that damaged the building’s façade.
The attack lasted less than 10 minutes before the students boarded buses and left, according to the newspaper Reforma.
Parents of the 43 students will take part in a march in Mexico City today with students and members of social and human rights organizations.
The father of one of the missing students said yesterday that he saw “a little hope” that the case will be solved during López Obrador’s presidency.
“Yes, there is a little hope with this government, there’s a new power, we’re going to raise everything . . .” Maximino Hernández told the television program La Nota Dura.
Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer for the disappeared students’ parents, said the incoming administration has a chance to right the wrongs of the current government.
“The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has the opportunity to give results in a very concrete way . . . [The case] could serve as an element that helps to resolve other cases of disappeared people,” he said.
The notorious Ayotzinapa-Iguala case and its subsequent investigation is considered by many as the biggest failure of the current administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. But the president said last month that he stands by the “historical truth” declared by investigators.
According to the official version of events, the students’ bodies were burned in the Cocula municipal dump before their remains were disposed of in a nearby river. Then attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam declared in early 2015 that the investigation had produced the “historical truth,” a phrase that has been widely ridiculed since by critics of the probe.
Earlier this year, the United Nations released a report that said that 34 people were tortured in connection with the investigation and that suspects had been arbitrarily detained.
The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) also said in June that it has “undoubted evidence” that one man was wrongfully arrested in connection with the crime in a case of mistaken identity.
The municipal council of Querétaro agreed yesterday to start phasing out the free distribution of plastic straws in restaurants.
Acting mayor Enrique Correa Sada explained that the technical aspects of the new regulations have yet to be worked out, and that a full prohibition won’t go into effect until March.
In the interim, the municipality will launch an information campaign about the new regulation, and give restaurateurs time to exhaust their supplies of straws.
The president of the Querétaro chapter of the restaurant industry association Canirac told the newspaper Milenio that its 185 members have reduced their plastic straw use by 95% over the last six months.
Current practice is only to provide a straw when a customer asks for one, said Sergio Salmón Franz.
He also said he supports the idea of biodegradable straws, but their use is up to each restaurateur.
A federal court has upheld a district court order granted to landowners in an outer borough of Mexico City that could place the completion of the Mexico City-Toluca train project at risk.
District court Judge Fernando Silva García granted a “definitive suspension” in February to Perla Negrete Gómez that prevents authorities from seizing 1,111 square meters of land owned by the Negrete Gómez family in Cuajimalpa.
The land abuts the Mexico City-Toluca highway at a point where it runs parallel to the toll route between the two cities.
The federal court’s confirmation this month of the “definitive suspension” is not open to appeal and will remain in force while an injunction application is processed, which according to the newspaper Reforma could take more than a year.
The Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (SCT), which is responsible for the 59-billion-peso (US $3.1-billion) project, argued that the original definitive suspension order didn’t take into account the public interest of the rail project being completed.
But the federal court rejected the secretariat’s claim, stating that the argument was insufficient to overturn the order, while also taking into consideration the complainants’ claim that proper expropriation procedures had not been followed.
The SCT had opposed that claim, contending that the land in question was expropriated by decree as part of a right of way obtained by the federal government in 1993 to build a stretch of the Mexico-City-Toluca highway.
The SCT also asserted that the Negrete Gómez family doesn’t have a valid property title and has only presented a “record of possession” issued by the president of the ejido (community land) commission.
The court’s decision is yet another setback for the infrastructure project, which has already faced delays, protests, construction problems and claims that it is unviable due to overruns.
Despite the difficulties, the SCT says the 57-kilometer project is now 82% complete and will be ready to start operations in the first quarter of 2020, with the capacity to transport 230,000 passengers daily between the México state and national capitals in just 39 minutes.
The civil engineering project is anticipated to be completed by next June, the SCT said.
But revisions of the completion date have been common in the three years since the project began. It was originally scheduled to be finished by December 2017.
An SCT statement issued yesterday made no mention of the federal court’s decision, focusing instead on the project’s progress.
“We have finished — electrified and with tracks — up to kilometer 22 and are working to conclude in the next three or four weeks up to kilometer 30,” said SCT rail development director Guillermo Nevárez.
The official added that by the third week of November “approximately, all of stretch 1 of the civil project, in other words, from Zinacantepec to the tunnels of La Marquesa will be practically finished.”
Tracks are also expected to be laid on stretch 2 — two interconnected tunnels running 180 meters beneath a mountain— in November, Nevárez said.
The third stretch of the project, totaling 17 kilometers within Mexico City limits, is only 56% complete but “it is expected that the work will progress quickly due to the use of prefabricated material,” the SCT said.
The trains that operate on the new railroad will be capable of reaching speeds up to 160 kilometers per hour and will be “completely automatic” but permanently supervised from a control center.
An engineer will be on board at all times to take control of the train in the case of an emergency, the secretariat explained.
The 39-minute service will run between terminuses at Zinacantepec, just west of Toluca in México state, and Observatorio in Mexico City.
There will be four stops in between at Pino Suárez, Tecnológico, Lerma and Santa Fe.
López Obrador, center, shakes on agreement with Tlaxcala Governor Mena.
The first federal government department to move out of Mexico City will be the Culture Secretariat, president-elect López Obrador said yesterday.
During a rally yesterday in Tlaxcala, capital city of the state of the same name, López Obrador said he had reached an agreement with Governor Marco Antonio Mena Rodríguez that the Secretariat of Culture will be the first to move.
He said that “in one year’s time Culture Secretary Alejandra Frausto Guerrero . . . will be working out of Tlaxcala.”
“We are starting here,” López told the rally, referring to his plan to decentralize the federal government and move most of its departments out of Mexico City.
“Why Tlaxcala? For its traditions, customs, for the culture of the people of Tlaxcala, a people full of history, of culture, they are good people, working people . . . .”
The secretariat was created in 2015 and has 14,261 staff.
Mexico’s next tourism secretary has pledged that promotion of the country’s tourist destinations will continue under the new administration amid concerns in the private sector that money currently allocated to marketing will be redirected to the Maya train project.
“I know that there is nervousness about [tourism] promotion,” Miguel Torruco Marqués told the newspaper Milenio.
“Yes, there will be [promotion], don’t worry. I’m the first to insist that promotion is essential to stay competitive in the international arena,” he added.
President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said that construction of the Maya train project, which will link cities including Cancún, Mérida, Campeche and Palenque, will be partially funded by the DNR tourist tax that foreigners pay when entering Mexico.
Some of the money collected is currently used for tourism promotion.
According to the Mexico Tourism Board (CPTM), which receives the funds, the DNR tax generates revenue of between 4.5 and 5 billion pesos (US $236.9 million and $263.2 million) annually.
Torruco stressed, however, that the money for tourism promotion would be freed up through cuts to bureaucracy that the incoming government intends to make
“Promotion will continue, we’re analyzing how we’re going to trim down the apparatuses of government, which are very obese . . .” he said.
The future secretary said there will be no deputy directors of government departments during the incoming administration because of duplication of activities, and that staff cuts will extend to the Secretariat of Tourism (Sectur), the CPTM and the National Tourism Promotion Fund (Fonatur).
But he also said that to ensure that Mexico’s tourism industry remains strong it is essential to launch large-scale tourism campaigns and attend tourism fairs around the world.
While recognizing the need to spend money to attract foreign tourists, Torruco said that Sectur’s expenditure of US $45 million on the Cirque du Soleil production Luzia, A Waking Dream of Mexicowas a “bad investment” because it hasn’t led to an increase in visitor numbers.
The show, which opened in Canada in May 2016, is a homage to Mexico’s history, culture and traditions and one of its objectives was to inspire people to visit.
Mexico is the sixth most visited country in the world, Tourism Secretary Enrique de la Madrid said in June, explaining that the upsurge in violent crime had not had an impact on visitor numbers.
Almost 40 million foreign tourists came to Mexico last year, spending just over US $21.3 billion while they were in the country.
