The base for annual paid vacation days could go from six to 12 if the proposal passes.
Annual vacation time for Mexican workers could soon double thanks to a proposal to be considered by senators next week.
Paid leave for employees who have completed one year of service would increase from six days to 12 under a proposal put forward by Citizens Movement party Senator Patricia Mercado.
Workers would get an extra two days of vacation time for each additional year of service they complete during their first five years of employment. After that period, employees would have to work for another five years to qualify for an additional two days paid leave.
Mercado presented her proposal to the Senate’s Labor and Social Welfare committee, whose members are set to debate and vote on it next Tuesday. If approved, the so-called “decent vacations” proposal would progress to the Senate for consideration by all 128 senators.
Similar proposals have been introduced to Congress in the past but haven’t been approved. It remains to be seen whether Mercado’s bill will attract sufficient support to become law.
The current vacation time offered to employees who have completed one year of service is significantly less than that recommended by the International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency.
Established in 1970, the ILO’s “Holidays with Pay Convention” states that “every person to whom this Convention applies shall be entitled to an annual paid holiday” of at least “three working weeks for one year of service.”
The standard working week in Mexico is six days, so Mexican workers would be entitled to 18 days of paid leave per year.
Mexico, however, has not ratified the ILO convention, and annual vacation time here is significantly less than that offered by employers in many other countries.
Jorge Sales, a labor lawyer, suggested that increasing paid vacations was too big a burden for employers to assume. The government wouldn’t cover any of the additional costs incurred by employers, he told the newspaper Reforma.
Oxxos in Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo have been closed for days due to fears of extortion by organized crime, already a standing problem with other businesses in the resort area.
Authorities have arrested eight suspected extortioners in Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, where threats by criminals forced the closure of at least 20 Oxxo convenience stores this week.
Guerrero police collaborated with federal and municipal authorities on an operation that resulted in the alleged criminals being taken into custody.
“They’re extorting Oxxo stores,” said state Security Minister Evelio Méndez Gómez, referring to the eight people who were detained.
Extortion threats shut down at least 20 Oxxo stores in Zihuatanejo and the nearby resort town of Ixtapa, the news website Animal Político reported Wednesday. Some have remained closed for days. An additional three Oxxos closed in the neighboring municipality of Petatlán.
The closures came after an armed man entered a Zihuatanejo Oxxo last Sunday and demanded money, Animal Político said.
The employees reportedly told the man that they couldn’t give him the money he was asking for because it was in a safe they couldn’t access. The armed individual subsequently shot and wounded one of the workers, Animal Político said.
Extortion has become a recurring problem in Zihuatanejo, a coastal city and municipality that is one of Guerrero’s top tourism destinations.
At his regular news conference on Thursday, President López Obrador said he was unaware of the Oxxo closures in Zihuatanejo but acknowledged that extortion is a problem across Mexico.
“It is the crime that has increased the most. I would say that we’ve managed to reduce the majority of crimes, but one that is still outstanding is extortion,” he said.
The president highlighted that thousands of soldiers, marines and National Guard (GN) members are helping to combat insecurity in Guerrero, and noted that his administration is building new barracks for the GN, which is now part of the army.
“We’re going to get to 500 [barracks] across the country, we now have 120,000 National Guard members and we’re going to get to 150,000,” López Obrador said.
“… When the Federal Police operated there were no barracks. At [the force’s] best time there were 40,000 members … but no barracks. If they were sent to Zihuatanejo because there was a lot of extortion, they had to camp or live in a hotel, [it was] a regrettable situation,” he said.
These giant stone balls are found in and around the Cerro de Ameca, 65 kilometers west of Guadalajara. Geologists have offered various theories as to how Mother Nature made them.
The Piedras Bola Silver Mine, located in Jalisco’s Sierra de Ameca, is named after a giant stone ball lying just outside its entrance. In 1967, the former superintendent of the mine, Ernest Gordon, was shown five more huge stone balls in the hills above the mine, prompting him to place a telephone call to archaeologist Matthew Stirling in Washington, D.C.
Stirling — a pioneer who headed the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology for several years and is known for his discoveries about the Olmec civilization and for being an early advocate of the idea that they predated the Maya — had published reports of granite balls he had found in Costa Rica, sculpted by human hands centuries ago.
The balls that Gordon had found in Mexico appeared to resemble the ones studied by Stirling. “These are six to eight footers,” Gordon told Stirling, “so perfectly rounded, they seem to be manmade.”
In December of 1967, Gordon led him to the site on top of the mountain where the balls sat, 65 kilometers west of Guadalajara, in Ahualulco, Jalisco. Today, it’s a nature reserve and park.
This 1969 National Geographic feature on the Piedras Bola happened because famed archaeologist Matthew Stirling convinced the magazine it was of interest. On top of the ball: U.S. geologist Robert L. Smith. National Geographic
“Such great numbers surely indicated natural formation,” wrote Stirling in an article in the August 1969 issue of National Geographic.
For the article, Nat Geo asked USGS geologist Robert L Smith to explain just how Mother Nature had formed all those nearly perfect spheres. The word of a scientist was definitely needed since the best that local legend could come up with was that these hills had once been inhabited by giants and the Piedras Bola had been their canicas (marbles).
Smith told the magazine that a pyroclastic flow of hot volcanic ash had blanketed the area long ago. Deep below the surface, the volcanic tuff began to crystallize “in the nuclei of single glass particles,” forming small balls that slowly grew larger with time, resulting in the stone balls in the hills above Ahualulco.
In 2007, the University of Guadalajara (UdG) published a 266-page book on the Piedras Bola and their surroundings. Here we find another analysis of the origin of the giant stone balls.
Image from the National Georgraphic article illustrating the theory that University of Guadalajara scientists would also ascribe to in 2007: that numerous of these round rocks should also lie hidden underground. National Geographic
The UdG team suggested that lava bombs and incandescent blocks were falling into the pyroclastic flow. As the flow passed through narrow valleys, they created turbulence, causing these intrusive lava lumps and blocks to rotate and become coated with layer after layer of hot tuff — snowballing into spheres of various sizes.
The Nat Geo and UdG theories were the only credible explanations I had heard of up until a few days ago when I headed for the Piedras Bola with a group of ornithologists.
Now, nine years later, I wanted to revisit the Piedras Bola because I had heard rumors that the nature reserve had been abandoned by local authorities and was falling into ruin.
This formation, called The Skull, helped geologist Chris Lloyd understand how these rocks were formed.
Riding in a sturdy Tacoma with four-wheel drive, we turned off the Ahualulco-Ameca highway onto the 6-kilometer dirt road leading there. We passed the now dysfunctional ziplines and hanging bridge, into which officials had poured a great deal of money, which critics say could have been used to build a better-quality access road.
Unfortunately, the road they did build deteriorates badly after three-quarters of the way, and you now need four-wheel drive to make it all the way to the top. The rough state of the road is matched by the deplorable state of the facilities which had been built to welcome visitors.
The outdoor theater for visitors that was built there is now overgrown with weeds. All the wooden bridges have fallen to pieces. Signs meant to orient visitors are now just about unreadable.
As we hiked up the trail to the Piedras, the organizer of this trip, Canadian geologist Chris Lloyd, mentioned that in his examination of the stone balls, he had never seen any evidence to back up the two theories of their origin which I have mentioned above.
Jalisco’s Culture Ministry spent over 10 million pesos at the Piedras Bola site, making it into a nature reserve with activities like zip-lining, Today, it has become a ghost park.
“Let’s take a look at some of the balls which have split open,” he suggested.
We only needed to walk 200 meters to find an example. The composition of the balls on the inside was completely homogeneous.
If the UdG theory was correct, we should have found a foreign object inside the ball. And if the National Geographic explanation was accurate, there should have been evidence of a crystal structure, such as a repeating pattern or radiating lines. But we could see nothing of the sort in any part of the balls.
We wandered up the hillside, which is strewn with these huge balls, until we came to a rock formation popularly known as La Calavera, The Skull, which is taller than it is wide. It is naturally connected to the bedrock and is not an independent unit like the balls all around it.
The Piedras Bola outdoor theater as it looked in 2009 (top) and how it looks today.
“This,” said Lloyd,” is showing us what’s really going on here. Look at the onion-skin weathering on the top.”
Yes, we could easily see that thin layers of rock were spalling off the top of The Skull (La Calavera).
What we were looking at, it seems, was a Piedra Bola In the making. Maybe in another thousand years or so it will weather to a nice round shape and, now disconnected from the bedrock, will roll down the hill to join the other members of the family.
Having reflected on La Calavera, we began to notice many other examples of rock protrusions that had weathered into nicely rounded curves. They were, in fact, partial balls.
Onion-skin erosion also forms balls on a small scale in the Ameca hills of Jalisco.
I suddenly realized that all the previous theories about these rocks had assumed that — apart from the stone balls lying on the surface — there were hundreds more of them underground, just waiting to be liberated.
If erosion is what creates the spheres, it means there is solid rock under the surface, here at the top of the hill, not hundreds of balls waiting to be liberated. It would indicate that all of the balls, those up here and those that later rolled down the hillside, were formed long, long after the pyroclastic flow had solidified and they got their round shape through a simple process of weathering.
A little while later, on the trail, Lloyd pointed to the ground. We could see that the rock beneath our feet was broken up into squares and some of these squares exhibited the same onion-skin weathering we had seen on the big balls, but here it was happening on a very small scale. Smaller versions of balls were forming right there on the trail!
The mystery of the stone balls having been clarified (in our eyes), we walked 500 meters northwest, beyond The Skull, to the area known as Las Torrecillas (The Little Towers).
Geologist Chris Lloyd on “the biggest Piedra Bola,” one of the “partial balls” that are also found here. Below the surface, however, the formations are not spherical but plain solid rock.
If you think the Piedras Bola are curious, here you can see a phenomenon even curiouser: stone balls perched on top of natural columns about 4 meters tall. The columns are composed of relatively soft material that was eroded away by rainfall — except directly underneath the ball.
Over the years, the number of torrecillas has been reduced, and today there is only one good example left. If you want to see it, better plan a trip quite soon because the ball on top of what I’m calling The Last Tower seems to be held up there only by spit and a prayer.
Yes, if you want to visit the Piedras Bola and work out your own theory of how they were formed, do it now while The Last Tower is still standing and the road is still driveable. It’s well worth the effort.
After finding yourself a four-wheel drive vehicle, check out my Wikiloc route to the Piedras Bola. Driving time is about two hours, whether from Guadalajara or Lake Chapala.
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, since 1985. His most recent book is Outdoors in Western Mexico, Volume Three. More of his writing can be found on his blog.
Pondering the Piedras Bola’s origins. Key to understanding how they were made, says Lloyd, are the broken stones, which show no signs of a crystal structure or an embedded object inside, as was previously theorized.
Dominican ambassador María Isabel Castillo Báez and other officials celebrate Arajet's first flight to AIFA on Thursday. Twitter @maisacastillob
Low-cost Dominican airline Arajet is now offering direct flights between Santo Domingo and the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA) north of Mexico City.
The first flight from the Dominican Republic capital touched down at AIFA on Thursday. Arajet, the second international airline to use the new airport after Venezuela’s Conviasa, will fly three times weekly between Santo Domingo and AIFA, located about 50 kilometers north of central Mexico City in México state. One-way flights cost less than US $200.
Arajet will commence flights from Santo Domingo to two other Mexican cities – Cancún and Monterrey – next Friday. It will fly to Cancún three times per week and twice weekly to Monterrey.
Federal Tourism Minister Miguel Torruco and the Dominican Republic’s ambassador in Mexico, María Isabel Castillo Báez, were at AIFA on Thursday to welcome Arajet’s maiden flight to Mexico. Torruco said that the new flights between Mexico and the Dominican Republic will benefit the tourism sectors of both countries.
“Through connectivity we boost tourism activity by facilitating the movement of tourists,” he said.
For his part, Arajet CEO Victor Pacheco Mendez said there was “skepticism” about the decision to fly between Santo Domingo and AIFA. But “of the 18 routes Arajet has, [flights to] Felipe Ángeles are the bestseller,” he said.
The Dominican Republic is not currently a major source country for tourists, with just over 12,000 Dominicans flying into Mexico in the first seven months of 2022.
Two other airlines will soon start flying internationally to and from AIFA, which was built by the army and opened in March.
The next international airline to open at AIFA will be Panama’s Copa Airlines, which will begin to offer a route to Panama City on Monday. Alan Wilson CC BY-SA 2.0
Panama’s Copa Airlines will start twice-weekly flights from Panama City on Monday, while Mexico’s VivaAerobús is slated to begin flights to Havana, Cuba, later this year. VivaAerobús, Volaris and Aeroméxico already offer domestic flights from AIFA to several destinations around the country, with each airline having recently added new routes.
AIFA general director Isidoro Pastor told a press conference Thursday that Mexican airlines are interested in commencing flights to the United States from the new airport, but are currently unable to do so because U.S. aviation authorities downgraded Mexico’s aviation safety rating to Category 2 last year.
The airport chief predicted that 1 million passengers will have used AIFA by the time it celebrates its first anniversary next March. Almost 300,000 people have boarded or disembarked flights at AIFA in the six months since it opened, and that figure is expected to double by the end of the year.
Pastor said the new airport is expected to become profitable in late 2023 or early 2024 as flight and passenger numbers continue to grow.
Step aside, tequila and mezcal. There’s a new – but actually very old – drink in town.
Sotol is a spirit made from the sotol plant (dasilyrion wheeleri), which grows in the deserts of northern Mexico as well as the southern US states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
The sotol plant is a close relative of the agave, and the beverage distilled from it has been gaining in popularity over the past several years on both sides of the border. Some industry experts claim the drink’s popularity will eventually surpass that of mezcal and tequila.
“Commercially speaking, it’s where mezcal was 10 years ago,” Ricardo Pico, Vice President of the Certifying Council of Sotol told BBC World. Notable for its clear pour, herbal, smooth taste, and easy drinkability, sotol has gained many new fans over the past several years. It can be consumed straight, but also makes a good base for cocktails.
The “heart” of the plant, which grows on the end of a long stem in its center, is traditionally roasted in an earthen oven, then pressed to remove the sap before being fermented. While sotol can be aged to bring out more complex flavors, it is not always part of the process.
There is archaeological evidence in both present-day Mexico and Texas of the cultural importance of the sotol plant that goes back 7,000 years. More recently, the Rarámuri tribe of Chihuahua, Mexico, are believed to have made a beer-like beverage using the plant starting approximately 800 years ago. When the Spanish began colonizing the region in the 16th century, they introduced the distillation process, making sotol what it is today.
Sotol was first mass-produced in Mexico in the 1930s, when it developed a similar reputation as moonshine north of the border. The Mexican government outlawed its production in 1944, not lifting the ban until 1994, after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
In 2002, the Mexican government granted the beverage a designation of denomination of origin (DO), meaning that only sotol produced in the states of Durango, Chihuahua, and Coahuila can rightly be labeled as sotol (similar examples are champagne and scotch). The DO designation is recognized by the World Intellectual Property Organization.
However, when the new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) came into effect in 2020, sotol did not receive the denomination of origin protection enjoyed by tequila and mezcal; in fact, it was removed last minute out of fear that it would hurt producers in Texas.
As the beverage gets more attention, the debate about spirits made from local varieties of sotol plants in Texas and whether they should be labeled and marketed as sotol has heated up.
Texas producers maintain that because the plant grows “in their backyard” and they are using the same or similar techniques to produce it, then they should be allowed to continue to do so while maintaining the drink’s name.
A few vocal Mexican producers and activists believe that Mexico’s DO should be respected, for cultural reasons and economic ones. But Mexican sotoleros like Jacobo Jacquez of Sotol Don Celso see increased visibility of the beverage as a boon to both sides of the border.
Jacquez, who collaborates with Texas sotol producer Marfa Spirit Co., told Texas Monthly, sotol is “a heritage that we share.”
Dua Lipa in concert for her current tour, Future Nostalgia. Flickr / Raph_PH / CC BY 2.0
British pop star Dua Lipa has declared that Mexico City is one of her favorite cities on the planet after performing in the capital’s Foro Sol venue on Wednesday night.
“QUÉ LOCURA!!! [What craziness!] Living on a cloud!” the 27-year-old singer-songwriter wrote on Twitter above a short clip of her concert at the open-air arena. “Our biggest show on our Future Nostalgia Tour!!! 65k people in Mexico City ~ one of my fave cities in the world. Thank you for the warmest welcome. Feeling very, very grateful for this journey.”
Lipa, one of the world’s most influential pop stars with 87 million followers on Instagram, will perform in Monterrey on Friday night, her second and final concert of her tour of Mexico. It’s her second trip here after performing at the 2017 Corona Capital music festival in Mexico City.
QUE LOCURA!!! 🫠❤️ Living on a cloud! Our biggest show on our Future Nostalgia Tour!!! 65k people in Mexico City ~ one of my fave cities in the world. Thank you for the warmest welcome. Feeling very very grateful for this journey 🌹 21.09.2022 pic.twitter.com/mexgYhYDnJ
Lipa’s Mexico City concert was a crowd-pleaser, with the London native singing all her hits, including “Love Again” and “Break My Heart” from her 2020 release Future Nostalgia. She endeared herself even more to her excited fans by speaking in Spanish between songs.
The artist made good use of her time in Mexico City, visiting local tourist attractions and some of the capital’s top restaurants.
Photos posted to her Instagram account show her at Casa Luis Barragán – the former residence of noted architect Luis Barragán, as well as at the Nido de Quetzalcóatl – an architectural project that features a structure in the form of the feathered serpent of ancient Mexica mythology. She also visited the Frida Kahlo museum in the Coyoacán neighborhood.
Lipa dined at Máximo Bistrot, recently ranked the 89th best restaurant in the world, and Contramar, which is known for its fresh seafood dishes. Both restaurants are in Mexico City’s hip Roma neighborhood. The songstress gave the tick of approval to one of the tacos she tried, posting a photo of it to her Instagram stories with the simple and to-the-point caption of “yep.”
Another image posted to Lipa’s Instagram page showed that she also chowed down on takeout tacos from Taquería Orinoco, a popular restaurant for the quintessential Mexican food with several locations in the capital. She also went clubbing in the Zona Rosa, a nightlife district popular with Mexico City’s gay community, and even experienced an earthquake as Thursday morning’s 6.9 magnitude quake in the state of Michoacán was felt in Mexico City just hours after her concert finished.
The cultural and culinary offerings the pop sensation experienced in the capital apparently energized her for her concert in Monterrey.
“Loved every moment on tour this month,” tweeted Lipa, who was in South America before coming to Mexico. “Last show tonight in LatAm ~ Monterrey, Mexico! Vamonossssssss.”
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard speaks at the U.N. General Assembly. Facebook / SRE
Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard has presented Mexico’s proposal to end the Russia-Ukraine war to the United Nations.
Addressing the U.N. Security Council in New York on Thursday, Ebrard said that President López Obrador’s proposal to create a “committee for dialogue and peace in Ukraine” was aimed at “strengthening the mediation efforts” of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.
The committee – which would conduct “direct talks” with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, according to López Obrador – should include “heads of state and government,” the foreign minister said.
He repeated López Obrador’s proposal for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and Pope Francis to participate in the proposed peace talks.
“The objective would be very clear – to generate new mechanisms for dialogue and create complementary spaces for mediation that promote trust, reduce tension and open the way to lasting peace,” Ebrard said.
He said Mexico hoped that the creation of the proposed committee would go ahead with the support of the United Nations’ member states. “As Secretary-General [Guterres] has said, it’s time to act, to make a commitment to peace,” Ebrard said.
He also spoke about Mexico’s peace proposal in an address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. In that address Ebrard asserted that the Security Council – of which Mexico is currently a non-permanent member – “has been unable to fulfill the mandate conferred to it by the United Nations Charter” because it was unable to prevent the war in Ukraine and hasn’t been able to stop it since it began.
It has failed to initiate “any diplomatic process that seeks a solution [to the conflict] through dialogue and negotiation,” the foreign minister said.
Mexico’s proposal included direct talks between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, with mediation by other world leaders. CC BY 4.0
Mexico’s peace proposal – first outlined by López Obrador during an Independence Day address last Friday – was rejected by Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to President Zelenskyy, last Saturday. He took particular umbrage at the president’s call for a five-year “truce” in the Russia-Ukraine war and all other conflicts.
“’Peacemakers’ who use war as a topic for their own PR are causing only surprise. @lopezobrador_, is your plan to keep millions under occupation, increase the number of mass burials and give Russia time to renew reserves before the next offensive? Then your ‘plan’ is a [Russian] plan,” Podolyak wrote on Twitter.
Ebrard on Thursday acknowledged that both Ukraine and Russia have been critical of Mexico’s proposal, but defended the government’s decision to present it. “It’s not enough to [only] condemn [the war],” he told reporters.
The foreign minister had the opportunity to personally explain Mexico’s plan to the the foreign ministers of both warring countries in New York, meeting with Dmytro Kuleba of Ukraine Thursday and Sergei Lavrov of Russia Friday.
“I shared President López Obrador’s proposal in favor of peace as well as our ideas about the future of the Security Council,” he wrote on Twitter after the latter meeting.
Lavrov on Thursday defended Russia’s military operations in Ukraine during an address to the Security Council and described Ukraine as “a Nazi-style totalitarian state where standards of international humanitarian law are trampled underfoot with impunity.”
Russia appears to be planning for a long war in Ukraine given that President Vladimir Putin this week announced a “partial mobilization” of military reservists that could see an additional 300,000 Russian troops deployed for active service.
Mexico’s peace proposal appears doomed to remain just that – a proposal – with Putin, Zelenskyy, Modi, Guterres and Pope extremely unlikely to be seen around the same table, despite López Obrador’s apparent best intentions.
The Mérida-based Yucatán Scientific Research Center developed the genetically improved plant, which matures much faster. It has given its henequen variety to some 100 growers across Yucatán. Photos: Conacyt
Farmers in Yucatán are reaping the rewards of a project that used genetic engineering to create a fast-growing and more productive henequen plant, a species of agave that can be processed to make textiles and a distilled spirit.
Scientists from the Mérida-based Yucatán Scientific Research Center (CICY) developed the improved plant, which has been dubbed “elite henequen.”
According to a report by the news agency EFE, the scientists visited henequen (Agave fourcroydes) plantations years ago and selected the most robust, resistant and leafiest plants. They removed the plants, took them to CICY labs and used in vitro genetic engineering processes to create “elite henequen” from them.
Since 2017, CICY has distributed more than 700,000 of the “elite henequen” plants to some 100 growers across Yucatán.
Researchers developed the genetically improved plant, which matures in nearly half the time of unmodified henequen.
“Now we’re seeing the results,” Javier García, director of technological management at CICY told the news agency EFE. “The producers recognize that the elite species grows more quickly, with more and longer leaves [yielding] a greater content of fiber,” García said.
According to García, the genetically enhanced plants grow to maturity in just three years, whereas an unmodified henequen plant takes five or six years to reach a point at which its leaves can be used to extract fiber, from which textiles can be made.
Bernardino Martín Chan, president of a Yucatán farmers association and manager of a plant where henequen is processed, gave a similarly glowing assessment of the “elite henequen.”
“CICY’s new henequen plants do grow quickly and they’re bigger,” he said. “If they distributed them across the whole state, we would once again have the splendor of yesteryear because the best henequen in the world is from Yucatán.”
One of the center’s mature henequen plants.
Chan was referring to henequen’s historic reputation as Yucatán’s “green gold” because of the prosperity its production and exportation brought to the state during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The plant was grown on large henequen haciendas, and some estate owners used their wealth to build opulent homes in Mérida, such as those located on the state capital’s emblematic boulevard, Paseo de Montejo.
Yucatán’s henequen industry declined as the 20th century progressed, partially due to the development of synthetic fibers. But it could now be on the verge of a renaissance thanks to the development of the “elite henequen.”
“Our mission is to promote the cultivation of henequen in the state,” García said before waxing lyrical about the “undeniable quality” of the genetically modified plant. He also said that CICY is working “hand in hand” with producers.
García added that the cultivation of the modified species will “rescue” henequen processing plants in Yucatán because they will have more plants to process. He noted that henequen can be used to produce a variety of products, including licor de henequén, a spirit similar to tequila.
The center says it would like to put its “elite henequen” — created from robust specimens taken years ago from plantations — in the hands of more growers in Yucatán.
“We’re no longer in the previous centuries when only rope and sacks were made [with henequen],” he said. “Now we’re looking to other kinds of products like … rugs, carpets, handicrafts, clothing accessories and an alcoholic beverage.”
He also talked up henequen’s environmental credentials — it doesn’t require much water. The market is increasingly demanding products made with natural raw materials to avoid contaminating the planet, García said.
Chan, the farmers association president, said that the federal government should partner with CICY to distribute “elite henequen” free of charge to growers across all 106 of Yucatán’s municipalities. “It can be achieved with the Sowing Life program,” he said, referring to the government’s reforestation and employment program in which saplings of fruit and timber-yielding trees are distributed to landowners.
Cañada de la Virgen in Guanajuato was one of the eight sites where DNA from ancient remains was collected for the study. (Kate Bohné)
Meet Mexico’s newest officially designated archaeological monument: Cañada de la Virgen, located near the iconic town of San Miguel de Allende in the state of Guanajuato.
The first archaeological zone to be declared a national monument by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) during López Obrador’s presidency so far, the site is more than 1,000 years old and researchers believe it served as an Otomí ceremonial center. The protection, granted by presidential decree, ensures that the site will protected from future residential or commercial development.
Archaeologists believe that what is known today as Cañada de la Virgen was most active from 600-900 B.C., long before the Mexica (also known as Aztecs) conquered the Otomí peoples who occupied the present-day states of Puebla, Guanajuato, and Hidalgo, in the 14th century.
A unique site situated on a symmetrical axis, it is oriented toward the sunrise in front, unusual when compared to similar sites in the area, and the moonrise in back. It was built in accordance with the sun’s daily path through the sky, and its temples are aligned with the heavenly bodies.
An aerial view of Cañada de la Virgen. INAH / Mauricio Marat
There are several major areas of Cañada de la Virgen: Complex A, called House of the 13 Skies, serves as an observatory; Complex B, the House of the Longest Night, references its connection to the Winter Solstice. Other areas include the House of the Wind and a 900-meter-long road, and still other areas of the site continue to be explored.
Cultural material found in the area indicates that priests lived on the site, and a wide variety of artifacts from other urban centers show evidence that it was an important stop along a long trade route.
Another notable feature is the site’s amanilli, a kind of reservoir that served to store water for the area. Also called a jagüey, it is evidence of the Otomí’s sophisticated hydraulic engineering system.
When archaeological work began at the site, only a point of a pyramid was visible; most of it was buried underground, and the excavation of Cañada de la Virgen took ten years. Luckily, work has been able to continue and has culminated in its designation as a protected monument despite widely criticized budget cuts for governmental entities dedicated to archaeological excavation and preservation.
I am excited to introduce myself to you as the new executive editor of Mexico News Daily and to give you a preview of my vision for the publication, in collaboration with our dedicated team of writers and editors.
I first visited Mexico at age 9, but the country had a large presence in my family’s life already: my maternal grandparents’ home in suburban Denver held artifacts of another world: a stern Olmec head in the garden, cobalt blue Talavera tiles in the kitchen above the Formica countertops, heavy wooden furniture carved by carpenters from Michoacán.
Originally from Minnesota, my grandparents arrived in Mexico City in 1960 with their two toddling daughters and stayed for 25 years. My mother grew up as a chilanga, and though she went to college in the United States and started her family there, Mexico pulled her back – with her daughters in tow.
I have lived here full-time since 2005 and have written about Mexico’s political landscape, judicial system, economy and also the complexities of a culture that has long held my imagination captive. I often find myself in the space in between, a good vantage point for observing the borders – visible and invisible – that we navigate as immigrants and expatriates.
My primary goal as I take on this new and exciting responsibility is to inform our readers and to expand their knowledge of Mexico and its people, inspiring their curiosity and providing context for the news of the day.
Mexico News Daily is essential reading for anyone who wishes to be “in the know” about Mexico, as the premier English-language news source covering current events. In this next phase, I hope to make Mexico News Daily the essential companion to your experience of Mexico.
I want to take you beyond the headlines and the postcards, to bring you stories that enrich your perspective and open your eyes to the many worlds contained within this ancient country.
You will hear from me more in the email newsletters very soon, with further details on the fresh content coming to Mexico News Daily. You can learn more about my background and writing at The Mexpatriate.
