Poppy production is up, but so are efforts to destroy crops.
The area of land on which opium poppies are cultivated grew by 21% between 2015 and 2017, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
A new UNODC report, completed in conjunction with the Mexican government as part of the Illicit Crops Monitoring Program, said that between July 2015 and June 2016 poppies were grown on 25,200 hectares.
In the following year, poppies covered 30,600 hectares.
The monitoring program, conducted via satellite and navy aircraft flyovers, identified three main poppy production regions.
The largest extends across the Sierra Madre Occidental in the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango, a region known as the Golden Triangle.
Large opium poppy crops were also detected in the Sierra Madre del Sur of Guerrero and Oaxaca and in the north of Nayarit.
Mexico’s efforts to eradicate the crops also increased.
Óscar Santiago Quintos, head of the PGR drug policy office, said authorities destroyed 29,692 hectares of poppies last year compared to 26,436 hectares in 2015.
UNODC Mexico representative Antonino de Leo called on the incoming federal government to formulate and adopt policies that will prevent the expansion of poppy production by focusing on the socioeconomic needs of the people who live in the regions where the plant is grown.
“I would especially like to invite the elected authorities to contribute to the eradication efforts with the formulation and execution of alternative, broad and sustainable development programs in the areas where illegal crops are grown . . .” he said.
“Alternative development doesn’t center on drugs, it focuses on people and communities. Alternative development programs help farmers to escape the poverty trap of illicit crops with measures that favor rural development and improve infrastructure, inclusion and social protection,” de Leo added.
He said the UNODC doesn’t currently have enough information to calculate total opium production nor has it determined how many people are involved in the cultivation. However, those figures could be quantified by future studies, de Leo said.
He added that the UNODC stood ready to help the incoming government in the fight against illegal drug production.
“I would like to make available to the authorities of the elected government the knowledge, experience, advice and technical assistance of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Efforts against drugs, crime and corruption [must] focus on sustainable development,” de Leo said.
Another option that the new government may be considering is the legalization of the cultivation of opium poppies for use in the pharmaceutical industry.
A former high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s right-hand man has been sentenced to life in prison by a United States court.
Dámaso “El Licenciado” López, 52, surprised the court on September 28 when he pleaded guilty to importing cocaine into the U.S. He admitted that he had been a member of the Sinaloa Cartel for 15 years, rising to a leadership post and becoming responsible for smuggling drugs into the U.S.
After his sentencing today, which included an order for the seizure of US $25 million, López offered an apology to the people of the United States for his acts.
López’s relationship with Guzmán dates back to 1999 when the drug lord was an inmate at the Puente Grande maximum security penitentiary. López was the penal facility’s deputy director of security at the time.
López played a crucial role in Guzmán’s prison break on January 2001, when he joined the criminal organization.
The friendship between the two men became stronger as time went by, and Guzmán was chosen to be the godfather of López’s son.
But the relationship came to an abrupt end with Guzmán’s third and final arrest in January 2016. Knowing of the imminent extradition of the former drug lord to the United States, López sought to seize control of the Sinaloa Cartel, which was under the control of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who also had the support of Guzmán’s sons.
But his ambitions were ended when he was arrested last year in Mexico City and later extradited to the United States.
López is off to jail now but he might be back in the limelight before long. U.S. authorities see him as a potential key witness in Guzmán’s trial, now under way in New York.
He might also shed some light on last year’s murder of journalist Javier Valdez in Culiacán, Sinaloa. His lawyer said in a statement that López wants to collaborate with Mexican authorities in the investigation.
He is “prepared and anxious to help,” said Manuel Retureta, but the Mexican government has not responded to his offer.
No alcohol sales as new president takes the oath of office.
Some authorities seem to view tomorrow’s swearing in of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president as a sober affair, and wish to keep it that way.
In Chiapas, the Health Secretariat issued a statement to announce that the so-called “dry law,” commonly invoked on election day, will be in effect starting at 12:00am Saturday and concluding at 11:59pm Saturday night.
The sale of alcohol will not be permitted during those hours.
Another ban will take place in Campeche but the booze-free period is shorter, starting at 3:00am and concluding at 6:00pm.
Those appear to be the only states where a state-wide prohibition will be in effect, but some municipal governments will impose their own.
In Silao, Guanajuato, the ban on alcohol sales starts at midnight tonight and will conclude at 11:00pm tomorrow.
A day-long ban will also be imposed in Reynosa, Tamaulipas.
The governments of Sonora, Quintana Roo, Querétaro, Hidalgo, Zacatecas, Morelos, Oaxaca, Sinaloa, Veracruz, Michoacán, Yucatán, Baja California Sur, Chihuahua and Tabasco went out of their way to assure citizens that there will be no dry law tomorrow.
The government of Nuevo León made a similar announcement, remarking that the state’s 51 municipalities were free to make their own decision.
The Mixteca Alta under cultivation after erosion was brought under control. DGCS UNAM
I recently learned that one of my neighbors, Javier Vergara-Blanco, was carrying out a most unusual project inside the huge Primavera Forest which lies adjacent to the city of Guadalajara.
“It has something to do with helping to solve erosion problems caused by heavy rainfall,” I was told. “You ought to interview him.”
Well, I contacted Vergara-Blanco, pulled out my recorder and said, “Tell me something about yourself.”
“OK,” said my neighbor in excellent English. “I was born in the town of Tlaquepaque, just east of Guadalajara. I got a B.A. in computer engineering, worked for IBM for several years doing systems development and analysis and then got an M.A. in applied economics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. After that I began a Ph.D. program in information technology at the University of Guadalajara.”
“Wait a minute!” I interrupted. “How did the background you just outlined ever lead you to work on solving rainfall-related problems in a forest?”
Erosion alongside trail in Jalisco’s Primavera Forest.
Vergara-Blanco then told me he had also spent some years in Monterrey carrying out the financial evaluation of investment projects, meaning that he had to predict what would probably be the outcome of such projects.
“And then,” he added, “I got a job at the national headquarters of Conafor [the National Forestry Commission] and worked for them for seven years.”
At Conafor, Vergara-Blanco used his skills to have the forest-related subsidy programs evaluated in order to support the development and conservation of national forests. “After that I got a job working with people doing applied geophysics and I learned about laser technology for precision mapping not only of the surface of a forest but also of what lies beneath the surface: is it rocky? Sandy? Full of holes? Is there water there already?”
During his years with Conafor, Vergara-Blanco developed a soft spot for forestry and when he began to think about a project for his Ph.D., he decided to “do my bit for forests.”
For the next five years, Vergara-Blanco applied his computing skills to create a program which simulates a storm event on any forest surface and could be instrumental in predicting the effects of forest fires or tree clearing on flooding.
As a model, he used an actual 100-hectare section of the Primavera Forest: a big hill cut by ravines located 10 kilometers west of Guadalajara. New, laser-based technology is used to overlay a three-dimensional mesh on this surface. The program takes into account not only the surface topography and rugosity (roughness), but the soil infiltration capacity as well.
Vergara-Blanco checks map during visit to his study site.
It simulates rainfall and shows how much of this water is retained and how much becomes runoff. It can also show what a storm does to the very same area after a forest fire has swept through it, or tree removal has occurred.
All of this became much clearer when my neighbor said, “Look, let me show you a simulation of an actual event, a particularly bad storm which hit my hills in the Primavera Forest on June 27, 2016. The storm lasted 92 minutes with precipitation of 50 millimeters, which is considered violent rain.”
On the computer screen I saw a three-dimensional mesh representation of the hill complete with ravines. As minute after minute ticked off at the top of the screen, blue shading appeared, showing water accumulation, movement and flooding.
With only a click, Vergara-Blanco switched from this animated video of rain and runoff to a second video showing the same hill protected by what forestry people call “land remediation controls” to minimize rainfall runoff and to maximize rainfall infiltration.
These controls could take the form of terraces, retaining walls, or strategically placed ditches, and their spatial distributions are designed by algorithms. Algorithms may seem esoteric, but Vergara-Blanco’s animation, which shows subsequently more effective spatial distributions, is mind-boggling.
“This is actually artificial intelligence at work,” he told me. “For this optimization test, 355 plans are generated, each plan including 100 alternatives. After each plan, comparisons and judgments are made and yet more solutions are proposed. The computer program can aim solely at minimizing overland flow volume and velocity, preventing or reducing erosion, or principally at infiltration: getting the rainfall into the subsurface so the water stays on the hill instead of flowing elsewhere. Finally, at the end, the very best proposals are presented.”
[soliloquy id="66418"]
In practical terms, this means that a ranger could run Vergara-Blanco’s program to find out the best land-control spatial distribution for a target area, and send out a crew to build structures of predefined sizes, which they can locate out in the forest by GPS. This could minimize the chances of flood, or erosion damage, that would otherwise occur perhaps several months later when the rainy season arrives.
The hill shown in the two videos mentioned above is located within the boundaries of the Primavera Forest and is visible from the community where I live. “I last visited that hill four years ago when I began my thesis,” Javier told me one day. “I would like to take another look at it, but it’s rather difficult to access.”
By chance I knew of a trail that skirts the southern side of this hill and I easily found friends willing to accompany us on a reconnaissance of his study site.
“On this hike,” said the computer programmer, “I was impressed by the great damage wreaked by erosion alongside the road and paths leading to the study area, but when we began to climb the hill, we found no erosion. I was happy to see how healthy the tree cover was, and I was delighted to see once again the watershed I had been analyzing with so much detail, the watershed clearly shown in the computer model of this hill. I could also verify first-hand that the soil texture is prone to sediment loss. It is therefore very likely that significant erosion will occur here if a high severity wildfire, or tree clearance, takes place.”
“This corroborates the conclusions shown in the thesis and makes the distribution of land remediation works all the more relevant.”
Javier Vergara-Blanco’s thesis project was inspired by the work of Jesús León Santos, an indigenous Mixtec farmer who, at the age of 18, decided to change the landscape of his homeland, the barren, dusty Mixteca Alta in Oaxaca, which is “one of the most arid places on earth” thanks to the deforestation and grazing introduced by the conquistadores.
To remedy this, León employed terracing techniques used by his pre-Hispanic ancestors and when the benefits were seen, more and more local people joined his organization, the Center for Integral Small Farmer Development in the Mixteca (CEDICAM).
Over a period of 25 years, León and his friends managed to bring erosion under control and to plant around four million native species of trees that did well in the local climate. They also developed an agricultural system that did not require pesticides.
“Today,” says the organization ProMéxico, “the miracle has happened. The Mixteca Alta is restored. It is green once again. Aquifers have filled up with more water. There are trees and crops and people remain to live on their land.”
By 2008 Jesús León had restored 8,000 hectares of previously barren land and was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize for work in ecology.
Vergara-Blanco now hopes to find financing to continue his research. He would like to add the removal and redepositing of soil during storms to his simulation and optimization system and develop it into a program that provides additional support for reforestation projects, which woodland conservationists could adapt to their particular needs.
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.
Peña Nieto, Trump and Trudeau sign the new agreement this morning in Argentina.
Mexico, the United States and Canada signed a new trade deal today, officially ending a drawn-out negotiation that lasted more than a year and was characterized by hardline demands by the U.S. and repeated threats by President Donald Trump to pull out of a three-way accord.
On his last day in office, President Peña Nieto joined Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires this morning to sign the new North American trade agreement, now known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
The signing took place despite strong demands by Mexican business leaders last month that the U.S. withdraw its steel and aluminum tariffs first. The tariffs remain in place.
The agreement will now be sent to the respective legislatures of the three countries for ratification, with expectations that it will take effect at the start of 2020.
Trade rules established by the nearly quarter-century-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will remain in force while the ratification process takes place.
The chief negotiators of the three countries, Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, were on hand at the signing ceremony, which took place at a hotel in the Argentine capital.
Flanked by Peña Nieto and Trudeau, Trump acknowledged that the process to reach the agreement had, at times, been difficult but praised the result.
“It’s been long and hard. We’ve taken a lot of barbs and a little abuse, but we got there,” he said.
“This has been a battle and battles sometimes make great friendships. This is a model agreement that changes the trade landscape forever.”
Trudeau also praised the new agreement but reminded Trump that tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum exports to the United States still apply and called for their removal.
“The new agreement lifts the risk of serious economic uncertainty that lingered throughout the trade renegotiation process – uncertainty that would have only gotten worse and more damaging had we not reached a new NAFTA,” Trudeau said.
“There is much more work to do in lowering trade barriers and in fostering growth that benefits everyone, but reaching a new free trade agreement with the United States and Mexico is a major step for our economy.”
Both Trump and Trudeau congratulated Peña Nieto for his role in reaching the new agreement, which in Mexico is known as T-MEC.
The outgoing president said that the new “treaty is an expression of the will shared by our three nations to work for well-being and prosperity.”
Peña Nieto added: “The act that we formalize today is proof that Mexico, the United States and Canada are close not just because of geography but because of the values and ambitions they share. They are ready to start a new stage of shared history.”
On Twitter, he wrote that the USMCA “is the first trade agreement with elements to respond to the social impact of international trade: it facilitates the participation of more sectors of the economy, increases the protection of workers’ rights and strengthens the care of the environment.”
Moises Kalach, a businessman and international trade official for the Business Coordinating Council (CCE), told the newspaper El Financiero that the new agreement would provide “clear rules for 75% or a little more” of Mexico’s exports.
He said that the signing of the agreement was cause for celebration.
“It’s a great message to send to markets, it’s a great message of optimism for our country. We can say ‘here there are things that are working,’ this [agreement] is something that is solid, valid . . . it’s a bet for the future that goes beyond a six-year presidential term . . . it’s an instrument that will last going forward,” Kalach said.
Kenneth Smith, the head of Mexico’s technical negotiating team, said that Mexico’s automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical and agri-food sectors were among those that stood to benefit most from the new agreement.
For Peña Nieto, who tomorrow will hand the presidential sash on to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the signing of the agreement allowed him to finish his six-year term, which has been tarnished by corruption and violence, on a positive note.
“On my last day as president, I feel very honored to have participated in the signing of the new trade agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada . . .” he said.
The Virgin of Zapopan during the annual pilgrimage.
The annual Jalisco pilgrimage in honor of the Virgin of Zapopan was added today to the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.
Every year on October 12, more than two million Catholic pilgrims walk about nine kilometers from the Guadalajara Cathedral to the Basilica of Our Lady of Zapopan accompanied by a 34-centimeter figure of the Virgin of Zapopan, an event known as La Romería.
The virgin is believed to have saved the inhabitants of Jalisco from a series of epidemics and floods in the 17th century and soon after became the local patron against storms, the website Religion News Service reported.
“The annual celebration of La Romería on 12 October, honoring the image of the Virgin of Zapopan, is a tradition that dates back to 1734,” UNESCO said in a statement announcing the pilgrimage’s inclusion on its cultural heritage list.
“The day marks the final phase of the annual ritual cycle popularly known as ‘The Carrying of the Virgin’, which begins in May and encompasses many community and liturgical activities,” it continued.
More than 35,000 dancers belonging to a range of indigenous groups also participate in the pilgrimage, and music and fireworks add to the festive atmosphere that spreads over the city’s streets.
Zapopan Mayor Pablo Lemus told the news agency EFE earlier this week that he was confident that the pilgrimage would be included on the UNESCO list because all local residents as well as many other people across the country banded together to support the cause.
The process began three years ago when the municipal governments of Zapopan and Guadalajara and the state government wrote letters to UNESCO in support of the pilgrimage’s inclusion on the intangible cultural heritage list.
Federal authorities, including the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs (SRE), also supported the inclusion bid.
After a long wait, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, announced the inclusion of the romería on its prestigious list during a meeting today in the island nation of Mauritius.
A small group of danzantes zapopanos, or Zapopan dancers, dressed in elaborate pre-Hispanic costumes performed at the meeting after the announcement was made.
UNESCO also noted that the romería plays an important role in bringing different sectors of the community together.
“Throughout the year, the planning of the activities depends on the interaction of different communities, helping them to renew and reinforce their social ties. Thanks to the community’s support for the practice year after year, La Romería is considered one of the most popular and strongly rooted traditions in west Mexico,” it said.
Among the other traditions and customs that were included on the list today were reggae music of Jamaica, traditional Korean wrestling and a traditional form of Sri Lankan string puppet drama.
Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras will sign on to a Central American development plan in Mexico City Saturday that seeks to stem migration by tackling its core causes of poverty and violence, the Honduran government said this week.
Honduran Foreign Secretary María Dolores Agüero Lara said the plan will be signed while the respective presidents of the three countries are in Mexico for the swearing-in ceremony of president-elect López Obrador.
The Comprehensive Central American Development Plan will be “aimed at generating opportunities on Mexico’s southern border” and in Central American countries, Agüero said.
In a statement sent to the newspaper El Universal, she added that the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) is supporting the initiative.
“. . . The four countries took the decision to present the plan to the United Nations because it’s the first plan that deals with the origin, transit and destination of migration.”
Future foreign affairs secretary Marcelo Ebrard said Tuesday that to contain migration flows originating in Central America, an effort on the scale of the Marshall Plan – which rebuilt Western Europe after World War II – would be needed.
There are currently thousands of Central American migrants in Mexico who have arrived over the past month as part of at least five caravans.
Ebrard told a press conference in Mexico City that the solution to stemming migration might not be similar to the Marshall Plan “but it will be in terms of the scale of the effort that needs to be made.”
He said that estimates were still being prepared to determine how much funding would be needed to develop Central America but suggested that the amount could be similar to the US $20 billion the incoming government intends to invest in southern Mexico.
“. . . Any serious effort undertaken for our brothers in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala would need to be a similar sum,” Ebrard said.
The future foreign secretary will meet with United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Sunday to discuss the border and migration.
Shortly after his victory in the July 1 election, López Obrador sent a letter to United States President Trump in which he proposed that the migration problem be addressed “in a comprehensive manner through a development plan that includes Central American countries.”
The president-elect proposed that Mexico, the United States and each Central American nation contribute resources according to the size of its economy and that 75% of the collective funds be allocated to finance projects that create jobs and combat poverty, while the other 25% would go to border control and security.
Ebrard said that the aim was for Canada to contribute as well to the investment in Central America, especially the so-called Northern Triangle area of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, which are the largest migrant source countries in the region.
With regard to the Hondurans currently in Mexico, Foreign Secretary Agüero said the government completely rejected any “xenophobic attitude” towards them, adding that “the right to migrate is a human right.”
The arrival en masse of Central Americans in Tijuana triggered an anti-migrant backlash, including from the city’s mayor who has been dubbed Tijuana’s Trump.
United States authorities, led by President Trump, have also made it clear that the migrants are not welcome.
Ebrard said that Mexico was not considering deporting all of the migrants currently stranded on the border as they face a lengthy wait for the opportunity to file an asylum request with U.S. authorities.
“What’s to be done? Get ready to assume that some of them are going to be on Mexican soil and in that area during the next few months,” he said.
Broken campaign promises have supporters wondering whether Andrés Manuel López Obrador will follow through on his commitment to ‘transform’ Mexico. Reuters/Henry Romero
Five months after he won a landslide victory in Mexico’s 2018 presidential election on promises to “transform” the country, leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador will be sworn into office on December 1.
The prolonged transition period – currently one of the the world’s lengthiest – has given Mexicans a preview of what presidential leadership will look like under López Obrador: aggressive.
Since its July 1 general election, Mexico has effectively been run by parallel governments with very different agendas. President Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s conservative and highly unpopular outgoing leader, has all but disappeared from the public eye, even as tensions with the United States over the treatment of Central American migrants run high.
Meanwhile, López Obrador has been increasingly visible, offering asylum and temporary work permits to refugees, pushing his legislative priorities and deciding the fate of major infrastructure projects – though, strictly speaking, he cannot follow through on any of these decisions until after his inauguration on Saturday.
The president-elect’s disregard for constitutional restrictions has many political analysts in the country, myself included, concerned about how he will use his executive power once in office.
Since July, López Obrador has unilaterally called two “people’s polls,” circumventing a constitutional requirement that all popular referenda be approved by the Supreme Court and administered by the national election authority.
In October, his Morena party hired a private polling firm to ask Mexicans in 538 towns near the nation’s capital to vote on whether to cancel Mexico City’s controversial, extravagantly over-budget and environmentally disastrous – but much-needed – new international airport.
Seventy per cent of the nearly 1.1 million people who cast their ballots wanted to scrap the $13.3-billion project, which López Obrador had harshly criticized on the campaign trail.
Opposition lawmakers and protesters retorted that Mexican law requires a 40% voter turnout for a popular referendum to be considered binding. López Obrador polled 1.1 million people in a country of 130 million.
Nonetheless, the president-elect immediately announced the termination of the airport project in favor of revamping an unused military airport north of the capital.
As engineers, academics and the business sector also denounced the decision to scrap the new airport, the Mexican peso plummeted amid investor concern about national stability.
A ‘national consultation’ on the fate of Mexico City’s new airport polled just 1.1 million people in 535 towns. AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo
López Obrador responded to criticism with a populist evasion, saying simply that “the people are wise.”
A month later, López Obrador’s transitional government called another unconstitutional referendum to decide the fate of another major infrastructure project. In late November, 900,000 voters determined that the Mexican government should build the Maya train, a 1,500-kilometer rail line that would connect five southern Mexican states and the Yucatán peninsula.
Not consulted prior to the referendum: the Mayan communities traversed by the proposed railroad and who, by law, must be included in all decision-making that impacts their indigenous territories.
Nonetheless, López Obrador has declared that the rail project will be completed by the end of his six-year term.
López Obrador’s misuse of direct democracy to expand his executive powers while not even president sends worrisome signals about how he will govern Mexico.
The Mexican presidency is already an enormously powerful office. It was designed that way in the 1920s by the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, which ruled the country virtually uncontested for nearly the entire 20th century.
After 80 years in power, the PRI lost the presidency in 2000 but was restored to power with President Peña Nieto in 2012.
López Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor who has unsuccessfully run for president twice before, won this year in large part because he promised to make Mexico’s centralized, stagnant political system more inclusive and consultative.
He pledged to root out corruption, reduce violence, restructure Mexico’s energy sector, respect the human rights of migrants and spur growth in the country’s most impoverished areas.
Legislatively, López Obrador will have the power to push through his transformative agenda.
His political party, Morena, secured majorities in both the Mexican Senate and lower Chamber of Deputies in July’s election. That also gives López Obrador the right to replace up to two justices on Mexico’s Supreme Court.
But some recently announced policies have surprised Mexicans who thought they elected a leftist champion of workers rights and social inclusion.
As part of his plan to slash public spending and eradicate corruption, López Obrador has released an austerity budget that includes laying off 70% of non-unionized Mexican government workers. An estimated 276,290 public employees will lose their jobs, according to Viridiana Ríos, an expert on the Mexican economy.
Bureaucrats who remain will be asked to work from Monday through Saturday for over eight hours a day.
López Obrador justifies the downsizing by quoting Benito Juárez, the celebrated indigenous president who ruled Mexico from 1858 to 1872. Juárez thought public officials should live in “honorable modesty,” avoiding idleness and excess.
Few doubt that Mexico’s government bureaucracy is bloated, and that expunging the rampant corruption of Peña Nieto’s PRI will require serious restructuring. However, the working conditions López Obrador proposes violate Mexican labor standards, which guarantee job security and an eight-hour work day.
There’s a logistical problem here, too. Implementing López Obrador’s ambitious policy agenda asks a lot of Mexico’s federal government. The president-elect now intends to transform his nation with an underpaid, overworked and understaffed bureaucracy.
López Obrador has angered other supporters by breaking a key campaign promise.
As a candidate, López Obrador pledged to reduce violence in Mexico by de-escalating the country’s war on drugs. Rather than using soldiers to fight crime, as Mexico has done since 2006, he said he would professionalize the Mexican police and grant pardons to low-level drug traffickers willing to leave their illicit business.
The security plan was underdeveloped, and when pressed for details on the campaign trail, López Obrador simply responded that Mexico needs “justice,” not “revenge.”
But voters recognized the sound logic behind his diagnosis. Numerous studies show that Mexico’s military crackdown on organized crime actually caused violence to skyrocket.
The number of criminal groups operating in Mexico surged from 20 in 2007, the year after the full-frontal war on drugs began, to 200 in 2011, according to the Mexican university CIDE. By last year, Mexico had 85 homicides a day – the highest murder rate since record-keeping began in the 1980s.
López Obrador has since radically changed his strategy for “pacifying” Mexico.
On November. 14, the president-elect released a National Security Plan that continues to rely on the Mexican armed forces for fighting crime. Lawmakers from his Morena party have introduced a bill to create a National Guard, a new crime-fighting force that would combine military and civilian police under a single military command.
Mexican political pundit Denise Dresser has dubbed López Obrador’s strategy as the current cartel war “on steroids.” Security expert Alejandro Madrazo wrote in The New York Times that the decision is a “historic error” that squanders the opportunity to have a national dialogue about the role of the military in law enforcement.
Mexicans gave López Obrador a mandate to revolutionize the government so that it finally works for them. The president-elect’s power grabs, austerity budget and U-turn on security are early signs that he may not deliver the transformation they so eagerly await.
Investigators at the Cocula dump, where students' bodies might or might not have been burned.
The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has expressed its support for part of the federal government’s “historical truth” regarding the 2014 disappearance of 43 students in Guerrero, but remains critical of the overall investigation.
Presenting a report yesterday about human rights violations in the Ayotzinapa case, CNDH president Luis Raúl González Pérez said the commission agreed that bodies had been burned in the Cocula garbage dump, one of the more contentious claims by federal investigators.
“For the CNDH, there was a fire in the Cocula dump and the remains of at least 19 persons were found,” he said.
Experts have previously both rejected and corroborated the government’s claim that the students’ bodies were burned in a large fire.
González urged the federal Attorney General’s office (PGR) to conduct an exhaustive forensic investigation to determine if the bone remains found belonged to some of the 43 missing students.
He criticized the PGR for not already having conducted DNA testing on bone and teeth fragments found in both the dump and the nearby San Juan River.
González also called on the PGR to widen its investigation into the case because the bone evidence found doesn’t support the assertion that all 43 of the students’ bodies were burned at the dump.
According to the government’s “historical truth,” the students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were intercepted by corrupt municipal police in Iguala, Guerrero, in September 2014 while traveling on buses they had commandeered to travel to a protest march in Mexico City.
The police then handed them over to members of the Guerreros Unidos gang who killed the students, burned their bodies in the Cocula dump and scattered their ashes in the San Juan river.
However, the government’s conclusion has been widely questioned both within Mexico and internationally and authorities have been heavily criticized for their handling of the case.
Many suspect that the army 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.”
The government, however, has failed to follow the directive.
González described the Iguala case as “abominable” and said truth was one of the victims.
What happened in Iguala in September 2014 is evidence of Mexico’s “profound deficiencies in public security and law enforcement and justice systems,” he said, adding that the investigation carried out by the CNDH “constitutes the closest approximation of the truth.”
The rights commission’s investigation confirmed the existence of clear links between authorities and organized crime as well as “the collusion and conspiracy of some federal, state and municipal authorities to create a favorable atmosphere for, to allow or to refrain from acting against such links.”
That collusion, the CNDH charged, caused the death of six persons and the disappearance of 43.
The CNDH said that the PGR must determine who “El Patrón,” or The Boss, is because, according to several statements, it was he who decided the ultimate fate of the 43 students.
Three men who were identified as being actual perpetrators of the crime – Agustín “El Chereje” García Reyes, Jonathan “El Jona” Osorio Cortés and Patricio “El Pato” Reyes Landa – were released from custody last month after a federal court judge ruled that 83 statements made by people accused of involvement in the students’ disappearance must be omitted from the investigation due to evidence that their human rights were violated.
González charged that high-ranking officials at the PGR also refused “on several occasions” to supply information to the rights commission about the case.
“. . . Authorities violated the right to truth of families and society by formulating and disseminating biased statements or partial or false information, which served to disorientate, confuse and generate uncertainty in public opinion, causing the victims to be revictimized,” he said.
González added that its 2,179-page report, entitled Recommendation No. 15VG/2018 “Iguala Case,” should serve as a “starting point and a clear guide of what’s still to be done” in the case.
The report, which contains 128 recommendations, says the CNDH has documented that at least 72 people accused of involvement in the disappearance of the students were tortured or mistreated by authorities.
The number is more than twice that cited by a United Nations report released earlier this year that said that there are “solid grounds to believe that torture was committed against” 33 men and one woman who were arrested in the case.
Interior Secretary Alfonso Navarrete Prida said the federal government would study the contents of the CNDH report to determine if it changes the “historical truth,” adding that its position would be made public in the coming days.
Today, however, is the penultimate day of the government’s six-year term, with president-elect López Obrador to take office Saturday.
Future human rights undersecretary Alejandro Encinas said the new government will accept all of the CNDH recommendations.
This week, López Obrador reiterated his commitment to create the court-ordered truth commission and today the director of the Centro Prodh human rights organization asserted that he would sign a decree to do so on Monday.
“We have been invited to the National Palace for the presentation of a decree to access the truth in the Ayotzinapa case, where President . . . López Obrador will begin to comply with the agreements he made with the mothers and fathers of the young men from Ayotzinapa,” Mario Patrón said.
Los Pinos: from presidential home to cultural complex.
Eighty-four years after it was first occupied by then-president Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, Los Pinos, the official residence and offices of the president of Mexico, will open its doors to the general public under the new name of Los Pinos Cultural Complex.
As promised during his election campaign by president-elect López Obrador, Los Pinos will become a public space instead of the president’s home once he takes office on Saturday.
The federal Secretariat of Culture said in a statement that starting Saturday at 10:00am, Los Pinos will start a new chapter in its history with guided tours, concerts and various cultural activities.
Five residences within the complex, all named after past presidents, will also be open to the public.
The first visitors to the new cultural facility will also have a chance to see and hear López Obrador’s swearing in ceremony and his first address to the nation as president on several screens installed around the gardens.
The broadcast will continue throughout the day, offering visitors coverage of the celebrations scheduled for Saturday afternoon at Mexico City’s zócalo.
The venue will open Tuesday through Sunday, from 10:00am to 5:00pm.
