The Tech4Nature project, a coalition of several groups including Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei, and the government of Yucatán, has used AI recognition to track previously undiscovered jaguars in the state. (Tech4Nature)
A team of conservationists has found jaguars for the first time in the Dzilam de Bravo natural reserve in Yucatán, using cutting-edge artificial intelligence as part of a year-long project.
TheTech4Nature Mexico project has identified five jaguars in the reserve, the team announced Thursday, using a network of camera traps linked by an integrated AI monitoring system.
A Tech4Nature conservationist shows a jaguar being tracked by a camera trap in the reserve. (Tech4Nature)
Over the last year, the project has collected more than 30,000 images and 550,000 sound recordings. The data is processed on the ModelArts and Arbimon AI platforms, managed by the NGO Rainforest Connection, which allows researchers to track animals in the wild.
The team identified 119 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, 34 of which are considered endangered, but proving the presence of jaguars in the Dzilam Bravo reserve is the project’s most important achievement to date.
“Knowledge is extremely valuable. What we’re getting now with the monitoring are things that, if we don’t see them, we don’t know they’re there,” Yucatán’s Sustainable Development Minister Sayda Rodríguez said in a statement, adding that this data is crucial to support conservation efforts.
Environmentalists estimate that there are 4,000–5,000 wild jaguars in Mexico, around half of them in the Yucatán Peninsula. The number of identified jaguars increased from 4,025 in 2010 to 4,766 in 2018, but they continue to be threatened by deforestation, hunting and climate change.
The number of Jaguars living in Mexico has risen significantly between 2010 and 2023, but conservationists hope new measures will allow researchers to track the animals more closely. (Edwin Butter/Shutterstock)
The Tech4Nature project, launched in early 2022, is supported by Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei, using recycled 3G and 4G cell phones to collect information from the cameras and sensors and transfer it to the company’s cloud center.
Huawei partnered with the Sustainable Development Ministry, the AI for Climate initiative of C Minds, the Polytechnic University of Yucatán, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the NGO Rainforest Connection and local Dzilam de Bravo communities to create the monitoring project.
The first jaguars were identified in Dzilam de Bravo shortly after the project’s launch.
“[The technology] reduced to a couple of months the work that was taking years,” Toshio Yokoyama, director of management and conservation of natural resources at the Sustainable Development Ministry, said at the time.
“Each of the jaguars we have identified has a different spot pattern, which allows us to identify it as an individual. The data allows the project 90% accuracy,” Yokoyama said.
A year on, the project is now in its second phase, which involves identifying other species that share the jaguars’ habitat and using the information generated to develop conservation strategies.
Frying fish for hungry shoppers at Zacualpan’s Sunday tianguis market. (All photos by Alejandro Linares Garcia)
Tucked away on the Morelos-Puebla border is a community that demonstrates that not all of Mexico’s magical towns are Pueblos Mágicos.
“Zacualpan is a little agricultural village with great tradition and culture. Very pretty too,” says 18-year old Daniela García Caltempa, the town’s “Barter Queen.”
Zacualpan de Amilpas remains small, with only about 10,000 residents whose lives revolve around the town’s 16th-century church and monastery and its agriculture.
It’s almost a jump back in time, even though the municipality is only 81 km from Mexico City, just off Highway 160, which links the capital with Oaxaca.Local historian Israel Sandoval Martínez takes great pride in that.
“The municipality has managed to preserve much of its unique character despite being so close to Mexico City,” he says.
Zacualpan’s story begins over 3,000 years ago with Olmecs in the region, later Toltecs and Chichimecas. As part of lands under the dominion of the Triple Alliance (the Mexica Empire), it was an important agricultural area. After the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish quickly built a monastery-fortress here, one of a series that are now World Heritage Sites.
The church and former monastery from the 16th century is still the center of life in Zacualpan. Heavily damaged by the earthquake of 2017, it was one of the first historic buildings to be repaired because of its World Heritage status
The town’s name comes from Nahuatl and means “atop something covered,” which is believed to refer to a pyramid that has not yet been discovered. Some say this pyramid is outside the town, but the church-monastery, Inmaculada Concepción, is significantly elevated over the plaza, possibly over a Mesoamerican base.
As small and quaint as the town is, the communities outside are even smaller and more isolated. They include the communities that were originally worker housing on old haciendas.
Zacualpan’s agricultural heritage is strongly shaped by its unique environment. Located on the lower slopes of Popocatépetl, it is filled with hills, ravines and box canyons. At 1,640 meters above sea level, it is in a transition zone from pine and oak to tropical forest, which allows for the cultivation of a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.
This agriculture shapes the local cuisine. Zacualpan has its own variety of mole, said to have been invented by the monastery’s monks. More prominent is its aguardiente de caña, a spirit made from sugar cane. Locals might tell you they cannot legally call it rum (not true), but that is what it is — and a good one too. Aguardiente de caña is most commonly enjoyed flavored with local fruits and herbs as a digestif.
Like other rural towns, Zacualpan’s annual festival calendar is important, particularly the festival of its patron saint, Our Lady of the Rosary, in late September. Like other such festivities in Morelos, it is celebrated with food, fireworks and Chinelos dancers but also features the mojiganga.
Like the more commonly-known puppets of the same name, the purpose of this festival is to lighten the mood after the serious religious processions and masses are concluded. Zacualpan’s mojiganga is a carnival-like celebration, where comparsas (like Mardi Gras krewes) spend the year making new, elaborate costumes and floats to parade in town only once. Costume themes vary, but the distinctive feature is the use of a hard papier mache for masks and sometimes other elements.
A ram-devil mask by Comparsa Zacualpan Mágico for the town’s annual Our Lady of the Rosary celebrations.
Although there are precedents in the 19th century, the modern mojiganga emerged in 1965, with young men dressing outlandishly in old clothes and using jugs for masks. In the 1970s, the Falfan family introduced papier mache, and the jugs gave way to paper helmets.
The festival draws tens of thousands spectators regionally. In addition to being important economically, Sandoval Martinez says that it remains important to locals because it helps to preserve community ties.
During the rest of the year, the best time to visit Zacualpan is Sunday morning: market day. Oddly enough, even the municipal market is empty the rest of the week. Everyone does their shopping on this one day, with open air stalls filling the center starting at 6 a.m. It is a very authentic tianguis market, but arrive early because just about everything sells out by 2 p.m.
There is one very special segment of this tianguis: the “barter market.” A rare vestige of how tianguis used to operate in the Mesoamerican period, the barter market survives because many families still rely on growing much of their own food and are so isolated that they have little monetary income. Instead, many exchange excess produce — mostly tomatoes, limes, cucumbers, onions — and small handcrafts with their neighbors.
This tradition is so important to the town’s identity that each year in October, they select a young woman to be the Barter Queen. Her duties are to participate in the year’s festivities, including the mojiganga, teach visitors about how bartering works in the town, and represent Zacualpan to the rest of Morelos and beyond.
This year’s Queen is Daniela García Caltempa, who sheepishly admits that while she competed for the title “somewhat out of vanity,” she believes strongly in maintaining Zacualpan’s unique identity.
Daniela Garcia Caltempa, the “Barter Queen” of Zacualpan, directs a group of visitors on how to exchange items with local barterers.
Zacualpan is proud to have maintained its identity to the present day, but it hasn’t been easy. Sandoval Martínez says the town has changed greatly during his lifetime, with the (late) introduction of electricity, asphalt roads and telephones, accompanied by deforestation and now problems with the formerly abundant water supply.
The main problem, he says, is not an influx of outsiders. As the local population has grown, people have subdivided land and built new houses, marginalizing old agricultural practices.The loss of family gardens and farms, he believes, represents a loss of self-sufficiency and a “lack of consciousness.”
Zacualpan does not seem to be particularly opposed to Pueblo Mágico status. It is included in the state of Morelos’ Pueblos con Encanto (Charming Towns) program, created when the federal Pueblos Mágicos ran into political difficulties.
When I was last there in March, I was asked if I would write an article, to which I replied that if I do, please take care that too many gringos/foreigners don’t move in and change everything.
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico over 20 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture in particular its handcrafts and art. She is the author of Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta (Schiffer 2019). Her culture column appears regularly on Mexico News Daily.
The Mexican economy has grown 0.4% in April, after an 0.1% contraction in March. (Google)
Mexico’s economy grew 0.4% in April compared to the previous month, and 2.6% in annual terms, according to preliminary data published by the national statistics agency INEGI on Thursday.
INEGI said that final data is expected to show annual growth of 1.7% in the secondary sector, which includes manufacturing, mining and construction, and 2.8% in the tertiary or services sector, which includes a range of business from commercial businesses to transport and the health sector. INEGI didn’t provide preliminary data for the primary sector.
In addition to providing a “nowcast” prediction of 2.6% annual growth in April, INEGI offered low-end and high-end forecasts of 1.7% and 3.5%, respectively.
The 0.4% month-over-month growth comes after a 0.1% decline in economic activity in March. INEGI published preliminary data in late April that showed that the economy grew 1.1% in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the previous three months and 3.8% in annual terms.
Mexico recorded GDP growth of 3.1% in 2022, while the federal Finance Ministry is forecasting a similar expansion of 3% this year.
The International Monetary Fund is less optimistic, predicting in its most recent World Economic Outlook report that Mexico’s economy will grow by just 1.8% in 2023.
The Bank of Mexico announced Thursday that it was ending a nearly 2-year-streak of raising interest rates. (Santiago Castillo Chomel/Shutterstock)
Mexico’s central bank has ended a monetary policy tightening cycle that lasted almost two years, with members of its governing board voting unanimously on Thursday to hold the benchmark interest rate at a record high of 11.25%.
The decision comes after the publication of data last week that showed that annual headline inflation slowed for a third consecutive month in April, reaching an 18-month low of 6.25%.
Victoria Rodríguez Ceja, head of the Bank of Mexico, in a photo taken in March. (Presidencia)
In a statement announcing the decision, the Bank of Mexico (Banxico) noted that headline inflation had continued decreasing since the last monetary policy meeting on March 30, at which all five board members voted to raise the key rate by 25 basis points to 11.25%.
“Moreover, in its last readings, core inflation decreased more markedly than in previous months,” Banxico said.
The bank, however, acknowledged that headline and core inflation — 7.67% in April — remain high and predicted that “the inflationary outlook will be complicated and uncertain throughout the entire forecast horizon, with upward risks.”
“Thus, in order to achieve an orderly and sustained convergence of headline inflation to the 3% target, it considers that it will be necessary to maintain the reference rate at its current level for an extended period,” Banxico said.
Banxico noted that headline inflation had continued decreasing since the last monetary policy meeting on March 30. (File photo/@dejoselapiz/Twitter)
The bank predicted that headline inflation will fall to 4.7% by the end of 2023 and continue declining next year to reach 3.1% in Q4 of 2024.
Banxico raised its benchmark rate by 725 basis points during a hiking cycle that began in June 2021.
Gabriela Siller, director of economic analysis at Mexican bank Banco Base, noted on Twitter that it was the bank’s most aggressive tightening cycle since it began targeting inflation in 2008. She said in an article that the central bank’s first interest rate cut following that cycle come come in December.
Siller said that Banxico’s monetary policy has been a factor in the appreciation of the peso, but noted that the dollar-peso exchange rate “practically didn’t react” to the bank’s interest rate announcement because an unchanged rate was expected.
The peso was trading at 17.70 to the US dollar at the close of markets on Thursday. The currency hit a seven-year high against the greenback on Monday, but subsequently lost ground during three consecutive days.
Siller said that the peso could depreciate if the United States Federal Reserve raises rates in June or if speculation grows about the possibility of future rate hikes in the U.S.
The synchronized swimming team took home three golds and a bronze medal from the Artistic Swimming World Cup in Soma Bay, Egypt. (Twitter)
A dispute between the Mexican government and the national women’s artistic swimming team has deepened after the head of the National Commission for Physical Culture and Sport (Conade) lashed out at the team for allegations of lack of state support.
Despite winning four medals (three gold, one bronze) at the Artistic Swimming World Cup in Egypt earlier this week, the athletes said they struggled to fund their success because the government had failed to provide financial support for their trip.
The team says they have been forced to sell towels and swimwear online to pay for the cost of their trip to Egypt. The government denies this, and says the team owe around US$ 2.3 million to Conade. (Twitter)
Conade chief Ana Gabriela Guevara has firmly denied this accusation, and instead claims that the team has misused public funds.
“Let them sell underwear, bathing suits, Avon or Tupperware, but they and their trainers are indebted,” she said in an interview on Wednesday with W Radio, alluding to the athletes’ attempts to raise money for their trip by selling swimsuits.
“We have given them 40 million pesos [US $ 2.3 million] and they have not accounted for [all] of it. The artistic swimming team, the athletes, owe Conade 2 million pesos from the 2016-2018 financial years that they have not been able to account for.”
Guevara called the swimmers “liars” and suggested it was “treacherous” for them to claim they’ve received no financial support from Conade.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told reporters at the Thursday press conference that his government has robustly supported Mexican athletes, and defended Guevara’s comments about the team, noting that Guevara had herself won Olympic medals without any government funding.
He also criticized Carlos Slim’s son-in-law, Arturo Elías Ayub, for funding the team’s trip to the world cup without seeking government support first: “If they weren’t given support, then that was bad, but if they had told us they needed that [support], how could we not do it? … even if the artistic swimming competitors were not supported, and even if Slim has decided to help them (…) [the team] has made a whole scandal, but people know, and we will continue to inform them, that athletes have never been so well supported,” he said.
The president also said that Conade provides around 500 million pesos of funding to high-performance athletes every year.
The Mexican Swimming Federation (FMN) has had historic issues with misappropriation of funds, with former head Kiril Todorov recently charged with embezzlement.
Ana Guevara, head of the National Commission for Physical Culture and Sport (Conade), called the artistic swimming team “liars” in an interview. (Ana Guevara/Twitter)
The Olympic diving team, who won three medals in the last three Olympic games, have said they are considering selling their medals to fund their bid to compete in Paris in 2024 because they lack financial support from the government. Mexican high divers recently campaigned on social media to travel to the World Aquatics High Diving World Cup in Florida after the FMN withdrew financial support.
The artistic swimming team consists of 11 swimmers, two coaches and a team doctor. The team was able to complete their stay in Egypt by selling commemorative towels and swimsuits online.
Six of the athletes are members of the military, and therefore receive funding from the Defense Ministry, said Defense Minister Luis Sandoval at Thursday’s morning press conference, though he noted that the army has limited funding for international travel expenses.
Security forces have recovered the bus from which the migrants were kidnapped in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The search continues for 2 migrants and both drivers. (Twitter)
Forty-nine members of a group of migrants who went missing in San Luis Potosí on May 16 have been rescued, President López Obrador announced at his Thursday morning press conference. The search continues for the two bus drivers who were transporting them.
Themigrants disappeared at around 2 a.m. on Tuesday morning, when their bus was intercepted near Matehuala, in San Luis Potosí. They were traveling from Tapachula, Chiapas, to Monterrey, Nuevo León, near the U.S. border.
The migrants were abducted when their bus stopped to refuel between El Huizache and Matehuala. According to reports from rescued migrants, the kidnappers accused the bus drivers of failing to contact criminal gangs when passing through the area. (Google)
Nine were found later that day walking along a highway near the municipality of Doctor Arroyo, Nuevo León. They confirmed to authorities that the group had been kidnapped but that they had managed to escape.
“The first migrants gave us the information that they had arrived at a gas station to refuel, and there they had been approached by members of organized crime,” Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval said at the presidential press conference.
Six more migrants were rescued on Wednesday in the Matehuala area, and one more later in the day in Dr. Arroyo. The migrants rescued on Wednesday gave authorities information that allowed them to locate 33 more people held captive on a farm in the community of Cruz de Elorza, on the border between San Luis Potosí and Nuevo León.
These passengers were rescued at 3 a.m. Thursday morning, according to Sandoval, in a security operation lasting more than six hours, the San Luis Potosí Attorney General’s Office said.
The rescued migrants — 23 men, 15 women and 11 children from Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, El Salvador, Brazil and Cuba — were transferred to a National Migration Institute facility in San Luis Potosí. Two more migrants and two bus drivers remain missing.
The rescued migrants say they were kidnapped near the town of Los Medina, in Nuevo León and that the kidnappers argued that the bus had passed through the area several times without “reporting” to their criminal gang.
33 of the kidnapped migrants were found at a location off Highway 57 this morning. (Guardia Nacional)
Following the kidnapping, people claiming to belong to the Gulf Cartel contacted the bus company, Heva Tours, demanding a US $1,500 ransom for each victim.
Earlier reports had stated that the total number of missing people at 52, a number which included two drivers, but Sandoval hesitated to specify the number of missing migrants at Thursday’s press conference, saying that they were interviewing the rescued migrants to determine how many more of their traveling companions are missing. It was possible that that as the group is reunited, some would realize that a group member was still missing, he said.
Nobody has yet been arrested for the kidnapping, Cresencio said, and it has not been confirmed what group was responsible, though he confirmed that the Gulf Cartel operates in the area and that local kidnapping gangs are known to target migrants.
Following the latest kidnapping,José Luis López, representative of the National Confederation of Mexican Transporters (Conatram) in San Luis Potosí, called for the federal government and state police to reinforce security on the highways to control crime.
“The reality of theNational Guardis that it is overwhelmed and does not have the capacity to monitor the roads,” he said. “By not having security on the roads, crime is unleashed.”
At the press conference, Cresencio stressed that 650 National Guard agents had been deployed to locate the missing migrants, and the search continues to locate the missing drivers, migrants and their kidnappers.
“We have no detainees, but [the investigations] continue,” Cresencio said. “The migrants will obviously give us some data that can help us identify the people who did this.”
Carlos Arce was born in Mexico, studied and worked in the U.S., and has now returned to San Miguel de Allende. (Courtesy)
Carlos Arce identifies with the lyrics of his favorite song “No Soy de Aquí, Ni Soy de Allá”, “I’m not from here and I’m not from there.” Born in Mexico, he moved to the US at an early age, and returned to his homeland only recently, in his 80s. He chose to settle in historic San Miguel de Allende, where he first came as a young man in the 1960s.
After achieving great success in the US, he chose to re-invent himself and invest his time and money in Mexico: acquiring a hotel and coffee shop, and playing an active role in the community, serving on the board of the local bilingual library.
As a boy in California, Carlos excelled at his studies. (Courtesy)
Carlos was an accomplished academic researcher and entrepreneur. He is also the proud grandfather of seven, all pursuing their individual visions: from a musician, an audio engineer, a medical student, an AI engineer to a fashion designer, scattered across the U.S., Canada and France.
“My family reunions today represent many identities; Mexican, Puerto Rican, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Native American, African American, and all sorts of European and northern African origins,” Carlos says.
Carlos was aware that his parents and grandparents hailed from the western mountains of Chihuahua, theSierra Tarahumara, but he and his brother have made discoveries about his deeper origins which span seven generations in this region of Indigenous peoples, goat and cattle farmers, and miners, likely drawn to this area since the late 17th century.
Carlos’s grandparents split their time between New Mexico and Chihuahua in the early 20th century, when the border was more porous. His family embraced cross-cultural life between the two countries. His father Francisco lived in the U.S. during the Great Depression before returning to Mexico, marrying, and then rejoining his brother José in California in 1954, when Carlos was 13, and his younger brother was six years old.
These years were spent in the Sacramento valley, where his father and uncle worked hard in the rice fields, gaining trust and respect from their employer which allowed the family to purchase a first home.
At the small catholic school, where the nuns had no experience with immigrants, Carlos was placed in a different grade each week, all the way up to 7th, which he now remembers with amusement as the chairs got bigger by the week! His schooling in Chihuahua had been excellent, so he aced all the subjects, foreshadowing a bright academic trajectory ahead.
With the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, the space race began; the U.S. turned its focus on students, like Carlos, with strong math and science skills. Fortunately for Carlos, he had the luck of being mentored by Charles Lindquist, a Swedish-American math and physics teacher, who made Carlos his teaching assistant. Lindquist put Carlos forward for Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, and Caltech and he earned merit scholarships to all of them.
He chose Berkeley because it was the closest to home.
Carlos remembers when he started, he developed a class schedule that would keep him in the class from 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. every single day, five days a week, having no clue that he was only supposed to take up to 15 hours of classes per week. The faculty advisor didn’t even lift his head when he looked at Carlos’s schedule and threw it back at him, but a fellow student he befriended told him a secret that would transform his college career: if a signature was scribbled on his class card, no one would notice. Carlos could design his own class card and therefore, create his own schedule!
Carlos went on a motorcycle adventure through South America for two months in the 1960s. (Coutesy)
During these college years Carlos became an avid cyclist, road-tripping from Berkeley to Vancouver, Canada. In 1963, he bought a motorcycle and went on his first long ride down to South America through Mexico, stopping in San Miguel de Allende for a month.
Carlos’s motorcycle journey in South America lasted for two months He loaded his bike on the boat at the Panama Canal heading to Turbo, Colombia, a port city that lies near the southeastern tip of the Darién gap, 340 km north of Medellín.
It was on this grand and risky adventure that he truly grew to appreciate diversity of race and class. He had a natural passion for observing, asking questions and most of all, for feeling at home wherever he went.
Due to his scientific bent and social commitment, he shifted from engineering and physics to eventually graduate with a dual major in anthropology and math in his almost seven years as an undergrad. He then became a committed ethnographic and social researcher, and was able to discover the country he loved and was most curious about; his own, Mexico; its people, and their dispersal.
During those college years he was inspired by two professors who were pioneering quantitative anthropology, examining massive quantities of behavioral data and parsing it into separate components around culture, folklore, ethnic relations, and more – essentially building affinity models to track how culture and cultural perceptions evolve.
He started his career after completing a PhD in 1974, working at the Survey Research Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and in 1984 he started up his own survey research company. He met his wife Johanna, who became his invaluable partner in both life and work.
His work centered primarily on quantitative research, asking “the difficult questions” and probing difficult topics, especially around intercultural differences and relations, delivering the insights his clients sought. After 25 years, Carlos and Johanna successfully sold their first company to a German firm, and a few years later, sold a second research company focused on GPS technology.
By this time, Carlos was in his 70s, and the call to pursue new horizons beckoned. He’d lived a full life in academia, and the adventure of successful entrepreneurship. His heart still belonged to Mexico, to San Miguel de Allende, the city he’d fallen in love with on his motorcycle journey in 1962. It was time for him to bring all that he had gained back to his homeland.
From left to right: Benjamín Gamond, 23, of Argentina, and Victor Masson, 27, of Canada, were killed in different parts of Oaxaca in unrelated incidents. (Social media)
Two foreign men — a Canadian and an Argentine — have been killed in the southern state of Oaxaca in recent days.
Victor Masson, a 27-year-old from Québec, was shot and killed in the coastal town of Puerto Escondido on Monday, while Benjamín Gamond, a 23-year-old man from Córdoba, died in a Mexico City hospital on Monday after he was attacked with a machete in Oaxaca’s Lagunas de Chacahua National Park last Friday. Both were apparently visiting as tourists in Mexico.
Masson, a mortgage advisor from Québec, with his Mexican girlfriend, who told police that her last communication with Masson was a text in which he warned her to call 911 if he sent her a text saying, “danger.” (Social media)
Masson, who was visiting Puerto Escondido with his Mexican girlfriend, was reportedly shot in the back while driving a rented car in the neighborhood of Arroyo Seco.
Oaxaca Attorney General Bernardo Rodríguez Alamilla said Wednesday that the shooting could be related to an argument Masson had with four people in a Puerto Escondido restaurant/bar.
He said that the Canadian man went on his own to an establishment in the El Adoquín area last Sunday and met two men and two women. There was an altercation between the tourist and the four people when they were paying the bill, Rodríguez said.
The attorney general said that Masson subsequently called 911 and reported that he had been robbed.
Gamond’s assailant, identified by authorities as Cruz Irving, 21, attacked him and Gamond’s two Argentine companions with a machete in Oaxaca’s Lagunas de Chacahua National Park. Gamond died in a Mexico City hospital. (Twitter)
“The most solid line [of investigation] we have is the altercation he had with these people,” Rodríguez said, adding that authorities are working to identify them.
Gamond, the Argentine victim, was targeted in a machete attack allegedly perpetrated by a man from Guerrero. He suffered severe head injuries while two other Argentines who attempted to repel the aggressor sustained non-fatal wounds.
The alleged perpetrator, identified as 21-year-old Cruz Irving, was arrested and placed in preventive detention on charges of attempted murder. Given that Gamond died, the suspect will be tried for murder.
Rodríguez said Wednesday that Gamond and his friends, Macarena González and Santiago Lastra, arrived in Chacahua last Thursday and were looking for surfing instructors when they had their first contact with the accused.
Gamond was a member of the Tala Rugby Club in Córdoba, Argentina. The club posted this tweet in Gamond’s memory on Monday.
“We have established that on May 12, at about two in the afternoon, they went out to eat, [and] the accused intercepted them and apparently attacked them without reason,” he said.
The attorney general said that drug use appeared to be a factor in the attack based on the behavior of the accused when he was arrested.
“It’s a terrible event,” he said. “The crimes under investigation are assault and homicide.”
According to press reports, Gamond’s family donated seven of his organs before his remains were returned to Argentina, saying that it had been Gamond’s wish to do so.
Oaxaca Government Secretary Jesús Romero said that the two murders were isolated incidents and stressed that Oaxaca is a safe state.
The Attorney General's Office announced Monday that it will prosecute four ex-officials for the illegal purchase and use of Pegasus to spy on civilians between 2012 and 2018. (Photo: Archive)
The Federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) announced Monday that it is prosecuting the former head of the now-defunct Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC) and three other ex-officials in connection with an “illegal” purchase of the Pegasus spyware system in 2014.
The FGR said in a statement that ex-AIC head Tomás Zerón, who the federal government is attempting to extradite from Israel, former Federal Ministerial Police chief Vidal Díazleal, and two other former senior law enforcement officials, Judith Araceli Gómez Molano and Rigoberto García Campos, were responsible for a 460 million peso (US $26 million) purchase of the spyware by the PGR, as the Attorney General’s Office was formerly called.
Tómas Zerón, former head of the now-defunct Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC), will face charges of torture and tampering with evidence if he is successfully extradited from Israel.
The Pegasus suite of spyware, which can infiltrate and extract information from cellphones, is made by the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group.
The FGR said the four ex-officials are accused of embezzlement, fraud, abuse of power and criminal association in connection with the purchase.
“The operation amount was 460 million pesos for a system that this new administration doesn’t have, that the [current] Federal Attorney General’s Office has never used and which was purchased illegally,” it said.
The FGR said it has requested on three occasions that an initial hearing be held at a Mexico City federal court and is awaiting a response.
Former President Felipe Calderón and then-President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto at a 2012 meeting. (Ariel Gutiérrez)
The federal government said in July 2021 that the administrations led by former presidents Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) spent approximately US $300 million between 2012 and 2018 to purchase spyware from NSO Group.
Santiago Nieto, who was head of the government’s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) at the time, spoke about an alleged kickback scheme in which some of the money paid to NSO Group was apparently funneled back to officials.
Among the government departments that bought and/or operated Pegasus during the previous two governments were the Defense Ministry (Sedena), the federal Attorney General’s Office (when it was known as the PGR) and the now-defunct Center for Investigation and National Security.
The New York Times reported in April on an initial deal between the Mexican military and NSO Group in 2011, in which the military became “the first client ever” to purchase Pegasus.
In July 2021, AMLO showed reporters a contract between the former president Enrique Peña Nieto’s government and the NSO Group to buy Pegasus spyware. He said that his government wouldn’t spy on citizens. (Gob MX)
The Times said it had “found that Mexico has continued to use Pegasus to spy on people who defend human rights, even in recent months.” Meanwhile, civil society organizations and media outlets published an investigation late last year entitled Ejército Espía (The Spy Army), finding that Sedena illegally used Pegasus spyware against journalists and human rights defenders in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
Luis Fernando García, executive director of Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (Digital Rights Defense Network), one of the organizations that contributed to the Ejército Espía investigation, said in a radio interview Monday that the FGR’s prosecution of Zerón and three other former officials “in no way satisfies the need for justice” in cases related to the use of Pegasus during the current government and previous ones.
The FGR noted in its statement that the investigation into the PGR’s 2014 purchase of Pegasus is “independent” of another case related to “several illegal interventions” carried out with the spyware during the Peña Nieto administration.
In October 2022, a group of journalists denounced the current administration for employing the same spyware to gather intelligence illegally. (Victoria Valtierra/Cuartoscuro)
Despite evidence to the contrary, López Obrador asserts that his government does not spy on anyone and only performs “intelligence work” to combat organized crime.
The former AIC chief had led the investigation into the disappearance of students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College. He now faces charges in connection with the case, including torture and tampering with evidence.
“I say to the authorities of Israel, how can … [you] protect torturers,” López Obrador said Monday after calling on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to follow through on the “commitment” to extradite Zerón.
Manolo Jiménez Salinas is the PRI"s chance to hold onto power in Coahuila's governor's office. (Alejandro Rodríguez/Cuartoscuro)
Voters in México state and Coahuila will go to the polls on June 4 to elect new governors for six-year terms that will commence later this year.
Citizens in Coahuila will also elect representatives to the state’s 25-seat unicameral Congress.
The current governors in México state, Alfredo del Mazo, left, and Coahuila, Miguel Ángel Riquelme, right. Both are governors in states that are seen as major tests for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) this election, as the party risks losing strongholds. (Moises Pablo Nava and Victorial Valtierra Ruvalcaba/Cuartoscuro)
With election day fast approaching, Mexico News Daily has prepared a guide to the contests in both México state — Mexico’s most populous state — and Coahuila, the country’s third largest state by area.
Who is currently in power?
The governors of both México state and Coahuila are representatives of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has been in power in the two states without interruption since the first half of the 20th century.
The México state governor is Alfredo del Mazo Maza, whose father and grandfather previously held the same position. The Coahuila governor is Miguel Riquelme Solís, a former mayor of Torreón.
The PRI has a majority in the Coahuila Congress, while no party has a majority on its own in the 75-seat México state legislature, whose elections were last held in 2021.
In México state, the next governor will be a woman, as the two major candidates are women.
Who are the candidates?
A female governor will take office for the first time in México state in September as both candidates are women.
Alejandra del Moral Vela, a former mayor of Cuautitlán Izcalli who was social development minister in del Mazo’s government until last October, will represent an alliance made up of the PRI, the National Action Party (PAN) and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD).
The candidate for Morena (the party founded by President López Obrador) and its allies is Delfina Gómez Álvarez, who also contested the 2017 gubernatorial election in México state. Gómez was education minister in López Obrador’s government between February 2021 and September 2022.
The Coahuila gubernatorial election is a four-way contest between former Saltillo mayor Manolo Jiménez Salinas, ex-senator Armando Guadiana Tijerina, former deputy security minister Ricardo Mejía Berdeja and ex-deputy Lenin Pérez Rivera.
Jiménez, who served as minister of inclusion and social development for one year in the current state government, will represent a PRI-PAN-PRD alliance, while Guadiana, a septuagenarian civil engineer, is the candidate for Morena.
In Coahuila, it’s a four-way gubernatorial race, with former mayors, congressmen and even AMLO’s former deputy security minister (Mejía Berdeja) in the running.
Mejía, a Torreón native who vied for Morena’s candidacy, will represent the Labor Party, which is an ally of Morena at a federal level, while Pérez, a former mayor of Ciudad Acuña, is contesting the election on a ticket supported by a local party called Democratic Unity of Coahuila (UDC) as well as the Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM).
What are the most important issues?
MÉXICO STATE
Del Moral and Gómez faced off in a first debate last month and will go head-to-head in a second debate this Thursday. The designated topics for the two debates are indicative of the issues that matter most to the approximately 12 million eligible voters in México state.
The topics considered at the April 20 debate were:
the fight against corruption
gender violence
public services
culture and recreation
México state Governor Alfredo del Mazo speaks at a meeting of state unions. Jobs are a major issue in this state’s gubernatorial election. (File photo/State of México)
Those up for discussion at this week’s showdown are:
security and justice
economy and employment
education
the environment and sustainable development
COAHUILA
The candidates for governor in Coahuila have already participated in two debates, one on April 16 and another on May 1.
Among the topics considered were:
education
water and sustainable development
the state’s financial situation
health
governance and security
One issue on voters’ mind in Coahuila is water sustainability, especially with the state government attracting more and more foreign companies. Last year, Coahuila suffered intense drought, and farmers saw significant losses when they couldn’t find water for their animals. Here is seen a cow that died from dehydration in Ramos Arizpe, also a state manufacturing hub. (Alejandro Rodríguez/Cuartoscuro)
What are the candidates saying on social media?
Alejandra del Moral Vela (PRI-PAN-PRD alliance), Twitter, May 15:
“Mothers and fathers and our girls and boys deserve a government that understands their needs, that is sensitive to their problems and that seeks solutions. … I want to be your governor because I want to reconcile the government with society, doing everything necessary so that México state families do well.”
“To the women of México state, I want to say that you’re not alone. Each step that we take together will be a step toward equal rights. Our fight is to guarantee a world in which each woman is free to dream, act and live as she chooses. Together we are the engine of change!”
Manolo Jiménez Salinas (PRI-PAN-PRD alliance), Twitter, May 16:
“In Coahuila, we will promote more programs and social projects for vulnerable groups and for the countryside. My commitment is to work for a more inclusive state with a better quality of life for everyone.”
Alejandra del Moral Vela meets with members of vulnerable groups in México state, where she’s running for governor. Both she and her main competitor Delfina Gómez are focusing on supporting families, children and women. (Crisanta Espinosa Aguilar/Cuartoscuro)
Armando Guadiana Tijerina (Morena), Twitter, May 15:
“The ONLY transformation project of ‘you know who’ [López Obrador] is in Morena. That’s why this June 4 [we need a] massive vote for Morena!!
Ricardo Mejía Berdeja (Labor Party), Twitter, May 14:
“We’re going all out against the corrupt. No half measures, no tepidness.”
“During this campaign, we’ve carefully listened to you. That’s why I reiterate: your dreams and hopes are possible if we get the PRI out of Coahuila! We’re committed to working tirelessly for the wellbeing of all.”
What have the polls found?
Morena’s Delfina Gómez appears on track to seize the coveted prize that is the governorship of Mexico’s most populous state. The newspaper El País analyzed the results of dozens of polls conducted in 2023 and reported Monday that Gómez has average support of 57.8%, compared to 41.8% support for del Moral.
The results of several polls conducted in May also indicate that the Morena candidate will prevail in México state on June 4.
In Coahuila, PRI-PAN-PRD candidate Manolo Jiménez Salinas is likely to win on the first Sunday in June, poll results indicate. Collated poll results published on the polls.mx website show that Jiménez has average support of 47%, 20 points clear of Morena’s Guadiana.
Mejía is in third place with average support of 17%, while Pérez lags in fourth spot with just 7% of poll respondents nominating him as their preferred leader of Coahuila.
Coahuila hopeful Manolo Jiménez Salinas (PAN-PRI-PRD alliance) is favored in polls to win the governor’s race. (Manolo Jiménez Salinas/Facebook)
What’s the bigger picture?
The elections in México state and Coahuila will take place less than a year before voters go to the polls to elect a new president and renew both houses of federal Congress. All political parties will thus be watching the contests very closely to glean any information that could help them electorally in 2024.
Neither Morena nor the opposition Va por México (PRI-PAN-PRD) bloc have chosen their presidential candidates for June 2, 2024, but they are expected to begin their respective selection processes shortly after the México state and Coahuila elections.
Among the possible opposition candidates are Senator Lilly Téllez, Yucatán Governor Mauricio Vila, former tourism minister Enrique de la Madrid and former Mexico City mayor and current Senator Miguel Ángel Mancera.
