A Veracruz woman got her dying wish last Saturday when a giant penis sculpture was erected atop her gravestone in Ignacio Zaragoza, Misantla. Catarina Orduña, called Doña Cata by friends and family, was surely laughing in her grave, as she often did in life according to her family, at the sight of onlookers taking photos with the larger-than-life penis that now decorates the local cemetery.
Doña Cata was known for her humor, sharp tongue, and sometimes racy conversation. She was a long-time political activist and could often be found talking to local politicians both during their campaigns and after they won.
According to her family, she lamented the fact that there were so many public monuments to politicians, lawyers, doctors, and teachers, but none to the penis, a reproductive organ she considered worthy of honor and reverence. She even believed that the penis should have its own holiday when its importance as a tool of pleasure could be celebrated by all. Her family said that Doña Cata was never embarrassed by talking about sex and didn’t believe that others should be either.
The woman requested before she died that they erect the penis sculpture atop her grave to remind all who knew her of her joyful and playful character in life. The sculpture, created by architect Isidro Lavoignet, was well-received by the cemetery according to the family. They said they knew of no other monument quite like it in another cemetery in the country.
Doña Catarina was born in 1921 and lived to 100. She had nine children and many grandchildren, one of whom, Álvaro Mota Limón, went on to be the mayor of Misantla in the early 2000s.
Drought is taking a toll on livestock in southern Coahuila: one farmer saw 50 of his goats die this year and sold the rest of his famished herd for a pittance because he couldn’t afford to feed them.
Nearby is the small town of Hipólito, where 73-year-old Silverio Alférez Piña began raising farm animals 25 years ago.
“There’s never been a drought like now,” he told the newspaper Vanguardia. Alférez described the current conditions as “ugly” before bluntly declaring that “there’s no water” in Hipólito, located 70 kilometers northwest of state capital Saltillo in the municipality of Ramos Arizpe.
Growing fodder is consequently impossible, meaning that local farmers have to buy feed for their animals. Alférez, however, reached a point at which at which he could no longer afford the feed his goats, cattle and horses needed.
With insufficient food, goats in his 140-strong herd, including pregnant does, began to die. Alférez admitted that his stubbornness led him to soldier on as a farmer but after approximately 50 of his goats had died he realized he couldn’t continue. He sold his scrawny surviving goats for a total of just 800 pesos (US $39).
Alférez also lost cattle due to the drought as well as some of his mares. “I sold all my [surviving] mares, about five of them died on me,” he said. “I sold pure [skin and] bones and … [the buyers] paid me as they wished,” he said.
Alférez has kept a couple of calves but is now out of the commercial farming game because turning a profit became impossible. He now runs a small store, which he opened with money he saved from his pension.
Other Hipólito residents also had to sell their farm animals because they didn’t have the money to feed them, Vanguardia reported.
Located about five kilometers from Hipólito on the border between Ramos Arizpe and the municipality of General Cepeda, the empty El Tulillo dam – which went completely dry four months ago – serves as stark testament to the drought the region is currently enduring, the worst in at least 20 years.
“It’s all dry,” said Eusebio López, a local official. “Not just the dam, the entire … [area], there’s nothing for the animals to eat.”
This model apartment in a building in the Roma Norte neighborhood is being advertised as an income generator in that the real estate company expects the buyer will rent it to travelers.
Foreigners — especially United States citizens – are changing the face of some Mexico City neighborhoods where they have recently settled and from which they work remotely.
Large numbers of mainly young Americans have moved to the capital during the pandemic, taking advantage of flexible work arrangements that allow them to live in Mexico while earning in dollars. According to the remote worker website Nomad List, a resource for digital nomads that claims over 10,000 paid subscribers, Mexico City is No. 5 on one of its lists of the fastest-growing remote work hubs in the last five years.
In 2021, once the COVID-19 pandemic began, Nomad List says the number of its subscribers who checked in from Mexico City grew 125% and grew 65% more in 2022.
According to the site, the pandemic influenced numbers in 2020 and 2021.
Foreigners, mainly people from the United States, are more than ever a familiar sight in places like this cafe in Polanco.
“For example, places with less travel restrictions (like Mexico) have grown faster for that reason, amongst others,” it said.
Many of these foreigners who are staying temporarily in Mexico City now live in trendy, central neighborhoods such as Condesa, Roma and Juárez, where renting an apartment is out of reach of most Mexicans but comparatively cheap for Americans armed with dólares.
A Milenio newspaper report noted that the sight of U.S. citizens at businesses such as restaurants and cafes in those neighborhoods, as well as Santa María la Ribera and the historic center – all of which are in the central Cuauhtémoc borough – is now commonplace.
It also said that businesses, especially those in Condesa, are adapting in order to cater to the large number of gringos living in the local area.
Long-established barberías now have “barber shop” signs for English-speaking eyes. Restaurants have English menus, and yoga studios offer bilingual classes, Milenio said. The self-proclaimed “healthy” restaurant Mora Mora, where “clean & green bowls” and “superfood sandwiches” are on the menu; the restaurant Ojo de Agua, where fresh food and free WiFi are on offer; and the Condesa branch of the cafebrería (cafe/bookstore) El Péndulo are all popular places among Americans who left the U.S. for a variety of reasons, including high living costs and the impact of the pandemic on their social lives.
An El Péndulo waiter told Milenio that at least half of all customers in recent months have been gringos. “The bad thing is that they don’t leave very good tips,” he said.
In an interview with Milenio, the president of the Mexico City branch of the Mexican Association of Real Estate Professionals said the arrival of Americans and the consequent influx of dollars has helped the rental market recover from a pandemic-induced downturn.
“They don’t have a problem paying 30,000, 40,000 or even 50,0000 pesos rent [per month],” Laura Zazueta said.
Mexico City has been considered an appealing destination for digital nomads since the mid 2010s, but this chart shows that its popularity during the first year of the pandemic shot up. Nomad List
At the current exchange rate (one greenback buys about 20.5 pesos), 50,000 pesos is $2,435. That’s almost 10 times Mexico’s monthly minimum wage, which is currently set at just under 173 pesos (about US $8.50) per day.
Zazueta acknowledged that Condesa, Roma, Juárez and the historic center are the most popular neighborhoods among foreigners, although some have ventured outside the Cuauhtémoc borough “bubble” to live in places such as swanky Polanco and nearby Anzures, both of which are in the Miguel Hidalgo borough.
Americans like neighborhoods such as Condesa and Roma because of the art deco architecture and the wide variety of dining options, she said. “[Roma] is also very attractive because the movie Roma was filmed there,” Zazueta said.
The industry group president said that account managers, bankers and office employees of multinational companies are among the foreigners moving to Mexico City. “They install themselves here because it’s not at all expensive for them, due to the exchange rate,” Zazueta said.
Most foreigners living in Mexico while working remotely for foreign companies enter the country as tourists, meaning that they shouldn’t stay here uninterruptedly for longer than six months, provided they were given a 180-day permit. Getting a 180-day permit was once all but guaranteed, but many travelers have reported that they were allowed 30 or fewer days.
While Americans and other foreigners living and working in the capital inject significant quantities of money into the local economy, their presence is far from welcomed by all Mexicans.
When a visitor from Austin tweeted in February that remote working in Mexico City “is truly magical,” a storm of indignation among Mexico City residents about remote workers from the U.S. pushing locals out of their own neighborhoods ensued online, Mexico News Daily reported earlier this year in a story about a Roma sandwich business’s battle against the seemingly unstoppable forces of gentrification.
A huge shipment of cocaine bound for Los Angeles was seized by police in Mexico City on Tuesday, officials reported, adding that the confiscated 1.68 tonnes made for the largest cocaine bust ever in the capital city.
The contraband came by sea from Colombia and entered Mexico in the Oaxacan coastal city of Puerto Escondido, the newspaper El País reported. From there, according to media reports, it was transported by two freight trucks to Mexico City, where some of the drug was going to be distributed in the Tepito neighborhood, though the bulk of the 3,704 lbs. of cocaine was on its way to L.A.
“This represents a strong blow to the financial structure of criminal organizations,” said Mexico City Police Chief Omar García Harfuch, who noted that the cocaine had a street value of about 400 million pesos (US $19.5 million).
Four people were detained and three vehicles, one of which was escorting the two trucks, were seized, one of them with secret compartments to hide the cocaine, El País reported. Some media reported that those arrested are Colombians, while others said they are from Durango.
Though Mexico City officials admit their city is used as a shipping point, they claim drug cartels do not operate as brazenly there as they do in other parts of Mexico.
In images shared by the police, agents are seen hammering the top of the vehicles and discovering hundreds of packages of cocaine. The bust took place in the Gustavo A. Madero borough, where Mexico City’s Norte bus station is located, and was aided by authorities from nearby México state.
However, the Minister of Public Security did not cite the Sinaloa Cartel or any other criminal organization by name. But noting that several drug trafficking routes have been identified, García did say intelligence work will lead to more busts going forward.
Two years ago, García was hit by three bullets when a vehicle he was traveling in was riddled by more than 400 gunshots. Two escorts from the Public Security Ministry died in that attack, as did a woman who was caught in the crossfire. Since then, 14 suspects identified as members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel have been arrested, El Pais reported.
Kennedy left 'the invaluable legacy of her books, an inspiration and guide for everyone.'
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.”
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.
Mexico would come out of recession in early 2024, according to the prediction. deposit photos
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
