Ambassador and ‘rock star’ of Mexican cuisine, Diana Kennedy dies at 99

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July 27, 2022

Diana Kennedy, a British writer who lived in Mexico for over 50 years and became the foremost authority on Mexican cuisine in the English language, died at her home in Michoacán Sunday at the age of 99.

The cause of death was respiratory failure, according to chef Gabriela Cámara, a friend of the cookbook author, whose 1972 book The Cuisines of Mexico sold some 100,000 copies and was credited with broadening foreigners’ understanding of Mexican food.

The federal Culture Ministry acknowledged Kennedy’s passing in a Twitter post, saying that her life was “dedicated to discovering, compiling and preserving the richness of Mexican cuisine.”

“She chose Zitácuaro to build her country house, la Quinta Diana, an example of sustainability and conservation of nature and biodiversity,” the ministry added.

“She toured all the markets of Mexico in search of ingredients and processes to recreate the flavors of [Mexican] cooks, who she always acknowledged and gave credit to for their creations. We’re left with the invaluable legacy of her books, an inspiration and guide for everyone.”

Born in Essex, England, in 1923, to a salesman father and a school teacher mother, Kennedy, née Southwood, moved to Mexico from Canada in the late 1950s after meeting Paul Kennedy, a Mexico City-based New York Times correspondent, in Haiti.

“I arrived to Veracruz in 1957 with 500 dollars and half a marriage proposal,” she told the Reforma newspaper in 2019.

The couple married in Mexico and spent the next nine years living in the capital, where Kennedy developed a fascination with the traditional cuisine of her adopted country and its vibrant, colorful markets where the myriad required ingredients are sourced.

Kennedy's first book — Kennedy’s first book sold 100,000 copies and led to a greater understanding of Mexican food.

While her husband was reporting on coups and uprisings in Central America, Kennedy drove thousands of miles to remote Mexican villages to collect recipes, the BBC reported.

“I’m not an academic, I’m a cook and adventurer. Mexicans are very generous, they’ve allowed me to travel around this country … in my truck. I’ve lived marvelous adventures because of the people who have welcomed me into their kitchens,” she told Reforma in 2016.

In a 2003 interview with The Guardian, Kennedy said she pestered Mexican friends for the recipes of the flavorsome dishes they served.

“They’d laugh and send me to talk to their maids. The maids would say, ‘You have to visit my village’, and that’s how I started driving all over the country tracking down recipes,” she said.

After Paul Kennedy became ill with cancer, the couple moved to New York, where he died in 1967. She remained in New York, where she began offering Mexican cooking classes, but frequently traveled south to continue her culinary adventures in Mexico. Kennedy was still residing in the U.S. when The Cuisines of Mexico – described by the BBC as “the tome of reference for Mexican cooking”– was published in 1972, but she returned to Mexico to live on a permanent basis in the mid 1970s and later began building her adobe house in Michoacán.

Her property in Zitácuaro, where she grew many of the ingredients she used in her dishes, became the Diana Kennedy Center for the preservation of Mexico’s cuisines. During her long life, Kennedy wrote nine English language books, including The Tortilla Book, Recipes from the Regional Cooks of Mexico, The Art of Mexican Cooking, My Mexico and Oaxaca Al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy. They include over 1,100 painstakingly-sourced recipes.

“The regional dishes of Sonora, or Jalisco, have practically nothing in common with those of Yucatán and Campeche; neither have those of Nuevo León with those of Chiapas and Michoacán,” the author – a champion of Mexico’s culinary diversity – wrote in The Cuisines of Mexico.

In 1981, the federal government honored her dedication to the promotion of Mexican cuisine by awarding her the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest award for foreigners. Twenty-one years later Prince Charles visited Kennedy’s Michoacán property to appoint her an MBE for “furthering cultural relations between the UK and Mexico.”

She served the crown prince tequila aperitifs, tortillas, cream of squash blossom soup, pork loin baked in banana leaves and mango sorbet, according to a Reuters report.

More recently, a documentary – Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy – explored the life and passions of the woman who has been described as “the rock star of Mexican cooking” and who continued her insatiable quest to obtain yet more traditional recipes into her 90s.

“She did something that nobody else had done,” said Cristina Potters, an American-born, Michoacán-based food writer who was a friend of Kennedy. “I admire her a lot for her achievements,” Potters – who publishes the popular Mexico Cooks! blog – told the newspaper El Universal.

In Nothing Fancy, prominent Spanish-American chef José Andres described Kennedy as “an Indiana Jones of food, trying to search for that diamond that is somewhere there in the mountains of Mexico.”

“And she will not stop until she … [finds] it,” he added.

With reports from El Norte, El País, El Universal and BBC

Priests’ murder suspect controlled beer sales in Sierra Tarahumara

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MND Staff

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July 26, 2022

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Efforts to find El Chueco have turned up a small arsenal of munitions in Urique, Chihuahua.

The suspect in last month’s murder of two elderly priests controlled the beer market in some Sierra Tarahumara communities, Chihuahua authorities said after seizing almost 50,000 cans of the beverage.

José Noriel “El Chueco” Portillo Gil – the 30-year-old presumed leader of a Sinaloa Cartel-affiliated criminal cell called Gente Nueva (New People) – is currently on the run after allegedly murdering two Jesuit priests, a tour guide and a 22-year-old man in Urique on June 20. He is also believed responsible for the murder of a U.S. citizen in 2018.

Chihuahua authorities earlier this month established that Portillo’s complicity with municipal police allowed him to seize criminal control of a significant part of the state’s Sierra Tarahumara region. They now say that his influence extended to the distribution of beer in communities in Urique, located in southwestern Chihuahua near the border with Sinaloa and Sonora.

State Security Minister Gilberto Loya told the newspaper Milenio that “clandestine” beer sales helped finance El Chueco’s criminal group, while Attorney General Roberto Fierro Duarte said his monopolization of that market in some towns was indicative of the criminal power he obtained.

During a joint operation, the army, National Guard and state police recently discovered a warehouse in Bahuichivo – a small Sierra Tarahumara town where Portillo owns a luxury home – where over 2,000 trays of beer that allegedly belonged to Portillo were stored. The authorities seized a total of 49,584 cans.

According to state authorities, Portillo secretly stored beer in several buildings in Bahuichivo, including a former church. The criminal leader and his henchmen allegedly forced Urique store owners to exclusively stock the Tecate beer they supplied, a racket that began about two years ago.

State authorities determined that Portillo’s gang brought the beer to the Sierra from Navojoa, a city in southern Sonora eight hours’ drive from Bahuichivo. It was unclear how the crime group sourced the beer.

Store owners in Urique told Milenio that El Chueco’s sicarios (hitmen) left them a telephone number they had to call to order beer as required. They complained that they had to pay 370 pesos (US $18) for a 24-can tray of Tecate original lager whereas their previous legal supplier charged 120 pesos less.

One store owner said he stopped selling beer because he was only making 5 pesos’ (US $0.25) profit on a six pack. “It was no longer a business,” he said.

Another owner said that buying beer elsewhere would trigger retaliation from El Chueco’s enforcers. “It was prohibited, they’d give you a beating or worse,” he said.

The small business owners told Milenio there is currently a lack of beer in the region and attributed the problem to authorities’ manhunt for their supplier, although a scarcity of glass bottles and high prices for aluminum and cardboard have been blamed for recent beer shortages in some parts of the country, including northern Mexico.

Milenio reported that Chihuahua authorities are investigating whether El Chueco and his criminal accomplices also controlled the beer market in the neighboring municipality of Bocoyna, which includes the magical town of Creel, located along the Copper Canyon route taken by the El Chepe tourist train.

With reports from Milenio

In the US Civil War’s aftermath, some Confederates fled to Mexico

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Rich Tenorio

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July 26, 2022

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Historian and author Caroline Janney — University of Virginia professor and historian Caroline Janney says her book was inspired by wondering what a country does with a rebel army after a civil war. Caroline Janney

As the United States’ Civil War ended in 1865 and many defeated Southern cities lay in ruins, a handful of ex-Confederates who ended up leaving their ill-fated secessionist nation opted for a perhaps unlikely destination: Mexico.

The narrative of what happened to members of the Confederate army after the war’s end is addressed in a new book about this period of history: Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by University of Virginia professor Caroline Janney.

“It quickly became clear there were so many unanswered questions and so many unanticipated consequences, questions that other people had not asked,” said Janney of what inspired her book, which took six years to research and write.

In 2022, it won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

General Robert E. Lee surrender at Appotamattox — A painting of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Northern forces at Appomattox in 1865. U.S. Army

Janney said her interest began with one question – “what do you do with the Confederate army, a rebel army, after a civil war?” She reflected, “It started as a simple question and blossomed into a whole host of questions.”

“I was most surprised,” she said, “to find out the number of men who didn’t surrender themselves at Appomattox, those who pursued the slim opportunity to continue waging the war.”

Confederate General Jubal Early is perhaps one of the more prominent of these ex-Confederates who ended up in Mexico for a while after the war; he led troops in some of the Civil War’s bloodiest and most famous battles, including Antietam, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg.

Defeated in battle, Early was relieved of his command by General Robert E. Lee in March 1865, just a month before Lee himself surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, widely seen as ending the Civil War.

Early and other defeated Confederates, including oceanographer-turned-rebel navy secretary Matthew Fontaine Maury, fled to Mexico in the war’s aftermath. Early decided he would not live under the United States government and fled to Texas on horseback, then on to Mexico.

Maury, who would develop a doomed plan for resettlement of ex-Confederates via land grants from the Mexican government, followed a more circuitous path that included a stop in England.

Most of those who journeyed to Mexico did so via steamship, although others traveled overland to New Orleans, and then to Texas.

Some who reached Mexico included generals and governors invited by Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian, who was a longtime friend of Maury’s. Confederate generals who came to Mexico at Maximilian’s behest included John B. Magruder, Sterling Price, Joseph Shelby and Edmund Kirby Smith.

Confederate gendral Jubal Early disguised as a farmer while escaping to Mexico — Confederate General Jubal Early dressed as a farmer as he escaped to Mexico soon after the U.S. Civil War ended. Valentine Richmond History Center

“They no longer considered themselves U.S. citizens,” Janney explained of ex-Confederates heading across the Rio Grande. “They see [Mexico] as a better alternative to being subjugated by the enemy.”

Another motivation of these men was the possibility of fighting against the U.S. again if war broke out over Mexico between the United States and France. With the Civil War over, the U.S. had sent soldiers to the Mexican border, including members of the U.S. Colored Troops, with the intention of enforcing the Monroe Doctrine against foreign involvement in the Americas.

A war between the two countries didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.

Even before the war had ended, as things were looking their worst for the South, apparently some were already considering picking up the fight against the Union from elsewhere: Janney’s book quotes a 23-year-old Confederate officer in Robert E. Lee’s army named William Gordon McCabe. He considered fighting against the U.S. under a different flag.

On April 7, 1865, two days before Lee’s surrender, he wrote, “I am willing and ready, if God spares my life, to follow the old battle flag to the Gulf of Mexico. If our men desert it, and I am not killed, I shall be forever an exile.”

On April 25, McCabe had journeyed from Virginia to North Carolina and was considering the possibility of a war between France and the U.S., “when we may probably get something to do in the service of H. S. H. [His Serene Highness] Napoleon III.”

By that point, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated on April 15 by Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, inflaming Northern hostility toward the South. This gave those who fled to Mexico yet another reason to consider leaving.

“Why were they willing to go to a country where the unknowns were so great?” she asked. “They feared retribution, they feared punishment within the U.S.”

Civil War Navy head Matthew Fontaine Maury — Matthew Fontaine Maury developed a resettlement plan in Mexico for ex-Confederates. However, most settlers left when their patron, Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian, was deposed.

Some former Confederates fled even further abroad than Mexico, refusing to live in a country with emancipated slaves; Mexico had ended slavery before the U.S. did. These men headed to two other Latin American countries where slavery still existed: Cuba and Brazil.

There were some ironies in Confederates fleeing the U.S. for Mexico: some had been there almost two decades earlier, fighting for the U.S. in the Mexican-American War.

“A lot of the [Confederate] officer corps was familiar with Buena Vista,” Janney said, referring to the 1847 battle between the Mexican army of Antonio López de Santa Anna and the U.S. force of Zachary Taylor. “It was not completely foreign to them in that regard.”

Some Confederates fled to Mexico to save their lives: two months after General Lee surrendered, he was indicted for treason on June 7, 1865, a fate shared by 36 fellow Confederates, including Jubal Early.

A treason conviction meant death, which pushed Early to become an expatriate in Mexico.

Some who came to Mexico committed fully to a new life here and planned to live in Maury’s and other settlements for ex-Confederates in a number of states, among them ones in modern-day Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Morelos.

Others realized that they had clearly made a spontaneous, angry decision to leave the U.S. and didn’t make it past Texas.

“Some of this clearly is a reaction that’s not especially well-thought-out in terms of long-term circumstances,” she said. “Going to Texas, many changed their mind within one month or two. Their immediate response, full of emotion and rage, tempered itself.”

cover of Ends of War book by Caroline Janney — Janney’s book took six years to research and write. Caroline Janney

Janney said she was struck by those who did make it to Mexico.

“It speaks not just to their devotion to the Confederate cause, but their rejection of the U.S.,” she said.

Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.

Moody’s predicts Mexico will be unable to avoid recession next year

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MND Staff

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July 26, 2022

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The Mexican economy will likely fall into recession next year, according to economic research firm Moody’s Analytics.

Alfredo Coutiño, the company’s head of Latin America research, believes there is a growing probability that the global economy will enter a recession in the next 12 months and that Mexico will be unable to avoid suffering the same fate.

“Given the increasing probability of a global recession within the next 12 months, Mexico would be unable to avoid an economic contraction caused by a recession in the United States,” he said.

In a report, Coutiño set out a global recession scenario in which a contraction begins here in the second quarter of 2023 and lasts for a total of three quarters. In the scenario, he anticipated that GDP will shrink 1.7% in the next calendar year, after growth of 1.8% in 2022. The contraction between the second and fourth quarters of 2023 would be 3.4%.

Coutiño’s report said the Mexican economy faces a combination of unfavorable events, including the persistence of supply shocks in the global economy, high prices for raw materials and weakening of domestic demand amid the necessity to raise interest rates to combat high inflation.

In the anticipated recession, Mexican families would suffer both from a decline in their purchasing power due to high inflation and higher unemployment, according to Coutiño.

His report envisioned Mexico coming out of recession in unison with the United States in the first quarter of 2024 and an ongoing recovery in 2025 as the U.S. economy strengthens. In the scenario, a reduction in unemployment would quicken in 2025, and inflation would drop to the central bank’s target rate of 3% in the middle of that year.

Although Moody’s Analytics anticipates a recession in the United States, the U.S. government is downplaying that possibility. “We’re not going to be in a recession, in my view,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters Monday.

“The unemployment rate is still one of the lowest we’ve had in history. It’s in the 3.6% area. We still find ourselves, the people, investing. My hope is we go from this rapid growth to a steady growth. And so, we’ll see some coming down. But I don’t think we’re going to, God willing, I don’t think we’re going to see a recession,” he said.

If Mexico’s economy does suffer a recession next year, it will be the third time that an annual contraction is recorded during President López Obrador’s six-year term. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions caused GDP to plummet 8.5% in 2020, while there was a 0.1% contraction in 2019.

With reports from El Financiero, Reforma, El Economista and CNN

Gov’t announces Mexico City airport repair funds after pothole closes runway

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MND Staff

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July 26, 2022

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pothole on runway Benito Juarez airport CDMX — A pothole on an AICM runway that was filled with gravel led to the runway being closed, a problem AMLO highlighted at Monday's press conference. Presidencia

The federal government has announced it will spend 46.5 million pesos (US $2.3 million) this year to repair structural damage in both terminal buildings at the Mexico City International Airport (AICM).

The Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transport (SICT) said that a range of projects will be carried out to strengthen the foundations and superstructures of terminals 1 and 2. The aim is to ensure that the two terminals can continue to operate adequately in the medium and long term, the SICT said.

The ministry’s announcement came after President López Obrador highlighted structural damage in Terminal 2 during his news conference on Monday. Noting that it was built during former president Vicente Fox’s 2000–2006 government, López Obrador said that the building is “not very old but has structural damage.”

“They charged a lot [to build it],” he added. “We’re going to check it and shore it up so that people are protected.”

Terminal 2 at Benito Juarez airport Mexico City — The president claimed that the construction of AICM’s Terminal 2, opened in 2007, was a project plagued with fraud and thus its structures need shoring up.

The president claimed that the construction of Terminal 2, which opened in late 2007, was plagued by fraud.

“It’s sinking and the land [on which it was built] wasn’t the most suitable, isn’t the most suitable. … They built Terminal 2 and it doesn’t have [adequate] support – it’s sinking or the structure is emerging. So we have to find a way to shore it up with columns, for safety reasons,” he said.

López Obrador acknowledged that a pothole shut down one of the AICM runways from Sunday evening until early Monday morning, but downplayed the seriousness of the issue. Claims that the pothole was a “crater” or “sinkhole” were exaggerated, he suggested before presenting an image of the bache to support his view.

AICM – Mexico’s busiest airport – has not had a stellar 2022. The Federal Civil Aviation Agency declared in March that both terminals had reached saturation point, while the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations issued a safety bulletin in early May advising that it had been made aware of several dangerous incidents involving aircraft arriving at the AICM.

Mexico City's Benito Juarez Airport — AICM, the nation’s busiest airport, has had a tough year, with multiple reported plane near misses and being declared completely saturated by the government.

In the days following that warning, there were two close calls caused by air traffic control errors. Pilots of a Volaris plane narrowly averted a disaster May 7 after they were cleared to land on a runway occupied by another aircraft. A similar incident occurred four days later.

More recently, AICM passengers have reported long wait times to collect their luggage, get through immigration and board taxis at both terminals. While delays have been blamed on a range of factors – including luggage inspections by the navy, insufficient customs staff and lengthy questioning of some incoming travelers – problems such as the recent appearance of a pothole on a runway are due to a lack of investment in maintenance, according to two aviation experts.

Juan Antonio José and Gabriel Rojas agreed that there has been insufficient monitoring and maintenance of key infrastructure such as runways. “Rainy season is when this type of control should be carried out more, … but they’re not doing it, and it’s due to a lack of budget,” Rojas told the newspaper Reforma.

José Suárez, press secretary with the Association of Airline Pilots of Mexico, warned that a gravel-filled pothole such as that which appeared on the weekend can affect a plane both at takeoff and landing. It’s dangerous for a fast-moving aircraft to operate on an uneven runway, he said. “Depending on the size of the pothole, it could cause structural damage [to the plane],” he said.

Situación de ALTO riesgo: AVION de VOLARIS intenta aterrizar con otro avion en pista. (AUDIO ATC)

Watch this video on YouTube

Video footage of the near-miss by two Volaris planes at AICM in May.

Rodrigo Pérez Alonso, former director of the National Air Transport Chamber, charged that the current problems at AICM are related to its saturation. Deputy Transport Minister Rogelio Jiménez Pons said in May that 25% of AICM flights would be transferred to the Felipe Ángeles International Airport and the Toluca International Airport over a period of 12 months, but that plan isn’t slated to begin until next month.

Pérez pointed out that AICM has been operating for over 50 years and has thus exceeded its useful life. The government’s efforts to remediate the airport’s problems have been insufficient, he added.

“AICM is a body that is already sick and they’re only trying to cure it with aspirin,” Pérez said, adding that the problems are coalescing in a “snowball” that ultimately won’t be possible to contain.

With reports from Milenio and Reforma

Woman dies after being doused in gasoline and set on fire

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MND Staff

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July 26, 2022

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Margarita Ceceña was attacked in a dispute over the ownership of a home, according to reports.

For the second time this month, a woman has died after being doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire.

Margarita Ceceña Martínez of Cuautla, Morelos, died in a Mexico City hospital on Sunday, 23 days after she was attacked by a family member in her home, part of which is a small grocery store.

Her death followed that of Luz Raquel Padilla, a Jalisco woman who passed away last Tuesday after she was doused with alcohol and set on fire in a park near her home in Zapopan.

Ceceña, her mother and her son were attacked on July 1 in an incident reportedly related to a family dispute over a home. According to a Reforma newspaper report, aggressors arrived at the 30-year-old’s home with sticks, a machete and a container filled with gasoline.

A man identified as Primitivo Rangel – an in-law of the victim – doused Ceceña, her son and Andrea Martínez with gasoline and attempted to set all three alight. Ceceña sustained second and third degree burns to 70% of her body in the attack, while her mother and son managed to avoid being burned.

Ceceña was initially treated in a Cuautla hospital before she was transferred to the National Rehabilitation Institute in southern Mexico City, where she died in the intensive care unit on Sunday. As a result of her death, the Morelos Attorney General’s Office (FGE) will investigate the crime as a femicide. As of late Monday, no one had been arrested in connection with the attack.

Martínez, the victim’s mother, told Milenio Televisión that the FGE advised her that arrest warrants have been issued, but questioned why no one has been detained.

“A month has passed and I haven’t seen them catch those who did this to my daughter,” she said. “The criminals are my sister, my niece and their husbands.”

Martínez said that her daughter had reported threats and previous acts of violence to authorities, but they didn’t take any notice. “Now, she’s dead and they still haven’t acted,” she added.

With reports from Reforma and Milenio

9-year-old Chiapas girl plans to enter university in the fall

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MND Staff

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July 25, 2022

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Michelle Arellano plans to study medicine first, but is also interested in marine biology and acting.

After passing middle school and high school exams earlier this year, a nine-year-old child genius from Chiapas is planning to commence university studies in medicine next month.

Michelle Arellano Guillén of Tuxtla Gutiérrez also aspires to become a marine biologist and actor, but will first focus on graduating as a doctor so she can follow in the footsteps of her mother. According to the Milenio newspaper, Michelle is currently awaiting acceptance into a university program, but other reports said she was starting a degree online on August 29.

“I’d like to be like my mom,” she said, referring to her dream of becoming a cardiovascular surgeon. “… I like medicine, … I know that because I’ve been to surgery with my mom to see what the organisms inside the body are like,” she said in an interview with Uno TV.

Michelle, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, stood out from a very young age, learning to speak English at the age of one and a half and to read and write at four, according to her mother.

Michelle with her mother, a medical doctor.

“She speaks four languages [in addition to Spanish]; she speaks English, German, French and Italian. She speaks English at an advanced level and German, French and Italian at a basic level,” Karina Guillén said. “She’s been a state swimming champion [and] she’s a black belt in taekwondo. She has eight trophies and 890 medals in total because she’s a great athlete as well.”

Karina initially believed that her daughter’s intellectual gifts were simply the result of the way she and her husband interacted with her when she was very young. “As I’m a doctor we gave her a lot of early stimulation,” she said.

However, medical and psychological testing later determined that Michelle was a gifted child. Michelle’s time in primary school — from which she graduated last year — was abbreviated because she skipped grades due to her impressive intellect.

Her parents subsequently found out that she could demonstrate that her skills and knowledge were up to middle school and high school standard by preparing for and sitting single exams offered by Ceneval, a national education assessment center. Michelle, who will turn 10 at the end of August, passed the middle school exam in March and the high school one earlier this month, paving the way for her entry to university.

Testing has also deemed she has an IQ of 158, just two points below Albert Einstein’s estimated intelligence quotient. Although her educational achievements are well beyond her years, Michelle retains some hobbies common among girls of her age, such as playing with dolls, music and sports.

“I really like doing sports, like swimming, basketball and taekwondo. I also know how to play the piano. When I grow up I want to be a doctor and a marine biologist because I really like animals,” she said.

With reports from Milenio and Uno TV

Mexico’s whale sharks still hold onto many of their secrets

By

Omar Vidal

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July 25, 2022

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The skin of a whale shark reminds me of a domino I had as a child.

Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are the largest living vertebrates, after the baleen whales. Reaching 19 meters in length, these giant fish avoid cold water and thus roam the world’s tropical and subtropical seas.

Some of these ancient migratory fish spend a substantial part of their lives in the Caribbean Sea, where they are particularly fond of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, as sea turtles are.

Whale sharks are as big as their legendary cousins, the now extinct megalodon (Carcharodon megalodon) — a black-eyed white shark equipped with 3-meter-long jaws that patrolled the warm seas of the Neogene era — the second of three divisions of the Cenozoic Era — 28 to 2 million years ago, devouring whales, sea turtles, other sharks, dugongs and any large creature that dared cross its path.

Whale sharks are one of only three species of filter-feeding sharks: they feed by sucking huge amounts of water at high speeds into their mouth — which passes through unique filtering pads in the throat that trap plankton and small fishes — and then spew the “cleaned” water out through their gills.

They capture massive amounts of plankton. Their jaws have more than 3,000 minuscule teeth that they use to macerate the larger bits of food.

The second shark that feeds this way is also the second largest fish (up to 12 meters long), after the whale shark. The basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) is a big-nosed, gentle creature endangered by overfishing to satisfy our insatiable appetite for their meat, skin, and fins.

And the third one is the smallest of the three — up to 5.5 meters long: the megamouth (Megachasma pelagios), a queer-looking, flaccid-bodied, bioluminescent, deep-water shark very rarely seen or captured.

My first face-to-face encounter with a whale shark was 15 years ago near Holbox Island in the Mexican Caribbean; the second was eight years ago in Bahía de La Paz, in the Gulf of California. In both cases, I was swimming with my young daughter.

In Holbox, as we stared intently at its left eye — the size of a headlight on my wife’s car — the whale shark looked back at us as if asking, “Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?”

I saw that wide-open left eye wink at me, even knowing that sharks don’t have eyelashes — an intimate stare down, during which I sensed the mysteries of nature and the strength of an ancient creature longing to live.

A few days ago, I came back from my third close encounter with whale sharks, this time in El Azul, some 20 kilometers off Cancún in the state of Quintana Roo. Here, and in a few other nearby sites, scientists have identified more than 1,000 different whale sharks that seasonally gather to feed in these rich waters.

The world’s largest known aggregation of these sharks — 420 of them in just 18 square kilometers — was found between Contoy and Mujeres Islands, not far from where I was swimming.

This time, being so close to these gentle giants, I couldn’t help but imagine myself gulped down by those huge jaws — like Jonah — and then spewed out with the water through the formidable gills — like Pinocchio — in the process that nourishes the world’s largest fish.

As with nearly all animal species, female whale sharks are more attractive, vigorous, charismatic, enigmatic and elegant than males. They are also larger and longer-lived, travel much farther and carry hundreds of shark pups in their belly.

These sharks are born alive, yet no human being has ever witnessed this natural miracle. In fact, off the shores of the Galapagos Islands is the only place where pregnant whale sharks have been observed with any regularity.

Most whale shark populations across the world are shrinking. They are threatened by overfishing, mainly in Asian seas, where people are still eating their fins, meat and liver.

But they survive despite being frequently struck by boats and despite the changes in water temperature, productivity and marine currents brought about by global warming — and despite some whale shark tourism operators in their habitat who ignore the guidelines that regulate this multimillion-dollar industry.

Every year, from May through September, whale sharks return to El Azul to feed and build their energy reserves. We know a good deal about their lifestyle while they are here, but we don’t know exactly where they go or what they do once they leave El Azul.

However, it is clear that Mexican waters are a whale shark paradise: the Yucatán Peninsula in the Caribbean. In the Pacific, it’s the Gulf of California, the islands of the Revillagigedo Archipelago and the states of Nayarit and Oaxaca.

Whale Shark vertical feeding in "El Azul" aggregation of Mexico

Watch this video on YouTube

A video of a whale shark feeding during the annual El Azul whale shark aggregation.

Scientists working for Pronatura Península de Yucatán — one of Mexico’s most important nongovernmental organizations — have studied whale sharks for a long time. They told me that one of every three sharks that visit El Azul is a female; the rest are males, mainly immature ones.

Unfortunately, I will never know whether the last whale shark I swam with was a female or a male. But I witnessed how she/he swam, rhythmically brandishing its bifurcated tail from right to left and from left to right while its gills slowly opened and closed like an accordion, allowing the warm waters of the Caribbean to flow through them like a melodious salty river.

As I gazed for one last time at the gargantua in the water with me, the whale shark’s colossal body, like a titanic domino, slowly vanished into Mexico’s blue sea, El Azul — a place where, occasionally, souls come to heal.

In loving memory of Priscilla Pinzón de Vidal (May 10, 1931–June 27, 2022) who taught me to respect and love all living creatures.

Omar Vidal, a scientist, was a university professor in Mexico, is a former senior officer at the UN Environment Program and the former director-general of the World Wildlife Fund-Mexico.

Oldest son of Sinaloa Cartel drug lord released from US prison

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MND Staff

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July 25, 2022

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At left, "El Mayito Gordo." At right, the DEA wanted poster for his father, "El Mayo" Zambada.

The eldest son of a Sinaloa Cartel drug lord was released from U.S. prison on Thursday.

Ismael Zambada Imperial, also known by the moniker “El Mayito Gordo,” is the first son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, one of the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Zambada Imperial was imprisoned in a federal penitentiary in San Diego, California, after being extradited from Mexico in December 2019. In April 2021, he pleaded guilty to importing and distributing methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana.

He was sentenced to nine years in prison on June 24. Thanks to time already served, only a little over one year remains on his sentence, which he will serve on conditional release. He was originally arrested in November 2014 in Culiacán, Sinaloa.

Zambada Imperial will be put back behind bars if he’s found in possession of drugs and must undergo a drugs test within 15 days of his release, and two further tests thereafter. He will also have to participate in a domestic violence reeducation program.

El Mayito Gordo’s criminal activities are part of a family tradition. His brother, Ismael Zambada Sicairos, was indicted alongside him, as was the son of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar. Both men are fugitives.

Zambada Imperial is the third son of Zambada García to be imprisoned in the U.S. Vicente Zambada Niebla was arrested in Mexico in 2009 and extradited to the U.S. a year later. He was sentenced in May 2019 to 15 years in prison, but is no longer in the U.S. prison system and was likely released as a protected witness, the newspaper Milenio reported.

Serafín Zambada Ortiz was the second son to face U.S. prison. He was arrested in November 2013 after trying to cross into the U.S. on foot from Sonora. He was sentenced to five and a half years in prison and was released in September 2018.

U.S. officials increased their reward for information leading to the capture of Zambada García in September. The whereabouts of the former poppy field worker was deemed to be worth US $15 million.

With reports from Milenio

Warnings issued over shoddy and substandard construction materials

By

MND Staff

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July 25, 2022

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Seduced by low prices, some builders are using wiring with risks of short circuits and fires. DepositPhotos

Lured by low prices, many construction companies are using electrical materials that are not authorized for use in Mexico, according to the head of a public-private electricity safety initiative.

“We’ve been finding in recent years that important construction developers are using electrical conductors that aren’t authorized,” Mari Carmen Ruiz, coordinator of the Programa Casa Segura (Safe House Program), told the newspaper Milenio.

In some cases, the materials are “banned in more than 30 countries, but we have more than 43,000 homes with these kinds of wires,” she said.

According to a Milenio report, unauthorized electrical components enter the country after passing customs “irregularly” and are subsequently sold here. They’re attractive because of their low price — especially considering that construction materials in general have increased significantly over the past year — but their use comes with risks such as short circuits and fires.

Not all Mexican wiring is up to code. — Not all wiring in Mexico is up to code.

Ruiz said that one of the most frequently detected unauthorized materials is copper-clad aluminum wire, which can contribute to short circuits and cause fires if not of sufficient quality. “If we didn’t allow ourselves to be seduced by the low costs we wouldn’t have that problem,” she said.

Milenio found a difference of up to 2,000 pesos (US $98) between prices for 100 meters of electrical wire. A survey conducted by Programa Casa Segura found that a majority of construction company respondents were using wires that aren’t authorized in Mexico due to their high fire risk.

Ruiz called on companies and individual consumers to buy electrical materials from established businesses and to check that their packaging confirms that they meet official Mexican standards. She also said that people buying a new home should ask developers about the kind of wire used and confirm that it is authorized. People who discover the use of unauthorized electrical components can file a complaint with Programa Casa Segura, which is backed by government and industry organizations.

The CEO of lighting company Signify said that some lights — including Christmas lights — sold in Mexico don’t meet official standards either. “The importation of lights is not properly … [monitored], customs is very porous,” Pedro Martín said.

“Of everything that comes in, there is a large percentage of product that doesn’t meet [official] standards,” he said, warning that there is a risk of electric shocks from poor-quality, unauthorized lights.

Martín gave consumers similar advice to that offered by Ruiz, but added a caveat. “We have to make sure that the packaging has the official Mexican standard stamp, but that’s not enough because there are packages that have the stamp … but in reality [the product] doesn’t meet [the standard],” he said.

“For example, there are LED tube lights that don’t have a safety circuit and if you touch it by mistake you can get a 130-volt shock,” Martín said. Prices of unauthorized lighting products can be 20% lower, but the risk they entail easily outweighs the saving, he said.

With reports from Milenio